Western Animation / Xavier: Renegade Angel

"I'm a survivor. We're a dying breed."

"Unload your troubles unto me, even if it's tough to swallow. I'm used to swallowing huge loads."

"I'm going to help you, even if it kills us both!"

Created by PFFR—the minds behind Wonder Showzen—for [adult swim] in 2007, Xavier: Renegade Angel is, on the surface, about an angel who has defected from Heaven. Good luck finding out what it is really about, though. The eponymous Xavier is either an actual fallen angel or just a cosmic abomination that was disowned by his mother. Walking the Earth because everyone hates him, Xavier seeks enlightenment and tries to help people—but at worst, he creates problems where none exist and causes tons of carnage, and at best, he somehow gets everyone to put aside their differences and join together for the common (and usually justified) goal of beating him senseless.

Probably the weirdest show [adult swim] has ever produced (and that is saying a lot), Xavier was largely one huge Mind Screw, with the title character speaking in a near-continuous, stream-of-consciousness...well, stream of dialogue ranging from narrative and conversation to puns and portmanteaus to "unintentional" double-entendres and callbacks. The show's only real coherent narrative revolves around a subplot involving Xavier's incredibly screwed-up childhood and the death of his parents.

Xavier is uniquely abstract, showing concepts in a way that—instead of using thematic devices such as plot—creates connections in various patterns to prove a point. A good example is the episode "Signs From Godrilla": This episode explores the aspects of choice, free will and religion by using various themes, including recursion and mind/body dualism, to aid in its expression.

The show was animated in 3D with (some) motion-capture all done in CGI, which allowed for a vast range of strangeness; it is all pretty damn trippy, to say the least. If you were to combine in equal parts Wonder Showzen, the works of Carlos Castaneda and Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kung Fu (1972), Walker, Texas Ranger and the graphics and tone of Postal 2 you would get something similar to Xavier. Do not take this as license to Watch It Stoned—it might make more sense, but it is just as likely that you will be utterly terrified from the sensory overload.

More than ten years after the show ended, Xavier made an official reappearance as part of Adult Swim's Class of 2020 Commencement Speaker series - watch it here.

A note on It Makes Sense in Context and Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: To save time, we will only clarify which one something is on the rare occasion where it does make sense in context.

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What Doth Tropes?

• Abusive Parents: Xavier had these. In "Vibracaust", he tells his mother that his pet parakeet feeds her children every day, and then asks why she doesn't do the same thing. Xavier himself acts this way to a giant sperm in "Escape from Squatopian Freedom", though he eventually learns to love it just before it kills itself.
• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: A frequent feature of Xavier's bizarre speech patterns.
  Xavier: I cunt be a hypoChrist? I'll commit sacricide.
• A God Am I: The kid from "Weapons Grade Life" eventually declares after creating life (life, life) in a petri dish that he does believe in God after all, because he believes in himself.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The AI running the information kiosk in the first episode after Xavier asked it "What doth life?"
• All Just a Dream: The final episode reveals (or at least heavily implies) that Xavier is a human patient in a psychiatric hospital, being given an inkblot test, and the entire series was him having wild hallucinations of what he sees in the cards.
• Ambiguously Bi: Although he does display some heterosexual tendencies (like peeping in on a showering woman in the first episode), Xavier's frequent unintentional innuendos (as well as having sex with a coworker while crossdressed as a gigantic black woman in the same episode where he marries the widow of a man he kills) leaves it entirely unclear what his true sexual orientation could be. His snake hand, however, is referenced to be bisexual. Though it's only characterized this way in one episode ("El Tornadador"), but considering how confusing the continuity of the show usually is... but then again, it isn't even certain that Xavier is biologically male, as it's shown several times that he has a large eye (or as he calls it, his "Peni".) in place of genitalia.
• Androcles' Lion: Xavier relocates the leg of a mosquito. It repays him by driving off two rednecks by sucking the blood out of the eye of one and tricking the other into beating himself up.
• Anticlimax: The first season has Xavier on a quest to find his father's killer, however in "Shakashuri Blowdown" he learns he was the culprit all along and immediately the quest stops with no resolution. By the next season he doesn't bring it up again and has learned nothing from the Shakashuri battle against himself, of which we also never learn the winner (although given both are exactly alike it hardly matters who won or lost as Xavier loses and wins regardless).
• Anti-Hero: Xavier can be seen as either this or an outright Villain Protagonist. His goal is to help people and to find the murderer of his parents, but all he ever succeeds in doing is spreading chaos and destruction. On top of that, he is extremely self-absorbed, hypocritical, idiotic, delusional and incompetent, preventing him from ever becoming particularly sympathetic.
