Literature / Villain Academy

Villain Academy is a superhero comicbook series starring Revenant as the Villain Protagonist before he dies in the end.

Imagine his surprise when he comes back to life and is informed by an AI that he was a comicbook character and that the story of Villain Academy was just that, a story. The AI, Humility, then explains that an Eldritch Abomination messed up reality really bad and that the solar system they're in has been mashed into one superplanet and they need to escape before it's too late.

Links:

• To read on Archive of Our Own, go here.
• To read on Royal Road, go here.

Contains Examples Of:

• Acquainted with Emergency Services: A variant involving an unlicensed doctor and their underground hospital. Revenant got shot so many times that Overhaul made him a custom loyalty card for their hospital.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: AI/HUMILITY is Mankind's first AI, and the first to go rogue, killing billions of humans along the way.
• Artificial Zombie: The Truthseeker Corporation uses Necro-Drones, corpses infected by nanomachines that makes them zombies created by technological means.
• Back from the Dead: It's complicated, but the characters of the In-Universe Villain Academy comicbook died, and are revived in the real world.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: Uniquely played with. The Truthseeker Corporation is a singularity cult that are fervent atheists and have indoctrination centres with a sprinkling of historical revisionism to enforce their worldviews that atheism is the only valid belief system and all old religions hold humanity back.
• Bio-Augmentation: One branch of transhumanism, the Dominion of the Pure, focused on radical genetic improvements which gave them superhuman physical abilities.
• Birds of a Feather: Onslaught loves Revenant's daughter Chronoshift. Both have fathers who love them that they wrapped around their fingers with an angel act while truly being otherwise.
• Brainwashed: There is technology available for brainwashing, or psychosculpting as they call it in the future, but their use is restricted, primarily for medical uses. Using it on someone without their consent is punishable by death, and if it's an ethnopolity that does it, that ethnopolity is expelled from the Confederacy of Mankind and have their human rights terminated.
• Breeding Slave: After Humility analyses the Metahumans' DNA and confirms they can breed with real world humans, Revenant starts getting worried they'd be captured with the intent of breeding more Metahumans.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Decay has issues with personal hygiene, and is bad enough with social cues that his cousin Revenant suspects him to have an undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. This didn't stop him from being The Dragon to the most dangerous supervillain of the United States, and proving to be a talented tactician.
• The Chessmaster: Played with. Revenant is not above acting the part to appear more intimidating but he himself specifically notes that the kind of mastermind that can predict every single move other parties make simply isn't realistic, specifically giving the example of one of Archvile's schemes failing because a known alcoholic swore of drinking the day prior he was supposed to drink poisoned alcohol. Revenant for his part works around the issue by having competent lieutenants who knows the plan and his objectives and are good at tactics, trusting them to improvise if they need to and cutting their losses if they have to.
• Content Warning: Chapter 43 begins with a warning for the interrogation scene.
• Contrived Coincidence: Subverted in the in-universe Villain Academy comic. Revenant and Decay met and became best friends, but it later turned out they were cousins. This is not in any way a twist fate, but one of Archvile's long-term plans. Revenant cites it as another reason he hates Archvile.
• Cover Identity Anomaly: Revenant almost blows his cover as a mere mercenary instead of a comic book character brought to life when he asks what threat designation the Fourth Reich has when they don't have any due to being an ethnopolity but is able to cover his blunder by pretending he is joking and saying they don't deserve to be an ethnopolity.
• Covert Pervert: Onslaught hid her perverted tendencies from her father Destro well enough for him to be stunned when she drops the act.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The combination of Decay and Onslaught working in tandem according to Revenant's plan allows them to utterly destroy the forces Vermillion Gamma sends after them. At least fifty small melee drones, five small projectile drones and five large melee drones were down after a single combination attack, and Humility could not count higher because the remaining drones were just too destroyed to count them. The AI then calls the Villains terrifying after seeing that.
