History ComicBook / Irredeemable

* SuperDickery: Deconstructed; a flashback describes the Plutonian's relationship with his girlfriend Alana (a Lois Lane {{Expy}}), which occurs in a similar fashion as Superman and Lois Lane's in UsefulNotes/{{the Silver Age of comic|books}}s. Except when the Plutonian reveals his true identity, confidently expecting her to fall into his arms and agree to marry him, she freaks out about the sudden revelation of all the mind games he's been playing on her all this time and angrily breaks up with him. Plutonian... did not take it well. A major recurring plot thread in these flashbacks to the Plutonian's "good days" seems to be his frustration over how even though he lives in a classic super-hero universe type of setting, no-one reacts the way they did in the old comics.

* TakeThat: Just to make sure that no one misses the subtext, the first issue comes with a long essay about how comic fans saying mean things on the internet suck and will destroy comic heroes. The essay was written by Creator/GrantMorrison, not Mark Waid, and is not quite as simplistic as that. If anything, the subsequent issues since number one have indicated Morrison's reading of the point is a bit off from Waid's true intent. To elaborate, said essay wasn't saying anything about people talking on the Internet destroying heroes. Morrison was talking about people's opinions, the difficulties in changing them, and what a hero must have to do to become completely [[TitleDrop irredeemable]]. And how Waid showed him the script for the first two issues, after their discussion if the internauts will ever stop seeing him as a [[UsefulNotes/TheSilverAgeOfComicBooks Silver Age]] {{Fanboy}}, a reputation Waid earned after ''ComicBook/KingdomCome''.

* DarkerAndEdgier: Not in the sense that it's more pessimistic than ''Irredeemable'' (which is definitely not a sunshine and rainbows kind of story) but it has a much more "[[UsefulNotes/TheDarkAgeOfComicBooks gritty]]" tone, with villains modeled on Neo-Nazis and magicians who power their spells with VillainousIncest. Plus, the [[DarkAgeOfSupernames unfortunate codenames]] of Max Damage's sidekicks (Jailbait, [[BrokenBird Headcase]], [[BondageIsBad Safeword]], [[PoliticallyIncorrectVillain Hatecrime]]) are practically a RunningGag.

* BigGood: What the Plutonian was before his FaceHeelTurn. After he snapped, Survivor and Max Damage aim to become this, with varying degrees of success.

** The UngratefulBastard who complained of the bullet damage to his yacht, after Plutonian and Kaidan saved him from a pirate attack. This particular event made Plutonian seek solace in the moon for 10 minutes, [[FromBadToWorse but then the virus strikes...]] True there's other {{Ungrateful Bastard}}s as well, but this is the guy who's caused him to lose it as the worst possible time.
** The scientists who told Samsara where the sound virus came from. Because they were scared of Tony, they told Samsara where the virus really came from, causing him to lose faith in the Plutonian. Unfortunately, this proved to be the figurative spark that ignited the whole fuel spill.

* InformedAttribute: While Charybdis does TakeALevelInJerkass, he still appears to be committed to protecting the world from the Plutonian and keeping it safe. It's said multiple times that he could become just as bad as the Plutonian, but nowhere in the series does he come close to Plutonian's sadism and mass murder.

-->''"There's this old ''[[Series/TheTwilightZone1959 Twilight Zone]]'' episode called, "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E73ItsAGoodLife It's a Good Life]]." It's about a farm town ruled by an omnipotent little boy who can change reality just by '''thinking''' about it. People live and die depending upon what'' '''mood''' ''he's in. Every second of every day, all these poor, scared people can do if they want to survive is tell what a '''good boy''' he is. They live on '''eggshells.''' They can't even '''whisper''' to each other how '''afraid''' they are because they're terrified he'll '''hear''' them. That's their '''world.''' Every morning, they wake up wondering if this is the day they do something to anger '''God.'''''"

* KryptoniteFactor: [[spoiler:The Candle of the Nahru Visna is the only thing that can make the Plutonian vulnerable. Bette Noir made a little bit of its wax into a bullet in case Tony ever went rogue.]]

* UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom: The UngratefulBastard who complained of the bullet damage to his yacht, after Plutonian and Kaidan saved him from a pirate attack. This particular event made Plutonian seek solace in the moon for 10 minutes, [[FromBadToWorse but then the virus strikes...]] True there's other {{Ungrateful Bastard}}s as well, but this is the guy who's the figurative spark that ignited the whole fuel spill.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: This trope is one of the main themes of the series.
** In a flashback from his early teens, the Plutonian hears his foster mother cocking a gun to commit suicide. He gets there in a fraction of a second, less time than it would've taken her to pull the trigger. But sound takes almost ten seconds to travel two miles. She was already dead before he left his school desk.
** While the Hartigans were the only pair of MuggleFosterParents who unconditionally accepted and loved young Plutonian, and they, Bill especially, wanted to impart good values to him, this wasn't enough to undo nearly a decade's worth of emotional trauma caused by being constantly bounced around in the system (and to say nothing of how [[MiseryBuildsCharacter Bill's "lessons"]] only worsened the boy's issues). This is a pretty depressing case of TruthInTelevision, as many foster children and adoptees can attest.
** On a more general note, MuggleFosterParents would really have no idea how to handle the super-powered child who throws tantrums sometimes. A lot of them were outright terrified of Tony's powers but didn't want to raise any alarms about it, mostly because they were more afraid of what he'd do to them.
** A BadassNormal won't stand a chance against a guy who has super strength and can shoot lasers out of his eyes. Indeed, the resident Batman expies, Hornet and Inferno, are very quickly dealt with by Plutonian (the former's death scene is the opening scene of the series, and the latter was killed off-screen without any manner of a fight being shown or even referenced), a vicious hammerblow to the usual idea of a Batman vs Superman conflict. Because if a man who can destroy planets through brute force wants you dead, martial arts training, nifty gadgets, and money won't do jack to save you.
** The Hornet, as a Batman expy, is a zig-zagged example. The first issue plays it straight, showing him dying easily with no real hope of resisting the Plutonian. [[spoiler:Then we find out that he ''did'' in fact anticipate the Plutonian going bad, having caught on to a single offhand remark the Plutonian made ages ago, and did in fact have a plan, which successfully neutralizes him long after the Hornet's death. But it's zig-zagged again in that instead of just letting him big-brain his way through the problem for free, his plan was basically to sell out the entire rest of the universe to save earth, in keeping with the series' DarkerAndEdgier tone.]]

* {{Superhero}}es: But of course.

* MakeThemRot: DK, a minor villain, has this as his power.

* OmnicidalManiac: Plutonian becomes this.

* SexSlave: Encanta is forced to be one for the Plutonian between issues 3 and 7.

* {{Technopath}}: Qubit's actual power.

** A representative of Singapore told the Plutonian his country was grateful to him. The Plutonian however, recognized this to be a lie, and responded by sinking the country into the sea.

* EldritchAbomination: The Eleos are nigh-omnipotent {{Reality Warper}}s who can smack Plutonian around with ease, and they claim that [[YouCannotGraspTheTrueForm their true form is too much for the brain to perceive.]] That said, they're actually pretty nice, styling themselves as knowledge keepers of the multiverse intrigued by humanity, and when they were sealed by a specialized radiation, they chose not to break containment so as to not harm the human race, instead settling for friendly chats with whoever's assigned to watch their imprisonment. [[spoiler: They're also Plutonian's origin race.]]

* InsufferableGenius: Qubit. This doesn't go unnoticed by this teammates, some of whom find it less and less tolerable as the situation worsens. Modeus as well.
* JerkassHasAPoint: As harsh as he was, Plutonian rightly points out to the radio team, that broadcasting his true identity, and that he works with them, would cause all of his enemies to hunt them down, capture them and torture and kill them and their families to find out even the smallest secret of his.

* KickTheSonOfABitch: Any time the Plutonian interacts with other bad guys.
** He tricks a posse of his old RoguesGallery into activating the self-destruct sequence to the Inferno's secret lair, pretending that the buttons he was handing them were kill switches that would incapacitate him somehow. The fact they were stupid enough to believe he ''had'' a weakness, or that he would willingly hand the means to it over to his enemies even ''if'' such a thing existed, something he gloatingly lampshades, makes it easy to laugh their deaths off.
** Frying Modeus' face off is done for the sake of being evil, but considering that Modeus is one of the most dangerous criminals in the ''Irredeemable'' universe, it's kind of hard to feel sympathy for him.

** Plutonian's name has a couple different ones. One meaning can be taken from how it's derived or associated with Pluto, the Roman god that is the {{Expy}} to the more well-known Greek god Hades, God of Death and Ruler of the Underworld. He's also as distant as can be from humanity in general (like the dwarf planet Pluto). Additionally, it's almost a homonym for plutonium, an element which can offer humanity great power but is incredibly dangerous if mishandled.

** [[spoiler:"Eleos" sounds a lot like Elohim. This, of course, makes the Plutonian another Satan trope]].

* MiseryBuildsCharacter: This is the main philosophy behind Bill Hartigan's lessons in heroism to Tony -- that because of Tony's immense power, he has to '''always''' be selfless and value others over himself. This gets taken to an extreme when Bill makes Tony give away his Christmas presents to other children because they're less privileged.

