Follow TV Tropes

Following

YMMV / The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Go To

    open/close all folders 

    The comics 
  • Anvilicious: In common with a lot of Alan Moore's work, the series is not particularly subtle when it comes to expressing his opinions on various subjects. It's less the case in the earlier volumes, which are largely throwback Victorian pulp adventures with little in the way of overt lessons to communicate, but from about The Black Dossier onward if the reader does not pick up on Moore's opinions on such matters as James Bond, Harry Potter, how terrible superheroes are for society and the general hollow inadequacy of modern pop culture, among others, it is certainly not from any want of effort (or somewhat heavy-handed lecturing) on Moore's part.
  • Awesome Music: Due to the integration of The Threepenny Opera into Century: 1910, characters derived from the play sing versions of its songs (and act like they're living in a musical in contrast to everyone else). The new lyrics still match the original music, and often work in their own right as decent English translations/adaptations of the original German due to having less or no references to the comic's plot.
    Willett and Manheim's translation:
    What keeps mankind alive?
    What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions
    Are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed.
    Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
    In keeping its humanity repressed.
    For once you must try not to shirk the facts:
    Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts!
    Moore's translation:
    What keeps mankind alive?
    What keeps mankind alive’s the millions yearly
    That we mistreat and cheat, the beaten, burned and barbecued.
    Mankind may just survive if it sincerely
    Keeps every decent human urge subdued.
    Try not to trim the truth to suit your needs:
    Mankind is kept alive by monstrous deeds!
  • Base-Breaking Character: Orlando is this. To some readers, he/she is a Blood Knight who is Living Forever Is Awesome personified. To others, he/she's a Creator's Pet and a one-note Camp Gay.
  • Bile Fascination: This tends to be what draws in people during later arcs, especially with the Moonchild.
  • Broken Aesop: The first volume opens with a joking Spoof Aesop where the narrator declares that a message the reader should take away is that "the Chinese are brilliant but evil"—implicitly declaring that the Orientalism of the book's time period is wrong. The volume then proceeds to take every single Yellow Peril trope and play it straight as an arrow, with only one sympathetic Chinese character among a horde of hideous caricatures that the heroes casually mow down. According to Moore, his objective when writing Fu Manchu was to try to divorce the character from his racist origins by depicting him as so inscrutably evil (even moreso than his original counterpart, who was cleanly a Noble Demon) that the reader would question if he was even human—apparently not realizing that depicting someone as an inhuman "other" is the entire point of racial stereotyping. Additionally, at one point, it's declared that Journey to the West, one of the foundational Chinese texts and one of the only Chinese stories mentioned in the series, was really total nonsense (the character saying this is an immortal gender-switching knight who met the actual King Arthur). In all, while the story mocks the racist views of colonial England, it also seems to verify them at every opportunity.
  • Broken Base:
  • Canon Defilement: Two major ones.
    • When you portray Harry Potter as committing the magical equivalent of a school shooting, you are not going to earn brownie points with the people who like the original work.
    • "Jimmy" Bond is a boorish, sex-obsessed thug who ultimately attempts to nuke the Blazing World (after already having done so to several places on Earth); a far cry from the flirtatious but ultimately heroic figure of cinema or the thuggish and prejudiced but ultimately still human Professional Killer of literature.
  • Complete Monster:
    • Hawley Griffin, aka The Invisible Man, is a cowardly and even more depraved incarnation of the literary character. Recruited by England, Griffin has been using his powers to sexually assault the students at an all-girls boarding school, having impregnated three and caught in the midst of trying to force himself on a fourth. Joining the team out of a promise for payment and pardon for his crimes, Griffin continues to prove his despicableness by beating an innocent constable to death at one point to steal his clothes and abandoning his team to die at another. When the Martians arrive to destroy the Earth, Griffin happily sells out his race so he can rule alongside the invaders, giving away the locations of human artillery positions and the hiding places of his own teammates.
