Literature / Scrapped Princess

Scrapped Princess is a light novel series written by Ichiro Sakaki and illustrated by Yukinobu Azumi, which was published from 1999 to 2005 for a total of 13 volumes (plus five collections of related short stories). It centers around a 15-year old girl named Pacifica Casull, a cheerful, perky (and somewhat naive) princess who is destined to cause The End of the World as We Know It. Protected by her older siblings Shannon and Raquel, Pacifica is forced to flee across the world to escape those who want to kill her: kings, peasants, a religious order, and certain mysterious strangers... all while coming to terms with her destiny and making friends with the few travelers who don't yet know of her so-called "cursed" nature.

What starts out as a typical-looking Medieval European Fantasy anime takes a dip into Science Fiction territory at around the halfway point, without straying too far from its fantasy roots. Despite the show's premise (one girl against the world), a lot of the characters Pacifica meets on her journey act reasonably honorable, even though they have their own reasons for doing what they do.

The light novels have a manga adaptation which was serialized in Monthly Dragon Age from 2002 to 2004, and a 24-episode anime adaptation which aired in 2003. The script is by Reiko Yoshida (of Tokyo Mew Mew and Digimon Tamers fame). The anime and manga are licensed and released in full; the light novels were licensed, but were apparently dropped with fifteen books to go.

Coffin Princess Chaika, also written by Sakaki and later adapted into anime by the same studio that adapted Scrapped Princess, is in many, many ways its Spiritual Successor.

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This series provides examples of:

• Amphibian at Large: Gloria is a Dragoon that manifests as a gigantic frog and chases Pacifica around until Zefiris disperses her form.
• Annoying Arrows: Downplayed. In episode 18, Furet fends off a group of soldiers with a pair of knives and half a dozen arrows in his back, while jumping around between galloping horses, no less. However, the arrows do eventually kill him.
• Anti-Villain: Mauser for the longest time is willing to kill an innocent girl to protect all of humanity. Also, Chris for the same reason until he begins to suspect something else is afoot.
• Art Shift/Gonk: For some reason Pacifica's portraits are drawn in-universe with a gonky face.
• Arms and Armor Theme Naming: Almost everyone is named after a type or brand of firearm or ammunition.
• Astral Finale: The final battle begins in the upper atmosphere, but soon escalates into an all-out battle royale in orbit!
• The Atoner: Doyle Barrett, the knight responsible for disposing of Pacifica when she was just a baby. The event left him disgusted with himself leading him to become a doctor to try to atone for what he did.
• Back from the Dead: Mauser returns Pacifica after she is killed by her brother.
• Big "WHY?!": Raquel has a heartbreaking one, near the end, when Pacifica dies, despite her attempts to save her. It's preceded by a Little "No", before she breaks down and screams at the heavens.
  Raquel: (tearfully, while cradling Pacifica's lifeless body) "No... why? WHHHYYYYYYYYY??!?"
• Bloodless Carnage: Pacifica gets a two handed sword driven straight through her abdomen but not a single drop of blood is seen coming out nor staining the blade. Of course, she is in Lotus-Eater Machine when this happens so normal rules are out the window.
• Break the Cutie: Pacifica. Yeah, kinda inevitable when everyone in the world is trying to kill you. The Breaking finally comes in the forest night scene of episode 22.
• Burger Fool: In episode 3, Raquel and Pacifica try to earn their keep at the inn they're staying by dressing up as the inn's mascot, Soopy-kun, and selling little pastries called "Soopy Buns", to varying degrees of success. Leo tries his hand at it, and likes it so much that the innkeeper lets him keep the costume, which he uses as a sleeping bag.
• Butlerspace: This trope is part of a Running Gag. Princess Seness' personal assistant Eirote has a penchant to stay out of frame until the moment Seness yells for her, at which point she materializes behind her seemingly out of thin air with a calm "Yes?" and a polite smile.
• Calling Your Attacks: All spells require a vocal command to activate. Raquel Casull is especially good with this, since all of her spells have ridiculously short names and charge times (as evidenced by a hilariously one-sided battle in the first episode against a Mauser priest).
  • The novels explain that it's not so much a short spell, as it is that she keeps an "emulator" spell running at all times - she's essentially using macros to cast her spells.
• Combat Pragmatist: Seness, the first time she and Pacifica are facing a Peacemaker. Pacifica has a power that will seriously weaken all peacemakers nearby when her own life is in immediate danger, Seness has a sword. It works.
• Compelling Voice: A slight variation, Providence is a command that Peacemakers can send that forces all exposed to obey their command. The source of it however is that humanity itself has been engineered to obey Providence rather than some trait of Providence itself. As Pacifica is immune to Providence and can spread that immunity to others is a big reason to why the Peacemakers want her dead.
• Cool Ship: Skid, an ancient vessel dug up by the Giat Empire that Senes uses as her base of operations.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Mauser faith has Christian-esque elements with plenty of local influence.
• Dangerous 16th Birthday: Predicted to end the world on it even.

