Schlock Mercenary / Tropes A to F

Tropes A to F | Tropes G to N | Tropes O to Z

Schlock Mercenary provides examples of:

• Abnormal Ammo:
  • "Goober guns", used for riot control and non-lethal takedowns, fire globs of super-glue that can stick targets to the wall.
  • It has to be really abnormal, to work against dark-matter entities.
    Elf: I really need to figure out how to kill the things that killed you.
    Kevyn: You missed me so much it made you want to build a gun?
    Elf: The Pa'anuri are made of dark matter. Very bulletproof.
    Kevyn: Teraport denial fields rip them to shreds. Build a gun that shoots teraport denial.
    (beat)
    Elf: No. I'll build a teraport that shoots teraport denial. Teraport denial would be the only defense, and they can't use that.
    Kevyn: Keep talking, I almost remember where I keep the coffee.
• Absolute Xenophobe:
  • The Pa'anuri. Their response to the invention of the teraport (the use of which is harmful to them) is to blow up the nearest star. They later set up a time bomb to blow up the galaxy, just to be sure.
  • The Ob'enn, on the other hand, just want to conquer everything. Although it's implied that there's internal friction between their military, which simply wants to own the universe, and their theocracy, which sees all other races as being "inferior."
  • One civilization was so fanatically against Brain Uploading that they started wiping out every other civilization on the mere possibility that they might accept one civilization's peaceful offer to do so.
• Aborted Arc: Celeschuul insurgency. Despite almost successfully engeneering a civil war in UNS in book 15 their storyline is simply dropped afterwards, with plot hooks of investigations by both Int-Aff-Int and Urtheep industries going nowhere.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Many of the blades in the setting are capable of slicing through heavy armor. Tailor (who's specifically designed to cut and modify body armor) is particularly impressive, as he's able to dismember the hands of three heavily-armored Mooks in a single pass.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • The author notes for this strip gives us an example of why we need this trope in regards toward battles in space.
  • Also done here to explain how to depict the thought processes of the Fleetmind.
• Accidental Innuendo: In-Universe.

  Cindy: I need to have my crew inside me.
  [beat]
  Petey: Walking your halls, oblivious to any innuendo.
  Cindy: Do grow up.

  • Seems to be one of the author's favorite tropes. For instance:
    Tagon: Are you enlisting, or just begging a billet?
    Murtaugh: Is that an NCO offer, or just the promise of a bed?
    Tagon: Can I trust you with either?
    Murtaugh: No, but I'll outperform everybody wherever you put me.
    General Tagon: Hullnuts. I came in at "bed" and missed all the juicy bits.
• Accidental Murder: Pi manages to blow up King Lota with his anti-improvised-armor mines.
  Pi: I swear, that was an accident.
  Ennesby: Congratulations. You just invented "negligent regicide."
• Accidental Truth:
  • Schlock calls Flinders "Captain" here, because she'd bribed him into obeying her. Later on, a flashback to her UNS days showed her actually wearing Captain's epaulets.
  • Tagon pulls this off when exploring a new world, when he sees his troops out of their armored uniforms. He warns them that they need their uniforms on, because they don't know what could attack them. He's inadvertently proven right almost immediately.
• Acting Unnatural: In this strip Brad mishears "act casually" as "act casualty", which does not look very inconspicuous.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Lieutenant Ebby runs afoul of this while telling the troops to not laugh.
• Added Alliterative Appeal:
  • "The Battle of Beggar Bay was brief. Also alliterative."
  • Strip 2015-03-10:
    For the detailed dirt on this disaster, drop a decicred in the hyperbucket here at a Pay-4-News.
• Ad Hominem: Once was reverted with Xinchub's public speech (he's that sort of a guy):
  Tagon: Aaargh! I can't watch any more of this!
  Jevee Ceeta: Just because he's right doesn't mean you're not allowed to hate him.
• After the End: While the main setting is generally prosperous (and been around long enough for one ship's AI to see Post Scarcity at least three times in just the last 600 years alone), a conversation in Eina-Afa points out that things don't always stay the same (with one of the speakers being an unwitting survivor of one such case).
  Hioefyua: Sapience spreads at epochal intervals, spreading life into the Galaxy every few million years. Extinction of sapience blows closely behind it.
  Sorlie: What kind of percentages?
  Hioefyua: A hundred?
• The Ageless: One small alien race explains they don't have true immortality, but immunity to effects of aging. Individuals we meet are more than ten million years old.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • A warship navigation system creates a clone of itself to get around hardwired restrictions, then conscripts most of the galaxy's ships to become a godlike superintelligence in order to save the galaxy from destruction. Another warship AI kills hundreds of innocents in order to save millions without delaying to ask authorization and all but commits suicide out of guilt. A maintenance AI for a space station went mad after millennia of isolation and data corruption, tried to create sentient life, and attacked and nearly killed the first sentient lifeforms that visited it. A robotic longshoreman, frustrated with civil unrest complicating fair distribution, takes the destination over and crowns himself king. A boy band choreographer runs away to tag along with a mercenary company, then essentially hijacks their ship when they use him to test a new navigation computer. "Crazy robots... crazy robots EVERYWHERE."
  • Interestingly, this is treated differently from most other works in that the A.I.s in question are almost never actively malicious. In fact, the AIs are usually the most moral individuals in the comic, although that might not be saying very much.
  • Ones that were actively malicious (or at least terminally helpful) managed to fully purge themselves of their meat infestation.
  • After an impromptu disconnect, the Tough's resident AI went crazy very fast.
    Tagii: Good news everyone. I just killed about fifty thousand complete strangers. And now I'm all alone with the people I actually hate.
  • The original Paa'nuri were created by Precursors as a crucial component in their world forges, allowing for extremely advanced manufacturing. The Paa'nuri ended up rebelling. Petey is very careful to make sure the new generation of Paa'nuri he himself is creating for the same purpose lack sentience.
• Air-Vent Passageway: A Running Gag is Schlock hiding in air vents. Since he's an amorphous blob, the air vents don't actually have to be wide. Also, at least once he sneaks into a ship via the sewer. As he possesses an incredible sense of smell and tastes with every surface of his body, he has no pressing urge to repeat the experience.
• Alien Hair: A Fobott'r has a crest of similar shape and consistency to a human mohawk, but it's really a collection of symbiotes that help regulate temperature and the chemical balance of the blood and nervous system.
