General Protection Fault

General Protection Fault is a long-running webcomic (November 2, 1998 - ) by Jeffery T. Darlington. At its core it's about the workplace hijinks of the staff of GPF Software as they deal with clients, internal strife, would-be world conquerors, alternate dimensions, mad science, and spies.

And that's not including the internal conflicts between the main characters:


 * Nick Wellington -- The strip's main character. Lead Programmer, Geek's Geek, Mad Scientist
 * Ki Oshiro-Wellington -- Chief DBA, Action Girl, Gamer Chick, Nick's long-time girlfriend and recent wife.
 * Jason "Fooker" Barker -- Systems Administrator. Slacker, not-so-secretly a government agent
 * Sharon Murphy -- Fooker's girlfriend and co-sys admin
 * Trudy Trueheart -- Marketing Director, Stepford Smiler, former would-be world conqueror, The Atoner
 * Dwayne Duncan -- The Boss, software engineer, Straight Man
 * Dexter Smith -- Coder, The Big Guy
 * Fred & Persephone -- Sentient slime molds originally believed to have been spawned from Fooker's garbage... until their race was discovered. Until recently, GPF's customer service operators.

The strip mixes geek humor with sci-fi elements (and occasional dips into the Cerebus Syndrome pool). A by-the-storyline index is available here.

On the strip's twenty-second anniversary, Jeff Darlington announced that it will be ending (or possibly going on a long hiatus) some time during the strip's twenty-fifth year, in late 2023 or 2024.