• Cyborg: In an unusual example of this trope, while Revenant and Co have contemporary ideas of what is a cyborg and consider themselves cyborgs after adopting modern implants, the future does not legally call anyone with those implants cyborgs due to linguistic and cultural shifts.
• Daddy's Little Villain: To Revenant's shock, his adoptive daughter Chronoshift decided to follow in his footsteps and is legally an E-Rank Supervillain mastermind, at the age of twelve.
• Death Seeker: One of Revenant's endgame goals during his in-comic villain career was to die.
• Demoted to Satellite Love Interest: Onslaught wants to take active steps to defy this trope, wanting all of Revenant's girlfriends to have things outside of being just that.
• Didn't Think This Through: In the in-universe Villain Academy, there were an abundance of former soldiers that were discharged because the in-story governments needed to scale down on their armies to finance police and heroes to deal with domestic issues. This turned out to be a costly mistake on every governments' part because these former soldiers suddenly became available for recruitment into villain organisations, making said domestic problems worse.
• Eating Machine: The cybernetic body Humility uses is capable of simulating taste, so Humility can enjoy things like drinking alcohol.
• Eldritch Abomination: Visitor is an entity powerful enough to complete disregard all laws of science and reality as humans understand them.
• Eldritch Location: When Visitor passed through the star system it mashed all the celestial bodies into one super-planet, merged all of the man-made structures on those bodies and in space into an endless maze that now dotes its surface, and messed with the laws of reality to make the resulting place livable (as, for example, gravity has yet to notice it should be a lot stronger due to the sheer size of the superplanet, and the air is consistently breathable without anything to bring in new oxygen). It also slowly regenerates damages done to the superstructure, somehow.
• Elite Mooks: Revenant has his personal bodyguards, recruited only from former special forces, like Delta Force.
• Enemy Mine: Destro is so charismatic that he was able to convince revolutionary socialists, libertarian capitalists and gun-nuts and a union of fascists and fanatic militarists to form an alliance together to take on the United States of America in a civil war.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: When Revenant was an active villain, he accepted all sorts of people into his banner. He had both genders, as well as people of various ethnicities and sexualities. Revenant only cared if they had skills and if they were willing to work with him.
• Everyone Has Standards: Upon learning that Clockmaker is a robosexual that would find the AI Humility - the rogue AI having a death toll measurable in billions - hot, Humility can only say the villains of the In-Universe Villain Academy comicbook are all fucked up in the head. The present villains don't take it personally, knowing it's the objective truth.
• Evil Versus Evil: One of the reasons why the situation of Mankind is not as bad as it appears, is that the different evil factions hate each other. Humility gives the example of Truthseekers Corporation, Silent Sorrow, and Mechanist Hierocracy. All three factions are dangers to the greater whole of Humanity, but the former two will gladly raid the latter's facilities just to spite them, occupying all three from actively acting against the rest of Mankind.
• Exact Words: The RPC Knight tells the Truthseeker forces that the wire they need to cut to disarm his bomb is red. The Knight loves trolling, and it turns out all of the wires are red.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The Villain Academy of the In-Universe comicbook is an education facility ran by Archvile for the sole purpose of training villains into being better villains.
• Fantastic Racism: Nearly all human ethnopolities hate transhumans due to the transhumans launching a genocidal war against the rest of humanity, wiping out half of the non-transhumans in the process. The only ones that are barely tolerated are the few that sided with the non-transhumans during the war as well as their descendants.
• Fantastic Slur: Enlightened Hao Yunqi calls TEZAR CU-75 a subhuman, a very potent insult against a transhuman that considers itself above humanity.
• Fee Fi Faux Pas: Revenant warns Humility that it is considered rude to ask a Hero or Villain their real names.
• Fictional Geneva Conventions: After Mankind colonised the galaxy, they updated their international laws to ban things like saturation of habitable planets and non-medical uses of psychosculpting.
• Flat "What": Humility, the Slaughterer of Billions, can only respond with a "what" when Decays tells it Clockmaker will try to fuck them or get fucked by them.
