Fanfic / Ages of Shadow

Ages of Shadow is an Jackie Chan Adventures fic by Eduard Kassel, and a part of Project Dark Jade.

Long ago, Jade Chan fell to darkness after a desperate bid to save her family from their worst enemy. Afterwards, they had no choice but to seal her away in the Shadow Realm. Now, countless centuries later, Jade has been forced to adapt to her new environment, in both body and mind. And then one day, she once again makes contact with the mortal world, setting in motion events that will see Jade take on many new roles, in order to take her rightful place in the new Ages of her existence.

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Tropes:

• Abhorrent Admirer: invoked Jade takes an interest in Alonso, since he looks similar to Boaz. He, however, is sufficiently (and understandably) squicked out.
• Adam and Eve Plot: Jade creates a Neukhan pair for this purpose, though she creates more than just them to start.
• Addictive Magic: The card game Brenner creates is designed to be addictive, even as it channels fragments of the souls of the losers as sacrifices to Jade. In fact, according to Domino, it's the very loss of those soul fragments that makes the game so addictive, and makes long term players so eccentric (at best). However, after the Final Battle, this no longer applies, as the soul fragments are returned, and Jade's influence on the game is cut off due to the seal.
• After the End: Jade believes this is why the world appears to have regressed to Bronze Age levels of technology. However, it's later confirmed that she's instead stumbled on an Alternate Universe.
• All Your Colors Combined: Lampshaded by Jade, when Trace combines all the Sun Souls to defeat her for good.
• Alternate Universe: The version of Earth Jade connects with after being sealed and cut off from her own.
• And I Must Scream: Jade is trapped alone in the Shadow Realm for centuries (and that's the minimum estimate), and only seems to be able to cope by sleep, and by going somewhat crazy.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • When Brenner's Sun Soul sides with Jade during the final battle, Trace asks if Brenner's Lost Lenore would want this. She wouldn't.
  • Jackie's spirit convinces Jade that the second Lotus-Eater Machine isn't real by asking her the name of her and Paco's child (who didn't exist in the real world). The shock of realizing she doesn't know is what makes her accept.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: How the Shadow Walkers settle things, even before Jade reorganizes things.
• Back from the Dead: Zaben has Boaz raised from the dead as a final gambit.
• Badass Boast: Jade speaks in pretty much nothing but these to the Shadow Walkers and her enemies.
• Bad Boss: Boaz completes his resurrection by draining the life of most of his remaining Shadow Walkers, even though he could have just waited for his powers to restore themselves normally; he just didn't want to wait a few years. This ends up costing him big.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Since by the time she meets the Shadow Walkers Jade's clothes have decayed to nothing, she gives herself this so that they aren't too distracted to listen to her. She covers her chest with a piece of silk taken from a dead Walker and fuses it to her body, while her nether regions just sort of... disappear around the point that she gives herself a tail and repurposes her legs into another set of arms. Even she doesn't know where they went.
• Big "WHAT?!": There are a few in Chapter 4 when Trace forfeits his last match with Alonso, just to prove a point.
• Bio Manipulation: Jade develops the ability to alter her form over time.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Jade, as she transforms herself into Yade Khan, giving herself extra arms, hair tendrils, and body pouches, and loses her genitals. And then more changes seem to happen on their own, as while she's recovering from her final sealing, she idly notes that at some point she grew two extra hearts, and her brain moved out of her head. She also mentions that her body temperature is fairly patchwork in nature, and at some point she lost the need to breathe.
• Bling of War: Jade completely covers herself in gold just prior to her Final Battle with Trace.
• Body Horror: Jade restructuring her body almost on a whim into a completely inhuman form.
• Body to Jewel: Jade's damaged eye turns into a gem after she removes it.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Jack is just as skilled and talented as the rest of Jade's children. It's just that he's very laid back and barely ever does anything.
• Bullying a Dragon: When cutting ties with Jade, Alonso gives her a "The Reason You Suck" Speech on why he would have never become her new lover. Naturally, this pisses her off, and she tries to kill him.
