Sluggy Freelance/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Acceptable Targets: PETA and telemarketers, especially in the earlier strips.
  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: When Zoe came back.
  • Archive Panic - Even if you skip the Filler Strips, you still have around a decade.
  • Non Sequitur Scene - The Torg Potter storylines are completely self-contained (at least so far), in contrast to pretty much every other storyline which can be guaranteed to have some effect later on.
  • Cliché Storm: Doctor Nofun is a blend of several villain sterotypes all packed into one character.
  • Complete Monster - The latest strip places Bestseid firmly in this category.
  • Crazy Awesome - Torg's moments of victory prior to when he Took a Level in Badass - for example, his apparently inane practice of keeping around "Emergency Pants", which go on to become absolutely vital a few strips later.
  • Dying Moment of Awesome: Several.
    • Mosp's attack on Horribus.
    • Fittingly, and weirdly, Bert one gets one with his last (living) lines: "Viva la Crotch!"
    • 2003's Batman Gambit to defeat Holiday Bun Bun
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Lots of characters of varying major-ness. As far as the main cast is concerned, Sasha. At the other end of the spectrum there's Pasquirlio, the squirrel that was Kiki's business partner and turned out to be Donald Trump's living hairpiece.
  • Epileptic Trees - Just read the forums. Especially about Oasis, whose precise nature has probably been specc'd on more than anyone in history except religious figures and the Doctor.
  • Esoteric Happy Ending - The heartwarming moment at the end of "Displacement" is almost enough to make you forget that there's a machine that displaces anything it touches by several feet heading straight for the earth's core.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment - The Steve Irwin Captain Ersatz "The Demon Hunter" gets stabbed in the chest with a nautically-themed spear.
    • Could also qualify as Crosses the Line Twice, as it does happen a second time, when his assistant/wife betrays him.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight - The arc where the group first meets the Lysindra vampires was funny enough in 1998. Come 2005 and Twilight, and the attack of the vampire Kullen and the fact that Torg has a mind that vampires can't read, and it's hilarious how well Twilight gets mocked.
  • I Knew It! - The use of the Minion Master as a Chekhov's Gun was figured out by the forumites fairly easily.
    • This trope is the reason the forum has a separate section for fan theories that Pete Abrams does not look at.
  • Like You Would Really Do It - Pete had told the fanbase for years that Zoe was going to die. As of this arc, she has been brutally burned, drugged into a coma, and Riff has now been told that she cannot survive off of the machines keeping her stable. However, this information has been relayed to him through a character known for duplicity and the use of a surveillance tape..
    • And it has since turned out that Riff used time travel and nanobots to bring her back.
  • Magnificent Bastard - Irving Schlock is slowly becoming one.
  • Mind Screw - a good portion of the comic is this.
  • Moral Event Horizon - Played straight and subverted by the same action: Oasis murders Monica, someone the readers know is an evil spy trying to bring about the downfall of the main cast. However, nobody (including Oasis) knew this fact. And up to this point, Oasis had not done any permanent damage to anyone the main cast would identify as innocent, meaning that for many of them (and Oasis herself) the event has become a Moral Event Horizon.
    • Her true Moral Event Horizon came when she burned Zoe alive.
      • I always figured it came when she tried to kill Zoe the first time. That's when the cast started regarding her as a serious threat, anyway.
    • This could also be seen as the end of an extended MEH crossing by Dr. Schlock, who not only set Oasis off again by ordering the death of Feng, but manipulated Riff to go against Oasis, and blocked out Torg's call to Riff thus depriving Riff of vital information.
    • Bestseid recently crossed the horizon when it was revealed he has been feeding ZHOAS (Jane) brains again. Made even worse by the fact that they are probably the brains of "innocent" random minions. Either way Jane is crazy enough when lucid that this is a bad thing.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Sasha being captured by a Face Heel Turned Monicruel. We don't even know what she's done to her, but she clearly looks like she's been mentally (and probably physically) broken.
  • Seasonal Rot - Opinion varies on where it started, what exactly's been going wrong, or whether it's still "good," and while many people feel that it's nowhere near what it was in the nineties and early 2000s, others think that despite the changes it's just as good as it ever was.
    • However, almost everyone other than the diehard fanboys would admit it's pretty much all been downhill ever since the whole "Captain Bunbun across the dimensional void" storyarc.
  • Tear Jerker - The finale of the bROKEN arc.
    • Also, toward the end of 4U City Red:
      • Riff: She was the best. The best All the craziness Torg and I put her through? She always did right. By everyone. She always shined. Remember that. Embrace that. And then let her go.
  • Villain Ball - Cleverly averted at the end of "Holiday Wars", where Bun-bun's enemies have concocted a clever Batman Gambit that will force him to use the Deus ex Ovum (push the Reset Button)--but if Bun-bun actually fell for it, his character would suffer Badass Decay. So instead the Groundhog's shadow falls for the scheme instead, and Bun-bun is appalled to find out that because they are linked, the effects of the plan will apply to him as well unless he uses the Reset Button.
  • The Woobie - Torg, for being unable to be with the woman he loves due to circumstances beyond his control. Zoe, for her perennial Butt Monkey status. Even Oasis has her Woobie moments, despite being an Ax Crazy Stalker with a Crush.
    • Also, some believe Zombie-Head-On-A-Stick has become quite pitiable lately.
  • The Writer Thinks of Everything - the forums are always filled with much debate as to how much is really Pete's advance planning and how much is just Continuity Nods. The recent explanation of how a character who made his debut by suddenly arriving in Timeless Space got there (along with another character from the Oceans Unmoving arc) seems more like the latter. The big reveal about Oasis, however...definitely the former.
  • Your Mileage May Vary - Opinions on "Oceans Unmoving" widely vary, with some people considering it a Plot Tumor and others thinking it was one of the cooler arcs in the story. The fact that the cast of the arc consists of Bun-bun and a bunch of characters not seen in any other arc may contribute to the former opinion.
    • Well, a couple of the characters made a reappearance in "Paradise" (one by appearance, one by name).