A fantasy webcomic written by ShamefulDisplay, the author of Way Of Wushu, Chanda follows the adventures of the eponymous amazon, who is searching for her homeland of Amazonia. In her voyage, she comes across a young magos called Atticus who tags along with her for his own reasons as she travels across the country of Aegea for clues to Amazonia's whereabouts. On their way, they end up on the front of the war between Aegea and the neighboring Ladonian Empire, as well as on the board of an ancient game between the gods where the humans are the pawns.
Read here.
The author's Tumblr is here (warning: NSFW).
Tropes appearing in Chanda include:
- Action Girl: Chanda is an amazon, so she can obviously hold her own in a fight.
- Affably Evil: General Aquila Varinius Felix seems fairly amiable at first, until he gets to the hostage negotiations. He manages to be incredibly venomous and threatening all the while keeping up a light smile and a pleasant tone of voice.
- Uzoma is perpetually cheery and friendly. Even while she's methodically crippling your limbs with rock throws.
- Amazon Brigade: Alfhildr, Uzoma and Shinju, a trio of amazonian mercenaries who serve on the Kyrtan front.
- Amazonian Beauty: All amazons have a propensity for this trope, but Alfhildr is the most notable example. Her muscles are very pronounced.
- Ambiguously Brown: Chanda. Uzoma is ambiguously black.
- Badass Boast: Atticus drops one against Shinju that is badass enough to make her immediately reconsider fighting him.Atticus: You are going to let her and the prince go, and I'm going to be kind enough to settle this matter after the war.Shinju: You are not in a position to make demands.Atticus: You must be dumber than you look, amazon. Let me explain this to you as simply as I can. If you both fight me, there's no way I can win.Shinju: What. Then why-Atticus: [Death Glare] However, I will definitely kill your unconscious comrade there, and ensure that I maim at least one of you before dying. You tell me if this petty squabble is worth a life and your livelihood.
- Bait-and-Switch: Lykos immediately starts throwing out flirty compliments upon meeting Atticus and Chanda. Chanda is just about to get embarassed when she realizes that Lykos is actually flirting with Atticus.
- Berserk Button: Do not insult Chanda's mother.
- BFS: Caliburn, the Sword of Kings. Summoned via a spell, it is the size of a building.
- Big Damn Heroes: Atticus barges in just in time to stop Chanda from being gored by the amazon trio.
- Big Ol' Eyebrows: Chanda rocks the look. Myrjol also has an interesting variant: her eyebrows are thick, but short, resulting in Starfire-esque oval eyebrows.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Uzoma stays perfectly nice even as she methodically disables Chanda's arms with rock throws. She even apologizes for being rusty with her throwing arm.
- Blood Knight: Besides all her goals, Chanda's primary reason for getting into fights is that it's fun.
- Bond Creature: Magical focus objects have daemons bound to them.
- Boss Subtitles: Most all characters are introduced with a subtitle of their name and a quick summation of who they are.
- Breast Attack: Alfhildr is missing her entire left breast with a massive scar in its place.
According to Word of God she got "very, very unlucky in a fight" and she couldn't be healed up with magic without leaving a scar because "there wasn’t enough left of her to heal up". - Brutal Honesty: Chanda is about as subtle as a brick.Chanda: Hehe! You're not as much of a loser as I thought.Atticus: ...you need to learn how to phrase a compliment.
- There's also this gem:
Atticus: Ahem. Pardon me, Lord Lykos. I am Atticus, a magos. This is my friend, Chanda, an amazon.Chanda: You're tall. - Calling Your Attacks: This is apparently how combat magic is performed. Using spells requires for the caster to shout out their name.
- Chick Magnet: Lykos has scores of women following him around wherever he goes. Of course, he's a champion of all Aegea and very handsome to boot.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Sophos is a bit loopy.
- Corrupt Church: The temple of Ikonos in the city of Akenus withholds knowledge from the citizens on account of knowledge being purportedly dangerous, while they still demand the city's respect. They also indoctrinate the children entrusted to them, and the entire thing is just a front by Agerochos to perform his blasphemous experiment.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: With all his stuck-up intellectualism and love of ranting about things he knows, it's easy to forget that Atticus is an extremely powerful and cold-headed magos. Case in point, he manages to knock out Chanda with a paralyzing spell and then effortlessly breaks up the fight between her and three amazons with just a well-placed threat.
- Crystal Dragon Jesus: Kaveh, the "one true god" that Sophos worships. His name even sounds like the Tetragrammaton.
- Exposition Fairy: Atticus loves to rant about things he knows.
- Eyes Do Not Belong There: Daemonbound Agerochos has eyes lining the left side of his body.
