"The town of Millville is in danger! Monsters and tropers are shoehorning examples into this page! I, Wendy Mercier, am here to stop them!"
— Wendy, paraphrased version of the opening narration
Millville Mornings is a 52-episode animated Fantastic Comedy created by Mikuru Fan. Currently, this is mostly a dumping ground for my thoughts on playing with tropes.
Note: The episode numbers on this page are outdated. There are being replaced with titles or are being moved to the recap pages.
Works:
Games
Take a good long look at these examples. Mmm-hmm.
- Adults Are Useless: The adults who appear in this show are either perverts, villains, or too incompetent to provide anything of use to the cast.
- Animation Bump: Suspiciously, the eroge episode has a much higher quality of animation than the rest of the show.
- Animesque:
- Uses some animation techniques of anime, but not a lot.
- Episode 4, with Cheese-chan and Baby.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The group of people following "monsters" in the Opening Narration for every episode is usually more favorable than them.
- Art Shift:
- Sometimes takes on a more modern cartoon appearance with Black Bead Eyes, Thick-Line Animation, and Noodle People-esque art.
- Animesque is used on episode 4.
- Art-Style Dissonance: Cheese-chan and Baby, with its pastel colors, Super-Deformed style, and pornographic content.
- Attractive Bent-Gender: Clark is considered attractive in his female form. Eliza as well.
- Bait-and-Switch Comment: Bryan mentions the consequences of sex.Bryan: It creates a mess... and cum.
- Barbie Doll Anatomy: Parodied. A featureless naked man is shown in "Beach Episode". In the next scene, after he is forced to put on a swimsuitnote , he gets hit in the groin by a volleyball. The Fridge Logic does not escape Bryan.
- Battle of the Still Frames: That's when the battles are shown at all.
- Beach Episode: Episode 6, appropriately titled, "Beach Episode". The episode has a lot more of Fan Disservice.
- Better than a Bare Bulb: Lampshade hangings are common; some subtle, some more explicit.
- Biting-the-Hand Humor: There are a few joking references to the network screwing the show over.Wendy: Wonder what they'll do next. Maybe they'll put the credits in the corner in favor of an ad?
- Black Comedy: Started with lots of it, but has become rarer and the humor focused more on the nonsensical.
- Black Comedy Rape:
- A choice that pops up commonly in Cheese-chan and Baby is "Use force it on her".
- The rape scene in Bryan's film fro "Bryan and Clark Break Up".
- Bland-Name Product: US Airlines for US Airways, DorMart for Walmart, Pepido for Pepsi, Papermitt for Paper Mate, among may others.
- Brains and Brawn: Bryan is brains and Wendy is brawn.
- California Doubling: Lampshaded in an In-Universe movie that starts with the line, "Once upon a time, in a far away land within an hour's drive from Palm Springs..."
- Cartoonland Time: The cast is able to visit Florida and Austria with minimal time or budget limits.
- Chekhov's Gun: The Undo Transformation Gun appears very briefly next to the Female Transformation Gun in the scene where James looks back at it.
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: As the show shifted from focusing on a large group to a somewhat Minimalist Cast where most of the plot focused Wendy, Bryan, Clark, Cromwell, and the monsters. Remember Susan?
- Clothing Damage: Not intended for fanservice, but often lumped together with Amusing Injuries tropes like Ash Face.
- Cooking Duel: Episode 21 has one between Wendy and Casey.
- Conspicuously Light Patch: Lampshaded. Wendy and Bryan are trapped in a hallway with many doors. Only one door will lead outside.Bryan: How about that door? It's less dull than the others.
- Couch Gag:
- The group of people following "Monsters" in the opening narration changes based on the plot of the episode.
- The object that lands on Clark varies.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Cromwell tells Wendy, Bryan, and Clark that the trip to the mountains to resolve the Gender Bender plot could have been avoided if they had just went to Cromwell and asked for the Undo Transformation Gun.
- Cutaway Gag:
- Normally averted. Jokes are preferably incorporated into the plot, adding them as it goes along.
- Parodied in episode 16. Wendy gets thrown into a pit while fighting the Monster of the Week, leading to this:Wendy: Aw, this is worse than time a fight scene was interrupted by a cutaway gag![cut to Wendy fighting another monster we haven't seen already]Wendy: This is worse than the time my brothers wrestled at the last family picnic!
- A Day in the Limelight: Episode 19 was told in the point of view of a Monster of the Week. It managed to portray Wendy as a heartless eugenicist.
