Marhawa Desire is set in the prestigious school of Marhawa Academy, located somewhere in Southeast Asia, where a seemingly controllable outbreak starts to spiral out of control and the dark secrets of both the school and students are seemingly the cause of said outbreak.
It's followed (in terms of manga canon with Capcom) by Resident Evil: Heavenly Island.
Resident Evil: The Marhawa Desire provides examples of:
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Averted. While Ray Hsu's sword is capable of slicing off a zombie's arm, it's not sharp enough to cleave all the way through its skull, instead stopping about halfway. When Ray zombifies and slams the blade into Kapoor's forehead, it doesn't go through his skull and instead gets severely bent.
- Accidental Murder: When Bindi and Nanan tried to escape Marhawa Academy, Gracia and her henchmen tracked them down and tried to recapture them. This accidentally led to Nanan falling to her death. Gracia secretly blamed herself for the incident.
- Action Girl:
- Merah Biji is the B.S.A.A.'s top agent in the Far East Branch for a reason.
- Bindi assists Ricky and the other people combating the outbreak with a crossbow. It later turns out that she's a Dark Action Girl.
- When everything goes to hell, another student named Quan takes up a bat and starts pounding zombies. She temporarily teams up with Ricky before Bindi kills her.
- Nanan turned out to be skilled at martial arts, which she put to good use against Alisa's gang and Gracia's henchmen.
- Adults Are Useless:
- The faculty working at the academy are either nonexistent or apathetic to the mean spirited antics that the monsters they teach get up to in class.
- When Beta Bitch Alisa Lin and her Slime Ball girl squad vandalized Nanan's desk in the flashback, not a single curriculum instructor came to reprimand them for it.
- Air-Vent Passageway: After boarding themselves off inside a classroom, junior class members Gwen Ti Quan and Yang Tai Ming use the ceiling vent to avoid zombies as they make their way to the staff room. Tragically it doesn't work out well for Tai Ming when he falls out of a hatch, gets dragged down by the zombie horde below and ends up eaten before Quan can save him. Quan makes it to the staff room alone.
- All of the Other Reindeer: In life, Nanan was an outcast at the academy because her father, despite being a successful chef, had gone out of business and was racking up huge debts to keep her in the academy. Bindi was the only one who would befriend her.
- Alpha Bitch: Despite being the Student Council President, Bindi is a nice person, at least until Nanan's death. It's the Vice President Alisa who's the bitch. Ultimately, Bindi ends up being much worse than Alisa.
- Ambiguous Innocence: Chris Redfield comments how if they had been contacted sooner, a lot of the tragedies that befell Marhawa populace could have been avoided. But this was a bit of a naive take, in the facet of his presumption that the students and staff were remotely guiltless.
- And the Adventure Continues: The epilogue takes place during the bio-terrorist attack in China, where Piers and Chris are off fighting the C-Virus once again. As for Ricky, he has quit college and become a photo-journalist, dedicating himself to discovering the identity of the hooded woman.
- And Then John Was a Zombie: Happens to nearly the entire campus. Tragically happens to Ricky's uncle Doug when Nanan finds him in the hospital wing.
- Anguished Declaration of Love: Yang Tai Ming screams to a zombified girl about having harbored a crush on her for years when she's approaching him. As she's already a zombie at that point, his words have no effect on her. It doesn't become Dying Declaration of Love, however, because Gwen Ti Quan saves him at that very moment by smashing her head with a baseball bat.Gwen: You should have asked her out while she was still alive. Bad timing, Tai Ming.
- Anti-Villain:
- Nanan Yoshihara, while she's not a bad person herself, is the most responsible for the zombie outbreak in the school after she's transformed into Lepotica.
- Same goes for Bindi Bergara. Despite having masterminded Marhawa Academy's destruction, she was just an Unwitting Pawn whose pain of loss was exploited for research purposes.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: The children of aristocrats are anyway, Marhawa Academy's roster is infamous for doing harm and doing nothing at all to stop the atrocities visited upon each other in the least.
- Asshole Victim: Bindi Bergara's Cynicism Catalyst / Start of Darkness would never have happened if either Alisa Lin and her Girl Posse or Mother Gracia had behaved like decent human beings towards Bindi and Nanan. Mother Gracia compounds this by secretly obstructing and hiding crucial information from the investigation, resulting in the outbreak becoming uncontrollable and killing off almost everyone, including several who might have otherwise been rescued/saved relatively easily (though she at least realizes that this was a bad idea). Neither seem to have much of Freudian Excuse, either.
- Truthfully, everyone in Marhawa can and/or ought to be likened as such, with the students & staff's Hidden Elf Village tendencies and My Master, Right or Wrong dogma, coupled with All of the Other Reindeer towards their fellow classmen, even as Bindi delved deeper into the underlying cruelties sifted through from that bitch of a school dean covering up all the reviled things the other kids got up too. There was very little sympathy to be had for most anyone, not even the guiltless kids and faculty.
