- Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Is Jobe Wilkins evil, or a well-meaning if Jerkass Mad Scientist who genuinely can't understand that his attempts to help are worse than the original problem? On the forums even the canon authors have disagreed on this point, but the author of the Book Of Jobe goes for the second viewpoint.
- Team Kimba: Powerful, but made up of compassionate and heroic individuals, or an Affably Evil subversion of True Companions whose members have almost no sense of restraint or mercy, care more about each other then the rest of the world, and are each a danger to the rest of humanity for one reason or another?
- Jade as written by Babs Yerunkle is a mature young woman struggling to overcome physical limitations and the dangers presented by the world with the help of her friends. Jade as written by Diane Castle is a Psychopathic Girlchild who is a continual source of crazy, entertaining things. YMMV on which version is better. Given the timeline of the stories in question, it's possible to interpret at as Jade being steadily pushed over the edge by her circumstances, demon mark, and exposure to mythos magic.
- Angst? What Angst?: Particularly in the early stories, where the relatively frequent deaths of students, faculty or staff doesn't seem to bother anybody much. Rectified by later stories revealing that some characters are actually suffering a lot, just not always in ways apparent to others.
- Base-Breaking Character:
- Headmistress Carson, over whether her actions so far are justified due to following Mrs. Potter's Omniscient Morality License... if that is indeed what she's doing.
- Try asking the fanbase whether they think Englund should have expected the Syndicate to go back on their deal and invade the school. Half of them think that he couldn't have possibly seen it coming, and the other half think he should be crucified for letting them into the school.
- Broken Aesop: Sara has a speech on how she doesn't understand why humans are so possessive of the people they love and uses branding as a metaphor, no one points out that she has branded people she loves with a demon mark, irreversible marks of ownership. If you have one, the demon owns your soul and can control you almost utterly any time they want. However, as said Insanity Prerequisite (Part 1)
:you have to be willing to accept it on some subconscious level for the mark to appear." - Complete Monster:
- Deathlist is a psychopathic cyborg who has an obsessive desire to spread carnage for his own sadistic pleasure. Responsible for the horrific butchering of innocent men, women, and children, Deathlist reaches a new height of depravity when he kidnaps an innocent mutant superheroine. Removing her limbs and jamming a device into her skull, Deathlist has the mutant subjected to a month of torture and rape by his own troops. Deathlist later kills her and leaves her body as a taunt towards her teammates.
- Hekate, real name Kallysta Thessellarean, is a sadistic sorceress who aspires to become something much worse. Sacrificing two children to learn a spell, Hekate uses her newfound magic to mentally enslave two of her classmates for a year, keeping them aware while they were raped and abused. Later trying to use the same spell on Fey, Hekate summons three iron elementals to brutalise her, promising them dozens of sacrifices. To spite Fey, Hekate stabs Jade in the heart, just to torment her foe.
- Crazy Is Cool: A few secondary characters.
- Peril. Imagine if the neighborhood daredevil developed a healing factor. What does he do? Go into business as a paid guinea pig/test pilot for the mad scientist students' more iffy experiments at the school. And he lets Phase pretend to rip off his dick in the cafeteria. At lunch. In front of the entire school.
- Jade Sinclair, 'Radioactive Condor Girl!' In fact, this is Diane Castle's goal in writing her.
- Designated Hero: Almost every main character has had moments of these, but special mention goes to Sara — who rapes (in both ways) the resident Jerkass Mad Scientist because she thought it'd be useful to have him angry at her, and Chou, who goes around killing people because a magic sentient sword told her to.
- Designated Villain: The Goodkinds shift between this and Knight Templar. Possibly lampshaded, since Ayla is quick to defend his family, AND retains contact with a few.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: Amongst people who dislike the series, Ayla and Jade are more popular for having more balanced powers and a more respectful take on transgender issues.
- Fashion Victim Hero: Jericho, intentionally. It's so bad that it induces vomiting. It's so bad that a fan comic CENSORS it (unfortunately, not for the characters in the comic). It's so bad that Phase paid a gadgeteer to make glasses to filter out colors.
- Hollywood Homely: When everyone else is an exemplar, minimum, the characters who are baseline in appearance (or worse) are pretty screwed. Or not, actually... Ayla comments a lot on this. (Actually, only about a third of the characters are Exemplars, but it does make a difference.)