- Deadpan Snarker:
- Clark is a subversion. He does make sarcastic and snide comments with a straight face before reflexively smiling.
- Wendy, sometimes.
- Digital Piracy Is Evil: Parodied in episode 4. Apparently piracy will suck you and your female friends into an Eroge world. Which may not necessarily be bad...
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Taiko-1's job, protecting the game from copying, can be a type of DRM.
- Don't Try This at Home: Spoofed.Wendy: You can try this at work. You can try this at school. You can try this on a freaking yacht if you want, but please, don't try this at home!
- Drama Bomb Finale: Both the Season 1 and Series finales. The series finale is even named "Drama Bombers".
- Dude, Not Funny!: In-Universe example where Wendy and Albert join a studio audience for a sitcom. After a character mentions a female coworker who was run over by a train, another character asks why a train would go through the kitchen. Albert stands up and tells the actors that that joke isn't funny. Both Wendy and Albert get kicked out of the studio.
- Emotion Eater: Many of the monsters are created by or are fueled by some sort of emotion.
- "End of the World" Special: Episode 29. The world gets better, though.
- "Everybody Laughs" Ending: Parodied. Albert says a completely inappropriate response to walking in on another couple making out. Everybody suddenly laughs. Bryan keeps laughing after everyone else is done, which the captioner cuts to a black screen with a caption saying, "We'd love to show you more laughing, but unfortunately, our timeslot has come to an end."
- Every Car Is a Pinto: Exaggerated/parodied in episode 22. Wendy throws a beach ball at a car in Honest John's Dealership and every car in the dealership explodes.
- Fake Interactivity:
- Subverted.
Wendy: Will you help us find the golden map?[Beat]Wendy: No? Oh, I planned this whole thing out where you can help us find things... it was part of our exec's audience participation program. Oh well.- Parodied in episode 5 with a Dora the Explorer-esque show that Bryan and Clark use to learn Spanish to impress Maria and her friends. The requests are far more demanding than an average toddler should be able to do."Dora": Repeat after me: "Voy a la casa con mis primas hermanas."Bryan and Clark: [monotonously] Voy a la casa con mis primas hermanas.
- False Camera Effects: Bryan's independent film includes Camera Abuse, Jitter Cam, and even the sound of wind blowing into the mic.
- Fan Disservice:
- Most of the Beach Episode. Includes the obese woman in a bikini sitting on Bryan.
- Episode 26. Everyone is in their own world, naked, and losing to their own fears. For example, Bryan getting stabbed repeatedly.
- Scenes that look like they're supposed to be titillating but instead apply extreme Off-Model to the characters so that the result looks more silly.
- The Stripperiffic outfits of the Action Girls Club. They range from amusing to downright disturbing.
- Faux Action Girl:
- Wendy may be one, depending on interpretation. The Stylistic Suck format makes it that no battles are shown directly, all of them offscreen or shown in still frames. However, the battles are strongly implied to happen.
- Parodied with the "Action Girls Club" from episode 1.
- First Law of Gender Bending: Averted. Clark stays as a girl for two episodes only.
- Gender Bender: Cromwell keeps a Transformation Gun that can turn anything into a human girl. The only time he used it on another human was on Clark in episode 23.
- Gratuitous Rape: In-Universe example where Bryan decides that he wants the villain to be completely evil.
- Great Big Library of Everything: Hirsch's library, though it is small, has books on any subject as if it were Hammerspace.
- Honest John's Dealership: One of Cromwell's allies run one. It gets destroyed in episode 22.
- Human Popsicle: In the Time Travel arc, Clark gets frozen when he falls into the lake on an ice fishing trip. He gets found a thousand years later by ice farmers in a world that's mostly flooded.
- Idiot Hero: Used In-Universe. In Bryan's film, he decides that he wants the hero to be one so the audience will have someone to feel superior to.
- Intentional Engrish for Funny: Most of the text in Cheese-chan and Baby is incomprehensible. It was pirated, after all.
- The Internet Is for Porn: Willow can access the internet with her mind. Clark thinks that she uses this ability to read porn on it.
- It Came from the Fridge: Episode 17 has a food monster created by Mr. Montgomery hoarding food and not throwing it out when it becomes expired.
- It Was His Sled: In-Universe example where the characters reveal something of a popular movie that is obvious, preceded by a "Spoiler Alert".
- Lightbulb Joke: Due to Metaphorgotten, the plot of episode 20 becomes finding out how many citizens of Millville can replace the lightbulb at Town Hall.