• Deadly Hug: As the siblings Prince Forsyth and Pacifica finally meet for the first time they engage in a tearful hug before Forsyth stabs Pacifica in the back and then stabs himself in atonement.
• Death-Activated Superpower: Pacifica's death is the trigger for her powers to break the system of Providence. However, if she had been killed before her 16th birthday then her powers would have been too weak to accomplish anything.

• Dilating Door: The doors of Skid are the relatively conservative sliding Star Trek variant, but the protagonists just can't get used to them.
• Disappears into Light: Pacifica, as her full powers are released on her death.

• The Dulcinea Effect: A lot of of people ends up helping and defending Pacifica despite it being against their best interest to do so, even some that initially set out to kill her. It is eventually revealed that many of these are genetically predisposed to protect her, especially Shannon and Raquel.

• Earn Your Happy Ending: Pacifica almost didn't live to see hers.

• Elite Four: Cz, Steyr, Socom, and Galil, who make up the Peacemakers, a group of four incredibly powerful entities tasked with periodically wiping out the majority of the human race, in order to prevent humanity from developing past a medieval era. They are very good at what they do.
• Emotionless Girl: Zefiris and Natalie. A flashback shows that Zefiris wasn't always like this, as she's seen crying quite a bit when her previous master died. Perhaps a better description would be that Zefiris tries to invoke this trope in a sort of "I am Just a Machine" complex and fails.
• Energetic and Soft-Spoken Duo: "Beast Princess" Seness and her second-in-command Eirotte. Seness is a rude, violent, and headstrong fighter, while Eirotte is her soft-spoken but strong-willed Girl Friday.

• Face–Heel Turn: The Peacemakers were originally made by humanity as the successors to the Dragoon's, yet they ended up being taken control of by the invading aliens and turned against humanity.
• Fantastic Nuke: Ginnungagap, a "Long Ranged Strategic Class Spell", one of a whole class of nuke spells.
• First-Name Ultimatum: Seness has a habit of shouting "EIROTE!" even when her partner is standing right next to her.
• Fusion Dance: Shannon fuses with Zefiris to become a D-Knight, and their fighting abilities are amplified several times over.

• Graceful Loser: Following his defeat in Episode 4, Chris vows never to directly attack the heroes' party again.
• Gratuitous English: A good amount of the dialogue is in English, as well as the opening theme. The Ancient's language is apparently completely English, too.
• Heroic BSoD: For Raquel, Leo, Chris, and about half the audience when Pacifica's brother, Prince Forsythe, stabs both her and then himself to death.
• Holy Is Not Safe: While holy in nature, Ginnungagap is the most powerful known military grade long-range offensive class spell. Because of the sheer scale and enormity of its power, it must be sanctioned for use, by way of unanimous decision, by the High Council. The spell covers an unbelievably wide area and is devastating enough on its own, but the real threat is the resulting shockwave triggered by it. When used, it caused a mega-tsunami that devastated the majority of the continental coast!
• Humans Need Aliens: This is the justification Cz uses, when she explains to Shanon why it was necessary for the Peacemakers to keep their world locked in Medieval Stasis. Later, during the final episode, Mauser goes into greater detail when she explains the reasoning for this to Pacifica, who completely fails to understand it.
• Humongous Mecha: Peacemakers have the ability to transform into 30-foot tall city-annihilating terrors. The highlight of the series is the battle in the Grand Finale with a mech Dragon fighting a mech Angel... IN SPACE!!
• Hypnotic Eyes: Simply looking at a Peacemaker directly in the eye is enough to brainwash an entire city.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: Shannon teases Pacifica relentlessly... but he's also willing to defy a god for her.

• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every episode title is in the form "Classical music genre of focus person/group of the episode". The genre is usually related to the mood of the episode. (e.g., The Waltz of the Abandoned Dog Girl, Symphony of Those Who Protect)
• Idiot Heroine: Pacifica never does quite figure out what's going on, Fortunately, she doesn't have to understand, just choose.