• Calling Your Attacks: Domino does this. Jade says he needs to work on the names.
• The Chessmaster: The Magus King, the villain who left Jade so desperate she absorbed the power of the Oni to defeat him, did so by apparently manipulating events to perfectly drive the heroes to the point of near defeat. And if Jade hadn't taken the Oni's power, something he didn't expect, he would have won.
• The Chosen One:
  • Boaz, the Third Himinion, was specifically chosen and secretly trained personally by Jade for years before taking over the Shadow Walkers.
  • King Cheherazad is this for the forces opposed to the Shadow Walkers.
• Clipped-Wing Angel:Boaz's clone Yade Khan was still incomplete when he was forced to complete his plan to take control of it, and the method was crude, causing it to degenerate into an infantile state, destroying his mind in the process.
• Conlang: As one of her many pet projects to pass time in the Shadow Realm, Jade creates a written language she dubs "Channish", which is a combination of English, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish.
• Crazy Cat Lady: Replace "cats" with "shadow snakes" and that's what Jade becomes during the first age of her imprisonment in the Shadow Realm. She even imagines them speaking to her.
• Creating Life Is Awesome: Jade and her children eventually start creating new plants, animals, and even mortals to inhabit a new world.
• Creating Life Is Unforeseen: Jade's power reacting with the energies released in the Final Battle seeds the Shadow Netherworld with simple life, as well as four infants.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Domino's attempt to fight Jade only results in her faking injuries out of amusement, before she kills him.
• Cyclops: Distracted with other things after her defeat, like the four infants, Jade decides that making herself this would be easier than regenerating her damaged eye.
• Darker and Edgier: Pretty much a given for a Project story, but this is one of the few stories rated M.
• Dark Messiah: Boaz was personally trained by his religion's goddess in order to lead his people to greatness. This would sound pretty good, except that it's a Religion of Evil, the goddess in question is an insane Fallen Hero-turned-Eldritch Abomination, and "leading to greatness" means conquering the world. Gets upgraded to The Antichrist when he's resurrected even more powerful than before, and intends to destroy modern civilization.
• The Dark Side Will Make You Forget: Jade originally put on Tarakudo's mask in order to defeat an enemy, the Magus King, out to destroy her family, and while her will won over that of the Oni generals, she was unable to resist the corruption of the mask.
• Dead Person Conversation: Any conversation Trace has with King, being that he's Cheherezad's spirit. There's also the Vision Quest conversation he has with a chi copy of Tohru.
• Deal with the Devil:
  • Brenner agrees to help Jade to gather the power to finally escape her imprisonment in exchange for immortality.
  • Jade convinces Alonso to serve her in exchange for safety and power for himself and his sister.
• Demonic Possession: After Jade's defeat, the Dark Queen's Favor card is brought to sentience by Zaben, who then has it possess Amara and rob Brenner.
• Didn't See That Coming: Jade being desperate enough that she would take up Tarakudo's mask was apparently the one thing that the Magus King did not anticipate.
• Didn't Think This Through: Domino tries to trap Jade in a situation that limits her power to a quarter of the whole so he can defeat her. As Jade lampshades when she stops playing and effortlessly kills him, as a being who could easily be described as a Physical God, a quarter of her power is still leagues beyond his.
• Distracted by the Sexy: When one of the elemental monks is rubbing her butt (sore from sitting on the rocky ground) right in front of him, Trace understandably misses what another is trying to say to him.
• Domain Holder: While Jade/Yade Khan never gains total Dimension Lord control over the Shadow Netherworld, she is the most powerful being ever in there, and learns how to create matter from the essence of the shadows around her.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: It took years, but Trace and company, after dealing with Yade Khan, managed to defeat Zaben, stop the resurrected Boaz, and destroy the last remnants of Yade's power on Earth, allowing King to finally pass on, with the last scene with them being Trace and Mildred driving off into the sunset.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • What Jade has become by the time she's met the Shadow Walkers — insanely old and powerful, sealed in another dimension, and having altered her appearance into a completely inhuman form. She's even referred to by Cheherazad's magical mentors as an "outsider", while Jade herself at one point compares herself to "something that H. P. guy would write".