- Limited Animation: Used deliberately for a Retraux effect.
- Man, I Feel Like a Woman: Subverted with Clark in episode 23. He looks shocked, then touches his breasts, and looks down. He screams and panics.
- Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy:
- Mr. and Mrs. Mercier, at least in their interests. Mr. Mercier enjoys cooking and sewing while Mrs. Mercier builds things in the shed.
- In episode 14, this trope becomes the norm.
- Meaningful Name: Many of the monsters' names. Sunny is the one at the beach while Pinn is the one from the bowling alley.
- Medium Awareness: Wendy knows that she's a cartoon character and often addresses the staff and audience.
- Men Buy from Mars, Women Buy from Venus: Parodied/inverted. A company that makes dresses aired an advertisement that said that they aren't for men. Every man started wearing dresses in that episode.
- Monster of the Week
- Mood Dissonance: A main source of humor. The scenes all look like ones from serious dramas, but the dialogue is actually really comedic and random.
- Mood Whiplash:
- "Earl of Sandwich", one of the most lighthearted episodes, aired before "Feary Canal", one of the most disturbing.
- Within "Feary Canal", we see Wendy's fear sequence, where she gets torn apart by dogs. Offscreen, but still. Then we see Bryan's fear sequence. He fails a vocabulary test in the most absurd way and the teacher punishes him with death with a Scary Flashlight Face. Bryan immediately makes a Big "NO!" Then we see Clark's fear sequence, which takes the slapstick that happens to him, turns it on its head, as if to ask the viewer what they were thinking when they laugh at what happens to him.
- "Seeking a Franz for the End of the World" starts out to take the subject of Maria's disappearance and the end of the world seriously, then shows an extended sequence in which Wendy, Bryan, and Clark squick over finding Rule 34 of themselves. Then it goes back to them being worried about what happened to Maria because they couldn't find her in her home.
- The Most Dangerous Video Game: Cheese-chan and Baby, the pirated version. Using it will suck the player and his female friends into the game.
- The Mountains of Illinois: The cast visits Florida to climb mountains that wouldn't look out of place in Anhui, China.
- Mundane Made Awesome:
- The bumper cars scene in episode 3.
- In the Cooking Duel episode, Slow-Motion Drop is used for breaking an egg. Repeat Cuts of Wendy and Casey mixing the batter while screaming were used.
- Clark finally makes the ultimate sandwich in episode 29. Suddenly, dramatic orchestral music plays and crepuscular rays shine on the sandwich, as he lifts the sandwich on a high place with people below bowing in a "The Circle of Life"-esque way. Being Clark, he drops the sandwich... and it falls up. It turns out that aliens abducted it.
- Never Say "Die": Parodied.Albert: Why can't you just say "die"?Wendy: [pauses, turns to the audience] Because the show's distributed by 4Childs Media, so even an aborted fetus can watch it alone!
- No Communities Were Harmed: Millville is loosely based on Moscow, Idaho.
- No Fourth Wall: Wendy often addresses the audience and predicts their reactions to events in the show.
- No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: Used to make Cromwell look more manipulative and James more of a pervert.
- Noodle Implements:
- Random objects are seen flying off from some of the offscreen fights between Wendy and the monsters. One fight involved a tricycle, a mailbox, and a copy of Eight Easy Ways To Get Men To Notice You.
- Mrs. Mercier brings unusual objects to the shed in the backyard for her project.
- Noodle Incident: In episode 2, Clark calls Wendy asking her how to give a squirrel a handjob. Why he would need to do so and the circumstances that led to the incident has never been questioned.
- no punctuation is funnier: The captions have no punctuation. For example, "No animals were harmed in the making of this cartoon or humans or plants but we did step on a mushroom somewhere"
- Opening Narration: Usually takes the form: "The town of Millville is in danger! Monsters and X are Y! I, Wendy Mercier, am here to stop them!" X is a group of people related to the plot, and Y is an action that X is doing. X is usually more favorable than the monsters.
- Out-of-Clothes Experience: The fear sequences in episode 26.
- Overly Long Gag:
- Clark making sandwiches at varying speeds in episode 25.
- Wendy staring at James's left cheek in episode 28.
- Parental Neglect: Wendy's parents were not good at watching her when she was little and are mostly ignorant of what she is doing.
- Parody Sue:
- Wendy's only important trait is that she's an Action Girl. She also has little bad traits. Characters call attention to this heavily and this makes her more susceptible to slapstick.