• Arc Symbol: The weird symbol in the "R" of the stylized title appears in every episode. In the Grand Finale we learn it is simply an inkblot on a Rorschach test a psychologist is showing Xavier in a mental institution, heavily implying the reason it appears so frequently is that the whole show is merely Xavier's elaborate hallucination as he stares at it.
• Arc Words: "What doth life?"
• Artistic License: So much of the show is ridiculous in terms of physics, medicine, and psychology that the stories can sometimes come off as insane and nonsensical. That said, the writers deliberately went into this trope as hard as possible, as much of the insane imagery and impossible physics are used more to convey metaphors about spiritualism than be realistic. The final episode implying Xavier is an insane patient in a hospital also helps to explain the absurd logic he constantly spouts or the ridiculous world he inhabits.
• Bedlam House: Xavier sends the poor kid in a dolphin costume there, and ends up meeting his long lost mother. It just descends into Brain Bleach territory from there. It's heavily implied that Xavier has actually been in one the whole time and the entire series was actually his hallucinations.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: "Signs from Godrilla" involves a priest having sex with a gorilla.
  • “World of Hurt, BC” heavily implies Xavier himself is the result of this. See Humanoid Abomination
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Xavier. He has a bird's beak for a nose, a snake for a left arm, six nipples like a cat, and his knees bend forwards instead of backwards.
• Black Comedy Rape: Xavier mentions in the Grand Finale that "this is my first time, not counting rape". It's unclear if this is meant to be interpreted as him being a rape victim or a rapist. And then he finds out that the woman he's having sex with is his mother.
• Bloody Murder: One episode ends with an army of killer Indians made out of blood when a rich old man tries to mine an Indian burial ground for blood to inject into himself so he can legally own an Indian casino. After Xavier gets involved, armies of cowboy terrorists (Sentient Cowboy blood mixed with Arab blood) show up.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Xavier seems to operate on a different value system than normal humans. His solutions to solving problems come from completely alien logic and he seems to be honestly unable to understand why his actions make people upset.
• Blue Liquid Absorbent: There's a fake commercial in one episode for special cookies with blue chocolate chips. As the commercial goes on, it’s revealed that there was a mix-up between the cookie and tampon factories and they are now selling tampon cookies with blue chocolate chips in them.
• Book Ends: "Damnesia Vu" begins and ends with Xavier hovering above a checkered floor, indicating that he's learned absolutely nothing, per usual, after being subjected to seven different realities of himself. Subverted with the sequel episode "Damnesia You", in which the episode begins the same way but ends with his severed head lapping up his own blood. The visual acts as a metaphor for the episode: interpretation of Xavier, the character, and the show, has been fundamentally altered thanks to the fan input that constitutes the episode, but it's still recognizably him/the same show.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  • "Fate. Destiny. Fatestiny. People throw these words around like tennis balls. But I eat balls for breakfast."
  • "Other kids could be cruel. They'd call me names. Dweeb. Chimp. Honkey. Dweeby Chimp. Honkey Dweeb. And worst of all, Chomsky Honk. Did you know there are over 87 combinations of those soul-scalding words? I found out the hard way."
• Break the Haughty: Xavier does this to the spoiled child of the above-mentioned rich old man to teach him humility and charity.
• Broken Record: Whenever Xavier gets beaten up, his assailants inevitably start yelling "Take that!" and "Taste the pain!" over and over, using the exact same copy-pasted voice clips every time.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: In "Bloodcorn", a farmer fires a gun into the sky and hits God. The resultant blood rain causes the crops in the city to come alive and take vengeance on humanity.
• Butt-Monkey: Xavier gets assaulted, humiliated, or almost killed in every single episode.
• The Cartel: In "Chief Beef Loco", Xavier helps out Percy, a kid who got beaten up by the Local Locos, a Mexican gang who engage in such crimes as murder and drug dealing. Xavier then infiltrates the gang and manipulates them into going clean.
• Cartwright Curse: Woe to anyone who befriends Xavier. Dying horribly would be the best possible outcome of their situation, considering that Xavier could easily destroy the entire planet or collapse reality as a whole as a result of finding a friend.
• Catchphrase: Xavier has "Frittata".
• Continuity Cavalcade: Several characters from past episodes return near the end of "Signs of Godrilla".
• Crapsack World: Even ignoring Xavier's presence in it, nearly every location shown in the series is a dilapidated shithole inhabited primarily by Jerkasses. The rare characters who are genuinely good-natured always end up meeting gruesome ends thanks to Xavier. Then again, so does everybody else. On top of all that, reality-distorting supernatural horrors seem to be commonplace, though they generally only seem to appear when Xavier provokes them.
• Cross Attack: How Robbie manages to dispatch the "Eversplosion" in "Weapons Grade Life".