- Fanservice: We get a naked shot of Chanda bound up in chains during "City of Akenus", although it's only in Nika's imagination and her private bits are obscured by speech bubbles. Later on there's an equal-opportunity fanservice scene of Chanda and Atticus skinny-dipping in a stream.
- Fantastic Racism: Chanda being an amazon born outside of Amazonia enrages Shinju to such a degree that she decides she has to be exterminated.Shinju: You are an outsider. The blood in your veins is an existential threat.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The Aegean League is visibly patterned off of Ancient Greece with its toga-clad residents and the fact that it's a loose military alliance of several city-states. They even have souvlaki, an actual Greek food.
- Inside of Aegea, the city of Kyrta is a counterpart of Sparta: a warrior-culture with many slaves where one has to be a soldier to be a full citizen. They also have Spartans' habit of declaring war on their own slaves as a way to train young soldiers.
- The Empire of Ladonia is a clear counterpart of the Roman Empire. Their armies are organized into legions, "consul" is a rank among them and the names are Roman-sounding as well (such as Tertius Varinius Varen).
- The Askuzai seem to be inspired by the Mongols or some other Central Asian nomadic people, judging from Opis' outfit and remarks about "steppe and horse".
- Abydos is Fantasy Egypt, a land of dark-skinned people ruled by a pharaoh. The eye makeup of Prince Sahure is also evocative of the Eye of Ra.
- Amazons can belong to all kinds of different Fantasy Counterpart Cultures. Alfhildr is pseudo-Scandinavian, Uzoma resembles an African woman, while Shinju obviously comes from the setting's equivalent of Japan.
- According to Word of God, Chanda's homeland of Hoduvarta is based on India, with some Pakistani influences.
- Inside of Aegea, the city of Kyrta is a counterpart of Sparta: a warrior-culture with many slaves where one has to be a soldier to be a full citizen. They also have Spartans' habit of declaring war on their own slaves as a way to train young soldiers.
- A Father to His Men: Given a darker twist with Aquila, who works in the camp among his soldiers, but to his enemies he's extremely ruthless.
- Flying Broomstick: Well, a flying stave, but Atticus rides it the same way.
- God Guise: According to Sophos, at least. He holds that the gods are not true gods, and there is only one true god called Kaveh.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: Sure, the Ladonians may be a militant empire of slavers, but Kyrta is no better and if Atticus' words are anything to go by, Argos (the other large city of Aegea) is similarly rotten. However, most of the people living in either of these places are just ordinary folks living their lives.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: The fate of Ancus at the business of end of the Sickle of the Druids.
- Happiness in Slavery: Myrjol's Boss Subtitles read "northerner and loyal slave".
- The Heretic: Sophos believes that all gods of the pantheon are simply powerful beings in a God Guise, and prefers a monotheistic approach instead. This has earned him no less than seven attempts on his life, the latest of which was when angry locals threw him off a cliff and Chanda and Atticus caught him in the air.
- Honor Before Reason: The chieftain of the Brenna furiously rejects General Aquila's offer at cooperation even at the threat of his people being slaughtered, saying that death is better for them than enslavement. As the elders of the tribe ponder if they should accept the offer, he steadily becomes angrier and angrier. Aquila, of course, exploits this to alienate the elders from him.
- Iaijutsu Practitioner: Unlike her fellow amazons who rely on brute strength, Shinju's entire fighting style relies on impossibly fast and precise sword draws. She's so quick with her blade that Chanda can't see or even feel the cut, only realizing she's been attacked when her wound starts gushing blood.
- Idiot Hero: Chanda, Chanda, Chanda. Among other things, she was so wrapped up in her quest to find Amazonia that she didn't notice the massive war that has been raging for the past three years.
- Jerkass Gods: Zig-Zagged. Some gods, like Eupraxia and Kalligeia are fairly reasonable. Others range from the inconsiderate (like Edafos) through the rude (like Kyros) to the outright callous (like Ikonos).
- The Lad-ette: Chanda through and through.
- Lady Land: In Amazonia, all locals are female. An amazon must travel abroad to find a husband, then return to Amazonia to give birth. Those daughters who aren't born in Amazonia aren't considered amazons. It's as of yet unclear what they do with the male children.
- Life Energy: Quintessence, the energy that fuels magic, seems to function this way. This would make the spells performed by magi more like Ki Manipulation, though they also need a focus object to shape it into a spell.
- Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Averted. Despite having no magical abilities whatsoever, Chanda can give Agerochos a hard time courtesy of her sheer physical strength. Of course, when Agerochos absorbs the daemons any hope of beating him physically goes flying out the window.
