Dead End Aegis - TV Tropes

Dead End Aegis (魔法少女消耗戦線 DeadΩAegis, Mahou Shoujo Shoumou Sensen - DeadΩAegis), sometimes stylized as DeadΩAegis, is a Science Fiction Visual Novel developed by metalogiq and released in 2021. It was translated by JAST, who released it in January 2022.

It's the year 2099. Mankind is broadening their horizons in the outer Solar System when they make contact with the Cosmic Cnidarians, or C.C. The ensuing Alien Invasion causes many casualities and forces the evacuation of the bases in Mars and the Moon. At that moment, the first Magical Girls show up, with Lisette Augerau leading the charge and putting a stop to the C.C. invasion for good. Along the way, she saves the last survivor of Mars, a girl named Minori Iizuka.

Nine years later, the United Earth Forces are still raging the war against the C.C. Their stronghold is the Cathedral, a Space Station located in the space sector where the aliens live. From there, they dispatch these magical girls formally known as Special Warfare Troopers. Minori feels indebted to Lisette and her heroism, so she trains in the officers' academy to join the Special Warfare Troopers, leaving her crush Mitsuomi behind. Little does she know how harsh life in the Cathedral will be...

A short prequel titled DeadΩAegis: Gaiden tells more details about the first C.C. invasion from the point of view of Lisette and her friend Circe.

Dead End Aegis contains examples of:

• Alien Blood: The C.C. have blue blood instead of red. This applies to humans infected by them.
• All Men Are Perverts: The first day, all male officers look at the cadets with very lustful eyes. Later, they molest the Troopers as they return to the deployment port and flip up their skirts in the hallways. Many guys go further abducting the girls to rape them in hidden rooms. Any new visitors and officers who come to the Cathedral quickly start to learn to abuse the females.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Every August, Paradise Lost's orbit gets the closest to the Cathedral and the C.C. take the chance to attack that Space Station. Hovewer, during the invasion of August 2110 on the base, the enemy force is five times its usual size and the aliens bring a massive C.C. strain with a devastating Wave-Motion Gun. This assault would later be known as the Great August Invasion.
• Anyone Can Die: Until the midway point, the only deaths are those of nameless extras and fellow Troopers that don't appear on-screen. Come the red route and all male officers drop like flies and get replaced by mindless C.C. in human shape, Ilyusha gets killed as an alien, Nana kills herself and both Circe and Lisette die in the final battle. The only characters left alive in the end are Minori, Mitsuomi, their child and Canxue.
• Arc Words: The word "consume" pops up in most dialogue by Commander Kinnison, the Japanese title (as 消耗, read shoumou), and the slogan of the United Earth Forces ("We will consume you"). It represents how the system of the Cathedral deprives their magical girls of all human rights and treats them like weapons to be expended in the battlefield. This philosophy extends to the capitalist powers that rule the Earth, too.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: In the end of the Red Route, both Minori and Mitsuomi have become the first true human/C.C. hybrids, new beings greater than both that will carry the evolution of both species forward to a new tomorrow.
• Assimilation Plot: All the torture and rapes in the Cathedral has the ultimate purpose of shredding all sense of individuality and dignity in everyone. Circe then physically merges all troopers, officers and dead bodies into a Great One, in order to rebel against the Great One of the C.C.
• The Berserker: Lisette is too passionate about defeating evil and driven by Black-and-White Morality. When she recognizes something as an enemy, even if she judged too quickly, she gives chase with all her might and doesn't stop until the opponent is completely destroyed.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: At first, Circe is presented as a victim of the same abuse as the Special Warfare Troopers, with the added handicap of having lost her magical powers. The Red route reveals that she was infected by the C.C. and that she's manipulating the men and other conditions of the Cathedral to make the hellhole even worse, to the point that it becomes little more than a People Farm. Her ultimate goal is the Assimilation Plot to merge everyone into a Great One.