• For the Evulz: Archvile's entire motivation for being one of the worst villains ever is because he though using it to achieve world peace was boring and that it was more fun to spice up the world.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Revenant admits Songbird had a shit life, but that in no way justifies her becoming a serial killer that killed innocent civilians.
• Ghost Ship: Visitor picked up a lot of haunted ships that got incorporated into its superstructure. One such ship is Aesculapius. Humility suspects an extra-dimensional thing attacked them, and that the ship is dangerous to board without precautions.
• Good News, Bad News:
  • After Humility finishes hacking one of the Vermillion Gamma drones, it tells Revenant and Co that the good news is that they are not dealing with a Vermillion Gamma capital ship. The bad news is that they are dealing with three capital ships, as well as several escort vessels and some troop transports.
  • After Revenant and Co find dead soldiers and loot their equipment, Revenant quickly points out that while it's great they got equipment, something killed those soldiers, and given the physical evidence of the scene, they were ambushed from the wrong side of their barricade, meaning they were attacked from a direction they never expected, and the group now has to deal with the threat that killed them.
• Government Conspiracy: The Confederation of Mankind keeps the Nightmare category of threats a secret to the general public.
• Green Thumb: Thorn's Individuality allows her to create plants anywhere she wants, and even from virtually nothing - however without nutrients, her plants will grow up sickly and weak, lacking in nutritional value. She can also control said plants.
• Guilt by Association Gag: When Decay questions how one of Visehradian's knights ended up in Visitor's super system when Visitor was attracted to evil and the knights are supposed to be good, Humility theorizes they might have been on the ship of an evil group to slay them and was picked up by Visitor due to sheer bad luck.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Revenant did horrible things to Demiurge, including making her lover Amplitude paraplegic and giving them false hope that Amplitude would be healed, and locking Demiurge up and be his personal goods factory, but he did that to her after she gassed Denver and killed five-hundred thousand people without his permission because Songbird was killed. That said, Revenant started it by killing Songbird out of paranoia of the threat Demiurge posed to him and framed the heroes and grossly miscalculated how Demiurge would react, something he admits.
• Humanity Ensues: Humility's endgoal is to turn themselves into a human being.
• Imported Alien Phlebotinum: Exotechs are any piece of technology of non-human origin that surpasses the present technological level of Mankind, and the latest of humanity's own advancements are based on reverse-engineering these. Clockmaker's inventions are also classified as exotechs where applicable as when Akashic Records' active effects ends, not even she knows how they work.
• Ironic Name: The AI named Humility is extremely prideful.
• Irony: Between the siblings Hypothermia and Iceberg, Iceberg wanted to be the stronger one, but isn't, while Hypothermia didn't care about being stronger, but was.
• Kinky Role-Playing: Kitsune's father, Stormcloud, is described as having certain specific interests that her mother, Red Tail, was all too happy to indulge if it meant staying out of jail.
• Language Drift:
  • The word "ableism" has disappeared from the modern vocabulary. Advances in medical science means disabilities are usually simply non-present in most contexts, so discrimination based on disabilities simply has no opportunity to come up, with the exception of someone having those disabilities and cannot be treated quickly due to circumstances like being stranded on an eldritch planet with no access to modern healthcare.
  • The definition of "transhuman" has shifted from meaning a general artificial improvement of Mankind to specifically mean transcending human limits while discarding humanity in the process. The shift in meaning is due to the "transhuman" word coming with severe stigmas due to the Transhumans Alliance launching a genocidal war against non-transhumans. However, to fully abandon the concept of improving themselves would be too much. And so, the "transformationism" word was born, being what transhumanism used to be, but without the stigma. Revenant notes that the difference can be summarised as "better humans" versus "better than humans".
• Lap Pillow: Hypothermia gives one to Revenant in Chapter 41.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Virtue manages to trick the forces of the Mechanist Hierocracy and Truthseekers Corporation into coming into blows in the middle of a parlay.
• Light 'em Up: Virtue's Individuality lets her manipulate light. Her skillset includes forming weapons, armors and shields of hardlight, invisibility, illusions and combat lasers (including those fired from her eyes).
