Madness Combat / Tropes A to K

Madness Combat Trope Examples
A - K | L - Z

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A

• Advancing Wall of Doom: Throughout Expurgation, dozens of sharp blades will periodically start rising up from the floor of the room Hank and Sanford are currently in, forcing them to advance lest they be Impaled with Extreme Prejudice. Hank actually gets impaled at one point, but is revived by the Auditor so he can continue fighting Tricky.
• Aerith and Bob: Some characters have rather common names, like Hank or Sanford. Then there's names like Deimos.
• Alien Blood: The ATP Engineers and Soldats have bright yellow blood instead of the usual red, seemingly as a result of whatever augmentations they received.
• Ambiguous Situation: The cliffhanger ending of Expurgation leaves it ambiguous on whether or not Hank and Sanford died in killing Tricky, or if they've been knocked unconscious.
• Animated World Hypotheses: The short "An Experiment" shows that the characters' Floating Limbs aren't physically connected to their bodies and continue to function when moved far away from them, albeit not without reality-warping side effects.
• Anyone Can Die:
  • Several times, even! The only main character not to die at least once is Sanford, and that's only if we're counting unambiguous canon deaths. The l33t-crew-employed civilians, such as the hot-dog vendor, are pretty safe most of the time.
  • As per the Running Gag, anyone who smokes is guaranteed to die at some point, including Deimos.

• Arc Words:
  • Almost every episode begins with "Somewhere in Nevada..."
  • Antipathy has "Just do what comes natural", which later comes back in part 2 of 9.5.
  • "Unity of purpose is strength." It's essentially the tagline of the AAHW, and though it's never terribly prominent, it recurs on a good deal of the background posters.
• Art Evolution:
  • Compare the first animation (unofficially titled "Boombox Madness") with either Consternation, Inundation, or Aggregation. Apotheosis is where the animation very noticeably changed to be smoother and more violent.
  • Hank's appearance in general. Same goes for Jebus and Tricky, who go from just a Madness character with a goatee and halo and some clown to a stitched-up, goatee'd holy man with a mouth and a literal Monster Clown.
  • Zombies go from green-skinned mooks to darker green mooks with gaping, bloody mouths full of teeth.
  • Weapon designs become a lot more detailed and varied between Depredation and Consternation.
  • Weapons and backgrounds get even more detailed starting from Dedmos Adventure and Expurgation with lots of shading added.
  • Starting with DedmosRebuilt.fla Krinkels has taken up a more freeform approach, with the character sprites' outlines having scratchy hand-drawn appearances, more detailed outfits, and what can only be described as freeform-Gorn compared to previous animations which utilized pre-fabricated injuries and blood splatters for the most part, with Deimos' punches denting bodies, destroying flesh, and occasionally littering the floor with teeth.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The protagonists' "wanted" posters list crimes such as arson, murder or kidnapping, along with petty things such as public urination, smoking or being ugly.
• Art Shift: Madness: Project Nexus 2 is in full 3D, making it stick out from the animations and the previous Project Nexus games.
• Ascended Meme: The fanbase jokes that it took seven years for Hank and Sanford to climb down a ladder with regards to the Sequel Gap between Abrogation and Expurgation. Guess what Krinkels said regarding Dedmos 5?
• Assimilation Backfire: In Abrogation, the Auditor starts absorbing corpses to stay intact. One of them belongs to Tricky, who promptly implodes the Auditor and begins hijacking his powers to rain literal Hell on everything. Oops.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Several of the big-ticket weapons in Madness Interactive, the first video game spinoff. For example, the rocket launcher is quite impressive... but it only has four shots, has a tendency to blow the victim's weapon off-screen (so you can't grab it when you run out of rockets), and it's an area-of-effect weapon, so you could kill yourself with it.
  • The same could be said for the M203 grenade launcher in Madness: Project Nexus; the game even lets you know that you can damage yourself with it by saying in the description that the grenades have no safety feature. It's also the only weapon that has friendly fire, which doesn't bode well when you have a squad of six teammates in Arena mode.
  • The M249 SAW machine gun in the same game counts too. It is one of the guns in the game with the second-highest fire rate, and can decimate any enemy-but it's also the most expensive weapon, has a painfully long reload time and decreases your character's speed to a walking pace when he's carrying it.
    • Although It's Balanced out by the fact that it has a whopping 200 rounds and as it's description states "Reloading is a pain in the ass, but chances are that everybody will be dead before you even need to reload."
  • In the same game, the S&W 500. It's the most powerful handgun available, and can instantly kill just about every enemy you hit. The issue with it is that it has an incredibly low ammo count, and in later waves where most enemies can dodge your shots, you'll find yourself wasting quite a lot of that ammo on single targets.
  • The Electrocannon you can pick up in Episode 1.5. It's a Ray Gun that one-shots just about everything, but it takes forever and a day to reload, and the ability to indiscriminately One-Hit Kill enemies is a lot less useful when those enemies include Reviving Enemies, namely Sleepwalkers and Abominations.
• Ax-Crazy: Pretty much everyone, but Tricky takes the cake. Whereas Jebus and Hank hand out cruel and unusual deaths like candy, Tricky takes it to bizarre, extremely sadistic levels, such as giddily dancing after murdering the entire cast and resurrecting Hank just so he can kill him again later.