- A Storm Is Coming: A heavy storm takes place as Bindi accepts a case of virus syringes from the hooded woman and then injects the deceased body of Nanan with one such syringe, ensuring the turn of the events for the worse for everyone involved during the flashback sequence.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Despite being killed by the BSAA, Bindi not only succeeded in destroying Marhawa Academy, but also in exposing Gracia's wrongdoings to the world as she had initially planned. Ricky lampshades that she got what she wanted in the end.
- Badass Bystander: The hooded woman, AKA Carla Radames, spends much of the story watching from the sidelines as Bindi uses the C-Virus to exact revenge on Gracia and the academy. When Ricky finally spots her during his and Chris' battle with Nanan, he recklessly confronts her with a gun. Being a doppelganger of Ada Wong, the woman effortlessly takes down the young man, pins him down and decides to inject him with the C-Virus. Thankfully she only gets as far as sticking the syringe in his neck before Nanan unexpectedly breaks away from the fight with Chris to attack them.
- Batter Up!: Quan takes up a baseball bat when the entire school becomes infected.
- Belief Makes You Stupid: The residents of Marhawa academy in a nutshell. Their blind faith in their dean's empty word only ever ended up unleashing a firestorm that consumed everything in its path.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: We see some students during the school wide outbreak commit suicide. Ricky would have joined them if Chris hadn't shown up when he did.
- Beta Bitch: Student Council Vice President Alisa Lin spearheaded the bullying campaign against Nanan, while Student Council President did her best to reign Alisa in.
- Big Bad: The Student Council President, Bindi Bergara, is revealed to be the main antagonist. She's the major cause of events in the series.
- Big Damn Heroes:
- When a zombified girl is about to sink her teeth into Yang Tai Ming, Gwen Ti Quan smashes her head with a baseball bat.
- When Gwen Ti Quan is making a run in her search for Gracia, a zombified male student causes her to fall to the floor by grabbing her ankle, before sinking his teeth into her leg. He doesn't get anywhere beyond that initial bite because Ricky, coming from behind, grabs his head by the hair before shooting him at point-blank range.
- Chris Redfield rescues Ricky Tozawa when the latter is overrun by zombies.
- Piers helps Merah by ramming Bindi to the wall with his vehicle when Bindi is getting the upper hand on Merah.
- Ricky helps Chris in his battle against Nanan by entering the control room and turning on the ventilation system to suck up the infectious blue gas, allowing Chris to engage in melee combat.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
- Mother Gracia and Alisa Lin are a lot less nice than they might appear initially. Though the former has enough of a change of heart to eventually help Professor Doug and Ricky.
- Bindi herself turns out to be this, having been behind the outbreak from the beginning.
- Bittersweet Ending: A very, very bittersweet ending bordering on downer. Ricky, Doug and Gracia ultimately fail to save Marahwa Academy from the zombie outbreak, resulting in the deaths of every single student and staff member. Gracia, Doug, and Merah are among the victims, leaving Ricky, Chris and Piers as the only survivors. The hooded woman gets away scot-free with the data she gained from her "experiment" with the C-Virus and some of the mutated Nanan's remains, leaving the B.S.A.A. with no clues as to her identity and motives.
- The only thing keeping this from being a downer ending is that the hooded woman will eventually get her comeuppance in Resident Evil 6, and Ricky has found a new purpose as a photojournalist investigating other bio-terrorist attacks such as the one in China.
- Black Cloak: The hooded woman is dressed into one, even since the beginning of the series. Nanan also wears one given to her by Bindi to conceal her identity, initially hiding the fact that Nanan and the hooded woman are two different people.
- Blind Obedience: A leading problem with much of the populace of Marhawa Academy, that being the tactless fawning over every word and action of the headmistress of the institute. Had they displayed a little more self-awareness and common sense, or at the very least been apt enough to ask questions (to have questioned authority in any case) a great many of the deaths incurred could've been avoided.
- Blood from the Mouth: Happens repeatedly throughout the ending of the series. Merah spits up blood when she is wounded by Nanan.
- Boarding School of Horrors: Even before the outbreak, Marhawa Academy is not the nicest school to attend. The first chapter's title of the first volume, "Academy of Tragedy", should tell you something about it. To the rest of the world Marhawa Academy is a wonderful place, and headmistress Gracia spends much of the manga trying to keep it that way.
- Break the Cutie:
- Failing to prevent Marhawa Academy from turning into a second Raccoon City and losing his uncle to the infection does this to Ricky.
- Earlier on, it's revealed that Nanan's death caused Bindi to turn from a Reasonable Authority Figure into the Big Bad of the events.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: The main hero, Ricky Tozawa. He is established as not-so-diligent college student in his introduction due to being a nephew of a professor in his university. However, while he's new in a Zombie Apocalypse situation, he's not that powerless to defend himself.
- Bystander Syndrome:
- Gracia's main Fatal Flaw among many others.
- While many amongst the student body didn't have a direct hand in a lot of the truly despicable things that the former headmistress tried to conceal, most are just as culpable in that their unwarranted faith in their idol's word made them complicit in their inaction to stop it.
