History CalvinAndHobbes / TropesJToP

** Dad is normally sarcastic towards Calvin or facetious. When the whole family tries to take care of an injured raccoon, he calmly tells Calvin the raccoon died. As Calvin starts to sob, Dad hugs him and comforts him, telling him they all did the best they could. It's one of the few times Dad is sincere and loving.

** Calvin's mom finally panics about Calvin being sick when she says it's Saturday and therefore he won't be missing school, to which he simply replies "I know" without being upset about losing leisure time.

* PerfectlyCromulentWord: Calvin has a vocabulary that any adult would be proud of, but that doesn't stop him from making up words when the opportunity arises. In one short story arc, Hobbes uses made up words like "snippid" and "brambish" to describe certain smells, although when Calvin asks how to describe how he smells, Hobbes just says "terrible" before running away laughing.

** In [[http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/08/28 an August 1989 arc]], Calvin didn't want to make his bed, so he and Hobbes spent all afternoon trying to build a robot to do it for him. They couldn't get the robot to work, but since they spent so long on it, the bed never got made. Mission accomplished!

* KidsAreCruel: Calvin has been both the instigator and the victim of such acts.

** Calvin himself can be one several times due to being [[ItsAllAboutMe an egotistical]] BrattyHalfPint. For example, he once stole Susie's doll to use as a ransom for $100. He took it even further by including a photo of the doll tied to a chair with the ransom note. He also knowingly attempted to try and infect Susie with his chicken pox. During one of his stints as Stupendous Man, Calvin dropped a heavy bowling ball-sized snowball on Susie's head from a tree, too oblivious to realize a stunt like that could've seriously injured her. When his mom confronted him about it, he tried to play it off, but his mom wasn't having any of it. She drilled into him what he could've done and threatened to take away his Stupendous Man costume for good if he ever tried something like that again.

** Right before Moe is about to beat him up again, Calvin demands to know why he doesn't pick on someone his own size? Moe simply replies "they'd hit back". Calvin recognizes there's a certain unethical logic to that answer.

* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: There are times when Calvin realizes his shenanigans have gone too far and he genuinely feels bad about it.

* MajorInjuryUnderreaction: One Sunday strip did a parody of [[UsefulNotes/TheDarkAgeOfComicBooks Dark Age]] comic books, in which a character having a huge hole blasted through his torso narrates: "I could feel my spine shatter. [[{{Understatement}} It hurt... a lot]]."

* NewMediaAreEvil: Sometimes used, sometimes criticized. The combination almost seems hypocritical on Bill Watterson's part. Generally speaking, Watterson tended to defend ''newspaper'' comics (not an unsurprising opinion for someone whose career was writing newspaper comics). They weren't necessarily less stupid at the time, but in his view comic strips had far more potential to convey deep meaning than the comics from the then-ongoing UsefulNotes/TheDarkAgeOfComicBooks, which often seemed to be in a competition to cram the highest possible death toll into twenty pages.

* MenagerieOfMisery: Hobbes hates the zoo and sees it as equivalent to a prison for animals, as shown in one strip, when Calvin asks to go to the zoo, Hobbes asks Calvin if they can visit a prison afterwards.

* PushPolling: Calvin tends to employ this when discussing his dad's "approval ratings", to try and convince him to give him later bedtimes or let him stay home from school. His dad is always unmoved.

** Calvin is generally inconsiderate, selfish and lazy. However, the raccoon strip shows Calvin making genuine effort to help a dying baby raccoon, [[spoiler: even becoming sad and indignant over its death]].

* PetTheDog: Even in her first appearance, Rosalyn locked Calvin in the garage for an unknown misdemeanor, so her kind moments are few and far in-between.
** During an arc where Calvin and Hobbes tried to run away from her, she actually offered to make popcorn with him. Rosalyn rescinded the offer when she saw they had flown the coop.
** Her last arc has her bribe Calvin that if he gives her no trouble, they'll play his favorite game and he gets to stay up half an hour past his bedtime. She actually keeps her word (and has fun) when she grabs the nuances of Calvinball is to make up as you go along. While Calvin isn't thrilled that she won and took Hobbes, hostage, he honored the rules and went to bed without complaint.

