Webcomic / Ava's Demon

"That was the risk of my clumsily concocted curse, I suppose: getting stuck with undesirable circumstances and creatures."

— Wrathia Bellarmina

Ava's Demon is a Webcomic, set on distant planets allegedly 1000 years into the future, about a 15 year old girl named Ava Ire. She has the misfortune of being haunted by a demon named Wrathia Bellarmina, who takes joy in manipulating Ava's actions to make her life as miserable as possible. Only later does Ava learn about Wrathia's true motives, and little does she know how tumultuous her life is to become.

The artwork of each page easily draws the reader into the story, with every page displaying beautifully painted characters and scenery. The comic is played out in "scenes", with each page serving as a frame in the reel of events that unfold. In a practice inspired by Homestuck, some frames are animated videos with music.

The first page can be found here and the author's blog here. It is also available to read on Webtoons.

The character page can be found here.

Warning: Spoilers are unmarked. As in literally all of them.

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Tropes:

• Alchemy Is Magic: The potion that Wrathia made certainly seems to imply this considering what it does. It binds their soul to the next being that is born in the universe upon the death of the drinker. Turns out, those potions were actually curses.
• Alien Sky:
  • The planet where Ava goes to school doesn't have a sun, relying on artificial light towers instead.
  • Odin's home planet Aedinfell has a sun that recently collapsed into a black hole, dooming it to Endless Winter.
• Alpha Bitch: Wrathia abused and tormented Ava from the moment she was born and holds no remorse for her actions. Furthermore, it's implied she wasn't as good a queen as she claims.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Wrathia's race appears to have a variety of different skin colors ranging from her own red/orange to Pedri's purple.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's currently unclear whether Gil and Odin knew each other at an earlier point in their lives, and at least one or both have forgotten, or if they're being affected by Nevy and Pedri's past memories, or both. There's the hosts' crushes occasionally reflecting their "ghosts'", too, but there's more than a few indications that it's less the ghosts' "influence," and more their own feelings (Gil blushes at Odin during the time Nevy is KO'd, for example).
• Ambiguous Time Period: Word of God states that the calendar saying that the year is 3031 in Ava's Demon is not the BCE/CE calendar we're familiar with.
• And Then What?: This exchange.
  Gil: Once they get into Paradise they can live there forever!
  Ava: And?
  Gil: And...? And what?
  Ava: Do they ever leave?
  Gil: Why would they want to leave? No one leaves Paradise. What a stupid question.
  Ava: I just thought the followers would come back and talk about it, or something. I guess you don't know if it really exists then, heh.
• As You Know: Tuls reminds Maggie of the rules behind his magic.
• Art Evolution: While there was quick evolution between the first and second chapter, over time body proportions such as height changed and became more fixed, and the soft, slightly hazy look of early chapters became sharper, with more standout colors and lining later on, such as chapter 16.
• Background Halo: A few. Gil gets one from a conveniently placed TITAN logo here which remains during his conversation with Maggie.
• Bait-and-Switch: A very sweet example, where we see Pedri ominously rising up behind Ava and reaching out with his big creepy claws...so he can tenderly stroke his hands through her hair, because it reminds him of Wrathia's.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Ava's rather miffed at not having her wish granted.
  • VERY MIFFED.
• Better to Die than Be Killed:
  • Surrendering didn't necessarily guarantee her survival, so Wrathia brewed a cursed wine that would kill her upon consumption, rather than live as a prisoner of TITAN.
  • Ava is of the same mindset - she didn't mind death by being impaled on a statue, because it meant that Wrathia hadn't succeeded in one of her suicide attempts. Besides, at least maybe she'd get some pity in death.
• Big "NO!": Odin when he finds out what happened to his ship.
• Bilingual Bonus: The paragraph after Moribund Malediction is in Runic, and says this:
  "I woke up this morning and realized that I could not remember the sound of her voice.
  Her laugh echos in my head when I try hard enough to imagine it, but it's nothing more than an empty weightless reflection of reality teetering on the cusp of my memory, and it only brings me pain to try and remember it.