  • Drago has also evolved into one by the time he reappears in the story. When his true form is revealed, he's described as a humongous mass of tentacles and mouths, with only a head that vaguely still resembles how he used to look.
• Elemental Powers: An order of monks powered by classical elemental magic aided Cheherezad in the past, and Trace in the present, to fight Jade.
• The Empire: Starting under Boaz's rule, the Shadow Walkers emerge from hiding to begin conquering in Yade Khan's name, carving out a kingdom in the Middle East known as the "Himinate". It lasts several decades, until being brought down by the Persians and their allies.
• Eunuchs Are Evil: The Second Himinion was a eunuch. Jade was neither fond of him, nor impressed with his meager accomplishments.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Trace lampshades this when he's told of Yade mourning Boaz.
  • Ulaz the Shadow Walker lost his father and uncles to Zaben's mad purge of the cult, and his remaining friends were unwillingly sacrificed by Boaz as part of his resurrection. This causes him to switch sides.
• Evil Is Petty:
  • Defied. Jade considers avenging oneself on strangers pointless, and gives up on her ideas of revenge when she realizes that the people who sealed her are likely all long dead.
  • Alonso calls out Zaben's campaign of destroying the lives of everyone close to Trace as this, since he's not even bothering to do it openly.
• Exact Words:
  • Zaben said he'd release Mildred if Trace defeated his servant. He didn't say anything about not blinding her...
  • The game rules say that the will of Yade Khan decides the winner. But there's more than one Yade Khan, so this allows Jade to decide the outcome of a duel.
• Exactly What I Aimed At: Trace fakes attacking Jade to strike the Well of Souls without her noticing.
• Expy: Starting with Chapter 3, the story has a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! expies, both with the card game Brenner creates and the characters introduced, though with some twists.
• Eye Scream:
  • Zaben gouges out Mildred's eyes after his minion loses a duel with Trace.
  • Jade looses her right eye to the Sun Sword right before she's sealed.
• Face–Heel Turn: Jade, as usual for Project fics.
• Fake Ultimate Hero: Maximus Domino is a Warrior Monk who has trained to be the World's Strongest Man, so he can be the one to kill Yade Khan. Jade is still vastly more powerful than he is, and effortlessly kills him.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: In-Universe. Apparently a consequence of the soul shaving from the Yade Khan game is poor fashion sense.
• Fallen Hero: Jade fell a long time ago.
• Female Misogynist: Jade has shades of this, only allowing men to serve her directly.
• Figure It Out Yourself: Jade's approach towards the Neukhan and advanced technology.
• Final Battle: Chapter 6 contains the final showdown between Trace and Jade, engaging in a game of Yade Khan for control of the Sun Souls and the fate of the world. When Jade is forced to cheat, it turns into a straight up fight, with Trace using the Sun Sword to free the other Sun Souls, and combining them to permanently seal Jade away.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Boaz, even with the knowledge of the modern age he absorbed from the Shadow Walkers he consumed in the process of being resurrected, so he summons monsters from the game to attack cities and level the playing field. Trace only beats him because he wasn't as skilled at the modern game and was unprepared for how much power his duel with Trace used.
• Floating Continent: By the time time she encounters the Shadow Walkers, Jade has expanded her Ominous Floating Castle to the point where she estimates that it's slightly larger than a circular Manhattan. After Jade and her children create the planet Hong Sisco in the Shadow Universe, they bring it down on the surface, creating a plateau.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Alonso lampshading the One-Steve Limit problem with Yade Khan the game and Jade's new persona hints at her Exact Words trick.
  • Similarly, her pulling an I Am Not Left-Handed on Domino and her talk about Victory Is Boring hints at how she's been sandbagging it the entire time.
