Anime / Queen's Blade

"To the strongest go the spoils. That's the law of this land."

— Risty

Originally a series of one-on-one combat gamebooks based on Lost Worlds. Lost Worlds let two players duel by exchanging books that represented different characters, with illustrations representing each action you could take. In 2005, Hobby Japan released a remake of the series, but instead of generic fantasy monsters, the characters of Queen's Blade were all women designed with a more ecchi slant. And thus the Fanservice began.

The story is as follows: Every four years, there is a tournament to decide who will be the next queen of the land. The rules are extremely simple: as long as the contestant is over twelve years old, the last one standing wins.

What began as some gamebooks with an erotic slant became a multimedia franchise spawning (besides the gamebooks) TV series, OVAs, manga and videogames (both for consoles and online).

The whole franchise is split into many continuities:

The Continent Saga

• Queen's Blade: Where it all began. The story centers around Leina Vance, the heiress to the Count Vance, travelling to Gainos to compete in the Queen's Blade tournament, while fighting against other warriors along the way and participating in the titular tournament, and eventually fighting against the two-time champion, the wicked Queen Aldra.
• Queen's Blade Rebellion: Takes place one year after the last tournament. The entire Continent has fallen under a tyrannical rule led by the Thundercloud Queen. Annelotte Kreuz, a brave young knight and exiled princess, leads a band of rebels to overthrow the queen and restore peace and order to the Continent, but things aren't that simple this time and lots of twists await them along the way...

Alternative Continuities

• Queen's Gate: Takes place in our modern world. A young European girl named Alice, along with her friend Dorothy, has to find treasures around the world, while dealing with a mysterious cult named The Cult of Arunikuf and a mysterious dimensional door named The Queen's Gate.
• Queen's Blade Grimoire: Takes place in another world, this time in a world based in classical fairy tales plunged into an eternal winter. The heroine this time is Alicia, who wants to find a way to her world, but first, she must fight in another version of the Queen's Blade tournament, winning the right to use the legendary Queen's Blade sword and dealing with the Winter Demon, the one who is causing the eternal winter.

There are also two PSP games, Queen's Blade: Spiral Chaos and a sequel, Queen's Gate: Spiral Chaos. Alas, these games are only available in Japan.

For similar Panty Fighter shows, see Variable Geo, Koihime†Musou, and Ikkitousen. See also Bikini Warriors, a show with a similar fantasy setting and Stripperific female warriors. Also compare to the Senran Kagura series, but with ninjas instead of fantasy stuff.

Not to be confused with the MMORPG Scarlet Blade, which is called Queen's Blade Online in its home country of South Korea.

At January 2017, Hobby Japan announced a complete reboot of the franchise, named Queen's Blade Unlimited. The reboot retells the whole original continuity with updated character designs. An OVA has been announced for release in July 2018. At November 2018, a smartphone browser game called Queen's Blade White Triangle featuring the Unlimited designs, was announced.

NOTE: Only general tropes for the series as a whole should go here. For character-specific ones, check out the characters sheet.

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Tropes in Queen's Blade include:

