The Face of TG Storytime Part 3: “Of Heroes And Villains” by Minikisa Review

The Face of TG Storytime

Part 3: “Of Heroes And Villains” by Minikisa Review

tw // death, dysphoria, self-hatred

As I said in the last review, it's no secret that TG Storytime does not have the best reputation and many individual stories posted on it don’t have a very good reputation either. However, there are exceptions to this and one story that consistently gets mentioned whenever people ask what the best story on TG Storytime is, is this one, “Of Heroes And Villains”.

A lot of people seem to agree that this story was really good, and one of the best ever posted on the site. As for me? Well the point of this review is to tell you my opinion so let's have a look.

“Of Heroes And Villains” was first posted by user “Minikisa” in January 2014 and was finished in February 2014. It was later updated in July 2014 with an entirely new chapter. Aside from TG Storytime it has also been posted on BigCloset, a site which, if I'm being brutally honest, has some of the worst UI I’ve ever seen.

“Of Heroes And Villains” is on the shorter side lengthwise, relatively speaking at least, coming in at only 67K words according to Google Docs (TG Storytime is really bad with word counts). It also has a sequel, “Of Heroes And Villains: The Ties That Bind”, which was posted and completed almost immediately after the original. There's also a third installment, which I have not read any of, mainly because it only got a few chapters in before being discontinued.

It's unfortunate. This story by itself is a finished work and can be read alone, as can its sequel. There are a few threads left hanging but overall it still feels complete and the reader will be satisfied. But the series as a whole was not finished. 

I understand it. The people who write these stories aren't doing it for profit. This isn't their job, it's just something they do in their free time. They don’t owe anybody on the internet anything. It is still disappointing when a story, or in this case a series, is left unfinished however, and since I'm now someone who writes these kinds of stories in my free time, I feel I have a right to say that.

The list of stories I'm reviewing in this blog series does include some that were left unfinished but I'll get there when I get there. For now, it’s time to focus on this specific story.

Before I start talking about the plot, I feel the need to mention that “Of Heroes And Villains” is basically a “City of Heroes” fanfiction. “City of Heroes” was an MMORPG that ran from 2004 to 2012. I have never played “City of Heroes” and considering how difficult it is to find a way to play it in 2023 (from what I understand the source code has been available since 2019 but access to servers is difficult), I probably won't play it any time soon. However it’s still a neat detail. It doesn’t affect the story at all, beyond its setting being Paragon City, the location from the game, and that’s for the best. People who haven’t played the game won’t notice anything while people who have played it will recognize a cool reference that’s never too in your face or obnoxious. There may be other references, but since I barely know anything about the game I wouldn’t be able to find them. Maybe someone who has actually played it can tell me if there’s more. 

Okay, with all that background information out of the way, let's finally talk about this story. To give a brief synopsis of my thoughts on it, overall I think it's great. It really does deserve to be called one of the best stories on TG Storytime and it's certainly one of my favorites on the site. I’m not sure if it’s the absolute best, but it’s definitely up there.

“Of Heroes And Villains” follows two main characters; the supervillain Dionaea, or Diane Cole, and the superhero Shade, or Kara Reynolds.

Power wise and character wise, Diane and Kara are very similar to Poison Ivy and Batman respectively. Diane is a human plant hybrid who sustains herself on photosynthesis and water only and cannot digest solid food, as she has no stomach. She has plant-based powers, and even has control over plant life itself. She is known for using her sexuality as a weapon and has a natural talent in seducing people.

As for Kara, she's a billionaire who spends the night patrolling the city streets for villains and criminals and beating them ruthlessly. In spite of this she still has a strong sense of justice as she never kills anyone. She wears a black costume, is very skilled in martial arts, and her backstory is that her family was killed by criminals and she wants to avenge them.

Yeah when I said the two main characters in this story were similar to Poison Ivy and Batman, I wasn't referring to only vague similarities here and there. Diane and Kara are very reminiscent of those two DC characters and it’s pretty blatant. 

In all fairness though I’m probably being too harsh. Diane and Kara are not identical copies of Poison Ivy and Batman. There are differences. For one thing, Diane is not a genius and in fact she's depicted as being quite clumsy and inexperienced, particularly with her atrocious hand-to-hand combat and stealthing skills. 

She also has certain powers that Poison Ivy does not. One of them is blood magic, which grants her the ability to summon vines out of her exposed blood. Also, and this is important, she's a healer. In fact, as the story describes it, she heals everyone and everything around her without consciously willing it.

Kara has superpowers, unlike Batman, those being that she can teleport and cloak herself in shadow. Also she's a woman, and trans. 

Yeah, they're still very similar to those characters, but we're talking about superheroes here. There have been plenty of derivative superheroes in the past. It's really not much of an issue at all, I'm just being too much of an asshole. 

From my experience, I actually forgot that Diane and Kara were similar to Poison Ivy and Batman while reading these stories, and that’s really what matters the most. They may be lacking in originality, but they’re good at making you forget that.

And yeah, Kara is trans. I've already said that but I want to take some time to really talk about it.

These days when it comes to TG webnovels, explicitly trans main characters are fairly common, especially if you look at sites like Scribblehub. Even TG Storytime has seen an uptick in trans MCs in recent years. But back then, even as relatively recently as 2014, it was a bit more unusual. Now I wouldn't go as far as to say it was completely unheard of, but still definitely a bit of an oddity. 

It's funny. The site is literally called “TG Storytime”, as in “Transgender Storytime”, and yet so many of the stories posted on it have nothing to do with transgender people.

There are quite a few stories on the list of ones I'm reviewing that also have a trans MC, but this is probably the most notable because it was posted at a time when it was more unusual to do that, at least on the site it was posted on. Generally speaking these kinds of TG stories tend to have a better reputation than TG stories that do not have a trans MC and there's probably a few reasons for that. For one, at least from what I've seen, these stories are much less likely to do the “forced het / comphet” trope or really any of the problematic tropes that you usually see in TG webnovels like brainwashing. In fact, these stories don't even need to do brainwashing, they don't have to make their main character like being a girl, as they're just going to like it no matter what. 

Many TG webnovels without a trans MC have a kind of plot hole, where for the most part they pretend that gender dysphoria does not exist. And by extension, they usually also pretend that transgender people don’t exist, or at least never bring them up. TG webnovels with a trans MC, by their very design, can not ignore the existence of transgender people, and usually they have a much better time dealing with dysphoria as a topic.

I have a better time relating to these stories, so to me they're better and also they have more well-rounded perspectives on gender and sexuality. Especially in comparison to something like “For a Girl”, which tried but fell flat too many times.

“Of Heroes And Villains” starts off right in the middle of the action. Diane, orchestrating a heist, is attempting to steal some money from a vault when Kara arrives to stop her. A fight breaks out, classic superhero fashion, and then everything comes to a halt when Diane accidentally rips a part of Kara’s uniform, revealing her secret.

She likes wearing panties.

Kara goes absolutely ballistic, cursing herself for becoming so careless, and then Diane convinces her to get them both out of there before the police come and see what she’s wearing.

And from then on, Diane keeps tempting Kara every single time they meet, pushing her to go further and further. She goes from just wearing panties to wearing bras, and then corsets and high heels. 

Diane even pushes her to come up with a female name.

Kara hates her obsession with women’s underwear and also hates that she has become so attracted to Diane, a villain. The fact that she’s lusting for a villain angers her so deeply. 

However, as time goes on, Kara begins to unwind, mentally speaking, and starts to become okay with loving a villain. She even starts letting Diane dress her up, without any objections. She begins liking her as a person, and enjoys being around her. Sure, Diane did push her, quite significantly, but after a while, she can’t bring herself to resist.

Eventually, they take the big step and have sex.

Kara begins to become a happier and more content person, realizing just how depressing and lonely her life was before.

She even makes a friend apart from Diane.

They don’t stay friends though, more on that later.

Things start to go south however when Diane’s healing powers begin to work their magic on Kara, without either of them knowing it. As stated, Diane heals everything around her without willing it. And the more time Kara spends around Diane, the more she begins unintentionally healing. Her body begins changing into that of a woman’s. 

It starts off subtle, with swollen nipples and a slight decrease in strength that could be reasonably explained away, but soon the changes start becoming too great to ignore, and Kara begins suspecting Diane of weakening her to harm her.

Things start going even further south when Diane says she needs to steal some money so they can pay for their hotel room. Diane has specifically avoided stealing money in order to not remind Kara of the villain she is. But their private hotel room they stay in is expensive, and her funds for it have depleted.

Kara offers to pay for the room itself, and Diane refuses, saying she wants her own money. She also takes note that her initial impression of Kara being rich was correct.

Diane opts to steal money from villains to ease Kara’s nerves, and she chooses the Knives of Arachne. Kara immediately rejects her selection, saying that the Knives of Arachne are too dangerous and will kill her.

Kara proves to Diane that she was never trying to kill her and could easily do so if she wanted. 

I like this moment. It really drives home what kind of people villains are. Not only does it demonstrate just how skilled in combat Kara is (which this story admittedly was a bit lacking in showing), it’s also the first time villains are depicted as being truly evil and dangerous. Earlier it was said that some villains were sociopaths, but this is the first time that’s really shown to the reader. Villains often have no mercy, and will not hesitate to kill. Fighting them requires a high level of skill and concentration.

Diane goes into the hideout of the Knives of Arachne and tries to walk around stealthily. She's overconfident in her abilities however and Kara needs to carefully and quietly take out each guard that comes close to her. Diane literally grows in the dark after all. 

Kara also becomes angry that she is helping her commit a crime. 

Kara panics when she sees Diane suddenly get struck with a blade. She then gets into a fight with her old rival, the Executioner. At first things seemed to be going well, but unfortunately Kara is not fully aware of how much strength she has lost from her body changes, and loses very quickly by making a dire mistake.