B

• Back from the Dead: Hank has died 7 times over the course of the series, Tricky has a grand total of 6 deaths to his name, and Jebus has gone out 4 times. That's not even taking the countless Zombie Mooks present in the series...
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Sanford and Deimos in 5.5, 6.5, 7.5, and Aggregation, then Hank and Sanford in Abrogation and Expurgation.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Most of the main episodes end with the antagonist winning. The most notable example is Expurgation, which ends with Hank, Sanford, and Tricky presumably dead, and the Auditor recovered and back in charge, seemingly with no one able to stop him.
• Badass Back: Attacking Hank from behind usually just means you'll die faster.
• Badass Longcoat: Eventually, Hank, Jebus and Deimos wear coats. You can also buy them in the Gear Shop in Madness: Project Nexus, in the form of Long Coats, Dusters and Trench Coats.
• Badass Normal: Hank at first, before going through numerous resurrections that give him superpowers, and now Sanford and Deimos fit the bill, being the only protagonists thus far without having some kind of power or mutation. Well, maybe just Sanford. That being said, no one is really "normal" as all the agents can have their stats raised by the Auditor with a press of a button. It makes the agents eyes glow red. Why he can't raise their stats higher remains unclear. Also, some of the regular recruits in Incident:011A. The last two guys in particular who finally manage to kill the MAG Agent. One of them still doesn't make it. Of all of them, only two manage to stab him and three hit him with bullets. The last one takes the easy route and implants a grenade round directly in the MAG's head.
• Badass Preacher: Jebus.
• Bare-Handed Blade Block: Hank proves he can do this in Part 2 of episode 9.5; the feat is made even more impressive by the fact that he's blocking a swing from another version of himself!
• Bash Brothers: Sanford and Deimos. Later, Sanford and Hank.
• BFG:
  • The Auditor is fond of these, as are any Mag Agents on the field. In the latter case it's justified as they're pretty big themselves and thus cannot use standard-sized equipment.
  • The Auditor attempts to use a GAU-8 against Jebus in Innundation, but Jebus moves far too fast for him to hit. He spawns another BFG in Abrogation to kill Hank and Sanford with, but is similarly unsuccessful. In Abrogation, he uses what appears to be an upsized OA-93.
  • Sanford gets his hands on a Bren light machine gun in 6.5.
    • Deimos gets a MG-42 in 7.5.
    • Hank briefly wields a MAG-scale M249 in Abrogation with suitably devastating results.
    • Tricky later re-summons his M60 to try and kill Sanford in Expurgation.
    • The Auditor later grants Hank a machine-gun-sized Fightlite SCR M-Lok Raider pistol with a ridiculously curved magazine that reaches to the muzzle - and Hank puts it to very good use.
• BFS: The Binary sword. It's noticeably longer than the characters are tall.
  • In Antipathy, Hank uses a giant axe to butcher an entire building's worth of mooks. The axe is as tall as he is, and he swings it around one-handed.
  • In Abrogation, the Auditor's sword, once he absorbs enough corpses. One slash is almost enough to cleave the industrial-sized elevator that Hank and Sanford are standing on in half.
• Big Bad:
  • The Sheriff, in the first episodes. Then Jebus. Then Tricky. And now the Auditor.
  • Director Phobos is this for the first Project Nexus game, serving as the Final Boss. He also fills the same role in the second game.
• Big "NO!": The death of the Auditor in Abrogation:
  Auditor: "What?"
  Tricky: "HELLO AGAIN!"
  Auditor: "NO!"
  Tricky: "YES!"
  Auditor: "NO! NO! NO!"
  Tricky: "YES! YES! YES!"
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Nevadeans have been described in ways that are very much not akin to humans. Of what's been shown or divulged, their Floating Limbs are literal, their flesh feels like clay and lacks elasticity, their brains aren't as important to maintaining biological functions (even less so for MAG agents), and they seemingly lack a face, but have all the necessary skeletal features for it under their skin, including a full set of teeth that was only first seen when the skin around it was torn open. But as seen with Sanford, they can make their mouths visible at will.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: The people in Madness Combat cannot reproduce biologically. The only way is via mass cloning machines, which raises the question on how they came into existence in the first place.
• Blinded by the Light: Deimos takes a flashbang to the face in 7.5 and stumbles blindly for a few seconds. Thankfully, Sanford covers his eyes in time and takes out the mooks who threw it.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: Every gun in Madness: Project Nexus has a golden palette swap.
• Blood from the Mouth:
  • Jebus during Inundation. Buckets of it. He's infected with a virus by the Auditor halfway through the episode to impede his progress. It fails to slow him down at all.
  • Expurgation starts with a shot of a strange red being repeatedly puking up blood or fire. Who or what the being is is unclear.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Surprisingly enough, considering that this is one of the more violent Flash animation series out there. The first episode was completely bloodless, and the next two had very little blood, with what little there was depicted as red starburst decals (although Avenger dialed it up, albeit comedically, with things like a mook flooding a room with the blood from his skull). The Gorn didn't kick in until Apotheosis and just kept escalating from there.
• Blood Knight: Everybody. Best exemplified in Tricky, who purposefully keeps reviving Hank over and over to kill him again and again.
• Bloodless Carnage: The first episode features no blood, in contrast to later episodes.
• Body Horror:
  • Hank slowly accumulates damage as the series goes on. This is particularly pronounced in his Antipathy design, where his ripped-off jaw has been replaced by a metal plate (leaving his upper teeth exposed), his skull is partly exposed, and his chest is basically a mass of bandages. Then he gains a crustaceanoid arm after being revived by the Magnification Chamber.
  • Mag Agent Torture has a pair of stakes rammed through his head in an 'X' shape, leaving him with a gaping hole through one cheek in official art.
• Body Surf: Tricky seems to do a version of this in Expurgation, going from one undead-imp like creature to the next whenever the body he is currently using is too damaged. May also qualify for Me's a Crowd as the imps seem to be his creations or manifestations.
• Bolivian Army Ending: DedmosRebuilt.fla, the last installment of the Deimos Adventure sub-series, ends with Deimos and 2BDamned facing down several giant Agents, 2BDamned complaining "God damn it Deimos," and a cut to black.
• Boring, but Practical: In Madness: Project Nexus, the assault rifles, especially the AK-74, TAR-21, M16, Steyr AUG, HK-416 and the FAMAS don't do anything cool, but they're common, plentiful, excellent all-rounders, surprisingly accurate, and the most powerful rifle, the FN FAL, is actually recommended for taking down heavily armored enemies, like the GO3LM units. They are also one of the best and the most plentiful weapons for fighting the final boss (plus the shotguns, which are also plentiful.) The FAMAS is also one of the fastest assault rifles in the game, able to take down Mag Agent GESTALT in seconds.
  • Two of the submachine guns, the HKMP5 and the Thompson, count as well. Excellent damage, better accuracy than some of the assault rifles and a nice, controllable, rate of fire, and they're among the most common submachine guns in the game. The Thompson can fall into Simple, yet Awesome for how ridiculously cool it looks, though.
• Born as an Adult: Children don't exist in the Madness Combat universe. Characters are directly created as adults.
• Bottomless Magazines: Notably averted; guns frequently run out of ammo, but throwing your gun always works. It's probably not that hard to keep track of the ammunition when animating one scene takes hours, and Krinkels always keeps count.
• Breaking Old Trends: Despite gradually getting Darker and Edgier, the first seven entries (not counting the interquels, which came later) follow the same formula. The later entries change it up.
  • Inundation is the first Madness entry in the main series where Hank is not the protagonist, with his old rival Jesus taking that role instead. It is also the first (and so far only) entry since Cheshyre started doing the music in Avenger that does not feature his music at all.
  • Aggregation is the first entry in the series with two co-leads, Sanford and Deimos, instead of one single protagonist.
  • Expurgation is the first time in the main series where the primary setting is not Nevada, in this case, it mostly takes place in the Auditor's Hell.
• Breakout Mook Character: Incident:011A stars Mag Agent: Torture as its protagonist, rather than one of the main characters.
• Broke the Rating Scale: When Hank is revived during the course of Consternation, 6.5 shows that his "integrity" level was listed as 0% (dead) and then briefly shot up to 107% before dropping slightly less quickly to 100%.
• Bring It: Sanford in 7.5, versus the newly activated ATP Soldats.
• Brought Down to Normal: After Jesus destroys the Portable Improbability Drive, Tricky changes from a flaming demon back to a zombie, and is quickly dispatched with Jesus's sword.
• Bulletproof Human Shield: Dead enemies usually come in handy as these. Hank's dead body in Aggregation is also used like this by Deimos. When Deimos is killed in Abrogation, the newly-revived Hank returns the favor.
• Bullet Time: Used in several scenes, mostly in Depredation.

