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Call Me Massacre

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Call Me Massacre is a Marvel Comics AU story where a traumatized girl named Maria Marshall, bonded to one of the knock-off Carnage symbiotes, decides to get as much power as she can so she'll Never Be Hurt Again.


Call Me Massacre contains examples of:

  • Above the Gods: Briefly alluded to by Loki when lecturing Maria. Apparently, there are tiers to divinity, with Loki mentioning Elder Gods and Cosmic Abstracts.
  • Accidental Kidnapping: Maria was not aware that Molly Hayes had a legal guardian until she meets Nico Minoru when visiting Strange Academy and Nico gets mad at Molly dropping off the radar like she did. It leads to an awkward conversation.
  • Accidental Marriage Maria elevating Kelda to proper godhood status right after her own Apotheosis as an act of romantic affection (with Venus as a witness) renders Kelda the "Earthmistress," or Queen, of the new pantheon with Maria, as the "Skymistress," or King... or as Loki puts it, metaphysically speaking they're married now. As it has no legal standing, they prefer to think of themselves as merely dating but that doesn't stop Venus from giving them a wedding present.
  • A God Am I Maria is usually pretty casual about being a God after she ascends but she delves into this when giving a The Reason You Suck speach to Mother Rightous
  • Amazonian Beauty: Kelda Allsdotir is a tall and muscular girl who Maria describes as the most beautiful girl she's ever seen and as a "Nordic Amazon."
  • Ambiguously Brown: Discussed with Kelda Allsdottir, a dark-skinned Asgardian (with Heinz Hybrid ancestry from across the Nine Realms), who expresses confusion at being described as 'black.' Additionally, while there are Asgardians who resemble African ethnicities, Kelda's features are described as Nordic and Maria posits that human racial terms shouldn't apply to Asgardians regardless. Kelda's grandmother is eventually revealed to be one of the aforementioned 'Black Asgardians'.
  • And Then What?:
    • Maria's goal is to Never Be Hurt Again by gaining enough power, but she doesn't really have any solid plans for after that. She eventually settles on utterly destroying Carnage and subsuming his legacy.
    • After becoming a Godhood Seeker, Maria doesn't actually know what kind of god she'll be or what she'll do afterward beyond stopping the version of Carnage that's been rampaging across the multiverse.
  • Anger Born of Worry: Nico expresses this when Maria's pantheon visits Strange Academy, as Molly's only indication of where she was was a brief note saying she was going to help Klara.
  • The Assimilator: Thanks to the enhancements she gets, Maria's symbiote gets more benefits from absorbing a codex than is typical, allowing her to rapidly increase her power and skills.
  • Aesop Collateral Damage: An Invoked Trope when Maria encounters a joint operation between the state police and national guard to take down Plague. The officer in charge of the operation, who Maria learns telepathically has something of a grudge against superheroes, refuses to listen when she tells him that the anti-undead bullets they're equipped with won't work, threatens to arrest her for vigilantism, and refuses to let her go in after the people moving in after she warns them that they will die so she just lets them get killed after informing the cop in charge that the deaths were on her head. A Deconstructed Trope later on, as she admits in her first onscreen therapy session that she should have saved them anyway.
  • The Atoner: Maria has a massive break down after killing Donald Blake. She wonders why Thor isn't punishing her for it, accepts his offer to mentor her and, after completing her quest for apotheosis makes it a point to apologize to people she's hurt in her quest for power so far. She also starts going to therapy again.
  • Batman Gambit:
    • After Maria frees Donald Blake after his imprisonment in Thor (2020), Loki manipulates Maria into killing him.
    • When forced to help Maria in response to the above, Loki makes a complicated plan that ends up Both apotheosizing Maria and giving Kelda, a distant descendant of one of Loki's prior incarnations, a chance to live out her dream. And possibly the two teens hitting it off.
    • After being informed of just what the Carnage Symbiote was up to the last time it was on Earth 616, Maria realizes that Cletus Kassidy played her like a fiddle, tricking her into seeking divinity to make her more vulnerable when Carnage returns to Earth than she would be as a non-god of similar power.