- Love to Hate: Jobe Wilkins. He's an obnoxious and grating Jerkass and acknowledged as such in-universe. But reading about him, you can't but laugh at his egotism and his blatant lack of respect for other people. It helps that we have characters like Jadis around to make snarky remarks at his expense.
- Memetic Mutation: There's a few on the forums.
- Appending mentions of the Canon Cabal with "(There is no Canon Cabal)", or (TINCC) for short.
- Responding to posts containing common misspellings of character names (e.g. Chakra, Fay, Tenryo, Alya) with RAAAAAGE! (Minus the pothole, of course. Angry red font colours are optional.)
- Tinsnip.
- Nightmare Fuel:
- "Sara's Little Purple Book," a guide to mutant sexuality, varies between Funny and this.
- Two words: Dark Generator. In the sim, her first attack (apart from Shroud going rogue too) is to animate part of Melville Cottage, turn it into a 30-ft golem and send it to attack. That is, not only part of the building, but everything in it, including furniture, possessions and people.
- Elaine Fleischer collaborated with the police to capture a rogue devisor who turned all his male subjects into beautiful busty women who were all slavishly devoted to him. While Delta made it out as a fully-functional girl and the guy got caught, his minions want her dead, and Phase at one point speculates that Delta actually did get the mind control treatment and just doesn't know it.
- All of the story Tennyo Goes To Hell, especially the second part. We find out what happened to the people Sara ate, and it's not pretty.
- Cavalier and Skybolt. After Fey and Jade rescued them, they were sent to ARC for treatment and therapy. And it hasn't worked. They've done pretty much nothing but sit together and barely react to anything, the notable exception being trying to separate them.
- Macrobiotic's family has been constantly waging war against a super villain called Deathmaiden, who keeps returning no matter what they do. Deathmaiden blew up Macrobiotic's father, and will most likely go after Macrobiotic and her mother when she next returns- which, as Macrobiotic notes in Ayla And The Mad Scientist, is a mere couple of years away.
- Fire Over Phoenix introduces FrankenCorp, a company that abducts mutants and other powered beings and sells them- either intact or in pieces- to people who want to vivisect metahumans, use their body parts for transplants, or just find out what non-humans taste like.
- Squick:
- Several examples. Almost all the main characters are transgender in some way shape or form and there are rather frank discussions of gender issues in the early chapters — for example, Ayla is mostly female except for... certain elements of his body, Jade uses her powers to "tuck" herself in and this is described rather frankly — did we mention that Jade is physically 12 years old? Sara essentially vomits out her entire set of internal organs when she "awakens". For the most part however, the series is a fairly standard slice-of-life high-school drama, except with super-powers.
- Jobe's design for an organic prosthetic penis, which was essentially a parasitic worm that attached to the vulva. What objections could women possibly have to that?
- The Woobie:
- Jade.
- Merry could also qualify, the chewtoy that she is.
- As above, Greasy shifts to this when Peeper's abuse is taken seriously.
- Phase.
- 'Ayla and the Mad Scientist' has Fey finding out that many of her big fights have resulted in the destruction of entire ecosystems because she was drawing more Essence than they could give her. She accidentally killed entire forests.
- Billie Wilson:
- In 'Ayla and the Great Shoulder Angel Conspiracy, Part 5/6', Billie's memories of being the Star Stalker are unlocked. As a result, she remembers the millions of people the Star Stalker killed, and because she's got it stuck in her, she ends up believing that she, Billie, killed them.
- She had a thing with Harry Wolfe which ended badly when Hexette stole him. Not only is Tennyo still wondering about her sexuality, she lost her chance with the only person she's romantically interested in.
- She's incredibly shy and doesn't have many friends, mainly because nobody wants to be her friend.
- Chou's father is stuck in the personal clutches of a demon with a grudge.
- Josie Gillman, a designated Butt-Monkey and comic relief character, is actually an aversion despite the universe constantly conspiring to humiliate her. Her Pollyanna, Cloudcuckoolander and Wrong Genre Savvy tendencies prevent her from seeing anything, no matter how humiliating, as more than a temporary setback.
