El Goonish Shive / Tropes A to E

Tropes A to E | Tropes F to L | Tropes M to R | Tropes S to Z

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El Goonish Shive provides examples of the following tropes:

• Abnormal Ammo: In Night Out Part 3 — Ellen's Crew, a group watches a movie where horses are used as projectiles. It's never shown how it's done on screen, but it is commented on.
  Susan: Would you be able to do that?
  Justin: I doubt it— I'm not trained in the art of using horses as projectile weaponry.
• Abilene Paradox: Narrowly subverted in the "So a Date at the Mall" story where Elliot and Ashley are discussing whether to eat immediately or to wait until later. Both of them are hungry, but let the other make the decision as to whether to eat immediately. They both assume the other isn't hungry and agree to delay eating. Thankfully a combined stomach growl gives them an excuse to do what they both want to do.
• Abusive Parents:
  • Damien ended up making himself a sort of twisted father figure to Grace and her brothers, but there is nothing "fatherly" about him at all. He is an abuser pure and simple, able to control his "children" through fear and constantly hitting them whenever they displease him. And like any parent whose children are young enough, he's too powerful for them to do anything about it. And the reason he wanted Grace back? He wanted to breed with her so that he could raise an army. Whether she wanted to or not. (She didn't, by the way.)
  • Unintentionally done by Tedd's mother, using a magic analysis wand to see why he had no magical potential; he was frightened by the noise it made until it became a Pavlovian Response. Worse yet, when it appeared Tedd had no magical aptitude she couldn't reconcile with that and ended up abandoning him.
• Aborted Arc:
  • Hints dropped at Ellen having depression and taking up drinking were later explained away because the creator didn't like the direction it would take. Then, the unopened cans are stuffed back in the refrigerator by Elliot... behind the Red Herring.
  • The "Lord Tedd" arc will presumably pick up again someday, but it's more or less indefinitely on hold because the author realized he introduced it too early.
  • Susan's crusade against the school uniform policy dropped out of focus and then ended abruptly not because nobody in the school wanted to wear the uniforms (even if only Susan was willing to openly act on the matter), but because the parents of the students complained about the increased laundry costs. (Although the author had always intended to end the arc in a lame way, he admitted he didn't intend for it to be so abrupt.)
• Academy of Adventure:
  • Moperville North: The school was attacked by the Goo, twice. It is also where Abraham's summon appeared and where Elliot met the griffin Andrea.
  • Moperville South: Raven mentions offhandedly that South has many unusual children — and he's in charge of protecting them, as he says to the wizard who invaded the school with the intention of murdering one of said children.
  • Moperville University is predicted to become a place where a lot of magical incidents happen. The centre of the flow of ambient magical energy into Moperville will shift from woodland where it originally was to Moperville University, and The Men in Black thinks this will cause the university to be the centre of multiple magic happenings.
• Accidental Truth:
  • Susan lies to her mother about Justin being gay. And one more about spontaneous hair color changes being a thing.
  • Ellen and Grace's math teacher pretends to deduce facts about his new students, and concludes that "the end result appears to be a duplicate squirrel of some sort." The girls are rather shocked about how close to the mark he is until he says he was just messing with them and it had all been gibberish.
• Action Girl: All the girls (and some of the guys) are combat capable except for Sarah.
• Actually Not a Vampire:
  • A variation. Susan flashbacks to an earlier encounter with an 'Aberration' — a person who has used magic in order to become immortal through parasitically leeching off the life-force of others. She starts to describe to her friends about how it had some vampire-like characteristics, realizes her description sounds like it is of a vampire, and decides to say it was one. When her friends ask if it really was one, she said 'No, not really, but it was a monster that used to be human, hypnotized young women and sucked blood out of their necks. It doesn't matter what I say. You two are going to hear "vampire."' The accompanying comments say no, it's not a 'real' vampire. About one arc later, the body-snatcher Sirleck is also identified as an Aberration, albeit one of a different variety than the one Susan and Nanase encountered in France. The common thread is that Aberrations are creatures that were once human, but physically and mentally transformed themselves into monsters in order to gain immortality.
  • Despite what some people might think, Raven assures you that he is not, in fact, a vampire. He also wants you to know that sandwiches are delicious.
• Adorable Fluffy Tail:
  • Grace Sciuridae has a big, fluffy tail in both her native full- and half-squirrel forms and is one of the friendliest characters in the cast. She grows two more tails in her omega form, which look notably sharper since she is more threatening in this state.
  • Played With with Nioi, a part-skunk hybrid with a big fluffy tail. While she serves an Evil Overlord Alternate Self of Tedd, she protects Grace from Damien's explosion and takes pains to give Ellen and her own Alternate Self memories of a happy childhood. Kaoli, the alternate self, herself plays this trope straight.
• Aerith and Bob:
  • Jerry the Immortal thinks you should be glad he's a Jerry, because most immortals go for elitist names from ancient mythology.
  Jerry: Let me tell you, there is nothing more hilarious than the legendary hissy-fits that result from two or more immortals named Zeus running into each other.
  • One of these examples is "Chaos", who originally wanted to be known as "Box", but settled for "Pandora" when the former proved too obscure for people to get the reference.
• Agents Dating: Agents Wolf and Cranium are dating and doing a terrible job at concealing it.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Noah uses the school's air vents to hunt a magical creature.
• Alien Among Us: Uryuoms hide themselves among humanity using their natural abilities. By technicality though, they're born on Earth, they're not aliens.
• All-Cheering All the Time: A sketchbook entry explains why "Cheerleadra" is an awful superhero concept, because they'd waste time on useless cheering than actually solving the situation.
• All Therapists Are Muggles: One noted issue that is brought up by Grace when discussing the possibility of any of the cast getting therapy is whether or not the therapist is in the know regarding magic and therefore wouldn't think the cast member that sees them are insane.
• Alliterative List: The narration lists of "invisible, intangible, and inaudible" here. They all start with "in".
• Alpha Bitch:
  • Subverted. Diane is set up to be this, but she's revealed to actually care for her friends (and be concerned for random crying strangers), as seen here, and is thus really a Lovable Alpha Bitch. Her friend Lucy, on the other hand, fits the bullying part of the archetype but isn't the leader of the group.
  • Susan seemed to be an example of this at first, being portrayed as a snobby mean rich girl... but the moment she was given more screen time, she quickly got one hell of a character development. She was also revealed to have a traumatic backstory, so it would be more appropriate to call her a Broken Bird, or, more recently, a Defrosting Ice Queen.
• Alternate Species Counterpart: Done in NP: Revenge of the Jokes 1, where the normally human Amanda is a catgirl for the second panel.
• Alternate Universe: Several. The one where Ellen and Kaoli "met" got Uryuoms and seyunolu as an accepted part of Human life for ''at least'' two centuries or so.
• Ambiguous Gender: Tedd (even without his regular Gender Bender shenanigans) and Noah. Word of God even notes that a female posing model is used for both. It's even the first trope used for a joke in the comic.
• Amicable Exes:
  • Nanase and Elliot are this after the former broke it off for Sarah's sake. Partially subverted for her that she later dates his Opposite-Sex Clone Ellen.
  • More straight is Sarah and Elliot, who came to their own conclusions why a relationship wouldn't work. The former because she felt it was too slow and passive, and the later realizing that he loved her as a sister. Regardless, they're still very close, even teasing one another that they should have reacted more viciously.
• Amusing Injuries: The end result of a Demonic Duck jumping out of a moving car. They were NOT amusing enough to distract Susan. (Justified as she was the one driving the car, and the author has a strong dislike of drivers in fiction who let themselves get distracted way too easily.)
• Anachronism Stew: Played With. The comic is set in modern day but due to the fact that it has taken several years to go over a few months the technology progresses rapidly so Susan having a DVD/VHS player is impressive near the beginning but her having a modern cell phone is common place later on.
• Anchovies Are Abhorrent: Susan trolls Nanase by pretending to order a pizza with "as many anchovies as you can manage".
• ...And That Would Be Wrong: Sensei Greg, on the possibility that his training could give "atomic breath or something" to a sociopath: "While awesome, that would be totally irresponsible."
• An Aesop: This comic and this one pretty much sum up the aesop for the Death Sentence arc. Basically, people should be looking for a better solution, especially when the current situation is crap. However, people need to temper that with the reality that sometimes, there isn't a better solution, only bad options and the best thing to do there is pick the least bad one.
• Anger Born of Worry: The first panel of this strip has Mr. Verres give a lecture to everyone following their encounter with Damien that's muddled between anger and relief that no one can tell whether they're being chastised or praised.
• Anti-Climax:
  • While looking for Grace, every time Hedge tries to do something dramatic, it gets ruined by something interrupting the drama. For example, being interrupted by a concessions stand worker with popcorn he had ordered. It's literally a Running Gag with him.
  • The extremely long school uniform subplot ends very suddenly when the principal ends the policy following complaints from parents about the extra laundry.
  • Elliot and Sarah's break up was surprisingly amicable, and it went down very smoothly, much to the surprise of the pair and many readers. This was quickly lampshaded about how none of their friends are going to believe that it went so smoothly.
• Anti-School Uniforms Plot: Moperville North institutes a uniform policy after the principal catches Susan and Tedd in the midst of a sissy slap fight that, he's told, began when Tedd poked fun at a shirt Susan was wearing. Susan is fundamentally opposed to this new policy, because it requires the girls to wear skirts, which she hates. Susan rebels by wearing the boys' uniform, and Tedd even joins her with the girls' uniform. The policy is eventually revoked, but not due to anything Susan did; the principal got complaints from parents about the additional laundry the policy generated.
• Anti-Villain:
  • Grace's brothers, or at least, at first. Hedge hated working for Damien, and did everything in his power to not bring back Grace, or even a woman in general, knowing full well what Damien's intentions were. Guineas too, but he had a lot less room for undermining Damien. Vlad was the only one who was actually loyal, and even he had mixed feelings at best upon learning Damien was dead.
  • Abraham didn't want to kill Ellen, but his oath was too broad, and he felt that he had no choice. He was all too happy to accept the loophole Nanase presented.
• Arbitrary Skepticism:
  • The cast has dealt with magic, not-aliens, alternate dimensions, immortals, shapeshifting Biological Mash Ups, and lots and lots of Gender Bending, but Tedd's claims of an interdimensional space whale that eats magic only gets him an odd look from his father. Possibly justified immediately afterwards — Tedd tells Elliot that his father can't be expected to know everything, and Tedd's the only character known to even be able to sense the space whales.
  • In the NP arc "Zombie Plans", Susan derides the idea of a Zombie Apocalypse as being scientifically impossible. Grace quickly points out the flaw in that logic. It ends with them asking Edward if it's possible, and he confirms that true undead reanimation is impossible, and the government is prepared for situations that could cause people to act like zombies while not being truly undead, like mutant mind control fungus.
  • Justin assumes rumors of someone selling magic stuff is just a scam. When this comes up in conversation he realizes that he probably should have looked into that more.
• Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: A non-sexual example, as Kevin, the sentient magic wand, is overlooked by a Magpie construct that targets "valuable magical artifacts" to his consternation.
