History Literature / TheHomewardBounders

* HeroesWantRedheads: Joris tells Adam, to his delight, that red-haired women are particularly prized as pleasure slaves in his world because the trait is considered unusual and therefore attractive. Sure enough, Konstam, the most classically heroic character in the story, starts falling for Adam's sister Vanessa almost immediately. (Jamie ends up observing his outraged reaction to Adam trying to sell Vanessa to him wasn't ''just'' moral indignation over being mistaken for someone who would buy a woman as a slave, but was because some part of him was genuinely tempted.)

* AfterTheEnd: Jamie and his friends briefly end up in a world that's experienced a nuclear holocaust and have to quickly flee to avoid radiation poisoning. Jamie says it's not uncommon to come across worlds suffering from the ravages of war, thanks to the nature of the games ''They'' play, and while this one is the worst he's ever seen, it nevertheless must have human survivors somewhere -- it's not like ''Them'' to trash a "game board" completely rather than finding a way to reuse it. It's implied that a disaster like this befell Helen's world immediately after ''They'' took control of it before they repurposed it as a DeathWorld; Helen's people are familiar with the concept of radiation, and Helen says her magical left arm may be a [[ILoveNuclearPower radiation-induced mutation]].

* DeliberateValuesDissonance: Jamie's seen a lot of awful things in his travels, but he's still taken aback by how slavery is casually accepted in Joris' world -- which has the most powerful BigGood human civilization in the setting -- and how Joris shrugs off the UnfortunateImplications of everything he's saying about it (like how the skillset he describes for typical female slaves makes it pretty clear they're being sold as {{Sex Slave}}s). To be fair, Konstam's demon-hunting family, the Khans, is said to be fiercely anti-slavery, but it's not clear whether they just personally eschew the practice or they're actually doing anything to abolish it.

* TheFaceless: Thanks to herbnags, it's some time before Jamie is sure that Helen even has a face, as she mostly seems to be a nose sticking out of a wall of hair.

* TheFaceless: Thanks to her BlindingBangs, it's some time before Jamie is sure that Helen even has a face, as she mostly seems to be a nose sticking out of a wall of hair.

* AdultFear: [[spoiler:Your child goes out on an errand one day and never comes home.]]

** Jamie at one point starts to give his last name but only manages to say it starts with "H--" before being cut off. [[spoiler: This is to conceal his surname, Hamilton, and the fact that he comes from our world and Adam and Vanessa are his descendants.]]

* YourMindMakesItReal: A variant -- in this {{multiverse}}, a sapient being actually living in a place and thinking of it as Home is what makes it real, but there's an inverse effect where observing a place that is ''not'' your Home from outside makes it less real. Perversely, this effect includes "observation" by imagining a place while you're not there; remembering a place or, worse, anticipating seeing it in the future, drains the "realness" from it to feed the fantasy version of it in your mind, an effect ''They'' have learned to exploit. [[spoiler: This is how ''They'' reduced TheMultiverse into a collection of semi-imaginary settings for their games; ''They'' bound the discoverer of TheMultiverse, Prometheus, to his rock and tortured him for eons, feeding on his desperation for freedom and the memory of all the worlds he'd seen to drain their reality and use it to create their own Real Place outside the worlds. TheReveal is the Homeward Bounders aren't just a capricious punishment for mortals who piss ''Them'' off -- the Homeworld Bounder system is tailor-made to drain reality from TheMultiverse by constantly generating new people damned to observe all the worlds they pass through as outsiders while longing for a Home they can never actually return to, to shore up the Real Place as TheMultiverse changes and expands beyond what it was the last time Prometheus saw it. The ending reveals that Jamie must maintain a tiny piece of this "Real Place" with himself as the anchor, being the one Homeward Bounder who continues to pass through all worlds as equally un-Home to him, so that the surviving members of ''Them'' can't start up the whole system again with someone else.]]

* RealityEnsues: When Jamie, Joris and Helen first end up in our world Jamie announces his dread of high-tech "organized" worlds like ours with lots of laws and regulations where it's hard to get away with being an [[FlyingDutchman anonymous drifter]] with no paperwork. Sure enough, Konstam runs into a lot of bureaucratic obstacles when he shows up hoping to launch a demon hunt -- even selling the gold wire he brought to finance their project ends up incurring a dangerous level of legal scrutiny. They only manage it by taking advantage of Adam and Vanessa's parents being out of town and faking their approval for a lot of things, leaving a big headache for them to untangle when they get back. (And this is only possible because it's still TheEighties and not the 21st century.)

* StrangledByTheRedString: It takes [[spoiler:Konstam and Vanessa]] less than a full day to fall in love, and they declare at the end that they're going to get married. Though some time has passed by that point, it doesn't seem likely that ''They'' would have allowed the two of them to have been together all that time, making it even stranger.

** Even for people who can see ''Them'', ''They'' appear only as hazy, formless cloaked figures, and [[InTheHood whether or not they're wearing their hoods up]] it's [[TheFacelesss impossible to get a clear look at their faces]]. [[spoiler: Until Helen unlocks her ability to turn her arm into the Living Blade, which effortlessly cuts through all of ''Their'' magic. The light from the blade shines through the shadows covering their faces and lets Jamie see them for the first time. [[NightmareFace He wishes he hadn't.]]]]