King Calliope

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Scrappy
Full Name	Calliope Regina Alfensiad
Alias	King Calliope The King
Origin	King and the Paladin
Allies	Ezekiel (husband) Rafealo Johannes Her guards
Powers / Skills	High intelligence Ruthlessness Swordsmanship Royal authority
Goals	Get revenge on those who wronged her (succeeded). Make Ezekiel suffer (abandoned).
What failed with the character?	She is meant to be seen as a tragic and sympathetic person who grows past her villainous self, but her actions themselves, including raping Ezekiel, make her far past her tragedy.
Type of Scrappy?	Unintentionally Unsympathetic Abuser

King Calliope is one of the two main protagonists of the Romance-Drama webcomic, The King and the Paladin.

She is the childhood love interest of the other protagonist, Ezekiel. After years of abuse from her family, she overthrows her family and becomes a tyrant obsessed with getting revenge on people she believes wronged her.

What Makes Her a Scrappy?

• The main problem with Calliope is that the comic attempts to portray her as a tragic character who is growing past her villainous self, but the problem is that she goes too far with her actions, including murdering her siblings, having Ezekiel's brothers killed out of spite, and (most infamously) drugging and raping Ezekiel for leaving her without even listening to him. This all makes the readers view her with disdain rather than intrigue.
• In relation to the point above, the comic tries to portray her actions as justified, but they are all contradicted in the comic itself.
  • It portrays her murder of her siblings as justified because they bullied her as kids, but the fact that they hosted a banquet for her at all shows that they no longer do so, making their deaths petty.
  • It also portrays Ezekiel's rape as justified because he liked it, but the fact that she drugged him prior makes his actual state of mind ambiguous.
  • Her love for her deceased mom is only used in flashbacks and isn’t given enough relevance to properly qualify as a tragedy.
  • Additionally, she tends to exaggerate what actually happened in her past and what happened in flashbacks, making her an unreliable narrator.
• She is ultimately viewed as a Karma Houdini, as she never gets called out or punished for her actions while the narrative paints her as redeemed despite never showing remorse for the things she did.
• Outside of her tyranny and abrasiveness, she doesn’t have a lot of character beyond that, which becomes clear once she stops her cruelty, in which she becomes a minor character in her own story.

Trivia

• Her Scrappy status has reached a memorable point in the Webtoons community, due to Webtoon protagonists being known to be unlikable, but can’t be Scrappies as they are loved by the Webtoons audience. Calliope, however, is hated even by them as well as the comic’s fans, mostly for her rape of Ezekiel, which actually caused many readers to stop reading all together.