C

• Call-Back: In Expurgation, Tricky uses an M60 while flying around to harass Sanford, much like he did with Hank in Avenger. He even gives a sort of knowing chuckle while he arms himself.
  • 9.5 is basically an animated instance of this trope, with Hank taking on his Madness Combat 7 incarnation, Tricky being unzombified, and the return of Antipathy Hank returning, coming across a note reading "Do what comes natural" as he did in that episode.
  • The fight choreography immediately after Hank leaps through the skylight in Depredation echoes part of the intro to Apotheosis.
• Came Back Strong: If any character has died once and come back from the dead so much as once, you KNOW this applies. Especially Hank.
  • Subverted in Consternation, where Hank is resurrected at the very beginning and fares noticeably worse than usual, continuously running from Tricky and even taking bullets from regular Agents at two points.
• Came Back Wrong: MAG Hank is a particularly pronounced example, what with the (supposed) steep drop in intelligence and giant mutant arm.
• Cannibalism Superpower:
  • Subverted in 5.5. Tricky attempts to use Jebus's zombie making powers after killing him by wearing the top half of his severed head like a hat. Much to his frustration, it doesn't work as he seemingly needed the halo instead.
  • Played straight with The Auditor, who absorbs bodies to grow stronger.
• Car Fu: In Apotheosis, Hank starts off his killing spree by ramming the first two mooks with a car.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The first episode was a comedic punch-up in a public park over a boombox. The next two episodes were about a man trying to kill a sheriff, but things were still rather silly. After that, the sun gets killed, a reality-altering device, which was previously used for comedic effect, turns the world into a nightmare, the existence of two warring secret organizations is implied, and everything is topped off by a monster clown that turns into a giant flaming demon and a satanic figure with the technology to build 10-feet tall super soldiers.
• Cerebus Retcon: Jebus was initially a way just to annoy religious folk on Newgrounds. Eventually, Madness: Project Nexus reveals he's not Jesus at all, but an ex-scientist who rebelled against Project Nexus after seeing his research twisted into abominations, and gained a massive messiah complex in the process.
• Chainsaw Good:
  • In Consternation, Hank uses one to butcher several mooks and brutally carve MAG Agent Torture's face apart.
  • In 9.5 Chapter Two, Tricky shows up with one, impaling the Retainer on spikes to keep it still before tearing it into pieces. It later shows up in the hands of Antipathy Hank as he butchers Tricky with it, before using it to attack Consternation Hank.
• Chekhov's Gunmen: Remember those two guys in Depredation, in the jeep, who throw Hank a weapon when he climbs out of the evil red glowing pit? In 5.5 (which was made some time after 5), it's revealed that they survived, and that they're actually Sanford and Deimos.
  • To a lesser extent, Tricky, whose corpse ironically saves both Sanford and Hank from the Auditor.
• Cliffhanger Wall: The first half of 9.5 ends with Hank injured and at the mercy of the Retainer. The second half switches to following Antipathy's Hank as he ventures through a different part of Hell, and only catches up with Consternation Hank towards the end, the implication being that he survived because the Retainer went after the other Hank.
• Combat Pragmatist: Hank is more than willing to use whatever he can get his hands on as a weapon. Be it a piece of lead piping, a street sign, a giant axe or even someone else's severed head, if he can hold it, he will beat you to death with it until he can find something more practical to use.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The second building Jebus storms in Inundation is the Sheriff's office from Redeemer and Avenger. You can notice this with the hastily-sealed air vent, which Hank used to enter the building in the third episode.
  • "The Bakery!" from Avenger reappears in SACRIFICE.fla, as the building Deimos comes out from. A dead Hank, looking just like he did in Avenger, falls into the floor and inflicts a seizure of images of that episode on Deimos when touched.
  • Towards the end of 9.5 Chapter 1, after Hank takes some Clothing Damage and is picked up by the Retainer, if one has a keen eye they can notice that underneath the bandana covering his mouth he still has the metal jaw he had back in Antipathy.
• Cool Shades: Hank wears a red pair of these since Depredation though they get replaced by a pair of similar-looking goggles in Consternation.
• Crapsack World: Very noticeable in the later episodes. The Sun was killed, after all.
• Crutch Character: A weapon example is the Walther PPK in Arena Mode of Madness: Project Nexus Classic. Stat-wise it's a Little Useless Gun with low damage and ammo capacity, but it is still a gun and thus a massive step up from basic melee weapons or bare hands for low-level characters. It's also about half the price of most other handguns, making it easy to obtain and giving you an actual fighting chance against early waves.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Practically every episode and spin-offs feature a protagonist or two effortlessly slaughtering tons of mooks. Though this does get subverted at points where the protagonists get killed.
• Cyber Cyclops: The ATP Soldats have a large, goggle-like cybernetic on their face that gives them this look.