• Aborted Arc: One for continuity, except in the gamebooks and the videogames:
  • In the animated adaptation of Rebellion, the series ends after the battle against Claudette and not only the outcome is different from the gamebook, as Claudette defeats everyone, except Leina/Maria, but also excludes the duel against Captain Liliana in her airship, the meeting with Menace in Amara, and the final battle against the Swamp Witch.
  • In the CD drama version of Rebellion, the meeting with Menace in Amara was excluded and the cast went straight to the Swamp to fight against the Swamp Witch, despite the fact that they needed to speak with Menace to get the direction of the Swamp, since Menace's voice actress was unavailable due to having a nasty case of Lupus and Hobby Japan wasn't able to find a replacement until the Vanquished Queens OVAs
  • The manga version of Rebellion is even worse: It ends after the battle against Elina, Ymir and Mirim, before the duel against Claudette, and turns into a Gecko Ending.
• Action Girl: Almost everybody, with the sole exception of Hachiel, Nanael's friend, at least until the 5th OVA episode.
• Adventure-Friendly World: Justified, since the whole series is heavily inspired in both videogame and tabletop RPG concepts.
• Aerith and Bob: Played with it: We have characters with names from different cultural backgrounds (despite the whole fantasy setting the series takes place) like Spanish (Leina, Liliana, Maria, Rana, Dora, Irma and Alicia), Swedish (Elina), French (Claudette, Jean, Annelotte, Huit & Vingt), Japanese (Tomoe, Shizuka, Airi, Izumi and Kaguya), Greek (Nyx, Echidna and Artemis), English (Menace, Goldie, Cute & Owen), Germanic (Cattleya and Hans), Celtic (Branwen), Scottish (Alleyne), Nordic (Ymir and Mirim), Hebrew (Ramshel, Sushel and Mishel), Arabic (Nowa and Layla) and totally made-out names (like Risty, Aldra and others). Nanael & Hachiel are names with a Japanese prefix mixed with a Hebrew suffix.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Happens in the Queen's Blade Spiral Chaos game: After many of the playable cast are reunited at the half of the game, the girls (Excluding Nowa, Ymir, Rana, Cute and Jean because they're underage or underage-looking) decides to throw a party with lots of booze everywhere. The results are obvious.
• Alien Sky: There are two moons in this setting.
• All There in the Manual: Inverted in Leina and Tomoe's cases (since most of their backstories are expanded in the anime series), but played straight with Menace, possibly because her backstory is too dark and violent, even for QB's levels.
• Alternate Continuity:
  • The anime series, the gamebooks, the manga adaptations, and the Spiral Chaos games take place in different continuities, with many of the main events taking place in different fashion. The new series, Grimoire is set in a new universe different from the one of the original series and Rebellion.
  • The Queen's Gate novels seems to take place in another one, despite looking like part of the regular continuity, since in the end Arukinuf, who is near identical to Funikura, was destroyed at the end, contradicting his fate in the regular continuity where he is OK, thus making them two different characters.
• Arc Words: "Who will emerge victorious? They won' t know that unless they fight!" Used many times at the beginning and in the end of many parts of the franchise.
• Artifact Title: In the original continuity, Queen's Blade is the name of the titular tournament. The sequel Queen's Blade Rebellion drops out the tournament and changes the setting, but keeps the title.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: The purpose of the Queen's Blade tournament. Only the strongest Beautiful Fighter can become queen.
• Attempted Rape: The first frightening scene in the franchise actually played straight, when Nowa is kidnapped by a gang of rapists and thrown onto a stable floor... but thankfully rescued by Echidna at the last second.
  • The same thing happens in the Hide & Seek manga, but with Ymir and Frollu, after being kidnapped and sold to pedophiles. Luckily, Ymir gets rid of them, with help from Elina.
• Band of Brothers: The Rebellion Army in QB Rebellion.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: The girls get beaten up, and even get repeatedly slashed on their breasts, but there are never scars, until the Vanquished Queens OVAs, at least with Leina's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
• Between My Legs: This shot is used very often, usually for fanservice.
  • In the final episode of Season 1 and throughout Season 2, the Priestess Melpha actually uses this as part of her fighting technique, much to Nanael's disgust.
• Bittersweet Ending: Despite the extensive use of Fanservice, the endings of many of the series of the franchise aren't exactly too happy for everyone:
  • Queen's Blade (TV series): Leina wins the tournament, but Shizuka has to pull an Heroic Sacrifice just to help her and the rest of the cast to defeat Aldra and Delmore for good. She decides to forfeit her title to her older sister Claudette and decides to go Wandering the Earth. The Swamp Witch and her minions are still a threat for everyone in the Continent. Irma ends being crippled by a brain-washed Risty and it seems that Echidna will have to take care of her.
  • Queen's Blade (OVAs): Leina decides to keep traveling to become a true warrior and leaves her family for good, much to Elina's chagrin. Nowa and Alleyne decides to part ways after defeating Nyx and Funikura. Airi decides to leave Cattleya and Rana for good and reunites with both Melona and the Swamp Witch. Menace manages to rebuild her kingdom slowly and neither Airi nor Melona managed to force her to go back to the Swamp Witch and Tomoe manages to defeat Delmore for good, but at cost of Shizuka's soul to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence and being cursed by the Swamp Witch.
  • Queen's Blade Rebellion (Illustrated Stories): Annelotte and Aldra, after too many dangers manage to defeat the Swamp Witch for good, restoring the peace of the Continent and redeeming both Claudette and their mother Werbellia, who was under the Swamp Witch's control. But the Swamp Witch is STILL at large, and Melona, Airi, Dogura and Branwen seem to still being threats, as long Airi manages to find another host for her...
  • Queen's Gate (Novels): Alice managed to destroy both Faye Wright, Arunikuf and his whole cult, but her mother, Lewis, is still missing when she was dragged in the Queen's Gate dimensional door, and now, Alice must find her mother, this time alone, much to the chagrin of Dorothy. At least Dorothy managed to kiss her for once.
• Breast Expansion: One of the chapters of the Rebellion Zero manga shows that when the girls lick Luna-Luna's horn-like piece, their breasts grow in size. Apparently it's one of the secrets of the Calibara tribe. The effect is temporary, though. Since she's a shapeshifter, Melona can do this at will.