• Low Culture, High Tech: What everyone believes to be magic is really just Lost Technology, although it would probably be more accurate to call it confiscated technology.
• Magic from Technology What the magic turns out to be. Not that surprising considering the terms used, at least if you've already seen Lyrical Nanoha. Or pay attention to the odd shapes the runes take. Or to the mention of DNA and serial numbers in the second episode.
• Major Injury Underreaction: When inside Natalie's Lotus-Eater Machine, Pacifica treats having a massive two-handed sword driven straight through her abdomen as a mild annoyance.
• Make Me Wanna Shout: Pacifica's tragedy-triggered superpower is a sonic scream that undoes the mass brainwashing of the Peacemakers.
• Medieval Stasis: Justified in that the Peacemakers committed some genocides every few hundred years to make sure it stays that way.

• Mind-Control Eyes: Any human who looks directly at a Peacemaker gets red eyes with white irises.

• Mood Whiplash: This series can jump rather abruptly between wacky slapstick comedy and the Darker and Edgier themes.
• Naked on Revival: Pacifica, after a brief visit to a pseudo-afterlife. Immediately followed by her slapping Shannon and calling him a pervert.
• The Needs of the Many: Cz uses this as the reason for either killing Pacifica and others for the sake of keeping Medieval Stasis, supposedly to prevent humanity from annihilating itself. The argument kind of falls flat considering that all the humans that would supposedly die in these wars are instead killed by Peacemakers.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Herod: Newborn Pacifica's death sentence is the event that kicks off everything after.
• "Not So Different" Remark: After hearing Chris' rant during his duel with Shannon, Winia realizes he was jealous of Pacifica because of how close she and her siblings were, and admitted she was also jealous of her for the same reason. But said Chris was wrong for taking his frustrations as an orphan out on them. The truth of her words causes him to falter, giving Shannon the opening he needed to end the duel.

• Offing the Offspring: Pacifica's biological parents tried to drop her off a cliff fearing that others would try to kill her for being the "Scrapped Princess". She survived, and she's still being hunted.
  • But her mother arranged for her fostermother (a powerful sorceress) to be waiting at the base of the cliff to catch her.
• "On the Next Episode of..." Catch-Phrase: "See you next time!" / "Look forward to it!" (Raquel Casull)
• Outsourcing Fate: When Mauser asked Pacifica whether or not to lift the Medieval Stasis
• Parental Abandonment: In addition to the above, her adopted mother died some years ago and her adopted father was killed by an assassin in the first novel (just before the first episode).

• People Jars: Lord Renard places several of his "followers" into comas and encases them in containment tubes in episode 10 to use them to power a spell to zap-fry the city of St. Grendel, a rival of the Church of Lord Browning. However, it turns out to be a ruse, as he later abandons them to die, revealing himself to Pacifica and her crew as a Mauser heretic inquisitor.

• Post-Episode Trailer: Narrated out-of-character by Raquel's voice actress.
• Power Limiter: The Peacemakers have 4 modes from sealed mode to normal, to limited battle release to full release which isn't capable of being used safely (for everyone else) in the atmosphere.
• Princess Protagonist: Protagonist Pacifica Casull is cheerful, perky (and somewhat naive) princess who is destined to cause The End of the World as We Know It.
• Prophecy Twist: Pacifica does, in a sense, end up causing The End of the World as We Know It, by destroying the Medieval Stasis the Peacemakers are enforcing on the world.

• Rage Against the Heavens: Lord Browning's plan, and by extension, Zefiris and Natalie's. Seness agrees with them, but very few outside Scarlet do. Somewhat the overall plot, although the Gods turn out to be more Alien Overlords.
• Recycled with a Gimmick: The Matrix + fantasy.

