YMMV / The Builders

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • After spending the whole novel building up their confrontation, the Captain and Mephetic never fight each other. Instead, the Captain signals Boudica to shoot at him with her rifle when he finds him in his inner keep, and his head is unceremoniously blown off in one sentence.
  • The Lord is even worse. After the Captain confronts him in his chamber, the Toad Lord is so delirious, obese, and high from drugs that he physically can't defend himself. The Captain doesn't hesitate to shoot him to pieces.
• He's Just Hiding: Barley. The novel itself hinted that his death was uncertain since his body was never found, and in the midst of chaos, he probably went back into hiding.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • The Captain is a former soldier seeking revenge against High Chancellor Mephetic. Having failed multiple times before, the Captain recruits former members of his gang so they can all infiltrate the Capital and kill Mephetic and the Toad Lord. After killing Zapata and his gang and recovering the Toad Lord's brother's body during a train robbery, the Captain is captured when he's betrayed by Gertrude and Reconquista. Having planned this in advance, the Captain waits patiently in his cell until his crew returns and breaks him out; he and his gang mow down the rest of Mephetic's forces as they lay waste to his fortress. When the Captain finally confronts Mephetic, he signals Boudica to murder him with her snipe rifle and later kills the Toad Lord himself, thus fulfilling his quest for revenge.
  • High Chancellor Mephetic is a manipulative backstabber who staged a coup during the War of the Two Brothers. After gaining power and becoming ruler of the Gardens, Mephetic soon discovered his adversary he betrayed, the Captain, was still alive. Eager to finally have another shot at killing him, Mephetic had Reconquista and Gertrude infiltrate his gang so he would know the Captain's whereabouts and plot when to ambush him. After Mephetic captures the Captain due to Gertrude's help, he later kills Gertrude herself after she betrays and attempts to murder him. When the Captain's gang storm his fortress and kill most of his forces, he accepts his fate and tries to blow up the whole fortress while he and the Captain's crew are all still inside, preferring death over having to continue his underwhelming, tiresome job.
  • Gertrude, a.k.a. "the Underground Man," is a member of the Captain's crew and an underground crime lord. After being persuaded to take out High Chancellor Mephetic, Gertrude eagerly joins the Captain's crew and assists him with taking out some of his forces. Secretly working for Mephetic already, Gertrude aids the Captain until betraying him during a shootout so Mephetic's forces could capture him. Once invited to Mephetic's keep, Gertrude coolly tells Mephetic that she had poisoned many of his guards and that helping him capture the Captain was their plan the whole time; she attempts to murder him moments later.
• Squick: The Toad Lord. He's a disgusting, obese creature covered in swollen, bulging blemishes and molasses, and he resides in a chamber that smells as bad as an abattoir or an outhouse. And on top of that, the novel all but confirms that he shat himself after the Captain shot him.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • For all the talk of how dangerous they are, Mephetic's Co-Dragons, Puss and Brontë, do virtually nothing in the book. Most of the time they're only seen talking or interacting with each other; Puss in particular never displays any of his skills, and the only notable thing he does in the whole book is mortally wound Bonsoir, which was mostly because Bonsoir had his backed turned for a half hour. Brontë isn't as bad, as she manages to kill Cinnabar in a brutal showoff (at the cost of her life), but just like Puss, this is the only plot-relevant thing she does.
  • Elf. The story sets up her former relationship with the Quaker early on, and she proves more than once that she's a Handicapped Badass. But she has the least amount of interactions out of anyone in the Captain's crew, and beyond her vague past involving the Quaker, very little is revealed about her. Halfway into the novel, she's Demoted to Extra, and existed solely as a Chekhov's Gunman so she could kill Reconquista and the Quaker.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: One of the main criticisms about the novel is that a majority of the cast is flat or one-note. Hardly anyone in the Captain's group goes through Character Development, and most of them are almost as bad as Mephetic and his crew, but we're supposed to root for them because the narration says so. When the Captain's crew is slowly killed off, it's hard to care about any of their deaths because the novel didn't flesh out the characters. The ending only hammers the final nail in the coffin, as it's implied that the death of Mephetic and the Toad Lord will most likely result in another war, and the Captain is fine with letting the country rot.

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