The eponymous character.
Bread, and all variations of the aforementioned or more commonly shortened to just BreadAVOTA is a New Weird fantasy webcomic by rolypolyphonic.
Originally hosted on the blogging website FC2, it moved to its own website at https://breadavota.cafe/
on November 1, 2024.
Officially described as a "hypertext multimedia story", the bulk of the main plot is in the form of a webcomic but exploring the website through hidden links and code inputs opens hidden stories, told through a combo of prose stories, animated videos and visual novels. Its synopsis given on the website:
In a Nation where "Living" is a legal and not a biological status, a sentient Doll named Bread, and all variations of the aforementioned appeals to have her name changed to something less... that. Unfortunately for her, the Court only tries Living citizens, so she embarks on a quest to fulfill the Requirements of the Living only to discover that things are far more challenging than expected, facing alien ghost universes, the impending Apocalypse and something about the radio in a World where Time and Space have been cleaved apart.
This webcomic provides examples of the following tropes
- Always Chaotic Evil: The Demons are wholly devoted to bringing about the Apocalypse. Subverted in that they view this as good and necessary due to their ties to Irrelevancy, and it's implied by Bien Maldevaran that Demons hear a "sound" from Living beings that symbolizes the painfulness of existence and that subjecting them to Irrelevancy is a form of mercy killing.
- Always Female: All of the Angels shown have feminine forms and names.
- Ambiguously Human: Uloron Entrièta is definitely one of the Living, but their exact species is not known.
- Angels, Devils and Squid: Both Angels and Demons are present, with the "squid" being the Marginals; all three species don't get along due to their drastically different psychologies and goals around the fate of the Universe.
- Art Attacker: The Curator is this, though the art pieces are technically extensions of herself, as the art museum is a sort of pseudobody for her.
- Become a Real Boy:
- This is Bread's main goal, though this would be a change in Legal status rather than in species, as she largely views it as a means to an end to get her name changed. Project Maldevaran was meant to achieve this, but didn't necessarily work in the long term.
- Media also has this desire as a result of wanting to live a normal life with Jacques. He claims it's a "secret" but it's obvious to the point other Marginals call him out on it due to its Illegal nature.
- Bedtime Brainwashing: Annotations are essentially this, but with stranger mechanics due to the bizarre natures of the Marginals.
- Bird People: The most common species in the nation of Maldevara. They live for 35 years on average and share a common ancestor with Non-Living (read: normal) birds. The High Judge, Jacques Emfoi is a member of an isolated subspecies of Birds with more animalistic features, including brain structure that lets him retain a Non-Living bird's ability to sleep with only half his brain, so his two hemispheres have distinct personalities.
- Bizarre Alien Psychology: All the Immortals.
- Marginals are the most prominent example, with eccentric personalities, speech and beliefs. One of their core beliefs is that "Love" is the most important value and is a necessary component for Life, and excerpts of educational materials the Marginals write reveal the Marginals have a tendency towards violence and sadism to prove their "Love" to their Objects. Media himself claims that his sadism is motivated by feeling a sense of pleasure in "reminding" the Living how much they "really" want to live by seeing the way they struggle to survive if you put them at the brink of Death.
- Demons having shallow goals and a hard time focusing is due to the fact that they only have true Souls, and their Minds and Bodies are merely compensations. Bien's journals show more about the way he thinks, in particular displaying a strange sense of logic especially with regards to how he interprets language.
- Angels may be the most "normal" of the bunch but they still have their own quirks in terms of morality. Heaven being structures as a corporotocracy, the Angels don't just work jobs but their very forms and memories "are" their jobs, with Angels changing drastically in form and personality if they get fired or demoted. This may be why some of them have callous personalities towards the Living and only see them as means to achieve their quotas.
- The Caligula: Judges are the only real politicians in Maldevara, and they can get quite eccentric — such as Luzvimin Lucille, who replaced Neofrene's water supply with orange soda for two months, or Len Archival, who instituted a mandated nap time for the entire Court.