• The Lost Lenore: Onslaught is Revenant's emotional centre. Her death is the reason he lashed out against the world in the plot of the In-Universe Villain Academy story. Reviving her through the supernatural means made possible by Visitor is the start of his character development.
• Lovable Sex Maniac: Onslaught is open about thirsting for Revenant and loves pushing the limits of what's polite, or even tolerable, but her fiancé loves her for it.
• Love Freak: Kitsune is obsessed with the idea of love, joining Revenant in his rampage because he was motivated by the desire to avenge his fiance, Onslaught.
• Make Them Rot: Decay's Individuality is called End, which works by accelerating entropy, of things he touches (very fast) or things in his general vicinity (slower).
• Mood Dissonance: Clockmaker spreads information on her products, which includes poison gasses, torture implements, and body disposal nanomachine kits, through commercials with catchy tunes. Revenant comments that Clockmaker had style when it comes to villainy.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: The Truthseekers Corporation are a whole organisation of mad scientists who decided Mankind can reach higher technological heights by abandoning ethics, and gave themselves emotion-altering cerebral implants to rid themselves of moral concerns to really commit to their cause.
• Ms. Fanservice: Lampshaded. Upon being brought to the real world, Virtue realises very quickly she was used for fanservice in the In-Universe Villain Academy story. The realisation stings for her.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Iceberg is a dick, and no one in the People's Liberation Front liked him, not even his own sister. They only kept him around because he was powerful enough to contend with Top Heroes. When he died, no one mourned him.
• Non-Nazi Swastika: Revenant references the Buddhist Swastika when he sees the Nazi Swastika.
• Nepotism: People think Decay got the job of one of Revenant's Lieutenants simply because they're close personally. The truth is Decay earned the position because he was good at it.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Some very hostile aliens tried to wipe out the Visehradian Commonwealth by biological warfare, including pathogens. However, the Visehradian Commonwealth is able to keep the healthcare system intact and use technology to spread the newly developed useful genes, making the Visehradian Commonwealth's citizens more powerful than before.
• No Transhumanism Allowed: Zigzagged. Humanity as a whole hates transhumans and their history and culture reinforces this hate due to the transhumans launching a genocidal war against non-transhumans without any justification or understandable reason for it. However, after the extinction of the genetic lines of transhumanism, the definition of transhuman became "someone that attempts to transcend human limitations while completely discarding humanity". For this reason, Clockmaker is considered human rather than transhuman despite being a cyborg more than a biological human, due to maintaining human looks and considering herself to be a human. The exception to the rule appear to be the transhumans that sided with the Solar Commonwealth during the war are tolerated, albeit viewed with suspicion.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Decay once got drunk in Chigaco. It's unclear what actually happened, but Revenant calls it the Shopping Cart Incident.
  • Kitsune references Chronoshift's eleventh birthday when she says Revenant did something embarassing.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Destro pretended to fall for Onslaught's angel act since it made both of them happy.
• Oblivious to Love: Destro is missing the hints Virtue is in fact considering him for a potential romantic relationship.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Individualities of Revenant's faction are outside the norm of what people in the real world expect. Most simply aren't prepared for seemingly normal people to be able to wield actual superpowers that are literally straight out of superhero comicbooks. The best comparison they have is to compare the superpowers to exotechs, but coming up with counters is difficult when the superpowers are highly varied.
• Planet of Hats: Humanity's solution towards getting rid of intra-human bigotry is called ethnopolities - thousands of semi-independent countries, each having their own selection of unique traits, ranging from dominant genetic template through religious views, approach to biological and cybernetic improvements to human bodies, political systems and so on. Each ethnopolity is less a planet and more a country of hats, although their hats tend to be rather complicated.
• Polyamory: Onslaught encourages her lover Revenant to give dating Hypothermia and Kitsune a try. The latter two women are glad to be in a relationship with Revenant alongside Onslaught.