- Cassandra Truth: Bindi's motive for starting the outbreak is to force Gracia to admit the dark truth about Marharwa Academy. When Gracia eventually resorts to framing Bindi for faking a zombie attack, Bindi decides to just end it all and destroy the campus entirely.
- Cat Scare: "Rat scare" in this case. As Doug, Ricky, Kapoor, Ray, and Bindi enter the underground facility early in the series to investigate the place, they're surprised by the sound of metallic pipes falling to the floor, before discovering that a rat was the cause of it, much to their relief. Then the zombified engineers start greeting them as they move farther into the facility...
- Character Development: Ricky Tozawa arrived at Marhawa Academy as a lazy college student who was often Distracted by the Sexy. after the outbreak he's become a hardened Action Survivor who has dedicated himself to tracking down and exposing the identity of the hooded woman who caused the whole tragedy.
- Cool Teacher: Doug Wright is a bio professor at Bennett University in Singapore. He has also worked with the B.S.A.A. in the past and so knows a lot about bio-weapons. It's why Gracia calls him to Marhawa Academy to find the source of the growing zombie infection.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Had Gracia not been selfish and only thinking about the school's reputation and covered up incidents such as Nanan's bullying where she had been beaten. (Mind you she dished out a good beating of her own on them.) Plus Nanan's tragic accidental death, then perhaps Bindi wouldn't have taken the C-Virus from Carla Radames and infected the entire school with it, then the Outbreak wouldn't have happened. By the time Gracia realizes this, it's too late.
- Plus, if Gracia had done something about the bullies in the first place, Nanan and Bindi might not have had a reason to try and escape the academy and Nanan would still be alive.
- Create Your Own Villain: Not only did Gracia's obsession with protecting the academy's reputation turn Bindi into a bio-terrorist, the unintended death of Nanan led to her transformation into a Lepotica.
- Cutting the Knot: Late in the story-line, the B.S.A.A. members and Ricky make their way to the underground facility where the helicopter is located, using the pass-code in the letter penned by Gracia that Ricky and Chris discovered earlier to open the security gate and close it once they pass through. Unfortunately for them, Bindi, who has become an Eldritch Abomination by this point, simply forces her way through and knocks the door aside by sheer brute force, forcing them to make a Last Stand against her at the helipad.
- Cynicism Catalyst: What really drove the Big Bad into evil is the death of her friend, Nanan, several months before the story.
- Dead Man Writing: After Doug is seriously wounded and Gracia has a Heel Realization, she leaves a letter on his bed while he's unconscious, in which she expresses her remorse for the calamity her actions have caused and reveals the existence of a helicopter they can use to escape the academy. Tragically Gracia is killed by Bindi soon after, and Doug is zombified by Nanan before he sees the letter. Instead Ricky and Chris discover the letter after killing Doug.
- Decoy Damsel: While fighting the zombies underground, Bindi temporarily disappears, having been supposedly kidnapped by the hooded woman before being found safe and sound in the sewer. It turns out that she was really leading the mutated Nanan to safety.
- Despair Event Horizon:
- After the academy becomes completely infected, Ricky briefly teams up with a student named Quan to find Gracia. When they do find her, Gracia and Quan both die at a mutated Bindi's hands with Ricky failing to save either of them. Bindi cruelly taunts him over his failure to save anyone as the zombies close in. Overwhelmed, a distraught Ricky gives up hope and prepares to shoot himself. Chris Redfield storms in and saves him just in time.
- We also learn Bindi crossing this was what started the whole plot.
- The same thing happens to many a student the mutated Nanan's gas didn't infect. Seeing no way out, a great many of the school goers hanged themselves. Ricky just barely missed getting flattened by one whom threw themselves from a high window onto the unforgiving ground.
- Designated Girl Fight: Merah locates Bindi at the cathedral just as she has killed the last remaining survivors. In the battle that ensues, Merah deals enough damage that Bindi turns into a cocoon and hatches as a spider-like abomination.
- Destination Defenestration: When Quan attacks Bindi for killing Gracia, Bindi throws her through a window into a crowd of zombies.
- Destroy the Evidence: Gracia has the building containing the first two zombie victims burned to the ground, to Ricky and Doug's horror.
- Devoured by the Horde: After the outbreak goes out of control, some people within the academy become casualties because of this.
- Yang Tai Ming, after falling out of the hatch, dies this way after the zombie horde drags him out from the Air-Vent Passageway he and Quan take to reach the staff room.
- And after zombies break into said staff room, the only living teacher remaining within when Quan reaches the room throws himself into the approaching zombies to buy time for Quan to get away and seek out Gracia for help.
- Quan herself falls victim to this, after Bindi throws her out of a window; Ricky is too late to save her.
- Dirty Coward: What many students of the campus are discovered to be in the face of adversity. One of whom in particular throwing another into a hoard of zombies, whilst others could be seen having to commit suicide to escape the self-invoked calamity.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Bindi destroying an entire school for people bullying her friend is definitely this. Also a massive
Moral Event Horizon since an untold number of innocent people were killed in the process. - Disposable Woman: None of the female characters in this manga survive except the hooded woman.
