YMMV / Empowered

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Emp's low self-esteem: Genuine insecurity or fishing for compliments? While it's obvious that she does have some body issues, Elissa's circle of friends is so genuine and accepting of her that it becomes much harder to believe that she hasn't become more comfortable with herself over time. It doesn't help that she lays it on pretty thick that she thinks her curvaceous body is fat and undesirable despite her boyfriend's refutations.
  • Just how accurate are Sistah Spooky's recollections of her youth? Was every other girl in her school really an Aryan uberhotty? Or was that just how Theresa perceived them? How much was she bullied? Clearly she was bullied, but was it really by everyone, or did it just feel that way to her? And was she really bullied for her looks, or because she was gay? In one of her flashbacks we see one of her schoolmates angrily accusing her of having tried to kiss her. For that matter, just how gay is she? We know she had sex with a man on one occasion, but that was to hurt Emp, at least primarily. Is she basically straight, but Mindf██k was the exception, or is she bi, or is she gay, and Mindf██k was her type? Could it be that her issues with blondes are, in a sense, sour grapes? That is, blondes are her type, but because of her experiences in school, she so fears rejection by them that she compensates by hating them before they have a chance to reject her?
  • In High School Hell, one item is cleared up; the Infernal Service Provider's package was quite clearly aimed at turning women into Aryan superhotties, and over fifty girls accepted his deal, losing their original appearance in the process.
• The Chris Carter Effect: There are quite a few plot threads that develop throughout the series, and some that are put on the backburner for several volumes. As entertaining as the series is, some fans are nervous that not everything will wrap up properly. This is acknowledged in the afterward of book 8, where Emp gripes about people always asking the author if he has an ending planned.
• Complete Monster: For such a lighthearted series, Empowered sure manages to get a lot of brutal villains:
  • Willy Pete is a fire elemental who still has a man's appetites, which he satisfies with rape—-he favors the eye sockets—and killing, which, in his case, are one and the same, thanks to his constantly superheated body. Because all normal food is incinerated on contact with him, he resorts to eating superheroes and supervillains. He doesn't even need to eat; he just does it because he likes the taste. Oh, and he usually eats someone while raping them. At the end of Volume 5, he incinerates 8 of the 10 supers sent to stop him, and then, just for fun, followed this up by throwing as much fire as he could through the portal they came through without even knowing what was on the other end, thereby forcing Mindf**k into a Heroic Sacrifice to save Emp.
  • Ninjette's father only appears for a few panels, in Volume 7, but manages a lot of evil, and is likely the reason that Ninjette herself is an alcoholic like her father. He starts by putting her through Training from Hell, and emotionally abused her to the point where she still has self-esteem issues. Later on, when she is still underage, he betrothed his daughter to a Dirty Old Man of an allied clan, Ninjette tried to lose her virginity, as the deal was for a virgin bride, but her clan was too frightened of her father to take her up on the offer. Instead, she slept with her childhood friend who was prince of an allied clan. Her father's reaction was to slaughter his bodyguards, castrate the prince and stuff his genitals in his mouth before ripping his head off, fully knowing there'd be a war, despite being formerly allied with the clan. He then proceeded to beat his daughter so that for some she wouldn't "be able to walk…or eat solid food, or piss without blood…" In addition, he's been shown as raping Oyuki, a genin around his daughter's age—-in a way "anatomically unlikely to induce pregnancy"—and hires another clan to drag his runaway daughter back to the clan without hands or feet to serve as a broodmare. Ninjette's father, despite only being a human with no superpowers, is one of the most vile characters in the series.
• Crack Pairing: The author himself has stated that he didn't expect the relationship between Ninjette and the Caged Demonwolf to become so... supportive.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Much (if not most) of the humour comes from how absolutely over-the-top horrific the situations depicted are. Adam Warren has mentioned that this trope is actually trickier to pull off than it looks - he has to be constantly careful to make things just tasteless enough that they're funny, without being so tasteless that it crosses the line a third time and goes back to just being gross.
• Friendly Fandoms: There's been quite a few people that have noticed how much the series has in common with One-Punch Man, what with all the superhero parody, kooky powers and supposed "loser" main protagonist. Not to mention that when it stops being funny, it REALLY stops being funny.
• Iron Woobie: Emp takes all the horrible luck and daily humiliation brought about by her unreliable supersuit. She cries, moans, bitches, gets scared... and then she will get back up again, because she is a hero.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Ninjette. Ask anyone and they may pair her with the Maidman, ThugBoy, Empowered, Caged Demonwolf. Basically any main character.
• Like You Would Really Do It: On one metatextual page, Emp says she tried to get some assurance from the author that he wouldn't kill off a character as prominent as Ninjette. Warren replied with an Evil Laugh that he liked Mindf██k too.
• Moe: Empowered. Part of what attracted ThugBoy to her in their first encounter.
• Moral Event Horizon: In Empowered and Sistah Spooky's High School Hell, Queen Bee Ashley solves the problem of too many blondes sharing too little mystical power by roasting the other girls alive in a deathtrap supposedly meant for the title characters.
• One True Threesome: The series keeps dancing on the edge of making the three main characters (Emp, ThugBoy, and Ninjette) into an outright threesome. Emp is a three-drink bisexual who hits on Ninjette when drunk, Ninjette is barely able to hide her attraction to ThugBoy ("Aieee! Me canoe be swampin"!). Not sure if Ninjette has ever shown any attraction to Emp or ThugBoy to Ninjette, but it wouldn't take much prompting. Anyone's guess if this ends up as a love triangle or a ménage à trois... but the Demonwolf definitely has an opinion on how it SHOULD BE.
  
