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Dark Lord of Derkholm: Difference between revisions
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* [[All Witches Have Cats]]: Querida, the most powerful witch on the continent, owns three cats.
* [[Beware the Nice Ones]]: Derk's children. Never get on the wrong side of a pissed off griffin.
* [[Cold Iron]]: Iron is much harder to work magic on than other substances, and untrained wizards can't use magic while in contact with iron.
* [[Deliberately Cute Child]]: Elda knows that her fluffy golden feathers and kittenish demeanor are powerful weapons.
* [[Fantastic Science]]: Derk's forte.
* [[Gadgeteer Genius]]: Callette is one of these... and she's a ''griffin.''
* [[Massive
* [[Nice to the Waiter]]: Emperor Titus' kindness to animals marks him as a good guy early on.
* [[Sufficiently Analyzed Magic]]
* [[Trademark Favorite Food]]: Elda loves fresh fruit--oranges especially.
* [[Truly Single Parent]]: Only two of Derk's seven children {{spoiler|nine in the sequel}} were born in the natural way. The others were created by him in his magical lab. However, he ''does'' use DNA from his wife in the other children, so they're still "related" to both their parents. This despite being ''griffins.''
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* [[Attempted Rape]]: It's unclear how far it goes. {{spoiler|Shona is at the very least molested by an entire gang of soldiers. Scales magically helps her cope, but she can never entirely forget.}}
* [[The Atoner]]: Querida, after she realizes that she has caused actual harm to Derk and his family.
* [[Automaton Horses]]: averted with a vengeance.
* [[Aw, Look -- They Really Do Love Each Other]]: One of the many problems Derk faces as he plays the Dark Lord is that his wife Mara is slowly growing distant from him. It doesn't help that she's playing the Glamorous Enchantress, and is wearing [[Stripperific]] costumes as she entertains hundreds of guests, many of whom are testosterone-poisoned men. However, in the end, {{spoiler|she reveals that her distance was all an act, in the hopes the worry would drive Derk to mess up. She apologizes, and when he proposes that they have some [[Winged Humanoid]] children, she happily accepts.}}
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* [[The Baroness]]: Querida is the Rosa Klebb type.
* [[Brainless Beauty]]: Geoffrey's sister Sukey. {{spoiler|Or so it seems. She's actually just as shrewd as her brother; she plays the part well, though.}}
* [[Cats Are Magic]]: Dirk's cats, which he bred to be invisible, are also inexplicably unable to be trapped for long, they always find their way out, even from magical barriers.
* [[Chew Toy]]: Derk. Oh, heavens, Derk. {{spoiler|his wife leaves him, his house is destroyed, his daughter nearly gets gang raped, his son gets shot and killed in front of him --- is it any wonder that he ends up having a nervous breakdown and hiding in a pigsty? And that was the ''plan''. The planners just weren't expecting him to be so competent...}}
* [[Cue the Flying Pigs]]: An elf king hopes [[Corrupt Corporate Executive|Mr. Chesney]] will eventually free his son. His other son says "Yea, and that day will come when pigs do fly." Sarcastic, yes, but a prophecy is a prophecy. As it happens, the protagonist, Derk, breeds flying pigs...
* [[Cloudcuckoolander]]: Derk. He's incredibly brilliant and so awkward, clueless, and spacy, everyone expects him to fail spectacularly as Dark Lord.
* [[Cool Horse]]: Beauty and her foal Pretty, Derk's winged horses, are so cool that the elf Prince is willing to pay a year of servitude for.
* [[Creating Life Is Awesome]]: The titular wizard creates new life forms all the time, including griffins and winged humans. Some of them contain his own DNA and are treated as family members. Although this creates some unusual parent-child tensions, his creative work is treated as a positive thing on the whole.
** This story also subverts [[Creating Life Is Bad]], by having various characters wrongly believe the protagonist to be evil.
* [[Death Glare]]: Querida has one.