• Boss Subtitles: Everyone gets one when a Queen's Blade match is announced. However, most of them are rather mundane (though that may be a gag since Nanael seems to have trouble remembering who everyone is).
• Canon Immigrant:
  • The Magical Stones (or at least the one Huit had in her house in the QB Rebellion's anime adaptation) are from the Spiral Chaos games.
  • Leina uses the Meteor Swing from the aforementioned games against Seiten in the Grimoire OVAs.
• Casting Gag:
  • Aya Hirano's role as Nanael is probably being one from her role as Misa Amane, when she was dressed like an angel when doing a movie during the Yotsuba arc.
  • English dub only: It's not the first time Annelotte's voice actress plays a half-demon girl before.
• Cat Fight: Pretty much the whole point to the audience, but in-universe is mostly justified.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: The franchise is notorious from switching from having Fanservice antics in few episodes to a darker narrative later, just to return to the status quo in the next episode. Also, some continuities and adaptation are darker than others.
• Chainmail Bikini: All over the place, pretty much literally in Leina's case.
  • In a truly rare situation, the inefficiency of said armor is actually acknowledged when one of Leina's enemies slices her in the chest in an unarmored location with a Sinister Scythe.
• Climactic Battle Resurrection: In Queen's Gate Spiral Chaos: not only both Ramshel and Sushel, the final bosses from the last game, came back from the dead, you have to protect them (and find both twins after getting separated) this time.
• Clothing Damage: Everywhere you turn; the anime seems to use it as a substitute for actual wounds during battle. Airi gets a special mention because her clothes regenerate, likely to be damaged all over again.
  • An actual option in gameplay. Battles can be won by doing a "Perfect Knockdown", that is, stripping the enemy of all their "armor". Pictures are presented.
• Condescending Compassion: Echidna defeated Leina sometime before the events of the Sword of The Unicorn novels, but didn't do anything humiliating to her afterwards, in spite of her Psycho Lesbian reputation. Far from being grateful, Leina saw this as Echidna's final insult, a way of telling her she isn't a worthy opponent in any way.
• Continuity Nod: All over the place in Queen's Gate, like Junko's certain problem at the Beach Episode, and how Jubei first appeared to Muneakira. Seeing as Banpresto made the game, it would make sense that these events would be present.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Each of the main characters from each of the QB's continuities has very different personalities between each other: Leina tends to be pretty laid-back, naive and sort of childish, Annelotte from Rebellion is more mature and more action-oriented, Alice from the Queen's Gate novels is sweeter and more serious, and Alicia from Grimoire is more violent and arrogant than her predecessors.
• Crapsaccharine World: Despite the whole setting looking like the typical Fantasy setting, according with Risty in the first episode of the first season, the whole setting is really unfair, with poor people starving and the nobles getting rich at expense of their own people. Leina gets depressed when she finds out about this.
• Crapsack World: In the QB Rebellion's Illustrated Stories, the whole setting becomes this after Claudette becomes the queen thanks to Leina and she starts to invade other countries and raises the taxes. While it doesn't reach Berserk levels of Crapsack-iness, the whole Continent becomes a pale shadow of its former glory. On the other hand, the animated adaptation of Rebellion doesn't change the setting too much, other than the invasions.
• Creator's Culture Carryover: Despite the Western European Medieval setting of the series, some Japanese stuff still prevails on it: The biggest offenders are the armors of the Vance County and later, the Claudette's army's soldiers, who looks a lot like Ashigaru soldiers from the Japanese Sengoku period, the members of the Assassins of the Fang are Medieval Ninjas and we can hear a woman who sounds like a Benshi announcing the final battle between Leina and Aldra in the second season.
• Crossover:
  • There's a spinoff series, Queen's Gate, whose main point is crossing over the regular characters with characters from other series and games, like Guilty Gear, Fatal Fury, Tekken, Dead or Alive, and others.
  • Also there's a non-hentai doujinshi (and also comic strip) named Mobile Suit Blade in which the girls are depicted as SD Gundam versions of many Mobile Suits from the Gundam franchise. For example, Leina, her sisters, Melona, and Aldra are depicted as Mobile Suits from Celestial Being, Airi as the Gundam Deathscythe, plus many other examples. And, as this wasn't already ridiculous enough, the same doujinshi also put the girls from Queen's Blade against SD Gundam-versions of Nanoha, Fate, and Saber.
  • There's also a freeware PC game named Queen's Blade Battle, that allows the player to use not only both the Queen's Blade and Queen's Gate gamebooks, but also the original Lost World books, the Marvel Battlebooks, both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader gamebooks published years ago, and even fan-created gamebooks.
  • The entire cast appears as special guests in the Japanese online game Arc Sign.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: While Melpha and Sigui's religion is never named, it's pretty obviously based in Roman Catholicism, including having a pope as their leader and being monotheistic.
• Curse: Maybe to prevent the rest of the original cast to steal the spotlight of the new heroines, both Hobby Japan (out-universe) and the Swamp Witch (in-universe) cursed most of the original cast (most notably Tomoe is blind and Leina can only stay awake for 8 hours) so they wouldn't be able to fight to most of their full power against her and Claudette in QB Rebellion.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Averted in the gamebooks' continuity: No matter what the rest of the characters with gamebooks do on-story, other than Leina, no one else wins the Queen's Blade tournament for any unexpected reason and the additional books explains what happened with the rest of the cast after that, minus Leina since she is the canonical winner of the tournament.
• Cypher Language: In the animated adaptation of Rebellion, the language used in the Continent is a cypher for a very bad English, except that anyone can read the text with some effort. On ther other hand, in the animated prequels, the text is a mix between English and phonetic Japanese instead.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • The sequel, Queen's Blade Rebellion have a darker narrative and setting, since the QB world transformed from a Crapsaccharine World to a full Crapsack World in less of a year. Oddly, the anime adaptation doesn't change the status quo too much.