• Blame the Paramour: Nana's boyfriend Satoru joins the officers and comes to the base, spending time together with her again. However, he takes the chance to force himself on Minori with her Shock Collar and has more sexual encounters as she is unable to tell the faces of men apart at this point. Satoru justifies the acts by claiming that Minori seduced her. Nana fully believes his lies and starts hating Minori's guts.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The C.C. are revealed to not be evil invading aliens as first thought, but rather that they are a Hive Mind that seek to connect with other Hive Minds and have mistaken humanity for being such a thing. All their attacks were attempts to break through what they perceived as a misunderstanding and reach the human hive mind to make first contact, not understanding that there are other forms of being. After Minori manages to clear things up they decide to leave humanity alone.
• Body of Bodies: Circe creates a Great One from the fusion of herself and all people, living or dead, in the Cathedral. It's a mismash of many headless, limbless torsos connected by organs and machinery. The only understandable element is that it all has the vague shape of a female reproductive organ.
• Broken Pedestal: Minori is a great admirer of the heroic Lisette, but she's wary that she hasn't met her during her life in the Cathedral. In the reception of the inspection committee, she witnesses to her horror that Lisette has become a wretched sex doll and learns that she can only fight with the aid of a red machine. From then on, Minori stops acting for Lisette's sake.
• Capitalism Is Bad: At least according to the capitalists themselves, who profit off the endless war against C.C. and don't particularly care about the costs or consequences.

  Executive A: But you know, sacrificing young women with futures ahead of them... history and capitalism really are cruel.
  Executive B: Calling them sacrifices is a little too poetic, isn't it? We're apostles of capitalism, so we're not sacrificing them, we're consuming them. Consumption is a symbol of civilization. Civilization consumes by its very nature.
  Executive A: If we're the apostles, we're gonna need a savior to look up to, no?
  Executive B: No, having a savior would just cause problems. We wouldn't be free to do as we please. Besides, we may not have our version of Christ, but we do have an Antichrist. A god that grants us violence, destruction, and consumption.

• Celibate Eccentric Genius: Doctor Aravind Brakash is purely invested in the science that is available within the Cathedral and has little interest in any of the sexual goings on within the facility, in addition to being impotent. Minori describes him as perverted in a way very different from the rest of the male crew because of his curiosity about the biology and development of the female body.
• Closed Circle: Once the Special Warfare Trooper enters the Cathedral, there is no going out due to the sinister nature of the base and that revealing it would cause a massive controversy and public outrage.
• Colonized Solar System: Mankind used to have cities on Mars and the Moon, and many other mining stations and bases in asteroids, which reached out to Saturn. However, with the C.C. invasion, everyone had to abandon the colonies and retreat back to Earth.
• Colony Drop: During the initial C.C. invasion, Lisette summoned a giant made out of light to launch the Moon out of orbit and towards the alien mothership, destroying it. This event was the key for the victory of mankind and would be known as the Lunar Orbit Battle.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The C.C. that get to defeat a Special Warfare Trooper usually pierce her body and tear off her womb. This kind of death is also undignified as the remains are salvaged and sent to the lab for unknown purposes instead of receiving a proper funeral.
• Cruelty by Feet: Nana, filled with rage over Satoru cheating on her with Minori and Slut-Shaming the latter, stomps on Minori's stomach while she's lying on the floor of the lab and covered with bodily fluids.
• Date Rape: In the blue route, Mitsuomi invites Minori to an expensive restaurant, which she accepts because she can ask for Canxue's whereabouts. When paying the bill, she feels wobbly and her conciousness fades since the food was spiked with sedatives. She wakes up in a bedroom and has no choice but to endure getting ravaged by Mitsuomi.
• Deconstructed Trope: One common cliché of hentai works, especially those involving sexually activated superpowers, are various roundabout justifications to put women into sexually demeaning situations that are somehow necessary. Dead End Aegis shows that this has not only been used for justification of what is basically industrialized rape, but that all of this is virtually unnecessary. Nothing more than the most basic of checkups is really needed. All the rest is just the rampant sexism and abuse of power that exists within the system and that the higher-ups turn a blind eye to.