  • Blood Knight: At the conclusion of the first "arc" of the story, Maria is forced to confront the fact that she genuinely enjoys fighting, growing stronger, and violence. At first, she responds by rejecting morals and her humanity, but upon realizing that's not who she is she spends some time trying to reconcile it.
  • Big Fancy House: After Maria becomes a god she's gifted one of these on the California Coast by Venus. It has numerous amenities and utilities supplied by magic, a decent chunk of private beach, magical defenses that make it hard to find and impossible to spy on, and to Maria's distress it was stressed to her that it was thoroughly cleaned and all the furniture replaced before it was handed over. A later chapter reveals that there's an in-home spa in the basement.
  • Conditioned to Accept Horror: Klara Prast mentions that she's gotten very good at coping with trauma, which concerns Maria who feels that's not the kind of thing you're supposed to get good at.
  • Central Theme: Coping with Trauma. Maria's quest for power is a poorly-thought-out response to the various events that occurred while she was hiding out on her own after losing her family and foster family in short order and even after she realizes that she likes fighting and getting stronger the desire for safety remains part of it, as her therapist points out. When Maria is on her own, she does a lot of dumb things in an attempt to get the power she feels that she needs to Never Be Hurt Again and, although it works, it causes more long-term problems. Once she finally agrees to accept help, however, things start going much more smoothly for her and she begins to realize that what she was doing wasn't exactly a healthy coping mechanism and starts second-guessing if she'll ever have enough power to satisfy her even as she finds more reasons to seek power.
  • Creepy Child:
    • Maria herself is presented as this when shown from the perspective of others. In Jane Foster's interlude, Maria is described as moving and behaving like a feral predator and this is reiterated during Maria's visit to the Limbo Embassy where Maddie Pryor takes an, admittedly condescending, interest in her due to Maria scaring many of the demons in the building, describing her as an experienced killer strutting about as if she owned the place.
    • Maria starts to realize this about Klara Prast when Klara casually dumps her entire traumatic backstory on her, admits that she's developed a taste for vengeance after the fall of ORCHIS, and would like to vandalize her husband's grave for this reason. She declines when Maria offers to put her in contact with her therapist, but expresses interest when Maria offers to use her authority as a God of Death to check if Klara's birth parents or husband are burning in hell. Nico mentions that the Avengers dossiers on the Runaways, to paraphrase, make note not to piss Klara off.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Every fight in the fic is either Maria giving or receiving one of these.
  • Dark and Troubled Past: Maria got her symbiote when she killed the homeless man who was its first host after he killed her parents, then she got taken over by it when Knull attacked, and in the aftermath, the symbiote properly bonded with her... giving her a mental front-row seat to all of Cletus Cassady's atrocities.
  • Deity of Human Origin: Maria eventually goes on a short quest that concludes with an ascension ritual, and as the Top God of her new pantheon can elevate others. When she starts expanding her Pantheon, her first two recruits are Molly Hayes and Klara Prast of the Runaways as the gods of Strength and Plantlife, respectively. Kelda, being originally Asgardian, doesn't count. Her God of Magic is Emily Bright.
  • Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: One chapter makes mention that the military has developed a Silver Bullet that has been blessed and alchemically treated and additionally contains the folkloric weaknesses of a wide variety of undead creatures as an all-purpose weapon against such creatures... Not that they do any good against corpses animated by symbiotes.
  • Did Not Think This Through:
    • Maria quickly comes to regret trying to manipulate the Kingpin of Crime into helping her gain the power she seeks.
    • While The Avengers were primarily interested in talking Maria down before she crossed a line and offering her help, it was only during the confrontation that it was realized that having four of the team's heavy hitters talk to a girl they lured out into the middle of nowhere might be taken a different way.
    • When the Kingpin sends a hit team to kill Maria and take her symbiote, the group tracks her down as she's coming out of the CDC, obviously carrying something, but they think that it's still a good idea to try and attack her, and only Maria's quick actions prevent a release of the Venom virus when the container breaks.