  But, my fear of forgetting her is much more powerful, and so I must remember, and I end up at the same question of everyone in the universe:
  What did we do wrong to deserve this?
  Why me?"
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Bound to come up due to the setting. Particularly notable in Gil's flashback when the silent scavengers destroy his homeworld and turn the sea to acid, his muscle tissue is blue, not just his skin.
  • Seen with Prudith as well that she's blue through and through, though a warning for the scene's graphic nature.
• Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Assuming that Wrathia's previous husband and Pedri are the same species as Wrathia, the men of her species have three eyes while the women have two.
  • Following the assumption above it is also worth noting that Pedri seems to have much longer, more claw-like, fingers than Wrathia in addition to this Pedri is also seen to have fangs when he lifts his mask, while Wrathia is noticeably more human-like.
• Body Horror: Part of what happens when you are stupid enough to make your pact an impossible task.
  • What the Gates of Paradise does to people.
• Born Unlucky: At the moment Ava was born, the demon Wrathia possessed her and has been bound to her body since then. Because of Wrathia's frustration from being stuck in Ava's frail human body, as well as her refusal to forge a pact, she frequently controls Ava against her will, getting her in constant trouble. This has ruined any possible friendship for Ava, and has recently gotten her expelled from school. There's also the fact that Ava's parents are nowhere to be seen.
• Bottled Heroic Resolve: Heroic isn't exactly accurate, but Wrathia's potions are these. When Ava is stuck in the Gates Of Paradise, Wrathia gets her to drink a bottle and Ava immediately gets power and a transformation. She proceeds to wreck the entire stadium.
• Black Widow: Wrathia has had at least one other husband in the past. The author refuses to say exactly how many.
• Break the Cutie: Poor Ava is constantly tormented by Wrathia, all in an attempt to make her commit suicide. Eventually she snaps.
• Came Back Strong: Ava, as a result of her forming a pact with Wrathia shortly after she died.
  • Strategos Six, prepare to die.
• Cessation of Existence: It is all but outright stated by Wrathia that there's no afterlife, and even straight up tells Ava that she won't go anywhere after death and will just dissolve into stardust. That said, souls do exist outside of the body for a short time (or longer if efforts are taken), and Wrathia, being Wrathia, could have been lying about everything out of desperation to convince Ava to agree to the pact.
• Chekhov's Gunman: A number of Gil's former friends and classmates who briefly appear in his flashback in chapter 5 make their reappearance 11 chapters later in chapter 16, and with it, bring about seemingly slight or larger consequences to the story and background.
• Comically Missing the Point: When Maggie abandons subtlety and suggests to the Straight Gay Gil that they make out, he takes it to be a slang term for leaving their moving spaceship.
  Gil: We don't even have the proper suits for that kind of environment.
  Maggie: [Stares silently with a frozen smile and Sweat Drop]
• Convection, Schmonvection: Averted for everyone who isn't a host or Strategos Six when Ava turns most of her surroundings into lava.
• Cool Mask: Pedri, Wrathia's husband, has a skull one of these. Word of God says that it belonged to Wrathia's previous husband.
• Dartboard of Hate: Apparently Olai painted a target onto Odin's portrait and shoots arrows into it.
• Deadpan Snarker: Ava becomes this after she dies.
• Deal with the Devil: Anyone who negotiates an agreement between themselves and their demon. Inverted in that the pacts are usually fair because the demon has no choice but to grant the person what they wanted or else they become a 'monster of failure'. Likewise, the living member has to comply to their half of the bargain or face the same consequences.
• Death World: Aedinfell became ravaged by resource wars after hitting a food shortage caused by its sun collapsing into a black hole.
• Demonic Possession: Wrathia states that as she spent more time trapped in Ava's body, she began to lose a certain degree of control over Ava. That doesn't mean Wrathia still doesn't abuse her control from time to time. The cause of Ava's possession is later explained as all part of Wrathia's desperate plan in an attempt to gain vengeance on TITAN.