• Deus Sex Machina: In order to become a Special Warfare Trooper, a cadet has to get raped by the C.C. so that they attach alien tissue to her uterus. Naturally, this process never works on males. The fusion of the alien organ and the uterus is called Holy Grail and it gives the Trooper abilities to manifest the Special Warfare Gear, manipulate Force Fields and fight back the C.C.. The power level is directly proportional to the sexual maturity and experience of the Trooper, and that aspect is deconstructed as she has to face two negative choices: either put up with the enviroment full of sexual abuse and bizarre experiments of the Cathedral, which the men are very eager to take advantage of; or die in battle for not being stimulated and strong enough.
• Dumb Muscle: Lisette is a magical version. The most powerful Special Warfare Trooper of all time and with as much brainpower as a bag of rocks on a good day.
• Erotic Dream: The debauchery of the Cathedral starts to bleed into the subconcious of the Special Warfare Troopers as Minori has nightmares about her previous rapes and Nana has naughty dreams with her boyfriend Satoru. The girls of Group 14 wet their beds as a result.
• Everyone Is Bi: The three main characters are all shown to be attracted to men initially, yet make no qualms about sleeping with each other for comfort, and Minori even remarks that she prefers it in a sense. On the other hand, the prologue introduces Circe and Lisette as a lesbian couple, and while every instance of them having sex with men is Played for Horror, the matter of Incompatible Orientation is never even discussed.
• Fragile Speedster: The Peeress type of C.C. has roles related to intelligence gathering and commanding over other C.C., with no combat or defensive abilities of their own. When a Peeress detects the presence of a Special Warfare Trooper, it flees much faster than she is able to catch up.
• Gender-Restricted Ability: The only organ of the human body in which the C.C. tissue, which gives powers over Force Fields, can safely be implanted without causing metastasis is the uterus. For this reason, only females are able to become Special Warfare Troopers. In the climax of the Red Route this is finally broken when Mitsuomi gains those same abilities as well, all thanks to the C.C. having a more proper understanding of humanity and can thus give this out more intentionally.
• Genius Loci: Paradise lost is not only the planet where the C.C. come from, it's the Great One of their species. The Great One splits off in Little Ones and they all share the same Hive Mind.
• Glass Cannon: Lisette is incredibly powerful and extremely fast with her sole weakness being her nonexistent defense. But her lack of defense doesn't matter much when she can just overpower her foes with raw brute force.
• Gold Digger: Satoru pretends to love Nana and takes advantage of her gullibility to suck up as much money as possible from her.
• Gonk: Commander Kinnison is much more hideous than what the advertisements show. He's morbidly obese, his hair is balding and his face looks like a frog's, with many wrinkles.
• Hate Sink: Callaghan is just one of the officers, but in almost all scenes he appears it's to intimidate and molest Minori, spouting sexist and racist remarks all the while.
• Hearing Voices: Ever since Minori had half or her body replaced by C.C. cells, she hears a voice that beckons her to "become one" and it's often accompanied with visions of Paradise Lost. It turns out to come from her C.C. organ in the womb. After witnessing her relationship with Mitsuomi, the voice convinces her to travel to Paradise Lost and have an audience with the Great One.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the blue route, the original trio of magical girls (Lisette, Circe, and Canxue) all lose their lives in their effort to end the C.C menace. Lisette and Circe perform a suicide attack on Paradise Lost — the aliens' home planet—, which causes the Pasta Tube to collapse, and Canxue uses the last of her power to speed up the carrier ship and drag Minori, Nana, and Ilyusha to safety, and she passes away soon after.
• The Hero's Idol: Lisette's history of heroicity, with saving the Earth in the first C.C. invasion and rescuing Minori in Mars, has inspired the latter to train at the officers' academy and join the Cathedral to hopefully become a strong Special Warfare Trooper just like Lisette.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Hello, Circe Bernhard. It doesn't get more obvious than deliberately inflicting the exact same treatment that ruined your lover's life on all the other girls, who don't deserve it one iota more.