  • Divine Ranks: Explained by Loki:
    • At the bottom are nature spirits and minor divinities, who aren't mortal but aren't true gods. The average Asgardian is here, as are it's implied most nymphs who aren't Oceanids.
    • Above them are the majority of the actual Gods of each pantheon.
    • Above that is what Loki calls the Titan-tier, home of the Greek Titans, the strongest of the Indian Daevas, and Thor due to being half-Elder God. Maria and her pantheon are also at this level, due to magic meant to mimic Thor and his hammer being a significant contributing factor to her own Apotheosis.
    • Above them are the Elder Gods who Loki describes as being on a whole other level compared to regular gods, using Utgard-Loki as an example.
  • Don't Fear the Reaper: Maria realizes, not long after her apotheosis, that she's the goddess of Death for her new pantheon, but she doesn't go after innocents, and even when seeking out Cassady she takes the time to help a few ghosts move on.
  • Elemental Powers: Maria picks a few of these up in her quest for power, and other such users appear as well.
    • Shock and Awe: Maria' first set comes from when she extracts the codex from Miles Morale's spine, gaining his bio-electrical "venom" powers and an immunity to electrical attacks.
    • Playing with Fire: Maria gains the ability to breathe fire after assimilating the remains of the original Red Goblin symbiote, and later seeks out Hellnir, a hammer made of living abyss and promethium that is to Hellfire what Mjolnir is to storms. Later she reforges it into an axe, called All-Hell, and its hellfire powers were purified into something else by Maria's apotheosis. Kelda, meanwhile, has a minor authority over fire as part of her role as a Forge God.
    • Dishing Out Dirt As the Earth Mother of Maria's pantheon, Kelda has authority over the bones of the earth.
    • Power of the Storm: When Maria absorbs the Serpent Symbiote to try and claim both Hellnir and the power Donald Blake drained from her, she ends up absorbing his biomass and with it all the divine power he accumulated, including the power of Red Norvall and his Warhammer and the remnant's of Stormbreaker that remained in Beta Ray Bill.
    • An Ice Person: Kelda gains a degree of authority over ice after becoming a Forge Goddess, due to ice's association with creation
    • Green Thumb: Klara Prast, as in canon. Then she becomes a goddess of plant life.
  • Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Maria cites this trope when she gets into an argument with Maddie Pryor in one chapter, noting that for as bad as Maddie's life has been none of it excuses any of the horrific acts she's performed.
  • God of the Dead: Maria, after her apotheosis, takes some time to figure out what exactly she's the God of but upon seeing the ghosts of people recently killed in a sentinel attack, and Death herself, realizes that she's a God of Death. She's a bit of a mixture of the main archetypes, being able to see ghosts or when people are going to die, talk the dead into moving on, prevent unnatural deaths, kill someone utterly by flexing her power, and grant her blessing for the dead to come back to life.
  • Godhood Seeker: As this story takes place concurrently with Death of the Venomverse, Maria is warned by Cletus Kassidy himself that she'll need to be a God to have a chance against the Carnage symbiote, which becomes her defining goal for much of the story... But...
  • Good Counterpart: Maria is essentially this to Carnage, more or less an Anti-Hero bonded to one of the offshoots of that symbiote on a personal quest that parallels what it did during Carnage (2022) and Death of the Venomverse. Though as she notes when she dismantle's ORCHIS, she's also this to Mother Righteous: Both sought a form of Godhood but Maria actually did the work while Mother Righteous is lazy and disrespectful of the powers she used in her quest.
  • Has a Type: Maria is exclusively attracted to tall, muscular women.
  • Heavy Sleeper: Maria somehow slept through a demonic invasion of New York.
  • Heinz Hybrid: Downplayed in that she's functionally just an Asgardian, but Kelda Allsdotir is the result of many successive generations of interbreeding by inhabitants from all across the Nine Realms, with her surname being a reference to this fact.
  • Huge Girl, Tiny Guy: Kelda's mother Rose is a ten-foot-tall frost giant. Her father is a four-foot-ten Asgardian with recent dwarven ancestry.