    • "Jimmy" Bond is a ruthless thug and Serial Rapist who refuses to take no for an answer, introduced trying to seduce and then rape a disguised Mina Murray. Jimmy is revealed to be a traitor who murdered industrialist Knight and later kills Knight's best friend, Bulldog Drummond, before making it clear he plans to seduce Knight's daughter Emma in her grief. Later becoming "M" in his old age, Jimmy has friends of Mina's tortured and killed to obtain access to the pool of Ker and immortality, murdering his handler as a young man and murdering and torturing his way to get to his foes. Jimmy even fires nukes at micro-nations, trying to obliterate the Blazing World and the mystical races there before trying to sneak aboard the League's ship to murder Emma one final time.
  • Creator's Pet: Orlando is frequently cited as this in the Century trilogy, though it's worth noting the character is a Base-Breaking Character who divides opinion.
  • Designated Hero: In The Tempest, we're clearly meant to support Emma in her plan to get revenge on "Jimmy" by murdering him. However, she doesn't even try to get her own hands dirty, and instead emotionally blackmails Jason King into being her assassin while she safely watches from a distance. Then when the apocalypse happens, all the story's "good guys" don't even make the slightest effort to save humanity, choosing instead to abandon Earth.
  • Designated Villain: In The Tempest, the rejuvenated "Jimmy" is a bloodthirsty sadist who fires a nuke at the Blazing World and plans to do the same to other magical realms seemingly just For the Evulz. However, since when creatures from these realms are ultimately released by Prospero onto humanity they turn Earth into a Crapsack World, it could be argued that "Jimmy" was trying to save humanity from this apocalypse.
  • Dueling Works: Scarlet Traces came out the same year as Volume II. It's a sequel to The War of the Worlds with enough cameos from other fictional characters to count as a Massive Multiplayer Crossover.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Whenever the Doctor appears, or is referenced, fans tend to make a big deal of it. This is to be expected, given how he's a classic British pop culture hero no matter how brief his appearances are. Ironically, Moore himself isn't a fan of the show, feeling that it peaked with William Hartnell. That didn't stop him writing comic strips for Marvel UK in the late seventies.
  • Evil Is Cool: As of The Tempest, a lot of fans who disliked his earlier portrayal admit that while they don't see "Jimmy" as a good deconstruction of James Bond, he makes for a pretty awesome Bond villain.
    • For all the complaints people have about Moore's characterization of Fantômas, there's a moment true to form where he only needs to utter two words as he tries to murder his enemies and possibly teammates: "I win."
  • Fanfic Fuel: This is a universe where every piece of fiction to ever be published exists alongside each other and are connected in some way. Go nuts.
  • Franchise Original Sin:
    • Alan Moore always tried to sell the series on the strength of its central Massively Multiplayer Crossover, with an intricate universe that showed dozens of classic works of literature weaved together into a cohesive whole. In that regard, one element that got some buzz was his use of Broad Strokes to develop once-bland cyphers into interesting characters in their own right. In the first volume, these two elements perfectly complimented and spiced up a genuinely interesting adventure story. However, by the time of Black Dossier and especially Century, they had become a major weakness. For the former, many scenes ended up being devoted to showing off Moore's education instead of advancing the plot, leaving a whole lot of interesting names scattered through a slow and boring narrative. As the series advanced into modern times, Moore also ran out of Public Domain Characters, forcing him to do a whole lot of obvious Writing Around Trademarks. For the latter, Moore attempted to apply his broad-strokes reinvention technique to characters who were far more well-known and fleshed-out to readers than the likes of Allan Quatermain (most infamously James Bond and Harry Potter), leaving the impression that Moore either hadn't done any research or was trying to fulfill some kind of vendetta. Other times, he botched the reinvention; one of his most ambitious creations, Orlando, earned a reputation as a Creator's Pet, and the general opinion of the Golliwog is that he was best left forgotten.
    • Moore has used the series as a means of performing mean-spirited hatchet jobs on characters he doesn't like since the beginning. The very first volume featured Griffin raping both Becky Randall and Pollyanna Whittier. In both cases it's Black Comedy Rape; the former is given an insulting portrayal as a dumb country bumpkin too stupid to fully understand what'd happened to her and the latter is completely unfazed. This is the Victorian equivalent of taking pot-shots at The Twilight Saga and just as shallow. But, unlike his treatment of Harry Potter and James Bond, the characters in question were old-tyme enough that they didn't have strong fanbases to be offended at their treatment, or at least, had fanbases that overlapped so little with the comic's target audience that most let it pass. And, also unlike them, the hatchet-job was a side-note within the plot rather than a central part of the narrative.