  • Before she kills him, one of the monks asks why Jade doesn't create life in her own world instead of conquering Earth. After her sealing, the process actually kickstarts life in the Netherworld.
• A God Am I: After taking control of the Shadow Walkers and taking on the mantle of Yade Khan, Jade starts viewing herself as a goddess.
• Genesis Effect: Jade and her children eventually create a proper sun and planet in the Shadow Universe.
• Genius Loci: The possibility is brought up that Yade's become essentially the heart/brain of the Shadow Universe, and the rest of the realm and its contents her body. Lin, one of Jade's daughters, finds this worrying, since her personal matter is a part of the Shadow Universe.
• A Glitch in the Matrix: To help Jade escape the first Lotus-Eater Machine she's trapped in by Drago, Jack gets in and manages to point out to her that she has long hair (which she never did) and more importantly that time doesn't appear to be passing with any meaning. In the second dream, she's more convinced of its reality, until the Talismans start popping up; plus, her hair is still long, and most importantly, she doesn't know the name of her and Paco's baby.
• Gold Fever:
  • When the Shadow Walkers start offering Jade tribute, this is all that she really cares about, since it's one of the only things that doesn't decay in the Shadow Netherworld.
  • After meeting with Brenner, Jade starts covering herself in gold, in the belief that it makes her look more godlike.
  • By the Final Battle, she's completely coated herself in gold, so she can properly present herself as Earth's new goddess.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Being sealed in the Shadow Realm alone for countless centuries drives Jade insane. She gets somewhat better after she establishes contact with the Shadow Walkers.
• Hates Being Alone: Jade lets slip in her Villainous Breakdown that she's tired of being alone in the dark.
• Heel Realization: Brenner has one in response to Trace's Armor-Piercing Question.
• Hero Killer: Zaben apparently mows through everyone on the heroes' side who faces him, and even blinds Mildred for no reason, altogether making himself the biggest threat other than Jade. By the Final Battle, however, Trace no longer has time for his shit, so easily kicks his ass.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Jade put on the mask of Tarakudo in order to defeat a foe called the Magus King who had captured Jackie, but lost herself in the process.
  • The priests who trained Cheherazad in magic sacrificed their own souls to empower his enchanted sword. Turns out to be a Senseless Sacrifice, as Jade easily shrugs off the sword's attack and disempowers it.
  • Shen uses up his Life Energy to neutralize Drago's attempt to Colony Drop Hong Sisco.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Jack feels that if Jade really wanted to hide something, she'd pull this trope.
• High-Heel–Face Turn: The two female Shadow Walker recruits switch sides and join the heroes.
• High Priest: The Himinion is this to Jade, serving as the leader of the Shadow Walkers in her name.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • This is how Jade was originally imprisoned in the Shadow Realm. Tohru realized that absorbing the combined power of all the Oni had oversaturated her with shadow chi, enabling him to cast a spell that permanently fused her into the Shadow Realm.
  • Jade's decision to imprison Cheherazad's soul in his own sword as a final punishment for defying her instead somehow allows it to completely cut off the Shadow Netherworld from Earth, leaving Jade without even the meager comfort of her followers.
• Human Sacrifice: The Shadow Walkers start offering these to Jade. Since she doesn't want to offend them, and since she has no other use for them, she feeds them to her snakes (though she kills them quickly first).
• I Am Not Left-Handed:
  • In Jade's battle with Domino, she purposefully pretends to be weaker than she actually is for a bit before she drops the facade and kills him.
  • The whole time Jade could have declared her servants the victors through her Exact Words control of the Yade Khan game, but didn't because it was more fun to do it the other way.
• Immortality Seeker: Brenner allies with Jade in the hopes that she'll make him immortal, so that he can live long enough to conquer death as a whole.
• Innocent Fanservice Girl: Jade's daughter Lin never bothers to wear clothing, as it makes it easier to observe her evolving body.