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: In "World of Hurt, BC", Xavier reasons that, since every cigarette you smoke takes 17 minutes off your life and every slice of bacon you eat takes 9 minutes off your life, smoking and eating bacon really quickly would allow you to go back in time. It works. He then returns to the present by vomiting all of it out.
• Death as Comedy: Many, many characters die in hilarious ways throughout the series, including two episodes (possibly 3 depending on what actually happened in the Gainax Ending of "Bloodcorn") ending in The End of the World as We Know It Played for Laughs.
• Deranged Animation: The entire show looks like it was rendered through a PlayStation 2. It's cranked up to ludicrous levels with "Damnesia You", the episode where the winners of a contest get their films shown in an Excuse Plot where Xavier goes to different dimensions to figure out his identity. Styles shown in the episode include:
  • Puppetry with green screening
  • Atari 2600-esque graphics
  • Garry's Mod
  • Live-action
  • 60s style animation like Yellow Submarine
  • Squigglevision done with paper and pencil.
• Doom Magnet: If Xavier tries to help you (whether you need it or not), you will be traumatized, go insane, forced to kill your own relatives, ruin your business and set it on fire, lead him to cause a genocidal level disaster that will kill millions (and or possibly cause The End of the World as We Know It) or just plain die horribly, or even suffer a Fate Worse than Death!
• The Drifter: Xavier is kind of like a parody of the lonely, wandering hero who stumbles upon a community threatened by a Monster of the Week or other problem like Caine from Kung Fu (1972).
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Many, many characters, often caused by Xavier himself. He even managed to talk a non-suicidal window cleaner he thought was about to kill himself into jumping off the building.
  • Xavier himself becomes briefly suicidal when he learns he was responsible for his father's death, seeing as he swore to kill whoever was responsible.
• Eats Babies: "The 6th Teat of Good Intentions" has Xavier unintentionally kidnap the seven babies of a woman who were left unattended in a park, taking them under his care while believing the infants were abandoned. The conflict arises from Xavier's snake hand's habit of eating the babies, eventually devouring all of them.
• Enlightenment Superpowers: Parodied with Xavier claiming that embracing a spiritual lifestyle gave him the power to blow people's minds with his philosophical insights.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In "Shakashuri Blowdown" a suicidal Xavier gets picked on and beaten up by a pair of Jerkass rednecks for no real reason (this being one of the rare occasions when Xavier was genuinely minding his own business and not bothering anyone) but they back off immediately and apologise when they see a number tattooed on his arm and assume he's a Holocaust survivor.
• Everything Makes a Mushroom: Including tobacco pipes.
• Evil Hand: Xavier's left hand is a snake with a mind of its own - and a taste for eating babies.
• Evolving Credits: During season 2, the first vanity plate in the credits has a sound added to it each episode. By the end, it's just a cluster of random noises from all the episodes.
• Expositron 9000: Computer. Computer is featured in two episodes and has absolutely no explanation whatsoever. When Xavier needs a particularly difficult piece of exposition he simply calls "Computer!" and asks his specific question. Computer does some calculations and gets the answer back to him.
• Expy:
  • Xavier's character design is very similar to Wonder Showzen's character He-Bro.
  • Chief Master Guru's character might be based on Don Juan, the eccentric shaman from Carlos Castaneda's books.
• Eye Scream:
  • One episode features a close-up of a mosquito sucking all of the fluid out of someone's eyeball.
  • Another episode features a vulture ripping out a dying man's eye and then flying away. The camera then briefly switches to perspective of the eye as the crow flies away.
• Fake Faith Healer: Double Subverted in "Weapons Grade Life": Robbie's father runs a Christian hospital which runs on faith healing. However, when we actually see an operation, it turns out that God himself appears to be performing surgeries and actually saving lives (through prayer, God performs a heart surgery by levitating a scalpel and other implements). But then it's revealed that Robbie is secretly manipulating the instruments using levers connected to strings and magnets.
• False Dichotomy: When a guy with a barcode for a head holds a gun to Xavier and asks him "Do you believe in God?" he demands Xavier answer yes or no. This results in Xavier, for once, being actually insightful about the loaded nature of that question and eventually managing to overload the shooter so badly he turns the gun on himself.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Lampshaded in the first episode, where Xavier warns a group harassing him that they may some day need his help. Cue the camera focusing on a truck driving by with 'FORESHADOW' written on the side.
  • Lampshaded again in "Weapons Grade Life" (bolding where the camera suddenly zooms in on the character's lips)
    Christian Doctor: I'd swim through a lake of water for these cakes! That's the only way to quell the raging fire in my belly for these cakes.
    Cake Shop Owner: That's an odd thing to say.
  • It turns out to be a Red Herring, though, as when Xavier tries to lure the Doctor after he becomes a sentient explosion though a lake with some cake, he fails at the last second.