* SecretIdentity: The Plutonian had one, and upon revealing it to the woman he loved [[spoiler:she promptly told their four coworkers and rejected his affection]]. It was one of the bigger contributing factors to his FaceHeelTurn.

* TheWorldIsNotReady: Tony makes the mistake of revealing to Alana his secret identity as the Plutonian, which only results in her revealing this to her co-workers and them almost revealing it to the world; it's implied that The Plutonian's Dan Hartigan was like Superman's Clark Kent, meaning his only possibility of blending in and having a normal life. Superman argues that ''he is Clark Kent'' and that he would go insane if he had to be Superman all the time[[note]]-as seen in ''WesternAnimation/SupermanTheAnimatedSeries''-[[/note]]; the story takes this point and amplifies it to its logical, albeit monstrous, conclusion, which is The Plutonian going insane for not being able to be Dan Hartigan (among other even more messed up things).

** Plutonian has no qualms with killing children. Not only is he introduced killing Hornet's family despite the pleas of his former colleague, when he first snaps, the rest of his superhero team turn up to find he's welded shut the doors of a school so he can kill everyone inside, which he then does despite their efforts, claiming the children were [[KidsAreCruel no different from the ones who bullied him relentlessly as a child]].

** [[spoiler:Tony's first human mother and the one whose desire for a child forged him into a human body, to a horrifying extent. She poisoned her own child in a fit of insanity, and when presented with a NighInvulnerable child proceeded to reenact the crime out of guilt and madness until she was DrivenToSuicide.]]

* ZombieApocalypse: The Sonic Plague [[BodyHorror liquefies children's flesh and animates their bones.]] Worst part is that it spreads like wildfire through the ''screams'' of the living. The Paradigm managed to stop it before it got out of control, but the damage is done and this plays into one of the biggest reasons behind the Plutonian's FaceHeelTurn.

** On a more general note, MuggleFosterParents would really have no idea how to handle the super-powered child who throws tantrums sometimes.

* MyGreatestFailure: Before he went insane, the Plutonian gave a piece of alien technology to a mudslinging scientist to be adapted for the benefit of mankind, also giving him a signal device to call him in the case that anything could go wrong. [[spoiler: The device turned out to contain a sound-based virus that only killed children. The Plutonian and the Paradigm might have been able to stop it early on, but Tony was on the moon, enjoying ten minutes of silence from the constant cries for help that his super-hearing picks up]]. This not only rocketed him toward his FaceHeelTurn, but seemed to affect him even after he became a villain - he still keeps a (rather unsettling) memorial to the victims he failed to help in his Citadel.
* NeverHadToys: In a variation PlayedForDrama, Daniel Hartigan (the future Plutionian) never had toys because his [[MuggleFosterParents Muggle Foster Parent]] Bill Hartigan, in an act of ToughLove to mould him into a hero, made them give them away to charity as soon as he got them to show him how there were people with greater needs than his. [[GoneHorriblyRight It did made him very selfless, all right]], to the point that when he completely snapped and [[GoingPostal went postal]] on ''[[PersonOfMassDestruction the whole planet]]'' when he couldn't stand anymore the [[UngratefulBastard ungratefulness of the literal vocal minority of mankind]].

** See MyGreatestFailure for the most obvious of these on the Plutonian's part, though his former teammates have their share too.

* PsychopathicManchild: One possible interpretation for the Plutonian's need to be loved. It's especially apparent in his confrontation with one foster family that gave him up for accidentally injuring their baby brother and leaving him permanently brain damaged.

* RuleOfCool: Kaidan's superpower is being able to summon the spirits of great warriors by recounting their stories. The characters in said stories are souls of samurai and Feudal warriors. It's awesome. [[spoiler:She later finds that she summon the spirits of superheroes and open a path through the underworld]]. ''Double'' awesome. Even Qubit is surprised by this (and he's the one that figures it out for Kaidan), and this is a dude that can create technological wonders out of thin air!

** The finale harkens to ''ComicBook/AllStarSuperman'' as [[http://www.comicsforge.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ending.jpg a pair of boys have a great new idea for a superhero]], much like Superman trying to create a universe without a Superman ends up with someone creating a familiar superhero comc.