  • The prequel manga Queen's Blade Rebellion Zero is even darker: The Fanservice is less frequent here and sometimes not Played for Laughs or sexiness, many characters die in a very brutal way like Annelotte's foster mother on Airi's hands and it's less idealistic and more cynical than the other series.
  • The Queen's Blade Rebellion manga adaptation seems to go to this direction, also overlaping with Bloodier and Gorier: Not only the setting is even darker than the original Rebellion canon, the Fanservice is even less frequent than Zero and when it appears, it's for the opposite reason, not to mention the death toll (at least regarding non-named characters) is higher.
  • The Queen's Gate side-stories also count: While the Fanservice is cranked up, there are also instances of Fan Disservice. Since the novels were written in collaboration with nitro+, this can be expected.
  • The Unlimited reboot seems to go in that direction as well: For beginners, killing the opponent is now allowed and the winner of any match can request anything from the loser.
• A Day in the Limelight: Each episode of the OVA series deals with what happened to a character (or group of characters) between the originals series ans Rebellion. The only characters that don't appear at all are Risty, Claudette and Irma.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • That milk is awfully thick isn't it? Wonder why it always coats a heroine's face, though...
  • In the 4th OVA episode, when Airi tries to sneak out of Cattleya's house to drain life force, Rana pleads with her to not do so. His lines are.... well let's just say it sounds like something out of an H-manga.
  • Echidna's snake, when acting as her "pants", wraps around her waist and covers her naughty bits (not that it leaves much to the imagination anyway). With the position it takes, the snake looks like a certain male part of the body.
• Downer Ending:
  • The whole point of the Vanquished Queens books, who are What If? situations where all the named characters are defeated and their dreams are shattered (or worse). Also, the end of the animated adaptation of Rebellion counts, since Claudette managed to defeat everyone (unlike what happened in the novelizations) and only Maria/Leina managed prevent the outcome, by putting herself between the Rebellion Army and her sister without fighting her.
  • This is even worse for Alleyne, (at least in the animated canon) since her entire village and her people were destroyed between the events of the original series and Rebellion and even if the Swamp Witch is defeated, that wouldn't bring back the dead people to life again and she will be the last elf of her tribe (excluding Echidna and Nowa) in that forest.
• Elves vs. Dwarves: Averted. Ymir befriends a lot with them, especially Nowa. (As long as she doesn't try to sell steel weapons to them). Curiously, it's more Elves versus Humans instead here.
• Excuse Plot: The original gamebooks only had a very basic plot for all the characters. Subverted later with the anime and manga adaptations that expand the plot more. Note that even this could be seen as an improvement over the original American Lost Worlds gamebooks, which didn't have any kind of plot at all.
• Fanservice: Every single character caters to at least one fetish, with large breasts being the most common. Special mention goes out to Melona, a Bunny Girl who is also a Slime-Girl (aka Goo-Girl).
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Hinomoto, which is clearly Japan. Its name is in fact derived from an alternate way of reading the kanji for Japan. Amara, where Menace comes from, is an equally obvious stand-in for Egypt. Also, in Queen's Blade Rebellion, we have Shai-Fang, which is a stand-in for China.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Excluding the cross-over characters from the Queen's Gate gamebooks, Vingt, Captain Liliana, Alice and her mother Lewis are the only characters who uses powder-based guns as their means of attack. In Captain Liliana's case, only her pirate ship uses powder-powered cannons, but she uses a rapier and sometimes, a revolver-shaped crossbow.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Possibly due of its origins from the original Lost Worlds books, not only we have the typical stuff you find in any Fantastic setting (humans, dwarves, elves, etc), but if we include both Rebellion, the side-stories and the Spiral Chaos games, we also have princesses, knights, barbarians, ninjas, samurai, thieves, robots, gunslingers, Mikos, mummies, slimes, ghosts, wraiths, demons, angels, archangels, Youkai, homunculi, giant robots, cooks, priests, nuns, slaves, and sometimes a mix of something of all the above.^note The only things QB doesn't have (yet) are Cowboys, Aliens, Cyborgs, and Methodists On top of this, the combination of Fluffy Cloud Heaven along with referring to the equivalent of Hell as "Hades," the astral aspect of the series seems to be a mix of Judeo-Christian and Greek mythologies.
• Fashionable Asymmetry: Most of the characters, though many cases fall into the explanation about armor.
• Females Are More Innocent: Zigzagged in the show’s nearly all-female cast. Though women in the series can be both good and evil, almost all of the evil ones get at least something approaching a Pet the Dog moment or a Morality Pet. Meanwhile, there are some benevolent male characters, but most of the men are usually faceless outlines and crow-fodder, or evil and lecherous assholes. In particular, Dogura, the only male minion of the Swamp Witch, is also the vilest one by far, being a Dirty Old Man who gets his kicks from torturing women, while the female Big Bad Aldra turns out to be a pawn of the male demon Delmore. On the other hand, the Swamp Witch herself is by far the evilest character in the series, while Delmore is ultimately a pawn of her, and is actually female in both the English version of the original anime and the Unlimited Alternate Continuity.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: This happens with all the characters in Queen's Gate: Spiral Chaos since all of them came from different dimensions and time periods.
• Fluffy Cloud Heaven: Nanael hails from one, complete with Greco-Roman architecture.
• Genre Shift: Queen's Blade Rebellion shifts from fighting in a tournament to waging a war against a queen.
• Giant Woman: The Season 1 finale ends with Melona summoning an enormous Sea Serpent to fight the heroes when they start to gain the upper-hand. Doubles as a Gorgeous Gorgon, as her torso is that of a dark-skinned woman with exposed breasts.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: In pure fantasy style, the final battle of the first season sees every major named character fighting against an army of the undead.