  • A surprisingly subtle example in the very first episode. When a redneck dies after drinking a giant bottle of AIDS, he sees a vision of his dead grandmother... whom he then proceeds to make out with. In the final episode of the series, Xavier sneaks into an asylum and does the same to his own mother.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You:
  • "Going Normal": The company Xavier works for makes a hot dog chain to the Moon and back, which stops the rotation of the Earth, causing the Earth to freeze over. The show ends with Xavier informing you that your TV screen has frozen solid just before it cracks.
  • "Kharmarabionic Lotion": The town of Lotion, New Mexico makes so much money off of oil that they buy the network which makes the show, then sell it to Arabs at a profit. As a result, for the last minute or so of the show, all the dialogue is in Arabic.
• Gag Penis: At the end of the first episode, the man who picks up Xavier flashes his weiner at him. Afterwards, his head inexplicably explodes.
  • In episode 8, something similar happens to Xavier himself. However, it should be called "Gag Eye", 'cause Xavier has a third eye there.
  • To make matters worse, in that episode, the darn eye also EJACULATES A SENTIENT DOG-LIKE SPERM.
• Gainax Ending: Every episode has one. Yes, every episode. Perhaps the weirdest was "Bloodcorn", in which the Earth spawns a giant eye, which then starts bleeding profusely.
• Genius Ditz: Despite his many, many weak areas, Xavier is actually surprisingly competent at psychotherapy. He manages to convince a gang of thugs and drug dealers to change their ways in "Chief Beef Loco" and in "World of Hurt, BC" he successfully fixes a caveman couple's troubled marriage.
• Godwin's Law: In "Free Range Manibalism", Xavier tries to get into a gourmet restaurant to use their toilet, so he tries to offer them roadkill for their meat. They tell him that their meat has to meet "higher standards", to which he responds:
  Xavier: (Annoyed) Well, [Roman salutes, mimicking waiter's measuring gesture] Higher-elllllllllllll Meat-ler!
• Grand Finale: The final episode gets the viewer closest to the truth of the show's reality before the final reveal: Xavier's actually human and is living in the same mental institution that houses his mother. The entire show is implied to be a chaotic chain of thoughts brought on by the sight of an Rorschach test inkblot while in a therapy session. Also, the doctor is the same animal-race as Xavier, apparently.
• Green Aesop: Several episodes have Xavier make attempts to protect the environment and/or teach people to do same, such as "Bloodcorn". This goes as well as everything else he tries.
• Grossout Show: Oh yeah. Xavier gets into a lot of bodily fluids on his "quest", not helped that he mostly visits places of absurd squalor.
• Hero with an F in Good: You can say Xavier might be the patron saint of this trope just by reading the rest of the page.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Xavier could be interpreted as this.
• Hold My Glasses: It starts with someone who's about to fight Xavier having his friend hold his pile of books. By the time they get to the actual beating, his friend is also holding his wallet, sunglasses, contact lenses, shirt, prosthetic leg, dentures, tattoo, and robotic arm. But he gets upset when his friend asks if he wants him to hold his toupee, too.
• Hugh Mann: Xavier attempts to disguise himself this way in "Going Normal" by wearing a crude human skin mask and suit, and insisting that he's just one of you normals and definitely not a freak.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • "Weapons Grade Life" has Xavier encounter a boy in a wheelchair and his friends. He immediately accuses said friends of picking on the boy, while at the same time making as many backhanded insults towards him as possible.
  • In "Shakashuri Blowdown": "You look so superficial, you probably judge things by their appearances."
  • In "Braingea's Final Cranny", Xavier burns three people to death immediately after declaring himself not violent at all.
• Ice-Cream Koan: Xavier speaks this as a primary language. And he believes every word of it. And he has an obsession with actual ice cream cones on top of that.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Repeated over and over like a Madness Mantra after he causes the deaths of a group of cryogenically frozen people by shattering their partially frozen bodies.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: The crushing loneliness Xavier experiences leads him into most of the bizarre adventures he experiences in the desperate search for even a single friend.
• Insane Troll Logic: The show runs on this.
  Xavier: I'm not violent at all, look! [blasts a laser and kills a group of people playing volleyball]
  Ink Blot: But you killed those people!
  Xavier: Did I? [aside glance] What he doesn't know is that I'm using reverse psychology on him.
  Ink Blot: I can tell you're trying to use reverse psychology on me.
  Xavier: That proves he doesn't know!
• I Resemble That Remark!: During his battle with himself, one of the Xaviers accuses the other of being a "chode's inability to confront the reality of his past actions." Considering he's still referring to himself, he's actually not too far off, given how he doesn't realize that he killed his father.