• High-Class Call Girl: In contrast to public Sex slaves like Minori, Nana lives in a luxurious room and has managed to keep her beauty. She trades sexual services with a select group of gentlemen in exchange for protection and it's very hard to get an appointment with her.
• Hope Spot: Much of the plot of the game is a succession of these. Minori finds a reason to endure amidst all the absurd cruelty that's forced on her... then that reason gets mercilessly stomped on. Then she finds another reason within whatever's left... then it all happens again.
  • She goes to welcome the inspection committee in the hopes of getting her voice heard and reaching out to Earth. Alas, they already knew about the deranged nature of the Cathedral and many of the members proceed to gang rape Minori.
  • She comes back from a mission full of confidence after learning how to summon a giant punch of light and even beats Callaghan to the ground. Not much later, Callaghan and his cronies catch Minori and force her into Bio-Augmentation experiments and sexual slavery.
  • Minori thinks the August C.C. invasion is her chance to prove her worth as a soldier. It proves to be a much tougher battle, she gets turned into a C.C./human hybrid and she loses her friend Ilyusha.
  • She gets some confort living in Nana's room while the latter encourages her to be more positive. Then Satoru comes into the picture and Nana sides with his lies, betraying and dumping Minori.
• Humans Are Insects: An interesting case in which it serves to save humanity. Minori manages to make contact with the C.C. and reveals to them how humanity is not a hive mind like them. This reveal however winds up being a great disappointment for the aliens and they decide that humanity is not worth their time of day. Minori is left feeling split on whether she should be grateful for the war now being over or insulted due to the C.C. thinking so little of humanity.
• I Am Not Pretty: Minori firmly believes that her looks are average and her body has no curves, so no man would approach her.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Commander Kinnison is well aware of the less than ideal state of things within the Cathedral, yet he views it as a necessary evil to fight the C.C. Too bad he is unaware of the fact that he is being manipulated by Circe.
• Island Base: The Bågenholm own a small, remote island where the head of the family, the elderly Mitsuko, lives. It's featured in the blue route as a place for undercover meetings between the Special Warfare Troopers, Li Canxue and the Bågenholm.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Satoru at first survives Nana's rampage after he revealed his cruel and manipulative personality to her. After that mess he plans to take advantage of Minori next. Just as he is about to assault her, his grey matter ends up decorating the nearby wall after Mitsuomi caught them just in time.
• Latex Space Suit: Near the beginning, the cadets quickly notice that the space suits they received are fairly thin and form fitting though when worn are fairly baggy and feel very cheap. Minori also notices that they seem to lack almost all of the basic survival features one would expect out of a space suit. Things such as circulatory systems and waste disposal are all absent, even a basic radio is missing. They provide oxygen and protection from the vacuum of space and that's it. This is of course because the cadets are completely expendable and most who launch for their first sortie will not return alive.
• Living Battery: A secret research facility on the Moon develops the Magic Drive engine, which can dramatically increase the speed of spaceships and is supplied by the magical powers of a Special Warfare Trooper. Canxue is subject to becoming their test subject and a literal engine component.
• Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction: The Special Warfare Troopers are magical girls who can transform into their Special Warfare Gear and fight off the C.C.. However, they are nothing but weapons employed by the military and stuck in the Cathedral, a remote Space Station. The system of the base utterly consumes and abuses them when they are not dealing with the aliens with high risk of casualties. That very same abuse, often sexual in nature, is the source of their powers. The propaganda on Earth whitewashes all of this indignity and portrays the girls as lovely maidens who are saving the world.
• Mark of the Supernatural: In the red route, after Minori is infected by the C.C. and turns into a hybrid, a glowing blue pattern displays around her buttocks.
• MegaCorp: The Bågenholm, described as a "family of snakes", own a multinational conglomerate that partakes in many industries. Its products can be seen everywhere in the Cathedral. They convert crises like the C.C. invasion and the Moon refugee crisis into opportunities for profit.
• Mercy Kill: It is mentioned that the Cathedral staff sometimes has to kill Special Warfare Troopers that make it back after their first encounter with Paradise Lost due to the implantation of the C.C. organ being improper, be it wrong orifice or the rough handling causing it to tear out of the womb. This is out of mercy as if it is left alone, it will only lead to a slow and agonizing death for the afflicted as there is no cure but death for when this happens.