  • Genius Bonus: If you got every single reference in this series without help... you need to make a lot more pages here at TV Tropes.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: In Century: 2009, Judi Dench's M from the James Bond films, who in this universe is Emma Peel, is made immortal. A few months later, she was killed off in Skyfall.
  • He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: A big part of the reaction towards Century: 2009 comes from the fact that a big part of the last leg of the story boiled down to a mean-spirited hatchet-job directed at Harry Potter. Whether fans' reactions were just this trope in action, or whether it was legitimately poorly-done and damaged the work from a literary standpoint is up for debate.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight
    • Moore's Grand Finale for Century: 2009 involves an epic face-off between Harry Potter and Mary Poppins. Just a few months after he wrote that scene (and almost exactly a month after the comic hit the stands) a battle between Voldemort and a swarm of Mary Poppinses turned out to be part of the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games.
    • Among many other tidbits, Century: 2009 manages to tie James Bond and The Avengers (1960s) together into one universe with the revelation that Judi Dench's M in the later Bond films is actually an aging Emma Peel. Though we never get to find out M's true identity in the films, Skyfall actually did turn out to include a brief moment where Kincade, Bond's old groundskeeper, addresses her as "Emma" (presumably because he misheard "M" as "Em").
    • Century: 2009 includes a brief cameo from "seasoned fixer Malcolm Tucker" on a television screen, in the same issue that includes several background cameos from The Doctor. Fast-forward to 2013: Malcolm Tucker is now the Twelfth Doctor.
    • A 2005 episode of Extras featuring Daniel Radcliffe mercilessly hitting on Dame Diana Rigg suddenly became Hilarious in Hindsight when ' featured Emma Peel leading the fight to take down a deranged Harry Potter. Maybe she wanted revenge on him for flinging that condom at her head?
    • The final scene of Century: 2009 (and the end of the comic, at least until Tempest) is of Quatermain's grave in Africa, just like the movie.
    • Similarly, though the movie had "the Fantom" (a villain loosely based on Erik from The Phantom of the Opera and Fantomas) the comics did finally incorporate Phantom of the Opera into the plot of The Black Dossier. According to one of the supplementary stories, the League had their final face-off with France's "Les Hommes Mystérieux" at the Paris Opera, where they tried to stop their plot to plant explosives in the Phantom's old lair. The other half, Fantomas, being one of the French team members. Fantomas even detonates an explosion in the Phantom's lair, which was something Erik himself threatened to do in the book.
    • About thirteen years after Alan Moore made Sherlock Holmes' older brother "M" in the first volume of League, the original M's grandson became Sherlock Holmes in Elementary.
    • Alan Moore has long been well-known for practicing ceremonial magic and being an avid student of occultism and the mystic arts, and he (in)famously claimed in 2003 that he worships Glycon, a Roman snake god that was once the center of an ancient pagan cult. In 2011, he attracted a bit of controversy for portraying Harry Potter as a thoroughly unsympathetic Antichrist figure who's also supposedly the epitome of everything wrong with the 21st century. In other words: Moore is an occultist who talks to snakes and has an intense personal hatred of Harry Potter. Voldemort? Is that you...?
    • After all those years of decrying fantasy stories as inherently Satanist, the most well known target, old Potter himself, is literally the Antichrist.
  • Just Here for Godzilla: At this point it's evidently clear there's a chunk of people following these comics only for the curiosity of seeing what works Moore chooses to reference. Many of these people are openly critical of Moore's creative choices but considering how large in scope these comics are they still want to see who's going to show up. Hell, even Godzilla himself gets a mention in The Johnson Report of Nemo: The Roses of Berlin, when Janni talks about burns on her arm caused by the radioactive exhalations of a "huge bipedal saurian" which the Nautilus engaged in waters off Japan. This reaction trope likely contributed to the much more mixed reaction towards the newer stories of the series, which rather heavily lambast newer pop culture icons, something that turns off readers who are attracted purely to the crossover premise, seeing many popular media dragged through the dirt by the author.