** Bill Hartigan, the foster parent who forged him into The Plutonian, teaches him to be [[LiteralMinded completely selfless]]; Tony [[ALessonLearnedTooWell took it a tad too far]] when he withheld the fact that [[spoiler:his foster mother has terminal cancer and he already knew when it had still be treatable. When she dies, his foster father kills himself in guilt.]]
*** Also, while the Hartigans were the only pair of MuggleFosterParents who unconditionally accepted and loved young Plutonian, and they, Bill especially, wanted to impart good values to him, this wasn't enough to undo nearly a decade's worth of emotional trauma caused by being constantly bounced around in the system (and to say nothing of how [[MiseryBuildsCharacter Bill's "lessons"]] only worsened the boy's issues). This is a pretty depressing case of TruthInTelevision, as many foster children and adoptees can attest.
** On a more general note, MuggleFosterParents would really have no idea how to handle the super-powered child who throws tantrums sometimes. The girl you've been dating won't find it fantastic that you've lied to her constantly about your secret identity. A BadassNormal won't stand a chance against a guy who has super strength and can shoot lasers out of his eyes. Indeed, the resident Batman expies, Hornet and Inferno, are very quickly dealt with by Plutonian (the former's death scene is the opening scene of the series, and the latter was killed off-screen without any manner of fight being shown or even referenced), a vicious hammerblow to the usual idea of a Batman vs Superman conflict. Because if a man who can destroy planets through brute force wants you dead, martial arts training, nifty gadgets, and money won't do jack to save you.

* TakeThat: Just to make sure that no-one misses the subtext, the first issue comes with a long essay about how comic fans saying mean things on the internet suck and will destroy comic heroes. The essay was written by Creator/GrantMorrison, not Mark Waid, and is not quite as simplistic as that. If anything, the subsequent issues since number one have indicated Morrison's reading of the point is a bit off from Waid's true intent. To elaborate, said essay wasn't saying anything about people talking on the Internet destroying heroes. Morrison was talking about people's opinions, the difficulties in changing them, and what a hero must have to do to become completely [[TitleDrop irredeemable]]. And how Waid showed him the script for the first two issues, after their discussion if the internauts will ever stop seeing him as a [[UsefulNotes/TheSilverAgeOfComicBooks Silver Age]] {{Fanboy}}, a reputation Waid earned after ''ComicBook/KingdomCome''.

* TeleportersAndTransporters: Quibit has built several devices that seemingly produce wormholes. [[spoiler:The Vespans, having had access to his technology, weaponize them and defeat Plutonian with them. After Qubit takes them back and Plutonian's escape from the prison-planet, they're put out of action.]]

* UnReveal: Qubit never says what he sees in the Survivor’s mind that leads him to ally with Modeus and rescue the Plutonian.

* UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom: The UngratefulBastard who complained of the bullet damages to his yacht, after Plutonian and Kaidan saved him from a pirate attack. This particular event made Plutonian to seek solace in the moon for 10 minutes, [[FromBadToWorse but then the virus strikes...]] True there's other {{Ungrateful Bastard}}s as well, but this is the guy who's the figurative spark that ignited the whole fuel spill.

** [[spoiler:Tony's first human mother and the one whose desire for a child forged him into a human body, to a horrifying extent. She poisoned her own child in a fit of insanity, and when presented with a NighInvulnerable child preceeded to reenact the crime out of guilt and madness until she was DrivenToSuicide.]]

What makes a hero '''[[TitleDrop irredeemable?]]'''''

*** Also, while the Hartigans were the only pair of MuggleFosterParents who unconditionally accepted and loved young Plutonian, and they, Bill especially, wanted to impart good values to him, this wasn't enough to undo nearly a decade's worth of emotional trauma caused by being constantly bounced around in the system (and to say nothing of how Bill's "lessons" only worsened the boy's issues). This is a pretty depressing case of TruthInTelevision, as many foster children and adoptees can attest.

* BlackAndGrayMorality: Qubit and the Survivor commit many questionable actions in their Pursuit for Justice, but they both are undoubtedly superior to the Plutonian who kills people wontonly.

** In a flashback from his early teens, the Plutonian hears his foster mother is about to commit suicide. He gets there in a fraction of a second. But sound takes almost ten seconds to travel two miles. She was already dead before he left his school desk.
** Bill Hartigan, the foster parent who forged him into The Plutonian, teaches him to be [[LiteralMinded completely selfless]]; Tony [[ALessonLearnedTooWell took it a tad too far]] when he withheld the fact that [[spoiler:his foster mother has terminal cancer and he has known all along. When she dies, his foster father kills himself in guilt.]]

** [[spoiler:After reading a Modeus-possessed Cutter's mind, former supervillain Burrows, a telepath, almost immediately commits suicide.]]

* SkewedPriorities: Bette Noir, she kept the [[spoiler: one bullet that could kill Tony secret, simply because she gained it by sleeping with him behind her husbands back.]]
* SmugSuper