Kara refuses to teleport to safety, staying to save Diane. Diane is able to heal herself and watches the fight in front of her. When she sees Kara go down, it’s her turn to panic, and she immediately reaches deep within her to reach her full power and trap every guard in the area with her vines to save Kara.

The guards continue to hack at Diane’s vines and close in on them, and the two are able to teleport back to Kara’s mansion for safety. Kara almost instantly passes out and Diane goes to work on healing her wound.

After being able to successfully heal Kara, Diane takes a tour into Kara's mansion, and notices just how huge it is and how Kara is even richer than she first thought.

Another thing she notes is just how non-personalized this Mansion is. There's barely anything here that she can point to and say belongs to Kara. It doesn’t feel like she truly lives there. There aren't even any pictures of family or friends aside from one picture that shows her parents, along with her older sister and herself as children. 

She finds three rooms in the mansion that are personalized. Her room holding her weapon collection, her training room with mannequins displaying each iteration of her costume, and a room that looks like a conspiracy theorist’s.

Diane investigates this room, finds Kara's huge computer in the center, and sees a folder labelled “Caroline”. As it turns out, Kara has an older sister named Caroline who has been missing for nearly 10 years, presumably dead, and this room is devoted to finding her whereabouts.

I’ll get more into Kara’s missing sister later but this character trait of Kara’s mansion being mostly non-personalized aside from a few rooms is not something that changes later on in the series. I apologize in advance for this but I kind of what to tap into my old, bad high school analytical reading skills to see what this all means.

Considering that the only rooms in this mansion that are personalized to any degree are the training room, the weapons room, and the room dedicated to finding her missing sister, I think this further shows what was stated before in the story. Kara has dedicated all her life and soul into being a superhero, finding her long lost sister, and getting justice for her. Her civilian life has become an afterthought, something that she only participates in rather than actively does. So divided has her civilian life and her superhero life become, that her civilian life only barely gets any thought from her.

It could also represent that Kara is so attached to her past, a more innocent time where everything seemed easier and simpler. She was born and raised in that mansion, and she wants to preserve every inch of it that she can. She doesn’t want to change any of it because she wants to hold onto those memories of her past. I’ll get into Kara’s past more later but for now I’ll say she has very valid reasons for wanting to stick onto her past like this.

I am so sorry everyone. I know I sound like a High School freshman bullshitting their way through an essay, but I really wanted to look into that side of Kara’s character because I think it reveals some key stuff about who she is as a person.

After Diane watches the video provided by the folder she hears a scream from within the mansion and finds Kara as a woman.

Kara is freaking out and she immediately jumps to blame Diane for doing this to her. The fact that Diane has learned Kara’s civilian identity, “Ian Reynolds”, the CEO of Reynolds Industries doesn’t help. 

The accusation deeply offends Diane, as she would never do something like that against Kara’s will.

Of course Diane really did do it but not intentionally. After she has calmed down a bit, she comes to realize just how much weaker her body has become, and starts to feel degraded and useless, as if her aspirations in life have now been ruined.

Basically, part of Kara’s character arc in this story is similar to Stephanie’s in “For a Girl”. She needs to come to peace with her limits and strengths, and learn how to work with them.

Diane tells Kara that her friend can help her find what's wrong with her. But her friend is a villain so she tells Kara to be nice. Unfortunately, Diane’s friend isn’t just any villain, she’s one of the worst, most powerful, and most ruthless villains of all, Cinder Snow, who was thought to have been dead.

After Kara’s failed attack, Diane pleads with Kara to cooperate with her, but Kara refuses, and things become worse when Amelia refers to Diane as her “minion”. Throughout the first half of this story, Kara has stopped thinking of Diane as a villain. She was only a “villain in name only”, but with Amelia being a friend of her, everything comes crashing down and Diane’s status as a villain is reinforced strongly in Kara’s mind.

Eventually, Amelia forces Kara into a chair and straps her in completely through a trapdoor. After telling Diane to get her something, Amelia says to Kara what the reader already knows. Diane was just healing Kara’s body to match her mind.

Amelia admonishes Diane for not knowing enough about her own powers when she tells her that she was behind Kara’s changes.

When Diane comes back to see Kara, Kara is eerily detached at first, but then yells at her and brings up every bad thing she has done throughout the duration of their relationship.

Kara says that Diane doesn't really see her as a person, but rather a “toy”. She never takes her feelings into consideration and she forces her to do bad things such as committing crimes. Kara teleports away from Diane leaving her crying on the floor. The last thing she says is that Diane doesn't understand love as she is a villain, and villains don't understand love.

The next few chapters see Kara and Diane split up. Diane has a conversation with Amelia, wanting to know why exactly Kara hates her so much and was so afraid of her, and that conversation is the final nail in the coffin in making Diane leave Amelia. Meanwhile Kara is trying to adjust to her new body and life situation. She knows that if the public learns that Shade has turned into a woman, it would be a big story and everyone would pay attention to her. She also notes, when buying new clothes for herself, that none of her credit cards refer to her as a woman. They refer to “Ian Reynolds”. She runs into a problem and realizes she needs to find a way to prove that she is herself.

This is a problem that a lot of TG’d characters would realistically run into post-transformation, and I love how this story addresses it. So many TG webnovels sort of gloss over how the TG’d character would need to prove their identity to the world and the law, and that it’d be difficult to do so. The solution Kara and Diane come up with later in the story is to use illusion magic to disguise Kara as her pre-transition self in business meetings she needs to attend, and then when she’s ready, get all the paperwork figured out.

Kara doesn't need a lot of time to accept what has happened to her. After beginning to miss Diane, and wanting to get back with her, she teleports back to Amelia's lair in order to find Diane only to learn that she has left her.

Diane is healing sick kids at the hospital when she gets caught by a hero who assumes she's hurting them. Kara learns about this and immediately goes to save her. Kara does something that she would never have done before and that's fighting a hero to save a villain. But it's Diane who she's saving and she has made it her goal to always be on Diane's side.

Kara is able to teleport them out of there and relaxes when she learns that Diane was only healing people at the hospital. Afterwards they have sex in their private hotel room, and then have sex again (they have a lot of sex in this story). Kara’s healing finishes as her penis becomes her vagina and the two fully embrace and reunite.

Kara and Diane begin living together, and Diane decides she doesn’t want to be a villain anymore, but when she notes that Kara’s hatred drives her heroism, she decides she doesn’t want to be a hero either.

At the end of the story, Kara continues being a superhero, with her superhero persona being known as being transformed into a woman, while Diane gets a job at the hospital and is able to fully utilize her healing powers.

Well that was a pretty long summary. Regardless, Kara and Diane are excellent main characters, and there’s a lot to discuss about them, so let’s do that.

Kara is a brooding, brutal, obsessive, and hate-filed superhero who has a strong, special hatred for villains. Her hatred for villains goes beyond what is normal for a hero. And other heroes don't hesitate to point this out. She's generally very unpleasant to be around and doesn’t have much of a social life. She trains very hard and obsessively, and taking out villains is described as being her “brand of therapy”.

I really like how this part really demonstrates how toxic Kara’s mental state is, as well as how deranged she can get with her “brand of therapy”. Kara’s main character arc revolves around her unwinding, loosening up, to let go of her hatred. To start enjoying life more. And through Diane, that is able to happen. Soon after her secret was first revealed to Diane, we learn that Kara’s obsession with female underwear is not just something she's embarrassed of, it's something she has a deep hatred for and something she hates herself for having.

The same goes for her lust for Diane, she hates that she has it and she wants rid of it. To love a villain goes completely against her moral principles as a hero. But as much as she tries, she just can't resist. A lot of Kara’s hatred for villains does stem from her backstory which I will go over fully right now. Kara was born as “Ian Reynolds” to a family of billionaires. When she was young, villains killed her family, most notably her older sister, Caroline. Even to the present day, Kara has a video recording on her computer of the last time she saw Caroline alive. It wasn’t in person, it was a video where kidnappers demand that the parents pay ransom money to free her.

And for the following decade Kara obsessed over finding justice for her sister’s death, and devoted a lot of her time to finding her killer’s whereabouts. And in her own words, she needs to be obsessed. Her sister deserves someone who cares that she's dead.

Spoiler alert, Caroline is still alive and becomes an important character in the sequel, but that isn’t relevant right now. I know a superhero backstory driven by grief isn’t the most original thing ever, but the way the backstory is revealed and how it connects to her wider character arc is all done superbly. Her deep hatred for villains, it all stemmed from this. As I’ve already discussed Kara’s arc of becoming less hateful, I really need to discuss her arc as a trans woman, because honestly, Kara’s development as a trans lesbian is one of the best I’ve seen in any story ever. As I said before, Kara’s obsession with women’s underwear is not just a weird quirk of her’s. She despises this part of herself, and she believes it makes her a freak. A lot of the hatred within her is directed toward herself, as well as her body. Diane pushes her to embrace this part of herself that wants to wear female clothing, and it doesn’t take much for her to comply. It’s a pretty classic set up in TG fiction, mainly force femme stories. Some male character is forced to dress like a woman through what is usually a ridiculous series of events. In this case though, it is all consensual. There isn’t any forced kidnapping or rape, which a lot of those older force femme stories on sites like Fictionmania veered into. It’s a pretty nice change of pace. This paragraph here pretty much deconstructs all of force femme and TG fiction by itself. And also best represents this story’s approach to that topic.

I also really like the way this story handles pronouns. As you’ve no doubt seen from the screenshots, this story is written in third person. A lot of TG and also trans fiction is written in first person, and the reason for this is pretty simple. The question of how to gender the protagonist can be hard to answer. Is it misgendering for the narration to refer to a trans female character as “he” before she realizes she’s trans? Even just for TG fiction, when do you switch from male to female pronouns? This can all make a third person perspective challenging to write, but “Of Heroes And Villains” absolutely nails the pronoun usage. In the beginning of the story, Kara is referred to with male pronouns exclusively, but as the story goes on, whenever she sees herself as a woman, she gets gendered female. Sometimes, it’s not necessarily when she sees herself as a man that she gets gendered male, it’s when she remembers she isn’t supposed to want to be a woman.