• Irony: In "Bloodcorn", when he can't remember a rain dance, Xavier attempts to perform a memory-jogging dance...which he also can't remember.
• Kangaroo Court: After being framed for killing a mayor and going to trial (for being on trial), Xavier is faced with a jury of his mental peers, in a courtroom where laws are illegal. Xavier is proven guilty of being on trial, and then sentenced to three glimpses into his own soul, which is immediately extended to seven when he scoffs at how easy it is.
• Knight Templar: Xavier is dedicated to helping the downtrodden, but what he considers helping is absolutely insane.
• Lampshade Hanging: Quite a bit of it. But a notable example is Xavier's boss in the episode "Going Normal". "I think I get what he's saying. He means we just gotta take wild leaps in interpreting his mundane statements and come up with our own ideas!"
• Left Hanging: How the Season 1 finale ends.
• Leitmotif: Mystical shakashuri music plays almost every time Xavier speaks.
• Magical Native American: Chief Master Guru parodies this, and also has Asian Indian traits (A Bindi and a Vishnu Statue on top of his Totem Pole).
  • Xavier also started as a parody of this (complete with mystical music playing when he talks) before getting a more wacky personality.
• Malaproper: When Xavier isn't pronouncing words extremely oddly, he's doing this.
  Xavier: Look buddy, know when you're defeated. Accept your defecation.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Xavier's reaction to getting beheaded in "Damnesia Vu" is simply "I don't feel so good. My tummy hurts."
• Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: The entire show.
• The Mentor: In flashbacks, Xavier is frequently seen conversing with Chief Master Guru, an old Native American shaman-type character who acts as his abusive spiritual guide, eventually imprinting on his pretentious nonsensical ideas that he tries to “help” people with.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Among the damage Xavier has caused either directly or indirectly: burning down his own house and killing both his parents, turning an entire town into an infected computer in "What Life D-d-Doth", creating a massive living explosion which cannot dissipate in "Weapons Grade Life", wounding God causing a rain of blood in "Bloodcorn", blowing up the Burning Person effigy and killing all but 2 of the people at the festival in "Escape from Squatopian Freedom", turning the Earth into one homogeneous mass and then destroying it in "Vibracaust", making a massive tornado in "El Tornadador", literally tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time in "Haunted Tonk", and stopping the rotation of the Earth thus causing the entire world to freeze over in "Going Normal".
• Mind Screw: The entire point of the show. If you are sober (or drunk on plain ol' liquor), prepare to be confused. If you have taken any other kind of mind-altering substance, prepare to be wowed, terrified, or both. It's almost a parody of Mind Screws, while it may seem completely nonsensical, each episode can have different philosophical themes read from them, but in the end of pretty much every situation, the moral of the story is, "Don't read too deeply into things or fucked up shit like this happens!" Seriously, every problem he creates can be attributed to him trying TOO HARD to be philosophical and spiritual. The creators half-jokingly claim that the show was meant to warn viewers about the dangers of spirituality.
• Mirror Match: Two Xaviers engage in an insult battle and a "Shakashuri Blowdown" during the season 1 finale. It's ultimately judged a tie.
• Miscarriage of Justice: In "Damnesia Vu", Xavier ends up being given a gun in order to protect a new mayor, a donkey, only for the mayor to be shot by the guy who gave Xavier the gun, who then says that Xavier did it. When he goes to court to plead his innocence, he learns that he is actually on trial for being on trial, and that by saying he's innocent, it proves that he is on trial.
  Xavier: What sort of law is this?
  Judge: Laws? Laws are illegal here! Guilty!
• Missing Child: "The 6th Teat of Good Intentions", where a mother takes one of her eight babies with her on a slide, promising a turn with each one, and during that brief moment is when Xavier, despite clearly being in the same vicinity as the woman to have at least seen her, believes they were abandoned and takes them with him. It's clear quickly he is not competent to raise children, as he takes them to a sewer, drops them on the floor and even gives them a sort of currency to win prizes. He also fails to recognize the woman looking for her babies, even after pointing out she's missing seven babies. There's also the fact that his snake head keeps eating the babies, with Xavier pulling a skeleton out.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Xavier is covered in thick fur, has six nipples, a beak, backwards bending legs, and a snake for an arm. Not even Wikipedia's sure what he's supposed to be.
  • When he gets a finger cut off, it grows back. As a snake. While that may account for his snake arm, it entirely fails to address why it happens.
• Multiboobage: A Rare Male Example in the form of Xavier, who has six nipples like a dog.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Practically a given considering the show's Negative Continuity and Mind Screw nature, but the circumstances of Xavier's birth are given several contradictory explanations - the first episode shows Xavier being abandoned as a baby Moses-style by an unknown being before being adopted by human parents, but later episodes establish that his human mother was the one who gave birth to him, and according to the final episode Xavier was just an insane human himself all along.