- Early-Bird Cameo: The hooded woman is Carla Radames, though her identity isn't revealed in this series.
- Emotionless Girl:
- Gracia oversees the zombie coverup and her other wrongdoings with an expression of pure indifference. It falters as she gradually realizes that the outbreak is growing beyond her ability to control.
- In life, Nanan takes the bullying aimed at her in stride. After her death and mutation, her expression is perpetually blank.
- Evil Matriarch: Gracia isn't their real mother, but everyone on campus calls her "Mother Gracia" and obeys her every word.
- Eyes Do Not Belong There: When an empowered Bindi confronts Gracia, the nun shoots her in the eye, seemingly killing her. Then she gets up and reveals that half a dozen more have grown in its place.
- Face-Revealing Turn: The first victim, a girl named Lana, does this to a fellow student before killing her at the start of the manga.
- Foregone Conclusion: Chris Redfield and Piers Nivans obviously survive the Marhawa Desire incident to participate in Resident Evil 6 even though it prolonged Piers' inevitable death.
- Girlish Pigtails: Merah has these as her signature hairstyle. Lana, one of Nanan's tormentors and the first zombie victim, also had these.
- The Glasses Come Off: During Merah's flashback, she was depicted as wearing eyeglasses while working as a research scientist and as a new recruit in the Special Forces unit of the B.S.A.A. Her eyeglasses were absent by the time Chris and Piers met her for the first time, by which point she already Took a Level in Badass.
- Good Girl Gone Bad: What happened to Bindi after Nanan's death.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The hooded woman who helped the Big Bad to transform into a J'avo.
- Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Downplayed and inverted when Piers and Merah team up. It's downplayed in that they're both equipped with firearms. It's also inverted because Merah is also equipped with a kukri, making her better suited for melee combat (her acrobatics also helps) than Piers, who, due to his lack of melee weapons, is dedicated to sniping at a distance.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Chris defeats the mutated Nanan by bisecting her. This doesn't keep her down for long, however, and it takes being vaporised by a gatling gun to finally do her in.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Merah Takes The Bullet for Piers when Nanan shoots a tentacle at him.
- Hidden Elf Village: Overlaps with Boarding School of Horrors and Town with a Dark Secret, Marhawa Academy is a school campus as large as a small town and even has its own shopping mall. It's also isolationist by nature, as it's nestled deep in the woods with communication to the outside world non-existent while within the confines of the campus, and those who are within it are largely wary of outsiders. The Big Bad of this series exploits this by dismantling all of the vehicles within the academy prior to instigating the outbreak throughout the campus, with the intention of ensuring that no one within the academy would be able to get help from the B.S.A.A. in time to halt the massacre.
- The High Queen: Mother Gracia is supposed to be a nun, but behaves more like a queen. Students and staff alike obey her every word and show complete reverence toward her.
- History Repeats: Doug once (rightly) likened events that are happening at the academy as the same encroaching dread which overtook Racoon City well before the start of Resident Evil 6 because nobody caught onto what all was happening before it was too late, and all because they took incredibly poor advice from untrustworthy sorts with bent personality traits.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: The isolated nature of Marhawa is used against its populace when Bindi dismantles all of the vehicles within the academy prior to instigating the outbreak throughout the campus, with the intention of ensuring that no one within the academy would be able to get help from the B.S.A.A. in time to halt the massacre.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: No one on the campus premise actually concocted the virus used against it, and even Bindi was just an Unwitting Pawn of someone else trying to perfect it. It goes without saying that, had school goers and the establishment overseeing it weren't so busy being full of themselves, the heroine revealed to be the Beta Test Baddie wouldn't have decided to turn the Boarding School of Horrors into a cemetery over the death of her only real friend.
- The Immune: Averted. Ricky is bitten by his zombified Love Interest, but he's not zombified. It's the first clue that the virus is not the T-Virus as initially thought. It's eventually revealed to be the C-Virus in the form of a blue gas that infects anyone who breathes it in.
- Insufferable Imbecile: Too many to count. You've got a bunch of elitist SpoiledBrats who torment one another to the point of attempted suicide, a sect of mindlessly loyal chattel whom function more like fanatics to a less than reliable leader than work as school teachers or janitorial help, ending with the stubbornly self-destructive overseer of the school whose constant redacting every bad thing that happens there under her purview inevitably lead it all to ruin.
- It's All About Me:
- One student is seen shoving her friend down the stairs into a horde of zombies in order to buy herself time to escape, unfortunately for her, she is surrounded by another group and Killed Offscreen.
- Gracia qualifies as well. All that she ever did and any malignancy she ever stooped to was only ever to protect herself and her father's memory. Even if she wasn't the prior caretaker of the academy's least favored daughter, she really didn't do anything to dissuade that erroneous thought process throughout the story.
- The students themselves are also guilty of this. Their borderline hatred of lower classes and tendency to turn on each other for & regardless of status or welfare leaves a lot for their characters to be desired.
