YMMV / Deepgate Codex

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Sillister Trench, while killed offscreen, is given a soulful send-off by John Anchor.
• Anticlimax Boss: Ulcis. Not that we care, though.
  • Also Cospinol and Menoa and... hell, just about everyone who pisses Carnival off to that degree.
• Complete Monster: Scar Night brings us Ulcis, the god of chains. After rebelling against his mother, Ayen, and being flung to Earth, Ulcis takes up residence in a seemingly bottomless abyss. Using his Herald, Callis, as his representative, Ulcis gathers an army of followers and orders them to construct the city of Deepgate atop of his abyss, promising salvation and a chance at reclaiming Heaven from Ayen to all those who die in his service. This results in the creation of a culture of people who dedicate their lives to waiting to die, creating a high suicide rate, and a total lack of anything approaching an appreciation for life. This is not the bad part. The bad part is that Ulcis is lying. He has no interest in reclaiming Heaven (he'd much rather Take Over the World) and he and his undead horde of angels instead devour the souls sent to him. That's without getting into his treatment of his daughter. Having found an attractive corpse, Ulcis reanimated her, raped her, and then impregnated her, keeping her alive so that he might enjoy her suffering. When his daughter's birth resulted in the woman dying again and being released from her agony Ulcis tried to hang the child from one of the city's foundation chains. When the girl chewed through the rope, Ulcis recaptured her, abused her, and had her gangraped by his undead, gloating that there was no point in taking her soul because by the end, there wasn't one left. When he encounters his daughter again (her having since become an amnesiac Serial Killer), he gloatingly informs her of what happened to her, forces her to recall it, than indicates that all of his soldiers remember her and would love to do it again. "They remember you. My little Rebecca. My little carnival freak."
• Ho Yay: Rachel and Carnival... eventually.
• Moe: Carnival. Ye gods, she's adorable.
• Moral Event Horizon: Ulcis in the first book; Menoa in the second.
• Network Decay: In Iron Angel, the established cast get to do exactly nothing - Dill is sent to Hell, where he spends most of the book running away, fails, and then the villains do exactly what they wanted in the first place, Carnival comes back to join the heroes for apparent reason, only to face a Curb-Stomp Battle against John Anchor, and Rachel's prior badassery and determination go out the window as she becomes a purely passive observer in events, complete with a new angsty, female, incredibly pale, not-as-inhuman-as-she-would-like protagonist to actually take her place. What? It might have been a decent novel in its own right had it focused on a new setting and new characters, but Iron Angel wastes a full third of its page count on making you watch the characters you were invested in do exactly nothing.
• The Scrappy: Sillister Trench.
• The Woobie: Carnival. Alice is introduced as one in Iron Angel, too, and by the end of the book Dill is also worthy of the title.