The above moment is brutal but also fantastic at showing exactly what Kara hates about herself and her body, without her knowing it herself. Later on in the story, when Diane and Kara have sex, with Diane being a healer, she's naturally empathetic and can just tell Kara doesn’t want to take the dominant position without having it be told to her, and she makes sex with a woman, something that had always been uncomfortable for Kara, feel good for the first time.

And then she does the same for wearing female clothes.

Getting back on topic, there eventually comes a point when she gets gendered female by default, but not before some introspection from herself.

Just like earlier in the story, whenever she remembers she isn’t supposed to want or like being a woman, her pronouns switch back to male. The same thing happens later when Kara becomes enraptured by a skirt. She wants to buy it, knowing she can do so without anyone judging her, but she stops herself.

Soon she comes to accept what has happened to her. She always hated being a man, and her new body is bearable in a way that her old one never was.

In regards to the pronoun usage, this story does an interesting thing with them sometimes by juxtaposing the name “Kara” with male pronouns. It’s an odd decision, but one that ultimately works. For the scenes told from Diane’s perspective it makes sense as Kara is still certain she’s a man and Diane doesn’t know her civilian name yet. It also works to show Kara’s confused mental state and the fact she hasn’t put together that “Kara” is in fact a woman.

Another part of her arc does have to do with her coming to terms with her decreased strength. And what one other character, David says to her is the kind of thing someone should’ve said to Stephanie in “For a Girl”.

Kara’s been fighting people multiple times her strength for years without any issue. She’s already a very skilled martial artist. She’ll get used to her decreased strength, she always overcomes any obstacles in her way. And yeah, the transformation happening by healing magic is pretty predictable and obvious, but not in the way where it’s frustrating. Healing magic acting as HRT for trans people is one of my favorite TG tropes and I always like seeing it used. There's something about the TG elements that I'd like to discuss, and it relates to a common thing I've heard said about this story. I've heard a lot of people praise the story by saying that the “TG elements are not the entire point of the story” or “the story doesn't revolve all around the gender transformation”. And I have to say, this feels like very backhanded praise. First off, a story revolving almost entirely around a gender transformation and its impact is not inherently a bad thing. No one would say something like, “this story is good because the romance isn't the entire point of the story” or “the story doesn’t revolve all around romance” about a story with romance in it. So why do they with TG elements? Personally I think it's more of a reaction to the general state of online TG fiction in the early 2010s. Stories back then were typically all about the gender transformation and many of them didn't really do a good job with the subject matter. So when this story comes in and does a great job with the subject matter and features it as not the most important part of the story, people would probably react by saying that. Still, I don't really like that praise. And also, “Of Heroes And Villains” is not even the only story where the TG elements are secondary. Hell, in the list of stories I’m going to review, there are more than a few where the TG elements are less relevant to the plot than they are here. I think the impression that this story specifically has the TG elements as secondary may in part be due to how late the physical transformation begins. It doesn’t even start until about a third of a way in. Many TG stories put the transformation itself very early (some do it a little too early, if you ask me). And even for stories with a gradual transformation rather than an instantaneous one, the transformation still begins early on. Meanwhile, “Of Heroes And Villains” has 12 whole chapters where Kara is fully pre-transformation. It’s actually pretty unorthodox for a TG story to do that. And also, in regards to the actual TG elements of the story, “Of Heroes And Villains” does break a lot of common conventions that many TG stories ran into, especially at the time. When Kara’s body changes, she doesn't lose any of her height. She's 6 foot 2 before transformation and she’s 6 foot 2 after transformation. She still retains quite a bit of her muscle mass, and her hair stays the same length, that being short (though it is said to be in a pixie cut). She doesn't become “uber girly”. In fact, from her descriptions she seems to be fairly butch. There’s nothing inherently wrong about the MC of a TG story becoming very feminine. In fact, I absolutely understand the appeal of it. I do enjoy a good TG story where the MC becomes girly, and wears dresses and skirts and puts on makeup and such. But also, variety is important. And with so many stories where the MC becomes very feminine, having a story where the MC becomes a lesbian tomboy is a nice change of pace. And thinking about it logically, there’s no reason why Kara’s hair would grow because of the healing magic anyway. Oh, and this story is a lesbian story. Today, that’s not that out of the ordinary. I mean, it seems like most explicitly trans TG stories today are lesbian stories. However in 2014, on TGST, it definitely stood out. Hell, the story even explicitly states that Kara is not attracted to men.

When it was surrounded by so many forced het stories, this part definitely made this story stand out among the crowd. I’ve already discussed my problems with forced het, the main one being that it's just a shitty thing to do that reinforces homophobia, but another problem I have with it is how painfully boring it is. Human sexuality is such a complex, interesting thing to tap into, and meanwhile a good portion of old and even new TG fiction will simply overwrite a straight man’s original sexuality to make them straight as a woman. It comes off as thoughtless to me. There weren’t even a lot of big het TG stories that weren’t forced het at the time. To have a lesbian story, especially a trans lesbian story, was kind of a big thing. I think part of the reason why this story is so well remembered is because of the context of the time it was posted. There simply weren't many explicitly trans stories on TG Storytime, much less long, novel-esque ones. There weren't many lesbian stories either. So to have an explicitly trans lesbian, long, novel-esque story on TG Storytime in 2014 was a pretty big thing. Variety is important and the fact that this story did break a lot of the common conventions of TG fiction at the time definitely makes it stand out, and I do applaud it for that.

I consider Diane to be one of the two main characters in the story because she gets almost as much development as Kara and gets basically as much time in the spotlight. Not only that, but a plethora of chapters are told from her perspective, including the first chapter. So yeah, this is as much Diane’s story as it is Kara’s story. As stated before, Diane is a plant-based supervillain who is part plant herself. Her physical appearance is human except her eyes which are described as glowing red. She also has petals in her hair. These physical traits make a secret identity impossible for her. Her dependence on photosynthesis means she is most often almost naked. Her main crimes include theft and the beating up of police officers who get in her way. She mainly sticks to robbery and avoids committing other more serious crimes. She’s not exactly the most ruthless or psychopathic villain out there. Hell, there's probably some people out there who will question if Diane is really worse than Kara all things considered. I kind of questioned that a bit, but in the end, the answer is kind of obvious. Diane is definitely worse, at least at the start of the story. Kara may essentially be a billionaire cop, but let’s not pretend that Diane is some kind of proletariat hero. She’s definitely not a Robin Hood. The reason she's stealing money is not to give it to the poor, it’s so that she can fund Amelia's science and other activities. And I should remind you that Amelia is a mass murderer who has ambitions of installing a dictatorship upon the world and suppressing the masses. Knowingly funding a mass murderer who intends to kill people and take over the world is enough to make Diane a pretty bad person in the beginning. Also, she had no qualms with torture and didn’t initially see much wrong with how Amelia forcibly strapped Kara into a chair. Yeah, she was pretty bad, and that’s what makes her development and her eventual redemption that much better. Diane's backstory is a tragic one, and it's shown to us in the first two interlude chapters of the story (another point in this being both Diane and Kara’s story is the fact that she gets two interlude chapters). The second one shows Diane’s life before she became a supervillain. Before she had powers, back when she really was just like any other person. Well, not exactly. By the time the reader gets to this interlude, they are already well aware of this fact, but Diane was diagnosed with a certain incurable heart disease that will guarantee her death at a very young age.

I might be wrong but I’m pretty sure most kids understand the concept of death by the time they’re seven. Anyway, as she grows older and starts to understand her shortened lifespan, she begins to take a more carefree attitude, where she appreciates all the beauty life has to offer. We never find out exactly what disease she had, or what specifically was wrong with her heart. All we know is that she was very sick, and was sure to die young. Most of Diane's character traits come directly from her youth and her early diagnosis of a fatal disease. Her careless attitude where she almost never takes anything seriously. Her love and almost sexual attraction for money. These all stem from her childhood. She grew up not really caring about what other people said about her. She didn’t care when other kids called her a “whore” for having sex as a 14 year old girl, and she didn’t care when her mother constantly reprimanded her for her poor grades. Her mother, Anne Cole, works tirelessly, day and night, to provide for her daughter’s medical care that never stops being expensive. She wants her daughter to have a good life, a good future, which Diane sees as pointless. She’s going to die very young, she doesn’t see the use in trying to get good grades or trying to get into a good college to get a good career. She’ll be dead before any of that is of use to her, and at one point she tells her mother that.

She wants her mother to stop being so stressed and live for herself. Her mother is still in denial of the fact that Diane will die. Now, I don’t have experience with having a terminally ill close family member, so if someone else whose reading this does and wants to add some perspective, feel free to do so, but this whole situation just feels so real. Having a mother in denial that her daughter is going to die, struggling to keep up with all the medical bills and working tirelessly to do so, it’s all written so tragically. It’s incredibly effective for what it is not even a one thousand word chapter. At the end of the interlude, Diane finds that she hates the small, close minded town she lives in, and wants to see so much more of the world. So she runs out and does so, not graduating high school. She begins stealing money, and commits a few minor crimes to get by, her general carelessness toward life eventually leading her to becoming a villain. She does not return to her home, and a few months after she leaves she writes her mother a letter. The first one she writes tells her to live her life and to stop working herself to death. She sends an envelope to her every month, but they stop, and Anne Cole cries thinking that Diane is dead. But months later, she gets sent an envelope holding a ton of money.

Ending the interlude on a heartwarming note. In the first interlude of the story we get the backstory of how Diane got her powers. She was lying in a hospital bed, certain to die, when Amelia finds her and offers her the chance to become a test subject for one of her experiments. The experiment in question involves combining her DNA with the DNA of a magic flower said to heal all ailments.