- It's Personal:
- Part of Merah's backstory goes that she has joined the B.S.A.A., first as a researcher before transferring into the Special Forces unit, in her determination to do what she could to stem bio-terrorism after her own parents died when Raccoon City, where they worked, fell into Zombie Apocalypse.
- The hooded woman is responsible not only for the deaths of the entire population of Marhawa Academy, but for the deaths of Doug, Gracia and Merah. She also tried to turn Ricky into a C-Virus test subject when he confronted her over her horrific crimes. As a result, Ricky has vowed to track her down and expose her identity to the world so she can't cause any more suffering.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Nanan's method of attack when she's not spewing zombifying gas. She does this to Doug Wright, seriously wounding him, and then finally kills Merah.
- Jerkass: Just about everyone in story who attends the academy proper. The kids are all impertinent little snots who are often as horrible to each other as they are to those less wealthy than them. The teachers and staff, very few of whom are well meaning, are loathsomely absent when dealing with bad seeds on campus. The worst of them all is a spoiled, untrustworthy, conceited and endlessly dismissive headmistress whose regular abuse of power kicked off the coming crisis facing her precious empire in the first place.
- Jerk Ass Has A Point: When Gracia frames Bindi for faking the zombie attack at the student festival and Ricky confronts her over it, she and Kapoor point out what would have happened had Bindi succeeded in exposing the zombie infestation currently plaguing the school. Without the B.S.A.A. to maintain control, the student body would have fallen into a dangerous panic in an extremely isolated area, making things worse. Doug admits that they're right and goes along with it for the time being.
- The Kid with the Remote Control: Bindi is the one who chooses Nanan's victims. When the hooded woman tests Nanan's ability to follow orders and tries to tell the mutant to come with her, Nanan attacks her. After escaping, the hooded woman uses this encounter to confirm that Bindi is the only one Nanan will listen to.
- Laser-Guided Karma:
- Gracia tries to cover up all the bad things happening at Marhawa Academy so she could protect its reputation and her late father's sanctuary. Her efforts lead to the academy being completely destroyed at the hands of a vengeful student and the academy's secrets being exposed to the world. If she had actually dealt with the incidents properly instead of trying to cover them up, Marhawa Academy's reputation wouldn't have been so utterly destroyed once the public found out what was really going on.
- Two students at the Marhawa school festival also gets hit with this (see the Mugging the Monster entry below).
- To the whole of the school in and of itself. The students were all spoiled morons, the teachers were negligent, inattentive milksops, some of the jackboots on Gracia's payroll were mindlessly abetting peons as much as the head of the school was a truly self-serving disappointment whom headed an establishment of cult-minded self-disposing elitist pond scum.
- Love-Interest Traitor: Happens to poor Ricky twice. First he becomes attracted to Vice Student Council President Alisa, only for her to become a zombie in the very first chapter. After her death, he learns that he dodged a bullet. Then his second love interest, Student Council President Bindi, turns out to be the culprit behind the zombie attacks.
- Last Request: Merah requests that Piers stick by Chris' side to help fight for a future without bio-terrorism before dying of the injuries inflicted by Nanan.
- Lethal Negligence: The real culprit behind the academy's destruction. Had Gracia not kept trying to silence all the bad her students get up to under the surface, while doubling down on such a bad habit when all the dead bodies rising from their shallow graves started turning up, the whole mess that resulted from it could've been avoided.
- Loser Son of Loser Dad: It really begs the question just what kind of family setting the brats of Marhawa were raised in to have produced such a universally reviled upper crust that warranted their own zombie outbreak out of blind revenge to slaughter them all. At the start of things, even Ricky was amazed with how every society produces its trash & scum in the beginning when he was dragged aside by the Jerk Jock sect of the sprawl.
- Ludicrous Gibs: When a bisected Nanan mortally wounds Merah and grabs onto the fleeing helicopter, an enraged Piers reduces her to this with a M2 Browning.
- Manipulative Bitch: Bindi turns out to be one.
- The Man Behind the Man: The hooded woman prowling around the school gives Bindi the C-Virus so she can exact revenge on Mother Gracia and the students who destroyed Nanan's life. At the end, having collected the data on the C-Virus she wanted along with some of Nanan's remains, the woman is identified as Ada. Those who played Resident Evil 6 will know her true identity as Carla Radames.
- Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Gwen Ti Quan and Yang Tai Ming, respectively, when they pair up. Gwen is action-oriented (she comes equipped with a baseball bat that she uses to save him from a zombified female student that almost bit him to death), assertive, and gives instructions/orders on what to do next; Yang is meek, emotional (after Gwen saves him, he apologizes tearfully to the now Killed Off for Real female zombie before following Gwen), and relies on Gwen for advice and help.
- Men Are the Expendable Gender: Inverted, of all female characters in the series the only one who successfully made it out alive was the main instigator of the entire outbreak, the Hooded Woman (Carla Radames), and even then she would eventually bite the dust herself in Resident Evil 6, courtesy of the real Ada Wong.
- Missing Mom: Ricky's mother died when he was young, and Doug took him in. It's not revealed what happened to his father.
