Basic Trope: The over-the-top edgy Anti-Hero characters very popular in superhero comics of The '90s and 2000s.
- Straight: Mega-Swordd is a ferocious fighter with exaggerated anatomy and an absurdly large BFS (he may also count as They Call Him "Sword" because of his weapon). He only appears heroic when he is fighting complete monsters.
- Exaggerated: Mega-Swordd has cartoonish proportions, and carries a weapon the size of a medium building. He fights against crazed dictators who want to blow up the world and madmen who think they're gods of the universe.
- Downplayed:
- Mega-Swordd is drawn like a real-world strongman, and carries one of the largest one-man weapons invented in real life.
- Mega-Swordd is curt, anti-social, and merciless to evildoers. The superhero society doesn't like to send him on missions to oppose villains they think can be redeemed.
- Justified:
- Mega-Swordd is the result of a steroid experiment or super-soldier project gone wrong, which has also made him a psychotic killer. His weapon is designed especially for him, as superhuman strength is needed just to lift it.
- Mega-Swordd lives in such an undeniably bad place where an evil god or god-like being and his enforcers are free to exploit, kill, and/or rape whoever they please with little to no concern for reprisal or lawlessness and constant fights between rival criminal organizations are the norm that using brutal and fatal methods are the only way he (and whatever companions he has) can survive.
- Mega-Swordd has served and been trained as a minion of Emperor Evulz for most of his life. Thus when Mega-Swordd has decided to leave Evulz's employ, he continues to use the methods he was taught and hasn't been able to adjust to the less brutal methods expected of more traditional heroes.
- Inverted:
- Mega-Swordd appears as a complete weakling and only has a wooden sword for a weapon, and he is often seen as a villain. His "enemies" are basically people with somewhat good ideals and villains doing things for valid causes.
- Mega-Swordd is a "villain" who only looks evil in comparison to the heroes he fights.
- Subverted:
- Mega-Swordd looks like a 90s anti-hero, and acts like one initially, but when the fight is over and the villain prepares to die, Mega-Swordd proves to be The Cape, and throws them in prison.
- Mega-Swordd seems like a well meaning jerkass even if he disparages idealism as being misplaced most of the time, but when things are done and over with, he reveals that he was The Mole for Emperor Evulz and was Evil All Along.
- Mega-Swordd is actually a Terror Hero who tries to minimize the killing he does pragmatically and even then the sheer overkill means it is a quick and painless, if messy death. He has actually killed only three people: the first was about to kill a hostage, the second a mind controller of a slave army caught in battle, and the third was reluctantly to someone suffering from The Corruption - he would have preferred to try to find a cure but honored his final wish anyway.
- Double Subverted:
- He only throws traditional villains in prison. Complete monsters are so evil that they set off his Berserk Button, and he hacks them down brutally to prevent them from slaughtering innocents. Bonus points if he also Lampshades and Justifies the act by explaining that the Nineties Anti-Hero method is the only way to take complete monsters off the streets.
- However, he is shown to be an Anti-Villain who was working for Emperor Evulz as part of a bargain with him to protect someone close to him and achieve a utilitarian goal in the end.
- On the other hand, Mega-Swordd is also deeply cynical and very opportunistic for a superhero - he often refuses to give the benefit of the doubt to villains who are trying to reform and scoffs at genuinely well-intentioned ones as hypocrites, shills shamelessly for In-Universe merchandise deals, and frequently takes advantage of his fellow supers to get things done for himself.
- Parodied:
- Mega-Swordd has so much muscle mass that he cannot function effectively, and can barely move his arms, let alone wield his weapon. Villains that he challenges feel so sorry for him that they fake their own gruesome deaths to make him feel better.
- Mega-Swordd acts like a Nineties Anti-Hero to make a fashion statement. He can pick out a perfect combination of pouches, belts, and shoulder pads for hours on end, follows a weightlifter diet and excercises rigorously to keep his improbable musculature in shape, personally designs his weapons to be as deadly and over-the-top as possible, and has whole books on history and morality of well-intentioned extremism and proper delivery of snappy one-liners in his study.
- Mega-Swordd is The Comically Serious.
- Zig-Zagged: Mega-Swordd is a Superpowered Evil Side of Actual Pacifist of Jeschon, a slender and saintly and forgiving figure who tries to keep Mega-swordd in check and reform others at all cost.
- Averted:
- Mega-Swordd is The Cape.
- Mega-Swordd is a morally ambiguous Anti-Hero, but actually believes in doing what is right and has a line he won't cross.