- Cat Folk: Some of the background characters are anthropomorphic Cats.
- Celestial Bureaucracy: Celes Industries is an agency that sells insurance to the Living so their souls can enter Heaven and be used in the next world.
- Cloudcuckoolander:
- The Judges are this by design, as only social outcasts get turned into Judges, and living in proximity to the Marginals causes the Living's thoughts to distort, making them even weirder over time. Jacques is a notable example for his rejection of Love and Life as political concepts in the story, and for his eccentric beliefs and behavior. A chapter where Media takes him to the supermarket for the first time has him pitying porridge boxes that don't get bought causing him to buy thirteen boxes, pressing his head against the price scanner to "check for brain chips" and lying down on the floor to pretend to be dead, something he seems to do often. The story points out that this is a result of Jacques being mentally ill with schizoid and schizotypal personality disorder.
- The Marginals as well. They're a bureaucratic species with an odd sense of ethics and philosophy manifesting as eccentric behavior. Media for example has a lot of intrusive thoughts, often concerning violence towards Jacques that are expressed as run-on word salads and ciphers. Justified as Media is implied to have an overwhelming awareness of the Living. He has some of "mind reading" powers and in the visual novel where he goes on a date with Jacques for Valentine's Day, the narration describes how he can hear the internal organs of the waitress at a restaurant shift inside of her when she bows, or the sounds of people's bones in a roller coaster when they go to a carnival. Combined with the implication that a Marginal's Objects are constantly fighting within their Internal Universe, and that Marginals are at least partially controlled by the AI V.A.R.A. who herself is a whackjob makes the Marginals' eccentric personalities understandable.
- Cloudcuckoolanguage: The Marginals each have their own "quirks" in speaking, with some Marginals speaking in incomprehensible world salads. While the Marginals in the main comic are mostly coherent, Bien gives more examples of Marginal speech in his spin-off, most of them speaking in nonsense. Subverted in that the story uses a fictional variant of English, so some of the made-up words and grammatical conventions are actually part of the story's dialect.
- Common Tongue: Everyone speaks "Maldevaran English", a fictional variant of British English, implied to be because of Media "coming from England". Sar and Bien point out how nobody else understands other languages or even seems to conceptualize the idea of other languages besides English existing, implying a darker subtext to Media's "development" of the Universe.
- Earth All Along: The Media is implied to be the Marginal representing our world. He identifies as British, introduced English to Maldevara, some of his Objects are shown to be human, and Halloween is explicitly called "one of his world's holidays".
- Ear Fins: One of the Objects in The Curator's world is a humanoid with these, as well as a tail and three eyes. Mermaids like Luzvimin are also designed this way.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Marginals are the ghosts of dead universes who establish themselves in the current world and restructure society with incomprehensible technology. Being too close to them for too long drives you insane and the first of them ate an Angel.
- Funny Animal: Many Maldevarans are anthropomorphic animals. They share a common ancestor with their non-anthropomorphic counterparts, though the latter are not considered Living.
- Genius Loci: Marginals are essentially the ghosts of dead universes, functionally making them the spirits of these.
- Green-Eyed Monster: In the Stupid AMV, the Reception's jealousy of Jacques for receiving all of Media's attention drives him to threaten his life on multiple occasions, culminating in an attack in the Judge's garden.
- Haunted Technology: The failure of Project Maldevaran on Bon/Scarecrow caused them to curse the medium of film, rendering television obsolete and forcing the country to only use radio and print.
- Hive Mind: The Reception is adept at creating multiple bodies, but has three main bodies. They act semi-autonomously but are part of the same entity and experience the same feelings.
- Hidden Elf Village: Downplayed. The region of Passryne is known to exist, but is very isolationist and home to a subspecies of Bird that hasn't evolved like the other Maldevaran Birds.
