Line #23 YMMV/SchlockMercenary


1	* AccidentalInnuendo: A RunningGag with Kaff Tagon, who has never been all that good at interactions with females other than work-related ones.
2	* AlternativeCharacterInterpretation: Are the Pa'anuri - the Dark Matter Entities - evil beings intent on maliciously exterminating all baryonic life, or are they former ''slaves'' of those baryonic beings and terrified of being enslaved to make transuranic materials for them again?
3	* ArchivePanic: '''''[[https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2020-07-24 20 years]]''''', 1 3- or 4-panel strip Monday through Saturday and a 6- to 10-panel strip on Sundays, ''never missed a day'', even when the hosting server literally blew up. If you set out to ArchiveBinge the whole thing, expect it to take days, if not weeks.
4	* CargoShip:
5	** Captain Landon and his intelligent, talking gun, P-1066 aka "Tenzy".
6	--->'''Landon:''' Get the door, babe.\
7	'''Tenzy:''' I'm your entry tool, now?\
8	'''Landon:''' Tenzy... you're my everything.\
9	'''Tenzy: ''' I'm blushing. Let me get that door for you, hon.\
10	'''Schlock:''' I want a talking gun.
11	** Para loves her robots, almost to a creepy extent, and they love her back.
12	--->'''Elf:''' You didn't need to ride in here on your new toy.\
13	'''Para:''' This is not a ''toy''. Her name is Silksilver, and she's a ''good'' girl, isn't she?\
14	'''Silksilver:''' Such good. Love!
15	* CrazyIsCool:
16	** Lt. Pi is "Every bit as irrational as his namesake", and yet it's exactly that craziness that has served him well on at least two occasions, figuring things out that no one would have considered because they were too bizarre for conventional thinking.
17	** Petey, if for no reason other than the sheer scope and audacity of his plans.
18	---> '''[[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2005-03-26 Kevyn]]''': Petey, what's going on here?\
19	'''Petey:''' Isn't it obvious?\
20	'''Kevyn:''' Well... all I can figure is that you decided to attack ''an entire star system'' as a feint to draw off the battleplate ''Vredefort'', so that you could escort us from the system with minimal collateral damage.\
21	'''Petey:''' See? ''Obvious''.\
22	'''UNS Boarder:''' "Minimal collateral damage" and "entire star system" [[ARareSentence do]] '''''[[ARareSentence not]]''''' [[ARareSentence belong in the same sentence]].
23	* CreepyAwesome: On occasion Shlock, being a BlobMonster, has that effect sometimes. [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2008-02-22 Case in point.]]
24	* FanNickname:
25	** Before the name of the dark matter entities ("Pa'anuri") was revealed, the fans tended to contract their description into "[=DaME=]."
26	** The red bar used to indicate the passage of time between panels was nicknamed "The Red Bar of EVIL" on the forums. In some subsequent strips, it's even labeled "[[AscendedMeme TRBoE]]."
27	* GeniusBonus
28	** The Mallcop arc also featured [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2010-04-20 a scene]] where the villains use command injection to force a CCTV system to sleep for ten minutes. When a QR code is held up to a security camera, the system reads the commands contained in the code and executes them because the administrators never changed the system's admin username and password from their defaults. The QR code in question is displayed to the reader, so what happens when you use your smartphone's bar code scanner to read the QR code the character is holding up? Your phone returns the following data:
29	--->UID='ADMIN'\
30	PASS='DEFAULT'\
31	CMD='sleep, 600sec, noprompt, [[Literature/{{Illuminatus}} fnord]]'
32	** An Int-Aff-Int officer talks about a [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2012-12-29 dash-nine option]], with regards to terminating the spy they put in Tagon's company. In a POSIX-compliant operating system like Linux, signal number nine is generally called KILL, and you can halt a misbehaving process that won't respond to the usual termination signals using "kill -9." Taken even further when the two officers argue whether it should be pronounced "dash nine" or "minus nine," something that real-life Linux users do today.
33	** The [[https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2014-06-01 background of one of the strips]] in the ''Delegates and Delegation'' has some apparently-random gibberish on a display screen [[note]][=QmUgc3VyZSB0byBkcmluayB5b3VyIE92YWxrd2lrIGFuZCBzaG9wIG9mdGVuIGF0IHN0b3JlLnNjaGxvY2ttZXJjZW5hcnkuY29tLVRXDQoNCg===][[/note]]. Run it through a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64 base64]] decoder and you get:
34	---> Be sure to drink your Ovalkwik and shop often at store.schlockmercenary.com-TW
35	* GrowingTheBeard: It's hard to say exactly when the strip starts to click towards the end of book 1, but the strip has definitely fully hit its stride by the beginning of book 2.