- Mona Lisa Smile: Bindi pulls this as Nanan infects Lana and Alisa.
- Mugging the Monster: At the student festival, two thugs, who had previously tried to harass Ricky and are later discovered to have been part of the gang that Alisa had set on the then-living Nanan several months ago, encounter a hooded figure. Thinking the person to be a freshman in cosplay, they decide to be assholes and push her around. When the hood comes off, they realize what a huge mistake they made right before they become zombies. The figure is later revealed to be a mutated Nanan, making their deaths a case of Laser-Guided Karma.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Gracia had her first moment several months ago when her pursuit of Bindi and Nanan unwittingly caused the latter's death. Despite this she still covered up the entire incident to protect the academy's reputation. She later realises what a horrible mistake this was when Nanan is discovered to be the monster transforming her students into zombies, and Bindi is the one pulling the strings.
- Mythology Gag: Near the end of the story, Nanan makes a last-ditch effort to stop the helicopter B.S.A.A. members and Ricky are using to flee from escaping the Marhawa Academy by grabbing onto the helicopter. This is quite similar to the way the end of Resident Evil 5 plays out, where the Big Bad of the game grabs onto the helicopter Chris and Sheva are riding in an attempt to prevent them from leaving.
- Neck Lift: Bindi does this more than once after the C-Virus increases her physical strength.
- Never My Fault:
- How the last few moments of life by Gracia near the climax boil down to. Even after everything that went wrong because of her actions, she still says Bindi should've taken her anger out on her instead of everyone in the school.
- What Alisa tried to make it out as when her plan to attack Nanan with five delinquents on campus grounds turned back on her in the end. Bindi wasn't having any of that.
- No Body Left Behind: Because Bindi's C-Virus injection turns her into a J'avo (whose body, upon death, would start visibly burning up from the inside-out as a byproduct of their overactive healing, leaving only ashes), this is her fate after the Last Stand the B.S.A.A. members and Ricky make against her ends. All that remains of her is a hairpin she wore prominently prior to her own mutation into an Eldritch Abomination.
- No Sex Allowed: Dating is not allowed in Marhawa Academy. That doesn't stop Beta Bitch Alisa from trying to tease the 'outsider' Ricky. Bindi catches her on her way to Ricky's room and sets Nanan on her.
- Not the Fall That Kills You…: Nanan's death came not from falling from a hill, but the rock she hit her head on.
- One-Winged Angel: Bindi as J'avo and Nanan as Lepotica. After sustaining severe damage from Merah, Bindi forms a cocoon around herself and emerges as a massive Eldritch Abomination that resembles a spider with a human face.
- Only Friend: When Nanan was alive, Bindi was the only person who befriended her.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Merah, Chris and Piers try to contact Doug Wright to make a report, they are unable to contact him and eventually learn from his university that he suddenly left with Ricky and didn't tell anyone where he was going. The fact that he's been gone for a lot longer than usual and didn't leave any contact info this time around makes them realise that something is wrong.
- Outliving One's Offspring:
- While searching for Doug Wright and his nephew, Chris Redfield and his group meet a man who was Nanan's father, who is worried for his daughter after she stopped contacting him. It's eventually revealed that she died several months ago, as the father learns to his sorrow at the end of the series.
- This happens on a huge scale as there are no survivors among student and staff. The end shows a newspaper report with a photo of many mourning families.
- Posthumous Villain Victory: This is the condition where The Bad Guy Wins, as Bindi, despite being Killed Off for Real by the end of the story, succeeds in not only destroying Marhawa Academy, but also in exposing Gracia's wrongdoings to the world as she had initially planned.
- Psychotic Smirk: Bindi does this a lot after her true nature as the bio-terrorist behind the zombie attacks is revealed. In a lengthy flashback, she does a more subtle version of this as she sets Nanan on Lana and Alisa.
- Powerful and Helpless: Bindi became the Student Council President so she could try and improve conditions at the academy, but was ultimately powerless against Gracia. The tables turn when she obtains the C-Virus.
- Red Herring: After Bindi claims to have seen the deceased Nanan in the sewer, the others assume that Nanan is the one behind the outbreak. It turns out that there are two hooded women; the mutated Nanan, and the mystery woman who is watching her handiwork in action.
- Revealing Cover Up: Gracia summoned her ex Doug Wright to the academy so he could contain the outbreak without the B.S.A.A. or the student body finding out, even destroying their car to keep them from leaving beforehand. Along the way, Ricky and Doug discover the dark secret of Nanan's death.
- Sanity Slippage: Bindi starts losing it after Gracia frames her for the "staged" zombie attack at the student festival (not knowing that Bindi herself had instigated said attack). She proceeds to inject herself with the C-Virus and ordered Nanan to infect the entire campus. Then she turns into a giant abomination, discovers that Nanan has supposedly died at the hands of the B.S.A.A. and flips out big time.
- Screw You, Elves!: Essentially the entire premise of Bindi's final rampage. Caring more about looking good on the surface than being good in practice, coupled with having an inflated ego while being Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense, does not in fact save you from the perils of life in the real world. Not in Marhawa Academy's case anyway.