• Determinator: At some point in her life Ava made a promise to herself that she wouldn't let Wrathia be the cause of her death. Cue her relief when she is impaled on a statue. As it turns out, she didn't care whether she died or not, just that it wasn't Wrathia who did it.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • While scolding Maggie, Gil lists off what she did wasn't very true to TITAN's rules. Little does he know that TITAN's follows would break those rules to serve TITAN.
  Gil: Well, I've got news for you, Maggie. Followers of TITAN don't resort to violence and harm to get what they want. ^note See Wrathia's empire And they would never lie about their misdeeds... especially to other followers. ^note See the Gates of Paradise
  • Gil thinks Ava ruined his dream of being a doctor by destroying TITAN HQ, when in fact we learn (though he doesn't) that he was lined up to become a medical janitor.
• Dream Sequence: Early on chapter 26, Gil has a dream where he is on a beach with Odin and they kiss. It's unclear whether this is his actual dream or if he is seeing Nevy's memories, overlaying himself in her place and Odin in Pedri's.
• Drunk on the Dark Side: Literally, in Ava's case. After she ingests the potion Wrathia gave her, she becomes so fueled by the power and rage that she stops being scared and starts being furious. She proceeds to brutally massacre the followers of TITAN HQ. Word of God calls her Wrava in this state.
• Doomed Hometown:
  • Ava's planet is blown up within the first chapter.
  • Odin's homeworld, Aedinfell, will be doomed to either starvation, war, or getting sucked in by the black hole it orbits if a solution isn't found soon.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Gil's former classmate Gev shows up in a Flashback a thousand pages before his first line of dialogue.
• Easy Amnesia: Nevy has amnesia but she got it by drinking a potion that simultaneously killed her and bound her soul to the next being that was born (or reborn, in her case) in the universe.
• Elemental Powers:
  • The demons have this motif. Wrathia is fire, Nevy is water, Tuls is earth, Pedri is death and the other three haven't been shown yet.
  • As confirmed here by the creator, souls that have made a pact trigger their powers when reacting with emotions such anger or embarrassment.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: The jury's still out on whether Pedri is evil or not, but he definitely has this motif, with his Iconic Outfit being a skull mask and his host's mindscape being an icy wasteland.
• Evil Versus Evil: TITAN is made out to be a conqueror in the same vein as Xerxes, but it's not like Wrathia, a self-proclaimed "ruler of hundreds of galaxies", exactly screams "Big Good", either. In fact, TITAN seems far more benevolent, although still oppressive, given that the TITAN Corporation which he has some connection to owned the school which Ava, Odin, and Maggie attended, versus Wrathia, who is likely to turn out to be as just a bloodthirsty dictator, if not worse. Given the whole feel of the story, expect general Black-and-Gray Morality.
  • Come Chapter Fourteen, it becomes apparent that TITAN is basically the opposite of Benevolent, what with his apparent taste for euthenizing some followers and literally reconstructing others in a way that would make Dr. Moreau nauseated. This is less of a case of simply "evil vs evil," and more "Satan vs. Yawg-Sothoth"...
• Exotic Eye Designs: While Ava's pupils are round, Maggie's are triangular, Odin's are square, Gil's are diamond-shaped, and Fira's are star-shaped. Disembodied spirits have cross-shaped ones.
• Eye Motifs: All of the characters that are listed as 'lifeforms' on the cast page have differently-shaped pupils. Additionally, in flashbacks to before Nevy was bound to him, Gil's pupils were black, but afterward, they're bluish-white.
• Eye Open: Ava, after the completion of the pact and at the end of chapter 3.
• False Flag Operation: The Scavengers have TITAN technology, leading Odin to realize that they have them attack planets and then swoop in to rescue the survivors in order to make them loyal.
• Family Theme Naming: of the mythological variety. The Arrow siblings are named Odin, Raven, and Crow - in Norse Mythology, the god Odin used those birds as helpers and spies.
• The Famine: Odin's home planet Aedinfell is suffering from global food shortages due to its sun collapsing into a black hole and sinking it into Endless Winter, sparking bloody conflict over its dwindling resources.
• Fantastic Racism: Wrathia seems to discriminate against any race that she considers inferior to hers.
