Don't Meddle With My Daughter/Nightmare Fuel


 * The whole reason Athena is so overprotective of Clara, and why she retired from being a super hero are brimming with legitimate examples of Adult Fear, to where it IS legitimately reasonable for her to be the way she is: . Then, . Athena is SO affected by this that she . It is after that point where she hangs up her cape and retires to raise Clara. Think about it. Clara is literally ALL she had left after all she went through as a hero, so you can be damn sure she was going to protect her.
 * What might be even more horrific and sad is the fact that.
 * While a lot of villains are, to some greater or lesser extent Played For Laughs, Heavy Metal is one of the few exceptions. In fact, he's one of the few villains the plot does not try in any way to diminish his seriousness a bit. The reason is sickening: He purposely set out to rape Athena, simply in an attempt to break her spirit and force to live with the horror of being the mother to his children. He fails miserably, but the plot not only regards his evil with all horror it deserves, it's revealed that while Athena has shrugged off other similar acts, that one was so scarring she still has nightmares about it.
 * Once you find out WHY went to the dark side, you cannot fail to completely understand and sympathize. She was a genuinely heroic person, but she was viciously subjected to both Mind Rape and the more literal version multiple times to the point she was willing to do anything to make it stop.
 * The are also one of the few times the plot stops trying to be remotely funny and explicitly acknowledges what they did in an attempt to create an army of Super Soldiers as unrepentantly evil. It's implied their fates after their crimes were exposed were not so pleasant, but honestly, those vile animals had it coming, especially after they tried to throw the very heroes they wanted to defend them under the bus just to save their own worthless skins for the mess THEY created. In fact, the plot in general would have never happened had these monsters never existed.
 * The entirety of the scene with those little boy rapists. Not only was it so depraved on their part that they were raping a villain to the point she was begging them to stop, they even doubled down and raped the woman who tried to make them stop, first callously believing being a "hero" justified any act of retaliation on their part, and then decided to revel in their own debauchery even after realizing this made them villains.
 * If you apply a few minutes of critical thinking to any of the major characters, they are deeply, deeply messed up on an emotional and sexual level.
 * Zenovia: On top of being horribly raped and psychologically abused to the point she was willing to do all sorts of evil things to make it stop, it's clear this scarred her so horribly her relations with her own children are deeply unhealthy for most of the story. She is even shown having sex with more than one of them because she was so warped on healthy sexual relations. In fact, the first time we actually see her, she's sitting on a "throne" that consists of a number of women on their hands and knees forming a "throne" for her. Yeesh.
 * Athena: She was deeply scarred by lots of rapes and molestation in her younger days that she is filled with all sorts of appropriate parental horror of her own daughter going through the same. More than one villain viciously subjected her to gang-rape with the explicit intention of breaking her spirit, and she's still shown to have nightmares about it. That's not even mentioning the emotional and mental stress of when she seemingly lost her husband right before her eyes, AND that was around when she was pregnant with Clara. Suffice to say, it makes total sense why she's so protective of Clara, because she's all she had left.
 * Partially mentioned below, but this is an additional reason why Athena isn't above using sex to win against villains or other heroes (if they happen to be antagonists at the time), nor is she willing to fight that hard against many of her assailants if doing so would be a worse alternative than enduring the rape, because on some level she's become conditioned to accept such a thing happening to her as normal.
 * Clara: Athena's daughter is shown to be deeply sexually repressed and to harbor sexual desire for HER OWN MOTHER (AND FATHER) because she cannot face this side of herself until she is forcibly made to deal with it by being mind-raped, and this makes her easy prey for two different beings who exploit this to turn her into a sex crazed monster (brainwashed, in her defense). She finally gets betters after purging these inner and literal demons, but the price is quite high, to the point, and while her unintended victim gets the blessing of Easy Amnesia to eliminate most of the scars the incident would leave, it's still on her conscience.
 * Artemis: Poor woman gets DEFILED through the series. Even her idolized "big sister" sexually assaults her to defeat her knowing that she's a virgin and knowing this would be her weak point, and the villains take especial delight in shattering what remains for her sanity along with her virginity, to the point she's basically broken as a person by the end of the story, and while she has recovered physically to some extent later, she's shown to be in a relationship with a much younger man that is certainly not entirely healthy on her part, even though it is apparently consensual. (Once you go strange, you can't really go back... So it seems.)
 * Point Blank: He's a clusterfuck of issues, ranging from the fact he's the child of the villain and the parent of one of the heroes, and thanks to barely being older than his own daughter due to Time Travel, his relations with his daughter are quite strained on her part because she finds that hard to deal with, and while he's generally in a loving and generally normal relationship with the mother of his child, he's also the willing participant in Parental Incest with, and if you apply some more thinking to it, that makes what they did rape on BOTH sides as well as sexually messed up to begin with.
 * Hanna: While somewhat better off, she's revealed to be the recipient of a rape in her past so brutal it still has scarred her in modern day, and she even renounced use of her own superpowers partially because of this until sheer necessity forces her to renege on that, lest worse fates befall her and others.
 * While they don't have names or often aren't named, most of Zenovia's kids in general qualify, as sex WITH THEIR OWN MOTHER is implied to be the kindest relationship dynamic they've ever been in, and if that's the nicest affection they've ever gotten, one shudders to think about the alternatives they've been through prior.