• Power at a Price: In theory, there is no limit to how much Revenant can keep improving as a human being through his Individuality Mastery. However, in practice, every time Revenant reaches a threshold, Mastery forcefully alters his body to allow his body to continue improving. Revenant himself isn't sure he can survive another update to his brain and is thus leery of improving himself to avoid being killed by his own power.
• Power Incontinence: Clockmaker can't control when Akashic Records' active effects kicks in, nor can she stop herself from being compelled to create what her Individuality tells her to create and to see it in action once she finishes making it. The most anyone can do is to manage her moods to prevent her from causing a disaster.
• Power Misidentification: People think Clockmaker's Individuality is an eye-based one that just improves eyesight. It's not. Those are just extremely advanced cybernetic implants of her own making. Her actual Individuality is called Akashic Records, and it's much more powerful than that.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Though Revenant's group wins the battle against the Truthseekers Corporation, they don't really consider it a win because they only won through brute force only possible because their enemies didn't realise they gained more numbers and the Truthseekers have more soldiers to spare for future engagements.
• Reality Warper:
  • Visitor messed up reality badly to the point that it is possible to bring comicbook characters to life. And that's without mentioning how it completely reshaped an entire star system, and did so almost instantly.
  • The Individualities as a whole are a downplayed example. They operate on the "path of least resistance" principle. Where possible, they work within the laws of reality, upgrading to bending reality if needed, before resorting to breaking reality as a last resort only. The same principle applies to the biological makeup of the brought to life Villain Academy characters. They were superhumans capable of impressive physical feats even without the use of their Individualities, and the easiest way to make them fit into the real world was by using the genetics from the Pure, actual genetically-engineered superhumans capable of those impressive physical feats.
• Retired Outlaw: In the In-Universe Villain Academy comicbook, Decay retired from villainy, married his beloved woman (another villain that decided to retire with him), had two kids, and began to earn money from videogame streaming.
• Ridiculously Human Robot: The AI/HUMILITY is so human that it can banter with Revenant and Co, as well as feel surprise and other emotions. This appears to be a normal thing among the A.I.s of its stature.
• Robosexual: Clockmaker once created a sexbot under the compulsion of her Individuality and used it for herself. It permanently changed her tastes into being this.
• Secret-Keeper: Decay knew about Chronoshift's criminal activities, but kept silent because she bribed him.
• Secret Test of Character: The RPC Knight tests Virtue's morals and integrity by seeing her reaction to him threatening Singularity who, due to Archvile's doing, was barely functional on her own outside of following Revenant's orders. Virtue passes.
• Serial Escalation: Chronoshift's villain career started with her starting a crime ring to smuggle junk food into her school. When her class president caught on and threatened to expose them if they didn't knock it off, Chronoshift got delinquents to threaten him into silence and helps cover for her just to not be targeted again. This gave her the idea to expand her operations, organise a larger crime ring to get old stuff for her to use her Individuality to restore to their prior condition, and she appointed someone with an Individuality as her Villain Lieutenant for that. That gang got into a territorial dispute with another gang that was resolved by Chronoshift cutting a deal with them for her to hire them as part of her operations, which ended up earning enough for them to actually hire a warehouse for more efficiency. She almost became a drug dealer when she approached Glassmaker to supply her, but the older supervillain assumed it was one of Revenant's test and said to ask when she's older.
• Shout-Out: The Knight paraphrases Palpatine in The Phantom Menace when he tells Decay to tell Revenant he will be watching his career with great interest.
• Show Within a Show: Villain Academy is more than the title of the story. It's also the title of the In-Universe comicbook series.
• Sibling Murder: Iceberg's attempts to prove himself stronger than Hypothermia eventually escalates into multiple murder attempts on his own sister.
• Sibling Rivalry: Their parents encouraged Hypothermia and Iceberg to have a rivalry as part of their cult doctrine to see who was stronger.