  • Les Yay: Mina has no use for Orlando when he's a male.
  • Narm:
    • Allan's death. To elaborate: he gets electrocuted by lightning coming from Harry Potter's dick. And then Potter gets destroyed by Mary Poppins.
    • YOU ARE THE SHIT OF THE WORLD! I SHALL KILL YOU NOW!
  • Never Live It Down: For a more humorous and less controversial example, it appears Frankenstein's Monster has never been able to live down the constant arguments of whether Frankenstein was the man or the monster, which the League version considers a constant struggle and his own personal existential crisis.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Deliberate in both cases, so as to avoid two of the most famous literary creations of the Victorian age overshadowing everyone else:
    • Sherlock Holmes' single appearance in Volume I, during Moriarty's flashback to Reichenbach Falls.
    • Dracula appears on a single page in Century: 1969, as part of Mina's drug-induced hallucinations at a rock concert.
  • The Scrappy:
    • The Golliwog. The fact that you have a character whose design is a walking Blackface-Style Caricature is one thing, but the more notable part is that in a notorious Deconstructor Fleet, Moore decided to play the character (whose name is so associated with racism as to have inspired an actual slur) entirely straight as a benign fey creature who is nothing but helpful to the protagonists. Even those who thought there was something to the idea of reclaiming the character tend to feel this wasn't the way to go about it.
    • The Moonchild. The mere concept of the character as a vicious Take That! to Harry Potter immediately drives off a lot of people. Meanwhile, those on board with the idea tend to find him to be a pretty weak take on it, as Moore ignores all the things one could criticize about the character: while Jimmy Bond was rooted in real critique of Fleming's Bond and had enough intrigue to be Love to Hate, the Moonchild has essentially nothing in common with Harry Potter, and moreover, isn't given any interesting or redeeming qualities or even much personality at all besides being an unflattering caricature of the younger generation. While the banal nature of his character and actions is intentional to a degree, it doesn't change the fact that he's still a major player in the last part of Century and ends up killing one of the main characters, which forces the reader to take him at face value as a villain when the entire narrative is screaming at them that he sucks and shouldn't exist.
  • Seasonal Rot: The first two volumes are widely liked, but the perceived quality of everything released afterwards is very contentious, for a number of reasons, but primarily due to the criticisms that the series underwent a noticeable Filibuster Freefall, which overshadowed the Massive Multiplayer Crossover that hooked readers to begin with, especially because, even as the continuity of the story got closer to the present day, Moore rarely included fiction younger than the 1960s (even as lawyer-friendly references), and if he did, it was to complain how new media sucks in comparison to old media, an opinion most of the series' audience disagreed with, and the references to older media got increasingly obscure to boot.
  • Spiritual Successor: After writing the novelization to the movie, Kevin J. Anderson wrote The Martian War which had a similar plot to Volume II. Even having Dr Moreau creating a virus to kill the Martians and Griffin having Hawley as a first name which was made up for the League comics.
  • Squick: Griffin's death by rape at the hands of Hyde in Volume 2. It's mostly off-screen, but it includes the implication it was horrifically violent given the amount of blood that later materializes everywhere.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • In the original volumes the League was in itself a Massive Multiplayer Crossover with elements of Deconstructive Parody to be found inside of an adventure story. As the series continued however some found that Moore's deconstruction wasn't exactly as good of a sell as when played straighter. With less of an interesting story going on people started calling out more examples of Shallow Parody that otherwise would have overlooked.
    • The announcement of the Century trilogy initially had fans buzzing because they thought they'd finally get to see the original graphic novel's premise applied to 20th century fiction. And they did... except, instead of creating a new team of champions for a new era of fiction, Moore just made the two remaining members of the original Five-Man Band immortal, and added one consistent new member (Orlando) who quickly devolved into a Creator's Pet. By 2009, Mina and Allan have mentally aged so much that they barely even resemble their literary counterparts (which kind of kills what made the series fascinating in the first place) leaving behind little more than ultra-obscure background references.