• N-Word Privileges: Xavier gives himself this ability in "Going Normal".
• Narcissist: Xavier is extremely self-absorbed. He believes himself to be a purveyor of profound spiritualism when he is in reality a delusional lunatic, sees himself as a compassionate martyr when he is in reality destructive and bigoted, and considers himself to be incredibly attractive when in reality almost everyone is disgusted by the sight of him. He will completely ignore anything that challenges any of these views, causing him to slip deeper and deeper into his delusions.
• Negative Continuity: The show has very little continuity even between individual scenes, let alone episodes. This is one of the few shows to justify this trope, with the last episode implying Xavier is mentally ill and hallucinating the entire series. Hallucinations don't need continuity.
• Never My Fault: In "Damnesia Vu", he accuses the tribe of angering the gods when it's him who made them summon the sun god and him who killed it (or at least an avatar of it).
• New-Age Retro Hippie: Xavier is a Deconstructive Parody of this trope. He's a delusional and idiotic self absorbed loser who uses New Age philosophy and Native American mysticism to make himself look more noble and sophisticated than the people around him, but causes more harm than good when he actually tries to live up to his beliefs.
• News Travels Fast: When a man blows himself up and turns into a sentient explosion that doesn't dissipate, within seconds bystanders are already setting up tourist traps around the "Eversplosion" (and when the Eversplosion goes berserk, an army tank is already there to try and shoot at it.)
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The vast majority of the problems that occur across the series are caused entirely by Xavier. The rare occasions where they aren't inevitably escalate into something much, much worse as a direct result of his meddling.
• No Ending: Every episode, to the point where it feels like we're leaving in the middle of a scene.
• Noodle Incident: When a man takes off most of his own body in preparation to beat down Xavier, his friend remarks:
  "I han't never seen him this heated since The Incident!"
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Xavier claims to want to help people, but he actually only cares about being seen as someone who helps people. The finale shows that he's totally fine with burning innocent people to death as an example of reverse psychology if he doesn't think he'll personally gain from helping them.
• Once per Episode: See Gainax Ending.
• Our Angels Are Different: Xavier himself, who is a borderline Angelic Abomination. However, this depends on the specific episode: sometimes he's just an abnormal person.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: Several creatures, most notably Xavier himself.
• Pedophile Priest: The episode "Vibracaust" begins with Xavier confronting a priest he sees walking with a boy under the assumption that the priest intends to molest the boy. After Xavier is beaten and driven away by the priest, it's revealed to the audience that the boy is actually the one who is molesting the priest.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: In "Weapons Grade Life", Xavier makes a lot of ableist comments towards Robbie, who's in a wheelchair. He's also made some politically incorrect remarks about Arabs and women. He's also a rapist and or necrophiliac, if some of his comments are to be believed.
• Psychopathic Manchild: While Xavier always means well, it's clear he's a total lunatic. His basic response to any problem is to walk in with no clue what's going on, poorly act like he knows what he's doing, screw everything up, and then throw a hissy fit if someone suggests he's done something wrong. In the first episode of Season 2, an assimilated Humanity in the form of a flesh "Mother Mary who's breasts are being sucked upon by Buddha" statue asks him "What are you going to do, tell your mommy?" after calling him a freak-and Xavier answers "Yes, That's EXATCLY what I am going to do!". His trying to find his mother in order to do so is the basic plot of the second season, shortly after digging up her grave and finding out she faked her death.
• Quarter Hour Short: Every episode is about 11 minutes long.
• Recursive Reality: At one point, Xavier turns on the TV, and while it's only shown for a few seconds, the program that appears is clearly the title sequence of Xavier: Renegade Angiel.
• Repetitive Audio Glitch: Sort of. In "What Life D-d-doth", the residents of one town eventually end up glitching this way after being infected by a computer virus in the water supply.
• Running Gag:
  • When someone says "life", the word echoes, almost every single time, no matter who says it. Noticeably absent in the last few episodes.
  • Those who meet Xavier have a tendency to tell him that they don't "cotton to freaks." Even himself.
  • Xavier also uses "ramble" in place of "wander".
  • "Take that!" "Taste the pain!" in the same voice every time Xavier gets beaten up for "being a freak", regardless of the character saying it.
  • The occasional mentions of Grinders.
  • Dialogue is often subject to Manipulative Editing, with YouTube Poop style sentence mixing, where characters will say things in other characters' voices, and certain words being obviously replaced with either punched-in dialogue or the same word from earlier in the sentence used over and over.
• Schmuck Bait: "You don't want to drink that."
• Shout-Out:
  • While traveling back to the present in episode 6, Xavier goes too far and ends up in the year 2112.