The experiment is a success and saves Diane’s life, giving her her powers. The rest of the interlude sees Amelia record observations that she finds about her, including some foreshadowing of what’s going to happen to Kara.

Another part of Diane's healing powers is that the healing magic itself will remain in a person if they are around Diane long enough, so even if Kara is away from Diane, her long exposure to her magic heals her wounds quickly.

It only serves to make her more powerful.

An effect of Diane’s disease is that she despises hospitals, and in Chapter 26, when she goes to hospital to heal sick people, it’s a pretty big point in tackling her hatred for them.

And later on, when she gets a job at the hospital and finally puts her powers to good use, the hatred is effectively gone, signifying the end of this part of her arc.

“Opposites attract” is definitely a cliché in stories with romance, but Diane and Kara have such good chemistry together that I can’t bring myself to care. Their differences play off each other so well and throughout the story they’re able to influence the other to become better people and rise above their flaws. Diane’s fun-loving, carefree personality is able to make Kara loosen up and stop being so tense. She allows her to just appreciate life more, and, I’m about to say the dumbest, most cliché and cheesy thing imaginable, to appreciate friends more (Yeah I know leave a comment mocking me for the whole ‘learning the value of friendship’ point). She lets go of some of her hatred, including her hatred of herself. Of course, the physical transformation and healing of her dysphoria definitely helped with this, but it wasn’t the only factor. And not all of her hatred and flaws are fixed, or even fixed fully, and that shows just how human these characters are. Not all of their problems or flaws can be fixed at once, and that’s okay. In fact, that’s real life. Kara’s sternness, strictness, and strong sense of morality is able to get Diane to use her powers for good, and gain a sense of morality herself. She learns to help people, and to not be so selfish. She stops treating others like toys, and she starts seeing them as real people. Both Diane and Kara didn’t really have friends before, but through each other, they find something special and are able to “put themselves out there” and not be so lonely. Is this all stretching? Maybe, but the point still stands that two flawed people helping each other, and unintentionally helping the other fix their flaws, is just something I love reading. And the best part is that Kara and Diane still feel like the same people they were before even after their arcs in this story are finished. They don't suddenly become different people who don’t remotely act like they used to, many of their character traits still remain, making the development of their characters all the more effective.

One last thing, before I move on.

It seems “For a Girl” wasn’t the only one of these stories to use girl as a verb.

Even beyond Kara and Diane the side characters in this story are very well developed and are given enough good material to really shine and make an impact. Let's first take a look at Amelia, or Cinder Snow. Admittedly it's a bit of a stretch to call her a side character, however for the purposes of this review I will classify her as such. Amelia is, as stated before, a supervillain. She is described as being the most dangerous and terrifying supervillain of all time. She's someone who, upon seeing her, immediately strikes fear and anger into one’s mind, as seen many times in the story.

She's insanely smart and powerful. And also, very threatening.

However, she's also very quirky. And she has a habit of acting as an exaggerated caricature of a villain. A very hammy and cheesy saturday morning cartoon type villain. In fact, that very characterization is how she's depicted in the first half of the story. A sort of exaggerated cartoon-esque mad scientist villain and not any kind of serious threat. A mostly quirky, mischievous person whose biggest goal in life is some vague notion of taking over the world. In the first chapter she's introduced we see her arguing with someone on the phone over a voodoo doll.

Her habit of breaking electronics and getting very angry and threatening to kill people over minor inconveniences is played as a joke.

It all makes her come off almost like a comic relief character. She’s evil in the same way most joke villains are evil. She isn’t a serious threat, at least not to the reader. I’ve already discussed the first interlude chapter where Amelia gives Diane her powers so I won’t say much about it here except that it can possibly serve as a way to make Amelia more likable. She saved Diane’s life and gave her a chance to truly thrive as a person. I’m probably stretching here but at least no one could ever see this action as making her a worse person. And throughout the rest of the first half of the story, Amelia mainly plays this role. Her main focus is on her science, and she appears only from time to time. She doesn’t seem to really care for anything else, as advancing science seems to be her main aspiration in life. Her goal of taking over the world is presented as more of a pipe dream than an actual goal. She may do it if she gets around it, but at the end of the day she doesn’t care for it enough to dedicate all or even half of her time to it.

It's almost like science is the only thing that she cares about, but the story shows that she really does care about Diane. Diane is a very important person to her. She even sees her as a friend, the only one she has. She actually gives advice to Diane pertaining to her relationship with Kara, like a parent would a child.

It's sort of poetic what she says about Kara, and what she says does align with Kara’s characterization as a very obsessive and tense person, who could snap at any time. Once Kara and Diane go back to Amelia's lair so they can try to “fix” Kara’s body, through the narration from Kara’s mind we learn a few things about Amelia. That she was thought to be dead after a fight with the hero Chrono Warden, and that she’s one of the most dangerous and powerful supervillains of all time.

And that, to a hero named PsyKick, she did something “far far worse than death”, setting her apart from most other villains as villains in general specifically avoid murdering heroes.

When Kara gets strapped to a chair, she freaks out. She's terrified. Through this, we gain more insight on who Amelia really is as a person. 

Diane is at first confused by how utterly terrified Kara was and why she was so mad. She was angry at the very fact that Diane is friends with Amelia and yells at her for leaving her alone with Amelia. 

It’s the tipping point in their relationship. It’s what makes her leave.

As I mentioned earlier there was a conversation Diane and Amelia had that was the main contributor to Diane leaving Amelia. And now I'm finally going to talk about that in Chapter 22 we get a full detailed retelling of what exactly Amelia did to PsyKick. Diane asks Amelia why Kara hates her so much and thus Amelia tells her the story.

Amelia's parents were mad scientists, and also villains. Being raised this way affected her and made her an evil genius. By the age of 10, she was even starting to become smarter than her own parents.

She had a little sister named Constance, who she says was the only person who could keep up with her intellectually. Constance had been born with the ability to bend time itself, a very gifted person in magic. Amelia was only able to gain her ability to influence temperature after usage of "several vats of toxic acid".

Their parents hated Constance, and for that, Amelia killed them.

The two went on to live in Paragon where Amelia performed science experiments and hoped to one day take over the world while Constance started attending a local University. The two were happy and happy with each other.

After making her debut as Cinder Snow, Constance started to become uncomfortable with what Amelia was doing. The culprit here was the hero named PsyKick, who she had fallen in love with.

Constance became a hero and went by the name Chrono Warden. What Amelia did to PsyKick was so bad Constance tried to kill her for it. Amelia was angry PsyKick was taking Constance away from her, so she decided to make PsyKick into a villain by brainwashing him.

PsyKick ended up in a hospital, where he is constantly watched and under restraint. He is never allowed to leave.

With this scene we're told who Amelia really is. She isn't just a hammy cartoon-esque supervillain, she really is a psychopath who does awful things to people and has no care for the well-being of anyone besides herself. She has no remorse over what she does to anyone and she takes pride in how much of a monster she is. It's an effective scene and serves as another way of showing to the reader what villains actually are.

As I said many times, learning this is what causes Diane to leave. Amelia's role after this chapter is kind of small but she does reveal herself to be alive and makes a huge comeback in the climax. I'll discuss that more later on, but what I will say is that Amelia still cares for Diane even after she leaves.

She cares about her so much she was even spying on her to make sure Kara didn’t harm her.

I really like her comment about how no one ever believes villains, even when they're sincerely sorry.

Overall Amelia's pretty well-rounded character. Even after it’s made clear that she really is a psychopath, that sort of hammy cartoon-esque supervillain side of her never fully leaves. She has a good backstory, she has depth, and she always seems like she really loves what she does. And sometimes, even someone as awful as her can display some humanity. She’s the best fully evil character this story could have. 

And now let’s talk about PsyKick. PsyKick is a superhero who has, well, psychic superpowers. He has strong mental defenses, can read the minds of other people, and even influence their actions. He was a member of the group, “The Tenacious Teens”, along with superheroes Texplosion and Dazzling Dawn. 

Once a well-respected hero now a shell of his former self due to what Cinder Snow had done to him.  the exact way he was brainwashed was to make him compulsively serve any villainess he comes across. To make him euphoric and derive pleasure from doing evil acts. At every moment his purpose claws at him, forcing him to want to be evil.

It leaves him so broken that he now has to spend his days locked in a mental facility for seemingly forever. He never makes any progress towards becoming himself again, and no one close to him visits him anymore.

The last chapter or epilogue of this story is spent with Diane slowly healing PsyKick, or Stephen. To bring him back to sanity again. This was already foreshadowed when Amelia said no one was able to break through Stephen’s strong mental defenses and find a way to cure him, remarking that the doctors “didn’t have tools as great as her”.

Diane essentially pretends to be his new “mistress” (what he calls the evil woman he is compelled to serve). From there she begins to create situations in which he is forced to think for himself and it all culminates with him finally breaking down and declaring that he doesn't want to be the way he currently is anymore. 

I really like the last scene of this story, even more so after reading the sequel. Spoiler alert, Stephen becomes a very important character in the sequel and a lot of that story is devoted to the rest of his healing process. With this in mind it becomes ambiguous when exactly this last scene is taking place. 

I like to interpret this scene as taking place after the events of the sequel and to me that makes it a lot more powerful. I also really like the last line of this story. “It was a great day to be a hero in Paragon City” is just so powerful to me, and it’s a wonderful way to end things off.

In fact, speaking of this ending there's something I want to mention about how some of these stories end. I did praise the way “For a Girl” ended and I still mostly stand by that. I thought it was a pretty cheesy but endearing ending. However, something I didn't really notice before was how cheap it is to have an ending where the character just goes through exactly how they've changed throughout the events of the story. It feels forced and doesn't have as much impact as ending the story in a more subtle way.

“Of Heroes And Villains” has a very strong ending because there's never a point where any of the characters just explain how they've changed and what they've learned over the course of the story. And that is so much more effective to me. 

There will be other stories in this list that do end in that way but I'll get there when I get there. 