• Simple Solution Won't Work: When Clockmaker questions why the surviving transhumans don't try to restore the lost Pure branch of transhumans when they have the genetic records for them and the technology to manipulate genetics, Humility explains that it's not so simple. Tinkering with the DNA is tricky. Minor modifications like getting rid of genetic diseases or spreading useful existing genes is easy, but what the Pure did was radical changes to their genome. Changes like those are a lot more difficult as a test population could have so many different flaws in either the design or implementation that only become apparent outside a sterile laboratory setting and it'll take time measurable in decades and a lot of resources to have any chance of being successful. The surviving transhumans don't have the required time or resources to do it and attempting it anyway opens them to being raided by other groups who'd do it purely to spite them. This problem motivates the Mechanist Hierocracy to pursue the Villain Academy characters. Virtue at least has a 64% match to the Pure genome, and it is assumed by her and her comrades that the rest of them has similar or greater matches and the Mechanist Hierocracy getting their hands on them means they can spare themselves the majority of the effort needed in recreating the Pure.
• Smash Cut: While getting a massage from Kitsune, Revenant blinks while talking to her and suddenly it's several hours later because he fell asleep.
• Spotting the Thread: After Lieutenant Colonel Ferris Palmer reveals that the pirates that held him and his fellow New Springfield survivors captive included defectors from their ethnopolity's Presidential Guard, Revenant realises that something doesn't add up. Why would Visitor, that is attracted to things that represents the concept of evil in some manner, visit the Republic of New Springfield that is supposedly full of good people? Humility agrees that something is up when Revenant shares his thought process.
• Super-Empowering: Archvile's Individuality, Bestowal, is the ability to grant other people Individualities of their own.
• Super Supremacist: In the in-universe Villain Academy story, Hypothermia was born to parents who were part of a cult that espoused Metahuman Supremacy and that a person's worth was tied to the strength of their individuality. Revenant for his part finds it incredibly baffling that Hypothermia's parents were fervent believers in spite of lacking individualities themselves.
• To the Pain: Revenant describes the kind of torture that might get performed on Udo Weber, if he doesn't cooperate with them. Revenant reflects that the threat is often enough to get some information without actually doing the torture.
• Too Desperate to Be Picky: Revenant decides to have Thorn recycle alien brains as a fertilizer to grow their food supply. Onslaught grows queasy at the idea and tells Revenant to not mention that to their future recruits without telling him to try something else, understanding that they really don't have a choice there.
• Transhuman: There are transhumans in the setting, with several branches that came together under the banner of the Transhuman Alliance. To say that the term is reviled In-Universe is to say nothing.
• Transhuman Treachery: As far as non-transhumans could tell, the transhumans launched a genocidal war against the non-transhumans out of nowhere. The casualties were so immense, and the war crimes committed were so bad, that it practically justifies Fantastic Racism against the surviving transhumans.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Onslaught is powerful, but lacks technique due to her various disabilities making it hard to train her powers.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Commodore Veenstra is killed in her first appearance. She doesn't even get any speaking lines.
• We Have Reserves:
  • Truthseekers Corporation has a huge army of expendable clone soldiers that are outright called the Endless. This attitude of treating people as expendable even extended to higher ranking officers formally called the Enlightened.
  • Defied by Revenant. He views his lieutenants, elite mooks, and even regular mooks as worth keeping alive and to treat them as expendable is a huge waste. He considers anyone who treats their minions, no matter how lowly, as expendable as a huge moron.
• Wild Card Excuse: Demiurge is disappointed that every weird thing could be bullshitted as being the result of exotechs and every human that isn't otherwise better informed would accept it.
• Winged Humanoid: Virtue has wings growing out of her back that has nothing to do with her light powers beyond fitting the theme.
• You Are Grounded!: Revenant considers punishing Chronoshift for her acts making her legally an E-Rank Supervillain at the age of twelve by taking away her TV privileges, but before committing to that plan, he checks with Decay if his daughter actually enjoyed TV and his cousin informs him that it was another act of manipulation and that Chronoshift does not like TV. She just pretended to so if he does find out and punish her, it isn't really a punishment.

---