- Sex Signals Death: After apparently developing a mutual attraction with Ricky, Alisa creeps up on him while he's sleeping alone in his and Doug's room, complete with shirt undone and bra exposed. Then Ricky discovers she has become a zombie and gets bitten, but because the C-Virus isn't transferred through bites he doesn't turn. He later learns that Alisa was a two-faced bitch who thought it would be fun to tease an 'outsider'. When she tried to sneak into his room to seduce him, Bindi caught her along the way and had the transformed Nanan infect her.
- Ship Tease: Piers and Merah are quite close. When Merah dies saving him from Nanan, Piers is completely devastated.
- Shout-Out: The infamous scene from High School Of The Dead where two female students are running from a hoard of zombies and one of the girls intentionally decides to sacrifice the other on a staircase as a means of escape, only to immediately run into another hoard of zombies and meet her own death, is done here in Book 3 during the montage of the outbreak exploding across the academy. Could be a coincidence, but the scene is played so close to the other that it doesn't seem likely.
- Interestingly enough, this time the girl who selfishly tries to escape seems to be a lot more... casual about the whole thing. Not only does she do it in a much colder fashion than the HSOD girl, who arguably did it because she was scared out of her mind and desperate, but when she discovers the zombie horde waiting for them, she just seems to shrug and accept her fate while verbalizing how pointless her action was. A pretty strange example of Face Death with Dignity.
- Sickbed Slaying: After being impaled by Nanan, Doug is placed in the hospital wing of the academy. After shit hits the fan, Nanan finds him and finishes the job.
- The Smurfette Principle: Merah is the only female assisting in the effort to stop the zombie outbreak in this story.
- Staking the Loved One: Sadly, Ricky must do this to his uncle when he becomes a zombie.
- Start of Darkness: Bindi Bergara's Cynicism Catalyst, above, was also this.
- The Straight and Arrow Path: A crossbow is Bindi's weapon of choice before she switches to a vial of C-Virus. At one point Ricky uses it himself to kill a zombie.
- Sympathy for the Devil:
- Of an ironic twist, one can sense the forlorn tinge of empathy in Ricky's voice regarding Bindi's maddened, grief stricken malice crusade despite everything that happened in that at the very least Gracia's long retinue of dark secrets kept hidden about the academy had finally come to light, giving poor, broken Bindi & Nanan some peace in the grave.
- More so surprisingly, from the instigator whom brought the virus to the school in the first place. True, while Carla/Ada was only ever using the would-be avenger as a means of farming guinea pigs for her new bioweapon, their benefactor could sympathize with Bindi's irrational desire to avenge herself on a broken status quo that took everything from her, connecting with the former's need to sow chaos to destabilize a crooked order coddled by weak-minded fools.
- Suicidal Lemmings: The main problem of the schools population is their Undying Loyalty to a less than veracitic focus of their affection. Such genre blindness, coupled with other unsavory proclivities in their Hidden Elf Village, inevitably killed them all as punishment for their mistakes.
- Teens Are Monsters: Most of what happens in this story are directly or indirectly caused by the students, especially Alisa and Lana. They receive their just deserts and become the first two victims of the resurrected Nanan.
- Tempting Fate:
- Piers asks Merah for a drink after this incident is over, with Merah saying that she'll think about it. Sadly Merah becomes a Sacrificial Lion at the end of the series, ensuring that such a scenario will never happen.
- A much more benign version of this trope takes place during Merah's flashback, which starts with her, as a research scientist in the Far East branch of the B.S.A.A., finishing her research project and asking to be transferred to the Special Forces unit. She has a rough start there, causing her supervisor in the research division, who witnesses her training regiment, to remark to Doug that "she won't last a month". Fast forward to a year later, when she meets Chris and Piers for the first time, as the top agent in the very unit she struggled in initially.
- Less benevolent iteration comes from the headmistress's continued refusal of disclosure regarding all the strange happenings dealing with zombies.
- Title Drop: The outbreak at the academy becomes publicly known as The Marhawa Desire.
- Together in Death: More than one.
- An unnamed male student, upon witnessing the outbreak and seeing his now-zombified female Love Interest approaching him in his room, tearfully embraces her as she starts to bite him and throws both himself and her off the balcony.
- As Nanan is about to be killed off, the spirit of Bindi appears before her.Bindi: We can be together... forever...
- After Doug and Gracia both die in The Marhawa Desire, they're buried side by side.
- Toplessness from the Back: Surprisingly enough, the headmistress (who is also a nun, no less) while she's taking a bath to clean the blood from her body after an attack from the third zombie victim.
- Too Stupid To Live: Pretty much sums up the entirety of the denizens of Marhawa academy. While not said directly, it is heavily lampshaded by Bindi just before Nanan drowns the school in zombie gas for their foolishly believing Gracia's empty word despite the numerous deaths occurring on campus, squarely blaming one who wasn't even properly convicted of what they're being accused of.