  Kevin: I am deeply offended.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • The Anime Style Martial Arts dojo is located in the same neighborhood as a strip club, cigarette store, adult bookshop, abortion clinic, and an ice cream shop.
  • In the commentary section of one comic, referring to an Obviously Evil Eldritch Abomination: "It probably ate a puppy for breakfast right before it burned down an orphanage and talked loudly on a cell phone at a restaurant."
  • In one strip where Agent Wolf is accusing Lavender (Mr. Verres' Uryuom secretary) of being an alien (again), he says that she has a tail, bug-eyes, no nose or ears, and a damn near impossible figure.
  • "I know this is a stressful time for you. You just realized you're gay, you're worried your family will find out, you were sneezed on..." Though admittedly, since she was the size of a doll when she was sneezed on, whether that's really that trivial is up for grabs.
  • "Students fighting, transgender mayhem, wrecked hallways, hairpiece snatchings."
• Artifact Title: Played with after so many people asked about the title's meaning. It was intended to be nonsense ("El Goonish" + the author's last name), but to appease the questioners, he introduced a "hired goon." In a non-continuity Fourth-Wall Mail Slot filler. For one panel (do you know what is it worth to hire a really huge goon?). There was also one easily missed mention of goons before this. There's also repeated references to "Super Smash Goons Melee".
• Artistic License: In the comic, change blindness tends to be treated as something that all characters experience to the same (frankly sometimes extreme) degree. In reality, while change blindness is very real, different people experience it quite differently.
• Artistic License – Biology: Played for Laughs in an NP comic, with a football player who claims his motivation is "disproving evolution" — every point he scores without evolving is apparently further proof against evolution. The reporter he's talking to points out how this doesn't follow because not everything evolves via leveling up. In fact, the very next comic shows that football players evolve by trade — into cheerleaders.
  The Rant: This is as least as valid as any "but why are there still monkeys" argument.
• Artistic License – Economics: Invoked.
  Magus: I can totally hook you up with straw turned to gold.
  Sirleck: I'm already worth millions, and you'd just be devaluing gold in general if you made more.
• Art Evolution: Contrast this and this. Same characters, same artist, 8 years.
  • He's also shifted from grayscale to full-color and back multiple times.
  • The first comic and tenth anniversary comic are also an excellent example of how the art has changed. Same two characters, nearly identical dialogue with a slight difference in the plot, vastly improved art style.
  • Six more years later in 2018 (to further contrast with the above examples), his style is still evolving, albeit in more subtle but clearly visible ways.
• Art Imitates Art: The second panel of this page contains an extra imitating Edvard Munch's The Scream.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: In "Sister III - Catspaws", the messenger of Magic asks why Pandora shapeshifts into a child. He's instantly given an answer when she throws a massive temper tantrum.
• Asshole Victim: Played for Laughs when a literal puppy-kicking orphanage-burning robber ends up as the first victim of an invading army of aberrations, showing that they've been eating humans while trying to avoid giving the story too dark a tone. Ironically, he never gets a chance to try his planned crimes as a result.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: In this comic, Andrea reveals that human royal bloodlines in her world have the strongest inherited magical ability, also making it a Magocracy.
• As You Know: One of the immortals following Elliot recaps the plot points related to them. When her companion calls her on it, she points out that it helps compensate for their Easy Amnesia.
• Aura Vision: What makes bloodgrem a useful summon instead of merely obnoxious. Also, this is Luke's power from his magic mark. He can see something to do with magic, possibly magic potential.
• Author Appeal:
  • The copious amount of transformation. In-story, Tedd represents this aspect of him. Or rather an exaggerated version, Tedd is more pervy than Dan.
  Dan: I suppose it's POSSIBLE Sarah won't get transformed at any point while assisting Tedd. Possible, but not bloody likely.
  • Also, judging from this rant, Susan (and Diane's) "concern for hygiene" is another example.
  • The fact Dan thinks goth girls are hot is pretty obvious. Most blatantly with Elliot (who's a bit of an idealized self-insert) getting a goth girl disguise form and liking it because it appeals to his obvious attraction to goth girls.
  • Large-busted girls, usually not to excess within the main comic, but without much limit in Patreon images. Lampshaded on this page, and then the lampshade is lampshaded in Dan's commentary.
• Author Avatar: Dan's squirrel avatar, though only out of continuity. Tedd and Elliot each serve this purpose less explicitly at times. Dan is also a squirrel-boy character in the comic strips Sarah draws in her spare time.
• Author Catchphrase: Dan never "plans" anything, he "plots". As in, "I was plotting to have new comics up Monday through Friday, but..."
• Author Filibuster:
  • The Legends of Celida arc so far seems to exist for the sole purpose of allowing Dan to rant about the true nature of Sheik from Ocarina of Time and whether Zelda is simply casting an illusion or out and out transforms into a male.
  • The Duel of the Discs arc is pretty much Dan using Justin, Grace, and Tensaided to give his opinions on Magic: The Gathering and the Star Wars prequels. And the arc before that, By the Numbers, was basically Dan's opinion on movie rating sites like Rotten Tomatoes, albeit with a bone tossed towards possible future character development for both Elliot and Susan at the very end.
• Author Guest Spot: Dan has appeared as himself as he appears in real life as the "super smart" guy in panel six of this strip, but as he only revealed that it was him in the commentary and calls it a cameo, it is more like a Creator Cameo.
• Awesome McCoolname: Pandora Chaos Raven. She chose it herself, and claims that it matches her personality. Raven is actually her married name. She keeps it even though her human husband died centuries ago.
• A Wizard Did It: The author's (word-for-word) explanation for any discrepancies in scenery or building layout, in this page's commentary. Also invoked in the title for this comic.
• Badass Boast: "No one will care if I kill you."
• Badass Family:
  • The Verres family. Edward is a powerful wizard. Cousin Nanase is a powerful magic user. Resident and practically-an-in-law Grace is a powerful Seyunolu. Tedd is a Seer, a rare type of Wizard with Evil Counterpart Lord Tedd showing the potential power he could achieve.
  • And the Raven family as well, with Adrian being one of the series' biggest badasses, and his adopted son/lodger Noah being able to defeat a dragon singlehandedly and is the child left behind from the experiments that created Damien and Grace. Meanwhile, Adrian's mother, Pandora, is one of the most powerful Immortals on the planet, although that power and mental instability go hand in hand. At least, up until her forced reset, but she did purge the world of the majority of aberration as her last act pre-reset.
• Badass Longcoat: Hedge, Abraham, and, of all people, Tedd's dad.
• Badass Teacher: Endangering students of Mr. Raven is the sort of things insurance companies make a specific exclusion for. Even for wizards.
• Bad "Bad Acting": The "Pizza" sidestory uses Animated Actors, and some of the characters are better actors than others.
  • Kitty is an extra Large Ham. She doesn't so much speak her lines as shout them, and while her character shows an initial reluctance to eat pizza, her appetite for scenery more than makes up for it.
  • invoked Ashley gives the script far more respect than it deserves. She also blatantly tries too hard. In particular, any gestures she makes are exaggerated.
  • George completely phones it in. He makes absolutely no effort to sell his performance and merely reads off the script.
• The Bad Guy Wins. Zigzagged with Voltaire in Sister III. While he fails to get Magic to change its rules and leave humanity defenceless, he does succeed in getting Immortals to agree to change their laws to be less restrictive because the incident he orchestrated to be the basis for it turned out far better than he could dream off when all Immortals learned they could have generations of descendants among humanity that they did not previously know about.
• Bad Liar:
  • Elliot. It proves to be a massive liability when he's being questioned by Damien and Hedge, but later is one of the reasons Mr. Verres leaves him to supervise Grace's birthday party.
  • Catalina just can't seem to hold back that she's dating Rhoda.
  • Same with Ashley, who is a self-admittedly horrible liar as demonstrated here.
• "Balls" Gag: When Grace is challenged to a volleyball spiking contest, her response is "Let's smash balls!". She's confused why the room suddenly got quiet after.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • In the Fate of Magic arc, it looks like it will be Tedd arguing for revealing magic and Arthur arguing for keeping it secret. But Tedd manages to get Arthur on board simply by figuring out that there are over a thousand seers who will be aware of the magic change. Arthur realizes his goal is simply impossible in the modern world, but magic itself is not so easily convinced.
  • In the rant for the end of Part 6 of the "Balance" arc, a comic that had Mr. Verres mentioning to someone on his phone he needed to tell Tedd and Grace something the next day, and that a moving van was involved, Dan chose to take the opportunity to address "the most obvious question a person might have": Why Mr. Verres was taking his phone call in the basement, and not upstairs.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Shirtless males are drawn without nipples in greyscale comics. Word of God is that this is because he can't make them look right without color. Color comics and sketchbook entries have nipples though. And now that's true for shirtless females in greyscale comics too, although given that Pandora was forming her body out of a cloud, there probably isn't anything there anyway.
• Bar Brawl: It is mentioned that Blaike was involved in tavern fights.
• Battle Couple: Ellen and Nanase are dating and once fought alongside each other against the Arc Villain of the "Family Tree" storyline.
  Nanase: ...Are you doing okay?
  Ellen: Flying...is awesome!
  Nanase: Focus, honey.
• Bears Are Bad News: Blaike Raven and Pandora once had to flee from a bear creature. A bear creature that was giant, magic, and half lion.
• Beat Panel: Frequently, and once turned into gag in its own right.
  • Used to great effect when Nanase encounters one of the guys she dated before she came out.
  Gary: I don't mean to be rude, it's just I used to think you didn't want to go on a date with me because I was too geeky.
  [beat]
  Nanase: Yes. It was entirely because I am a lesbian.
  • Again in the sketchbook, which features 8 beat panels in a row before it's revealed that Elliot's arms are stuck in that position.
• Beat the Curse Out of Him: When Liam the griffin is under a mind control spell, being knocked briefly unconscious is enough to restore him to his senses.
• Beautiful All Along: Guineas is a rare male example. He believed his human form was hideous, but when he was finally convinced to transform at the end of Painted Black, it turns out that he's a buff attractive man. Ellen and a female officer have to stop and look at him slack-jawed.
• Berserk Button: Quite a surprising number of times, for a relatively non-violent series.
  • In the earlier arcs, Tedd is extremely sensitive over him looking feminine, to the point of using the TF Gun on Elliot in a Moment of Weakness. ^note Later revealed to be Magus's influencing Tedd's emotions at a key point, as part of Pandora's scheme to get Magus a new body in as complicated and uncertain a way as possible.
  • Dan himself admitted in a commentary that while was perfectly fine with people believing in conspiracy theories, you will get on his bad side if you try to convince him the moon landing was faked.
  Dan: People worked their asses off, made sacrifices, and some even died in their effort to reach the moon. If someone is going to proclaim we never made it there, they better damn well have really solid evidence or kindly shut the hell up.
  • In a Q&A session, Dan reveals that he absolutely despises... doors on public bathrooms.
  Dan: I've seen people exit bathroom stalls and walk right past the sinks! There should always be a way to get out without touching that damn dirty handle!