  • During the "battle of wits" between the two Xaviers in "Shakashuri Blowdown," one of them says "your mom's so shallow, she probably thinks this quip is about her."
  • In "Signs From Godrilla", Xavier comes across a town which is the site of a recent massacre. Also, the logo for the show being reflected in a pool of blood seems to be a reference to the beginning of Hostel.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Xavier believes himself to be a profound spiritual philosopher who wanders the land providing healing and assistance for troubled people. In reality, he's an insane idiot who ruins the lives of everyone he crosses paths with in a misguided attempt to resolve their (often nonexistent) problems.
• Special Guest: Several episodes feature a cameo from some celebrity.
  • "Vibracaust" and "Xavier's Maneuver" both have Bill Hader in a brief role.
  • "Free Range Manibalism" has Snoop Dogg, somehow.
  • Kristen Schaal has a few lines in "Going Normal".
  • "El Tornadodor" and "Damnesia Vu" both have Vincent Freakin' D'Onofrio.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • In "World of Hurt, B. C.", Xavier sees a news broadcast on the discovery of the oldest known cave painting, which depicts a being that looks very similar to him, and goes back in time to find out how it got there. Xavier tries to ask a caveman if he's seen it, but isn't sure how to describe it, so he makes a drawing of it on the cave wall. It turns out that drawing he made was the painting that was just discovered.
  Xavier: I'm looking for a painting on the cave walls. Have you seen it? It looks like this. [draws it]
  Nimgok: Yeah! You just made painting!
  Xavier: Ooga booga!
  [cue freeze-frame and sitcom credits music]
  • Played With in another Season 2 episode, involving Xavier imagining himself going back in time to talk to his past self. Mind Screw ensues.
• Super Window Jump: Xavier does it often when he feels pressed for time. In the first episode, he does it twice with the same window, and breaks it both times.
• Stock Scream: "Braingea's Final Cranny" uses the Howie Long Scream when Xavier tries to use discarded brain parts to reverse his mother's lobotomy.
• Stuff Blowing Up: One episode ends in a car chase with a sentient explosion that is incapable of stopping exploding.
• Stylistic Suck: Invoked, as it adds to the weird and uncanniness of the show. The show's crude CGI graphics were achievable on consumer-grade PCs even back in 2007, but they fit with the show's overall weirdness.
• Suicide as Comedy: "Xavier's Maneuver" begins with Xavier seeing a window cleaner and thinking he's about to jump, so he tries to talk the guy out of killing himself. Instead, Xavier's speech convinces the guy to leap to his doom and splatter on the ground into a grisly mess.
• Surreal Humor: Good gracious, yes.
• Take Our Word for It: A bizarre in-universe example occurs when Popo, a gorilla taught to speak in sign language, converts to Christianity and asks to speak at the funeral of the local priest whom she'd had sex with and supposedly gives an impassioned and beautiful speech about finding faith in God through grief. Although it is so effective that it converts the whole world to Christianity we, and by extension everyone else, don't actually hear the speech but rather Popo's handler's comments on her use of wordplay and tendency to take metaphors too literally.
• Take That!: Much of the purpose of the show is to mock various Western forms of spiritualism, non-spiritualism that swings all the way back around into spiritualism on its own, the commodification of spiritualism by capitalism, and the superiority and authoritarian complexes that arise from these notions.
  • Xavier himself is a parody of the White Savior trope^note with his name being pronounced with a soft-X (or Z) to sound similar to the word "savior". Though he believes he has an Enlightened Self-Interest to help others, he actively inserts himself into situations that he perceives as having problems and begins to antagonize others until they do what he thinks is best for them. In "Shakashuri Blowdown", Xavier believes so fully that he cannot be wrong that he literally splits in two to battle himself, and neither party shows any sign of stopping or accepting that they might be wrong by the episode's Non-Ending.
  • The show extends its mockery to things such as organized religion, hippies and centrists, where misguided individuals and groups will apply an authoritarian slant to their beliefs and insist that their opinion is correct and should be followed, rather than working with others to find commonality and make things better for everyone.
  • One line of thought also skewered by the show is the co-opting of Eastern and Native philosophies for their perceived benefits while failing to understand them or the cultures that they sprung from, and instead selling them back to a Westernized populace that wants to reach Enlightenment now for $14.99. Xavier himself is also a parody of the Magical Native American trope, and it's reasonable to assume that by extension, he's a parody of anyone who models themselves after that trope.
  Infomercial Announcer: "But in our sophisticated world, who has time for that noise [practicing Buddhism]?
• Take That, Critics!: The reason Xavier's voice drastically changes as the show goes on was because of critics saying that his voice in Season 1 was too weird. The creators responded by making his voice weirder.