  And for additional rampant speculation fuel, witness Volume 5 in which Ninjette encounters a fellow (female) ninja disguised as ThugBoy, who proceeds to passionately kiss her until detected. Ninjette then claims the disguise was obvious because the ninja "kisses like a girl". A) This is yet more evidence that Ninjette has some interest in ThugBoy and B) Saying someone kisses like a girl implies the speaker actually knows what it's like to kiss a girl! So... yeah.
  • Ninjette's done more than kiss a girl: a little earlier in that Vol. 5 story, we learn that Ninjette consummated a woman's marriage disguised as her new husband.
  • Oh, ThugBoy's attracted to Ninjette: seeing her drop her panties or having her cuddle up against him gets his elephant trumpeting.
    • And then there is 'Jette's flushed contemplation on how sexy Emp is. It seems all the linkages are there.
    • Volume 10 has the Trio in bed together cuddling in their underwear. If that's not High Octane Ship Fuel, I don't know what is.
• Periphery Demographic: While the large amounts of Fanservice are ostensibly geared towards a young adult male audience the comic has a lot of female fans who enjoy it due to the interesting writing for the female characters and the presence of relatable themes such as empowerment and body image.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The Jerkass-to-genuine-good-guy ratio leans pretty hard in the Jerkass direction and Cerebus Retcon is also on a high ratio (at least Volumes 7 and 8). The titular heroine being a Failure Hero with an elephant-sized dose of Dude, Where's My Respect? (and other Dysfunction Junction issues) balancing out her Determinator attitude can also trigger this. On top of all this, the villains just keep getting stronger and more horrific while the heroes fail to come anywhere close to being strong enough to threaten them.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: As Adam Warren himself pointed out, a bit near the end of the fifth volume has the villain Anglerfish claim that his son didn't deserve his Cruel and Unusual Death, as he never committed any serious crimes and only ever used his lurelight to get laid. While the exact details of how he used his powers aren't really elaborated on, considering that Anglerfish's abilities are to trap people who see his light in a hypnotic illusion, many readers took this to mean that he was using it to mindcontrol people into sleeping with him—which would mean the guy was a rapist, and therefore an Asshole Victim at best.
• The Woobie:
  • Anglerfish, who laments on the murder of his son (Kid Anglerfish), Katastrophe, and Baby Bird and how the Superhomeys didn't care just because they were villains.
  • Mindf██k, who essentially mindraped herself in order to force herself to be a good person. To make matters even more tragic, this contributes to her reasoning behind her Heroic Sacrifice: Empowered is a genuinely good person, whereas Mindf██k (in her mind) isn't because she had to force herself to be one.
  • Empowered. Almost every single act of competence and badassery and happiness she gets throughout the series gets actively denied by the Jerkass part of the cast (who have more of an influence over All of the Other Reindeer than the reasonable part of the cast... doesn't help that they are still smart enough that they manage to pull a Jerkass Has a Point even on the most blatantly unfair of moments), and then we find out stuff like her having seen her dad die of an aneurysm in front of her when she was a child, while he was preparing breakfast for her, and the constant implications that she would be even more badass if she wasn't so absurdly fraught with self-doubt. It's not "one step forward, two steps back" with her, it's more like "one step forward, ONE MILE back".

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