  • Humanoid Abomination: Maria's true form is terrifying to behold.
  • Innocent Fanservice Girl: Kelda's village has a Nordic-style communal bathhouse, and she sees nothing wrong with talking to Maria about the quest she's come to seek her counsel on in the bathhouse's steam room after bringing the other girl on her after-work routine. As Maria finds Kelda very attractive, she spends most of the conversation staring at her feet, with Kelda assuming that Maria's flustered reaction is due to not being used to the heat until sometime after they start dating.
  • I Know What You Fear: Trauma, as in canon. He starts out looking like Maria's symbiote like it was on the man she killed in self-defense before it jumped to her, then a hollowed-out and broken version of her to symbolize Maria's fear that she's empty and broken and that no amount of power will satisfy her, and finally Maria as a Celestial after using the Black Vortex (which she's been dreaming about) to unlock her full cosmic potential, fearing that she'd go bad like most who use the relic do and become something that no one could stop.
  • I Need a Freaking Drink: Implied when Maria meets with Kelda's family for the second time. Kelda's parents want to interrogate Maria about the two girl's relationship, being concerned at how fast it's developing, and things get awkward when Maria admits that her parents are dead and she'd be alone most nights if Kelda wasn't sleeping over.
  • Insistent Terminology: Maria is not Maria, she's Massacre.
  • I See Dead People: As a goddess of Death, Maria discovers her power when she starts seeing ghosts.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite her name choice and attempts to make herself seem tough due to her traumas, Maria has a softer side buried deep down. Like when she offers Thor condolences over Odin's death, when she heals and frees Scott Summers and the other imprisoned mutants after taking Scott's codex, or when she gives Ben Reilly his memories back.
  • Love at First Sight: Maria, for Kelda. Kelda falls for Maria not long after.
  • Never Be Hurt Again: Maria's goal in gaining more power is to be able to prevent herself from suffering the way she had before, or at least that's her justification for herself.
  • Never Gets Drunk: While she's staying on Asgard, Maria is permitted to drink mead by Thor citing Asgard's more liberal policies on alcohol consumption and that her constitution can probably handle it just fine. This somehow resulted in a drinking contest against the Warriors Three where Maria realized that she just flat out can't be affected by alcohol, mentioning that "it doesn't do anything for me" when offered some by Kelda's mother in a later chapter.
  • Noodle Incident: A number of Canon Marvel Comics incidents are presented as such.
    • The "Dark Web" and "Scribble Man" arcs of Amazing Spider-Man are this to Maria's perspective as she somehow managed to sleep through both of them.
    • Outside of references to canon, Maria mentions offhand that she's decided that she Never Gets Drunk... during a drinking contest with the Warriors Three while staying in Asgard.
    • At one point the events of of the Strange Academy crossover miniseries, where some of the students at Strange Academy managed to decode the Voynich Manuscript... and since it was made by Loki in this universe, it caused a naked and hog-tied Thor to crash through the ceiling, are mentioned.
  • Pro-Human Transhuman: Maria is a mass of symbiote goo, various powers, human and mutant DNA, and so on. But she's by no means malicious.
  • Rape as Backstory: Klara Prast, as in canon.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure:
    • Thor, in his capacity as King of Asgard. When Maria frees and then accidentally kills Donald Blake, Thor doesn't issue a punishment despite her submitting herself to his custody because her guilt and grief are more effective punishments than anything he could lay out. Instead, he concerns himself with helping a child in pain.
    • Between the Olympian's appearance in Guardians of the Galaxy and Ares' death in the most recent volume of The Punisher, the rulership of Olympus has defaulted to Venus whose behavior has improved significantly following the epiphany she had as of her most recent appearances in Marvel canon. Now her number one goal is maximizing happiness.
  • Removed Achilles' Heel: Once Maria gets enough of a boost that going after symbiote codices is worth the effort, she starts seeking out codices specifically to shore up the typical symbiote weaknesses, like absorbing the Endo-Sym armor to harden herself against sonics, or using Freak's codice to harden herself against Anti-Venom, etc.