- Enforced:
- Lampshaded: "Man, Mega-Swordd is so frigging awesome! He's totally not like the other goody-goody superheroes out there!"
- Invoked: A guy wants to get away with killing people and decides the best way to do it is by only killing bad guys.
- Exploited: A clever antagonist takes advantage of Mega-Swordd's wrecklessness and extreme brutality he uses to achieve his goals to undermine his cause before the general public. This brings about Mega-Swordd's downfall causing him to suffer irrepairable damage to his reputation and possibly making the villain look reasonable.
- Defied: Mega-Swordd does not want to be seen as an anti-hero, so he just does things like a normal superhero should.
- Discussed: "Holy crap, this guy is the hero?! What's the villain like?"
- Conversed:
- "So this is supposed to be that Mega-Swordd guy you harp about? As far as his whole 'Evil men are like cockroaches: You can't cure them of their flaws, you can only kill them' rant, all I can say is that he has a jacked up sense of morality and it's beginning to piss me off."
- "Mega-Swordd is a young man who is on a journey of GORE! GORE! BLOOD! TITTIES! GORE! RIDICULOUSLY BADASS WEAPONS! YOU SEE THAT GIANT DEMON OVER THERE!? NO YOU DIDN'T, BECAUSE IT'S FUCKING DEAD! BLOOOOOOOOOOD, GOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRE!!!"
- Implied: The time of Nineties Anti-Heroes is a thing of the past in the story and never shown, but looked upon as a literal Dark Age by the characters from the present, and Mega-Swordd has an undying reputation as a textbook example of one such "hero".
- Deconstructed:
- Mega-Swordd is no different than the villains that he fights, and as a result, he is often seen as a hazard rather than a force for good.
- A discussion about what makes a hero a hero and whether or not Mega-Swordd fits the criteria.
- Mega-Swordd is a dangerous man in a dangerous world with a plausible reason for being so dangerous and a matching philosophy. Yet in spite of being so very dangerous, his world is a complicated a place and violence is not always the answer because not all problems come directly from irredeemable villains. In the end, Mega-Swordd simply doesn't match up to the weaker but smarter and better-hearted heroes who save the world with a much lower body count.
- Reconstructed:
- Mega-Swordd learns to restrain himself, if not out of morality then at least for pragmatism and/or professionalism, and thus keeps the bloodshed to a minimum.
- Mega-Swordd doesn't care about being a hero, but continues to fight off the villains anyways.
- Mega-Swordd is an aloof, cold son of a bitch who doesn't play well with others and makes no secret that he has his own personal goals, but understands that Friendship, Love, and Virtue are not weaknesses, because without those traits humanity would have died out long ago. Thus he uses his abilities (whether they be Vampiric or implanted DNA from a fire wielder) to protect his companions and civilians.
- Played for Laughs:
- Mega-Swordd is so large and powerful, that he beats up the sadistic bad guys and makes pretzels out of their bodies.
- Mega-Swordd is a Heroic Comedic Sociopath whose fighting sometimes involves slapstick comedy.
- Mega-Swordd's "gritty action hero" thing tends to quickly come apart when he's not in action, revealing him to be a neurotic, socially awkward Idiot Hero whose chief concern with mundane activities is whether or not they're "badass".
- Played for Drama:
- Mega-Swordd is an anti-hero operating in a normal, half-decent world - but he comes from a terrible, hopeless Wretched Hive, where Might Makes Right and trying to help people without having the firepower to back up your actions will get you killed by the people who routinely prey on the weak. His Love Interest and True Companions keep trying to show him that not every place in the world is as horrible as the one he comes from, but it's difficult for anyone to overcome a lifetime of horror, and Mega-Swordd's entire character arc is about his worldview slowly changing for the better through a great deal of effort.
- The world of the story used to be a much better place, with many idealistic superheroes protecting it - but after a massive invasion of Scary Dogmatic Aliens and a long, bloody war for the survival of humanity, it became an After the End Crapsack World where only the Nineties Anti-Heroes survived to protect humanity from supervillains and interstellar threats. Mega-Swordd and others like him do their best to protect what's left of Earth, but they understand they will never be able to be as heroic as their pre-War counterparts.
- Played for Horror: Mega-Swordd became timelessly infamous by performing two huge massacres on January 1st 1990 and December 31st 1999, wiping out all of the criminals (actual and alleged) in the city, an act so bloody that all heroes that came after him swore earnestly that they would never fall so low. And then Mega-Swordd decides to try to "bring back the 90s" by killing all of his fellow heroes and replacing them with his own hand-picked "improved" replacements.
Back to '90s Anti-Hero, dude.