D

• Darker and Edgier: More or less consistently with each episode. The original video was just a random fight Flash with no story and plenty of bloodless silliness. Redeemer introduces blood to the violence. Avenger reaches a level of greater gore. Afterwards it's the setting that gradually gets bleaker. Apotheosis shows a world of endless night. Depredation introduces more of the dystopian elements with the AAHW. Antipathy and Consternation show a hell-like red sky world. Inundation, Aggregation, and Abrogation show a reality that is collapsing. And then in Expurgation, the majority of the episode takes place in the Auditor's Hell, an even greater Eldritch Location than Nevada.
• Dark Is Evil: The Auditor, who is a Living Shadow Humanoid Abomination. Jesus used to work for him but quit and tried to stop the madness he's causing. The protagonists appear to have some sort of mission to stop him too.
• Dark Reprise: A few in the series.
  • "Calliope", the track in the second half of Avenger is actually a dark sounding techno remix of "Powerhouse", the instrumental track by Raymond Scott that is most famously used in various Looney Tunes cartoons. This fits the cartoon-like insanity from the activation of the Improbability Drive.
  • The middle of "Madness 7", the track of Consternation, is a slower and more demonic sounding version of "Train Madness" from Antipathy, showing the more vile and serious form Tricky has taken since the last episode.
  • The song from Abrogation has segments that remix "Madness 7" from Consternation and "Clown Song of Death" from Depredation in the middle. The end of the "Clown Song of Death" portion syncs with Tricky coming back to life near the end of the animation.
• Death Is Cheap: Anyone Can Die. And they will, again, and again, and again...
  • To give an example, Hank, the protagonist of the series, has died and gotten resurrected a total of seven times in canon. Lampshaded in 9.5 Chapter Two when Consternation!Hank arrives in Hell:
  HELLO AGAIN... AND AGAIN... AND AGAIN... AND AGAIN...
• Defector from Decadence: Many characters are implied or shown to be former A.A.H.W. agents:
  • The posters in Abrogation imply this about protagonist Deimos.
  • Also Dr. Jebidiah Christoff, playable character in Madness: Project Nexus. We know him today as Jebus, Sheriff's bodyguard and Hank's rival.
  • Doc, AKA 2BDamned may also be a former agent.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Most of the art is in black and white with some exceptions, the most notable being the vibrant red (and later yellow) blood.
• Dem Bones: Tricky become a giant dragon-skeleton thing in Expurgation, he also spawn an army of black skeletons who later sports his clown haircut. Tricky himself looks like on of these skeleton mooks while in "Auditor's Hell" only distinguishable by the halo and his shiny eyes.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Warning: DANGER!
• Developer's Foresight: In Madness: Project Nexus, there are several weapons that are supposed to be inaccessible to the player. If you somehow acquire them anyway, their Flavor Text will call you out on it:
  • The Giant Axe (dubbed "Mega Hammer" in-game): "The fact that you have this means I hate you."
  • The Severed Head: "Where'd you get this filthy thing?"
  • The Minigun: "HOW DID YOU GET THIS? THIS DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU. YOU DO NOT BELONG IN NEVADA."
• Divergent Character Evolution: Hank looked like a plain Madness Combat character at first, but then got different with each passing installment. Same for Sanford and Deimos, for whom you actually see this happen in real-time in one episode.
  • In a more literal sense, according to various screens seen throughout 7.5, Advanced Training Program (ATP) candidates are divided into 2 different training programs based on personality traits or skills exhibited by a particular candidate:
    • More intelligent, intuitive and leadership-focused candidates become Engineers.
    • More aggressive, malevolent and more physically capable candidates become Soldats.
• Dodge the Bullet: Mooks have decent to good aim, but the heroes usually either dodge or kill them before they can shoot. Later, the Auditor personally upgrades two random mooks, who are capable of super-speed dodging, making it a pain for the heroes to kill them.
• Double Meaning: At the start of Antipathy, the newly-resurrected Hank finds a note reading "Just do what comes natural". When Hank stumbles across an identical note in 9.5 Chapter 2, red text flickers over the top of it, alternating between the obvious meaning - "KILL" - and a second meaning - "DIE".
• The Dragon: Jebus, in the second and third episodes. Tricky seems to take this position in episodes 4 and 5. Which brings us to our next trope...
• Dragon Ascendant: After Hank shot the Sheriff, Jebus got to be the Big Bad for a little while until Tricky snapped.
• Dramatic High Perching: The Auditor really likes this. He raises himself up on a giant pillar to retreat from our heroes.
• Duct Tape for Everything: Injuries can be healed by simply wrapping them up with bandages.
• Dumb Muscle: Subverted by Hank in Aggregation, whose transformation makes him mentally retarded. According to the monitor outside the augmentation chamber, his intelligence stat is reduced from 9 to 3. In Dungeons & Dragons, this is the minimum number needed for a creature to even count as sentient. Then it's shown that he isn't so dumb after all, as he made a working pipe bomb strong enough to blow up the two possessed ATP engineers, and use Deimos' corpse as a decoy.