  • And Mr. Tensaided, being an uber-nerd, proves a bit of intolerance for complete non-nerdy types, at least as far as the hiring process goes.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Grace is normally a nice girl, but she can shapeshift into any number of extremely lethal forms when provoked. And when she's reluctant or unable to enter close combat, she just uses telekinesis instead. Beware, indeed.
  • Tedd looks like Lord Tedd when he discovers Damien's mistreatment of Grace, and especially when he learns it wasn't a one-off event. As "One Way Road" shows, he wants to be able to help his absurdly powerful friends, and is not satisfied with roles of a reclusive ballast or Mission Control. And as a Mad Scientist, he's able to climb the Super Weight ladder if he really wants... and does, as The Stinger to the same arc shows.
  • Pretty much most of the regular cast. They're all pretty much very nice people, but each of them, when pressed, can unleash the beast. Elliot, Ellen, and Nanase are among the most powerful and protective of others.
• Big Damn Kiss:
  • The kiss between Nanase and Ellen at the end of the Grace's Birthday Party arc was given an extra-large panel, and a glowing, star-filled background. There were even four◊ different◊ wallpapers◊ made◊ using that panel.
  • Also during the Grace's Birthday Party arc, Tedd and Grace, while not their first kiss, have a significant kiss when Tedd discovers that Grace's Gender Bender party theme was a gift for Tedd all along. While Grace feels terrible that she didn't realize Tedd might be uncomfortable being romantic with guy!Grace due to homophobic bullying, Tedd finally goes for it out of love for Grace, complete with glowing background. (Which gets Lampshaded one comic later when Grace asks, "How long have you been able to glow?")
  • The kiss between Elliot and Ashley in the "So a Date at the Mall" arc was emphasized with a large panel, and an odd angle, and served as a turning point in the arc, as they transitioned from two characters on a date to an actual couple.
• Big Eater:
  • Nanase eats a lot very quickly, which is sometimes quite subtle and other times Lampshaded to hell. At one point, Susan point-blank asked how she manages to avoid being fat. She (well, at the time, he) casts spells "from calories", in addition to being a martial artist. It's eventually established that her trim belly is probably due to what she doesn't use being stored on the mezzanine.
  • Later, at a roadside pancake place the girls stop at on their road trip, Grace became one of only four people to eat the entire Pancake Mt. Doom Meal. This consisted of a dozen flapjacks, a variety of fruit fillings, sides of bacon, sausage, hashbrowns, three kinds of syrup, and your choice of eggs. The best part is that "Andy Debtman, Eater of Food" from Man Engulfs Food arrives to take on the challenge, and stands in front of the Wall of Fame filming his introduction when Grace's photo is added.
• Big "NO!": Played for Laughs several times:
  • Elliot lets out a big no after he learns that Nanase is Tedd's cousin. Then he realises he doesn't actually care.
  • Mr. Verres accidentally blurts out NOOOO! when it dawns on him that he agreed to pay for pizza for eight teenagers. While in the middle of a meeting.
  • This strip when Justin somehow knows that Nanase's hair was shaved.
  • Another one from Justin, this time deliberately referencing Revenge of the Sith, when he finds out Tedd doesn't own the laser disc edition of Star Wars.
• Big "WHAT?!": Everyone's reaction to Sarah being okay with going along with the theme of Grace's gender-swap birthday party is to shout "what" very loudly.
• Big Word Shout: Susan's reaction to learning that she can't play as a princess in a Mario game because they had trouble programming skirt physics. "SKIRRRRT!"
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • If you're willing to go here to translate Uryuomoco.^note actually a cipher upon English, and has been spelled "Uryuomocco" in-comic, the name decodes to "Alienese" or "Alienesse" A couple real examples with French and Japanese, though.
    • "Verres" in Uryuomoco is "Bolloc" (he is a cover-up specialist). It's also the French word for "Glasses" (though technically it only refers to the lenses).
    • Pretty much needed for this comic to make much sense beyond "ominous dream involving the big bad."^note Although, ironically, it has parts which the translator cannot translate entirely correctly, and at least one may be an error - although it should be noted that the text is canon while the translator is not, and the other may be an undocumented cluster rule. It translates as follows: "It is time for the end of man. This master of fire shall inherit the Earth. My very presence eats away at your flesh..."
    • In a later comic, the Uryuomoco in the comic was shown translated. In the commentary, Dan stated that it was because he felt it was irresponsible to alienate readers who didn't know how to translate it.
  • Principal Verrückt's last name is German for "crazy".
• Birthday Episode: A whole arc took place during Grace's birthday, with Character Development for most of the main cast.
• Bishie Sparkle: Elliot's Mild Mannered form sees Justin with sparkles surrounding him.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Uryuom reproduction is very complicated. When two of them get together, they can produce enough material to form an egg. The egg at that point is essentially functionless, but touching any of the receptors around the egg causes it to accept that DNA for the child, which doesn't need to be from the parents or even from Uryuoms. That does pretty much make them a genetic engineer's dream.
• Bizarre Gambling Winnings: Parodied, when the prize in question is use of the original, unedited version of Star Wars on laserdisc.
• Black Eyes of Crazy: Lord Tedd's first appearance shows him having dark eyes. Tedd also gets them when he uses his version of the former's Power Fist.
• Black Eyes of Evil:
  • Elliot and Sarah display these here to indicate extreme anger at Tedd.
  • Nanase, Ellen, and Grace aren't amused by Nanase's ex-almost-boyfriend interrupting their double date. Could you tell?
• Bland-Name Product: A "Swedekea" store. "Salty Crackers Comics" counts too; there's a regional comics chain around Chicago called "Graham Crackers". There's also the American Cake movie, a reference to the movie American Pie, but with the plot of The Brady Bunch Movie. One strip gives us the manga Ranma ¼, Dragon Ball W, Cowboy Rocksteady, Two Piece, and No Punch Man.
• Blasphemous Praise: Tedd once called Joss Whedon before quickly admitting it is blasphemy.
  Grace: Who's Joss Whedon?
  Tedd: God.
  Grace: Really?
  Tedd: No. That was blasphemy.
• Blatant Burglar:
  • The female French immortal is shown wearing this sort of outfit when proposing an alternative to being invisible and intangible at Elliot's house. She never said it was a good idea.
  • One sketchbook entry showed Ashley as a book thief, with a domino mask, an all-black outfit, and a Thief Bag with books falling out. This was inspired by a strip where she claimed to know all the security blind spots in the book store.
• Blatant Lies: This strip, where Grace takes six Beat Panels to unconvincingly deny that she's stalling so that Ellen and Sarah can work out their feelings.
• Blessed with Suck: Sure, Elliot will get pretty sweet magic powers, but the Power Incontinence (especially embarrassing for Elliot) means that for a while, life will be just a little crap for him. It's not helped by people who've read too much Ranma ½ dumping buckets of water on him.
• Blinding Camera Flash: As the title puts it, "Dude, Like, Sarah Just TOTALLY Flashed Female Justin".
• Blunt "Yes": When Tedd discovers that All Men Are Perverts is less "complete nonsense" than "an exaggeration of the truth", he says that sucks, and Grace can only say :yep".
  Grace: I just said I know a bunch of guys who treat me like that. Sarah's dealt with guys like that, too. And Ellen. And... well, I figure every girl has to deal with stuff like that.
  Tedd: But... that's not okay! That sucks!
  Grace: Yep.
• Body Horror: When Pandora attacks Magus for refusing to push Edward into killing Abraham, she shifts half her body into a horrifying amalgamation of claws and mouths.
• Book Ends: Sister 3 begins with the narration "Several centuries ago, there lived an Immortal who would come to be known by many names..." before showing the origins of Pandora, including her Start of Darkness. The very last panel of the arc is the newly reborn Pandora saying a first-person variation of the same line as she begins to remember her past life.
• Both Sides Have a Point:
  • The ongoing debate regarding whether magic should be made more widely available to everyone (as opposed to keeping magic a secret, which has become a moot point in light of the very public displays of the supernatural over the course the comic and the not-changes by the Will of Magic:
    • Pros: Some of the cast (most vocally Tedd) feel that magic has too much potential to do good to rightfully keep it out of the public's hands, especially when they already have access to magic and technology that would be greatly appreciated by some (like transgender people looking for a safer way to transition).
    • Cons: Due to the way magic works in this setting, making it more available would also heighten the risk of the worst people getting their hands on some particularly horrific spells (e.g. mind control). Not-Tengu is a particularly effective example of what can happen when the average jerk gets their hands on magic. Even the Pro-Magic side concedes that it's too dangerous to spread magic currently due to this, so one of Tedd's goals is to find a way to increase everyone's magical resistance. Those against spreading magic are concerned that this wouldn't really be enough to justify the risk, with Edward Verres himself comparing it to giving everyone a bomb-proof suit to protect themselves from rocket launchers - no one knows how much protection that would actually give under those circumstances.
    • One complicating factor that most of the cast (except for Pandora) don't seem to have brought up is the development of technology compared to magic, particularly weapons: she raises the reasonable point while wizards with fireballs against a group of medieval peasants would be way too one-sided, the same can't be said when against people armed with guns, explosives and intercontinental ballistic missiles. "Magic is exotic and scary, but any random fool with a gun can still best a wizard!" In her eyes, making magic widely available would allow people to develop better defenses against both magical and mundane threats.
  • Myst's and Potestas' debate regarding testing the magic-taking artifact on a morally bad person. Myst rightfully points out that they are assuming the artifact is still in working order when A) it hasn't been used since before Myst was born, and B) they are in a different universe with different rules of magic that may render the artifact inert. Potestas meanwhile points out that Myst is assuming the person he found is evil based on various things that are all circumstantial and he has no definitive proof the guy is in fact evil. Because both sides have valid points, their leader Saou makes a compromise. They will look up the person Myst found and get his measure based on how he treats his underlings. If it can be shown he mistreats his subordinates, Saou will approve testing the artifact on him comfortable in the knowledge that the man is at least an Asshole Victim.
• Brain Bleach: Invoked here when Tedd asks if Grace is able to erase the memory of his father saying he is impotent.
  Tedd: Grace, can your antennae function as Brain Bleach?
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Here, Elliot calls a customer doomed. Susan says he was also an ass. Elliot amends his statement to say he is a doomed ass.
  Elliot: He's doomed.
  Susan: He's an ass.
  Elliot: He's a doomed ass.
• Break the Cutie:
  • Many times, especially Grace, who went through an abusive childhood under Damien.
  • Believe it or not, resident Deadpan Snarker Susan as well. She was apparently a literal Wide-Eyed Idealist before she had to kill a literal monster herself.
• Breast Expansion:
  • Using the "FV5" setting on the TF Gun on a woman makes them taller and curvier. The effect doesn't stack, but using it on someone who's quite busty already can get pretty ridiculous results.
  • Subverted in an old sketchbook comic, where Ellen attempts to invoke her "Wonder Twin Powers"... and fails to increase her bust.
  • Grace is a Voluntary Shapeshifter, and altering her chest size (or anything else) is no big deal to her. She discusses with Sensei Greg whether it's a good idea to go flat if she ever gets in a fight, but he's too uncomfortable to answer the question. Later on, she admits that she changes her breast size to mess with boys at the comic shop.