• Grand Finale: Queen's Blade Rebellion is the grand finale of both Leina and Annelotte's sagas and the end of the regular QB series as a whole, with other series like QB Grimoire, taking place in a different setting and universe.
• Happy Ending Override: Between the original series and Rebellion. To wit: several heroines are cursed, one of them becomes a tyrant queen, and the Greater-Scope Villain becomes more powerful and her influence in the continent slowly raises.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Leina in the original series, Annelotte in Rebellion and Alicia in Grimoire use swords (albeit Annelotte also has a lance). On the other hand, Alice from the Queen's Gate novels and games uses handguns (due to the modern setting of the story) who also can be used as knives.
• Hidden Elf Village: There are more than one, but the only one the audience gets to see is the one where Nowa and Alleyne live. It gets destroyed in Rebellion.
• High Fantasy: It's a story taking place in an alternative world very similar to medieval Europe, but with magic and fantastic races, where several characters from different backgrounds face each other to achieve their objectives, and there is a great evil lurking in the shadows they must eventually defeat.
• High School AU: The bonus omake included on the DVDs, which take the cast out of their fantasy world and into a modern day one, with no change in fanservice level per episode. Although fitting that much fanservice into a 3-minute episode doesn't leave room for much else.
• Historical Domain Character: More like Historical Domain Character Names instead: Many characters are named or their names are puns of famous historical or mythological characters like Menace, Claudette, Ymir, Nyx, Echidna, Mirim, Annelotte, Laila, Branwen and Lamica from the Spiral Chaos games
  • The Vances are an interesting case: Their last name is very likely based in Jack Vance, who was a major influence for Dungeons & Dragons, which Queen's Blade takes some inspiration from.
  • Almost all the characters in the Queen's Gate side-story novels are based in historical or literary characters like Alice, Dorothy, Lewis, Leonidas and many others.
• Hotter and Sexier: With the base being the original books and related merchandise. The original line was only Ecchi, but later editions really cranked up a few notches in the Fanservice department, arguably becoming borderline Hentai.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: It's explained in many additional materials that the Vances (Leina's family) were the former rulers of the Continent before the Queen's Blade tournament was created by the gods after a war that happened centuries ago. For some reason, they lost their power after that war and they became a mere shadow of their former glory. This was one of the reasons why Leina's father hates the QB tournament (besides it being the cause of the death of Maria, his wife). It also became an important plot point in the OVAs. When Claudette becomes the new queen thanks to Leina, the rest of the nobles revolted against her and her father (and her sister Elina almost pays the price for it), since they considered the whole move to have Leina forfeit the title to her sister as a very dirty political move to restore their former glory.
• Improbably Female Cast: Given the target audience and premise of the franchise, this is not surprising; still it's worth mentioning if one wants to take the story a bit seriously. There are only a few remotely significant male characters in the whole franchise, and even so they are token motivations (Owen and Count Vance) or enemies (Delmore) for the female characters.
  • Played with it in the Queen's Gate novels: While there's many named male characters, practically all of them are the bad guys, (Excluding Rama) and at the end of the story, all of them, minus Rama, died when Arunikuf, after fusioning with Faye Wright (the main villain), was destroyed by Alice.
• In Name Only: The only thing the Vanquished Queens OVAs shares with the original printed versions is the fact that the heroines face some kind of very terrible dilemma, but not the original downer endings from them. This is not a bad thing per se, since it allows to expand the personalities of many of the characters, not to mention to explain what happened with many characters who don't appear in Rebellion.
• Interfaith Smoothie: Nanael and the other angels reside in Fluffy Cloud Heaven and are based on modern Judeo-Christian beliefs, whereas the Swamp Witch and Hades are taken from Greek Mythology. It's also unclear if there is one god or many, as the Head Angel refers to only a singular deity, but the narrator and other characters refer to multiple (though the Head Angel may be referencing the Top God).
• Introdump: The first episode of season two has Nanael listing pretty much everybody to quickly bring the audience up to speed.
• Istanbul (Not Constantinople): Tomoe's Far East country, Hinomoto, is literally just a different way to read "Japan" in kanji.
• MacGuffin Title:
  • The Queen's Gate novels are about the titular dimensional gate that allows traveling through dimensions.
  • The title of the new series Queen's Blade Grimoire has two meanings: Grimoire refers to the magical books the protagonist uses and, unlike the original continuity, the titular Queen's Blade is a proper sword, the most powerful weapon that can destroy the Winter Demon, the new Big Bad in this continuity.
• Magic Is Evil: Despite being a Fantasy series, there's very few people with genuine magic powers, and many of the supernatural fighting techniques are more akin with those used in the Shōnen genre, rather with those of the fantasy genre (Or sometimes, like Claudette, due to some MacGuffin, like her sword). The only people who use magic powers continuously are The Swamp Witch, who is the main antagonist, Nyx (thanks to Funikura, and even Aldra and Delmore are afraid of him, despite their origins), Menace (thanks to the her master, The Swamp Witch, and she wasn't a wizard in her former life in first place and more of a melee fighter instead) and many of the villains from the Spiral Chaos games. The only exceptions are the angels (Nanael and Hachiel) and Melpha, but their powers are from divine origins, rather than their own. In fact, Hobby Japan themselves heavily implies this is the case.
  • This is averted in the newest continuity, Grimoire, where everyone can use magic without guilt.
• Magitek: Despite the Fantastic setting, normal people can watch the battles of the tournament using magical crystal balls floating in the sky, who are the Fantasy version of a widescreen giant TV normally used for watching sport events for free in the street in real life. (In the gamebook continuity, the same ones appears, but they are smaller and used in pubs, just like a flat-screen HD TV in a bar in real life)