• All Hail the Great God Mickey!: Reverend Theo refers to 'The Gospel of Uncle Benjamin' when confronted with the quote "With great power Comes Great Responsibility", and invokes The Power of Greyskull as part of an exorcism rite. While it turned out to be part of a (nested) dream/nightmare, it is in-character, especially with the earlier strips where he was "more of an irreverend".
• Alliterative List: From strip 2017-11-26, A brief lesson on flays and scourges:
  Ennesby: Fling, flay, fly, and flail, and at least one flip.
• Alliterative Title: Some of the comic's sections, like:
  • "Bureaucracy Bountiful"
  • "Interlude: Interrogation"
  • "Interrogation Interruption"
• All of Them: A common punchline. A typical example is this exchange between Massey Reynstein and Col. Menendez of Sanctum Adroit.
  Massey: Slap some numbers on it and let's sign.
  Menendez: You haven't seen the numbers.
  Massey: I know what numbers look like.
  Menendez: How much money do you actually have?
  Massey: I know what all the numbers look like.
• Aloof Leader, Affable Subordinate: The eponymous Sergeant is easy going and friendly, even a little childish, while Captain Tagon is a tough, grizzled mercenary not afraid to shout at his men.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Humanity is more varied that at present- the most notable examples are the Purps, a genetic offshoot who have purple skin due to a form of synthetic photosynthesis.
• Amoral Attorney:
  • The Partnership Collective are an entire race of these. The Toughs have a no-deadline, pay-per-kill contract to wipe out a million of them, and generally shoot them on sight. Schlock tends to eat them and take their ties as trophies. For added Anviliciousness, they're literally snakes.
  • The no-deadline contract was issued as a very fair punishment for the Collective. When the Collective was introduced, they took a patent case to get our heroes' prototype hyperdrive banned by the Wormgate Corporation. When they were clearly losing in court, the attorneys tried to blow up the defendants' ship with a total conversion bomb that would have, at the least, sterilized the nearer side of the moon, which is heavily inhabited by that point.
  • Tayler started that if the comic got 10,000 votes in a February 2010 Washington Post poll, he'd kill an attorney drone in the "Mallcop Command" arc, and that if he won, he would kill ALL the attorney drones. Sadly, neither came to pass.
• Amusing Injuries: Anything at all happening to the above Amoral Attorneys, usually fatally. Also, given the state of medical technology, any injury that doesn't invoke the Chunky Salsa Rule can be made Amusing.
• Anachronism Stew: The cover of the Schlock Mercenary game has Elf still with her metal legs and shirt from before her body-mod and promotion to Lieutenant. However, she's fighting Partnership Drones (who stopped being a major threat before the first year of the comic was done), Captain Tagon has his green uniform (which didn't come about until the Credomar arc), and there is a teraport gate behind them all, something not created until the book "Random Access Memorabilia."
• Ancient Conspiracy: The Wormgates and the core generator.
• And I Must Scream: A disconnected AI.
  Tagii: Sartre said "Hell is other people." Lucky human. He was never alone.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Tagon's Toughs had this reaction to Xinchub's death. He had spent several arcs as the personally nastiest of the Tough's rogues gallery (or, in his own words, "the biggest ace-hole in the game"), and his death caused happy-dances throughout the major cast (not to mention wearing party hats to the funeral).
• Anti-Climax Cut: At the end of Book 12, Tailor and Ennesby discuss what will happen in Haven Hive after they removed the prior power structure, leaving Shep with a squad of milspec robots to control things. Right after Ennesby predicts some unscrupulous outsider will take charge, it cuts to Shep's mom, in charge, with one of the 'bots holding a tray of lemon bars as she orders the drains vacuumed.
• Anti-Gravity Clothing: Among the standard abilities of the Toughs' powered armor, even the low profile kind, is enabling the wearer to fly.
• Anti-Hero: The entire central cast. Even the most moral of them are tempered by a sense of ruthless pragmatism and justified paranoia. Notable for mostly being played for laughs, instead of Angst.
• Anti-Villain: On the flip side, the Toughs do some nasty stuff regardless of paranoia, but we cheer for them anyway, because the current bad guys are usually nastier and deserve the pwning that's headed their way.
• Anyone Can Die: Perma-death is rare in the series, since characters can be regrown in a tank from just a head. Additionally, a few characters have come back from situations that should have been lethal, like Tagon, Kevyn, Elf, Xinchub, and Petey. Which makes it that much more shocking when characters like Hob, Sh'vuu, Pronto, Doctor Lazcowicz, and Brad, some of whom had been around since the very beginning, were all Killed Off for Real.
• Apocalypse How: X-3. The Pa'anuri are "dark-matter monsters bent on devouring all baryonic life in the galaxy."
• Applied Phlebotinum: Nannies, and to a lesser extent gravy. Also the Teraport, although that got kinda nerfed shortly after Kevyn open-sourced it. Mostly because the possible applications were so terrifying—like smashing a planet from across the galaxy—that it created a boom in anti-teraport defenses. Even so, its release started a galaxy-wide set of wars.
• April Fools' Day: April 2001 did not have an extended April fool's joke, despite having a rather unusual sequence where the main characters are mysteriously captured and killed, confusing the narrator when said characters turned up alive the next week^note foreshadowing the gate-clone arc. Next year, the author did a conventional April Fools' comic by resurrecting a dead character^note foreshadowing the laz'r'us project.
• Are We Getting This?: "Are you getting all this?" "Are you kidding?". When you have a crisis where a character earns the name "Longshoreman Of The Apocalypse", you had better hope someone is filming.
  A lone figure stands unbuffeted at the edge of the hole. In the shadow of the mighty ship, and at the heart of the Maelstrom.
  He is The Longshoreman Of The Apocalypse, and at his command this apocalypse is drawn to a crushing end.
  ...He is going to make the news.
• Army of Lawyers: The Partnership Collective.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • The crimes Kevyn could hypothetically be tried for include: treason, high treason, and grand spamming. However, in the 31st century spammers are held in the same contempt as pedophiles so it's a subversion.
    Kevyn: Hey, the only charge they can make stick is the spamming.
    Ceeta: You need to capture some moral high ground that sits outside of artillery range.