  • She Is the King: While Maria prefers the feminine Skymistress over the masculine Skyfather, she doesn't mind being called a king citing this trope as her justification.
  • Shout-Out:
    • When seeking asylum in Limbo, Maria makes several references to SilverHawks.
    • After Maria introduces Kelda to food and entertainment from Midgard, Kelda develops an appreciation for the music of Galactikraken and she and Maria have a few exchanges implying that Kelda is watching The Owl House.
  • Spanner in the Works: Maria ends up being this to ORCHIS after coming into conflict with them in her quest. As well as to the X-Men when she unilaterally takes down ORCHIS herself. By extension, she effectively foils Moira's plans and it's subtly implied in Text and confirmed in the Spacebattles thread that killing Mother Righteous prevented Enigma from coming online in this timeline.
  • Shipper on Deck: Loki admits that the possibility of the two hitting it off is part of why he arranged for Maria to meet Kelda (who is a distant descendant of a previous incarnation of his), and later refers to them as his favorite newlyweds.
  • Stop Worshipping Me: After Maria takes down ORCHIS and helps accelerate the revival of the sixteen million mutants waiting for it, it's noted that there's no way that she doesn't have a cult now, which she has mixed feelings on.
  • Super-Strength: Ubiquitous, given that it's a superhero setting and a high-level one at that, but special mention goes to Molly Hayes, who becomes a God of Strength when she's taken into Maria's Pantheon. Since she was already capable of exchanging punches with gods before her apotheosis, becoming a god primarily grants her greater control over her power, including affecting people selectively, along with a stronger body when not using her powers.
  • Their First Time: Implied at the end of chapter 32—34 on Archive of Our Own—when Kelda inquires if Maria would like to join in her the steam room of the house's in-home spa shortly after noting that Maria's accomplishments that day should be celebrated. Mara takes a moment to think it over, then agrees.
  • “The Reason You Suck” Speech: Maria gives ones out to Liz Allen, Maddie Pryor, and Mother Righteous as she encounters them.
  • The Trickster{/}The Storyteller: Loki plays a role in the story. And explicitly tells Maria to look for someone who fulfills these archetypes when looking for people to expand into her pantheon, among others who'd contribute heavily to the pantheon's overall strength.
  • There Are No Therapists: Averted, Maria starts seeing Terrace Ward/Trauma in his capacity as a therapist after she starts accepting help and multiple mentions have been made that she was briefly his patient in the past in-between Absolute Carnage and King in Black.
  • Title Drop: Maria/Massacre quotes the title more than once.
  • Top God: A Skyfather, potentially Skymother if female is the ruler of a pantheon and is imbued with a mantle of cosmic power that is cultivated as the pantheon grows in power. Thor and Venus are the current rulers of the Asgardians and Olympians, respectively, and Maria becomes the ruler, referred to as Skymistress, of a brand new Pantheon after completing her apotheosis.
  • Totally Not a Werewolf: When Maria tracks down Plague hoping to consume it and gain its powers of teleportation, she finds that the warehouse it's been in between killing sprees surrounded by state police and the the national guard, who have mistaken him for some sort of undead due to its appearance and are equipped with Depleted Phlebotinum Shells meant to take advantage of as many traditional undead weaknesses as possible. They refuse to listen when Maria tries to tell them that it's a symbiote and that they will all die if they go in after it, which they do when the officer in charge refuses to let her go in after them. Of course, given that Plauge's host is the reanimated Cortland Kassady they're not completely wrong, as Maria lampshades.
  • The Worf Effect: Discussed and Invoked by name when Maria confronts the leadership of ORCHIS. When grappled by Nimrod, she asks him if he knows of it. He humors her and defines it, then she calls him "Worf" and uses her divine-cosmic powers to destroy him utterly.
  • Ultimate Black Smith: Kelda comes from a long line of smiths, magicians, and artificers from all across the nine realms. She learned all of the crafting skills and magic accumulated by her ancestors and turned it to her dream of becoming a forge god and proves her worth in such regards by literally forging Maria into a God.

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