The Fuzzy Five
Appearing at first glance to be an exercise in Product Placement, but actually a funny and intelligent Embellished Webcomic about five Living Toys and their companion humans, written by Charles D. and drawn by Melissa Zayas. Find it here.
Tropes used in The Fuzzy Five include:
- Bland-Name Product: In this strip, Otto is using a search engine called Searchy with a suspiciously familiar colour scheme.
- Bonus Material: The strip commentary is sometimes excerpts from in-universe material. The first occurs at strip #6, with OMSU and U: A Prospective Student’s Guide, Page 27
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: e.g. here
- Coincidental Broadcast: Averted in this strip, where Claire turns off the radio in the middle of the relevant item.
- Counting Sheep: Parodied in this strip, where Claire counts copies of Otto in place of sheep.
- Cuteness Overload: Weaponised by Spirit the Fox in this strip.
- Everyone Meets Everyone: A major component of the first storyline.
- Everything's Better with Plushies: effectively the underlying assumption of the strip.
- How We Got Here: The first strip apparently starts In Medias Res, but after one frame, Spirit invites Otto to Flash Back to how it all got started.
- Lampshade Hanging: Twice in the first strip. See How We Got Here and Mr. Exposition.
- Living Toys (of course)
- Mr. Exposition: Claire lampshades her own expository speech in the last panel of the first page.
- Odd Friendship: Britnee the perky blonde and Meredith the Goth.
- Shout-Out: The Fluffton P.D. has an Officer Krupke. For extra points, the strip title is Hey, Look! Social Commentary!
- Social Semi-Circle: this strip
- Speech Bubbles Interruption: A villain pops Meredith's (thought) bubble here.
- At the end of the first storyline, the box declaring the end obscures Nina Jr's assertion that no unseen force was going to interrupt them.
- Stealth Pun: e.g. "Ominous Mountain State University" is abbreviated (see above) as "OMSU and U".