E

• Early Game Hell: Arena Mode in Madness: Project Nexus. You start out as a basic grunt with no money, no weapons, no armor, and no stats, meaning that all you can do is slowly punch enemies to death as they gang up on you three at a time. As such, your first couple of attempts will end in death before the halfway point of the first wave, and if you haven't died by then, you will probably get curb-stomped by the mooks showing up with actual weapons. However, once you've built up your stats and accrued enough cash to purchase a weapon of your own, things become a lot easier.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • A sort of prototype for the series, "Marsh-Mellow-Madness", came out four months prior to the actual first episode. Barring the similar-looking character designs, it has nothing in common with any other part, being far more whimsical in tone and featuring no combat whatsoever (though a character does end up getting Squashed Flat by the titular marshmallow, with some amount of blood). The short seems to be out-of-continuity but gets occasional homages in the main story. It also provides one of the very few instances of a normal human in the Madness artstyle giving what is unmistakably a smile—it looks surprisingly creepy.
  • Compare the first three episodes to the rest of the series. Back then, the backgrounds were a light gray instead of red, zombies didn't have mouths or tattered clothing, heck, the first episode didn't even have a single drop of blood in it!
  • In his first appearance, Tricky was just a simple henchman with clown makeup and a clown haircut. Even when he re-appeared and got turned into a zombie, he still didn't really have a distinct personality. It took until "Depredation" for him to become the Ax-Crazy Monster Clown with Glitch-y powers everyone knows about.
• Easter Egg: Zoom in on some of the posters. Additionally, pause when Sanford looks at his PDA, or when Tricky/Jesus/Auditor look at a PC screen.
• Emergency Transformation: Hank, in Aggregation. It's hours late, though.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • Tricky becomes a giant, flaming demon at the end of Antipathy upon activating his Improbability Drive, a form that he keeps over the course of Consternation before Jebus kills him. In Expurgation, when he's resurrected again, he appears with a skeletal version of this form.
  • The Auditor himself is both this AND an Eldritch Location - specifically, he's a living gate to a dimension that looks like actual Hell. The Auditor also looks like a vaguely humanoid dark mass because, according to Krinkels, that's only how the viewer can perceive him.
• Eldritch Location:
  • Nevada itself, after the Improbability Drives are activated. The sky glows red eternally, new buildings and hallways with impossible geometries seemingly spontaneously pop into existence, and reality seems to slowly tear itself apart in the later episodes.
  • Nevada is nothing compared to the purgatory/hell that Deimos found himself in the Deimos Adventure series, known as the "Other Place". The insane geometry is everywhere, the gravity constantly changes, and random paranormal things constantly pop into existence to make Deimos suffer.
  • Hank's personal Other Place is also just as screwed up, with multiple A.A.H.W agents being stationed there (implied to be unwilling), Tricky messing with him, and a Retainer, whose job is to keep Hank in Hell permanently, and does a pretty good job doing so.
    • As noted above, the Auditor IS one of these, he's a living gate to a dimension that looks like actual Hell. Expurgation takes place in this where impossible physics and geometries are also in full effect, but the Auditor also has some ability to directly manipulate the realm and its inhabitants too such as by creating sharp spikes and even stopping time by 'hacking' the space.
• Elevator Action Sequence:
  • One in Redeemer, which ends with Hank cutting the cables down with a shotgun.
  • A brief one in Consternation, cut short by the appearance of Tricky in his Monster Clown form, landing on the elevator and forcing Hank to retreat.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: After Hank momentarily grabs the Auditor's halo in Abrogation, he gains a new hand and eventually an energy charged punch. Which appears to be the only way the Auditor can be harmed.
• Elite Mooks: Subverted. Agent-style Elite Mooks are dispatched, but rarely, if ever, slow down the hero. Same with the ATP (Accelerated Training Program) Engineers and Soldats. Tricky may have originally been one as well.
  • The two ATP Engineers transformed by the Auditor in Aggregation play this straight. They're noticeably more competent, accurate, ruthless, and capable of bullet dodging. They manage to kill Deimos and wound Sanford, albeit superficially..
  • The possessed agents in Abrogation also count, taking far more gunshots to kill than usual. They are, however, rendered just as useless as regular agents by Hank's new Magnified form.
• Employee of the Month: One of the many amusing posters in the series claims that a generic Mook named Rich is employee of the month. Rich later made an appearance in Project Nexus, where he has been employee of the month at a power plant for 30 years straight. He also seems to be the only employee of said power plant.
• Enemy Mine:
  • In Expurgation, the Auditor heals and empowers Hank to defeat the Tricky Demons. Ultimately subverted as the Auditor was actually using him to kill Tricky and return to the living world, uncontested.
  • In 9.5 Chapter Two, after attacking Hank repeatedly throughout the episode, Tricky ultimately teams up with him to fight the Retainer. Tricky proceeds to beat him single-handedly, allowing Hank to get away.
• Everybody Do the Endless Loop: The guy dancing in the background in the first episode.
• Everything Fades: The bodies of dead enemies fade away in the first game adaptation, though it has a fixed timer, so the floor might be coated in gibs before they disappear.
• Evil Is Petty: According to Madness Interactive, the reason why Hank is looking to kill the Sheriff is because he stole Hank's pie. This may not be canon to the animations, however.
  • Averted in the latest installment Madness: Project Nexus, which is basically an advanced playable adaption of the cartoons themselves.
• Evil Versus Evil: Expurgation was one big Cosmic Chess Game between The Auditor and Tricky. It's the Auditor who wins.
• Excuse Plot: Initially about a fight over a boombox, graduating into a Mêlée à Trois between Hank, Jebus and Tricky. This no longer became the case after the Sheriff's death, implementing a plot about reality warping and a mysterious organization trying to stop it all.
• Extremely Short Timespan: While the episodes from the first one to Depredation (episode 5) are separated by time skips of unknown length, starting from Depredation every episode takes place directly after the previous one. This means that in the span of a few dozens of minutes:
  • Several characters died and came back to life (sometimes multiple times).
  • The protagonists fought many armies of agents (who themselves have been upgraded twice), genetically modified soldiers with yellow blood, giant people and skeletons.
  • The main characters stormed multiple buildings and got new clothes.
  • The protagonists travelled in hellish dimensions and got new powers.
  • Hank got a mutant arm he lost twice, only to get a better one seconds or minutes later.