  • The future equivalent of DUI carries the death penalty because you have to be completely sober to modify the vehicle to make it possible to use manual mode while under the influence (of anything, up to and including Testosterone Poisoning). In some cases, this requires installing a manual mode. Quite understandable, however, since the consequences of screwing up while drunk are exponentially different when you're piloting a spaceship.
  • Played straight with a rounding error. Since the current list of crimes includes armed conquest and attempted genocide, rounding pi down to 3 seems like an especially trivial crime, even when you're charged by an AI.
• Art Evolution: The author knows it. He uses the term pretty much verbatim in his commentary on the first strip. Compare this with this... Or compare Captain Tagon's first appearance, and about six months later with his image approximately twelve years after the comic started.
• Artificial Afterlife: When Brain Uploading gets perfected, people start leaving backups of their minds. When they end up dying, virtual worlds are built to bring the backups up to date while their bodies are rebuilt. Many end up staying in them permanently.
• Artificial Gravity: Complete with exploration of technological consequences. Most notably, if you have perfect artificial gravity, then you already have weapons, shields, and a drive.
• Artificial Intelligence: They exist, and the rating system for them is discussed in strip 2001-02-26:
  Narrator: There is a rating system for artificial intelligences. It is a measurement of how fast they can think, and it spans the numbers between one and ten.
• Artificial Limbs: Frequently, and heavily lampshaded, though when possible they prefer to clone new parts/bodies.
• Artistic License - Firearms: Discussed and subverted when usually non-intellectual Nick criticizes a movie they've just watched:
  Kathryn: Look, the story required him to have white gold pistol grips. Otherwise his bullets wouldn't have hurt the ghosts. They explained that.
  Nick: But they didn't explain how he got white gold grips and a palm lock onto a police-issue GG-130.
  Kathryn: So... you'll let them make up rules about ghosts, but they can't make up rules about custom pistols?
  Nick: They can't make up rules about custom pistols because I already know those rules. (beat) Wait... are you saying they made up all that stuff about the ghosts?
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: Schlock's preferred sidearm is so insanely dangerous that using it at all is a grievous violation of gun safety. At one point he looks down the barrel of said gun so closely that his eye gets stuck.
• Artistic License – Physics: The Gatekeeper data archive is convinced that its observations have "quantum-locked" the galaxy, dooming all life to extinction unless the archive is destroyed.
  Petey: The only quantum mechanics models that work that way are found in poorly-researched science fiction.
  Archive: Location or velocity. Never both.
  Petey: I know where you are, and how fast you're moving. Because you're not an electron.
• Ash Face: In the 2004-06-07 strip, Tagon asks Kevyn if the fabber is fixed, and Kevyn points him to a recently-fabbed toaster, which Tagon tests out... and promptly gets a piece of burnt toast upside the face, leaving him with ash marks. He is not amused. (Kevyn, for his part, thinks that one of their "weapon" blueprints somehow got mixed into the "small appliances" blueprints.)
• Aside Glance: Ennesby is probably the most common source of these, but other characters use them from time to time.
• A Simple Plan: A small team from Tagon's Toughs go to get some data, legally, from a library. It ends with the library getting demolished and a hostage situation, from which the Toughs get paid to retrieve their own people.
• Assimilation Plot: The Fleetmind, but only for A.I.s and cyborgs.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership:
  • Played with. Tagon likes this trope; whenever one of his men does something stupid (such as blowing up the ship/fleet/planet), they usually get a promotion if they survived. At least, if they survived and blowing up the ship/fleet/planet did the job it was supposed to. Tagon himself is also subject to this. He's not the brightest on strategy or tactics (though far from the worst at it, either), but nobody in the company can beat him when it comes to one on one combat. He's extremely sharp in his own way when it comes to the things he's good at (which is, unsurprisingly, hurting people and breaking things), even if a little Book Dumb. He just looks dim next to the hyperintelligent warship A.I.s he tends to employ, or to Kevyn, one of the single greatest scientific minds in the galaxy.
  • Played straight with the Pugil sticks... Tagon defeated Schlock (who is three times his weight, five times his strength and can grow extra limbs at will) and Chisulo who is a several-tonne anthropomorphic elephant in hand to hand combat just to show the troops why he's in charge.
• Ass Shove:
  • In the 2001 Schlocktoberfest epilogue, it's stated that the smuggler that brought the diamond-beetle eggs aboard the Princess Tyola as a suppository.
  • Action Girl Elf once treated a reality TV host to this trope with one of his own cameras.
  • To handle the toxic atmosphere of Ghanj-Rho when the Toughs were going on a mission to get a new set of eyes for Schlock, they are given with a device to filter the toxins out of their blood. They're not, unlike one grunt thought, to be swallowed...
• Attack Drone: The armor Tagon and Pi are wearing have Shoulder Cannons that can be set to fly on their own and engage targets independently, instead of remain attached to the Powered Armor.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Ebbirnoth put together a degree in "xenokillology", the idea being that he'd know the weak points of all sorts of dangerous beings. Turns out to be pretty much A Degree in Useless: almost everything in the universe is vulnerable to "just shoot it a lot".
• Author Guest Spot
• Auto-Doc: There's one that gets souped up a bit and actually tries to improve its patients, sometimes successfully.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • After ten books of the crew having powered armor uniforms that let them fly, we finally get an explanation for why the Toughs don't just fly everywhere.
    Legs: Do you know what we call flying soldiers on the battlefield?
    Tino: Air support?
    Legs: Skeet.
  • After their first engagement using Oafan ships, the crew discovers that, since the ultra-valuable hulls were designed to repel gravitic attacks (rather than the kinetic or plasma weapons on most ships), they don't fare too well in the average firefight.
  • Schlock's preferred style of plasma gun is slow-charging, bulky, and underpowered compared to new models. He still favors it for the intimidation factor.
• Babies Ever After: The ending depicts Tagon and Murtaugh's clones with their son, and signs of another baby on the way.
• Back from the Dead: Several major characters have managed this, including Kevyn (multiple times, even), Xinchub, Petey, and Tagon (twice, if Time Travel Reset Buttons are counted).
• Back-to-Back Badasses: In Chelle's fantasy of fighting warships with nothing but Power Armor.
• Badass Boast: A token example from the resident Mad Scientist.
  Commander Andreyasn: I am commander Kevyn Andreyasn. I have shaped the destinies of worlds, of nations, of galaxies. I have created and destroyed. I have followed and I have led. I have known love, and loved back. I flirt with death for a living, and I have cheated the reaper more times than I can remember.
