Awesome Music: The members do their best to turn songs from diverse video games and other sources to their own advantage. SDM and Aurion occasionally even create or remix songs specifically for the series. For example, "Darkness", a dark, depressing remix of Patchouli's theme (which also incorporates a hint of Mithos Yggdrasil's theme, which is Hellgate's leitmotif). This music plays in the Hellgate Gaiden when SDM lets the Dark Spore get the better of him and becomes cruel to her.
Cry for the Devil: Almost all of SDM's villains have something tragic about them. The Solos regarding Vocus in particular fit this trope very well.
Growing the Beard: It is usually accepted that the series as a whole started really getting good during the Coronai arc of Hellgate 2 P2.
Fridge Horror: Thanks to Hellgate's meddling, Gensokyo prior to Crossroads was pretty much screwed. One timeline has Hellgate destroying it through his machinations, the other has the Black Spawn try to, and The General actually suceed to do so. From the Xat roleplay: becoming a full-fledged "Gift of Anathemus" requires the "incomplete" Gift to die, preferrably in intense emotional trauma. In the case of the two Arachni, getting them through the emotional trauma necessary required the Rainbow Factory to stage an assassination of Celestia by a mechanical copy of Executor (which then proceeded to kill the Arachni for real). To put this into perspective, Celestia is a Universally Beloved Leader, and Executor is their Fire Forged Friend who willingly agreed to pretend to be evil so the rest of the group could seek out the relative safety of the Factory (he's so good at pretending, that even said group suspects he may now have gone power-mad for real, a theory which may have a grain of truth in it). All this to lead up to the following: Executor's power has awoken, too. Assuming that the Clan used the same "emotional trauma plus death" combo, and keeping in mind that Executor's will is strong enough that he was fully prepared to raze cities from the surface of the planet and even to die for the sake of his friends, what the hell did the Nihilus Clan have to do to him to inflict sufficient emotional trauma?
Memetic Mutation: Poor Zoruff. Everybody always keeps forgetting about him.
", a dark, depressing remix of Patchouli's theme (which also incorporates a hint of Mithos Yggdrasil's theme, which is Hellgate's leitmotif). This music plays in the Hellgate Gaiden when SDM lets the Dark Spore get the better of him and becomes cruel to her.