  • It's later used in a Magic: The Gathering parody, with the "unbalanced" enchantment that stops a fairy from being able to fly.
  • This was one of the things Rhoda tried while experimenting with her Sizeshifter powers. She also briefly considers giving Kitty gigantic boobs to stop her from chasing her and Catalina, but quickly decides that's a terrible idea.
• Brick Joke:
  • Susan once claimed that her hair spontaneously changed colour to Nanase. Nanase is sceptical but Susan stands by her claim that she herself admits is ridiculous. Six years later, Nanase hears from a government agent that officially, hair ''does'' spontaneously change colours.
    The Rant: Furthest. Callback joke. EVER.
  • Ellen once imagined Adrian Raven as a pimp. This is recalled later.
  • Catalina once used a toy hammer to beat up some perverts. George can later be seen wielding a similar hammer when Justin confronts a fire person.
  • In one of the earliest strips, Elliot and Tedd do a fundraiser to get Sarah to wear a bikini. It gets an interim payoff over three years later in a sketchbook entry when Minion shouts to revive the fund when Sarah refuses to wear a bikini here. The fund was finally funded in real life.
  • When Grace finds out that people associate nudity with sex, Tedd is surprised that she didn't know, since she had told him that her not wearing anything under her trench coat wasn't sexual when they first met. It turns out that she had misunderstood something that Hedge had said about "flashers". Then she remembers that Sarah had seen her naked...
  • Vampiric Hat Double Brick with yet another Take That! on top.
  • Another one is from here. Carol, the news journalist, is told by her boss to find a plausible story, like Bigfoot or giant hogs. I guess she'll cover the current arc too.
  • Turns out Raven totally does get Grace apology ice cream.
  • January 2007: "You're suggesting that girls just casually cuddle and fall asleep together? Could you imagine Sarah doing that with Grace?" Three and a half years later, we don't need to imagine.
  • When Jerry the immortal appears in "Hammerchlorians" he says most immortals give themselves names from mythology, leading to "legendary hissy fits" when two immortals named "Zeus" meet. In "Sister III, part 22: Apocalypse" Jerry's reset form insists on being called Zeus.
  • One of Tedd's comments to the Will of Magic is about how spellbooks are overly complicated/hard to understand. After Ellen gets home, she finds hers has shrunk.
• Broken Bird: Susan, but slowly getting better once she got much angst out of her system in one big Freak Out.
• Broken Masquerade: Breaks on a semi-regular basis to individuals. Later on, it showed more cracks during the Sister 2 storyline and the cracks grew wider during and after the New and Old Flames storyline. The tipping point was Pandora using the mechanics of her forced reset to force every Immortal onto the physical plane and cast a spell that wiped out over 99% of the global Aberration population, and the spell was visible for miles around and had multiple points of origin. The Will of Magic outright states that even without the previous incidents, that one event would have completely shattered the Masquerade on its own.
• Brought Down to Badass: Nanase, even without her crazy powerful magic, is still a very experienced martial artist who can bench press 160 pounds ^note which is vastly above average for a 17-18 year old girl.
• Brought Down to Normal: Anyone who suffers a magic burnout, caused by overusing magic in a short period of time, loses all access to magic for a time. It can range from a day to a few months depending on the severity of the burnout. Nanase burns herself out well beyond her limits to save Ellen from Abraham, and ends up burnt out for several in-universe months (as well as several real-life years). Interestingly, one of the downsides of Nanase's Guardian form is that it will always cause a magical burnout when it ends, regardless of how much magic she used beforehand.
• Bully Hunter:
  • Elliot Dunkel has fought bullies in the past to protect their victims, including both Justin and Tedd. He lapses back from time to time when a friend of his is bullied nearby, though circumstances always manage to deal with the problem before Elliot can get started.
  • Gerald as well, sort of. He wears gothy outfits and makeup specifically to provoke bullies into picking fights with him. However, Nanase eventually realises that he himself is a jerk and does this to pick fights and be able to call himself in the right.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Resident Mad Scientist Tedd is quite brilliant... it's just difficult to recognize when his field of expertise is so deeply tied in with his many quirks. Arthur however considers him worthy of a government funded lab as he is the best candidate to be in charge of researching how to make magic safe for the general public.
  Susan: Tedd[...]has become very responsible with his transformation technology.
  Tedd: Hey guys!
  Susan: Tedd, you're a catgirl.
  Tedd: I am? Oh! Right. Forgot about that.
  Susan: Adequately responsible.
• Burn the Orphanage: The "Comically evil guy" is introduced plotting to burn an orphanage as a distraction for the rest of his evil plan. However, he's eaten by a vampire before he can actually do it.
• The Bus Came Back: Vladia, whose last previous canon appearance had been in 2005,^note And even her last previous appearance in a sketchbook was in 2014 shows up again in 2023 as part of a group looking for Magus.
• California University: The main cast (and several high school supporting cast members) plan to attend the local Moperville University, with Raven and Tensaided becoming part of the faculty.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": Jeremy, despite being a weird cat-hedghog hybrid, is just referred to as a kitty.
• Call-Back:
  • Nothing can penetrate the coat of solitude.
  • Nanase wasn't always discreet with her magic, constantly floating around prior to her burnout. A fact Diane will bring up when she reveals she knows Nanase had magic, saying half the school has seen her float.
  • Elliot simplifies the sudden existence of Ellen with four simple words, "She's family. Help her." Ellen will use those same four words to convince Susan to meet Diane.
  • Susan's GPA is lower than you'd expect.
• Calling Your Attacks: What else would you expect from "Anime Style Martial Arts"? Elliot and Ellen do this on several occasions — in Gratuitous Japanese, no less. Lampshaded when Elliot wanted a do-over after he forgot. And mocked once.
• The Cameo: Matt and Rat were two characters from one of Dan's previous comics in junior high, who made a handful of appearances in the beginning of the story. They're the only characters who are aware that they're in a comic strip, though everyone else just treats them like they're nuts, and Word of God says that they were eventually treated for their shared psychosis and are now productive members of society.
• Camp Straight: Ambiguous Gender Noah, (who is Friends with Benefits with Melissa, and who once describes himself as being so pretty that it makes straight men "see rainbows." Dan later admitted that Noah is one of two male characters that he uses female posing models for (Tedd being the other).
• Can Not Tell A Lie: Another world is mentioned where Ancients (known as Immortals in the main world) are incapable of lying without bringing the wrath of their entire race upon themself. Immortals in the main world are under no such restriction, meaning that Tara the griffin (who is from this other world) is easily manipulated by an unscrupulous immortal in the main world because she falsely believes that he cannot be lying to her.
• Canon Discontinuity: Anything to to with Matt and Rat, Those Two Guys in early strips who had No Fourth Wall and were Unknown Rivals to Elliot in a battle only they acknowledged for control of the comic.
• Can't Get in Trouble for Nuthin': Ellen tried being an Evil Twin when she believed she only had a few weeks to live, but consistently failed to get Elliot in trouble for anything.
• Canted Camera: Abe's sleep bomb causes this for the next page, reflecting how the spell dazed him.
• Captain Superhero: Spoofed when Catalina tried to think of a better superhero name than "Cheerleadra."
  Catalina: They should've called her "captain" something! Captain Tiny Skirt!
  *disapproving look from Susan*
  Catalina: ...What? I don't have a lot to go on.
• Cardiovascular Love: In this comic, hearts show around Tedd when he exclaims he loves Grace.
• Cartoon Bomb: The spider vampire uses a lot of cartoonish bombs against Andrea the griffin.
• Casanova Wannabe: T.C., aka "The Playah" is self-proclaimed to be a player, but he is never actually seen with a girl.
• Cast Full of Gay: In 2019, a Q/A confirms that the entire main cast is somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, and Dan himself considers this to be the norm for humans. Just to break it down; Justin, Nanase, Catalina, and Lucy are all homosexual (or have only been shown having serious romantic interest in the same gender), Tedd and Elliot are gender-fluid and are therefore open to both genders romantically (although Tedd less so due to childhood trauma over being teased for appearing gay), Grace appears to be pansexual (although she describes it as "Tedd-sexual", she is attracted to Tedd regardless of his/her form or gender), Ellen, Rhoda, Ashley, and Diane are bisexual, and Susan is asexual (although not aromantic). One In-Universe explanation is that high magic power provides subconscious gender neutral attraction, making people who are various degrees of bi more likely to notice an interest in the same sex.
• Cast of Snowflakes: Dan's had to come up with lots of new designs for extras in later arcs.
• Cat/Dog Dichotomy: Given a Stereotype Flip with Rhoda and Catalina. The two are dating and have a dog and cat motif respectively, but Rhoda is a Shrinking Violet while Catalina is a Genki Girl.
• Cat Girl:
  • In various ways, ranging from the appropriately-named Catalina who almost looks like an outright cat girl, to Ellen's online persona, to Grace's werecat form and the variants thereof to normal form of Nioi and Kaoli (they're skunks, but this looks close enough). Not to mention Elliot's catboy form....
  • At some point in the backstory, Sarah was stuck as a catgirl for a day thanks to Tedd being careless with the TF gun.
  • Tedd also frequently turns themselves into a catgirl, of course.
  • And now, Sarah again, this time on-panel.
• Cat Scare: Parodied and Justified at once — Jeremy defending his territory is not a critter to be trifled with. Well, unless you can project your spirit energy into a force field.
• Catching Some Z's:
  • Sarah finds Tedd asleep on the couch making a "ZZZZZZ..." sound, with Grace asleep as well. Since Grace is in a half-cat form at the time, she's purring instead of snoring.
  • Jeremy emits 3 Zs when sleeping.
• Catchphrase:
  • Tedd had "Sexy-awesome!" as one in the early arcs, although he dropped it coinciding with his Character Development.
  • "Za?(!)" is frequent Verbal Tic from Elliot and Ellen, in place of "Huh?".
  • Catalina yells "JACKASSES!" enough for it to be one.
• Cerebus Retcon: Before this series developed Cerebus Syndrome, many hyper-zany elements were present in the story, and now that the series has become more serious, Dan is having fun going back and deconstructing lots of the ridiculousness of the earlier strips. The self-deprecatingly titled "Hammerchlorians" arc is devoted to one particular instance of this.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: The comic started out wacky, took a turn for the dark in Painted Black, went back to wacky hijinks with Grace's party, turned dark again in Sister 2, turned wacky again with a (mis)adventure in a furniture store, and seems to have finally settled on a consistent tone of being mature, but the cast gets to have some fun along the way from New and Old Flames onwards.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The Painted Black arc was the turning point, dropping most of the goofy tone in exchange for a very serious story. The comic has pulled back on the grimdark significantly since then; the story has never reached the heights of seriousness of Painted Black, even the antagonists have delved into absurdity and humor and generally have sympathetic aspects, unlike Damien. The obvious authorial intent is more mature storylines in substance rather than just being edgy.
• Chafing Against the Dress Code: Susan rebels against the newly mandated school uniforms (which she sees as too gendered since the women have to wear skirts) by wearing the boys' uniform. Tedd later stands in solidarity with her by wearing the vest from the girls' uniform, protesting that the girls having to wear vests when the boys don't is more ridiculous than just the skirt vs pants.