- Made of Iron: Chanda seems to be made of titanium. At one point, a priest beats her with a burning iron for minutes on end, and she barely seems worse for wear afterwards save for some bruises.
- Mad Scientist: Agerochos is a sorcerous example, who was willing to pierce the firmament and let Akenos be potentially wiped off the map by daemons in order to study them. He also has a sick fascination with Chanda's extreme toughness, gloating that he would cut her up to see what an amazon looks like on the inside after he'd kill her.
- Moving the Goalposts: This is the reason Chanda has never been defeated in battle. If she happens to lose, she just redefines "defeat" so it'll won't count.
- Our Demons Are Different: Daemons (with an ae) are Eldritch Abominations from outside the firmament who can be summoned by sorcerers and bound to objects. Unbound daemons take the form of a black mass with many eyes and mouths.
- Our Goblins Are Different: Goblins are apparently a kind of daemon who can be summoned to work for the sorcerer. They are quite dumb, rowdy and prone to bullying others, and speak broken English.
- Our Gods Are Different: They are humanlike and seem rather similar to the Graeco-Roman pantheon, with two important differences: there are "supreme gods" who embody entire concepts such as war or fertility, and subordinate gods who embody more precise things within their supreme god's domain; they can also be killed and their role taken over by a new god. How the new god comes to be is unknown.
- Person of Mass Destruction: Agerochos after bounding with the unbound daemons can level cities with a single spell.
- Power Crutch: Magi require a focus object with a daemon bound to it in order to perform sorcery. The priests of Ikonos use amulets for this purpose. Atticus first uses an amulet as well, but after "Will of Ikonos" he switches it out for a stave.
- Powers via Possession: Agerochos pulls this off by grafting a disembodied mass of unbound daemons to his body and suppressing them into mere sources of quintessence. This stunt catapults him right into Person of Mass Destruction territory and massively boosts his magical capabilities.
- Proud Warrior Race Guy: Kyrta doesn't have any walls despite being the first frontier against Ladonian attacks, because Kyrtans believe that walls make for cowards. Chanda herself counts too, as an amazon, and has an appropriate reaction to Atticus telling her about this.Chanda: [with starry eyes] That's so cool...!
- The Rant: Mostly used for short remarks regarding the page, but sometimes it offers In-Universe proverbs, myths and quotes from various people as a form of Worldbuilding. Word of God admits that this was inspired by Kill Six Billion Demons.
- Rape, Pillage, and Burn: The genocide of the Dolonci tribe. The Ladonian Legions exterminated an entire tribe of mountain people by crucifying the men, raping the women in front of the men and then slaughtering them, and throwing the remains of the children into a river going in the way of the Aegean war camp as a warning. According to one of the tribe elders, the roads literally flowed with blood.
- Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Atticus and Chanda, respectively.
- Scars Are Forever: Alfhildr has a massive scar starting under her left eye and going all the way down to where her left breast used to be, which never fully healed.
- Semi-Divine: According to Agerochos, amazons are demigods, though it's questionable if he's right. Lykos is also said to be the son of the earth god Edafos and a mortal woman, but this is implied to be Argosian propaganda.
- Shout-Out: To Back to the Future, of all things. At the beginning of "The Road to Kyrta", this exchange occurs right before Atticus summons his staff:Chanda: Anyway - where are we headed? Do you know anything about us amazons? What road are we taking?Atticus: I'll get to that in a moment, but first... [adjusts glasses] where we're going we don't need roads.
- The large unbound demon in "Will of Ikonos" closely resembles Father.
- Sinister Scythe: Sickle of the Druids is a spell that summons a massive sickle made out of pure magical energy.
- Smug Snake: Aquila is extremely haughty and continously mocks his prisoners of war.
- Soldier vs. Warrior: Lykos' soldier is contrasted with Chanda's warrior in "The Road to Kyrta".Chanda: Wasting lives? Aren't you some bigshot warrior?Lykos: I don't fight because I enjoy it, Chanda. I fight because it lets me defend what's important.
- Later in "Ladonian Diplomacy", Chanda comes across a warrior, Alfhildr, and yet another soldier type, Shinju.
Chanda: You say "love of combat" like that's a bad thing! I thought all amazons loved combat. The stories I've heard were all about fighting!Shinju: You are an ignorant fool. Fighting is not an end. It is a means. Alfhildr may forget that on occasion. I do not. - Symbiotic Possession: Agerochos bounds with a mass of hundreds of daemons at once to gain a power boost against Atticus. They try to take over him, but he represses their minds by sheer force of will.
- Villain Episode: Chapter 4, "Ladonian Diplomacy", focuses on a Ladonian encampent near the war front.
