On the left is Theo and on the right is his sister Hannah.
"Sure, you could lock away some bad guys- or beat up someone evil- but you'll see, when you get older, that most of the bad things are around because nobody can agree on how to make them better! Starvation, war, even boredom, it's all because nobody can agree on how to fix things."
A BETTER PLACE is a webcomic by the author of Demon's Mirror.—Hannah
A pair of young siblings, Hannah and her younger brother Theo, accidentally summon a demon through "blood* , fire* , and sacrifice* " while on an adventure in the woods, which grants each of them one wish.
Fast forward a hundred years, and Hannah has become the new god of Earth, although she clearly never grew up mentally. The world has been rewritten with the rules of a fantasy RPG, populated by robots. After she reveals an absurd plan to attach enormous rocket engines to the Earth to turn it into a giant spaceship, her advisor Ninabell is forced to seek out Theo to be the one person that God Empress Hannah will listen to. Meanwhile, the Anti-Theists would like to overthrow Hannah and make Theo their new god; the mysterious rabbit Mr. Bun is collecting mysterious artifacts from each city, each guarded by insanely powerful "wards" of Hannah's direct creation; and Hannah's closest advisor Empress Computer would like to run the world herself so that Hannah need not worry about those trivialities.
Can be found on Tapastic
. Its first page is here. It is now complete.
Tropes:
- The Ageless: Hannah has used her powers to halt her aging process. At one point she considers aging again in an attempt to reconnect with Theo, and she's had some angst about it.
- Achilles' Heel: Something about Terrors makes them dangerous even to Hannah.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Empress Computer is certainly off her rocker.
- Alliterative Title: At least one strip:
- All There in the Manual: the descriptions of the episodes contain lots of worldbuilding, from descriptions of the cities to what the Wards are and why Hannah wants to protect the artifacts they guard so badly.
- An Arm and a Leg: Hannah lost her right arm at one point.
- Anyone Can Die: Several major characters die by the end, including Hannah.
- Artificial Limbs: Hannah lost her arm at one point, and replaced it with a mechanical one.
- Badass Santa: Hannah made a robot Santa.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: The being that grants Theo and Hannah their powers warns then to be careful, since they only get one wish and it'll strip them of their power if they don't use it wisely. Hannah doesn't really take to that last part very well...
- Beware the Superman: As described in flashbacks, Hannah wanted to use her powers to make the world a better place, but her clumsy initial efforts only terrified humanity and made them react with violence. In the end, she instead opted to conquer the world and remake it from the ground up.
- Big Brother Is Watching: Empress Computer's MO, especially after she usurps Hannah.
- Big Sister Instinct: Hannah gets very mad when she finds out that Theo is gone.
- Bittersweet Ending: Hannah and several other of the major characters die, but Theo and Nina survive and rebuild, with the world becoming the one seen in Demon's Mirror several centuries later.
- Blood Magic: The being that granted Hannah and Theo their powers was summoned by a combination of Theo's blood from thornbush scrapes and Hannah frying an anthill:
- As said in the author commentary for Forgotten Shrine:
And by blood, and by fire, and by sacrifice, shall I be called- In One Wish:
"By Blood, Fire and Sacrifice"
"I am brought forth!" - As said in the author commentary for Forgotten Shrine
- Crapsaccharine World: Hannah's new world has shades of this, especially since Empress Computer keeps her blind to a lot of problems.
- Creating Life: Hannah can do this, but she's learned that if she doesn't develop the intelligent ones properly they can easily go crazy.
- Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: Hannah wishes for an omnipotent Imagination-Based Superpower from the Eldritch Abomination in the woods. Upon hearing that her power will be revoked if the being decides she doesn't deserve them anymore, her immediate response is to use her new powers to destroy the stone monolith that triggered the being's appearance. As it turns out, the monolith was seemingly the only thing anchoring the elder god to the world, and its destruction causes it to either die or disappear, allowing Hannah to keep her powers indefinitely.
- Eldritch Abomination: Whatever being gave Hannah and Theo their powers.
- Terrors, which are dangerous even for Hannah.
- Emotion Control: A diagnoser machine Hannah creates tells her that, in addition to mild depression, something is magnifying her emotions. It turns out to be one of her advisors who she gave the power to increase and decrease existing emotions to in order to fight an effective emotional plague.
- Eye Beams: As said in One Wish, Theo wished for:I want to be able to fly! And shoot laser beams from my eyes! And explode!!
- Eyeless Face: A defining characteristic of Terrors is that none have been found that have eyes.
- Flight: As said in One Wish, Theo wished for:I want to be able to fly! And shoot laser beams from my eyes! And explode!!
- From Nobody to Nightmare: Hannah was once a completely ordinary (if cynical) kid, until she managed to scam an Eldritch Abomination and gain a nigh-unlimited Imagination-Based Superpower. A century later, she is the immortal God-Emperor of a world that is totally unrecognizable as having once been Earth, with aspirations of becoming a Galactic Conquerer.
- Gambit Pileup: Empress Computer is manipulating Hannah out of a twisted desire to love and protect her, keeping her in the dark about how messed up her perfect world really is. Meanwhile, Bunny is manipulating the anti-theist rebellion, Theo, Nina and Arma, as well as Hannah's other advisors under the guise of Advisor Irtes.
- Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: Hannah gave one of her advisors an Emotion Control power to do this to the people of Center City, to combat a rise in negative emotions.
- God-Emperor: Hannah rules over the remade world as a god.
- The Gods Must Be Lazy: Hannah's lack of micromanagement (and refusal to consider that she might be wrong) leads to several problems in her 'perfect world', which Nina points out. In particular, Empress Computer is repeatedly and explicitly empowered with the ability to act however she sees fit while Hannah focuses on personal projects, which allows the AI to manipulate her by selectively withholding information.