F

• The Faceless: Initially, everyone at first. Zombies gained mouths in Apotheosis, as well as Jebus, and Sanford has one.
  • The Sun (first appearing in Marshmellow Madness) is featured as a smiling face... Until Hank beats it to death with a street sign in Avenger.
  • Deimos has visible upper teeth after he loses his lower jaw in SACRIFICE.fla.
  • A rather horrifying subversion in An Experiment. Someone whose Floating Limbs are being pulled away from him is driven mad by the torture and starts grinding and slamming his face against the wall. When an ATP engineer enters the room, the subject turns around to reveal exposed eye sockets and teeth beneath his torn-off skin.
• Facial Horror: In An Experiment, shortly after Scrapeface is separated from his hands, he rubs his face on a wall so hard that it gets torn off and his skull becomes visible.
• Fingore: At the beginning of 9.5, an ATP engineer accidentally cuts another guy's fingers with a sword while trying to attack Hank.
• Flash Step: Tricky is quite fond of this, using it either "normally" to close the distance or to bounce off ceilings and floors.
• Flight:
  • Jesus' Halo allows him to do this.
  • Tricky in Incident:1000A and Expurgation. There is no explanation of why he can do this in the former though.
  • Two random skeleton Mooks in Expurgation could do this.
• Floating Limbs: Floating hands are omnipresent in this series. An Experiment establishes that these floating hands can be sealed in a box and pulled several meters away from the person's body without the person losing control of them... but that they lose control of themselves in the process.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Littered in the background of almost every episode are posters and fliers that change every episode. They start out comical (recruitment posters filled with over-the-top propaganda, or random gibberish), but over time get darker or more desperate ("HE DOESN'T BELONG. But then again, neither do you. We can survive together.")
• Friendly Enemy: Jebus seems to have this relationship with Hank, as he seems to mercy kill Hank to grant him a final death, and teams up with him to fight Tricky.
  • In addition, Hank refers to Jebus as "Player 2".
  • During their duel in Depredation, Jebus orders all his henchmen to cease firing and line up against the wall so he can fight Hank fairly. Later on, Jebus physically stops one of his henchmen from shooting Hank after he's fallen down a cliff.
• From Nobody to Nightmare:
  • Tricky starts off the series as an assassin clown hired by Sheriff who gets killed off by Hank fairly easily. However, through the power of the Improbability Drive, Tricky gets revived and upgraded into a reality-warping Monster Clown.
  • An update to Madness: Project Nexus includes a prequel episode involving a long-haired, goatee'd Nexus Scientist named Dr. Jebidiah Christoff, who attempts to stop the insane project from achieving its goals after he learns what he has been creating. By the end, he's murdered his way through the facility and picked up a halo and magic powers as well.
  • Scrapeface from An Experiment. The torture not only drives the guy completely insane, it somehow turns him into a glitchy Eldritch Abomination who proceeds to destroy the entire facility while reducing himself to Ludicrous Gibs.
• Funny Background Event:
  • In the very first episode, while Hank is laying waste to everyone around him in the field, there is a random person in the background dancing to the Chicken Dance that's coming out of the on-screen boombox. Hank promptly shoots him as soon as he kills everyone else.
  • In the rave room in Apothesis, one mook whom Hank missed sees the slaughter before him, and decides to sit back and enjoy a smoke...until he gets crushed by a door.
  • In Aggregation, Sanford kills an Engineer with a rocket launcher just as the Engineer fires, causing the rocket to shoot up into the sky. Later on, the rocket can be seen falling back to earth in the distance.