• Misery Builds Character: Of a sort. While he was not the target of it, in the Red Route, all the stuff that Mitsuomi gets to witness going on within the Cathedral ends up having a great impact on him and makes him clean up his act, becoming a genuinely kind and morally upstanding individual ready to stand with Minori through thick and thin. This is contrasted with the Blue Route where he does not experience any of this and winds up as a manipulative man who constantly tries to control Minori only for their relationship to eventually end up in shambles.
• Morton's Fork: Commander Kinnison calls Minori in to inform that her sexual performance is falling behind and it could cause her to get overpowered by the C.C. in battle. He offers Minori four choices: continue receiving special training from him, take part in a secret mission whose contents can't be disclosed but which will have the same effects, seek sex for herself, or die in battle. At this point, the player can only choose between the training and the secret mission. Subverted because going for the latter leads to a worse scene and prevents access to the Blue Route in which Group 14 returns to Earth.
• Multiple Endings: There are three in total.
  • A premature bad ending if the player picks the most reluctant choices near the beginning. During a patrol, Minori gets powerless against the C.C and is gruesomely murdered by them.
  • Choosing to send Group 14 back to Earth leads to a route marked with blue chapters in the Scene Selection screen. It focuses on politics and on Li Canxue, a former Special Warfare Trooper turned terrorist for the Moon refugees.
  • Choosing to make Group 14 stay in the Cathedral leads to the other main route, indicated by red chapters in Scene Selection. It involves way more suffering for everyone and a higher death count.
• Murder-Suicide: Nana snaps when her trusted Satoru confesses all his lies and she transforms into her Special Warfare Gear out of pure rage. She then procceeds to slaughter virtually all men in the lab and is heading to destroy the males' residential blocks, only to be stopped by Minori. Nana gets upset and thinks that despite the guys being terrible, she is at fault for everything, including Minori's suffering. She ends up directing the remaining magic powers towards herself, commiting suicide.
• Naughty Tentacles:
  • In the first sortie, a couple hundred space cadets, with Minori among them, are sent without warning to Paradise Lost, a planet full of writhing alien tentacles. They all get raped by the C.C. and only a third of the cadets manage to get the C.C. organ in their wombs, transform into Special Warfare Troopers and make it back alive. Interestingly, the C.C. themselves have no sexual interest in the girls. As they don't understand human anatomy they simply examine them all over, including every hole they've got. This also means that many end up dying due to the rough handling or when getting the C.C. organ implanted into the wrong orifice and then their bodies rejecting it.
  • Some experiments on Minori involve her having her limbs restrained while Doctor Brakashy sics artificial tentacles on her.
  • During the August invasion, Minori and Ilyusha land on a smaller version of Paradise Lost inside a gigantic C.C. and get violated by the tentacles again. This time, both of the girls get infected and turned into an alien in the case of Ilyusha and into a hybrid in the case of Minori.
  • Minori visits Paradise Lost one last time to get an audience with the Great One. She is thoroughly examined by the C.C. and they completely replace her cells with alien cells and give her a special genetic factor.
• No Woman's Land: Females in the Cathedral in the middle of space have to risk their lives fighting against the C.C. while men stay inside, carrying out debris removal at most. Inside the base, women aren't safe either because they have to face perverts and all kinds of sexual training and abuse.
• Overclocking Attack: In both endings, Canxue hacks into the system of the main reactor of the Cathedral and overloads it with energy, causing the base to blow up.
• Parasite Zombie: The C.C. infest some corpses of fallen Special Warfare Troopers to control them willy-nilly for the Great August Invasion. These corpses prove to be some of the toughest foes suring the battle as they can mimic the magic powers of the Troopers.
• People Puppets: All the male officers within the Cathedral have systematically been infected by Circe, enabling her to control their bodies even though they've still got their minds.