• It Amused Me: Jade could have rigged the Yade Khan matches at any time she wanted, allowing her to easily obtain the Sun Souls. She didn't because it was more fun the other way, and she finds easy wins boring.
• Karmic Death: Mildred, whose eyes he ripped out, is the one who shoots Zaben dead in the end.
• Killed Off for Real: Jade killed Uncle after escaping her original imprisonment.
• Klingon Promotion: The Fourth Himinion rises to power by assassinating Boaz. Since he was Jade's favorite, this gets his killer killed.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: After Cheherazad starts decimating her followers, Jade orders her remaining servants to flee so that they can start anew.
• Lampshade Hanging: Once the story turns into a pastiche of Yu-Gi-Oh!, this is all over the place — the Serious Business nature of the game, character designs and personalities, and even the scene change tags start listing how many episodes have passed alongside the normal amount of time.
• Lizard Folk: All of Jade's children have varying degrees of reptilian traits to their biology, though Hebi also has insectoid attributes. The Neukhan race Jade bases off of them are also reptilian in nature.
• Locked Out of the Loop: As it turns out, the Shadow Walkers never knew that Jade was sealed, they merely thought she had abandoned them.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Using the Sun Souls, Jade intends to exploit a flaw in the seal holding her in the Shadow Netherworld — she can't permanently escape to Earth, but there's nothing stopping her from dragging the Earth in with her.
  • In classic Jade fashion, she does this with Exact Words with the rules of the game to allow her to decide the outcome of duels. It says that the winner is decided by Yade Khan, but that doesn't just mean the game...
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Drago traps Jade in a double-layered one. The first is a world where she never grows up and is able to have a never-ending string of adventures just like her canon ones. When Jack helps her escape from that by pointing out all the inconsistencies, she "wakes up" in a world where the Magus King never happened, so she's still human and living a normal life with her family. This one she escapes after her subconscious, manifesting as Jackie's ghost, helps her realize it's a dream, and she fights her way out.
• Master of Your Domain: Jade eventually learns how to reshape the very structure of her body, allowing her to easily do things like extend her spine into a tail, turn her legs into another pair of arms, and animate her hair into tendrils.
• Meaningful Rename: Upon introducing herself to the Shadow Walkers, Jade rechristens herself "Yade Khan", the former part a tribute to Paco's constant incorrect enunciation of her name, and the latter a tribute to the Shadowkhan. She also renames the Shadow Realm as the Shadow Netherworld after realizing her sealing is similar to the Demon Sorcerers in the Demon Netherworld.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Ulaz turns on Boaz after Boaz kills his friends as part of his resurrection.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: After Jade gives herself a tail to match the appearance and mobility of her snakes, she decides her legs are now redundant, and changes them into a second set of arms.
• Multiboobage: Jade adds a second set of breasts to herself after finding the four infants in the Shadow Netherworld so she can feed them all.
• The Multiverse: The monks of Trace's world are aware of it, and of Jade's extra-dimensional origins.
• Mysterious Watcher: Jack takes on this role when following Jade in the Lotus-Eater Machine and trying to catch her attention.
• The Needless: Jade. She doesn't eat anymore, her stomach having apparently effectively atrophied away to nothing, and doesn't need to breath. The only need she seems to have left if sleeping occasionally.
• Nonhumans Lack Attributes: Jade's alterations have given her Barbie Doll Anatomy.
• No OSHA Compliance: Trace lampshades this with some of the duel setups.
• No-Sell:
  • When Jade first encounters the Shadow Walkers, one tries to attack her with a spear. Tries being the key word here.
  • Cheherazad's sword, empowered by the magic of all the other Elemental Powers and the willingly sacrificed souls of those who practice them, has absolutely no effect on Jade.
  • Domino's attacks don't even scratch Jade. She just let him think he hurt her as a sick joke.
• Official Couple: Jackie and Viper/Veronica married at some point prior to Jade's banishment.
