"I swear, this is the weirdest school in the entire world."
— Tori, the main character lady
The Villain Academy is a NaNoWriMo 2009 winner, published on LiveJournal. It tells of a sadistic school for villains and one lone hero girl trying to infiltrate them. Featuring death, giant mutant electric squids, plot twists, creepy twins, pyromaniacs, non-sparkly vampires, death, dinosaurs, ninjas, filler, and death. Clocks in at 51k+.
The tropes used are:
- Abusive Parents: Rune is shunned by his parents for being born a Dhampyr and not a pureblooded vampire.Rune: "I only learned to cook to feed myself so I wouldn't starve."
- Action Girl: Angie, but the other girls could be as well.
- Black Eyes of Evil: Rune. It's a vampire thing.
- Blatant Lies: Pretty much everything the villains tell Tori before they find out Tori is actually the Snowflakes' long-lost little sister.
- Blessed with Suck: Rune can read people's thoughts by touching them. Apparently it isn't as cool as it sounds; he's basically shunned human contact.
- Version two: Charlie's sister can control plants, but his "superpower" is the ability to disguise his voice perfectly.
- Blood-Splattered Innocents: Subverted; the villain kids are far from innocent.
- Bring It: Tori's foster parents to the Snowflakes.
- Chandler's Law: NINJAS!
- Creepy Twins: The Snowflakes.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Oh, God.
- Truculent gets thrown off a second-story glass window. Characters observe his body on the grounds for the remainder of the novel.
- Charlie gets stabbed quite horribly and with a very squick-worthy description.
- Joy gets chased by the kid villains, slashed by a Velociraptor, and falls down the stairs losing blood and suffering brain damage before finally dying. And then she gets eaten by Velociraptors.
- Cute Little Fangs: Rune has them.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Basically all the villains have them in varying degrees.
- Deadpan Snarker: Ensemble snarkers. It's noted that Tori is, but she quickly becomes tired of everyone else being one too.
- Downer Ending: Tori-Aimee basically causes the deaths of her foster family and her sisters at the end of the final chapter.
- But a Bittersweet Ending for the rabid Tori/Rune shippers.
- Dhampyr: Rune. But dhampyrs and vampires aren't so different, really.
- Distress Call: Ends badly for all involved.
- Secondary distress call doesn't end too well, either.
- Doomed Appointment: Charlie's with Tori, as well as Felicity and Edgar's.
- Duality Motif: Tori. It's because when her foster parents took her home, they had her appearance changed and she got one eye from each of them.
- Evil Tower of Ominousness: The Villain Academy is described to have an ominous tower. But the whole building is just one dark, ominous mass.
- Filler: It's NaNoWriMo. Filler is required.
- Final Battle: An explosive one in "Finale."
- Fluffy the Terrible: Rex, the giant mutant electric squid, was apparently raised and trained by Headmaster Truculent.
- For the Evulz: Oh, sure, the villains angst their little brains out, but they're in it for the lulz.
- Gratuitous Ninja: It's NaNoWriMo. Of course there are entirely unnecessary ninjas!
- Heel–Face Revolving Door: Tori. She goes from hero to villain to indecisive villain to neutral.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Tori at the end.
- Is It Always Like This?: Apparently ninja break-ins are a normal, annoying occurence.
- It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Always.
- Meaningful Name: Most everyone in the novel has a name with a deeper meaning or a name that describes their character. Angie's full name Angana means "fire," Gemelle and Tamsyn both mean "twin," and so on.
- Pyromaniac: Angie.
- Shipping: Many readers are devout Tori/Rune shippers, to the point where they plotted to hunt the author down when Rune betrayed Tori to the other villains by kissing her.
- Plotting is such an ugly word, don't you think?
- Ship Sinking: The Tori/Rune ship was once sunk so horribly that the author commented: "The Titanic went "odamn.""
- Shout-Out: Several. To NaNoWriMo itself, to My Chemical Romance, and to 24.
- Sibling Team: After Tori finds out she's actually sister to the Snowflakes, they team up.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Rune.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Tori calls out her hero parents and her uncle because they blew up Tori's biological parents, who were mad scientists.