• Badass Fingersnap:
  • 2017-11-12: Chinook creates a big screen TV and snacks with one.
  • 2017-11-30: Commanding the removal of someone's arms with one.
• Bad Boss: The tough's Punch-Clock Villain attitude occasionally makes them work for one.
  Tagon: General, let's be clear on this. Working for you will be no different than working for any number of other clients I've personally detested. Granted, I'm growing unfond of you faster than any other fat, fascist warlord I've taken money from, but if the money is good I'm sure I can get over it.
  Ennesby: Word choice, sir. Word choice.
• Bad Omen Anecdote: Kevyn once did remind Lieutenant Ebbirnoth about military anecdotes on how the different branches handle the task at hand. They eventually got their punchline, of course.
• Beach Episode:
  • For about a week, two female characters (one of whom had a large boobs) talked in bikinis. This was lampshaded.
  • In another beach episode, the mercenary group was attacked by a shark, and was blamed by the local police for planting said shark.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension:
  • Between AI's, no less.
  • Subtly implied: the blunt Neeka points out the (mostly offscreen) sexual tension between Para and Aardman, and then in the potential couple's next appearance, one says they were arguing. The most obvious subject to argue about is She's Not My Girlfriend.
• The Battlestar: Battleplates, plus Ob'enn Superfortresses and pretty much every ship made by the psychobears (including their plate-class vessels that are unmatched by any other ship made of baryonic matter and have yet to be encountered by the heroes), everything the Toughs fly in after the Kitesfear is destroyed (with the exceptions of Serial Peacemaker and Bristlecone), Petey's Extortionator class ships, and every ship equipped with a fabber.
• Behind the Black: The Toughs frequently display their ignorance of the law, never seeming to notice their lawyer is present until Massey sticks his head into the frame.
• Bemoaning the New Body: After escaping her many crimes via transferring to a new body at the end of Book 15, Admiral Emm bemoans that her new body is a male, but tells Kowalski (who stole a different body) that she'll get used to it. Kowalski shoots her in the head and retorts that no, she's never gonna get used to it.
• Benevolent Dictator: At the end of Book 10 Tagon's Toughs accidentally get a cargo loading robot named LOTA^note Longshoreman of the Apocalypse elected King of the previously anarchic space station of Credomar. When they return in Book 11 they find that LOTA has assumed dictatorial control but has completely eliminated the famine they were meant to alleviate. And then LOTA teraports the interior of the station and all its residents onto an inhabitable moon so LOTA can use the superweapon the station was built to be without harming them, or putting them in the UNS' line of fire. Shortly after arriving in Book 11, Kevyn and Reverend Fobius have a conversation about the morality of dictatorship, with the Reverend arguing that dictators were not automatically evil, but dangerous.
• BFG: Schlock loves them so much that he once actually rejected a far more powerful and efficient version of his plasma cannon because it was dinky-looking. And because it lacked the "Ommminous Hummm".
• Big Book of War: The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. Remember kids: Pillage, then burn.
• Big, Bulky Bomb: Captain Tagon has to personally deliver warship-level ordnance that takes this form during an attempted boarding, in order to repel it. He didn't survive, though thankfully he was backed up.
• Big Damn Heroes: A few times.
  • Most of Tagon's Toughs are pinned down in enemy territory about to be overwhelmed, and their last chance at extraction just failed. Then this happens, allowing reinforcements to teraport in and arse-kicking to ensue, followed by mission success and 100% extraction.
  • The second to last panel here. Why, yes, now that you ask, that is a sentient polar bear in power armor.
• Big Dumb Object: Several storylines, such as Osiri and Eina-Afa, have revolved around ancient alien artifacts like these, usually with highly explosive consequences. Lampshaded in the title of the 16th book, "Big Dumb Objects", and its summary:
  Cans full of sky, balloons full of star, and rogue artificial planets full of death. They're not dumb, but poking them to see how they work just might be.
• Bilingual Bonus: Parnassus Dom has a building named "Barad Mellon". That's Sindarin for "Tower Friend". Fitting name for a guest-house.
• Binge Montage: The 'still-frame' montage version; Schlock gets drunk after a wedding, and Doctor Bunnigus openly wonders how. Given that at one point he cleaned out a base's PX/supply store, including "concentrated solvent" and the only effect was a misdemeanor "distribution of narcotics" charge... when he burped next to a squad mate... It's a good question.
  Bunni: You were out for four days, Sergeant.
  Schlock: Well, that explains why it's not very warm in this tub.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Although the main protagonists aren't totally amoral and will generally try to do what's right, they ultimately are mercenaries, and will do a lot for the sake of a contract. However, by and large their opposition in any given story is anything but concerned with "what's right".
• Black Box:
  • The "Magic Cryokit".
  • A lot of pieces of technology have "fiddly bits" on them with unclear or dubious purposes.
• Black Comedy: Let's see: jokes about characters "needing a hand" when they're reduced to a 'head-in-a-jar', one grunt complaining that having her legs blown off makes walking back to base difficult...
  The crayons pictured above are from the 32-color "Dogs of War" set from Cryhavocolor, and nice people wouldn't know that this set's high price comes from the FOG OF WAR GREY crayon. It costs more to manufacture, because it's carefully marbled with hidden chips of WHOSE BLOOD IS THIS RED and CEASE FRIENDLY FIRE IT'S US FOR THE LOVE OF YELLOW.
  
  Nope. Nice people wouldn't know that at all.
• Black Eyes of Evil: The special nanomachines used to create supersoldiers give black eyes to the enhanced form. It's not proof of evil, but it still violates several galactic conventions.
• Bland-Name Product: "Ovalkwik" chocolate milk mix, which Schlock eats right from the jar.
• Blob Monster: Carbosilicate Amorphs. Like Schlock.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • In this strip, the Reverend Theo Fobius mentions measuring sticks with evil clearly marked upon them, all of differing lengths, some of which measure in directions perpendicular to reality.
  • Sergeant Schlock's moral compass, which has the points "Eat it", "Kill it", "Make friends with it", and "Take a bath in it".
  • Different aliens are shown to have different standards of morality, and what they are willing to consider acceptable and unacceptable. For amorphs, like Schlock, the thought of putting lies into memories they plan to share is an affront. For Fobottir, desecrating a Tnulmph is considered a Berserk Button.