• Ominous Floating Castle: Jade's Grand Palace of the Shadow Netherworld starts as one of these, but by the time she meets the Shadow Walkers, she's expanded it into a Floating Continent.
• Omnicidal Maniac: After Jade's defeat, Zaben loses it, believing that all life goes badly eventually, and devises a plan to use the Omega: The End card, the Elemental Seal, and three Sun Souls to destroy the universe and put everyone out of their misery.
• One-Steve Limit: Brenner names his card game after Yade Khan, which Alonso realizes is kind of confusing for those in the know. This turns out to be Foreshadowing about how Jade actually uses this to her advantage, using the fact that she and the game share a name to set up a loophole in the rules so that she could decide the outcome of a duel if she wanted to.
• Our Souls Are Different:
  • The Shadow Walkers wager pieces or the entirety of their souls during their magic duels with each other.
  • Cheherazad powers his sword through the Heroic Sacrifices of twenty priests, who seal their souls within it. Jade dismisses them, and then traps Cheherazad's inside as punishment for defying her.
  • The card game Brenner designs, named Yade Khan after Jade, is designed to slice off a tiny fragment of the loser's soul as an offering to her.
  • There's also the matter of the seven Sun Souls, which together will apparently grant Jade enough power to escape her imprisonment.
• Physical God: Jade sets herself up as one to the Shadow Walkers. Considering she has the powers of all the Oni generals, apparently doesn't need to breathe, doesn't need to eat, and seems to be immortal, she may have a few valid points.
• The Power of Creation: Jade gains the ability to create physical matter out of shadow energy.
• Precision F-Strike: When Mildred is delivering a curt Shut Up, Hannibal! to Jade during the final duel.
• Prehensile Hair: Jade eventually infuses shadows into her hair to give her hair tendrils.
• Promoted to Parent: Jade to the four babies born as a result of the combined energies Trace used in the final battle mixing with her blood and the darkness of the Netherworld.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Jade, in the middle of a Villainous Breakdown, fighting off the monsters the Sun Souls send at her:
  "HOW! MANY! TIMES! MUST! I SHOW! I CAN'T! BE BEATEN?!"
• The Purge: After Zaben goes mad, he slaughters most of the rest of the Shadow Walkers, leaving only a handful. Most of whom are, in turn, sacrificed by Boaz to restore himself.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Gracia apparently gives one to Alonso in Chapter 4, complete with a "flashback recap" episode. While it doesn't cause a Heel Realization, it does talk him out of killing Zaben for failing Jade.
  • Alonso gives one to Jade when cutting ties with her. All he does is piss her off.
• Red Baron: After rechristening herself as Yade Khan, Jade gives herself multiple titles, which attentive readers will realize are all references to her accomplishments in canon.
• Redemption Equals Death: During the battle with Boaz, a Shadow Walker named Ulaz defects to the heroes. Boaz kills him for it.
• Reincarnation: Jade apparently thinks Alonso is Boaz reborn.
  • Reincarnation Romance: What she is apparently trying to start with him.
• Religion of Evil: The Shadow Walkers were already a cult of shadow magic users before Jade found them, and then she reorganized them around the worship of her god persona, Yade Khan, at which point they dedicated themselves to conquering the world in her name.
• Ret-Gone: Omega: The End, the third Forbidden Card, goes this, even to the point of making the memories of people and locations vanish entirely, though the impact remains, and the memories can apparently be regained via prompting, and sealing away those erased by it.
• Revenge by Proxy: After Brenner's defeat, Zaben goes about destroying the lives of everyone close to Trace. Subverted, however, by the fact he's just doing it to get Trace's attention, not because of he's trying to pull Avenging the Villain.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: A minor example — after the Shadow Walkers conquer a kingdom only because the king's brother betrays him, said brother ends up right behind him on the sacrifice list.
• The Sacred Darkness:
  • When Trace is channeling all the elemental magics for his final fight with Jade, he notes that that includes the true power of shadow, not the corrupted version used by Jade.