• Chain Pain: In his original appearances, Hedge wielded a chain as a weapon — specifically, the very chain that had once bound him in captivity in the laboratory that created him. Very symbolic. Very quickly forgotten, too. It only really appeared in one scene, though Grace references it again later.
• Character Development: One of the strong sides of EGS. It's rather chaotic and detail-saving, but profound.
• Characterisation Marches On: Goes hand in hand with Art Evolution and Cerebus Syndrome as the author grows from an adolescent to an adult.
  • Tedd was an unashamed pervert with little to no restraints, but he quickly develops restraint.
  • Elliot was a pervert on par with Tedd, which is very inconsistent with his later character failing at perversion.
  • Sarah was a Straw Feminist but this was quickly dropped as the story actually starts.
  • Susan is an especially notable example, as she went from a Straw Feminist who frequently harangues and insults other characters for no good reason, to being a brusque and antisocial but fairly polite girl who has genuine complaints about the sexism she sees around her. Even her own author is shocked at how different her behavior used to be.
  Dan: Seriously, I tend to skip my own huge blocks of text in these old comics on account of me already knowing the key points and being plenty busy, and after I wrote about Susan apologizing to Greg, someone asked "what about apologizing to Nanase for calling her that thing?" My genuine response was "Susan called Nanase WHAT?!"
• Character Filibuster:
  • Tedd once gave a long rant on why he keeps his hair long to get people to blame that on why he looks girly as opposed to his face.
  Elliot and Sarah: (a synchronized Facepalm) Aw crap!
  Susan: What? Did I say something wrong?
  Tedd: They've heard the rant to follow before.
  • Elliot mixes this with a Berserk Button when homophobia comes up.
• Chekhov's Gag: In an early gag, before it was established that there was a Masquerade, Nanase is floating through the hallways only to be seen by a physics teacher. Later, Diane reveals that this habit of hers clued her into the fact that Nanase has magic.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • A lot of 'em. It got to the point that Shive redesigned a character who would have had certain "suspicious" traits (such as an eyepatch) specifically so that nobody would sit around waiting for those to be explained.
  • Possibly lampshaded in the commentary for this strip: "On the plus side, should the fact that there's a photo of Grace on the wall of a pancake place where a TV show episode was filmed ever come up again, the high-res version is already drawn." Definitely lampshaded in this page's commentary.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • Noah is introduced suddenly — he showed up, gothic font and all, and then... completely vanished. For years. It took a long time for him to be revealed to be the Child Left Behind.
  • In an innocuous gag, a griffin named Andrea talks to Elliot in Tedd's list of why he's famous at their school. This later becomes important because her wife comes searching for her after she doesn't return in time.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • Elliot's Tamashii Gekido was later used by Ellen on the goo.
  • It took nearly eight years to explain how Susan made a sword appear back during the Sister arc.
  • A minor one, but Susan's initial attempt to un-summon a magical copy of a fairy doll had explosive results. Seven years of strips later, she's learned to weaponize it.
• The Chessmaster: Pandora. Dan even says in one commentary that she's not someone you want to play at chess. Her desire to manipulate events rather than getting directly involved actually makes sense for two reasons: the other immortals get cheesed off if one of them does anything more than assist people on the physical plane, and she prefers things to be as unpredictable as possible (Chaos is literally her middle name, that she gave herself). Doing everything herself would either earn her severe retribution or just make things too boring.
• Children Forced to Kill: Susan and Nanase when, during a class-trip to France, they wind up being targeted by an aberration. He's not technically human anymore, but he LOOKS human — mostly — and while Nanase does most of the fighting, it's Susan who ends up having to kill him — with an ax, even. Unsurprisingly, she was somewhat traumatized, and the storyline that featured the flashback culminated in an Immortal decrying the irresponsibility of the two French Immortals who originally equipped the girls for the battle, while giving them no apparent alternative save dying at the hands of the aberration. Apparently, they could have simply informed the French Government's anti-supernatural-creature-squad instead, but elected to drag two teen girls into a battle in order to 'recruit them for the fight against evil'. Omniscient Morality License, anyone?
• Child Soldier: After a monster attacked Susan in Paris, two Immortals empowered her and Nanase, and instructed how to kill it, though it's implied – and in the Hammerchlorians arc, confirmed – that they could have gone to an experienced local magic-user instead. Susan... didn't take it well.
• Chivalrous Pervert: Tedd. There are numerous examples of this, but possibly the best one is the first time he meets Grace. When he asks what Grace is wearing under her trench coat and she says she "Nothing," he quickly welcomes her into the house in the most over-the-top way possible, but the first thing he does once she's inside is offer her some of his clothes to wear.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • The best example in this series was likely Sensei Greg. Despite having played a fairly decent role in early arcs, he was reduced to a brief cameo in Painted Black, and only got a short, non-plot critical scene in the party arc before it got into full swing. Greg made a major return in the New and Old Flames arc, before again mostly disappearing for more than a decade outside of occasional namedrops and NP strips.
  • A more infamous example would be Lord Tedd, who was set up for a long time as a potential Big Bad for the series but both him and his plotline quickly became buried amongst plot twists and never seen again. He's still occasionally referenced, but Dan has long realised he was introduced too early.
• Clark Kenting:
  • Tedd can fool Will and Gill without even meaning it — they call him an impostor when they see him without his glasses. On the other hand, those are really big glasses, they have never seen him without them and they seem not to know what glasses are (instead assuming they are his eyes) which would make sense if, as shapeshifters, they never need glasses since they can shapeshift to correct or modify their vision.
  • Exaggerated with an incredibly lame (but apparently successful) government campaign to hide the presence of aliens on earth by such methods as having them wear T-shirts that say "Homo Sapiens."
  • In the New And Old Flames storyline, Elliot got a superheroine form spell, which comes with its own alter ego form which seems to allow this trope. However, it is subverted in that in the form Elliot actually requires glasses and his speech patterns are made mild-mannered. This means he doesn't really need to engage in Clark Kenting consciously; the form does it for him.
• Clone Angst: Played depressingly straight at first. When Ellen was accidentally created, she freaked out, with good reason. She had all of Elliot's memories, but suffered Loss of Identity since she could never get back his old life, and all of his friends were now essentially strangers she only knew about secondhand. She was permanently stuck in female form, something the original Elliot was so desperate to escape that he resorted to using a dangerous magical artifact he clearly didn't understand rather than risk spending (at most) a few more weeks in that form. Ellen also had reason to believe she might have less than a month to live, and feared she'd spend that time locked up in a research facility as a test subject. She went a little crazy, and as a coping mechanism, tried being an Evil Twin for a while, which only made her more miserable. However, this trope was subverted in the long run. Ellen learned her fears of an imminent demise or being locked up for study had no basis in reality. Elliot's friends welcomed her warmly and treated her like a normal individual, rather than just an accidental female copy of someone they knew. Elliot became fiercely protective of her, treating her as a cross between a little sister and a daughter, rather than the Evil Twin she had tried to be. Even Elliot's parents accepted her surprisingly easily, given the circumstances. Ellen eventually developed her own personality and became a major character in her own right, as well as an unprecedented solution to an earlier Love Triangle.
• Clue, Evidence, and a Smoking Gun: How Susan figures out that Elliot transformed into a girl. The way she does it is a bit Bat Deduction (Elliot lampshades this).
  "How the hell did you figure that out?"
• Cobweb of Disuse: There's a dojo that's disused but lacking cobwebs... then the sketchbook explains why.
• Code Name: Grace originally didn't have a real name, but went by the code name 'Shade Tail'. 'Grace' was the name her Dr. Sciuridae gave her, after the dead daughter who had been her gene-parent. Both for Grace and general Tail variants, Tail as the last name is not arbitrary, it's the family name, since their Uryuom parent's name translates to Tail from Uryuomoco.
• Collector of Forms: Grace's alien DNA allows her to become or mix-and-match together any form she's had previously. However, she can only gain new forms by first being transformed by an outside force. This is quickly Exploited however; her boyfriend is a Teen Genius with an alien Transformation Ray, so she naturally has enough varied human forms by the end of the summer to be a full-on Voluntary Shapeshifter.
• Color-Coded Multiplayer: When Nanase creates one shadow copy of herself, the copy is colored with one of the primary additive colors (red, green, or blue), while Nanase is colored with the corresponding primary subtractive color (cyan, magenta, or yellow, respectively). This actually makes sense from a scientific standpoint: The real Nanase is absorbing the color the fake one is producing.
• Color Failure:
  • Nanase does this twice after discovering that Ellen knows that it's her who picked out Ellen's outfit for the party. She had been a bit bolder than she might otherwise be when choosing Ellen's outfit because she assumed it would just be blamed on Susan. Finding out that wasn't the case was a bit embarrassing.
  • Shortly afterwards it happens to Tedd, when he learns the party theme was for his benefit, and Grace is now blaming herself for not realizing he wouldn't be comfortable.
  • In another arc, Tedd goes white with shock when he discovers that the man who had been hitting on him earlier was straight, and thought he was a girl. Previously, he had simply assumed that the guy was gay.
  • Susan does this after finding out that Diane is a cheerleader, given their contrasting personalities. Particularly since this was during their first meeting and neither was sure if they were related by blood somehow.
  • Ashley gets one here when she blurts out that she can't picture anyone other than Grace as a character in a story she's writing, by proxy admitting that she's attracted to Grace to her face.
  • In a role-playing game, Rich has a white-out after he accidentally calls Larry hot while trying to reference the elf bard he's playing as. He then fades back into colour when he realises nobody cared.
• Combat Pragmatist: Unlike his "fellow" aberration Gullet, Scarf resorts to a regular handgun, albeit a large one, to take down Adrian Raven.
  Scarf: Fancy magic... Fire and noise... All outdone... By humanity's toys.
• Come Back to Bed, Honey: An alternate female Elliot knows the best way to take advantage of alternate Tedd's father being out of town is to spend it in bed together.
• Coming-Out Story:
  • Justin tells how his gay status became public to Susan during Grace's party. He told one person, Melissa, and she didn't keep the secret. His homosexuality became public out of his control and people were making comments about it behind his back.
  • Nanase comes out during the party, though by then everyone there that night except Tedd already knew. For a while she was only out to the people who were at the party, though. However, after the events of Sister II, she's done hiding and becomes open about her homosexuality.
• Common Law Marriage: By the events of the Squirrel Prophet arc, Tedd and Grace have been a happy couple for long enough that combined with the fact they live together, their friends describe them as practically married, with Justin wondering if they did in fact legally married.
• Confused Bystander Interview: Carol interviews a girl, complete with sound effects, Buffy Speak, and general hyperactiveness when covering the Cheerleadra sighting. Subverted in that she's actually not a bystander. She's the superhero that she allegedly saw. And she's not even a "she".
• Congruent Memory: Tedd is supposedly better at cooking while female. His argument is that he usually cooks for himself when his father is away on business, which is also when he's most likely to spend a lot of time gender-bent. He seems fully aware of the absurdity of this, however, admitting that it's probably all in his head. Doesn't stop him from doing it.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Justified. The "fire monster" summons in the New and Old Flames arc aren't really made of fire because they would incinerate themselves. They just look like they're on fire and have fire-related vulnerabilities. It's a beginner's mistake when summoning certain monsters to just go with what looks cool instead of what actually works.