• Technical Pacifist: Xavier has vowed to never harm another. Despite this, he easily indirectly kills and/or inflicts severe wounds on hundreds of people across the series through his tendency to cause terrible things to happen everywhere he goes.
• That Came Out Wrong: Xavier has a penchant for this. For instance, in one episode, a prehistoric woman tells Xavier her husband beats her because he loves her. Xavier responds "If that's love, I'm going to make some love to his mouth!"
• The Obi-Wannabe: Xavier tries to dispense sage advice and wisdom to the people he meets, and wants to help them solve their problems... but his advice is useless and idiotic at the best of times, and his help more often leads to chaos, destruction and general mayhem.
• Third Eye: Xavier has an eye where his penis should be.
• Token Nonhuman: Xavier is allegedly a Fallen Angel in a world of humans. Even his parents are humans, although the first episode implies he was abandoned at birth by some other being and adopted by humans, and the last episode implies that Xavier was just an insane human the whole time.
  • The most likely explanation for what he actually is comes from “World of Hurt, BC”, where during a trip though a Mental World, he sees a vision the night he was conceived; his mother, about to have sex with a an eagle, a buffalo, two chimpanzees and a goat.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Xavier is actually a human male in a mental institution and has dreamt up the show on his own while staring at a Rorschach test inkblot.
• Tragic Hero: Despite all the wacky stuff that happens, you have to feel sorry for Xavier. His entire goal is to find out what he is, who killed his father, and to help people. And no matter what happens, it fails horribly.
• Undercover Cop Reveal: Don Ho's singing henchman, Disgratzio, from the episode "Xavier's Maneuver". His high-pitched voice and candy-obsessed singing are just an act, one that he's had to stick with for twelve years due to making some poor choices as a rookie.
• Unexplained Accent: The characters that Xavier encounters in the first episode all have southern accents, yet he's in Burbury, Connecticut^note Possibly a play on Danbury, Connecticut.
• Vertigo Effect: Played with when a man points at Xavier from far away. After the zoom effect is done, we get a side view showing that the camera didn't zoom out, and the guy's arm just stretched so that his hand is right in Xavier's face.
• Villain Protagonist: Xavier can be interpreted as this, but his deranged insanity makes it hard to tell if he's trying to murder people or if he's so delusional he's incapable of understanding.
• Visual Pun: The desert Xavier walks through and monologues in at the start of every episode is vast and empty, just like his mind.
• Vocal Evolution: Xavier's voice is more of a direct parody of a Magical Native American in the earlier episodes, but steadily becomes more lilting and atonal to fit with the ever-increasing Mind Screw of the series, becoming like a combination of a Magical Native American and a Surfer Dude.
• Walking the Earth: A parody of these kinds of shows, specifically Kung Fu (1972), Fist of the North Star and Walker, Texas Ranger (with a dash of The Incredible Hulk (1977) and Touched by an Angel).
• Who's on First?:
  • First:
    Xavier: Who did this to you?
    Xavier's father: Our... son...
    Xavier: I know it was arson dad, but who?
  • Later in the same episode:
    Fireman: I think it was arson.
    Xavier: No, it was MY son.
  • Becomes a Defied Trope in a later episode, when his father's spirit immediately corrects him:
    Xavier's Father: Son... it was you who killed me!
    Xavier: What kind of stupid name is Yoohoo? Well when I find that demon I shall slay him! To death! Yoohoo! Yoohoo?
    Xavier's Father: No no no not "Yoohoo"! It was YOU dammit! You Xavier! You killed your own father!
    Xavier: Me? It was I who — I killed my—? No! NOOOO!
• Word-Salad Humor: 99.9% of the dialogue.
• World of Chaos: It's basically the universe that would be produced if Azathoth had a fever dream.
• World of Symbolism: Much of the show is not meant to be taken literally as doing so can make the show completely nonsensical. Instead, the entire show uses numerous symbols of religion, anarchism, government, technology, independent spiritualism, etc., to basically poke fun at the logic of everything with a bunch of Take That! moments for comedy. Most of these symbols do not spell themselves out, allowing the viewer to determine what they feel the purpose of any dialogue or object is.
• Xtreme Kool Letterz DOWN UNDA!
• You Killed My Father: The series starts out with Xavier looking for the man who killed his parents. He is completely oblivious to the fact that he was the one who did it by accidentally burning his house down.
  Father: Son! It was you who killed me!
  Xavier: What kind of stupid name is Yoohoo? Well, when I find that demon I shall slay him! To death! Yoohoo? Yoohoo!?
  • When he finally cottons on that he is responsible he contemplates suicide, as he vowed to kill whoever was responsible.
  Xavier: The pride I feel for finally fingering my father's killer is dampened only by the fact that I promised to kill my father's killer. I fingered myself. To death...

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