  • This also turns out to be Mildred's magical strength.
• Sanity Slippage: Jade goes a bit crazy due to being sealed away.
• Sanity Strengthening: Raising her children and creating the planet of Hong Sisco in the Shadow Universe helps Jade regain her senses after her final sealing. She even recognizes how she must have been insane in the past.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: As it turns out, Jade had a loophole built into the Yade Khan game that Brenner never knew about, allowing her to decide the victors of duels.
• Sealed Evil in Another World: Jade is sealed in the Shadow Realm by her family after her Face–Heel Turn, after more mundane ways of locking her up failed. Her entire plot during the Third Age (Chapters 3-6) is to gather the power to escape this imprisonment. Ultimately, Trace fixes the flaw in the seal that let her communicate with other worlds, locking her away for good.
• Secret Test of Character: King is given one when he has to choose between letting Trace fall or gaining a chance to return to flesh. He chooses right, and is rewarded with the restoration of his memories.
• Serious Business: Shen treats Jade's transcriptions of Shonen manga as great and revered sagas.
• Shout-Out:
  • The plot is basically a non crossover version of another Dark Jade fic, Her Shadowed Realm.
  • Jade's claims of being inevitable are a lot like Dark Danny's claims in "The Ultimate Enemy". Word of God says this was unintentional though.
  • Jade herself at one point compares herself to "something that H. P. guy would write".
  • During Brenner's first trip to the Shadow Netherworld, he wonders if he's dying and imagining the whole thing, comparing it to an American Civil War short story he read once.
    • He also notes that Jade appears to have a monument to the Superman franchise in her palace.
  • When bragging of her power to Domino, Jade claims that by his ranking system, hers is over 9000.
  • On one adventure in Drago's Lotus-Eater Machine, the J-Team stopped Kratos from starting an endless war. Another adventure has them going up against the Hanukkah goblins.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Right before the start of her final duel with Trace, Jade offhandedly offers his friends a chance to join her. Mildred tells her to fuck off.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: When Trace starts to give a Patrick Stewart Speech during the Final Battle, Jade interrupts him and tells him to get started with the dueling.
• Sins of Our Fathers: Subverted. When Jade realizes that she's lived so long that all those who sealed her are more than likely dead, she denies being petty enough to seek revenge on their descendants like Shendu, meaning that she doesn't even have the potential of revenge to look forward to.
• Sore Loser: Jade gets all huffy after Trace forces her to activate her Loophole Abuse with the Yade Khan game rules to win.
• Soul Jar:
  • Cheherazad/King is sealed in his sword by Jade.
  • Boaz made his helmet into one, which is how he's revived.
• Spiritual Successor: To Her Shadowed Realm, complete with an Expy of Duel Monsters named after Jade's new persona.
• Straw Nihilist: After Jade's final sealing, Zaben comes to the conclusion that life is meaningless and cruel.
• Sympathy for the Devil: After learning about Jade's past, and after having to seal her away again, with her final words before the seal is completed being that she doesn't want to be alone in the dark anymore, Trace can't help but pity her.
• Take Over the World:
  • Jade tried to cast the world into shadow, apparently by pulling a rogue planet into permanent orbit, before being stopped. And via her Shadow Walkers, she tries to do again the old fashioned way.
  • When the first attempt with the Shadow Walkers fails, and after reconnecting with them via Brenner, Jade comes up with a new plan requiring the Sun Souls. Specifically, it turns out that she intends to drag Earth into the Netherworld with her.
• Take That!: In their final scene, Alonso asks Brenner about rumors that he's intending to start a school dedicated to teaching the card game. Brenner responds by stating that the whole concept is stupid, as how could you build a whole school year curriculum around a game?
• Taking You with Me: When being permanently sealed, Jade threatens to drag Mildred in with her if Trace doesn't stop the spell. Cheherezad swoops in and rescues her, however.
• Tastes Like Purple: At one point, Jade takes a whiff of some magic incense that's meant to help her sleep, and complains that the new recipe smells purple, to the confusion of her attendant.