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* [[Evil Vizier]]: It's ''very'' subtle, but it's implied the Grand Vizier of the Emirate acts this role for the Tours.
* [[Family-Unfriendly Death]]: ''Barnabas''. Dear Lord, Barnabas.
* [[Five-Man Band]]: Derk's seven children in the original:
** [[The Hero]]: Blade (also, incidentally, one of the only two humans)
** [[The Lancer]]: Kit and Shona (the other human)
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** [[The Chick]]: Lydda and Elda. ( {{spoiler|Lydda was actually created by Derk to be surprisingly tough, but she doesn't get to show it much since she prefers to cook and is rather chubby.}} The sequel also shows that Elda is ''very'' ingenious and full of magical power.)
* [[Friend to All Living Things]]: Derk.
* [[Heroic BSOD]]: Derk after {{spoiler|he believes Kit is dead}}.
* [[Hot Mom]]: Mara; she gets to play the "Glamorous Enchantress" due to her good looks, and even her children are surprised at how hot she looks.
* [[Instant Awesome, Just Add Dragons]]: Scales.
* [[Knight Templar]]: Querida's only priority is to rid the world of Mr. Chesney. {{spoiler|The gods acknowledge her basic intentions by giving her the task of ''finishing'' the job.}}
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* [[Parents as People]]
* [[Proud Warrior Race Guy]]: Elf Prince Talithan, and Scales. Talithan is at one point highly upset because the city [[Designated Villain|he was going to sack]] {{spoiler|didn't have any people in it}}.
* [[Punch Clock Villain]]: Derk is perhaps the ultimate example. He isn't even ''evil.'' He ''has'' to play the Dark Lord because his boss sucks.
* [[The Generic Guy]]: Don, who is, for the most part, normal.
* [[Star-Spangled Spandex]]: Derk's original cape as Dark Lord has a lining made of a miniature universe.
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** [[Ascended to Carnivorism]]: The carnivorous sheep.
* [[Two Lines, No Waiting]]: The later half of the book ping-pongs between the adventures of Derk and those of his children, Blade, Shona, and Kit, as they lead a party through the "game."
* [[Ugly Guy, Hot Wife]]: Everyone wonders how Derk managed to score a babe like Mara.
* [[Winged Humanoid]]: {{spoiler|What Derk decides to make at the end of the book. We see these two children in the sequel.}}
* [[Xanatos Gambit]]: ''Inverted,'' of all the crazy things. {{spoiler|Derk is genuinely clueless. However, everyone around him hopes his cluelessness will convince the odious fellow abusing their world to leave them alone, and so they try to help him be ''more'' clueless than usual. Naturally, this is the exact time Derk decides to get competent, and kicks the bad guy out by doing the ''exact opposite of what everyone thought he'd do.''}}
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* [[Adorkable]]: Pretty much all of Elda's male friends in the sequel are rather endearingly awkward. Lukin is probably the ''most'' confident (it's hard to say whether Ruskin's is this or bravado), but Felim is the most obviously awkward-sweet. Not to mention Derk himself.
** Flury's [[Anguished Declaration of Love]] qualifies him. "Don't take whatshername with you!"
* [[Ascended Extra]]: Corkoran in the sequel. One-off in the original book; main teacher in the sequel.
* {{spoiler|[[Assassin Outclassin']]: The seven assassins sent by the Emir of Ampersand fail resoundingly to kill Felim, thanks to the extensive protective spells and even more extensive traps that he and his friends set up before they got there.}}
* [[Baleful Polymorph]]
* [[Big Damn Heroes]]: {{spoiler|Kit and Blade running off the primal griffins from Callette and Elda.}}
* [[Big Brother Instinct]]: Titus to Claudia. He adores her, and threatening her well-being is pretty much the only way make him really, truly mad. {{spoiler|When he learns that the Senate has plotted to murder her, he throws the lot of them in jail, declares martial law, and rushes off to make sure she's all right.}}
* [[Brainless Beauty]]: Nicely subverted with Melissa.