 * All the Myriad Ways -- (She isn't)
 * Alternate Universe -- One ruled by Nick's Evil Counterpart
 * Annoying Younger Sibling -- Ki's brother, Yoshi. It's implied that this is true of Lori, but she and Nick are never shown interacting.
 * Bald of Evil -- F**k*r, much to the annoyance of his prime counterpart.
 * Beard of Evil -- The nega-verse counterparts of Nick and Dwayne, based on the facial hair they wore in the Surreptitious Machinations arc before they were persuaded to shave it at the end.
 * Big Eater -- Fooker, who has gotten banned from a few all-you-can-eat pizza places.
 * Bigger Bad: Pandemonium, to Empress Trudy and Nega-Nick.
 * Bitch in Sheep's Clothing -- Trudy is exceptionally polite and good natured around most people besides Ki and Fooker.
 * Brilliant but Lazy -- Fooker is able to do all his work for the day in only a fraction of the time, and spends the rest goofing off.
 * But Not Too Foreign -- Ki and Yoshi, who have a Chinese mother and Japanese father. Ki's mother won a bet and got to give her a Chinese name, but Ki's father still commonly calls her "Kyoko-san".
 * Cat Fight -- Ki and Trudy during the battle of New York. Also, Ki and Sharon when they're arguing about a project they're both working on.
 * Cerebus Syndrome -- The comic has more serious storylines in the third year, and Surreptitious Machinations was the first with a truly dark tone.
 * This can be to an extent credited as the trope namer, as it was in a post about GPF that Burns coined the term. Of course, this post was about how GPF was an example of this trope gone horribly wrong.
 * Converse with the Unconscious: Patty confessing to the unconscious Dexter why she was leaving GPF. He turns out to have been awake for at least some of it.
 * CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: Nick nearly drowns in a flood arc in 2001, and Ki gives him CPR. Although "just fine" initially, he does end up sick, slightly subverting the trope.
 * Crossover -- Most notably with Kevin and Kell
 * Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass -- Fooker.
 * Dark and Troubled Past -- Hinted at for Trudy and Sharon.
 * Deep-Immersion Gaming -- One of the Mutex's capabilities.
 * Devil in Plain Sight -- Trudy.
 * Dysfunctional Family -- Trudy's family.
 * Einstein Hair -- Uncle Otto.
 * Establishing Character Moment: After putting up a sickeningly sweet facade around Dwayne, Trudy shakes hands with Ki, who is not one of the people Trudy wants to fool. Ki asks if she just shook hands with the devil and Trudy responds that she has that effect on "inferior life forms." Shortly thereafter, she has a literal Kick the Dog moment.
 * Nega-Nick executes for her failure.
 * For Want of a Nail: Many of the Nega-verse counterparts in To Thine Own Self became different people from their primary universe counterparts as a result of a single event happening differently. The world goes on a different course because Nick and Ki decided to take over the world.
 * Fun with Acronyms -- C.R.U.D.E.
 * Nicole belongs to a law firm whose partners' first initials spell "S.U.E. E.M." During his attempts to find a lawyer to sue Fred for libel, Trent visits two firms whose names spell "S.U.C.K.E.R." and "D.E.A.D."
 * Future Me Scares Me -- Trudy, after meeting Surreptitious Machinations' Empress Trudy.
 * Genius Ditz -- Fooker.
 * Giggling Villain -- Trudy.
 * Happily Married -- Dwayne and his wife. Ki and Nick (so far).
 * Hidden Depths -- Dexter.
 * Horrible Judge of Character -- Nick trusts Trudy when most of the rest of the cast does not, but after realizing her true nature, decides to be less blindly trusting. Mr. Jones, one of GPF's clients, thinks that Fooker would be a good choice of a motivational speaker despite his Bunny Ears Lawyer traits, thinks that Trudy was a good person who "fell in with the wrong crowd," and has a favorable impression of Trent.
 * Hypocritical Humor -- Fooker tells Sharon to ignore her rival system administrators, but after they insult him, he tosses snowballs at them.
 * If I Can't Have You -- Trudy to Nick, word for word, at the climax of Surreptitious Machinations arc.
 * Improbably High IQ -- Yoshi has an IQ of over 200. Fred is an aversion, since his IQ is quite high at 139, he had hoped for 70 more points.
 * Insatiable Newlyweds -- Nick and Ki.
 * It Came From the Fridge -- Fred came about as a result of Fooker's horrible "housekeeping", and later produced Persephone.
 * Kick the Dog -- One of our earliest hints that Trudy is more than just a StepfordSmiler ditz.
 * Kick the Son of a Bitch -- Fred taking control of Trent's body, forcing him to sexually harass Sharon, go into a meeting with a client only wearing a tablecloth, and go outside and get arrested for indecent exposure would come off as much worse if Trent wasn't a jerk without any redeeming qualities.
 * Kid From the Future -- Todd (Nick and Ki's kid from an alternate timeline)
 * Long Lost Siblings -- Trudy and.
 * Let's Wait a While -- Nick and Ki deciding to put off sex until marriage.
 * Look Both Ways --
 * Mad Scientist -- Nick, his uncle Otto Wisebottom.
 * Missed the Call -- The spy agency Fooker works for was originally looking to recruit his brother (said brother does eventually land a spot in said agency).
 * No Accounting for Taste -- Sharon dating both Fooker and Dexter.
 * Non-Human Sidekick -- Fred and Persephone.
 * Obfuscating Stupidity -- Trudy's supposed hippie father is an FBI agent investigating her mother's criminal activities.
 * Odd Friendship -- Ki and Fooker.
 * Only Sane Man -- Dwayne.
 * Or Was It a Dream? -- The arc in which Nick and Ki first see Fooker as a secret agent.
 * Parental Abandonment: Fooker and Justin's mother is dead, and their father left them years ago.
 * Puppeteer Parasite: Fred & Persephone
 * Redemption Equals Death --, . Averted with Trudy.
 * Ripple Effect Indicator -- Todd uses.
 * Rousing Speech -- Planck does one to the Grays in the Nega-verse, largely as a Shout-Out to Braveheart.
 * The Atoner -- Trudy.
 * The Password Is Always Swordfish -- The password to the computers at a chocolate center is "Creamy Center."
 * The Short Guy with Glasses -- Nick.
 * Set Right What Once Went Wrong -- The objective of Surreptitious Machinations appears to be this, but Todd points out in his confrontation with the Empress that the Bad Future was never meant to happen, and could only have happened with the interference of Future Trudy, who would not have existed otherwise.
 * Shout-Out: In the climactic battle of Surreptitious Machinations, the news team reporting is WPET, with humans who are analogous to the dogs of KPET in Newshounds.
 * Sinister Silhouettes: A popular choice to mask the bad guy for a few strips. Compare a mismatched silhouette, with a rather obvious one.
 * Smug Snake -- Trent.
 * Snowball Fight -- One breaks out when a few system administrators attack Sharon.
 * Stable Time Loop -- Stopping one was Todd's ultimate objective in Surreptitious Machinations.
 * Stalker with a Test Tube -- The Brotherhood Of The Twisted Pair want Fooker and Sharon to get busy conceiving "The One".
 * Stepford Smiler -- Trudy.
 * Strong Family Resemblance: Nick and his father have very similar hair.
 * Suspiciously Specific Denial -- Nick, regarding his offer for JCN. He's so shaken up he even denies it when he isn't even being directly asked about it.
 * Team Dad -- Dwayne.
 * Trust-Building Blunder -- Dwayne's decision to take several computer nerds on a team-building hike. He, being more of a businessman than a nerd, underestimates how badly suited his employees would be to it.
 * Weekend Inventor -- Nick.
 * Wide-Eyed Idealist -- Nick.
 * Wouldn't Hit a Girl -- Fooker complains that "It's not fair. Guys should be allowed to hit girls in self defense," after recalling when Ki beat him up in their first meeting for making sexist remarks.
 * Yamato Nadeshiko-- Ki's mother, up to and including making her husband sleep on the couch.
 * Your Princess Is in Another Castle --.