• Pyrrhic Victory: During the Great August invasion, the Cathedral barely manages to fire an X-ray free electron ray before the Jewel Thief, a massive C.C. strain, landed a shot of its Wave-Motion Gun on the base. That victory comes at a high price: many veteran and newbie Special Warfare have died in battle and the C.C. have set foot on the base, destroying the facilities and killing a majority of the officcers. The chain of command is now in disarray because Commander Kinnison and Vice-Commander Chan have been fatally shot and the crew is increasingly being infected by the C.C., including Minori and Ilyusha.
• Pink Heroine: Minori's hair is pink and the Special Warfare Gear she manifests in her Magical Girl form is all pink and white. She's also the protagonist that holds heroic values of justice and dignity in contrast to the utilitarianism of most of humanity.
• Play-Along Prisoner: In the Blue route, Canxue allows herself to be captured intentionally, all in order to engineer a reveal of what the military has truly been up to and expose all their corruption for the world to see.
• Plucky Girl: The amount of horrifying stuff that Minori goes through is nothing short of harrowing, and yet despite how many times she is beaten down and seemingly right on the verge of breaking she always manages to bounce back and refuse to let cynicism and defeatism to claim her.
• Pocket Dimension: There is a turbulent portal in outer space called Pasta Tube which connects to a small space sector. It only contains Purgatorio, a red giant star; Paradise Lost, the planet where C.C. come from, and the Cathedral, the Space Station of the United Earth Forces and the Special Warfare Troopers.
• Power Trio: The three Troopers of Group 14 have great synergy in battle. Minori is an agile vanguard who slays C.C. at melee range using light swords; Nana is a defender who deploys shields and counter-attacks with the Magical Hammer; and Ilyusha is a gunner who offers support from a long distance with her pair of drones and the powerful Gugnir blast.
• Pregnancy Scare: After her audience with the Great One and becoming a full human/C.C. hybrid, Minori's womb becomes functional again. Circe informs her that she has been impregnated by Callaghan, the man she hates the most. Minori is anxious about having to bear a child until she meets Mitsuomi in the void of space and he tells her that it was all a lie because the genetic incompatibility is very high.
• Pro-Human Transhuman: In the Red Route, after both Minori and Mitsuomi become true hybrids, they decide to help humanity and save them from Circe in spite of all the abuse and evil they witnessed.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: In a highly satisfying and cathartic moment, Circe uses the command she has over Callaghan to make him reveal how many bullets he still has in his gun (three) after which she orders him to within two hours, shoot off his own balls and that after another two hours, shoot himself in the gut and then finally with the last bullet to shoot himself in the head. Two hours later, a gunshot and scream echo through the halls, and yet another in two more hours, and then finally a gunshot followed by silence after two more hours.
• Psychosexual Horror: One of the main themes is the normalization of rape culture and how it's steadily scarring Minori's psyche, to the point that she's walking the fine line between staying human and turning into a mere sex doll.
• Sensual Slavs: Ilyusha Petrovna is a white-haired Russian who used to be part of an idol trio. During her job, she gained experience in offering nude shots and other sexual favors for men, and to this days she feels it's easy to manipulate them.
• Sexiled: Nana provides Minori shelter in her room, but her boyfriend Satoru comes back to the Cathedral and she hogs the room for sex with him. That plunges Minori into a routine of abuse again.
• Sexposition:
  • Minori goes to service the inspection committee that comes from Earth to the Cathedral every year in the hopes that her complaints about the hellhole will be heard. The Bågenholm member she hooks up with, a relative of Mitsuomi, drops some reveals that break her heart all while banging her: the committee already knew about the rape culture of the Cathedral and he even had indecent videos of Minori; Mitsuomi already has a fianceé, and even the legendary Lisette has been defiled just like all Special Warfare Troopers.
  • The audience Minori has with the Great One of the C.C. is her getting thoroughly explored by the tentacles of Paradise Lost while the Great One explains in her head the nature of the aliens as a Hive Mind and their relationship with humanity.