G

• General Failure: The Sheriff isn't shown to be especially competent at his job. His one and only kill in the entire series happened when he shot one of his own men by mistake while running away from Hank.
• Genius Loci: The Auditor himself is a sentient gate toward his personal dimension that strangely looks like Hell. Madness 9.5 implies that the real Hell itself has a degree of sentience. And it seems angry about Hank getting revived numerous times.
  LISTEN HERE, HACKER
  YOUR INTEREST WILL BE TERMINATED
  HANK WILL BE RETAINED
• Genre Savvy: At one point in 9.5 part 2, a couple of agents are shown prefiring through a door after it opens during a screen transition, in contrast to most mooks waiting for the protagonist to walk in before attacking. Too bad that wasn't the door that Hank was actually walking through, though...
• Giant Mook:
  • MAG Agents. All featuring equally giant weapons, and they fare little better than their tinier co-workers.
  • Hank fights a giant masked skeleton in Expurgation. It's unknown if he's a Magnified skeleton or was just made that way.
  • Deimos fight several giants agents in DedmosRebuilt.fla. It's unknown if they are related to MAG agents as they are smaller and don't have sharp claws.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Jesus in the first episode, and the first MAG Agent shows up with no explanation. We do get one later (the Auditor's been growing them). In addition, whatever the Auditor was... growing and deploys against Hank and Sanford prematurely in the ninth episode.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom:
  • The Auditor has red eyes.
  • Later, Skeleton Tricky and his clones gain similar eyes.
• Good Guns, Bad Guns: Various "Good" and "Bad" guns all appear briefly or prominently in the series. However, in Madness: Project Nexus, A.A.H.W. troops are often seen wielding the MP-40 in the later levels of Episode 1 and throughout Episode 1.5.
• Good Lips, Evil Jaws: Sanford's signature protruding lip and Jebus's determined grimace, contrasting Tricky's (and most zombies for that matter) exposed jaw full of sharp, jagged teeth, or the horrifying grins of the mustached betrayers. Ultimately Averted though, since Hank and Deimos have lost their lower jaws and have got them replaced with much more menacing and inhuman ones made from a different material, while the Agency have much more normal faces, even if The Auditor doesn't have a normal looking face.
• Good Old Fisticuffs:
  • Used by MAG Agent: Torture in Incident:011A (which, for some reason, takes away his shotgun). Let's just say it got messy.
  • Deimos also indulges in this in DedmosRebuilt.fla with his newly formed rock fists. Let's just say it got even messier.
• Gorn: Not so much in the early episodes, but the later ones? Various Mooks get sliced in half, shot full of bloody holes and splattered all over the scenery by buckshot or explosives. Krinkels does very realistic blood spray.

• Guns Are Useless: In the hands of mooks, at least. When they DO hit Hank, it doesn't even seem to bother him much.
• Gun Accessories: The games have three main ones: silencers, scopes and laser sights. Although silencers don't really affect anything rather than change your weapon's firing sound, laser sights and scopes actually affect your weapon's range and accuracy.

• Gun Porn: The wide variety of guns used and the detail given in using them is rather high. This is best shown in the beginning of Inundation, wherein Jebus delicately disassembles an entire TAC-50 bolt-action rifle piece by piece.
• Grievous Harm with a Body:
  • Hank semi-frequently uses severed heads as weapons.
  • Mag Agents are known to use entire bodies to (attempt to) bludgeon the heroes.
  • Ironically, Deimos uses Hank's corpse as a bludgeon and a meat shield during the course of Aggregation, at one point even throwing him at someone to knock them off a ledge.
  • In Incident:110A, Jesus kills two mooks by repeatedly smacking one into the other via telekinesis.

H

• Hand Cannon: Jebus seems to prefer having the biggest handgun in the series. He carried a Desert Eagle until they became L33t Crew standard issue, and then he switched to a S&W 500 revolver.
  • There are a couple of these in 9.5, part 2 which get to shine briefly: a Desert Eagle recovered by Antipathy Hank is capable of blowing Tricky to pieces with a few well-placed shots, and a beefy long-barreled revolver which Consternation Hank steals from an ATP Engineer can send a dead body flying a fair distance.
• Heel–Face Turn: Jebus is the protagonist in Inundation, apparently having decided that the insanity has gone too far.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Deimos dies rather unceremoniously mere moments after placing Hank in a Magnification device in Aggregation.
  • This is definitely the case in Inundation, where Jebus embarks on what is essentially a Suicide Mission against the Auditor. He dies in the end, but takes the primary Improbability Drive with him.
• High-Pressure Blood: In Avenger, a mook gets a large portion of his head blown off by Hank. A veritable FOUNTAIN of blood begins gushing out, flooding three quarters of the room's floor in the process.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Tricky has repeatedly stabbed Hank with the signpost that originally killed him.
  • In Consternation, Jebus finished Hank off with the infamous stab, lift, and headshot from Apotheosis.
  • As of Abrogation, this has happened to the Auditor. Remember kids, Monster Clowns are NOT part of a healthy diet!
  • Non-canonical example in Incident:1000a when Jebus gets his face punched off by MAG Hank's electrical, normality-restoring Power Fist; the hand on MAG Hank's mutant arm and its special power were originally gained after Hank briefly got hold of the deceased Jebus' halo in Abrogation. This event would normally imply a blatant Temporal Paradox but, again, it was a strictly non-canon fight.
• Hollywood Silencer: Zig-Zagged. Played straight in Redeemer and Madness Interactive, justified in Apotheosis, averted in Depredation, played straight in Aggregation, played straight and averted with two different guns in 7.5, and exaggerated in Madness: Project Nexus, where everything from a silenced pocket pistol to a silenced magnum will produce the same sound.
• Humanoid Abomination: The Auditor is a humanoid mass of shadowy flames with supernatural powers, and hails is a living gate to his own dimension that looks like Hell.
• Hypocritical Humor: The AAHW has "wanted" posters for the protagonists for various crimes, despite the AAHW itself being a criminal organisation.