    • The first installment of the Nemo Trilogy, Heart of Ice was criticized for not doing much with the At the Mountains of Madness setting, as Janni and the other crossover characters just duke out against each other and go through similar scenarios depicted in Lovecraft's book, rather than giving it a new spin.
    • The sheer lack of many popular literary characters invented from the 1960s onward not even getting a Writing Around Trademarks Shout-Out is one major source of criticism. Even when accounting for the references to various works that were present, the fact that many of the sources were doggedly Anglocentric didn't help matters either.
    • Once Century: 2009 finally revealed the Moonchild's identity, many fans of Harry Potter objected to the entire storyline — not necessarily because of Moore's treatment of the character, but because it wasn't nearly as interesting as it could have been. If Moore had managed to rein in his hatred of today's pop culture, and had actually familiarized himself with the character enough to make his portrayal feel authentic, it could have been a genuinely fascinating look at youthful rebellion, the paranoia of the post-9/11 world, and the conflict between destiny and free will. Instead, Harry is just portrayed as a one-note foul-mouthed teen with an attitude problem. Regardless of how you might feel about the source material, that's hardly the basis for an interesting villain.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Tempest is basically a massive Author Tract against modern-day superhero media, and unilaterally portrays them as fascist-coded cash cows with no redeeming qualities as an attempt to indict comic-book readers... you know, the people who read Alan Moore's work. It's possibly more hateful of superheroes than The Boys, since that work didn't end with humanity being condemned to be consumed by bad writing.
  • Uncertain Audience: The League throughout its entire run ran with this trope rather than an actual target audience. Many people who were general Alan Moore fans followed it but openly admitted much of it required annotations by Jess Nevins to be able to follow and be appreciated. The comic also got the attention of people with wide tastes who love crossovers, but as this page shows many of these readers are openly in complete disagreement with Alan Moore's opinions that went into building the world of the comic and his attitudes towards many of the properties included. Up until the very last issue the comic never really aimed itself in favor of one or the other and left many readers interested but never without heavy complaints. Even fans tend to celebrate the ambitious achievement as a crossover rather than its artistic merits as a comic.
  • Values Dissonance: The comic deliberately fakes this trope to create aesops such as "The Chinese are brilliant, but evil." We would like to stress this is a verbatim quote.

    The film 
  • Accidental Innuendo: Reed has this gem in his conversation with Quatermain: "Stories of your exploits have thrilled English boys for decades."
  • Angst? What Angst?: Quatermain doesn't seem that all broken up when the Fantom's men killed his friend impersonating him, or when they blew up his clubhouse at Kenya with his other friends supposedly still inside.
  • Broken Base:
    • Perhaps maybe the biggest example that only grew more contentious with time. For people who genuinely love the comic this movie is often considered an In Name Only abomination. However it has another large faction full of the people who decry Moore's use of Deconstructive Parody is just example after example of Shallow Parody that feel many things this movie changed from the comics were improvements. Debates about this still spring up to this day on most sites talking about the movie or comics.
    • Tom Sawyer's inclusion through Executive Meddling is either seen as a refreshing addition to the cast who appeals to the younger generation or a thinly-disguised marketing ploy shoehorned in to get more Americans to see the movie.
  • Complete Monster: The elusive Fantom, actually Professor James Moriarty, wishes to engulf the world in war, just so he can line his pockets. Killing British and German citizens to increase tensions, the Fantom tries to attack a peace conference by sinking all of Venice, where it was taking place. Founding the titular League while acting as "M", claiming it to be a counterterrorist organization, he gathers a group of individuals with superpowers and advanced technology, planning to replicate them to sell to the highest bidder in the war he plans. At his secret base, he houses hundreds of scientists, forcing them to work around the clock to recreate the League's abilities, while keeping their families hostage in overcrowded cells.
  • Creepy Awesome: Hyde is this when he finally fights for the League.
    Hyde: Trouble? I call it sport.