• Cool, but Inefficient: Invoked. While building a deck for the card tournament at the comic shop, Tedd mentally declares one of the cards to be "not efficient, but pretty damn cool".
• Cooldown Hug: Tedd invokes this by having Grace hug a very frustrated Elliot.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot:
  • Ellen's creation was eventually revealed as completely avoidable twice over; first when it's revealed that Tedd has a device that can gauge the end result of a transformation beam (the whole thing started when he claimed to zap himself to test the beam because he doesn't have such a device and the safety for the gun got stuck) and just likes to turn himself into the girl. The second is when Tedd's father reveals that when he turned from his business trip, he would've brought more than enough parts with him to repair the transformation gun, meaning that Elliot would've only been stuck as a girl for two days instead of a month (he left a note on the fridge explaining this, but the message never got across because of his "ink blot handwriting.") However, it was eventually later revealed that everything was due to Magus manipulating everyone's emotions in a convoluted plan given by Pandora to get his body back.
  • Tara suspected Elliot of hiding Andrea because an immortal told her so, and she's from an alternate universe where immortals Cannot Tell a Lie. However, that's not true in this universe, which Andrea had actually told her earlier. Elliot and Nanase are not amused to learn this, especially since she was willing to seriously injure Elliot over it.
  • Voltaire admits that his convoluted schemes to interfere with Tedd (including tricking Tara into killing his best friend just to traumatize him) were unnecessary and he could just have talked with Tedd and accomplished more.
• Covert Pervert:
  • Justin, of all the crew, is the first to wonder if using the TF gun on a female results in a male form with generous... er... gentlemanly parts.
  • Sarah, too. At the very least, she seems to have lots of romantic and possibly sexual (Possibly?) ^note Though that is a Sketchbook page and not necessarily canon fantasies
  • Agent Cranium has an interesting ability that she claims to have never abused, but the flashback clearly shows she did use it to spy on men.
• Crazy-Prepared: Mr. Verres' party chaperon presentation.
• Creating Life Is Bad: Played for Laughs — "Our goo kinda came to life...," but later revealed to be a monster sent on purpose from an Alternate Universe. Also, in a filler strip soap bubbles came to life as Pac-Man-like critters... and promptly attacked Tedd.
• Creator Cameo:
  • This strip (panel 6) has Dan Shive in a comic shop. Note that this is different from the Author Avatar character that appears in some non-canon strips.
  • Also in the second panel here.
• Cringe Comedy: Catalina's plan to defuse rumors that Elliot is gay is to randomly kiss him in front of other people and falsely claim to be lovers. That's an airtight argument, alright.
  Sarah: It's like a train wreck, and I can't look away...
• Critical Staffing Shortage: The feds specialized in magic are short on numbers, to the point that they have "one full agent, a trainee, a history teacher, and a criminal" going after one fugitive mage, making Arthur keep an eye on the main cast, desperate to recruit more.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Mr. Verres and Agent Wolf. In early comics, the two characters were pretty goofy and usually played for laughs. That changes a bit later on:
  • We've gotten hints for some time that Mr. Verres is a very prominent figure in the paranormal area (possibly even enough to qualify him as the Big Good of the EGS world), and his moment near the end of the Abraham encounter demonstrates that he has enough skill with magic that you really don't want to mess with him or anyone he cares about.
  • The encounter with Abraham has also shown that, when he's not obsessed with aliens, Agent Wolf is very professional, and Raven has identified him as one of the most powerful wizards in the Midwestern United States.
• Crush Blush:
  • Two in relation to Elliot.
    • Susan has one here.
    • Ashley has one here.
  • Vladia has one pointed at an undisguised Raven.
• Cuddle Bug: Grace and Ellen occasionally fall into this — they hug someone all the time, while The Glomp was performed not by one of them only twice: by Nanase (to Ellen) and Catalina (to Tedd). In the Second Life it was said to be fairly typical for a greater chimera. As to Ellen, at least Justin thinks it's pretty normal for girls. Or she's just that uninhibited.
• Curse Cut Short:
  • An example from the Goo: PROCEEDING WITH A PREPARED SET OF CURSE WORDS IN ORDER TO IMITATE ANGER. DAMN. CRAP. F--
  • Agent Wolf is such a--
  • Elliot explaining Justin's coming-out.
    Elliot: He was MISERABLE and DEPRESSED and it was ALL BECAUSE OF THAT STUPID-
  • "Well, f-". The author alleges that Justin was going to say "fudge".
• Curtains Match the Window: The hair and eye colours of Susan, Elliot, Ellen, and Tedd all match.
• Cute Approaches Camera: Jeremy has a close-up picture here.
• Cute Little Fangs:
  • Catalina Bobcat is drawn with very prominent canines to go with her whole Cat Girl thing. They get even more pronounced while she's in her actual cat girl form.
  • Grace in her squirrel-girl form (a squirrel obviously should have big incisors instead, but she also got lespuko traits).
  • Vladia also has little fangs, though it's harder to tell.
• Cuteness Proximity: Jeremy tried this on Susan, but failed. See also Sarah's reaction to Grace's full squirrel form.
• Damsel in Distress:
  • During the "Painted Black" arc, Grace becomes one when she's captured while infiltrating Damien's base... at least until Damien makes her really, really mad.
  • Zigzagged by Elliot, who ends his stint as a Distressed Dude by genderbending his way out of his restraints.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Magic apparently drains users at various rates. Spells too powerful to handle may overtax even well-trained magic users, possibly even removing their magic for months at at a time.
• Dark Horse Victory: After an entire year-long arc, Some Guy wins the card game tournament.
• The Dark Side: Parodied early on, when the Goo is first created. Tedd refuses to give in to the dark side and give his principal an army of goo-based hall monitors.
• Dawson Casting: Tedd invokes this in an EGS:NP strip by claiming to be twenty-one outside of continuity due to Comic-Book Time. Grace counters the gap might be up to a year, making Tedd eighteen. She then goes on to say that it doesn't matter anyways since none of them are likely to look any different before they turn 30. Though the revelation that he may be under the drinking age causes Tedd to excuse himself so that he can dispose of a keg in the fridge before his dad finds it.
• Daydream Surprise:
  • Here, it starts with a montage of Grace experiencing school, only for it to be revealed to be Grace dreaming.
  • Here, it starts with Susan and Catalina going on a date only for it to be revealed to be Susan fantasising about it.
• Deadly Upgrade: Nanase's usage of the Angel spell very nearly kills her as she was pushed far beyond her limit already when she casts it, and it drains a lot of energy.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Depending on the situation, any given character can give snarking remarks. Definitely Susan, who remarks that Ellen could, just maybe, be covered in goo from the goo monster they just fought in response to Greg thinking she turned into the She-Hulk. Dying is usually inconvenient. Lampshaded here.
  • Elliot once turned it on Susan, telling her to be very detailed in her notes for what she's like when turned into a man.
  • This guy, in response to Vladia screeching at him, just reports the absurdity to his superiors.
• Death Glare:
  • "If Looks Could Kill..."
  • Hello, Lucy. Ellen is just happy to see you, that's all.
  • Nanase can do this too.
  • Tedd gets hit with a rather scary double whammy.
  • Elliot gives a wonderful first impression to Melissa.
  • Gerald gets a triple dose from Grace, Ellen, and Nanase.
• Deep-Immersion Gaming: Several straight examples and variations:
  • Grace perfectly roleplayed and imagined an entire epic duel for Justin's and Tensaided's card game duel.
  • Whenever the characters use IM, instead of showing them typing, the author shows their avatars acting things out as if the conversation was happening face to face. The author explicitly stated it was because simply typing was boring.
  • During Squirrel Prophet, all the card games are visualised as epic battles rather than just people playing card games on desks.
  • Most NP arcs that focus on video games have Grace as the character in the game world reacting to it. The one exception was the Chrono Trigger bit, since that was more about how Tedd and Grace play the game rather than parodying the game itself.
• Department of Redundancy Department: "You could always get hugs, have a second player for video games, get hugs, have help with chores, get hugs..."
  • Not to mention Dan's commentary here.
• Deus ex Machina:
  • Subverted or maybe deconstructed mildly with the Dewitchery Diamond. It seems like a plot device at first, but then it solves it in a way completely different from the way everyone expected, and caused more problems than it solved, in the form of Knight Templar Abraham.
  • Magic is stated to have a flair for the dramatic. The characters expect magic to do last-minute interventions specifically because it is more dramatic.
• Didn't Think This Through: Abraham is infamous in the wizard community for his incredible shortsightedness. First he enchanted a diamond to cure a friend of lycanthropy rather than just sell the diamond to hire someone more competent, and because of his ineptitude the diamond's "cure" actually splits the curse from the person as a new being capable of spreading the curse further. Then he made a Rash Promise to slay anything created by the Dewitchery Diamond, not foreseeing it being used to break a relatively harmless curse like a Gender Bender, forcing him to kill an innocent teenage girl. He also made a critical mistake when fighting Adrian. Anybody who forgets he's fighting a wizard after having to overcome his spells just to get there deserves to be spammed by exploding crows on the spot.
• Digging Yourself Deeper:
  • Abraham's diplomatic efforts. He doesn't tongue-slip, but still manages to annoy the hell out of Adrian Raven with every phrase, starting from the second.
  • Tedd gets a little too invested in Elliot's cup size while setting him up for Grace's gender-swap party.
  • Much later, Tedd still has the habit, but seems to be a lot better about Shutting Up Now.
  • Elliot gets himself into an awkward situation trying to explain why he accidentally turned into a super-curvy version of Sarah.
  • Nanase has to dance around how she used to really get around and also how her Last Het Romance was Ellen's brother (which Ellen also has all the memories of...). All Gerald's fault.
• Directionless Driver: Referenced after Ellen's "birth," when Elliot says Ellen might use a tactic that would never cross his or Tedd's mind to find her way back to Moperville. Cue a scene change to Ellen asking a gas pump attendant for directions.
• Dirty Old Man: Averted, but lampshaded, here. Greg's greatest regret is that he doesn't have a dirty mind.
• Disaster Dominoes: During Who Is Ellen, Nanase rolls to see how well her character would walk down the stairs. She rolls a one and falls. Larry rolls to save her and also gets a one, meaning her character slams into his. Rich rolls to save them and also rolls a one. George rolls to do nothing and rolls yet another one. The end result is that the entire party falls down the stairs and Ellen asks Justin if the dice are cursed.
• Disowned Sibling: Mrs. Kitsune has no sister, and it's clearly unsafe to argue about the accuracy of this statement.
• Distant Reaction Shot: Space Is Noisy now — courtesy of Catalina and Raven. Among others. And it's beginning to bug the neighbors.
• Distinction Without a Difference: Uryuoms are not magic; they just use energy that is classified as a type of magic.
• Distracted by My Own Sexy:
  • A V5-ed Susan gets distracted by her own sudden-sexy in this strip. Understandable, as in addition to the appearance this form has a rather... unusual hormonal status, which she wanted to experience in the first place. She stood enthralled until Insulted Awake... and only from the second attempt.