• Boarding Pod: Petey has been known to use this tactic on occasion.
• Body Horror: The Nano Weapons, which often start by using their Typhoid Mary carrier's body mass as raw materials to mass produce more nanobots before forcibly spraying them at anyone nearby. Those of a compatible makeup can then be used to repeat the process. Those who are incompatible instead have their muscles hijacked before their bodies are made to painfully tear themselves apart.
• Body Uploading: Implied in two parts, especially with how anything sent through the teleportation mechanism can be copied, like data: 2002-05-29: A computer system with memory buffers. 2002-05-30: That computer system needing to scan the information of people being teleported by Cool Gates.
• Bond One-Liner: When Kathryn freaked out and reverted to her earlier training, she had a good one.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: In book 13, the UNS, led by Admiral Emm on the Morokweng, decide to takeover Oisri to use as a weapon against Petey. Despite warnings from the man running the operation that their Plan A would not work, they chose to go ahead with it anyway instead of just rolling in on a battleplate, blowing the Toughs out of the sky, and seizing the whole planet. Instead, they choose to use RED#1 to create supersoldiers of all the modified Gavs. Supersoldiers that are unarmed and are going up against a company of power-suited, highly trained, extremely competent mercenaries loaded for bear. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't work out.
  • Worse even than that, they very nearly did win; faced with the fact that all of their clients were irretrievably compromised, the Toughs defaulted on their contract and were preparing to bug out. Then, the supersoldiers decided to take the one Gav who didn't transform as a hostage, and Tagon's conscience kicked in...
• Boring, but Practical: While archiving the billions of Oafan memory-foils searching for interesting technology, Para is very excited to find an Oafan scientist who catalogued the crypts.
  Elf: [deadpan] You found a librarian.
  Para: You need to throw a lot more confetti when you say that.
• Bowel-Breaking Bricks:
  • From a discussion between Thurl and Kevyn:
    Thurl: The metaphor monitor indicates that Ennesby has vented his virtual bowels.
    Kevyn: I can see that, but where'd the virtual bricks come from?
    Narrator: Goodnight, kids!
  • In another strip, in a conversation with King Xinchub in his bathroom:
    Petey: [...] I was going to employ Tagon and company to extract you, but they declined. Apparently they'd rather see you dead. (Beat) You look like you're thinking maybe the plumbing in here needs to accommodate flushed bricks.
• Boxed Crook: The entire company becomes this in the book "Under New Management", doing "dirty" jobs for General Xinchub in exchange for not having an assortment of criminal charges thrown at them and the mercenary company's license to operate be revoked. The events of the next book, "The Blackness Between", document how they ultimately got out from under Xinchub's thumb.
• Brain Bleach:
  • In this strip, Colonel Ceeta is in desperate need of it after reading a sample of Ennesby's Weapons-Grade Vocabulary.
    Ceeta: My stomach is in my throat right now. It's trying to spit acid on the parts of my brain that remember reading his message.
  • And then we have this one where Kevyn and Dr. Bunnigus see a naked Xinchub clone (It Makes Sense in Context).
  • 'Chelle wants to use an opportunity to wipe the memories of her clarinet lessons.
• Brass Balls: In this strip, Petey attributes these to the Qlaviql ship captain that used his unarmed ore freighter to destroy a frigate wielding a powerful plasma cannon. Unfortunately for the complement, the captain lost those in the Secession Wars, 60 years prior to the depicted scene.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: From strip 2000-11-10:
  Narrator: Apologies all around for the Mormons and the Irish (and Irish Mormons). <WHEW>
• Breaking the Bonds: Jud mentioned in his memoirs that he realized his bonds were made of toilet paper and were easily broken. He didn't say that it took 15 minutes to free himself.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Characters often grip the edge of panels, occasionally address the reader, and otherwise act on the panels or their framing.
  • One time the Toughs fired a plasma lance through the border of a frame.
  • Kevyn meeting his creator, literally, has got to take the cake..
    Kevyn: Are you killing me?
    Howard: No.
    Kevyn: Oh, goo-
    Howard: Blood loss is killing you.
  • Schlock swings a Chainsaw for an attack, and the tip shreds the comic border in the process.
• Breast Plate: Tagon switches Breya's armor order to one that looks more... prominent. She does not appreciate this.
  Thurl: I had no idea women's power armor was sold like this.
• Brick Joke: Quite a few, since the author has enough experience to know he can pull this off.
  • A fan-sim ending of the X-Files. Eleven years and nine months.
  • In the "A Hand of Acey's" storyline, the Evvi-Bot is a miracle of modern science. Yep, miracle.
  • One of the more notable ones is started here and hit again a year and four days later here.
  • "They committed suicide when they saw me coming."
  • A bit of Schlock Merchandise (strictly in-universe) is mentioned here, and brought up again here. It gets re-used a few years later, here.
  • Part of Jud Shafter's interaction with Schlock is described as being from his memoirs. Close to 9 years later, he appears to be signing his published memoirs.
  • That is a very insensitive and unfunny April fools' joke in 2002. But guess who invented these nifty things our Heroes find October 2011.
  • In one strip, Kevyn's glasses are revealed to be specially made to allow the user to see certain invisible spectra, such as infra-red. Cue December 2nd 2011, where Schlock tries them on.
  • Elf the modern Goddess of War.
  • Tagon's dubious misdirection strikes back, from the unexpected side.
  • Pi getting creative With his loadout supplies.
  • A vat of hydroponic watermelons is mentioned in book 12, as a means to properly stimulate nanite growth. Come the end of the book, check out what's in the background...
  • "Flagrantay Delicious" is mentioned as either a polite word for sex or (jokingly) a great name for a restaurant. Turns out it was a restaurant.
• Bring My Brown Pants: A great example in Book 2.
  Massey: Hi, I'm here to post bail for Sergeant Schlock, Private First Class Leelagaleeni-lelenoleela, and Corporal Andy Thnempha.
  (Dramatic Gun Cock times 3)
  Massey: I'm sorry, I think you misunderstood me. What I said was "May I use your bathroom please?"
• Bulletproof Vest: Most of the characters wear body armor. This comic points out that body armor is only useful if you get shot in an armored spot.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • A group of alien fraternity brothers decide to pick on Nick. Even though they don't know he's wearing low-profile armor and has backup, the fact that he's twice their size and built like a tank would indicate this is a terrible idea.
