YMMV / The Villains Series

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Eli and Serena's relationship is definitely not healthy, but one also has to wonder if it's even truly consensual. And if it's not, who's coercing who? Serena can make anyone obey her with words alone... but Eli's trying to kill her and makes it clear he will do so if she doesn't keep ordering him not to, essentially forcing Serena into a position where she has to act as his henchwoman to save her own skin, whether she likes it or not.
  • The cause of Eli hallucinating Victor while imprisoned in Vengeful. Is it a guilty conscience for having (allegedly) killed a man who was once his best friend? Pure psychosis? Genuinely missing his Only Friend? Is it some form of love?
  • Was Eli always batshit, or did Angie's death push him over the edge? Or was it the very experience of becoming an EO, similar in the way Serena and Victor's worst qualities were exacerbated by their transformations?
  • Does becoming an EO really bring out anything new in a person? Or does it just highlight what was there all along? It's true that Victor, Eli, Marcella, and Serena all display an alarming Lack of Empathy after their transformations... but the former three weren't really great people before their transformations, either — though they weren't anywhere near as bad as they eventually became. (We don't know enough about Serena's life before becoming an EO to really say what kind of person she was back then.) And Dominic and Sydney both avert the Lack of Empathy trope, showing that not all EOs lose their goodness.
• Cry for the Devil: Eli may have become a religious Serial Killer with a belief that all EOs are evil and must die (except him), but it's hard not to feel sorry for him with the reveal of how messed up his life was from the very beginning. From having an abusive preacher as a father to losing the only family who ever truly cared about him and having nothing but his faith to keep him going, it's not hard to see why he turned out the way he is.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Some of the fanbase has a rather disturbing tendency to whitewash Victor's actions or see him as a hero, possibly due to his tender moments with Sydney and Mitch, his Magnificent Bastard status, and his contrast with the hypocritical Serial Killer Eli. However, Victor still tortured and killed a police officer, (accidentally) killed his friend with no remorse, experimented with his pain-inducing power on hundreds of inmates killing one, sees other people as tools, and generally acts like an unrepentantly evil sadistic sociopath.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Victor Vale is an expert planner and mastermind who wears cool, black clothes and has an calm, eerily polite demeanor. Victor also has the amazingly terrifying ability to induce pain in his opponents and is a true One-Man Army.
  • Eli Cardale is a religious Serial Killer dedicated to wiping out other people with abilities (EO's) but he also is very charismatic and can snark very well. Eli's power to heal any injury makes him near unstoppable and virtually immortal.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Eli/Victor is by far the most popular ship in the fandom due to the large amount of tension present in their rivalry.
• Fanon: Mitch's race is never specified, but most of the fandom seems to agree that he's black.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Victor and Eli are... fixated on each other, to say the least. Their mutual hatred comes off more as an obsessive, destructive attraction at times. They're the most popular ship in the fandom.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Eli "dying" in the bathtub, and later repeatedly cutting open his arms to test his Healing Factor get a lot more messed up when we learn how his mother died.
• Ho Yay:
  • In their college days, Victor and Eli's friendship comes off as quite intimate, and Victor's jealousy over Angie is far more directed towards the loss of some of Eli's attention than it is to hers. After they become mortal enemies, this doesn't lessen the subtext one whit. In the second book, we find out Eli hallucinated (and conversed with) Victor constantly while imprisoned. He also admits Victor is the only person that ever understood him.
  • Victor and his new partner, Mitch, sometimes come off like partners in the other sense of the word. There are many, many jokes about Sydney having two dads in the fandom.
  • On the Les Yay side of things, June's devotion to Sydney, and her desire for Sydney to "choose" her sometimes comes off more as an unrequited crush than a desire to be a Cool Big Sis. Which can get a bit Squicky, since Sydney, although she's about seventeen or eighteen by the time she knows June, physically still looks like a thirteen-year-old.
• Jerkass Woobie: As of Vengeful, Eli. He may be a near-sociopath and Serial Killer, but his childhood was a neverending nightmare, and things only got worse from there. No matter how much you hated him in the first book, it's near-impossible to read the scene where he's vivisected without cringing.
• Magnificent Bastard: Victor Vale is an eerily polite, cunning genius who started off as normal university student who upon attempting to gain pain-based powers ended up killing his best friend and went to prison for it. A patient plotter, Victor seeks revenge against his other friend Eli Cardale who sent him to prison and for ten years planned his perfect escape. Upon discovering Eli has become a Villain with Good Publicity who hunts other powered beings with religious fervor, Victor destroys Eli's safeguards and then tricks Eli into killing him in front of the police, sending Eli to prison for life and totally ruining his life in the process and later uses his adoptive daughter Sydney to resurrect him. Victor upon becoming sick, later starts a Serial killing spree in order to cure himself and uses his expert skills to fend off the various other villains of the series. A true mastermind always with a new scheme when issues arise, Victor balances his evil with a genuine love for others and the desire in the end to atone for what he's done.
• Moral Event Horizon: Serena crossed it when she lured Sydney to be murdered by Eli. While she believes there is something deeply wrong with EOs, herself included, it is still very telling that she wouldn't let Eli kill her... but she would let him kill her twelve-year-old sister. To be fair, she clearly has conflicting feelings about the whole thing and is remarkably self-destructive in other ways that hint she hasn't really been mentally well since her near-death experience. Despite being justifiably furious, Sydney still loves her very much and spends part of the second book trying to find a way to resurrect her.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: Carvale, for Victor Vale and Eli Cardale.
• The Woobie:
  • Poor, poor Sydney. Her life went straight to hell the moment she acquired her powers. Meeting Victor makes things better in some ways, but a lot worse in others.
  • Mitch's entire life has sucked, to put it mildly, and now he's caught in the crossfire of a feud between two extremely powerful people.