  • Critical Dissonance: There are fans who are genuinely confused by the movie's poor reception and love the action scenes and performances. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 44% audience score which, while still on the lower side, is still noticeably better than the 17% critics score.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Even though a main criticism of the movie is practically being an In Name Only, many fans of the graphic novel prefer the film's version of the Invisible Man, Rodney Skinner, over his predecessor in the comics; Hawley Griffin was... a rather vile character.
  • Fanfic Fuel: Those who actually liked the movie might add every other work of fiction into this universe, specifically live-action adaptations of them, to have the LXG be more Truer to the Text.
  • Fan Nickname: Posters abbreviated the title to "LXG," causing certain derisive fans of the comic to call the movie "The League of EXTREME Gentlemen."
  • He's Just Hiding: For those who like the others at Quatermain's club, it can be nice to hope they went out in time to not be blown up, especially since it's never outright said anyone died in there from the film.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Narm:
    • The opening scene where a police officer stupidly stands in front of a tank and yells at it to stop several times, only to get run over. He might not know what it is, but most people would know to get out of the way of the huge metal object heading towards them. It's like someone tried to do a serious version of this Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery scene.
    • Hyde and Mina have really put-on monster voices that sound more like children playing pretend than professional actors in a blockbuster film. Thankfully Mina only uses hers once.
    • When he's captured in Paris, Hyde's outfit inexplicably includes a giant top hat. Did Hyde seriously walk into a shop to have it commissioned? Sawyer even channels the audience by picking up the hat while making a face that just screams, "Where the hell did he get this?"
  • Nightmare Fuel: The in-between states of Mr. Hyde's transformations are as disgusting as the effects are bad.
    • Dante's Hyde transformation may not be a good effect, but he's basically stuck in in one of Hyde's mid states, except even larger, so his skin is stretched out and bright red.
  • Nightmare Retardant:
    • The Fantom loses all intimidation when he starts taunting Quatermain in the cemetery. Why? Because the whole time he's running around desperately trying to get out like a frightened child.
    • In general, Moriarty spends most of his screen time running away from fights he started. He claims to have been reborn, but it was evidently into someone far less impressive.
  • One-Scene Wonder: The Badass Bystander hunter at Quatermain's club who comments on the unsporting nature of the automatic rifles and is convinced that it must be the Belgians attacking them.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Shane West (Sawyer) later played Michael in Nikita. It's a little bit funny, because Peta Wilson (Mina) got her start as the lead on La Femme Nikita, of which Nikita is a remake.
  • Special Effect Failure: Due in part to the film's overall Troubled Production, the VFX are not all that great.
    • Skinner is convincing enough as a CGI effect, but it becomes extremely obvious whenever he's just Tony Curran in face paint. The scene where he's actually applying said face paint is perhaps the most jarring sequence of them all.
    • Dorian Gray's death is also extremely fake-looking CGI. But considering that it's essentially magic at work which also involves him basically turning into his own portrait, maybe that was the point...?
    • Another place that the subpar CGI lets down the film is the Nautilus, which looks utterly unconvincing and fake in every scene it's in.
  • Strawman Has a Point: Dorian mocking Jekyll when he refuses to become Hyde again is probably meant to be kicking the dog, but the League explicitly wanted Hyde for his brute strength, leaving one to wonder what exactly Jekyll thought he was going to be contributing.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • While the Fantom is revealed to be Professor James Moriarty, the revelation doesn't add any new elements for the character, not making any use of the genius intellect, unprecedented crime empire, or historic rivalry with Sherlock Holmes.
    • Reed, the man who recruits Quatermain, could have been an addition to the team, possibly as The Mole given how The Fantom was apparently the one who set him up there.
    • The other patrons and staff at Quatermain's club. It isn't even made clear if they survive the explosion when they could have showed up later in a Chekhov's Gunman role if the league needed help somewhere, or at least Given a little extra presence and emotion to the funeral at the end.
  • Took the Bad Film Seriously: Half of the cast definitely put up a valiant effort into their performances, though the standout seems to be Jason Flemyng as both Jekyll and Hyde gives a nicely evil but charismatic performance as the latter and makes Jekyll's agony at his dual identity legitimately compelling.

Top