Another side character that ends up making an impact is Captain Patriot, or David. Captain Patriot is the second superhero of his name, taking after his father, also named Captain Patriot, who was one of the most famous and iconic superheroes of all time. His powers are super strength and near invincibility. 

David is trying to live up to his father’s legacy, but unfortunately he just isn’t up to it. To make matters worse, a good portion of the hero community views him as an annoying, insufferable dudebro.

Especially Kara.

David keeps trying to befriend Kara, without much success. To Kara, David sees her as the second “Arrow”, the non-powered hero that often worked side by side with Captain Patriot. And Kara hates that.

Throughout Chapter 4, his introductory chapter, David is portrayed as, like stated before, an annoying, insufferable dudebro. Kara absolutely despises him and fantasizes about how he could die so he’d stop bothering her.

Captain Patriot drops out of the story for the rest of the first half, but comes back in Chapter 23, when Kara is first starting to adjust to her new body in public. Without a costume on, she does some hero work just to feel better about herself after what happened with Diane. 

But unfortunately for her…

David spots her and begins to follow her relentlessly, even hitting on her, which is what makes her snap. She accidentally reveals her identity to him and explains her transformation as a “magic accident”. They go drinking together and it’s shown that David is more than just the insufferable dudebro he was portrayed as. In fact, it’s even revealed that David isn’t trying to get Kara to be his sidekick.

He just wanted Kara to be his friend.

By the end of the chapter, the two are actually friends. David turns out to be a pretty nice guy, and someone with depth to him. An actual character, rather than just a joke,

And then right after that, we’re given the third interlude, in which it’s shown why David wanted to befriend Kara so much. As it turns out, everyone just accepted him as one of the best heroes of all time, someone who’s confident and sure of himself all the time. He doesn’t need to learn anything, because he’s already one of the best.

But Kara treats him as a new hero, someone who needs to be taught because he’s still incompetent in too many ways. 

Kara is one of the only people who does not treat David with any respect at all. She’s obviously annoyed at his presence and treats him as a nuisance. David doesn’t think he’s earned all the hero worship, and Kara gives him none of it. She even has a dry, snarky sense of humor that David likes.

David learns that Kara has begun dating Dawn of the “Tenacious Teens”, and has started hanging out with them. He also realizes that Kara doesn’t really talk to any of the members aside from Dawn, and she doesn’t really have any friends at all.

Once Kara and Dawn break up, Kara stops hanging out with the “Tenacious Teens”, and none of them seem to miss her. Many of them such as Texplosion voice their distaste for her. 

Stephen even insists to David that Kara isn’t worth the time and that he should stop being so invested in her. He says it’s only a matter of time before she snaps.

Kara just needs a friend. She really needs a friend, and David makes it a goal to be that friend.

In the next chapter David sleeps at Kara’s mansion and they tell each other their secret identities. They part on good terms.

In just two chapters, David is shown to be a well rounded character with depth, in a way that’s natural and not at all forced. When Kara befriends David, it’s completely believable. 

David’s part in the story does not end here. We’ll put a pin in that for now and focus on another side character, Amethyst Star, or Elaine.

Elaine is a superhero whose powers include absorbing other meta’s superpowers (“meta” is the general term in this story for anyone with superpowers), and using that to power her purple energy blasts. There is no limit to the amount of power she can take from a meta. Anything from small powers like Kara’s teleportation to David’s godlike strength and invincibility can easily be stripped away by her.

However, she can only absorb one meta’s powers at a time (two on very rare occasions). And she can not copy them for herself, only take them away.

Before the events of the story, Elaine was one of the most popular superheroes out there, until a huge controversy came in which she was caught snapping a man’s neck on live TV, killing him.

Okay, as an aside it kind of bugs me that in most cop related media (let’s face it, superheroes in this story and in almost all media are basically cops), any force that acts against the cops is portrayed as being bad. It just rubs me the wrong way. Realistically, Elaine probably would’ve just gotten away with this and have a ton of supporters cheering her on.

Was Elaine in the right here? Yeah obviously. This man was clearly trying to kill a ton of people with nuclear weapons, and in that situation, if he’s about to do it and has the means, then it’s best to just kill him. Just like it’s best to kill someone who’s about to commit a mass shooting and already has the gun, the ammo, and is showing no signs of stopping. And also, launching nuclear weapons is a pretty big deal that can permanently destroy an area for hundreds of thousands of years and kill thousands of people. Elaine was completely justified in killing him.

At the same time, to do a plotline where the majority of the media and public opinion is actively against cops can sometimes be frustrating because it just is not the reality at all. For instance, take someone like Kyle Rittenhouse, who in 2020 specifically went to an anti-racist protest with a gun to kill protestors, and at least half of the U.S. government, probably a lot more, was on his side, as well as a good portion of U.S. citizens. The U.S. court of law sided with him too and he got off with no consequences. People say the media slandered him when all mainstream conservative news, which counts for half of U.S. news, was also on his side.

And that’s not even counting the military, who are just cops for people overseas. The U.S. media will defend to its dying breath every single war that the U.S. enacts upon foreign countries just for their own gain. Every single coup, every single sanction it enacts and bomb it drops on foreign countries will surely be defended by at least 90% of the U.S. media, and that’s a generous estimate.

Look, I know I sound like a jackass here, suddenly bringing real world political issues into this story, and I’m sorry. It’s not this story’s fault or the author’s fault that a lot of cop related media has this kind of plotline. But it just gets frustrating sometimes for me, seeing so many cop shows and movies portray any forces that work against the cops or criticize them as bad or foolish. Or to say that the mainstream media has it out for cops, which just isn’t true at all. 

This plotline is not a flaw in the least, and I’m sorry for taking it out so harshly on this story, but I just had to get it out.

Okay, now that that rant is over, the controversy has made Elaine more cold and distant. Very much unlike the bubbly, cheerful hero she used to be. 

Luckily for her, later in the story, it’s revealed that her trial worked out in her favor. She was cleared of all charges. But in spite of that, not much really changes. Her reputation is the same and people still treat her mostly the same.

This scene here is great. I know I’ve talked about how the framing of the media in this story kind of bothers me (it’s still not a flaw with the writing) but reading these two characters just talking about the tough realities that being a superhero brings feels so real. And it’s a great set up to Elaine’s eventual downfall.

And yeah, Kara’s friend that I mentioned earlier in the story is Elaine. And it is a temporary friendship, for obvious reasons.

She appears next in Chapter 26, being the hero Kara fought in the hospital. When she spots Diane, a known villain, next to a child, she does not hesitate to start fighting her and is not hearing any arguments to the contrary. Diane then realizes exactly what hero she is fighting.

As stated before, a fight between Kara and Diane breaks out, where Kara is just trying to get her and Diane out of the hospital as unscathed as she can muster. And she succeeds.

But not without dislocating Elaine’s shoulder.

This enrages Elaine. To her, the one person who really listened to her, who really reached out and helped, had just betrayed her. Had just fought her to help a villain escape. And when she sees the media turn against her again, her rage only grows stronger.

In Chapter 30, at the Escapist club, Elaine is alone, dealing with a ton of stares. And it’s here where we gain some insight on how warped her perspective is or has become.

To say no one has tried to help her, that no one has tried to reach out or listen other than Kara is just not true. Other heroes have reached out to her but she shuts them down.

She ponders whether the mysterious woman she fought at the hospital really was Shade. Since Shade doesn’t party, she’s out of luck when it comes to searching for her in the club, but when David shows up she finds she may have some luck.

Going back to David, he has strong feelings for Elaine that are made apparent throughout the duration of the story.

Elaine hates David about as much as Kara does. She despises his obnoxiousness, his stupidity, and his terrible attempts at pick up lines.

However, when Elaine remembers how often Kara and David are seen together, she asks him about her, and he says they went out drinking together, which shocks her as Kara does not socialize. To make matters worse, David calls Kara “her”.

With it confirmed that the woman she fought in the hospital was indeed Shade, she begins to set a trap for her.

The final battle is set in motion. In Chapter 31, David sends Kara a message to meet him at the Faultline (which was a location in “City of Heroes”) to discuss a possible new villain. 

While waiting for Kara to arrive, David notices something very off about Elaine. He notices a strong tension emanating from her that could snap at any second. 

The rest of the scene is told from the perspective of David, and we again see that he is not nearly as dumb as he seems, and he even sees himself as an idiot sometimes.

We learn that David does not buy Kara’s “magic accident” explanation for her transformation at all, which is the same reaction many other characters have as well. Kara is simply far too calm as a woman when she was so tense as a man.

David realizes he never told Elaine about Kara’s new body. When Kara arrives, Elaine immediately gets confrontational with her and berates her for attacking her to let a villain escape. David is stunned by this revelation while Kara keeps trying to reason with her.

It’s all useless. Elaine now has the same deep contempt for villains that Kara used to have, only much worse. 

Feeling so broken by Kara’s betrayal, she finally snaps, and within her she finds the full extent of her power.

Elaine manages to create a power suppressing field stretching around all of Paragon City, instantly stripping every superhero and meta of their powers. Not only that, but she actually manages to copy the superpowers for herself.

All of them.

She goes on a monologue on how what heroes and villains do is nothing more than a game that doesn’t make any difference in the long run.

Elaine shoots away David when he tries to calm her down, yelling that he never had to earn anything and people only love what he represents.

And so her new ideology is established. Villains are to her, pests that do nothing but make the world worse. She makes it her goal to kill every villain on the planet.

She tries to kill Diane, but is unsuccessful as Amelia comes back, revealing herself to still be alive.

Diane reunites with Amelia and refuses to return to her, but when she sees Amelia letting Kara get herself killed, she begs her to help, even offering to be her minion again, to which Amelia refuses, noting that it “just wouldn’t be the same”.

To Amelia, Diane is special enough that she wouldn’t want to brainwash her or force her to be loyal and a friend. For her to lose what made her special in the first place, her being loyal of her own volition, would bring nothing to her except emptiness. 