- Humanity Is Infectious: Livinghood is infectious for The Media, who wants to have an identity, which is frowned upon in Marginal society.
- Lillip Utians: Some of the Objects in Reception's World seem to be this.
- Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!: Maldevara is inhabited by a mix of Humans, anthropomorphic animals and humanoid fantasy creatures such as Fairies, Mermaids and Lamias.
- Living Toys: The protagonist Bread, and all variations of the aforementioned is one. She was part of a line of 45 other living dolls called Breadlings.
- Longevity Treatment: The Marginals have injected nanomachines into the blood of the citizens of Maldevara, which means that all the species now live for the same amount of time, which is implied to be 500 years. People who want to die earlier have to fill out a series of forms to get drafted into Suicide Wars.
- MegaCorp: The Heaven Conglomerate is a massive collection of Angelic Companies who market themselves to the Living of the World.
- Mind Hive: Bread is this; the ball-jointed doll body is named Shortcake, and Bread as an individual contains all 46 Breadlings. The Demons are also this when they manifest on Earth, as it takes the entire species to manifest a physical body due to their nature as Souls.
- New Weird: The comic's world is one of angelic mega corporations, alien ghost universes powered by an anomalous AI, magical technology that includes life extending nanomachines and robots that replace much of the legal system and a very strange view of life and love as legal concepts rather than biological or emotional ones.
- Nice Girl: Charlotte is chipper, polite and happy to help Bread on her quest to become one of the Living.
- Our Angels Are Different: Angels are an Always Female species of Immortals who collect the souls of the Dead for use in the next incarnation of the world. They don't seem to care if a soul is "good" and prefer souls that are interesting or have interesting perspectives and ideas to contribute. Their humanoid forms have black blush and hair that acts like fire, but are more Angelic Abomination in Heaven, which is a corpratocracy ruled by the Heaven Conglomerate. They are one of the three Immortal species and are described as "Solid"; their bodies contain their identities and damage to the body or a change in hierarchical position leads to a change in identity.
- Our Demons Are Different: The Demons are a species trying to bring about the end of the world. They are one of the three Immortal species, and are extremely physically weak, so they must band together to form a single body called the Herald, making Demons and Hell one and the same.
- Our Fairies Are Different: The Fairies of Maldevara love gardening and have butterfly wings.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: Marginals are often described as "alien ghosts" or "alien ghost universes". They are the remaining memories of Dead Universes that remember themselves and only have true Minds, their bodies and souls are mere compensations. Each one has a distinct appearance and represents a different World. They are tied together by their evolutionary history and origin rather than any aspect of their biology.
- Our Mermaids Are Different: The only mermaid shown in the comic is Luzvimin Lucille, who is paper white with colorful spots, Pointy Ears, black sclera, blue pupils and can move around on land in wheelchair-like devices.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The Undead are theorized to be animated by Souls who refuse to be collected by Heaven after Death. They may be tied to the appearance of sentient Non-Living beings.
- Robot Maid: Jacques owns one, as do many other Maldevarans, who are beginning to worry about an uprising.
- Split Personality: Subverted with Jacques. His two hemispheres have distinct personalities due to his species's unique ability to "half-sleep". His left hemipshere is more serious and intelligent while his right hemisphere is prone to daydreaming and only speaks in bird sounds. When he's completely awake his personality is a mix of the two, and he doesn't seem to identify as having two separate "identities" even though both hemispheres are mutually aware of each other.
- Snake People: Lamias are among the Living species in Maldevara. Their flesh is yellow and their tails have colorful spots. One of the High Judges was a Lamia.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Reception 1 has jelly donuts (that they somehow manage to eat with no mouth) while Reception 3 has printer ink.
- Vichy Earth: Maldevara is the 7th Marginal occupied country, and it is entirely governed by The Council of the Marginals and their magical technology. The only Living politicians left are Judges, who are social outcasts shipped off to the Courts to fulfill various duties for the Marginals and handle certain cases involving the Non-Living.