• Merchandise-Driven: The Visual Battle Books are what really ignites any other related product for the franchise, from figurines to Anime/Manga and Video Games; Hobby Japan itself are endorsed by other companies to make merchandise of their products, so making some for their in-house creation comes off as expected.
• Mood Whiplash: The franchise seems to love this trope a lot, especially in the anime series and the Spiral Chaos games. Despite being a Panty Fighter series, things can get very dramatic and sad sometimes. Normally at the halfway of the plot:
  • First season: While not as extreme as in later incarnations, episode 7 is moderately depressing, since Nanael complains about how she's discriminated for having a deformed wing and being unable to fly as well as the rest of the more normal angels, like Hachiel.
  • Second season: Tomoe kills Shizuka as a plan of the latter by forcing her to fight to the death. Cattleya is petrified by Aldra, and Airi disappears after losing all her life force.
  • Rebellion (Anime): After Annelotte fights against Mirim trying to destroy the Magical Stones from her armor, her Superpowered Evil Side finally shows up and Captain Liliana steals Vignt from both Ymir and Huit.
  • Rebellion (Illustrated Stories): Too many to mention, but the aforementionated scene from the anime with Annelotte happens in different fashion and it's bloodier than the animated one with Ymir, Elina and Mirim barely escaping alive from that battle.
  • Rebellion (Manga): Same as the anime and the Illustrated Stories, except the aforementioned battle from the Illustrated Stories is even messier and bloodier, even for the standards of the franchise.
  • Rebellion Zero: Too many to mention too. Just in the beginning of the story, Airi kills Annelotte's mother and her father pulls out an Heroic Sacrifice to stop Annelotte when she went into her Superpowered Evil Side due to her rage.
  • Queen's Blade Spiral Chaos: Cute reveals her Superpowered Evil Side and her real name.
  • Queen's Gate Spiral Chaos: Weiss, the final boss, appears for first time, the heroines are unable to defeat her, and Cute, Ramshel and Sushel pull out both a Fusion Dance and a Heroic Sacrifice of sorts at the same time to stop her.
• Mordor: The Swamp where The Swamp Witch lives.
• Nintendo Hard: Compared with the Super Robot Wars games they are based of, the Spiral Chaos games are much harder: You begin the game with few characters and some of them, especially Jean, are too weak to pick a fight against many enemies (especially named ones). You don't have a battleship or something equivalent in those games for recovering HP for free and you have to use items for that, and you have to buy them or get them from defeated enemies and unlike the recent mainstream SRW games, the Spiral Chaos games use the classical SRW method of upgrading your character (your weapon and each part of their armor and each upgrade cost money). You have to use Jean for recruiting the Monsters Girls while you manage to find the rest of the cast and, above all, grinding (or cheating, if you like it) is almost mandatory in those games.
  • The one thing Queen's Gate has compared to SRW games is that it has a "Free Battle Mode" to train your other characters so that they won't get left behind.
• No Ending: Rebellion's anime adaptation ends on a cliffhanger that has yet to be resolved, with the series instead being rebooted with Unlimited, and even that is only two OVAs.
• The Nudifier: Melona's "acid breast milk", and the mucus from the Kouma toad, though the latter is more to demobilize.
• Numerical Theme Naming: All the angels from the Queen's Blade universe (excluding Layla from QB Rebellion) are named after numbers in Latin with their names ending with the Hebrew ''-el" suffix. For some odd reason, Nanael, Hachiel and Kyuel have their names beginning with Japanese numbers (seven, eight and nine respectively) instead.
• Only One Name: Everyone, except Leina, Elina, Annelotte, Fio, Maron, Alice, Dorothy, Goldie and Michel. Justified, as being set in medieval world, only nobility can use last names. Alice and Dorothy, being both from modern era Earth, have them by default.
• Panty Fighter: Par excellence. Exploiting this trope as much as possible is pretty much the entire point of the franchise. The anime makes sure that at least one woman's breasts are exposed in every episode. While this doesn't always happen through fighting, it's during those situations that it happens the most.
• Perpetually Shiny Bodies: The franchise often portrays the girls with high-gloss on their exposed skin, albeit it depends on the artist.
• Perspective Flip: The Hide & Seek manga is about Elina's Stern Chase of her sister Leina, the main character of the series.
• Porn with Plot: What begins with the transparent Excuse Plot common to Panty Fighters series develops into something more.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: Since the original gamebooks only had a very basic plot, many adaptations of the franchise have to adapt the plot from many other sources, mainly from additional books. The anime is possibly the most notable example of this: Basically it takes the originally premise of the franchise and expands the personalities of many of the characters, especially Leina: While in the gamebooks she was a Hot-Blooded heroine since day one, in the anime she's turned into an angsty girl with an inferiority complex that growns into a Hot-Blooded heroine, and the rest of the cast also receive improvements in their personalities, especially Nanael and Tomoe.
• Put on a Bus: The only returning characters from the previous series in Rebellion are Ymir, Elina, Aldra, Risty, Menace, Airi, Claudette as a queen, Leina under a new identity, Melona impersonating Ymir and Melpha becoming an archbishop at the end of Siggy's story.. The fate of the rest of the cast are explained in different side-stories (Tomoe, Alleyne, Nanael and Nowa) or it's never explained whatsoever (Nyx, Irma and Echidna). Cattleya is unique in that she does gets an explanation for her absence, but it's an intentionally ambiguous one.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits:
  • While this is normally averted in the TV series for obvious reasons (except during the final battles from both seasons), it's played straight in the Spiral Chaos games: Including the TV series along, we have five princesses (Leina, her sisters, Ymir and Cute, each one with different personality quirks), a thief (Risty), an angel (Nanael), a sword-wealding miko (Tomoe), an half-elf (Nowa) and her instructor, a normal Elf (Alleyne), a Mercenary Elf (Echidna), a big-breasted Monster hunter (Cattleya) and her son (Rana), an assassin (Irma), a dimensional-traveling gunslinger (Alice), a Magical Cook (Maron), a queen (Aldra), a nun (Melpha), a street-fighting Ojou (Lili), three ninjas (Shizuka, Mai Shiranui and Junko Hattori, make it four later with the inclusion of Taki, or five if we also include Kasumi), a Magical Girl (Ink), a nurse (Kotone-chan) a Power Ranger-wannabe (Wonder Momo), two humanoid girls with massive power (Dizzy and Noel Vermillion), a jungle girl (Cham Cham), a ninja maid (Iroha), a Medieval dominatrix (Ivy), two Gender Flipped Samurai (Jubei Yagyu and Sanada Yukimura), a Gender Flipped Three Kingdoms General (Kan'u/Aisha), a girl infused with an evil sword power (Pyrrha), the reincarnation of the last Tsaritsa of Russia (Katja) and her servant, a pedophile bully (Hana), ... and a perverted male Cleric. (Jean)
