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troperville

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tools

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toys

• Anvilicious: Religion makes you evil, period. If you are religious you can't even die with dignity.
• Complete Monster: This hardly seems necessary; it's a Crapsack World with too many Complete Monsters to count. And yet the Smiler has to be mentioned for this. In a world nearly without ethics, he goes above and beyond the call of evil. If you want a rundown, he has his campaign coordinator publicly assassinated to win sympathy for himself after his campaign went into the gutter; he has his family killed in an "accident" to again win sympathy; he has a member of his State Sec pull a sniper spree on civilians so that no one would notice the freak storm brewing nearby, a storm that causes massive damage and loss of life, all so he could wipe the evidence against him from existence; he has a peaceful protest of college students riddled with bullets at the first opportunity of "I thought he was pulling a gun"; he allows the brutal murderers of an innocent kid to go free and orders the cops to butcher all of the protesters as soon as violence was initiated (and it was done so by the murderers); oh yeah, you find out later that he orchestrated a riot that led to the brutal slaughter of many rioters and innocent bystanders by the police, all to make the current government look bad. This man would make Satan cringe, and this is just the incidents that immediately come to mind. He also masturbates into the American flag whenever he's stressed.
• Crazy Awesome - The whole thing, but especially Spider.
• Crosses the Line Twice - And then hops back and forth over the line some more just for the hell of it before firing a bowel disruptor into the air indiscriminately.
• Ensemble Darkhorse - The Chair Leg of Truth.
  IT. DOES. NOT. LIE!
• Family Unfriendly Aesop - Like so many things in the series it Crosses the Line Twice:
  Spider: Hi. I'm Spider Jerusalem. I smoke. I take drugs. I drink. I wash every six weeks. I masturbate constantly and fling my steaming poison semen down from my window into your hair and food. I'm a rich and respected columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper. I live with two beautiful women in the city's most expensive and select community. Being a bastard works.
  The City Careers Service. Call us now. No matter how much of a fuck you are.
• "Funny Aneurysm" Moment - Near the beginning, Spider gets a faceful of Information Pollen in a futurist "reservation". He complains that it causes an Alzheimer's-like effect and asks, "Did you just ruin my brain, you weird-looking fucker?" Near the end, the I-pollen really does.
  • "Every law that curbs my basic human freedom; every lie about the things I care for; every crime committed against me by their politics; that's what's makes me get up and hound these fuckers, and I'll do that until the day I die... or until my brain dries up or something."
• Harsher in Hindsight: On the penultimate pages of the series, Spider puts a cigarette in his mouth for One Last Smoke, draws a handgun, puts it under his chin, and it turns out to be a lighter. Sad part? Three years later, Spider's inspiration, Hunter S. Thompson, did the exact same thing... except the gun was real.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Remember Fred Christ? Wannabee alien-love-god and all around waste of space? Turns out he shares a name with Donald Trump's father.
• Jerkass Woobie: Spider. His reaction to Vita Severn's murder is heartbreaking, and whenever he's not being completely insane, you can't help but feel bad for him.
  "Sometimes I want to be someone else so badly it hurts."
• Misaimed Fandom - Ellis has repeatedly said that Spider is not a role model to be emulated. And yet...
• Moral Event Horizon: Vita Severn's murder.
  • It's eventually stated that Vita's death wasn't it after all, happening years previously with the family kitten literally thrown under a bus. It's revealed to be the Smiler's favorite political trick.
• Protection From Editors - Used as a plot point. Royce, the editor at the newspaper Spider writes for, doesn't actually edit Spider's writing, nor does anyone want him to. He does occasionally suggest topics, but mostly he runs interference and protects Spider, finally getting a Crowning Moment of Awesome for it in the runup to the finale.
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped - You can't do a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson and not be anvilicious.
• Squick - Yelena drinking the bottle of tequila on election night. Rather than a worm it has a cockroach in it and we're treated to an extreme close-up of her slowly biting it in half!
• Tear Jerker - A story Spider tells in an interview about a young woman and her brother. It's agonizing.
  Spider: He systematically sexually abused her over a two-year period and she missed him because he was her brother and she loved him.

  • The picture for the above shot? A close-up of the girl's slashed wrists.
  • Vita's death. Spider's reaction shot is crushing. We've seen him angry, excited, confused... it's the first time we've seen him horrified.
  • "Business". The whole damn thing. But especially the line "Can we go to Long Pig? They have toys."