- Town with a Dark Secret: A campus to be more specific, but Marhawa Academy is as large as a small town and even has its own shopping mall. On the surface it appears to a pristine academy full of intelligent, privileged students; in truth it's not. Because of their isolated upbringing, many of the students are rotten to the core and treat anyone who isn't of their station like garbage, and their headmistress covers up every single unsavory incident to protect her 'sanctuary'. The worst incident, the bullying and eventual death of Nanan Yoshihara, is what sows the seeds of the academy's downfall. By the end, not only is Marhawa Academy's population completely massacred, its dark secrets are exposed to the world.
- TragicMonsters: Twofold, both Bindi and Nanan act as the focus of events which end up devastating the institute they once called home. They never would've become the pair of devastators they are, had the despicable staff, students and supervisor treated them a little more humanely, much less practiced a little more tact and humanity that matched their misconceived self-perception.
- Undying Loyalty: Kapoor and Ray are Gracia's right-hand men, and obey her without question. This is because when they both became orphaned by an unknown war, Gracia's father, the previous headmaster of Marhawa Academy, saved them from starving to death and took them to an orphanage he built. Gracia, who as a child was helping her father at the orphanage at the time, treated them kindly.
- The Unfavorite: Its aversion is reason why Gracia is intent on covering up all the unsavory incidents at the academy, including the zombie infestation. For most of her life, she believed that out of his many children, her father liked her the least. When he died, he passed leadership of Marhawa Academy, which he founded and made the best school in Asia within a generation, onto her. The revelation that her father did indeed value her filled within her an obsession with protecting his 'sanctuary'.
- The Unfettered: Bindi became this more and more as time after time she tried to corner Gracia into confessing her misdeeds only for the focus of her ire to skirt her responsibility and reassign blame. She inevitably went full tilt scorched earth, deciding to bring it all crashing down on the deans swelled head, killing everyone on campus.
- The Unreveal: In-universe. The B.S.A.A. never find out the identity of the hooded woman who gave Bindi the C-Virus and started the whole mess. In an unknown facility at the end of the story, the woman is said to be "Ada Wong," or more accurately Carla Radames. When Chris and Piers encounter her again in Resident Evil 6, they have no idea she's the same woman who instigated the Marhawa Desire.
- Upper-Class Twit: What most of the students tend to portray when it comes to the outside world, the worst amongst whom thinking they can solve all their problems with money despite the severity of what they consider to be horseplay.
- Villainous Breakdown: Bindi has a huge one after discovering the bisected corpse of Nanan, and goes after the B.S.A.A. operatives responsible.
- Villainous Rescue: Nanan unknowingly does this when she breaks away from a battle with Chris to attack the hooded woman and Ricky. At the time, the hooded woman had been seconds from injecting an incapacitated Ricky with the C-Virus.
- Unwitting Test Subject: What Bindi, Nanan, and all the zombified victims of the bioterrorist attack at Marhawa Academy ultimately are. Carla used the school as a testing ground for the C-Virus.
- Wham Line: Right after the mutated Nanan reveals herself and attacks Ricky, Doug and Kapoor, she makes her way to Bindi's room, where Bindi has been confined after Gracia framed her. Just when it seems that Bindi is going to become another victim...Bindi: [smiles] Welcome back!
- Wham Shot: When Ricky, Doug, and Tahir Kapoor confront the cloaked Nanan, a gust of wind blows the hood off to reveal that she has become a Lepotica.
- What The Hell, Townspeople?: A lot of the jerkier site goers are often slapped with this on a regular basis, either by the local Nice Girl before she went insane in the membrane, Bindi Bergara for the classmen's intolerance towards outsiders and lower classes. Even by said same foreigners such as Doug Wright whose Shaming the Mob fell on deaf ears despite the incredibly stupid ventures taken to play a bioterror attack by year.
- Where Are They Now: In the epilogue, Ricky is revealed to have become a photojournalist dedicated to tracking down the mystery woman responsible for the Marhawa Desire. He's last seen in China investigating the C-Virus outbreak occurring there, and manages to get a photo of Chris and Piers before evacuating.
- Wretched Hive: The school proper functions more like a fringe cult of the elite than a school for higher classes. The kids are all contemptable little silver spoon fed runts who discriminate and persecute people of humbler origins. Their overseers in the faculty are either absent or woefully ignorant of all the crap they get up to, while the person overseeing it all is a two-faced, stuck-up, overbearing, power crazed fascist who cares more about the institute's outward appearance than about the wellbeing, be it physically or mentally, of its denizens overall. Worse yet, everybody is mindlessly devout to hanging on her Every. Single. Word, all despite her being a Consummate Liar who underscores just how serious bioterror can be.
- Working with the Ex: Professor Doug and Mother Gracia are ex-lovers. Gracia asked Doug's help to solve the zombie outbreak in her school.
- You Are Too Late:
- To their dismay, Chris, Piers and Merah arrive hours too late to prevent the entire academy from becoming infected.
- Played earlier when Bindi reveals her true colors and sets out to bring the academy crashing down on Gracia in a fit of revenge.