• Foreshadowing: Lots of it! Here's an example of Odin's foreshadowing—Ava's walking backwards before tripping but before her goggles fall off right as she lands in front of Odin, you see Pedri's pattern all over Odin's legs and feet.
• Flaying Alive: Prudith's final fate. Even more horrifying than usual because rather than a savage act of animalistic violence, it's done by a team of clinical, dispassionate, eerily clean robotic arms as part of TITAN's conversion process.
• Fractured Fairy Tale: Each of the Hosts individual story is a retelling of a famous book or fairy tale.
• From Bad to Worse: It starts with being expelled from school and quickly escalates into an entire planet being destroyed.
• Funny Background Event:
  • After Ava dies, the body just sort of hangs around in the back for a while in a morbidly humorous sort of way.
  • A less morbid example would be Maggie guzzling down the booze Gil gave her while Odin freaks out about his ship.^note That is, unless you know that the booze is actually poisonous and Maggie's knockout was essentially a kind of not-death
• Fusion Dance: When a pact is formed, the two souls merge into one body.
• Green Thumb: Maggie has shown the ability to convert her arms into surprisingly strong vines for combat purposes.
• God-Emperor: It's implied that TITAN's empire is built on this concept, though the only person who describes it in detail is the Religious Stereotype Gil. His followers' dogma is pretty explicit about it.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Wrathia and Odin both smoke a wooden pipe, but with different settings and atmosphere.
  • When Wrathia does it, it not only adds to her evil nature, but combines this trope with Smoking Is Glamorous to establish the idea that she's perfectly comfortable with the state of the body that she shares with Ava, despite that it techincally died.
  • When Odin smokes, he performs it secretly in a remote and nature-filled location to reinforce his Stoner idenity that was previously only implied to the reader. Not to mention he was smokes Fantastic Drugs that help him block out Pedri's voice.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Averted. When Ava is impaled on a statue, we get to see every second of it, right up until she dies.
• Healing Factor: Just one of the things that making a pact bestows upon you.
• Holding Hands: Odin knows the protocol at Disneyland.
  Odin: S-so we don’t get s-separated. Just h-hold tight, okay?
• Homoerotic Subtext: Wrathia can get pretty close physically to Ava, sometimes while both are in their naked spirit forms. Their pact starts with Wrathia hugging her tightly until their bodies merge. This sequence has Wrathia positioned over her suggestively. And it keeps getting more and more....suggestive.... Word of God confirms it's intentional, as demons and their hosts are "the same person".
  shes momentarily falling in love with her inner self, the terrible things she has wrought, in this moment she has given up
• Impossible Task: The penalty for not completing a pact is only invoked once completing the bargain becomes this.
• Interface Screw: While Ava is watching Prudith get disassembled by the Gate to Paradise, the background shifts to what looks like a bunch of MRI scans, and the Home button turns into a HELP button.
• Internal Reveal: After her experience at TITAN HQ, Ava gets so fed up with Gil and Maggie demonizing her that she spills the beans about her pact with Wrathia, then puts on her spirit goggles and sees Nevi hanging around Gil.
• Jerkass:
  • Maggie with her treatment of Ava and Tuls. While it's implied Ava (or Wrathia) may have done something to destroy their friendship, her treatment of Tuls is unacceptable. Subverted in the case of Maggie trying to kill Odin; she was under the impression he was a stalker who kidnapped her.
  • Considering how it's implied Tuls has barely held a conversation with the lady he's created painting after painting of, Maggie putting him down for it might be Justified. Then again, the way Maggie is attempting to fulfill her end of the deal is literally *making* someone into falling in love with her (although Tuls says his flower would have the receiver "uncover the desire in their heart..." the implication, at least, seems to be that instead of the victim finding the desire themselves, it's dragged out of them).
  • Wrathia invokes this with Ava. She used Demonic Possession to make everyone think that Ava's a Jerkass.
• Last-Second Word Swap: "w-with the huge -- c-c-claws"
• A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...: The planet of the school Ava attends does not resemble Earth, and the in-comic year is 3031. Wrathia was originally from a distant galaxy and was in control of "hundreds of galaxies" at the height of her power, which implies interstellar travel is possible.