  • Genderbent Sarah also has one of these moments here.
    NO! BAD Sarah! Stop thinking of yourself as a sex object!!
• Distracted by the Sexy: It turns out that Tara the Griffon had been told that Immortals on this side of the world were capable of lying, unlike the ones they know of, which would have been very useful to remember when she tried to kill Elliot because she trusted a local Immortal's word over his. However, her girlfriend is cute when she's being nerdy. (For instance, when she's talking about little-known facts about Immortals.)
• Distressed Dude: Elliot for most of the Painted Black arc.
• The Ditz: Elliot in his "party girl" form, who has a Motor Mouth and very little self-control.
• Ditzy Genius: The reason for Grace's Ditzy characteristics. Both her ability to absorb information and her lack of common sense are impressive.
• Does Not Like Men:
  • Susan started out like this, firmly believing that All Men Are Perverts. A major part of her Character Development is moving past this, acknowledging that most males she knows aren't that bad (even the genuinely perverted Tedd has redeeming qualities). She got this from her mother, who extended to issue of her former husband's affair to all men. Susan had to lie that Justin was gay so she'd let him stay over, if only in the hopes that his homosexuality would rub off on Susan.
  • Catalina and Diane are both stated to automatically assume any man is a jerk until he proves otherwise. The former is a lesbian while the latter is, or at least for a long time was, a Gold Digger.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • When Ellen yells at Tedd for never apologizing for the mistakes that lead to her creation, his reply makes it sound more along the lines of an unplanned pregnancy, also tying in with the Running Gag about Tedd being Ellen's father.
    Tedd: If you're the result of my mistakes, then they were the best mistakes I ever made!
  • The discussions about transformation can sometimes sound like it's being used as a metaphor for sex (or possibly kinky sex). Especially when the consent issue is brought up.
• Doing in the Scientist: At first, the plot was fairly silly, and all transformation weirdness was due to the Transformation Gun, an invention of Tedd's. Then it was revealed to come from Uryuom technology. Then that was revealed to be based on magic, a fundamental form of energy which had already cropped up in earlier storylines.
• Doing In the Wizard: In a way. Magic has actually become more prevalent after the Sister 2 arc, but it's also become less silly and more systematic. See Cerebus Retcon above.
• Don't Try This at Home:
  • The commentary for this comic goes out of its way to inform readers of the potential hazards of using a sleeper hold.
  • Also in the commentary for this one.
• Do Not Go Gentle: The reason Ellen raised hell at the school in "Sister", is because she thought she had less than a month to live.
• Dope Slap:
  • Discussed here. Mr. Verres said he would smack Elliot upside the head for not keeping up with his spellbook, and only isn't on account of him being a girl at the time.
  • You normally wouldn't expect someone like Grace to perform this on anyone, but when your friend's been acting like a dummy...
• Doppelgänger Spin:
  • Nanase Kitsune
    • She creates two images of herself while in a demonstration martial arts match with her boyfriend Elliot. Each of the images she creates has different colored hair (green and blue). She uses them to distract him so she can make a sneak attack from the rear. Elliot complains that he hates "these trendy 'which one is real?' illusion attacks".
    • She uses a variation on this early on while fighting a giant blob of goo. In a subversion, none of the ones fighting the goo are the real Nanase; the real Nanase is rescuing Ellen while the goo is distracted by the duplicates.
  • Magus, while "powerless", later used this to run away from more or less godlike beings.
• Double Standard: Ashley draws a line between fairy doll Nanase accidently coming across as flirty in a conversation, which makes her uncomfortable, and Grace unintentionally playing into Ashley's fetishes by shrinking herself, which she obviously enjoys. Of course, she has said before that she likes Grace, but it's not quite clear if she takes an explicite issue with Nanase.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Discussed by Elliot and Sarah after they break up. They can't say that Elliot threw things at Sarah in their exaggerated retellings. He's a guy and Sarah's a girl. People will freak out. The opposite situation won't get the same reaction.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • During the Sister 3 arc, Magus still believes, not unreasonably, that Pandora is a monster and that he needs to stop her. What he doesn't know however is she underwent a lot of Character Development and is making up for her actions, culminating in a Heroic Sacrifice where she kills Aberrations in spite of the action being in violation of Immortal law and forcing a reset.
  • In "Balance", Luke rejects Justin's plan for him to use his magic-detecting abilities on two unnamed friends of Justin's without their knowledge for a number of reasons, one of which is that he hates using his power, since it just makes him feel powerless. He's particularly skittish about it at that point because his other friends pressured him into using it the previous night, and he detected an insane amount of power... from exactly the people Justin's talking about.
• Dramatic Stutter: Tony stutters his name when confronted with Grace in Tedd's form without Tedd's glasses to hide Tedd's feminine eyes.
• Dramatic Thunder: Happens whenever Nanase's mother says something emphatic. Played seriously the first time, and then for laughs in one of the Q&A comics.
• Dramatic Wind: Susan is particularly good at it, with her long hair often billowing in the wind in dramatic moments, even indoors. Lampshaded in one comic, where she debates getting a haircut but a gust causes her hair to whoosh, which she decides is reason enough to keep it at that length.
• Dream Emergency Exit: Lucid dreamers can exit magic dreams by pinching themselves. The Rant notes that you can experience pain in dreams, but because the "pinch-me" cliché exists and magic is powered by intent, pinching yourself is the obvious way of signaling "I want to wake up now".
• Dream Sequence:
  • Sleepy Time is an entire Story Arc of them, each revealing something personal about one of the main characters.
  • Late into Parable, the Fable parody is revealed to be a shared dream between several characters, and is canon.
• Dropped Glasses: Played with. Tedd forgets to grab his glasses when he wakes up and rushes to check on Grace, revealing that the character doesn't really need them.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady:
  • Tedd's face is so feminine that he grows his hair out just so he can blame that on why he looks so much like a girl when his glasses are off.
  • Noah, though he seems completely fine with it.
  "Regardless of which gender he is at the time, I use the female [plastic] artist model for Tedd. And Noah, now that I think about it."
  • Mist in his non-disguised, non-unicorn form. If his pronouns weren't clarified in that form's introduction on this page, readers would most likely have mistaken him for a woman.
• Dysfunctional Family: Not only has Tedd's mom gone to Europe and abandoned her family, but when Nanase's mom is asked about her sister, the answer sounds much like Pandora-Chaos at her worst.
• Eagleland: The Government isn't that bad. Even The Men in Black (though they have their moments). But tourists...
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Early in the comic Elliot and Nanase share a rather overtly sexual relationship, with the two even having a tradition of making out after sparing matches. This becomes a rather odd point later on, when Elliot is revealed to be borderline sexually repressed, and even Nanase seems a lot more reserved (of course, this might just be in comparison to her new girlfriend, Ellen, who is a lot more open and flirtatious). Later interactions between Elliot and Ashley seem to be reaffirming Elliot as overtly sexual, insinuating his situation with Sarah was actually more out of character for him due to Elliot not realizing his feelings for her were deeply platonic, not romantic.
  • While it was always insinuated people could simply be more lax about their magic use before it started getting unwanted media attention, some of the magic use in the early comics was pretty oddly overt. Most of all was probably Nanase, who used to openly use blatant magic in public (she regularly levitated through the crowded hallways of her school, to the point where a joke was made that the Physics Teachers have a pet peeve against her). Even weirder, after magic gets exposure, almost no one thinks of confronting Nanase about her magic use, in spite of using it publicly in her school for possibly years.
  • The early comics repeatedly bring up the characters worrying about pregnancy and how it might relate to transformations, and nobody ever seems to consider using prevention if they really want to have sex while transformed. It's not until 2013 that Sarah points out that very obvious solution in a talk to Nanase.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • Susan never once apologized for her earlier behavior, and nobody seems to mind that she used to dismiss Ellen's gender identity, deem Tedd's transformations as being meant strictly for perverted reasons without ever inquiring what it actually meant to him, imply Tedd and Elliot wouldn't mind having sex (an insinuation that has always been a sore spot for Tedd), and fling insults at Nanase, Greg, Grace, Elliot, and Justin like nobody's business. Especially the last one stands out, because Diane explicitly had to apologize later on for calling Justin a "defective male", whereas Susan got away with "excess baggage" and "boy-toy". Even Tedd's and Sarah's early attitudes were later referred to as jerkass behavior, which both of them admitted, while nobody ever pointed that out about Susan.
  • Ellen is weirdly ready to not only forgive, but even justify Magus giving her body to an aberration to inhabit, possessing her brother, and taking Ashley hostage. She insists that he was in a desperate situation, and wants him to get away with what he did.
• Eating the Eye Candy: While not hunky, Sarah ends up considering it during the Party arc. The object? Herself. It Makes Sense in Context, really.
• Economy Cast: Played with with regards to the comic book shop Justin works at. The only employees seen with any regularity are Justin, George, and Grace. The business owner, Justin's uncle, is only seen once when he interviews Grace for a position. This led to at least one other character, Sarah, assuming it was just them working at the shop until Justin clarifies that no, there are other employees. Sarah (and the readers) just never saw them.
• Education Mama: Nanase's mother, who pushes her to insane levels academically despite wanting nothing from her when she grows up other than to be a homemaker. She certainly knows more about magic than she lets on, so it might be her way of protecting Nanase.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • Immortals like Pandora are powerful shapeshifters and can look like Lovecraftian monsters if they choose to.
  • There are aberrations like this... thing. Horrific monsters than were former humans who used magic to turn themselves into monsters.
  • There are "whale" things that Tedd encounters. They exist only on the spiritual plane and feed on magic.
• El Spanish "-o": The "El" in the name of the comic.
• Embarrassing First Name: Susan goes by her middle name because her first name "Tiffany" sounds like a stereotypical cheerleader. Also because her dad, whom she caught cheating, picked that name.
• Embarrassing Last Name: Susan's surname being Pompoms, which would probably be embarrassing even if it didn't clash with her personality so hard. In fact, Susan hates her name so much that it stopped her from getting a name-based affinity, since "Tiffany Pompoms" should under normal circumstances be the kind of name that attracts cheerleading spells.
• Embarrassing Middle Name: Tedd Drew Verres isn't such a bad name, but he makes a big deal out of it. Middle Names are Always Fun!
• The Empath: Uryuom (and greater chimera) have empathic abilities they use instead of pheromones, as well as low-grade telepathy. Both are related to antennae.
• Empty Piles of Clothing: Greg stumbles onto a pile after charging into Tedd's house to protect Grace.
• Enhance Button: Discussed in the commentary of this comic, including a jab at CSI's usage of this trope.

  Of course, if this was CSI, some dude would magically multiply the resolution of the image, clean it up, and get the license plate of a nearby car from a reflection in Elliot's pupil.

• Endearingly Dorky: Both Elliot and Ashley. According to Dan, the key to writing their interactions is to remember that they're both dorks and everything flows from there.
• Enlightenment Superpowers: Sensei Greg created Anime-Style Martial Arts by going on a viewing marathon and achieving a breakthrough at the end of it.