David sees that Kara’s friend that she saved at the hospital was a villain, and not just that, but a “friend of Cinder Snow’s”. And for the first time, David sounds truly upset and angry.

Kara realizes that Elaine is basically a god compared to her, someone so powerful she could easily crush her with no effort.

But that had always been the case for her, and she goes into the fight anyway, solidifying the end of her arc about coming to terms with her strength.

When Kara has Elaine in her grasp, she could very easily kill her just by flicking her knife. It’d be so easy.

And yet she doesn’t do it.

And thus, the divide between heroes and villains, the divide between Kara and Elaine is fully shown. Heroes don’t kill. Diane may have been a villain, but killing her would’ve been immoral. Villains are not simply labeled as villains, they are villains because they have no grounding in morality.

And Elaine nearly tears up as she notes she is now a murderer.

Now that so many heroes have died, Elaine feels she has to continue and kill all the villains she can, or else everything she did would amount to nothing.

David, with his arm gone and verging on the loss of consciousness, tries to confront Elaine, to dissuade her from killing Kara.

I really like the short scene that comes next. Elaine says that she always hated David, and he says he knows. He understands that he isn’t like his father, and he likely never will be. He has disappointed people.

The final thing Elaine says before she leaves is that “Amethyst Star is dead”.

The aftermath of the event sees many non-powered superheroes try to locate the source of the power suppression field. Mainly tech-based ones, including Tech-splosion, who is in a rivalry with Texplosion over who first came up with that name.

Many heroes died during the event, and we are given some descriptions as to how some of them died. 

First off, I want to note how there are a few times in which this story uses hollywood sci fi tropes and analyzes the full implications of them in ways that aren’t completely unheard of, but aren’t as common as one would think. For instance, I’ve not seen the idea of a shapeshifter having a biologically nonviable half-form that often, so when this story uses that idea, even for just one sentence, I’d like to point it out.

There’s another moment like this as well. In a scene right after the power suppression field is activated, Constance is suddenly thrown into a normal time speed. It’s said that she hadn’t fully froze time, as that would be dangerous because of the non-moving air molecules.

The first time I read this scene as a teenager I was thinking “yeah that makes sense, if time was frozen then air molecules wouldn’t move and you couldn’t breathe, why haven’t I seen a lot of media depict this before?” It’s not a big thing, but I do like it and it, again, shows this world as being thought out. 

Second off, if that many superheroes died, it really shows just how many superheroes use their powers nearly all the time, as well as how many superheroes there are in Paragon City. Perhaps they have become too dependent on their powers.

The heroes eventually find the source, leading them to Kara, Diane, Amelia, and David. Amelia forces Kara to reveal herself as Shade, and everyone witnesses Diane heal David to grow his arm back. 

The next chapter is an interlude, and here we get a glimpse of Elaine’s life before becoming Amethyst Star. She was a normal kid who had a deep love for superheroes ever since she saw the original Captain Patriot break the sound barrier in her town.

She has trouble finding what she wants to do with her life. But nothing interests her enough to say it is what she’s meant to do. She’s afraid she won’t amount to anything and will “grow up to be boring”.

She moves to Paragon City just to be near superheroes, and finds one superhero named Freeze Flash, and through him she’s able to find that she does have powers.

This is another case where it’s shown that many superpowers are gained genetically, and seem to be random. As Amelia said in Chapter 22, there’s no telling who will born gifted with magic.

Either way, Elaine finds her calling in life, and vows to make the world a better place.

The last time we see Elaine in this story, she is alone, contemplating what she just did, and how many heroes died as a result. She never meant to hurt them. She lost control and got too angry. 

But she still hates villains, and everything they stand for. She despises with all her being.

She, now calling herself “Event Horizon”, makes it her new goal to atone for what she did, and does that by getting rid of all the villainy in Paragon City.

David forgives Kara for attacking Elaine at the hospital. And he curses himself for not being able to save her. He sees himself as an idiot, someone who will never be like his father. He curses himself for it. But Diane reminds David that he is a hero, and heroes are meant to save people. 

As he sees Kara and Diane so content with each other (the first time he’s ever seen Kara so content), he’s reminded of what Diane told him. To save Elaine. He goes through his whole life, of how he came into being a hero to be like his father and never truly had anything to fight for. But now, he does. He vows to go to the end of the Earth to save Elaine.

Chapter 37 also features the media aftermath of the Event, with Amethyst Star’s downfall, the amount of heroes who were killed, the return of Cinder Snow, and Shade’s gender bending accident, which raises an eyebrow from Dawn and causes Texplosion to laugh so hard he can’t breathe.

The last image I just showed of David wanting to go save Elaine best represents the end of his character arc in this story. Again, throughout his entire life he didn't really have any reason to be a hero other than to be like his father. Of course, that's not to say that he didn't want to be a hero. Going through the rest of the story he very much did, but he never truly had anything to fight for. 

Adding my own take here, throughout the beginning of the story it looks like David wanted to be a hero more for notoriety or fame rather than to actually do good. The key word here is “looks like” because I'm sure David himself definitely wanted to do good, but from other people’s perspective it really just looked like he was in it for the fame. He doesn't take the job very seriously, flaunts his status, and he comes off as dumb, obnoxious, and annoying.

Elaine was right when she said people didn't like David because of anything he actually did, but rather because they liked the idea of “Captain Patriot”. They liked who his father was: the perfect hero who never failed and always knew the right thing to do. The best superhero of all time.

For David, this is terrible because he's constantly reminded that he isn't like his father. He can’t be the best superhero ever. He tries but he can't do it. And yet people still worship him because he’s “Captain Patriot”, treating him like a legend instead of a person. The end of Chapter 37 even states that he plays his stupidity up so people wouldn't have such high expectations for him. High expectations he could never possibly fulfill. 

To do all of this with a character who, in the beginning, just seems like a dumb side character who even gets forgotten in the first half, is pretty incredible. He isn’t just the dumb “dudebro” he appears to be at first glance. As the story progress, he’s shown to be just like any other person. He has depth, he has goals, he has aspirations. In fact, even he finds himself to be an idiot sometimes.

With Elaine’s downfall, David finds a goal. Something to truly fight and strive for. A reason to be a hero other than to be like his father.

He saves her. Because that's what heroes do, they save people.

Throughout the story it's left vague as to whether or not the original Captain Patriot is still alive but it's implied that he's not, which makes David’s character even stronger (no pun intended). He has to live up to the expectations of a man who is dead, his own father no less.

With Elaine, the story does a very good job of making her sympathetic in spite of what she did. It holds her to account for all the people she got killed (which was manslaughter in her case), while there is so much media out there that doesn’t even fully acknowledge when a character to be redeemed murders people intentionally for years on-end, which kind of frustrates me. 

Elaine's backstory is not really anything too special. She was just an average person who didn’t know what she wanted to do in life. She just didn't have a passion for anything and nothing really spoke to her. I think there's a lot of people that can relate to this. Being a superhero was the one thing she really wanted to do. She wanted to make the world a better place. That's what her goal in life was. 

To an extent I can kind of understand her perspective. When she tells Diane that the fear she gets when she's in her grasp. The fear of knowing someone who’s far more powerful than her is going to determine whether she lives or dies on a whim. It’s terrifying, and in a world where there are a lot of murderous psychopaths around with godlike powers, it's terrifying to a lot of people. It's a good line. Obviously Elaine's perspective is misguided, deeply flawed and pretty awful, but there is a speck of truth in it.

As for her downfall, it was almost all her fault. Yes the media certainly didn’t help, and the police deserve as much blame as her for the hospital fight as they were the ones who forced an evacuation for the hospital and called for help in the first place, but there were plenty of heroes that were perfectly willing to help her out and she never listened to them. She let those mistakes she made get to her head, and obsessed over them.

Her obsessive hatred for villains can be seen as a reverse of Kara. While Kara learns that her hatred of them is unhealthy and grows beyond it, Elaine’s hatred for them only increases throughout the story, and gets to the point she has nearly no second thoughts about killing them.

Heroes do not kill, and that's something she lost sight of.

The end of the story definitely plants the seeds for a sequel focusing on David and Elaine, and what happened there I’ll get to later, but for now I’ll say that they are as well written as Diane and Kara. Of course, as they are not the main characters, they will never be quite as developed, but their character arcs are still very well executed.

Dazzling Dawn is a character that plays a minor part in the story. She’s Kara’s ex-girlfriend, a friend of PsyKick and Texplosion, and the woman Kara revealed her secret to.

Her reaction to Kara’s panty wearing obsession was revulsion that she tried her best to hide. When Texplosion and PsyKick eventually learn about it, they seem to think its funny, and regard Kara even more poorly than they did before.

Her revulsion to Kara’s “fetish” simply poured more fuel onto the fire of Kara’s hatred for herself. Of her seeing herself as a freak. It made her more keen to hide it. Even if Dawn doesn’t appear in the story that much, she influences a huge part of Kara’s character.

Dawn’s full powers are not made clear in this story though her main power is flying.

Another character worth mentioning is the Executioner, an assassin, a member of the Knives of Arachne, and Kara’s rival who nearly killed her in their first battle. Kara received scars from their battle, which were later healed unknowingly by Diane.

He doesn’t play a big part in this story but it’s neat to see that Kara has a rival. He leaves an impact just like everyone else.

Even the very minor characters, the ones who are only given short scenes, still leave an impact. Texplosion, the southern best friend of PsyKick. Fusion Flare, the eternally incompetent supervillain. Sir Fluffington, the eldritch horror trapped inside the body of a bunny. Platypus Man, the obvious joke character. They all leave an impression. It all shows how well written, described, and developed these characters are. To the point where all of them are memorable and feel important.