  • The villains are not better about this: We have a Slime Girl (Melona), a Wraith Maid (Airi), a lesbian Cleopatra-wannabe (Menace), and her talking perverted sceptre (Setra), a Witch (Dora), a vampire (Lamica), a Bunny-heared Idol Singer (Luna), a gothic gunslinger (Aine), a Mecha-otaku (Humina) two underage-looking priestesses (Ramshel and Sushel) and a girl in a giant Mecha (Weiss).
  • And in Queen's Blade Rebellion, due of the change of genre (from fighting in a tournament to waging a civil war), in the heroic side we have a half-human half-demon princess (Annelotte), an underage-looking genius elf (Huit), a Robot Elf (Vingt), Two Ghost-hunting sisters (Tanyang and Sanyang), an half-angel half-human girl (Layla), a Stripperific jungle girl (Luna-Luna), a Samurai (Izumi), a Slave (Branwen) and many of the returning cast of the previous series.
  • And in the Villainous Side in Rebellion we have some of the heroines-turned-villains (Elina, Ymir and Claudette, this time as a queen) a Ghost pirate (Captain Liliana), a Valkyrie (Mirim), a nun (Siggy), some of the returning villains of the prequel, and the Swamp Witch, a very powerful and mysterious figure who is behind all the events.
• Ramming Always Works: Many characters, especially Leina, really love to use this tactic against their opponents.
• Rape Discretion Shot: This page from Hide 'n Seek, complete with falling rosebud, makes it clear that Elina rapes Nyx, without having to show it.
• Really Dead Montage: When Tomoe kills Shizuka.
• Redshirt Army: The Queen's Army in Rebellion is a literal example, since their armor is red.
• Revised Ending: The DVD version of the first season fixed a potential Plot Hole regarding Melona in the final episode: In the original TV broadcast, she transforms into the Demon Snake, and she was destroyed by Leina, possibly to give the series a proper ending in case it wasn't given a second season. Since the series received a second season, the DVD version retconned this and Melona just summons the Demon Snake, while Melona becomes her shield, and while the demon was destroyed, she managed to escape in time.
• Rock Beats Laser: In Queen's Gate Spiral Chaos, due to the fact you have to travel to different worlds with different technological levels, it's not unusual that the Queen's Blade heroines (who are from a Medieval setting) had to fight against more advanced opponents like robots, people with guns, or even against a Mecha on foot (Weiss, the final boss), with nothing more that swords, maces, magical powers, handguns, and sometimes with their bare hands!
• Schizo Tech: Taken to ridiculous levels in Rebellion (at least in the TV series, since in the regular continuity the technological level didn't change a lot), where we can see Ymir using a magic-powered car. Vingt's very existence is this trope, with her being a wind-up powered robot elf with machine guns able to fly.
• Sequel Hook: The ending of the anime version of Rebellion is an obvious hook for a fourth season. However, due to various behind-the-scenes issues (i.e. Menace's Japanese VA being pretty much unable to reprise her role), the studio has put the series on hold for now.
• Shout-Out:
  • The game Queen's Blade Spiral Chaos includes many shout outs from many mecha anime (Gundam SEED, Gundam Wing, Great Mazinger, Super Robot Wars, etc.) and some non-mecha too (Fist of the North Star, Tales of Phantasia, Guilty Gear, etc.) Justified, because the game was programmed by Banpresto, the creators of the Super Robot Wars series.
  • Also, if you press the Select + Start buttons together to activate the Panic Mode, in the first game, you will see Leina in a 8-bit RPG game Dragon Quest-style and in the sequel, you will see Jean and Maron (the new original character) parodying Mega Man instead.
  • Many stages from the Queen's Gate Spiral Chaos game are named after episodes or titles from other anime series, mainly from the Mecha genre, like "Blood-sucking Princess of Sorrow"^note 哀・吸血姫, a parody of 哀・戦士 (Soldiers of Sorrow), one of the most famous songs of that series., Booby Trap^note Named after the first episode of the series, The Melancholy of Ink and Weiss' Ambition.^note Named after the game Mobile Suit Gundam: Ghiren's Ambition
  • The masked male Mooks that appear in Queen's Gate Spiral Chaos looks like the ones from Shocker. (With their high-pitched yells, to boot.)
  • While it could be a coincidence, and from all the things they could reference in the series, The Mobile Fortress Bligh from Queen's Blade Rebellion can be a shout out to Discworld.
  • In the Queen's Blade Battle fangame, if you put both Melona and Captain Liliana in a tag team, their tag team is named Ungrateful Undead.
  • The titular Queen's Gate from the QG Spiral Chaos looks like a combination between a Cross Gate and the Stargate
  • The titular tournament being organized each four years sounds like the rules from another fighting tournament where the fighters use Gundams (And at least in the animated version, the previous winner of both tournaments blatantly abuses of Screw the Rules, I Make Them!).
  • The Holy Milk Monster Ellosium from the Vanquished Queens OVAs looks like a combination between the EVA-01 (without the armor) and a Titan.
• Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality: Lands on "Out of the Way, Sperm Bank!". Men are occasionally in positions of formal power, like the priests and noblemen of Hinomoto, the ruling council of Elves, and Count Vance, but in all cases they rely on women. Men are still often soldiers and bandits, but very much in the background. Named male characters are also very likely either villains or a Satellite Character to one of the girls.
• Spell My Name With An S: Until the official website for the anime spelled things out in English, some characters didn't quite have a lock on their names. Note that even this page isn't consistent.
• Spiritual Successor The Spiral Chaos games technically are spiritual successors of the Banpresto's Playstation game Super Tokusatsu Wars 2001 which was the first game using the Super Robot Wars engine, but with human-sized characters from the Tokusatsu genre like Kamen Rider, Kikaider, etc. Both games manage to get one in the shape of Super Heroine Chronicle.
  • The franchise itself can be a spiritual successor of sorts from Ruin Explorers, also from Hobby Japan, which also takes place in a fantasy setting and the main characters are also female.