• Entendre Failure: When Elliot reveals his new date Ashley seems like the fact that he's capable of Gender Bending, Tedd tries to be subtle when asking if Ashley is bi. Given this is Elliot, it fails.
  Tedd: Oh... Does she, um... swing both ways?
  Elliot: Swing, what swing?
  Tedd: No, no! Does she like apples... and oranges?
  Elliot: I don't know her fruit preferences.
  Tedd: [exasperated expression] Bisexual. Is she bisexual?
  Elliot: Oh! I dunno, maybe?
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • Ellen and Nanase reach the conclusion that Susan and Diane must be sisters due to their uncanny resemblance, being born twenty minutes apart, having the same magic affinity, Diane being adopted, and the fact that Jerry appears to believe it. Tedd's father debunks the possibility they're twins Separated at Birth, but Susan's father being "a cheating cheater who cheated" raises the possibility of half-sisters. Ultimately, their familial connection is revealed to be Adrian Raven, who fathered a distant ancestor of Susan's and is Diane's biological father.
  • The thing that convinces Susan that she might indeed be related to Diane is the fact that Jerry appears to believe it enough to protect Diane on "her sister's" behalf, while doing nothing to protect Rhea. The fact that an immortal, who would likely have much more ability to find out something like this, thinks is true is enough to convince Susan it's a real possibility. Jerry, standing next to them and invisible, notes he doesn't know any more than they do.
    Jerry: I reached that conclusion for the same reasons Ellen and Nanase did. I don't know jack.
  • Grace chooses Die Hard as the first movie in a Christmas Special marathon due to assuming that if it is a movie set during Christmas-time it must be a Christmas Special. (She does realize it's a violent action movie, but still thought it counted as "Christmas".)
  • Despite correctly piecing together the fact that Elliot is Cheerleadra, George makes a wrong assumption about Ellen, thinking that she is Elliot rather than Elliot's Opposite-Sex Clone. To be fair, he knows that Elliot can transform into a woman, that he and Nanase were dating up until Ellen suddenly appeared, and they have the exact same friend group, so that conclusion probably makes more sense than the truth.
• Epiphany Therapy: Lampshaded. Tedd gets over his fear of being called gay for liking Grace when she's gender bent long enough to kiss male Grace, but Grace is quick to point out that just recognizing he has a hang-up isn't enough to instantly make it go away.
• Epiphora: From balance-116: Talking about how magic training "is good":
  Ashley: It was surprisingly tiring for how mundane it was.
  Edward Verres: This early on, tired is good. Mundane is good. You'll be doing stuff that makes me glad it's not my job to cover this stuff up anymore in no time.
  Ashley: Thanks?
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: While running as Game Master for a tabletop rpg, Ellen finds it distasteful that the premade adventure she is running doesn't detail a reason for the why goblins are acting as some guy's evil minions, simply using them as generic and potentially swappable mooks. Her response is to swap out two of the three goblins for a human and a dwarf.
• Especially Zoidberg: Susan drops one of these on Elliot and Tedd in a moment of frustration, then immediately apologizes as her frustration isn't actually directed at them.
• "Eureka!" Moment:
  • Tedd has such a moment when he realizes that the only way for Elliot to stop getting spells themed around turning into a girl is for one such spell to accurately reflect who he is. Magic is trying desperately to give him a spell that reflects his personality, but the gender bending, which is the one thing it is absolutely sure about, is also the one part it is getting wrong.
  • After having her clothes spontaneously grow back to full size off her shrunken body, Grace is able to figure out how magic's change gave her the ability to transform her clothes. She then proceeds to follow tradition by shouting "Eureka" and running around naked.
• Even the Girls Want Her: Female Variant Number 5 is designed to release pheromones to make even other women attracted to someone with that form. However, the production of those pheromones are temporary. A few days tops.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Discussed. After the furious look Elliot gave Melissa, Noah tries to get out of him what was that about and his first theory is that Elliot is jealous of Mellissa being with Noah.
  Noah: I have been told I could make straight men see rainbows.
• Every Man Has His Price: In the non-canon Nanase Craft and the Crypt of Zappiness, Nanase Craft has principles! She charges extra if someone wants to use an artifact she found for evil.
• Everyone Can See It: Elliot and Susan have become far closer to each other than they realize and pretty much everyone, including Sarah, ostensibly Elliot's girlfriend, notices it. Sarah herself would be all for it if Elliot and Susan got together, because it's become clear to her that Elliot isn't even really functioning as her boyfriend. Even Tensaided thought that Susan and Elliot were a couple. It's gotten to the point that even the in-universe fandom for their video reviews is shipping them.
• Everyone Has Standards: Magus is a good man pushed to very desperate measures due to being trapped in a shitty situation. Despite that, he won't help Chaos ruin Verres to just to kill Abraham... just to punish Raven for being a disobedient son.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • During the first few story arcs up until Painted Black, Hedge did everything in his power not to bring women back to Damien, knowing that he only wanted them for breeding.
  • All aberrations are The Sociopath, but unlike one of his fellow mercenaries, one retains enough humanity to think cannibalism is disgusting and is enough of a Pragmatic Villain to not want to draw attention via killing more people than necessary.
• Everyone Is Bi: This didn't seem to be true at first, but ultimately, of the main eight, only Justin and Nanase appear to have an uncomplicated gender preference. From the beginning, Ellen was bi and Grace wasn't exactly straight; although any male character turned female will be attracted to men and vice-versa, that's a much greater part of Elliot's life (although that means any homosexual character transformed into the opposite gender will actually technically be considered heterosexual while in that form); Tedd, Sarah, and Elliot slowly come to realize that they're attracted to both sexes regardless of form; and Susan comes to realize she's an exclusive voyeur, whose subjects could be of either gender. Furthermore, more recent important characters, such as Noah and Ashley, seem similarly difficult to label. Eventually confirmed by Word of God in a 2019 Q&A comic: "Gender fluidity and bisexuality feels normal and like the default to me."
• Everyone's in the Loop: The main cast typically make a point of keeping each other in the loop regarding the constant supernatural happenings. As such, plotlines regarding one character not knowing something important only happen outside the main cast, and even temporary misunderstandings only happen when Susan is being reclusive and hasn't talked to anyone in a while.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Sirleck cannot understand why Raven would do charity work for military veterans. It's Justified. The process of becoming an Aberration removes one's empathy.
  Sirleck: What's the point of living for centuries if you're going to let your heart bleed?
• Evil Laugh: Along with Psychotic Smirk, played to the hilt with Raven, though he could just be being creepy and weird. Definitely just being weird, considering he's one of the series' most powerful supporting heroes. His mother, on the other hand, plays this one straight when she appears on live news and acts all Creepy Child.
• Evil Overlord: Lord Tedd, though Nioi insinuates that he's nothing of the sort. Well, to Nioi and around her, he may be a very nice lad indeed. After all, Lord Tedd is the product of Tedd's issues never fixed by the presence of either Elliot or Grace, and he looks like "guy with a furry fetish and a half-cat girlfriend" again.
• Evil Stole My Faith: Played for Laughs. Upon seeing Susan's "kitty face", Justin thinks to himself that there is no god.
• Evil Twin: When she's first introduced, Ellen tries to be one of these for Elliot in an effort to give herself some sense of identity. She turns out to be spectacularly bad at it.
• Exact Words:
  • Immortals in Moperville's universal neighborhood are forbidden by their own laws from doing much more than "guiding and empowering." However, as the comic progresses, it quickly becomes clear that "empowering" and "guiding" have loopholes big enough to drive a truck through. Loopholes which many immortals use with giddy abandon to achieve ends ranging from "vampire extermination" to "make me not bored."
  • Magus explains why he ordered eighty dollars worth of pizza with a casual "You would not believe how long it's been since I've eaten anything". Normally when someone says that, they might mean "all day" or even multiple days — but for Magus, this is his first meal in a body of his own after spending years stuck in a spirit form.
• Exposition Cut: The webcomic has built up decades of plot and to keep recaps and exposition to bring other characters in the loop from padding things out, lengthy exposition the readers already know are skipped over. Its frequent use is lampshaded in this comic from late in the "Sister" arc.
• Exposition Diagram: Both Mr. Verres and Elliot's parents have used the Type 2 version.
• Exposition Party:
  • Grace's birthday party has each of the main characters get their own Character Development arc that starts tying up a lot of hanging threads.
  • The "Title Pending" arc invokes this, with everyone throwing a party specifically to help Ashley get acclimated to the world behind The Masquerade. Of course, things go awry and they end up exploring a lot more than just magic.
• Expressive Hair:
  • When Catalina asks Susan on a date, her hair acts like cat ears, raising when she's happy and laying flat when she's upset.
  • Ashley's weird Anime Hair bang spike thingies often flop around to match her mood.
• Expy:
  • Grace definitely has nothing in common with Squirrel Girl... oops. On the other hand, "cat girl"-to-"squirrel girl" substitution doesn't leave many options anyway.
  • Mr. Raven comes across as Snape with better style, at least at first.
  Raven: You are a homicidal wizard invading a public school. No one will care if I kill you.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!:
  • First there was a hilarious version with female Tedd and too deductive Susan when she realises Tedd singing in the shower is irrelevant, unless he was a girl at the time.
  • And another, slightly more dramatic one with Elliot about his girlfriend Sarah: "I care deeply about her and I want her always to be a part of my life! I don't want to hurt her! She's like a sister to me!"
  • Later, Grace is sure that if Justin has a magic mark, he must know about it. After all, there's no way he could miss a small mark colored slightly different from the rest of his skin on a spot high up on his back where he'd need a mirror and probably have to make a deliberate effort to notice. And then it sinks in that yes, Justin could miss it.
  • And then there's Tedd objecting to the possibility of Justin having awakened, saying that it can't just happen, it has to take any number of methods. That's when Tedd realises that Justin could have easily awakened without anyone noticing.
    Awakenings just don't happen! Something major has to happen! Or you have to train a lot! Or be really strong! Or have an immortal... make it... there are about five billion ways someone like Justin could have awakened, aren't there?
• Extra Parent Conception: Uryuoms are perfectly capable of reproducing with more than two parents involved. The record is twelve.
• Extra-Strength Masquerade: A variant. There is no special effect stopping people from noticing magic if it happens in front of them, and the fact that knowledge of magic can easily be spread with modern technology is one of the main drivers of the plot. However, The Will Of Magic has decided (for reasons that presumably make sense to it), that it does not wish magic to be too widely used or publically known. Therefore, whenever the Masquerade truly breaks, the Will of Magic changes the rules for how humans can access its power, everything that everyone knows about magic becomes false, and the Masquerade is back in place. When discussing the Fate of Magic, Tedd successfully makes the Will of Magic realise that with modern technology, maintaining the masquerade is no longer feasible, permanently ending the cycle of magic changing the rules.
• Extreme Doormat: Sarah's motive to be upset with Elliot to the point of wanting to break up with him. Elliot never takes the initiative of suggesting something to do and doesn't even have the drive to call her until someone tells him to do it. Sarah's always the one who must come out to call him or ask him out and decide what they should do, and even though she knows Elliot does it to avoid being oppressive to her, she's sick of it. Not to mention Elliot, in all the months they had being together, never tried to have sex with her.

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