• That Man Is Dead: After being permanently sealed, and taking on the role of mother to her new children, Yade Khan is forced to fully admit to herself that the Jade Chan part of her is long since gone. Later, to escape Drago's Lotus-Eater Machine, Jade has to symbolically accept this by letting herself be devoured and absorbed by Yade Khan.
• Time Abyss: Since there's no real way to tell the passing of time in the Shadow Netherworld, Jade herself doesn't know how long she's been sealed away. Just that it's been a very long time.
• Time Skip: The story takes great liberties with this, usually through the fact that Jade tends to sleep for years on end.
• Unfortunate Names: The leader of the Shadow Walkers when Jade found them was named "Arses". Is it any wonder that Jade renames him Himinion?
• The Unmasqued World: The Interlude has Trace mention that this is likely going to happen in the future.
• Unto Us a Son and Daughter Are Born: Jade's children number two boys and two girls.
• Victory Is Boring: Jade mentions before killing Domino that she avoids direct confrontation largely because everyone she considers a Worthy Opponent is smart enough not to let her fight. This is also why she never used her ability to rig Yade Khan duels before Trace nearly beats her.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Upon being soundly beaten just before the Final Battle, Zaben flees.
• Villainous BSoD:
  • After Boaz dies, Jade lapses into a five-year depression.
  • She falls into a similar slump, sealing herself in created clay, after her final sealing, and only the arrival of the four babies stirs her out of her funk.
• Villainous Breakdown: It starts after Trace nearly beats her in a duel, with Jade needing to use cheating to win, gets worse when the Sun Souls are freed and Brenner stands against her, and peaks when the seal is nearly complete, Jade screaming that she doesn't want to be alone in the dark anymore.
• Villainous Legacy: Jade's sealing doesn't stop Zaben from enacting several more plans, the final one being the resurrection of Boaz.
• Vision Quest: Trace has two in Chapter 5. First, the elemental monks give him one to explain the origins of Yade Khan and the Shadow Walkers. Later, he's given a vision by a chi construct echo of Tohru, which explains Jade's true origins and how to defeat her.
• Visionary Villain:
  • Unlike his predecessors as Himinion, Boaz was not content to simply have the Shadow Walkers hide in the shadows and rule over countrysides, worshiping Jade in secret. Instead, he turned the cult militant, to begin carving out an empire dedicated to Jade's worship and service.
  • Brenner wants to gain immortality, not for personal gain but to be able to live long enough to eventually free all of humanity from death.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Jade's son Shen prefers to never wear a shirt.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The reason Brenner is willing to serve Jade in exchange for immortality is to live long enough to conquer death, apparently for the good of all of humanity. He considers helping Jade take over the world a necessary evil to accomplish this. Trace's Armor-Piercing Question during the Final Battle makes him realize that it's all not worth it.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Suggested for Boaz's monster army, though it's explained that it wouldn't work.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: The combined energies of the Sun Souls, mixed with Jade's own dark magic, kickstarts life in the Netherworld and births four nonhuman infants.
• You Are in Command Now: After killing the Fourth Himinion for assassinating Boaz, Jade randomly selects another Shadow Walker as his replacement.
• You Have Failed Me: It's shown that in between Chapters 4 and 5, Jade tortured Zaben for failing to defeat Trace and his friends at Alonso's tournament. The details of what exactly she did aren't given, but considering that Zaben is described as being heavily scarred, it probably wasn't pretty.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • After Brenner loses his duel to Trace, Jade doesn't hesitate to take his Sun Soul, since thanks to the Shadow Walkers and Alonso, he's now redundant.
  • Just before the Final Battle, Jade disbands the Shadow Walkers, since she no longer needs servants on Earth if she's going to be free to roam it. To her credit, however, she gives them all a chance to try and waylay Trace and his friends, though really this just means reducing them to cannon fodder.
• Your Head A-Splode: How Jade kills Domino.

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