36
37	* HarsherInHindsight: Since Elf invoked what everyone else saw as her CartwrightCurse to get her squad to shut up, Pronto and Brad have been KilledOffForReal. Not to mention that Kevyn and Schlock (who were also kissed) have both died ''at least'' once as well. Heck, Kevyn dies ''in the same arc.'' Both of them got better, though.
38	* HilariousInHindsight: When Tagon and Ceeta use DecisionDarts on a galactic survey map to pick a random uninhabited star to hide near, [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-05-26 Tagon's first dart throw is a "bullseye".]] Ceeta then says, "That's the Galactic Core, Tagon. We don't want to go there." And, of course, she's right -- [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2004-11-25 that's where the center of the explosion will be.]]
39	* HoYay: After breaking up with future-Kevyn, Jengisha seems [[https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2019-11-05 oddly]] [[https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2020-05-28 close]] to Chelle, despite her being her CO. Nothing comes of it.
40	* IdiotBall: The F'sherl-Ganni in the early part of the story. Despite being an advanced {{Precursors}} race that has controlled the galaxy for hundreds of millennia, they let themselves get outwitted by a blundering group of mercenaries, who manage to invent and publish the ''one'' technology that they had dedicated themselves to suppressing. They are able to selectively duplicate objects and people on a molecular level, but use it to clone and interrogate living victims (some of whom eventually escape), rather than just reading their brains.
41	* InformedAttractiveness: More like informed youth, but Elf dismisses Tagon as old (saying "what was I thinking" of her previous attraction) even though her boyfriend Kevyn is somewhat round-bellied, bald and could easily be assumed to be the older of the two.
42	** Although Kevyn is later shown growing hair when he's stuck on a primitive planet for awhile, implying that he shaves his head rather than being naturally bald.
43	* {{Narm}}: On [[https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-02-04 Feb. 04, 2018]], Tagon orders Cpl. Gugro to withdraw her forces from the station, only for an adorable, wide-eyed native to walk up to her and start asking where her family is. This leads Gugro to reject Tagon's orders, saying she's staying where she is. Take your pick why it's narm: that there's a civilian wandering around where this conversation is taking place instead of being in a shelter, where there are ''hundreds of corpses stacked like cordwood,'' that Tagon is willing to take any guff from Gugro at all when earlier her actions triggered the Toughs having to get into a shooting war with the local militia (Gugro and all but one of her team effectively quit the company on the spot and the militia turned out to be slaving pirates in fancy coats so there are no real repercussions), or that Tagon is willing to speak so calmly (and just repeating what is basically, "you have to follow orders,") when one of his best friends was killed.
44	* ProtagonistTitleFallacy: Schlock is a major character, but if any one Tough is the star of the show it's Captain Tagon.
45	* TheScrappy: Tayler used to get emails calling for Para Ventura's death on a regular basis. She hasn't had much CharacterDevelopment since then. That she has been spying on the Toughs for the UNS may help or make things worse.
46	** Recently RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap, as her spying got her briefly exiled, then demoted all the way to Corporal, and she's now treated as just another Tough.
47	* ShockingMoments: Book 19 is really wracking these up. A passing worldship accidentally destroyed a nascent dinosaur civilization on Earth by passing through the halo millions of years before? The same ship found out about it and actually ''rescued'' them? Another race contacted them but covered it up (deliberately) badly? Petey had to build a telescope bigger than the galaxy to find it? When he did, he found out the area around the galaxy is packed ''full'' of the damn things? The Dark Matter Entities have their own ''warships'' now, and Petey's resources to fight them are now depleted? Said ships cause artificial supernovas, and the only way to save civilians in time is to kill and digitize hundreds of billions of people?
48	* ValuesDissonance: Doctor Ed's backstory is based around eugenics laws, which nobody seems to question in the slightest. For quite a few people, that's a bit of a deal-breaker.
49	* VillainDecay: The Partnership Collective went from manipulating planetary governments to nothing more than comic relief once the Toughs got the contract on them. Probably attributable to the fact that the Gatekeepers stopped using them as proxies once the teraport went open-source. Combined, of course, with the fact that said 'contract' means there is literally no reason the Toughs can't just shoot the guys on sight.
50	** The Paa'nuri also get this, to a pretty major extent in book 20. With the introduction of the Dro'nuri, the Toughs immediately have something they can physically attack. It was mostly averted in all other forms of confrontation, as it's clear the Paa'nuri themselves are still difficult to stop, and are winning on other fronts even after showing their AchillesHeel. In the end, they're undone not by becoming less strong, but by [[spoiler:showing they were too new to this "total war" thing and making exceedingly costly tactical mistakes no baryonic military older than a few days old would have made]].
51	* TheWoobie:
52	** Mister Aliss, and Tailor is quickly earning this title for himself too.
53	** Although Tailor has become a lot more badass, especially when he teamed up with General Tagon. Para Ventura may count though: she seems to be the only character who gets distressed by killing.

Context YMMV / SchlockMercenary