• Loser Protagonist: Ava's one former friend thinks she is crazy and hates her guts now. Because of Wrathia's frequent possessions which get Ava into trouble, she is eventually expelled to a "Special Needs" child containment planet.
• Magically-Binding Contract: The pacts are a mix of this and Deal with the Devil. This is why the pacts cannot be defied, because they have a built in deterrent for anyone looking to break the rules although they can be exact-worded a little.
• Magic Potion: Wrathia makes a potion that binds the drinker's soul to the next being that is born in the universe upon the drinker's death.
• Making a Splash: Although she hasn't actually used it yet, Nevy can do this. Her associated element is water after all.
• Malevolent Mutilation: The Gates of Paradise RIPS APART whoever's inside of it until they either resemble the template that was created for them or they DIE. All to the tune of disturbingly inappropriate music. It happens to another Follower right in front of Ava. Poor Prudith.
• Meaningful Background Event: Sharp eyed readers can spot Nevy here as she begins to manifest after Gil's rebirth.
• Meet Cute: Ava and Odin have a second meeting like this. No word yet on what it means for the rest of the comic.
• Mental World: Where demons that make pacts with their hosts reside.
• Mind Screw: The experience of growing up with a demon that no one else can see magically bound to you.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Anyone who has entered a pact, it is a side effect of their being two souls in a single body. An example of this is Ava, who managed to get right back up after being impaled through the chest on a statue after she made a pact with Wrathia.
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: Gil and Ava initially invert this, believing Nevy and Wrathia to be hallucinations until proven otherwise.
• Not What It Looks Like: Odin catches Ava looking up Maggie's shirt.
• Odd-Shaped Panel:
  • One panel is split, slantwise, to show two characters at once.
  • There are a number of "panels" that are folded, burnt, or otherwise finagled with as one would with a page inside a book. It's unclear if most or any folded etc. panels are supposed to be missing, or making up a "beat" page, though occasionally some are mysterious enough that they MIGHT be implying or foreshadowing something...
• Orwellian Retcon: Some panels have had their dialogue edited since they were first posted. For example, the message Wrathia makes Ava write in the beginning was changed from "fuck you ava you fat bitch" to "die in a fire, ava ire", Wrathia making Ava call the principal a land whale was changed to calling him a "paper-pushing moron", and Crow calling Odin an 18 year old virgin was changed to calling him a "jealous, ugly nerd lord".
• Our Demons Are Different: Demons in this Webcomic are the ghosts of alien warriors. All of them possess Elemental Powers that seem to match their skin color. Some have horns, some have fangs, some have both.
• Painting the Medium: A great amount of it, from TITAN's followers speaking in a different font, to video updates rather than static panels, and entire updates invoking Interface Screw.
• Playing with Fire: This is Wrathia's associated element, and the power that she gives Ava when they form a pact.
• Power Tattoo: Using the powers gained from a pact causes faint markings to appear on the persons body, the specifics of the marks are usually related to which demon was involved in the pact.
• Rainbow Motif: This is a very colorful cast of characters.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: When Wrathia is angry her entire body shifts from her usual orange to a much more fearsome red. Ava gets this trait after making her pact with Wrathia.
• Regular Caller: Wrathia, until she decided that she would be better off killing Ava and moving onto another host.
• Religious Stereotype: Gil is shaping up to have plenty of these. To be fair he was raised by a cult that encourages this behavior.
• Replaced with Replica: Odin loses a ring when his ship crashes and his sisters find it and replace the stone with a similar looking tracking device before he is able to locate it.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: Word of God has stated that the various aliens shown are not Human Subspecies and are all a different species. They don't look much different from humans.
• Rules Lawyer: While pacts cannot be defied, or else, the beings negotiating it can twist their words a little.
• Scenery Porn: Gil's home is on a planet with a prominent source of plant life and many errant spirits hanging around in Limbo. Because WOW.
• Science Fantasy: The setting has aliens, interstellar travel, advanced technology, magic, potions, and "demons", which are like ghosts.