** Calvin is fleeing from a furious swarm of hornets; when Hobbes asks why they're so angry, Calvin casually replies that he spent the whole morning [[TooDumbToLive throwing rocks at their nest]]. Calvin is incredulous when Hobbes decides he deserves his fate and leaves Calvin hanging in a tree for the insects to get him.

* PlatonicKiss: Calvin's parents sometimes kiss him goodnight when they're putting him to bed. Mom also often has to kiss Hobbes, much to her chagrin. One strip even had Calvin wake her up in the middle of the night to kiss Hobbes ''again'' because the first one "didn't take":

** The incident that most fans point to is the time that Calvin asks Hobbes to tie him to a chair so that he can break free. Calvin is tied so tight that his parents are stumped as to how he got himself into the situation, despite Calvin's insistence that Hobbes did it. Related to this is the fact that Calvin can't escape and Hobbes doesn't/isn't able to set him free; is it really because he got distracted reading through Calvin's Cub Scouts manual or because, as an imaginary friend, he literally ''can't'' untie Calvin?
** There are several strange things that have little explanation other than that Hobbes ''is'' real. As in ''photographic evidence''. When Calvin took a picture of Hobbes "pouncing" on him, it was indeed a picture of Hobbes flying through the air with seemingly no outside force (possibly a friend could have thrown him, but of course Calvin has no friends), although it could have been a timed photo. Hobbes once took a photo of Calvin while the boy was sneezing. There was no way Calvin could do this by himself -- setting the time right would be nigh-impossible and we can see Calvin's hands in the photo. Heck, it makes Hobbes pretty impressive; catching someone mid-sneeze would be an impressive feat for a professional photographer. That said, no one else except Calvin and Hobbes sees the photo so one could still say the picture was imaginary.
** The one scene where Susie sees Calvin fighting Hobbes (or to her, he's rolling in the dirt and grappling with a stuffed animal), and ''losing''. Even she admits that she can't explain that one.
** There's the time that Hobbes was missing, and Susie found him, and decided to hold a tea party with him. Enter Calvin, asking Susie if she's seen Hobbes, and rushing over to thank her, kissing her hand. Now, Calvin was in front of Susie the whole time, in her line of sight. [[http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/05/31 But when she turns back to her tea party?]]
---> '''Susie:''' Hey! Who took all the cookies?
** There's Calvin's bicycle. He's clearly terrified of it and convinced that it wants to kill him. An easy explanation is that he's creating malicious fantasies to justify his fear of falling off the bike, yet on one occasion, he actually found it "hiding" in his room in an apparent ambush. Could Calvin have overcome his fear enough to move his bike in order to set up an imaginary attack, and then seemingly repressed the memory of having done so, when he normally runs away from it as a matter of course? In another case, Calvin's helmet has bike treads on it, which would've meant he somehow ran ''himself'' over repeatedly if the bike wasn't alive, although you could interpret it as cartoonish exaggeration. In yet another strip, even Calvin's dad is very perplexed at just how often Calvin gets clobbered trying to ride the bicycle, musing about middle ear issues. On the other hand, the one time Calvin's dad accompanies Calvin in teaching him to ride the bicycle, it never acts up even once, and never does so ever again.

* NameAndName

** In some strips, Calvin likes to add ''more'' sugar to the already super-sweet cereal or using ''soda'' instead of milk. One shows [[SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome the consequences]] of him doing so:

* PyrrhicVictory: Played with in one story arc, where Calvin attempts to weasel out of having to do a writing assignment for school by using time travel to get it in the future when it's already written. It doesn't end up working out, because in order for the assignment to exist in the future he had to have written it in the past, but the past and future Hobbeses together, realizing in advance Calvin's scheme won't work, write up a story themselves and give it to Calvin, so he still gets out of having to write a story himself in the end. Unfortunately, when Calvin presents the story the next day, he finds it's an insulting story about how much of a useless idiot he is for using time travel to weasel out of doing his homework with time travel that, according to Calvin, turned him into the laughingstock of the class...and earned him an A+.