All of these characters feel like real people, with depth and grit to them. The result is that the world of the story feels connected and more real. It’s more developed and feels more lived in. Rereading this story after so long I remembered almost all of the characters, and that is not something to gloss over. One of the benefits of a third person omniscient point of view is being able to develop every character and make them feel real and important, and that is something “Of Heroes And Villains” does amazingly.

If you remember from the very beginning of this review, I said that this story was given an update about five or so months after being first posted. Well, let’s talk about that.

The author stated that they proofread the story by making character interactions more natural, the prose less awkward, and reorganizing scenes. Some scenes were apparently cut. I never read the first draft of this story so I don’t know how it went. But the most drastic change, at least what appears to be the most drastic change, is the addition of a new chapter.

Chapter 15 was added after the entire story (and its sequel) was already posted. It was added after a reader asked Minikisa why Diane loved Kara.

Overall, Chapter 15 was a worthwhile addition. It does feel a bit disconnected from the rest of the story, and more like some side story in the middle of the main plot, but the positives definitely outweigh the negatives. It’s in this chapter where we get more insight on Dawn being Kara’s ex-girlfriend, and we’re told that Kara told Dawn her secret.

This is the first time Dawn appears in this story, and having her in this chapter definitely works to flesh Kara’s character out.

Seeing Dawn and remembering her look of disgust makes Kara realize how much more disgusted Dawn would be if she were to know what was going on then. Kara was wearing panties and a villainess was seductively calling her a female name.

Kara comes to hate what she’s allowing herself to become, and becomes angry when she arrives at Diane’s hotel. They have an argument, but Kara apologizes later and everything becomes alright again. 

There’s a little arc in this story, which I suspect was added in these revisions, that involves Diane wanting to see more than her close minded hometown. I talked about a bit earlier when discussing Diane’s character.

And in Chapter 15, we see that. Kara takes Diane to France, and promises to show her the world.

This gets limited to one trip per week because long distance teleportation is very draining for Kara, but still it’s a very nice moment.

And the interlude chapters. I’ve already talked about all of them, but I haven’t really got into just how well they’re integrated into the rest of the story.

According to the author’s notes on both this story and its sequel, there was once a side story called “Of Heroes And Villains: A Digression” which contained all these chapters as their own one-off stories. That story has since been deleted and all those chapters were moved to being part of the main stories. For chapters that were never written to be in the main story, these fit incredibly well. They never feel abrupt, like a waste of time, or as if they break the pacing of important scenes. They always show important scenes that give extra information and context regarding the world, the characters, the personalities of the characters, and the actions of the characters. They do not have any unnecessary information or scenes, nor do they give anything that would spoil later parts of the story. They always come in at the right time. They’re so well integrated that I legitimately can not imagine this story not having them. That’s very impressive.

There’s a small touch I like, and it’s how in Chapter 25, Kara is lying down with her earpiece in, hoping that Diane would call her back. She hears a police transmission of a villain spotted at a hospital with a child hostage. At first, you don’t think much of it, but then in Chapter 27, it’s shown that Diane was that villain and the hospital staff believed she had taken a child hostage, leading to the hospital fight. It’s not big, but it’s neat.

It’s kind of funny it’s taken me this long to talk about this, but “Of Heroes And Villains” works really well just as a superhero story. The fights, the action scenes, the variety in the superpowers, the detailed descriptions of the suits and costumes, the way Paragon City and its civilians operate. It all makes for a great superhero story that feels real as a world populated by superheroes.

The way the Paragon City civilians are portrayed as mostly apathetic to the world of battles and superpowers around them is a fantastic touch.

There are other details I really like too, like the threat rating system. There’s a system in place regarding how the superheroes stack up against each other and supervillains. It creates a science to how supervillains are fought, a science that can be studied and analyzed.

The emergency med ports are another inclusion I like.

As well as the addition of the Escapist or “E” club, a nightclub exclusively for superheroes.

These are small inclusions sure, but they’re ones I really like. They, along with the depth and variety of the characters, make this world feel more lived in and thought out. It really integrates the superheroes into the world, and it makes that world more developed as a result.

I’ve already said the fight scenes are good, but I want to talk about why they’re so good. They’re snappy and interlaced with dialogue, thoughts, and emotions from the characters. Everything is always in-line with the tone of the fight. They never drag on too long and always manage to have the amount of tension they need. They’re entertaining to read and like, well, a superhero fight.

Too many times a fight scene in a story can read as dry and monotonous. They can read less like an actual fight and more like a long series of actions. “X did this, then Y did that”. That’s never a problem here. Where other stories fail, this one succeeds.

Something I only kind of mentioned in the “For a Girl” review that I really should’ve touched upon more was that that story had very good prose and from a technical standpoint was written very well, and when judging these stories as a whole that means a lot. I bring this up because all of this also applies to “Of Heroes And Villains” which also has good prose and is written very well technically.

It's quite a bit more quick and snappy than "For a Girl" though, in a good way. Kind of like, well, a comic book.

In fact, something I want to bring up with the writing here is that this story is actually pretty funny. There are multiple comedic moments that work really well. 

I really appreciate the sense of humor here. It adds a sense of uniqueness and memorability to the writing. And there aren’t any jokes that are poorly placed or feel awkward either, which is a huge positive.

There honestly aren't many things in the story that I can really say are flaws. You could make an analysis of how the superheroes are, like I’ve said before, basically cops and they've likely brutalized poor and disadvantaged people (it’s a big part of Kara’s character that she is far more brutal when dealing with villains and criminals than she needs to be, she’s even considered a psychopath by other heroes for it), but that brand of liberalism is present in most superhero media. It's certainly worth talking about, and media that depicts superheroes in a negative light definitely does have its place, but for this story alone I'm not going to criticize it.

What I will criticize however is the pronoun usage. Yes, I know I've said that I like how the third person perspective and pronoun usage enhance Kara's character development, however, even after Kara’s acceptance of herself as a woman, the story still uses male pronouns for her, a lot.

In some cases it's understandable, like in Chapter 30 where Amethyst is contemplating whether or not the woman who fought her in the hospital was really Shade.

At this point Shade’s transition was not public yet, so this is understandable. There's another scene in Chapter 38, where Kara is still pretending to be “Ian” in corporate meetings through an illusion, as she can not transition her superhero persona and her civilian persona at the same time, lest people find out who she really is.

This is also understandable. As an aside, Kara’s civilian identity is still not transitioned publicly by the end of this story, which becomes a big plot point in the sequel, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

However this story still refers to Kara with male pronouns, even when the other characters are aware of her transition and status as a woman.

Sometimes it's a few distracting typos.

And other times it's when referring to Kara before her transition.

You really shouldn't ever refer to a trans person by their AGAB. That includes when you’re talking about them pre-transition. The end of this story and its sequel do this constantly and it’s kind of annoying.

Hell, sometimes it's not even when discussing her pre-transition, it’s just when discussing her at all. She can still be gendered male a lot, usually when the story is from a perspective that isn't hers.

In this scene all those heroes know that that woman is Shade and yet the narration still uses male pronouns for her.

This is something that really bugs me because it's almost as if the narration of the story doesn't fully consider Kara to be a woman. Now, I know that's a very extreme claim to make. I'm sure that the author never wanted anyone to come away with that impression but unfortunately that is the impression I got from these stories.

What makes this really weird is that there are a ton of third person TG stories that don't make this error and consistently gender their non-trans, TG’d characters female. And yet this story, which does have a trans character, and is much more trans positive than a lot of what was posted on TG Storytime in the first half of the 2010s, constantly flips between male and female.

Kara really should be gendered female as default unless there are specific circumstances in which it wouldn’t make sense. Unfortunately, in “Of Heroes And Villains” and “The Ties That Bind”, it feels like Kara being referred to as a woman is something that only happens about half the time, and in many cases where it isn’t necessary she’s referred to as a man.

On this topic I should mention a scene at the end of Chapter 13 where Kara needs to sign a document to approve of a new company policy. And it’s only halfway through signing it that she realizes she’s singing it as “Kara Reynolds”.

As an aside I find it kind of funny that the writing here goes out of its way to prove Kara is a “nice and friendly” CEO and billionaire. Since she's a fictional character and is overall pretty badass, I'll allow her to be a good CEO and billionaire.

Anyway the point I wanted to make here is that Kara really should have been called “Ian” in this scene. At this moment, she isn’t with Diane, the writing is from her perspective, she’s doing something only “Ian” would be able to do, she isn’t acting and thinking as she usually does when she sees herself as Kara (not in this point of the story anyway), and most of all, her physical and mental transition to Kara has only barely started. And why should she have been called “Ian” in this scene? Because it would’ve made the last line of the chapter hit harder. With her being called Kara throughout the whole scene, the effect isn’t as big as it should be.

There's another problem with the story and it relates to pacing. Now for the most part, the pacing in this story is really good. As I said before, the prose in the story is really good, and that includes stuff like development and pacing and such. However, there is one big exception to this, and that’s in the final battle against Amethyst Star in the last few chapters. The chapters in this point in the story constantly switch perspectives between characters who are and are not in the battle, and it becomes a bit unfocused and sloppy.

The two chapters of note here are Chapter 32 and Chapter 34. Chapter 32 goes through multiple different short scenes of characters losing their powers during the event and it shows the effects it has on them. I used to have a problem with this chapter but I've since grown an appreciation for it. It adds some nice worldbuilding, shows just how big and important this event is, and serves as build up to the actual battle that will soon take place. Overall, it’s a worthwhile inclusion.

Chapter 34 though? Not so much. This chapter goes through Amelia's thoughts regarding Diane and Kara’s relationship, as well as her own relationship with Diane and her relationship with Constance. And I have to say, this chapter is mostly very unnecessary. 

I know I've already said this but I really need to get across how having a chapter like this right in the middle of an important battle is a huge pacing issue. And not only that, but this chapter does not add much of anything to this story. It only repeats information the reader already knows and doesn’t add any extra depth. It's already been said that Amelia had been spying on Kara and Diane. It's already been said that she has no remorse over what she did to PsyKick. It’s already been said that she really does care about Diane as a person.