• Seven Deadly Sins: The four demons whose names we know are Wrathia, Nevy, Tuls, and Pedri, and their hosts are, respectively, Ava Ire (which is both a synonym for "anger" in English and derived from the Latin word for wrath, ira), Gil Marverde ("mar" is Spanish for "sea," "verde" is green- Nevy seems to be water-elemental, and the sin of envy is often associated with green), Maggie Lacivi (as in lascivious), and Odin Arrow (sounds like arrogant). The humans they made their pacts with also follow this pattern.
• Shout-Out:
  • Ranunculae is another word for "Buttercup" and she's a princess.
  • The black hole that Aedinfel orbits uses the depiction popularized by Interstellar.
  • The figures and setting of Gil's dream include several references to "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch.
• Sinister Scythe: It isn't very prominent but Pedri does have one.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: When Prudith gets her skin and skeleton peeled off like a grape, the notes of a song are written out in midair, but not heard. Turns out the song is Tempo Di Valse.
• Speech Impediment: Odin has one in the form of an ever-present stutter.
• Spot the Thread: How Gil figures out that Maggie hasn't been honest with him. Likewise for Ava realizing Odin cannot be the normal student he's been pretending to be (which Pedri finds absolutely hilarious).
• Stalker with a Crush: Maggie considers Odin to be this, which he's not very good at discouraging. Turns out he's only interested in her because she's a host.
• Starfish Aliens: May overlap with Eldritch Abomination. After Ava takes on the curse, Maggie muses she seemed to be consumed by "primordial chaos" and Odin theorizes that Ava possesses aspects of "s-something...not from this dimensional realm," which if true, could mean Wrathia and those who went down with her were already different from those in their dimension, or became different afterwards. TITAN also states that he felt "an undulation [...] in our continuum."
• Sugar Bowl: Maggie's Mental World is filled with talking flowers and little green pixies that constantly flatter her and make her flower crowns... no matter how much she crushes them with her bare hands.
• Super-Empowering: Pacts do this for the living participant regardless of whether it was actually part of the deal or not. Pacts also make the living participant practically immortal due to having two souls in a single body. All of these powers are taken away after the pact is completed unless they are specifically what the person asked for.
• Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom: The Gates of Paradise, as Ava and a rather unfortunate Follower find out, in rather explicit detail.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Wrathia's backstory does evoke a little bit of sympathy for her but most of it is for Pedri and her unhatched child.
• Tears of Joy: Wrathia thinks Ava should weep these over the planet's destruction.
• Theme Naming:
  • Each of the (living) characters' last names relate to one of the seven deadly sins.
  • Odin has a pair of twin sisters named Crow and Raven. Sound familiar?
• The Stoic: Odin Arrow never seems to be fazed by anything, no matter how grim the situation seems. His facial expression is one of perpetual seriousness, and rarely has any emotional outbursts.
• Timed Mission: All pacts are this albeit relaxed ones since the pact members are effectively immortal and they have until circumstances render it impossible to complete.
• Tortured Monster: This is what Ava and Wrathia will become if they do not properly complete their pact.
  • Split-Personality Merge: This is the way it can happen. Very painfully.
• Troubled Fetal Position: Ava goes into one after her planet is destroyed.
• Vague Age: Applies to Odin, up until Crow confirms his age to be 18.
• War Refugees: Gil tells Ava that TITAN succors them.
• Webcomic Time: The comic started in 2012, and as of 2018 less than 24 hours have passed in-universe.
• When It All Began: The story kicked off when TITAN seized every one of Wrathia's galaxies within a single night and demanded she join him in surrender or he would destroy every last planet and take her and her husband prisoner.
• Winter of Starvation: Odin's home planet was condemned to Endless Winter when its sun collapsed into a black hole, setting off brutal wars to claim its dwindling resources.
• You're Insane!: Gil says this to Odin after he brings Ava on board the ship he and Maggie are on after she's basically wiped out the Titan base they were on. He looks straight at Maggie, who transformed and wrecked his ship previously, and says that so is he.

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