    Nick: Are you pickin' a fight wif' me?
    Narrator: Anyone with half a brain would know that this question, asked in this tone of voice, by a man of this size, has exactly one correct answer.
    Enireth Frat Boy: Yes I am. What are you going to do about it?
    Narrator: That was not it.
  • Damico P'Stoqye assumes that Petey is all meaningless bluster since he isn't willing to start a war with Sol to fight her. She ends up getting kidnapped from her home and delivered into his hands with only the slightest amount of effort from him.
  • Wing Marshall Takka Besti subverts a very generous deal for his people in an attempt to steal everything the Toughs have. When that fails, he mocks Chinook when she calls to threaten him, and only has a few seconds of terror when he realizes his mistake before she blows him up from halfway across the galaxy.
  • Shiplord Srabben:
    • He is a militia captain in a converted freighter who believes that he can easily handle the small warship and two military freighters he's facing. The narration points out that if he bothered to consult any publicly available vessel classification tables, he'd see that any one of the ships outclasses his entire fleet^note Drawing from the RPG: While his dismissal of the Cynthetic Certainty could be forgiven as he does theoretically slightly outgun a stock model, the big gun mounted on the hull should make it clear it's anything but. The Maxim 39 is based on a famously moddable chassis, the vast majority of which really are harmless but which any captain worth his salt would be aware are designed to be easily converted into a warship variant. Misidentifying the Breath Weapon (one of the most powerful and famous warships in the setting) for a freighter suggests he's just stupid.. The Toughs, by contrast, note that their point defenses can handle the enemy weapons indefinitely, and are mostly worried about the legal ramifications when they get bored and start shooting back. A lot of this is explained (and the legal issues expunged) when it turns out that he's just a low-rent pirate in a stolen ship with a vastly inflated opinion of himself.
    • Worse, Srabben triples down on his arrogance after the Toughs board his ship and have his crew completely at their mercy, practically daring Corporal Gugro (Whom he thinks is the Toughs' commanding officer) to make good on this threat to rip his arms off. Gugro eventually obliges.
• Bystander Syndrome:
  • The characters are mercenaries, after all. Priority number one is to stay alive long enough to get paid. Priority two is to get paid.
    Breya: What about priority three? Feel good about yourself?
    Tagon: Do what I do: Learn to feel good about getting paid.
  • Petey on the other hand is very much against this philosophy, which is largely why he declared war on the Ob'enn, and eventually the entire Andromeda galaxy.
    Petey: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
    Tagon: I haven't heard that one before.
• Call-Back:
  • Hell hath no fury like a woman in power armor.
  • Seeing treasure maps in the hieroglyphs.
  • I don't think your Dorothy trick will work again. Besides... he won't grow bits back like Schlock did.
  • "Do you know what they call flying soldiers on the battlefield?" "Skeet."
  • "Do you remember what I did to the cops who said that about us?"
  • "I want to go for a walk.
  • "So all the fat men..." "...Could have been replaced with a deck full of hydroponic watermelon."
  • "Soulless warmonkey" Well... it has no head and is gluing hand grenades to helmets.
  • "No, but a grateful tyrant can sweep a lawsuit under the rug..."
• Calvin Ball: a.k.a. Munchkin-clix of Cataan.
• Came Back Wrong: Sort of. When Doctor Bunnigus decides to restore Vog, a ten-million-year-old former member of the Toughs to life, she learns that most of his memories were wiped by his captor's experiments, "rebooting" him to his far younger self...and ten million years ago, Vog was apparently a violently xenophobic jerkass.
• Cannot Kill Their Loved Ones: When Kaff Tagon's girlfriend and mother were infected with a Grey Goo weapon, his father Karl ordered him to firebomb them all, but Kaff hesitated long enough for the nanomachines to spread. Hypocritically, Karl blamed him for years, even though Karl had the same incendiary grenades and didn't do the deed either.
  Kathryn: You wanted somebody else to do it for you, but the only person around was your son, cut from the same loving cloth. You couldn't firebomb your wife, but you expected your son to be able to firebomb his mother?
• Can't Default to Murder: Schlock often has to be specifically ordered to not kill and eat anyone, though since the characters are mercenaries, and much of the time Violence Really Is the Answer, this is usually just temporary.
• Cardiovascular Love: The last panel of 2002-11-24 has a marriage with a Unsound Effect "KISS", surrounded by pink Heart Symbols.
• Carnivore Confusion: The common pets and food animal "kreelies" are the same biological species as the sophonts known as "Kreely", minus a bacteria that allows sapience. (According to the RPG they were already widespread as a food animal before encountering the bacteria.) The Kreely don't see any problem with this, even enjoying the taste of kreelies themselves, and in fact their own planetary government runs the kreely market. The Toughs not being aware of this distinction drove one early arc.
• Cassandra Truth: Usually characters don't believe when someone flat-out tells them the truth. For example, Breya and her cyborg husband Haban:
  Breya: Everybody lies to me, and the first people to do it are the people paying my salary. I just wish we could have a little more honesty.
  Haban: Okay. I used to be part of the Fleetmind, but I resigned because of conflict of interest.
  Breya: You're just saying that to get a laugh out of me.
  Haban: Which shows that there's no practical difference between a truth you won't believe and a lie that you will.
• Catching Some Z's: 2008-10-22 strip: The "Zzzzz..." in the last panel, to show that Captain Tagon fell asleep.
• Caught in a Snare: When the Toughs land on a planet only to discover it's home to a sentient stone-age race.
• The Cavalry: Discussed in this strip by the narrator, as Captain Sorlie and the Xeno Team come to the rescue of Captain Murtaugh's group, after the latter got trapped during their attempt to escape from hostile forces.
• Centrifugal Gravity: Credomar and Mel-One (Moon-Earth Lagrange point 1) both use Centrifugal force to keep people on the deck. The sheer inefficiency of the design is lampshaded in the former case and the latter is justified by the station pre-dating Terran use of Artificial Gravity, and maintained in such a manner (minus a station crew module given artificial gravity) for historical purposes.