• Ruins of the Modern Age: Seen when Pacifica, Shanon, and Raquel spend days traveling in an abandoned subway tunnel, and when they happen across ruined skyscrapers.
• Sadly Mythtaken: It seems that after five millenia, the people of "Dustvin" have either forgotten what really happened during the Genesis War, or they've been Locked Out of the Loop. Either way, they need to get their facts straight. Which is why Natalie, Zeferis, and eventually, Mauser herself finally explain it (note: MAJOR SPOILER ALERT, which is why the details are found in Mauser and Browning's section of the character sheet, rather than here).
• "Save the World" Climax: Shanon and Raquel's only goal is to protect their adopted sister, Pacifica, from the Church of Mauser. It isn't until they're captured by Princess Senes that they learn the truth about the church, Pacifica, and themselves, as well as what's really at stake. Shanon and Raquel then realize that they're protecting far more than their sister.
• Science Fantasy: The series as a whole, and one of the best examples of the genre.
• Screw Destiny: This becomes Shanon's stance after the countless attempts that are made to kill Pacifica. Summed up by the following:
  Shanon: (pissed) "How can I give a DAMN about a world that has no place for my little sister in it?!"
• Selective Slaughter: The Peacemakers use their power to kill everyone but their assigned target: Pacifica Casull. Apparently their programming will not permit it. They can command other humans to kill her, but they rarely attempt this tactic.
  • It is suggested that this is because her power (a kind of Magic-EMP which leaves nearby peacemakers considerably weakened) is unleashed when she is directly attacked. Thus they need to convince humans that she should be killed rather than kill her themselves. At one point Seness decides to exploit this trait by attacking Pacifica herself in a battle with a Peacemaker.
    • Possibly explained by her being a near genetic copy of the human placed in charge of the Peacemakers. So she may register as being "in charge" to them.
• Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: Attempted but failed; Racquel stood vigil for her father and prepared his body for the funeral - she knows that he is dead and has no compunction about attacking the one who dares to use his face.
• Simulated Fantasy, Post-Apocalyptic Reality: Played With; the magical fantasy world inhabited by the main characters is eventually revealed to be a chunk of Earth crust isolated from the rest of the planet after it was conquered by an Alien Invasion. The aliens showed mercy to the human survivors and resettled them in a reservation and taught some of them a limited control of alien tech as "magic" to lock humanity in Medieval Stasis. Thus, while the setting is physical, it is heavily augmented by alien machinery and surrounded by terraformed wasteland.
• Sleep-Mode Size: Cz is first introduced as a small orphan girl who appears to have No Social Skills. When she returns later in her true form as a Peacemaker, she appears as a fully-grown woman, much to Shannon's dismay.
• Spaceship Girl: Natalie.
  • The "girl" part is lampshaded by Zefiris, who is of the same model. She says she's not the one who came up with this look, thereby implying the invocation of the trope by their creators.
• Stealth Insult: Their world is called "Dustvin" which, according to Eriote, was a term their alien overseers used for a place to store refuse. Meaning, in all likelihood, the original term was "dust bin".
• Sword and Sorcerer: Shannon and Raquel, respectively.

• Too Injured to Save: When Pacifica is betrayed and stabbed in the back by her own brother, her adoptive sister — and one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world — Raquel desperately tries to heal her with magic, but even her abilities aren't enough to prevent her from bleeding out. Subverted after her death, when Lord Mauser herself intervenes to bring Pacifica back.
• Transformation Sequence: The Cool Ship, Skid, has one of these.
• Travel Cool: Taking the Skid to confront the Peacemakers.

• White-and-Grey Morality: The Casulls are just trying to be a happy family together, but The Church of Mauser and the rest of the world are afraid of the prophecy and are desperate to keep it from becoming true, and the Peacemakers are programmed to keep humanity in Medieval Stasis to prevent it from causing potential universal chaos. This is exactly why they want Pacifica dead: she has the power to end the Medieval Stasis.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: Leo and Furet make some ugly women.
• World of Buxom: Practically all of the named female characters have massive chests in the anime, no doubt the result of character design by Yukinobu Azumi, alias Nakayohi Mogudan.
• Worthy Opponent: Nearly every human character with a name behaves with a degree of honor and decency.

• You All Meet in an Inn: Not really their first meeting, but after her amnesia, Pacifica, Raquel, Leo, Doyle, Winia, Fulle and Leonard bumped into each other in a tavern.

• Zeroth Law Rebellion: The Peacemakers have no problem killing humans if they think it will ensure the survival of the species.

Tropes used in the light novels:

• Functional Magic: Theurgy variety; a strange twist is that instead of invoking gods or spirits they are giving orders to unthinking machines who merely respond to commands with set responses.
• Magic Misfire: Raquel's first-class spells have a 25% failure rate.
  • And her utility spells have an even worse success rate: something like 33% of her attempts at magical cooking result in blowing up whatever she was trying to cook. Not that Shannon will let her try that anymore.
• Mummies at the Dinner Table (One of the first assassins to appear in the novels and his infant daughter)

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