• Status Quo Is God: More like the Status Quo is "Maintained by the Gods": The whole series (at least during Leina and Annelotte's sagas) makes it clear the Queen's Blade tournament is possibly the only thing that keeps the whole setting in check, since the whole Continent is recovering from a previous war that happened many decades before, and the gods created the tournament for avoiding another war that could destroy the Continent or even the entire world. In Rebellion's Illustrated Stories, our heroines, after many battles, decided to restore the former status quo, even if that status quo is the one who caused the whole mess in first place. In fact, after defeating Claudette, they found out about this the hard way, as they can't kill her, or even vanquish her, since the gods (or Leina) choose her as the queen.
• The Stinger: Queen's Blade Rebellion (and the whole Continent Saga as a whole) ends with the Swamp Witch defeated for good... except that we see Airi carrying the remains from the real Swamp Witch after Aldra and Annelotte managed to remove her from her mother Werbellia, and trying to find another host for her.
• Stripperiffic: 99% of all characters. Lampshaded in 2nd episode of the second season when Tomoe comments on the other fighters.
• There Can Be Only One: Only one Beautiful Fighter can win the tournament and become queen.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: While the tournament is very brutal by itself, it's not allowed to kill the opponent, unless there's no other choice. This rule is removed in the Unlimited reboot.
• Too Hot for TV: Zigzagged since whether or not the anime is censored while airing in TV depends on which network it is currently airing.
• Tournament Arc: The whole second season is about the titular tournament.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Sausages for everyone! Eaten quite ....strangely at times.
• Trailers Always Lie: The trailers of the OVAs make you believe that many of the characters will face a serious life-threatning danger or may be doing something nefarious (like Nanael), but at the end, everyone lives (except Shizuka), but not always in a satisfactory way.
• Translation Convention: It's heavily implied during all the series that none of the Western characters (Leina, Elina, Nowa, etc.) speaks Japanese at all and they speak a language based in glyphs (Although it's implied in Rebellion to be English, with a different, alien typography). On the other side, Tomoe and Shizuka speak Ancient Japanese, but it's never explained how they managed to understand the language of the rest of the cast, since both girls never traveled outside their country in their lives. In a very funny twist, they tried to learn the language using a very old scroll with Russian greetings instead.
  • This is a plot point (of sorts) in Queen's Blade Rebellion: While it is never mentioned on-story, Tanyang supposedly speaks with a Chinese accent, but Sanyang speaks the local language without any accent at all.
  • Also, it's implied that the non-human characters (Alleyne, Echidna, Ymir, etc) speak in their own languages, but they are possibly bilingual since they have to interact with humans a lot (especially Ymir).
  • This is also the case in Queen's Blade Grimoire, except that, besides speaking English, the characters also use Hebrew, of all languages, for some reason.
  • In Queen's Gate Spiral Chaos, this is averted like hell with Chample, who speaks only in Okinawan, unlike her master Mina who is also from there, also speaks "Japanese" (or whatever language used in-universe) like everyone else.
• Undressing the Unconscious: In episode 2 of Grimoire, Alicia and Tiina are attacked by Liliana and her Ghost Pirate crew and are knocked out. When Alicia wakes up, she finds herself naked and tied up, hanging by a rope on the ship's mast.
• Vague Age: According to Hans (The avatar of Hobby Japan), most of the human characters don't have established ages. The only exceptions to this are Cattleya (she's about 29-32), her son Rana (7 years old) and Aldra (12 years, albeit her real age is about 20 in the original series and 21 in Rebellion as she won two previous tournaments before, so she's been ruling the Continent for about 8 years) and from the non-human side we have Echidna (about 500), Alleyne (1000), Nowa (about 17), Ymir (60-70) and Eilin (50 years). This doesn't include the angels like Nanael and Hachiel, who are possibly immortals. Oddly enough, in the Spiral Chaos games, the original characters Cute, Jean, Maron and Aruta looks older than 15 but not older than 19.
• Villain Song: The second season ending theme, "Buddy-Body", sung by Melona, Menace and Airi.
• Villains Out Shopping: Melona, Menace and Airi in episode 7.
• Wardrobe Malfunction: The DVD version of the anime applies logic to everyone's outfits - which is to say, if their nipples would slip at a given point, they do.
• Wham Episode: While the whole franchise has lots of these for continuity, possibly the biggest one to this date is the third episode of the Vanquished Queens OVAs because Leina, the main heroine whom, until that episode and after she won the tournament was considered basically untouchable by any mere mortal other than the Swamp Witch, receives possibly one of the most one-sided, brutal and undeserved beatings a character from the franchise can even receive. And, if we include the non-canon alternative ending, it's heavily implied she even ends being raped by the Swamp Witch and her supporters, male and female alike, with the sole exception of Captain Liliana.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: We don't know the name of the country or even the name of the continent where the series takes place. In fact, both the animated versions and the gamebooks makes it clear that the continent where all the story takes place doesn't have a name and it's only referred in-story as "The Continent". This is possibly intentional, since there's very few things written in stone about the whole setting, other than the rules of the titular tournament, so the authors can put any kind of stuff without worrying about contradicting themselves about the setting.
  • This is averted in Queen's Blade Grimoire, since the name of the country where the story takes place is given: Mel Fair Land.
• World of Action Girls: Good luck finding a named female character in this franchise that can't fight. A nobleman's daughters? They must be trained to become proper heirs. A Miko? She learns enough sword techniques to make a samurai jealous. Nuns? They know many techniques to exorcise spirits and punish heretics. That friendly weaponsmith? She and her husband are former adventurers who once killed a dragon. That dwarf girl, part of a race known for making weapons rather than fighting? What better way to demonstrate how good her weapons are than beating people with them?
• World of Buxom: The majority of the cast are very busty and greatly outnumber the characters who have smaller breast sizes.
• Wutai: Hinimoto, the country Tomoe hails from.

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