"God has a wicked sense of humor."
- Rire, Chapter 4
After Hedone High is destroyed in an explosion, a charming yet slightly off-putting headmaster named Rire and a formally stoic student named D gain super powers after surviving the blast. Due to unforunate circumstances involving their powers, the two of them are forced to live together. Things only get worse from there.
God's Humor is an anonymously written fanfic based off original characters by Darqx (an artist and co-creator of Boyfriend to Death). The story is incredibly dark, with character deaths, violence, suggestive themes, suggestive paedophilia, grooming, body horror, suicide mentions, and gaslighting. There are 18 chapters total, which most chapters getting progressive longer as they go on.
The story can be read here.
God's Humor provides examples of:
- All Love Is Unrequited: D doesn’t reciprocate Izm’s feelings. Rire doesn’t reciprocate Val or Monroe’s feelings. But in both D and Rire’s case, they either pretend to reciprocate or are willing to play along.
- Ambiguous Ending: It’s unclear whether D will stay with Rire or go after the gang who through the molotov at Rire’s car.
- A Million Is a Statistic: Played With, but mostly averted. The weight of all the deaths from the Hedone Explosion is brought up multiple times, and a few characters do express distress at the loss even if they didn’t know everyone who died. But at the same time, the deaths that are given the most focus are the ones closest to D; Izm, Marcus, Zeke, and Wei Ren.
- Alternate Universe Fic: The “alternate universe” aspect of the story gets brought up in one chapter.
- Apocalypse Anarchy: Things don’t take long to fall apart even though the “zombie apocalypse” isn’t that bad.
- Beware the Living: When the “zombie apocalypse” happens, humans cause more problems than the zombies do.
- Bittersweet Ending: After all the pain and tragedy D went through, after slowly dissociating throughout the first 40 days of attending Lotus Eaton, he reunites with Desmond and Isla which seems to bring a little life back into him. However, Rire is still trying to groom D without him realizing it, and it’s clear that Rire’s emotional hold on D is strong. D’s reluctance and inability to figure out whether he wants to go after the boys who throw a molotov cocktail at Rire’s car not only shows how much scars D has from all his trauma, but also highlights the ending as being more bitter than sweet.
- Boom, Headshot!: A few characters get shot in the head throughout the story.
- Boarding School: Hedone and Lotus Eaton are both boarding schools.
- Came Back Wrong: Most of the time when Rire brings people back from the dead, they’re normal. But if he waits too long to bring them back to life, when he finally does resurrect them they turn into zombies.
- Chandler's Law: This most notably comes into effect in chapter 9.
- Cool Kid-and-Loser Friendship: Rire was the cool kid, while Monroe was the bully turned loser turned “cool-by-proxy” kid.
- Dark Fic: Canon has gotten dark, but God’s Humor is darker on a more consistent level.
- Death Fic: So many canon characters get killed off. Izm gets killed off twice!
- Death Is Cheap: Thanks to Rire’s powers, he can bring back people from the dead. This is not always a good thing.
- Death of the Hypotenuse: Val’s death ended a few love triangles. See Love Triangle below for more details.
- Destroy the Evidence: Val’s suicide note gets burned because it could lead people to ask too many questions about my she decided to kill herself.
- Everyone Can See It: There were rumours going around that Izm and D were gay for each other. They were only half right.
- Fat and Skinny: The Davis brothers.
- Friendship Favoritism: Rire seemed to be the “the favourite” in his old group of friends. Though Rire favoured Monroe out of everyone else in his group.
- Friends with Benefits: Rire and Monroe seem to be heading down this path near the end of the story. It’s not clear if they will however.
- Genre Shift: Most of the God’s Humor plot revolves around D and Rire just trying to live their lives after gaining super powers. However, for a few chapters, it briefly turns into a zombie story.
- Hard Truth Aesop:
- If a person is very good at lying and covering their tracks, they can get away with almost anything and keep doing awful things.
- Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you want to do good, life can still get in the way of your efforts.
- How Do I Shot Web?: Everyone who has powers is able to use them naturally, but they don’t know how they do it and slowly learn the rules of their powers over time.
- Just Friends: D thought he and Izm were just friends while they were at Hedone, but he starts to wonder whether Izm really had a crush on him or not. Turns out he did.
- Incompatible Orientation: Izm is in love with D. D is asexual.
- If Rire has no attraction to women, then Val’s relationship was like this despite the two of them dating. This trope does not apply if Rire is bisexual however.
- Intergenerational Friendship: By the end of the story, D and Rire are on friendlier terms. This is not a good thing.
- Love Triangle:
- Val (a) was dating Rire (c) but also had some interest in Monroe (b). Monroe may or may not have liked Val romantically, but he did care for her to a certain degree. Monroe also liked Rire, but at the point they hadn’t see each other in years so Rire had no reason to think about him.
- Monroe (a) was married to Estelle (b) but slept with Val (c). Val probably had feelings for Monroe, but she and Estelle didn’t like or speak to each other.
- Magic Meteor: What kickstarts the plot.
- Militaries Are Useless: Averted. It takes the a while, and they arrive when the zombies are already dead, but they eventually lockdown the city to keep the “zombies” from spreading and to bring order to the city.
- Not a Zombie: Averted. It doesn’t take long for the city to see and recognize the zombies walking around.
- One-Gender School: Hedone was an all boys school, Lotus Eaton is not.
- Our Zombies Are Different: They are mentally the same as they were then alive but their bodies are decaying and falling apart.
- Outliving One's Offspring: All the parents of the Hedone victims have to go through this. D sits next to Marcus’ mother during the funeral in the second chapter.
- Personality Powers: Inverted with D and Rire. D, who wants to help people, has the powers of death and erasing memories. Rire, who is more selfish, has the power of healing, life, and teleportation. It’s hard to say whether this is played straight when it comes to Blair Trask, since all we know about him is that he’s average.
- Police Are Useless: Justified. Usually the conflict is over/there’s nothing more the police can do by the time they get to the scene.
- Popular Is Dumb: Averted with Rire’s high school friends. None of the were stupid.
- Pseudo-Canonical Fic: Somewhat, at least in regards to Rire’s friendships while he was a student at Hedone and the relationships he had throughout his life, since those things haven’t been talked about much in canon.
- Restrained Revenge: After being repeatedly killed by Rire in chapter 7, D gets his revenge by pretending to throw out Rire’s clothes.
- Rule of Drama
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Spiritual Successor: To the fanfic “Redback’s Weakness”, but only if you squint hard. - Screw the Rules, It's the Apocalypse!: People start stealing and assaulting others once they think they’re living through an apocalypse.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The fanfic is closer to cynicism than idealism.
- Super Fic: D and Rire aren’t superheroes, but they do get powers and D tries to be a hero of some sort but it never works out.
- Teens Are Monsters: Not all the teenagers in the story are bad, but the ones who are tend to be absolutely awful.
- Unreliable Narrator: Both Rire and D's POV are this to some degree, due to personal biases or simply not having all the information at the time.
- We All Die Someday: The reason why D didn’t believe Rire gained immortality until the former headmaster was attacked by Izm. Though this statement wasn’t outright said by D, he clearly thought it.
- Zombie Apocalypse: The “zombie outbreak” is so small, it can hardly be considered an apocalypse. But once news of the zombies come out, people start acting like the world has ended.
- Zombie Fic: God’s Humor becomes this for a few chapters before things go back to normal.
