Shortpacked!/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Base Breaker: Amber/Mike. One third thinks they work together, one third thinks someone's emotionally abusing someone[1] or that they're just plain not right for each other, and one third thinks Mike's just waiting for the right moment to give Amber maximum suffering.
    • Ethan's collecting habit. Many in-depth discussions (read: arguements) were had over whether Drew is right and it's a harmful addiction, or whether it's an innocent hobby and Drew is being unreasonable.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse:
    • Fuckface the iguana, despite simply sitting around with one facial expression. (This is usually in contrast to Malaya, who is less popular.)
    • Arnold, one of Ken & Malaya's roommates, also gets a bit of this. His appearances in two strips -- telling Malaya to get a job in the first and telling Ken to "stop barking up the bitch tree" in the second -- were enough to make him far more popular than either of them.
    • Faz and Ninja Rick, because they're both absolutely hilarious.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: Panel 6 of this strip. Even though it's just a joke, it makes anyone who has read more recent strips cringe.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: When Robin is elected to Congress, she insists on wearing her sombrero while in session. Fast forward to November 2010, and Frederica Wilson.
  • Internet Backdraft: Mike and Amber's relationship, between those who think that if he didn't really want it (whether because it's the relationship itself he wants or because he's setting her up for a fall) there's no way she'd be able to keep a hold on him or that he's such a bastard that he deserves whatever he gets, and those who see Amber as using blackmail to rape him and think that she crossed the Moral Event Horizon when she forced him to start dating her and keeps going further over it the longer she keeps it up. Recent events have not helped.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Mike's proposal to Amber.
    • Mike IS this trope. He's capable of planning and executing extremely convoluted plans for the sole reason of pissing someone off and despite that most of the cast considers him a friend, with Amber and Ethan even up to a point of becoming a subject of desire. In fact, the above example is the only time his plan ends up not having the effect he expected, and even then due to actually trying to achieve something he thinks is good for her.
  • Memetic Mutation: Though it's not from the "main" storyline: "I'm Batman and I can breathe in space."
  • The Scrappy: Malaya for some. Some find her grating and annoying and hate her constant bitching while contributing nothing. The fact that she was created as the result of a fan's bitching doesn't help matters.
    • It really says something when her pet iguana, Fuckface, is a vastly more popular character despite doing nothing but sitting around with the same facial expression.
    • Roz also had this, with many of her appearances (Especially when she interacts with Jacob) causing fans to leave many negative comments for her.
    • Drew became this for treating Ethan's toy collecting as something more than a harmless hobby.
    • Ken falls under this for some for being a flat-character whose main plot has come to revolve around being a Dogged Nice Guy for Malaya, who is actively disinterested in him. His blindness to her faults and the largely superficial basis for his attraction tends to make people dislike him and dislike her more too.
    • Amber is one for those who can't get past the way she started her relationship with Mike.
  • Unfortunate Implications: Or maybe just hypocrisy, but Willis often makes points about just how terrible and oppressive and just plain mean straight white males are by putting his own arguments in the mouths of minorities (gay men, black women, etc.). Since he is himself a straight white man, it could easily be considered appropriation, where he makes use of the struggles and trials of others to make his own points.
    • He also said that he makes comics on sexism for people who already agree with him. This was apparently in response to people asking him to try and be a little clearer, for the people who might misunderstand him (who are implicitly imaginary). In the next comic, he said that the people represented by the strawman were really just trying to "justify sexist attitudes". Because there couldn't possibly be any flaw on his end.
    • Sexual assault, occasionally bordering on potential rape, is often played for comedy.
    • Willis seems to see no issue with exposing young children to sex and nudity. Recent pages having Ultra-Car pleasure Malaya in public view and even drawing a porn comic in which two parents try to have such loud sex the other will wake their child.
  • Villain Decay: Mike is getting it hard, leaving behind the central concept that he "just was" as he was.
    • Although Mike was generally the flattest character in the Walkyverse for comedy purposes, he did have a few hints of depth every now and then, especially in his relationship with Dina. For example, this comment to Joe suggested that Mike may have actually cared for Dina and caused a firestorm of debate about Mike's character when the strip first aired.
    • Faz even moreso. He has lost any semblance of power and has been so thoroughly defanged that he can no longer plausibly threaten Amber or Ethan - he's just a Butt Monkey now.
    • He's Back. Mike's marriage proposal to Amber is almost certainly his Crowning Moment of...Being Mike. A whole year ago he found out that Jacob had a crush on Amber, as well as a sex adiction. He had also promised that when Amber's mom Stacy came to visit, he wouldn't bang her. So he switched the numbers of their (his and Jacob's) appartments and stole Stacy's phone so that when she came back to look for it, she would end up knocking on the door of Jacob and get seduced by him. Then Mike recorded the resulting sounds and edited them into an actual marriage proposal. Magnificent Bastard indeed.
      • But he only did that because he loved her enough to try and get her to break up with him so she'd end up with something better. He had to get drunk (and turn into Nice!Mike) to do it because Asshole!Mike is too selfish to let her go.
  • The Woobie: Leslie. Poor, dumped-on Leslie.
  1. ↑ And given Amber starting the relationship with blackmail and Mike...being Mike, this group is split as well
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