I

• I Have Many Names: Jesus has also gone by Jebus, The Savior, and Dr. Jebediah Christoff.
• I Will Fight Some More Forever: The heroes never stop trying to damage the Auditor, even after it's made very clear he can become intangible, though it's justified by the fact that when he becomes intangible he must either drop his weapon, teleport to safety, or both. He also needs to consciously use this power, as shown when Hank snuck up on the Auditor and grabbed him from behind to steal his halo.
• Iconic Sequel Outfit: Hank's outfit in Consternation, the 7th episode of the series, is his most popular one.
• IKEA Weaponry: Jebus disassembles his TAC-50 whenever he's not using it. Comes into play later in the same episode, where he rapidly reassembles it when a MAG Agent shows up and he lacks a means to kill it.
• Immediate Sequel:
  • Starting with the sixth episode, almost every episode starts right when the previous one ends. "Aggregation" is a minor exception since it starts about a minute before the end of the previous episode, "Inundation".
  • There isn't any time skip between any episode of the Deimos Adventure mini-series.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Most notably Hank in Avenger. Tons of Mooks meet the same fate on regular basis, including one memorably badass moment in Apotheosis when Hank gets hold of his first katana and uses it to skewer one of the mooks and lift him up before unloading a submachine gun into his face.
  • MAG Agent: Torture's defining feature is the two colossal nails driven crosswise through his head. They do not hinder him in the slightest.
  • If a Retainer wants to do away with someone very quickly, it might telekenetically launch large spikes - which it can raise from nearby surfaces ex nihilo - at them. Victims will be quickly and completely skewered multiple times, which is exactly what happened to Tricky the Clown.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Not only do almost all of the Grunts, Agents, Engineers, and Soldats miss pretty much every shot, but it's actually come to be expected as a plot device. Not to mention the overall accuracy from the MAG Agents totaling in at a whopping 0%.
  • It's somewhat subverted, because the protagonists seem to do a pretty good job dodging bullets thanks to their superior reflexes and not necessarily due to their enemies' poor aim. Regardless, there have been examples here in there that are definitely this trope.
  • Subverted in 6.5, where Sanford is badly wounded by an ATP Engineer's .357 revolver, greatly hindering his ability to fight for the first quarter of the episode.
  • Subverted twice in Consternation where Hank is wounded by grazing shots twice in a short span: one Agent manages to ambush him on the elevator and graze his shoulder, and later on another Agent grazes the same shoulder just below the first wound with a TAR-21.
• Implacable Man: Despite his many physical wounds and being infected by some kind of virus that makes him periodically vomit up blood, Jebus kept chasing after the Auditor.
  • The MAG Agent in Incident:011A.
• Improbable Weapon User: Tricky's main weapon is a road sign that he uses as a staff, a spear and an axe. Sometimes all at once.
• Improvised Weapon: If it appeared in the series and can be wielded in both hands, someone has used it as a weapon. Tricky's road sign, initially used by Hank to pin him to a giant marshmallow, is the most iconic, but there's a lot of them.
  • On several occasions, mooks find something to take cover behind only for Hank to squash them with it. Jesus also telekinetically lifts crates to smash mooks with.
  • Early on in 5.5, Sanford incapacitates an agent by splashing a drink into his face.
  • Madness Interactive allows you to rip a urinal off a wall and bludgeon enemies with it. The urinal is also a Dummied Out weapon in Madness: Project Nexus.
• Informed Flaw: Hank's mental retardation from Aggregation onward. After his transformation and resurrection, he uses clever tactics (MacGyvering up a bomb and tossing it at Elite Mooks after distracting them with Deimos' corpse), uses the environment to deploy traps, hangs back to let Sanford take care of enemies armed with guns, makes use of martial arts, and keeps his gun trained on the exit when riding an elevator. He also adapts quickly to the Auditor's changing tactics. If anything, he's more careful than before his resurrection.
• Interquel: Madness Combat 5.5, 6.5 and 7.5 follow Sanford and Deimos' story before they were formally introduced in Aggregation, revealing them to be the two guys who gave Hank the Dragon Sword in Depredation.

K

• Katanas Are Just Better: Especially when they have Thai inscriptions on the flat of the blade. Hank loves his very much, making ample use of it in Apotheosis and Depredation. Additionally, it is available in Madness: Project Nexus as Hank's primary weapon.
  • Interestingly, though, the katana isn't his, or rather isn't exclusive to him. When first introduced in Apotheosis, Hank picks it up from a dead grunt and just manages to keep it for the rest of the episode, unlike the vast majority of his Throw-Away Guns through the series. It's given back to him in Depredation by two people later revealed to be Sanford and Deimos to deal with Tricky. A random ATP Engineer later uses it in Inundation and The Auditor summons it in Aggregation before switching to his Auditor Sword in Abrogation.
• Kuleshov Effect: In his introduction in Aggregation, Sanford only had two expressions: a normal default expression where he looks stoic, and an annoyed expression where he's frowning. However, when he sees Deimos's corpse, he goes from his annoyed expression to his default one, and the disappearance of his frown upon seeing his partner's corpse makes him look more surprised than stoic. Then he sees the Auditor and goes back to his annoyed expression, but the context makes him looks more angry than merely peeved.
• Kung-Fu Jesus: Jebus, obviously.

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