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TV Tropes Org
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Mind Screw: Web Comics

  • Meta-example: anything on the Dada Comics page, though its not like they try to make sense.
  • Dresden Codak does this to varying degrees. This one is a complete Mind Screw.
  • Kagerou. The main character's Split Personality is actually pretty realistic (he's unaware of his other personalities, and none of them are really functional human beings), suggesting that the author perhaps has some personal experience.
    • Suggesting? He outright declares it on the very first page.
  • Expecting to Fly by Daniel Østvold.
  • Adventurers!! lampshades this trope in the some sort of symbolic climax.
  • Grounded Angel (link). Let me save you a couple of hours of mediocre art and predicable plot twists: the main character turns out to be an angel who is being chased by demons and a cat-man who leads a cult, they want the power of a book that only she can open. And in the end when she gets to the book? Turns out humanity is not yet ready for the way she wants to use it, and she gets to return to the start and do it all over again with her memories of the whole thing erased; oh, and she's been doing this for 176 years. Yeah, everything in the story occurred at least 64,240 times.
  • Magicandphysics has this, generally in the presence of Fridge Logic. Once played with when a character just says the word Mind Screw, and it has this effect on another character.
  • The Sluggy Freelance guest arc "The Sluggite Koan" does this in a big way. What at first seems like a somewhat straightforward Refugee From TV Land and Trapped in TV Land story delves into weird symbolism, philosophy, and loads and loads of Metafiction.
    • While not really symbolic, Torg's flashbacks will freeze your brain. Mainly because we see things through his perspective so anything we read has already been warped by his screwy mind. Most of the time we don't even know he's flashbacking until the scene suddenly cuts to him in a completely different scene saying "And that's how..."
      • This goes double for his latest flashback. We know he's having one because we see him start narrating. The story is wild enough, but Sasha's reactions are even more unlikely and surreal. At one point Torg gets killed by a boomerang riding porcupine and it turns out he made up the whole thing while having a flashback about him having a flashback.
    • As the matter of fact, Sluggy has been gradually drifting from regular punchlines towards screwing with the minds of the readers. A recent strip featured ... well just see for yourselves. Good luck working this out (well, if you're familiar with the events leading up to it).
  • YU+ME: dream starts of as a straightforward Yuri Genre strip (albeit with an ebonics-spouting conscience), until the last ten pages of issue 9, when the entire comic up to that point is revealed to be All Just a Dream, with a minor character actually being a Morpheus-like being...and then it gets weird.
  • The final arc of the fifth book of Fans!, "What Dreams May Come" focuses on a wish-granting artifact granting a kind of (extremely geeky) Instrumentality, apparently a metaphor for the afterlife. A few of the earlier and later introspective storylines could get a little Mind Screw-ey, but this one (being the intended finale) was just plain insane.
  • Templar Arizona. The main characters are straightforward enough, but everything about the world around them is some twisted reflection of our own.
  • A Nedroid storyline ends on this screwy note.
  • Level.
  • Occasionally, Gene Catlow wanders into this, mainly due to the strange mix of philosophy, spirituality and sheer silliness.
  • Bob and George, the Entire series was just one big MIND SCREW, unless you pay attention to every detail, you are going to get lost.
    • Gets especially bad when you have five versions of each main character running around and most of them hate each other.
  • Jerkcity. It's just a bunch of chat logs, mainly focused on UNIX, pot smoking, and homosexuality. OR IS IT?
  • Homestuck starts off relatively easily to understand, but once the Kudzu Plot had taken root, updates are now more likely to bring up far more questions than they answer.
  • In El Goonish Shive, there is lots of it. When done intentionally, usually involves attempts to project the normal family tree onto Ellen's case in several equally disturbing ways.
  • In-universe example in this xkcd.
  • Face All Red derives most of its horror from this.
  • Dialogue in Rumors of War is often a bit on the screwy side, but Nenshe goes on a Journey to the Center of the Mind during the fifth story arc and the things we see there are less comprehensible.
  • Gunnerkrigg Court managed to confuse some readers as to what's going on in Chapter 34 (Faraway Morning). The recipe in this case is interaction of characters who are a bunch of teens in extra weird circumstances, and as such themselves neither have a clear idea of what they want nor are good at sorting through their own feelings.
    • Zimmy's episodes also get increasingly bizarre each time, particularly when Antimony inexplicably starts turning into Zimmy.
  • Captain Snes definitely reaches this at times. Particularly in one comic in which the character telling the stories taunts about how the truth should be obvious at this point. Before realizing that he'd forgotten to mention key details earlier, and adding a whole other layer to the story.

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