And it's already been said that she really was hurt by Diane leaving her.

To me, this one moment in Chapter 25 is much more effective at communicating how hurt Amelia was by Diane leaving her than anything in this chapter. This chapter is simply too explicit and on the nose about Amelia's thoughts and feelings. It doesn't really mesh well with how she’s depicted in the rest of the story and it actually kind of detracts from her character.

None of the thoughts and emotions on display in this chapter really feel in line with Amelia's character of being a genius supervillain. It's much more effective to, in short moments, make it clear how hurt Amelia is by Diane leaving her than to spell it out like this.

Moments like this at the end of Chapter 36 are all that’s really needed.

The only pieces of information that could be gained from this chapter are that Amelia purposefully sent Diane on villainous errands to drive Kara and Diane apart, which is a minor thing that doesn't add much by being explained and doesn't justify having this chapter in the story on its own, and the reason why Amelia got involved in the battle and revealed she was alive to the public (who at that point thought she had been dead for years), that being to save Diane’s life. But that’s gotten across by this conversation in Chapter 35.

So there's just nothing gained from having this chapter.

If it were up to me, I'd say Chapter 34 should’ve been cut from the story. It interrupts an important final battle and ruins the pacing of it, it doesn't add any new information to the story, it repeats information already known, and it kind of detracts from Amelia's character by explaining her thoughts and emotions on various things too explicitly, in a way that doesn’t feel in line with her character. This is what the interlude chapters could have been if they were done poorly. Badly placed awkward chapters that interrupt the pacing and don’t add anything.

This chapter also creates an unfortunate effect. In Chapter 35, when Kara and David learn that everyone's powers had been taken away, the reader had already been told that multiple times.

So yeah, a bad chapter overall that makes the final battle feel a bit unfocused and disjointed.

I guess if there's any other problem this story has, it’s that it doesn't do a good job of showing the impact of the Event. According to the story, dozens of heroes and villains were killed and it doesn't really acknowledge the full impact of that. These characters were all unnamed and never given any characteristics or time devoted to them. And they were only given brief descriptions as to how they died. Also, immediately following the Event, we get the happy ending of our main characters, so the impact of the Event that killed more than a dozen people isn’t demonstrated well to the reader. Maybe the villain with the god awful costume that Kara fought in Chapter 4 could’ve been a good candidate for someone to die in the Event. He never appears or is mentioned again in this series so if he was just given a name and said to be killed there, then this event could’ve had more weight. But as it is, the deaths mean nothing to the reader if they don’t know any of these characters.

Okay, the last thing I should talk about regarding this story is probably the fact that it ends on a cliffhanger. As I said earlier in this review, some of the plot threads are left open for future installments to further develop and flesh out. However, this one specific story still feels like a complete story. You can read it as a standalone work without much issue and be satisfied. A bad cliffhanger is one that makes the story feel like it's legitimately unfinished. 

That can be a vague thing to judge though, especially when it comes to novels that are part of a series, so take what I said there with a grain of salt. It’s complicated, but mostly it depends on the specific story.

Of course, I did also say that this series as a whole was unfinished. I’m not sure how many stories were planned to be in this series, but it seems like it was intended to be a trilogy. Each installment goes through the journey of two main characters. I will be spoiling things here a bit, but you probably already expected that coming into this review.

This first installment was mainly about Diane and Kara. The second installment was mainly about Stephen and Caroline. And the third installment was mainly going to be about David and Elaine. It was likely going to depict Elaine’s redemption, and a possible romance with David and Elaine. Though considering how Minikisa liked to subvert expectations, it’s very possible they were not going to do a romance between David and Elaine after doing it with the main two characters of the previous two stories. Really, it’s hard to tell what exactly Minikisa had planned.

Still, the third installment was not finished, and it only got four chapters in. There were a ton of threads created in this story that were left hanging. For instance, Diane and her mother never reunite, which seems like something that would’ve happened in the third story. Diane doesn’t have a secret identity, but considering how oblivious the people of Paragon seem to be, it’s probably not known that Dionaea is Diane Cole.

But Anne would almost certainly recognize her daughter. It’s not specified where Diane lived in her childhood, but it’s implied to be close to Paragon, so Anne being aware of Dionaea is very possible. And that begs the question of how she would react to her daughter becoming a villain. Probably not well, but seeing her become a worker at a hospital and being redeemed would likely soften the blow.

If Anne really is unaware of Dionaea, then she might think her daughter is dead. Either way, having Diane go back to her mother would be important for her character and I’m guessing it was going to happen in the third story, but since it was never finished we don’t know how it all turned out.

The bigger picture here revolves around David and Elaine though. The way their arcs are written here clearly is meant to lead into a future story mainly about them. They’re both minor characters in the second story but as a spoiler they do get one scene together.

How Elaine gets redeemed and if she even gets redeemed at all is still unknown.

There are other threads left hanging too. Amelia is a very minor character in the second story and how she works with the public knowing she is still alive is not touched upon. And Kara’s civilian identity still isn’t publicly out as a woman at the end of the second story. 

I probably sound really bitter and ungrateful here. I’m sorry, that wasn’t my intention. I understand why someone may not finish a free online story. Real life can get in the way, and when writing isn’t your job I can understand why it can be dropped.

If you’re wondering, the second story does end on a bit of a cliffhanger as well, but it’s still definitely complete and much like the first, can be read alone without much issue. You will be satisfied with just these two stories.

But still, sometimes I wonder how this series would’ve turned out if it was completed. 

Wow, this was long. This was really long. Honestly I’m kind of sorry this was so long, and I don't think the next review is going to be near this long. But it's over now, so let’s try to wrap things up. Just a heads up, I’m going to be bringing up “For a Girl” in this section a lot, sorry. It’s just easy to compare these two stories with how popular and well known within the community they are, and with how strongly they represent different “eras” of TG stories.

I have a lot of good memories with “Of Heroes And Villains”, and coming back to it, I can say it’s certainly aged a lot better than “For a Girl”. It's remembered more fondly too, it's not as if there's a ton of people I know who despise it, another positive.

Much like “For a Girl”, this story gives you a lot to think about. In fact, there are still things about “For a Girl” that I did not mention in my original review that I think are really weird, and just to satisfy that stupid itch at the back of my mind, I’ll list them here.

• Even though gay marriage was not legal in the U.S. when this story was posted, it seems GB women have no problems getting married to men. If GB were real I highly doubt this would’ve been the case.
• What if an intersex person caught GB? If the disease truly is man-made, then an intersex person could unknowingly be given it by the perpetrators. What would happen then?
• What if a trans man caught GB? Again with what I said above, this disease is man-made. This is not at all out of the question.
• The story has a writing style reminiscent of Joss Whedon's. Some of the dialogue does feel kind of Whedonesque.
• Speaking of Joss Whedon, Stephanie’s appearance is apparently similar to Michelle Tractenberg, the actress for Dawn in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (2003 Michelle Tractenberg, that is). Kind of neat.
• It’s actually really weird that gay men get turned into lesbians by GB. The forced het angle was already pretty bad but this minor addition really makes it seem like not much introspection was done for the sexuality part of the story at all.
• The story does feel very 2000s in general, even looking past the TG elements. I mean, it has references to renting a movie and all that.
• There’s a weird line in the epilogue that implies Stephanie is just sexually submissive and this was always the case even before her transformation.
• A lot of het TG stories, including old het TG stories feel like romance novels written mainly for cishet women, just with the female lead being a man in the beginning. Just read how the boyfriend and general attraction to men is described in this story and compare it with the average romance novel. There are a lot more similarities than you might think.
• I’m not sure if this is true, but O2bxx is possibly a trans woman and she did transition after this story was posted. If so, good for her.

Sorry for that. Promise there won’t be any more. Either way, “Of Heroes And Villains” certainly gives a lot of material to work with, and that’s probably part of why this review ended up being so long.

Also much like “For a Girl”, “Of Heroes And Villains” has been kind of influential within the TG webnovel sphere. I can see a lot of elements from “For a Girl” in high school TG stories posted today. And the same goes for “Of Heroes And Villains” and superhero TG stories posted today. And yes, there have been a fair share of “For a Girl” and “Of Heroes And Villains” clones. 

2014 in general was quite the year for TG Storytime. Not just because this story was being posted, but because there were other big stories at the time being posted as well, and it seemed like these stories really influenced the way that TG stories were written in the years to come. 

“Of Heroes And Villains” had a fantastically written trans character at a time when that wasn't very common on TG sites. The story overall feels like not just a good TG story, but a good trans story, and a good story in general. The writing and prose is fantastic, the pacing is almost flawless, there’s a good varied cast of characters who are all memorable, and the worldbuilding is amazing. It never gives you too much or too little at one time, information is always given at the correct pace. Everything feels connected, thought out, and real.

It has been 9 years since this story was first posted. As an aside, it feels weird that the amount of time from “Of Heroes And Villains” to now is still shorter than the amount of time from “For a Girl” to “Of Heroes And Villains”. It seems like this story has been around a lot longer than 9 years, and I think that speaks to how classic it feels. 

Regardless, looking back at old TG stories is fun to me, because it puts into perspective the time of when it was posted and how transgender people experienced life and were seen then. And compared to how problematic “For a Girl” was, it’s incredible to see how much changed in only 11 years.

I’m sure “Of Heroes And Villains” will be fondly remembered for years to come. It absolutely is one of the best stories on TG Storytime and I’m happy Minikisa was able to bring it to life. Minikisa is another author who doesn’t have an online presence anymore. I do hope they’re doing well and making bigger and better things, wherever they are.

When thinking of the rating for this story, I wasn't entirely sure if I should give it a perfect score, but after finishing this review, I can say this story deserves it. It really does.

Rating: 10/10

The next story I’ll be reviewing is “Fangs” by Misaania. See you all then and have a good one!