- In one of the later flavor-text entries, it's revealed that Hannah's laziness led to her shrinking Earth's available landmass to only a fraction of what it once was, sinking entire continents under the ocean so she would have less territory to govern.
- The Heartless: Terrors are subconscious creations of Hannah, made from her fears and slipping out through her dreams.
- Honest Advisor: Nina is one Hannah's few advisors that doesn't seem to be plotting against her. Even freeing Theo from the Stable Time Loop was to try and get him to reason with Hannah, not overthrow her.
- How Do I Shot Web?: Part of the reasons things went bad so quickly when Hannah first tried to use her powers to make the world a better place is that she was still not completely familiar with her powers, and had to make it up as she went along.
- Imagination-Based Superpower: Hannah's power allows her to create anything she can imagine.
- This is slightly deconstructed in one of Hannah's journal entries later on, with Hannah noting that you need to be able to actually imagine something to create it. For example, it's difficult to imagine even one dollar with all the details, let alone a billion. She doesn't have to be that specific, but she still has to comprehend it. If Hannah tried to make a billion dollars, she'd be unable to do it all at once since a billion is such a huge number, she'd have to keep imagining "lots and lots and lots of dollars." until she got the desired amount. In addition, as mentioned under Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object, how "real" something is depends on how much she focused when creating it.
- In Their Own Image: With her powers, Hannah conquered the world and transformed it so thoroughly that it's entirely unrecognizable a mere century later. Now ruling as a God-Emperor adored and worshipped by everyone, her new ambition is to convert Earth into a Planet Spaceship so she can travel the universe and make every planet in the cosmos 'perfect'.
- Killed Mid-Sentence: Something like that. In Hannah Saves The World, Hanna destroys the shrine that the Super-Empowering entity was communicating through. It is unknown whether the entity really died, even though Hannah used a weapon called "Destroy-All". It dies partway through saying something:Wait-! The-link
- Lonely at the Top: Hannah apparently feels isolated by her power and status.
- Loss of Identity: Hannah sometimes worries about this, and it's the major reason she's never altered her own mind despite being capable of it.
- My Beloved Smother: Empress Computer takes on this role to Hannah, deliberately keeping her in the dark about the condition of her empire.
- No Endor Holocaust: Hannah rearranging the continents and eliminating things like mosquitos had some ecological consequences.
- Older Is Better: Apparently the longer something that Hannah's made sticks around, the more "real" it becomes.
- Out of Continues: Terrors can kill someone permanently.
- Planet Spaceship: Hannah plans to turn the Earth into one in order to reach other parts of the solar system.
- RPG Mechanics 'Verse: Hannah's remade world had shades of this, with levels, reincarnation with all your memories after death, modifiable appearances, etc.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: What happens to the worst criminals in Hannah’s world.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
- On occasions when Hannah wonders if everything that she did was worth it, she expresses in her journal a desire to hit the Reset Button and try things again, instead of rushing forward without sufficient practice with her new powers.
- After accidentally killing Nina, in a way that she couldn't reverse, and being attacked by a furious Theo, Hannah uses her power to reach back in time and stop herself before its too late. Even the pages where the incident happened get replaced.
- Ship Tease: Between Arma and Nina.
- Shoot the Builder: The moment Hannah realizes the wish-granting Eldritch Abomination is capable of taking away her newfound powers, she tries to eliminate it so it can't interfere. She succeeds.
- Stable Time Loop: Hannah put Theo and their parents in one.
- Stealth Prequel: The ending reveals that the story takes place hundreds of years before the events of Demon's Mirror.
- Super-Empowering: Hannah and Theo were empowered by a mysterious Eldritch Abomination:
- As said in One Wish, Theo wished for:I want to be able to fly! And shoot laser beams from my eyes! And explode!!
- Hannah has apparently managed to empower others.
- As said in One Wish
- Time Skip: As said in A Braver Newer World:-One Century Later-
- Touched by Vorlons: The entity summoned by the shrine gives Hannah and Theo superpowers.
- Treacherous Advisor: Several of Hannah's advisors have their own agendas.
- Empress Computer has taken on a My Beloved Smother role to Hannah, and is keeping her in the dark about serious issues. Then there's her use of Theo to try and create a weapon behind Hannah's back. She later outright takes control and starts trying to chip people.
- Irtes turns out to be manipulating everyone.
- Another of her advisors, a couple merged together, is manipulating her emotions. This appears to be related to what Irtes is plotting, given that he suggested them for the job.
- Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object: Hannah's created unbreakable shields and swords that can cut anything to test this out. For her which one wins ends up being dependent on both which one she spent more effort on when creating and which one is older, as both make the resulting thing more "real".
- Was It Really Worth It?: A few pages, like the 2016 Holiday page, implies that Hannah regrets on some level the events that led to her becoming God-Emperor of the world in a desire to make it better, and has to keep reassuring herself that it was worth it.
- One of her journal entries has her admit that, in hindsight, she should have spent more time practicing with her powers before she tried to start using them to make things better, and even if she feels things are better now, she wishes sometimes that she could hit the Reset Button and try again, feeling that she could save everyone and everything now.
- What You Are in the Dark: Hannah is introduced as a normal enough kid, but when offered a wish, she immediately wishes for the ability to create anything she wants, destroys/banishes the wish-granter before it can rein on the deal, and quickly goes mad with power as she sets out to make the world a better place.
- In the present, she regrets how things turned out when she started out with her powers, and has even expressed the desire to hit the Reset Button and start over with How Do I Shot Web? not being an issue like it was the first time.