* [[Cain and Abel]]: {{spoiler|The Emir, who has sent assassins to kill Felim, turns out to be his older brother.}} The strange thing is that, while they seem to spend a lot of time yelling at each other, they're actually fond of each other- and {{spoiler|the Emir actually wants Felim to be his heir.}} He just felt honor-bound to go through with the threats he made in a moment of rage.
* [[Calling the Old Man Out]]: Happens all through the book...as the students' tuition letters reach their homes. Olga has the most notable example.
* [[Charm Person]]: Isodel.
* [[Cool and Unusual Punishment]]: The spells that Elda and her friends inflict on the would-be assassins are quite... unusual. They involve turning them into roosters, ash, and... making them drown in pits full of orange juice.
* [[Cool Versus Awesome|Pirates vs Ninjas]]: When Olga's father and his crew (pirates) encounter the Ampersandian assassins (ninjas). They team up.
* [[Demoted to Extra]]: Don, the most normal and least quirky of Derk's griffin children, hardly appears in this book.
* [[Freudian Excuse]]: for Corkoran. He was kicked out of his home at age fifteen, and the University is the only home he has.
* [[Halfbreed]]: Claudia is one of these, and she suffers for it rather a lot.
* [[Honor Before Reason]]: Felim has a mild case of this- he often feels compelled to do things by his honor, but his friends talk him into sensible behavior when necessary.
* [[Love At First Sight]]: Rather a ''lot'' of it, with {{spoiler|Lydda and her new husband, Blade and Claudia, Titus and Isodel, seemingly Lukin and Olga, and Flury and Elda.}}
* [[Mouse Trap]]: After Elda turns the pirates into mice, every student in the school gets busy trying to design one.
* [[Must Have Caffeine]]: Olga. She gets everyone else addicted to coffee too, as befits a bunch of college students.
* [[No Kill Like Overkill]]: Elda and her friends engage in ''defensive'' overkill to protect {{spoiler|Felim from assassins}}.
* [[The Nondescript]]: Flury goes to some trouble to be this way.
* [[Offscreen Moment of Awesome]]: Kit and Blade have been busy adventuring in the meanwhile. Aside from a brief mention of serving in the war, this is not brought up at all.
* [[Our Founder]]: Subverted. {{spoiler|The statue of the wizard Policant actually turns out to ''be'' Policant, who apparently turned himself into a statue as part of a prophecy, to be revived in the titular Year of the Griffin.}}
* [[Our Dwarves Are All the Same]]: Despite his full beard, the dwarf is about twelve years old (in human terms; he's actually thirty-something) and embarrassingly pubescent.
* [[Parent Ex Machina]]: not literally; but the return of Querida and the older wizards to the University plays with this.
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** The Wild One: Elda (Though Elda is [[The Hero]], in the story)
* [[Sibling Team]]: Kit and Blade work as one.
* [[So Beautiful It's a Curse]]: In the sequel, everyone is surprised when seeming [[Brainless Beauty]] Melissa sticks up for Olga against {{spoiler|her horrifying misogynist father}}. She brings up how everyone thinks that just because she's pretty, she can't be a good wizard.
* [[Spell Book]]: The six students' main way of learning magic, since so many of their tutors are incompetent.
* [[Stealth Pun]]: The Emir's kingdom, Ampersand.
* [[Two-Teacher School]]: Not quite, but almost. There are about five teachers mentioned, but only two of them seem to have a role in teaching the six main characters- Corkoran (their tutor, who also gives lectures to them) and Wermacht (who teaches almost all the first-year classes). Neither is terribly competent. (One character mentions attending Myrna's lectures as well, but this comes up only once.)
* [[Volleying Insults]]: In marked contrast to his behavior in the rest of the book, Felim engages in this with {{spoiler|his brother the Emir.}}
* [[Writer on Board]]: {{spoiler|Olga's horribly misogynistic father, and the backlash against him.}} However, while it does make a very clear point about sexism, it ''does'' also help build sympathy for Olga.
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