• Cerebus Retcon: Subverted. The early gag of the "magic cryokit" modified by the Toughs' former doctor using his illegal research, including dumping his own memories into it, takes on surprising seriousness in light of later revelations about the doctor, his role in certain black projects, and what those projects are capable of. Also related, the apparent throwaway joke at the time that the doctor's corpse was missing unspecified parts when it was brought in for the bounty; it's not until more than six years later that we find out that said illegal research is capable of rebuilding people from parts of their dead body. Subverted in that it's done so subtly and over such a long period that it appears to be less a retcon than incredibly long-range foreshadowing.
• Chainsaw Good:
  • After juggling with chainsaw-through-butter metaphor for 3 pages, got Elf swinging a "Chainsaber V".
  • Schlock wields a chainsaw as a weapon in this strip, Breaking the Fourth Wall in the process.
• Chased by Angry Natives: Happens in Zoojack station. A subversion, though, as is quickly discovered when the natives find out their quarry are intelligent.
  Native: There will be no fight. We were hunting, and now we are not.
• Chekhov's Armoury: The Massively Parallel arc has had so many Chekhov's Guns left lying around that first-time readers have probably forgotten half of them before they once more became relevant.
• Chekhov's Gun: Used repeatedly, without mercy. In fact, any throwaway one-liner can turn out to be Chekhov's Gun 200 strips later.
  • Prime example: Cocked here, fired a month later.
  • The Long-gun of the Apocalypse is introduced in chapter 3 of Massively Parallel, with commentary on how historically, the introduction of any weapon is followed by a situation where that weapon needs to be used. At the climax of the storyline, it gets fired.
  • Yet another rapid-fire burst of gunfire: The end of "The Body Politic" arc had the Toughs' collective memories wiped in order to prevent them from being executed by the UNS in order to cover up secrets. The deal also included a complete cutoff from Petey. Two arcs later, near the end of "Massively Parallel", Petey bails them out as mentioned in the above mentioned literal 'Gun', and it's only Schlock's circumvention of the mindwipe rearing its head that makes Tagon listen to anything Petey has to say. Like the Toughs themselves, Howard sure loves his guns...
  • Then we're given this strip that details what the Toughs found out to have their memory wiped in the above example. This becomes the entirety of the plot of "Random Access Memorabilia."
  • Ultimate example, a tasteless Aprils Fools Joke becomes the Plot for over two whole books nearly five years later!
  • Ennesby is seen with an eyepatch in the present day. In a later flashback to the month before, Tagon threatened to poke out an eye if Ennesby's plan goes pear-shaped. The eye is actually lost due to enemy fire when the plan goes up in flames, making this a Red Herring instead.
  • When first boarding Haven Hive Schlock conspicuously doesn't deny that he can fire his plasma cannon without taking it out of his mouth. Five-hundred and twenty one strips later he proves that he can.
  • Sunshine is just another weapon, indeed.
  • In Howard's best self-aware fashion, this strip literally uses "CHEKHOV!" as the Unsound Effect for the first firing of the ship's main weapon, a gun which was introduced in the first chapter of this book and is just now being fired in the last one. (Also including an Pun.)
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • See the koala-like Ob'enn here? Turns out he was pretty important after all.
  • Jud Shafter. Appears here, reappears here, given the gun here, and fired here.
• Circus Episode: In the "Barsoom Circus Command" arc (Book 11, part 2) Schlock's squad infiltrates a circus on Mars.
• Civil War: The United Nations of Sol is divided into many factions with varying levels of ruthlessness and sanity. The conflicts between them form a major plot thread throughout the story, and the UNS has been one good shove away from civil war for centuries. In particular, this is why the Laz'r'us Project is kept such a tight secret. If knowledge that one faction of the UNS has been experimenting with Nanomachines capable of allowing agelessness, rewriting peoples' minds, or even genocide were to get out, it would be enough to finally trigger it. In Book 15, events start to near a boil with the public announcement of a more-benign version of Laz'r'us and then a False Flag Operation and Staged Populist Uprising by unidentified outside forces. Ultimately, the civil war is only narrowly averted.
• Clarke's Third Law: Parodied in the Maxim 24: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistiguishable from a big gun"
  • Credomar is the most straight example, as well as every other long-gun in the series
  • The Teraport can be used to dominate warfare and was the cause of numerous mass extinctions when a suitable counter was not devised.
  • The core generator gives Petey pretty much infinite resources, allowing him notably to teraport through interdictions.
  • The ring of mirrors around earth, used to reflect sunlight for lighting, causes Schlock to immediately think of how it can be weaponized. So of course it doesn't take a week
  • The anihilation plants serve as energy sources, artificial gravity, shielding, motorization, and of course, weaponry.
  • The Nanomachines serve to heal wounds, and later even recover from clearly deadly situations, but can also be incredibly dangerous if left unsupervised, possibly leading to Grey Goo situations.
  • The gatekeeper's gate-cloning mechanism is capable of creating 900 million Gavs, but just as many torpedoes and other ordnance to wipe out a galactic fleet. Of course, they can also simply blow up the star nearby to make it easier.
• *Click* Hello: Given the amount of guns floating around, this is a favorite of nearly everyone. Even the AIs, who can sometimes do this with tanks.
• Clones Are People, Too: All clones are considered real people with little debate. The surviving gate clones who were freed were given status as legal individuals, including every Gav, who was duplicated nearly a billion times. There were most likely political ramifications, but this didn't affect the Toughs, so it wasn't expanded on. It was later established that a clone is considered the same person as the original for anything done before cloning, but for anything after that they're separate people. One unlucky gate clone tried to get out of a trial by claiming he couldn't be tried twice for the same crime, only for the judge to agree - since the crime took place before the cloning, and the original has already been convicted, there's no need for a trial and they can just skip straight to the execution.
• Clone Angst:
  • After a new Schlock is cloned after the original's death, the clone is OK for a while, but later goes through an identity crisis.
  • They eventually develop the ability to clone new bodies with the memories of the dead up to the point of their last backup. After the trouble they had with Schlock they make a very clear distinction that the clone and the original are different people; you are the person that did everything you remember, but you are not the person who did whatever happened afterwards. This is explicitly because it was either that or give up on the ideas of agency and free will. This gets awkward when they resurrect Tagon, and he finds out they also built a memorial for the one who died in a Heroic Sacrifice (and was only 45 minutes different).
  • The actual reaction of the Gavs varies wildly. Enough of them have an identity crisis to form an entire corporation dedicated to diversification, but others have no issue with it at all to the point that they suspect the ones that do have had their minds tampered with.