• Sex Slave: All women in the Cathedral are trained to become sexually submissive to men, with the justification that this improves their combat abilities. Some examples include:
  • Every year, the commander Kinnison picks a Trooper to be his secretary as well as his lust receptacle. This time, it's Ilyusha's turn.
  • The moments Lisette is not fighting or resting in her tank, she is a plaything for men to use.
  • Callaghan and his cronies blackmail Minori into swearing to become their slave in exchange of not revealing that she has had a Bio-Augmentation done on her naughty bits. Every day, she has to visit an abandoned room to suffer their depraved acts.
  • After the August invasion, Minori becomes a human/C.C. hybrid and is told to prove that she's harmless. Minori is no longer able to fight as a Trooper, she is forced to service all officers in the base and they can turn on her Shock Collar if she doesn't obey.
• Sexy Secretary: In the blue route, Minori becomes Mitsuomi's secretary and mistress. She wears cute glasses and a form-fitting uniform, and she is compelled to offer him sex each time he implies they have some time.
• Space Station: The Cathedral was built on a rock called Main Anchor, located in the space sector of the C.C. The central hub has spires like a church and is connected to the residential blocks surrounding it. This station houses the Special Warfare Troopers.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Lisette and Circe used to be the first Magical Girls and loved each other very much, especially the latter. Currently, they can't be together. Lisette is kept unconscious in a tank of liquid the moments she's not in combat and even then, she's just carried by a red machine, and Circe is a veteran who lost her powers. In both main endings, Circe and Lisette die in battle or have to sacrifice themselves.
• Starfish Aliens: The Cosmic Cnidarians got their names because of their similarities to anemonae and jellyfish. They have no humanlike body parts and they are unable to talk.
• Stripperiffic: Minori feels that her Special Warfare Gear is too revealing and inappropriate to fly around space. It consists of an extremely short skirt, thigh-high socks and top that is transparent around the belly and chest, with only two strips hiding her naughty bits.
• This Bed of Rose's: Nana takes in Minori, who at that time is living in a small cell and spending her time as a Sex Slave, in her private room in which she prostitutes herself for a select gentlemen. That is, until Satoru comes back.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Circe and Lisette. The former is reserved and demure while the latter is a brash and unladylike Boisterous Bruiser.
• Transformation Trinket: The Special Warfare Troopers are given shiny Encased Wands that are used for engaging their Special Warfare Gear. Subverted in that it's a ruse designed to condition their potential, as at several plot-critical points, the girls pull off the transformation without the wands, only with desperation or willpower.
• Trauma Conga Line: The entire game is just misfortune after misfortune happening to poor Minori.
• Vapor Wear: The top of Minori's Special Warfare Gear is translucent except for two white stripes that cover her nipples. This means that she wears no bra.
• War for Fun and Profit: While they didn't start the war, the defense industry executives have plenty of sway over the Cathedral and its choices and are interested in maintaining the current stalemate between humans and the C.C. for as long as possible, since it means they can profit indefinitely. In fact, part of the mission of the Special Warfare Troopers is to please said executives.
• Wedding Finale: Done in a symbolic sort of manner. In the climax of the Red Route where both Minori and Mitsuomi have become true Human/C.C. hybrids, their Special Warfare Trooper outfits takes a form resembling a wedding dress and white tuxedo respectively, symbolizing their eternal vows to each other.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Commander Kinnison is intent on consuming the Special Warfare Troopers as much as possible, which means putting them through an oppressive military regime with many casualties and sexual abuse. It's all for getting a step closer to victory against the C.C. He's even willing to sacrifice the Cathedral and himself.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Minori and Ilyusha return from the Great August Invasion having been transformed into a human with 50% of C.C. cells and a full-on C.C., respectively. They are received with cruel experiments and torture, going as far as Ilyusha being dissected alive. When Minori and Nana meet Ilyusha after her rampage in the labs, they recognize her former personality and self, but Lisette comes and quickly slays her for being an alien. This is specifically Exploited in the case of Minori, with Dr. Brakash acknowledging that for all intents and purposes she's still human and most people would consider her as such, but legally she is not and thus she has no human rights, a situation which the base makes full use of.

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