- Maria Susana is a subversion. Her name literally translates to "Mary Sue" in Spanish, and she is considered physically attractive, but her immaturity and Ax-Crazy tendencies make her unwanted.
- Pastel-Chalked Freeze Frame: Many of the episode endings. This gets lampshaded by the captioner in episode 9.
- Permanently Missable Content: The Male Transformation Gun falls out of Clark's hands, off the cliffs, and into uncharted gorges.
- Power Trio: Bryan and Wendy are Foils, being Brains and Brawn, with Clark as the balance being neither.
- Pronoun Trouble: Everyone runs into this problem at some point when trying to talk about female Clark.
- Pun-Based Title: Often, to the point where the title card for episode 29note has the caption, "An oppuntunity not taken is an oppuntunity lost."
- Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: Averted for comic effect. Characters constantly talk over each other, stutter, or have random asides. Lampshaded when Hirsch makes a list of things with the list showing up in the side, messing up, the item in the written list being crossed out, and replaced as he corrects himself.
- Repeat Cut: Parodied. Sometimes they zoom in a bit too much on the subject, sometimes it's used as an Overly Long Gag, and sometimes an unrelated clip (like a goat bleating) is put in the middle between the cuts.
- Retraux: The animation in general is supposed to be evocative of Dark Age cartoons, involving large amounts of Stylistic Suck.
- Rule 63: Episode 14 runs this on all characters. Including the mooks. The result is an adorable boy beating up a bunch of older women.
- Rushmore Refacement: Pennington does this in episode 7 to change the faces to himself, Cromwell, and two other people.
- Said Bookism: Referenced. Clark calls Deadly Euphemisms "dead bookisms". He also has "bed bookisms" for Mills and Boon Prose.
- Scenery Porn:
- There's a good chance that whenever the characters are launched into the sky, there will be more focus on the scenery.
- This trope is used when the writers consider the characters' discussions to be boring, along with fanservice.
- Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Clark and Bryan can be on either side of this dynamic. Usually, Clark is more emotional and Bryan more reserved, but Clark's interests are associated with men.
- Sequel Snark: Episodes are said To Be Continued, even if they wont. In "Clark to the Future, Part III", a caption appears at the end that "there might even be a Clark to the Future, Part IV!" Followed by a "That was sarcasm."
- Sexy Discretion Shot:Wendy: Sorry... things are not turning out like they're supposed to. While we fix things, we'll show you a clip of an attractive girl undressing.[Cut to a black screen with white text that reads, "Clip removed per request of the Millville Feminist Organization"]
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: The Gender Bender arc, where Wendy, Bryan, and Clark go on a journey to the mountains to find the Male Transformation Gun. Said gun falls into a gorge, and the three go back to Cromwell to complain. Cromwell just lets them use the Undo Transformation Gun, which changes Clark back to a boy.
- Shoulders-Up Nudity: Parodied. Wendy complains to the cel artist that the screen is too close to her face. The screen zooms out, but a bit too much. The screen zooms back in slightly.
- Shout-Out: Many examples border on this and Take That!. Many are in the Pun-Based Title of each episode.
- There's one to This Very Wiki. In episode 17, Clark sees the food monster and quips that someone's putting it on the Fridge Horror page. Bryan asks him, "You're reading TV Tropes again, are you?" Clark says maybe.
- In one scene, a bored Wendy watches TV. Someone on the TV says "Uguu".
- When Clark gets turned into a girl, Bryan tries to douse him/her in hot water to turn Clark back into a boy. He panics and tries to avoid it.
- Skinship Grope: This exchange from episode 19:Stacy: Wow! Can I, like, touch your boobs?Wendy: No.Stacy: Really? I mean, we're both girls, so it's okay, right?Wendy: [slaps Stacy] I said no.
- Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror: Elements of the show are obviously meant to be scary, though most of the time they're played for laughs.
- Slurpasaur: The "extremely scary monster" from Bryan's film, who's actually Clark's pet rabbit.
- Small Reference Pools:
- Averted to the point of lampshading at the amount of obscure references.
Bryan: Who the hell is Yasu?!- Parodied in the game show episode where all of the questions are very simple ones because the show's creators cannot think up more difficult questions. Many people seem to get the answers wrong. It turns out that Mind Control is involved and the contestants uncontrollably say the wrong answer.
- Space Whale Aesop: Plenty, and mostly Played for Laughs.
