The Apocalypse Troll: Difference between revisions

* [[Eternal English]]: Slightly subverted - some bits from 400 years in the future require explanation, such as dropping the first syllable of "mister" and just saying "Ster".

* {{spoiler|[[Girl in A Box]]: After her fighter is destroyed her escape pod homes in on Dick's boat and he opens it to find her inside, unconscious and covered in blood with a hole in her chest.}}

** For [[Retired Badass|certain values of "normal"]]...

* [[Punny Name]]: Ludmilla's fighter is named {{spoiler|Sputnik Too. Not Two, Too.}}

* [[The Symbiote]]: The source of her superhuman reflexes, strength, [[Healing Factor]] and [[Really Seven Hundred Years Old|apparent youth]]. Can be passed to others via blood transfusion, but since it has a 95 to 99% death rate (depending on the available medical technology), this is never done except in desperation, [[Emergency Transformation|when the person receiving it would die anyway]].

** And if you read that and started wondering about mosquitoes, that question is [[Lampshade Hanging|explicitly raised]] in the book as well. Answer: it kills the mosquitoes pretty much instantly, before they have a chance to bite someone else and pass it on.

* [[Take Me to Your Leader]]: The second sentence she says to Dick (after "Hello, yourself") after waking up. It's an [[Invoked Trope]] because she's from the future, literally fell from space, has an interest in "historical" entertainment, and (as she explains when Dick calls bullshit on her using this line) has a low brow sense of humor.

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Tropes associated with the rest of the book:

* [[Absolute Xenophobe]]: the Kangas. The Trolls, judging by the sample of one we have, go past this and into [[Omnicidal Maniac]] territory.

* [[Always Chaotic Evil]]: the Trolls, every single one.

* [[Blood Knight]]: While Trolls are best described as [[Omnicidal Maniac|Omnicidal Maniacs]], they do delight in destroying the objects of their all consuming hatred.

** The Trolls are portrayed in the book as especially hating Ludmilla and her kind.

* [[The Dragon]]: Blake Taggart.

* [[Dying Moment of Awesome]]: Captain Onslow ordering Ludmilla to pursue the fleeing Kangas with all of her surviving fighters instead of returning to protect the [[The Battlestar|Defender]] because he's already given orders to [[Ramming Always Works|ram the Troll dreadnaught]]. He nicely caps it off with the words "[[See You in Hell]], Col-" as the flagships collide in a titanic explosion.

* [[Mysterious Antarctica]]: where the Troll first lands on Earth.

* [[Omnicidal Maniac]]: The Trolls would gladly kill their alien masters if they could, but the Kangas made very sure they can't. So they'll settle for killing everything else.

* [[See You in Hell]]: literally Captain Onslow's last words, spoken to Ludmilla as the ''Defender'' [[Ramming Always Works|rams the Troll dreadnaught]]. Both ships are completely annihilated in a huge nuclear fireball.

* [[Sole Survivor]]: Ludmilla and the Troll are the only survivors of a pair of [[Standard Sci Fi Fleet]] battle groups that spent about a month (subjective time, at least, considering that they spent most of that time traveling at relativistic speeds) wiping each other out both before and after they [[Time Travel|went so fast they went back in time]]. {{spoiler|The Troll is unaware that Ludmilla survived for most of the book, however, because he thought he had killed her when he destroyed her fighter over the Atlantic. He only learns of her survival when she activates her blaster during the climactic final battle, an instant before she blows him to hell.}}