Fables/YMMV

• Anvilicious: There is an abortion-powered witch. That is all.
• Base Breaker: Jack to extremes. Views shift from Loveable Rogue to Complete Monster virtually identical to Max Piper.
• Complete Monster: Hansel. When Hansel and Gretel were captured as children by Frau Totenkinder, who was trying to sacrifice their lives to demons for youth and power, they fought back and burned her alive in her own oven. Hansel found he enjoyed the sight of watching witches burn. With this newfound bloodlust, Hansel set out to make as many witches suffer as he could, not caring that all too often, victims of his witch hunts were innocent girls. Hansel subjects them to torture and deaths for his own gratification without a twinge of remorse. His crowning moment of evil is after he discovers Gretel had been taking an interest in magic. He murdered her on the spot before fleeing the Fable community to align himself with their great adversary as his Inquisitor general, putting himself in charge of hunting down those who might prove disloyal to the Empire. Hansel is one of the Empire's most feared and zealous leaders who uses his position to satisfy his need for torture and domination.
• Designated Hero: Jack. All of the Literals represent some form of storytelling trope, and as a Literal/Fable hybrid, this was Jack's niche. He is abusive to his friends, incredibly vain, selfish, ruthless, a womaniser, and will betray any ally or supposed friend in an instant. Jack has worked as a mass-murdering robber in the old west; likely did a lot more of the same; assassinated quite a few giants; was willing to let his allies be killed for the glory of himself; sold the soul of his firstborn son to a devil; seduced, broke the hearts of, and immediately left hundreds of maidens to raise his bastard children; likely did a lot more of the same during his long life; and ended up as a ravenous cannibalistic dragon, so on closer inspection he is considerably worse than the Con Man he initially appeared to be. In a sense he went the exact opposite path to Bigby.
• Genius Bonus: Plenty of the characters who are not explicitly named or only slowly implied. Not to mention; in the first Jack of fables book, we see a black janitor named "Sam" who doesn't seem to remember where he is. By the end of the book, he starts running very fast and we see that the tigers had been turned into butter, and Revise shouts that he thought he had him censored - who's he talking about? Little Black Sambo.
• Hollywood Homely: A subversion with Mrs. Sprat who is very fat and very homely, and also a Perpetual Frowner and Battleaxe Nurse. In Fables #100, Snow White calls her on the fact that she is both ugly and mean, and that is why no one likes her. In a "The Reason You Suck" Speech moment, Snow explains that she herself is beautiful but can be quite a bitch at times, but her beauty lets her get away with it. Likewise, a woman can be ugly as sin but have a pleasant and charming personality, and that will let people get close to her. Since Mrs. Sprat is both ugly and mean, she needs an attitude adjustment before she pisses off the wrong person.
• Idiot Plot: Inverted; almost every character seems to be hypercompetent and highly articulate. One explains this by pointing out that even the world's greatest human in a given field still has only a lifetime to practice, and the Fables have had several hundred years and counting.
• Moral Event Horizon: Some consider Jack taking advantage of an emotionally devastated Rose Red in order to have sex with her in The Great Fables Crossover to be the point where he stops being the guy you love to hate, causing the reader to just hate him instead.
  • Or just go look at his dealings with the Snow Queen. Downright villain at that point.
  • Which pretty much makes him a jerkass from almost the very beginning.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Bigby Wolf in his origin story. A wolf bigger than a clydesdale horse. Half its mouth is covered in blood. Standing on top of knights, soldiers, and civilians eaten alive in a gory burning field. Looking the reader right in the eyes.
  • What Totenkinder engineered to happen to Yusuf.
  • One cover featuring witchhunter Hansel drowning two women.
• Tear Jerker: "A Frog's Eye View" from 1001 Nights of Snowfall.
• Unfortunate Implications: In Peter and Max, it's revealed that most Fables are now sterile due to a trick from Max. To get around Snow and Bigby's children, it's revealed that Frau Totenkeinder created a potion that could cause Fables to reproduce. It's the potion Bluebeard used on Bigby and Snow in Storybook Love that lead them to conceiving the kids. However, it's also revealed Totenkeinder was hoping the pair would fornicate under the spell's effect, meaning she essentially set up a Batman Gambit to get Snow and Bigby to date rape each other.
• What Could Have Been: Originally; The Adversary was to be revealed as Peter Pan, who would kidnap mundy children so that they would remain easily corrupted. Meanwhile, Captain Hook would have made a Heel Face Turn and operated to save the kids. The theme was later rehashed through Max Piper.