- In episode 4, if you pirate a pornographic video game online, you and your friends will be sucked into the game.
- In episode 17, hoarding food will create a food monster that will destroy the whole town's food supply.
- Stealth Insult:
- After Mr. Pines shows his Jerkass behavior, Clark asks Wendy if "i before e" applies to his case.
- When the cast visit Kansas, the welcome sign reads "Welcome to Kansas, the Poquoson State".note
- Stock Ness Monster: The Monster of the Firth of Forth from episode 43.
- Straw Feminist: The Ladygirlswomen Club and Millville Feminist Organization.
- Stripperiffic: Parodied. Everyone on the Action Girls Club wears clothes that are so absurdly revealing that they become more amusing than arousing. When Wendy joins them, they force her to wear a Stripperiffic outfit, much to her disgust.Bryan: She has to wear that?!Wendy: But... but...!
- Stuff Blowing Up: The result of Wendy defeating a monster. No explanation is given for this phenomenon at all.
- Stylistic Suck:
- The Retraux animation.
- The scenes of Wendy defeating the Monster of the Week are just stand-alone shots of explosions. The monster disappears afterwards.
- The film created by Bryan in episode 10.
- Sugar Bowl: Parodied.Caption: EVEN THE SLUMS ARE DELICIOUS
- Technobabble: Lampshaded. Here are just some of the examples:Bryan: Find the square root of the molar mass of sodium carbonate, multiplied by the mass to volume ratio of the ball and the time to pull the trigger is... Now!
- Super-Deformed: Some of the monsters.
- Time Travel: Episodes 11, 12, and 13. Clark gets frozen at a fishing trip and ends up on the year 30--. The government sends him back via time travel, but an accident sends him into The Dung Ages. He tries to get back to the present by freezing himself again, only to fail at this task.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In-Universe. Bryan's dad is watching Porn with Plot, which has surprisingly good writing, and remarks that he would love to show Bryan and Wendy the show if not for the porn.
- Those Two Guys: Albert and Benson.
- To Be Continued: Used even if the plot will not be continued at all.
- Token Trio: Played with by making the white female the hero and making the minority male Ambiguously Brown.
- Transformation Ray: There's a Male Transformation Gun, which turns objects into human men, a Female Transformation Gun, which turns objects into human women, and an Undo Transformation Gun, which changes them back to their original states. Cromwell owns the Female and Undo Transformation Guns, and the Male Transformation Gun is buried somewhere in the mountains.
- Trapped in TV Land: Bryan buys a cursed Eroge online. The game corrupts his console and traps him and every female in the neighborhood into the game.
- True Art Is Angsty: In-Universe example in episode 15. Wendy gets defeated by a Monster of the Week and is left to die. She contemplates her life and the world with excessive Word Salad Philosophy. She's actually telling a story she wrote to other people in a reading group. The sudience asks Wendy if she just wrote the story that way to appeal to them.
- Viewers Are Goldfish: Defied.
- When Stacy is introduced in episode 18, a caption showing her name appears every time she appears on the screen. Wendy tells whoever is in control of the captions that she's sure that the audience knows Stacy's name by now.
- In the same episode, Willow recaps and flashback to events that happened five minutes ago. Everyone else tells her to get on with it already.
- Viewers Are Morons: Wendy treats the audience this way.
- Wacky Sound Effect
- Weirdness Magnet: The statue in downtown Millville.
- Where the Hell Is Millville?: It's never stated where Millville actually is. It's based on Moscow, Idaho, but it's clear that the show does not take place there.
- Who Writes This Crap?!: Asking this is one of the captioner's most defining traits.
- Why Don't You Marry It?
- In episode 9, Bryan gets a paddleball for Christmas and he spends the rest of the year playing with it and bringing it everywhere. Wendy asks him this question.
- And in episode 11, it's revealed that Bryan and his paddleball became legally married.
- In episode 24, the paddleball is transformed into a woman. Bryan loses interest in her because she's not a paddleball anymore.
- Word Salad Title: The eroge, Cheese-chan and Baby. Cheese is a "Blind Idiot" Translation of Chizu, and the plot involves finding a Doorstop Baby.
- Wraparound Background: Parodied.Bryan: Didn't we already go through this neighborhood?Wendy: I don't know. I might as well be driving in circles.[Cut to Wendy driving in an area circled by the background]
- Year X:
- The work takes place in the year 20—.
- In "Clark to the Future", Clark ends up on the years 30—, 10—, and 19—.