The Familiar of Zero/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Abandon Shipping: Many bailed on the Louise/Saito ship after Louise beats him with a whip until he falls unconscious, and Saito tries to undress her while she's sleeping.
  • Angst? What Angst?: Deconstructed but not at first glance. It is only when the brainwashing effect of the summoning contract starting to wear off that Saito's Angst begins.
  • Audience-Alienating Premise: The Familiar of Zero actually evolved into this trope, due to the Flanderization of its main characters from "Ordinary High School Student Trapped in Another World" and "Tsundere-ish Cute Witch" into "Perverted Jerkass" and "Psychopathic Sadistic Tsundere" respectively.
  • Canon Sue: Tabitha's long lost twin sister, who seems to have been created from a checklist of Mary Sue cliches.
  • Colbert Bump: The series recently[when?] saw a huge upswing in popularity on the Spacebattles Creative Writing board after The Hill of Swords showed up on the Fanfiction Recommendations thread; prior to that, it had been an almost complete unknown in the community, now ZnT fanfic threads have practically taken over the board.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome - Saitou goes alone against up against an army of 70,000 bloodthirsty, berserk soldiers, and dies heroically. Big damn hero, even if he was fighting them for his girlfriend and not Tristain.
    • It's not so much that he went up against an army alone, it's that he disrupted and held them off for four goddamn hours by himself.
      • And on top of that, he didn't kill a single enemy, only knocked them unconscious. Now thats what I'd like to call awesome!
  • Die for Our Ship: Siesta treats Saito much better than Louise, but is loathed by fandom for that.
  • Dismissed Gender/Double Standard/Values Dissonance - Invoked plenty of times to say the least. Although then again Louise is not acting very different from what nobles actually did during Ancient Rome and Middle Ages. At one point killing a commoner (not to mention beating them up if they displeased you) ceased to be a crime at all (that usually didn't apply to townsfolk though, who were under protection of law to the extent that you had to have a valid reason to kill them).
  • Double Standard: Louise gets bashed for her abuse of Saito, yet very few people seem to care about his creepy perversion or rape attempts on her which, unlike Louise's questionable actions, are never provoked.
  • Dude, Not Funny: In chapter 2 of the second light novel, Louise whips Saito (not with a riding crop, but a real whip) until he passes out from the pain, after a previous beating from the night before.
  • Eight Deadly Words: With such unlikable main characters like Louise and Saito (especially Louise), as well as terrible execution and Unfortunate Implications, many people ditched the series halfway through the first season.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Tabitha, Miss Lougeville, Kirche.
  • Macekre: Original light novels are, even though they still aren't free from occasional Fridge Logic concerning their plot, a few levels over the anime adaptation, which had quickly devolved from grey-coloured story with occasional breathers to Tsundere comedy with a lot of Fan Service and something happening in the background. Because of that, some things were slightly changed, and some cut off completely, often resulting in removing heart-warming or awesome moments just to put more female body parts in (a very prominent example being Saito's death, which was the reason why Louise's company had come into contact with Tiffania, and an important part of Louise's character development, being changed into Saito coming back a short while later on his own, and then dragging Louise to Westwood for no apparent reason; another fine example is Agnes' behaviour towards Colbert after his faux death, once again an important part of someone's character development (in this case, of two characters, even), being cut completely).
  • Moe: Tabitha, so very much. To quote someone from animeblogger:

"Tabitha has taken over Siesta as my favorite character, and not just because she is channeling Yuki. She is made of pure win, I don't usually like the stoic silent types, but something about Tabitha just makes my inner moe meter go berserk."