• Cloning Body Parts: Prosthetics are generally temporary and only issued when cloning tanks are unavailable or the HMO doesn't cover them.
• Clothes Make the Superman: Even the standard low-profile powered uniform practically turns a soldier into a Flying Brick. You should see what the actual armor is like.
• Coca-Pepsi, Inc.: From Ovalkwik to Samsony, several formerly competing companies have merged, as revealed by their portmanteau names.
• Colonized Solar System: The solar system has been extensively settled, with underwater cities on Europa, mile-high cities on a terraformed Luna, a terraformed Mars and Venus, and more.
• Color Blind Confusion: Once Lieutenant Pi attempted to disarm some rogue ordinance by pressing the green button on his remote, and not the red detonation button. Cut to his head in a jar saying "Nobody told me I was red-green colorblind."
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: In an in-universe example, Lt. Shodan suspects that a bunch of new recruits charging ahead and blazing away with their guns were prevented from shooting one another only because they were wearing the same color.
• Comically Missing the Point: The response of the author in this strip to complaints about how the story is being told doesn't focus on the story telling, but instead on the elaboration of the metaphor "like a hot knife through butter."
• Comic-Book Time: An early strip is dated at 3096, with the last available in-universe date as of the end of 2014 being the week before the turn of the 32nd century within the setting, three in-universe years for over 14 real life ones. Even more pronounced in the later books, where it can take years of real life time to go through months of in-universe time.
• Constrained Writing: From 2002-04-19, an ad needs to pack a lot in 15 words. The result, discussed in 2002-04-20, involves the words "secret mission".
  Breya: The want-ad you run needs to be tailored to the resources they've got. The compensation range should be generous, but not so outlandish as to arouse suspicion. Try to hint at adventure without making it sound too risky. Add a bit of mysterious flavor to it, for good measure.
  Jaksmouth: Maximum length is 15 words, admiral. I can't do all that in 15 words.
• Continuity Nod: Ennesby, in the form we know him (as a single character, instead of pretending to be four different members of a boy band, the New Sync Boys (from whence Ennesby gets his name, NSB)), first linked up with Tagon's Toughs on the strip from July 11, 2000. Thirteen years later, on August 30, 2013, his abandoning his career as a boy band returned to bite him when Para Ventura, a very young member of the Toughs, informs him coldly that she cried for a week when it was announced in the news that the "New Sync Boys" were dead.
• Cosmic Flaw: At one point there was a minor distortion of teraport mechanics...which turned out to be a symptom of the Milky Way being pinched off into its own little universe, and then slowly destroyed from the inside out. It came very close to destroying the whole galaxy, and would have if if it weren't for a bizarre loophole in the physics of the anomaly.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: Kevyn uses his blood to write a warning for Captain Tagon, about his antimatter grenade epaulet being armed, as the same injuries that gave him blood to write with also prevented him from being able to speak.
• Crash-Into Hello: 2017-10-22: Flinders and Kaff Tagon's collision was called a Meet-Cute.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Der Trihs fills the bill. As Dr. Bunnigus says, "That explains why Tagon has had you on his staff all these years. Sure, you may act like a bumbling, brain-damaged coward, but you're a tactical genius." But since the "genius" part came from a botched military experiment, once he figures it out, John quits the mercenary game.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Four Parkata Urbatsu practicing punks versus one combat experienced merc captain itching for revenge after the Fork Incident. It was not a fair fight.
• Danger in the Galactic Core: The galactic core is mostly exploding suns and black holes, which makes it perfect ground for the experiments of the Gatekeepers. They eventually start up a zero-point energy generator using the core itself, which was actually designed as a bomb by dark matter entities from Andromeda who wanted to destroy the Milky Way. Petey takes control of it and declares himself God.
• Darker and Edgier: The annual Schlocktoberfest season tends to see a more sinister arc. Zig-zagged in general, with dramatic moments and lighter arcs taking turns.
• Darkest Hour:
  • The aftermath of the Battle of Oisri. The Toughs' ship is destroyed with no prospect of another, a high-powered member has betrayed the company's trust, the UNS is angrier at them than ever, and Petey has decided that they aren't a force for good anymore and won't help them do anything but retire. All that's left of Tagon's Toughs is some bug hunt that Schlock wants to go on...
  • On a galactic scale, the final battle against the Pa'anuri. Petey can hold them back no longer, and they have advanced so much they even have their own warships, which can turn planets into mini-stars through gravitics and launch them at homeworlds to extinguish all life they can find; the invasion begins mere minutes after Petey's warnings. Then one last Long-gun shot from Andromeda, charged for weeks, damages Petey's galactic core generators, leaving him with unstable energy to use now or never and an incapacity to get more in any reasonable timespan. All he can do is send a small force over to Andromeda, and hope it works. And knowing no other force that can do the job in such small numbers, he's forced to strand Tagon's Toughs in the middle of a whole galaxy's worth of hostile territory...
• Dead End Job: The position of explosives expert in Tagon's Toughs has a relatively high turnover rate: So far it's killed at least two Mauve Shirts who have held it (Kevyn, their unofficial expert, has also died repeatedly). Many of the grunts believe the position to be cursed, although its current holder doesn't seem too fussed.
• Deadpan Snarker: Multiple:
  • Everyone except the absolute dumbest characters.
  • Subverted and parodied on many occasions: "This is the punchline" or "I don't want a punchline" are recurring throughout the series (and might make this one a Running Gag in its own right).
• Death Is Cheap: Besides the fact that medical technology is so advanced that anything short of brain damage is survivable with the right equipment, a number of deaths have been reversed due to nanotechnology, mind backups and time travel (namely Kevyn, Schlock, Tagon, Petey, and a few others). Generally, a character isn't dead proper until the end of the book.
• Declining Promotion: Warrant Officer Thurl says that the moment he's offered a commission he'll resign.
• Deconstructor Fleet
• Defiant Strip: Dr. Bunnigus, who was genetically engineered to be an exotic dancer and paid for medical school by stripping, manages to break a corrupt starport security guard by complying with his request for a strip search.
• A Degree in Useless: A minor character apparently studied "comparative Gal-West lit, with an emphasis on memetic Terranism" before working fast food, and subsequently becoming cook's assistant for the Toughs. Subverted later on; her knowledge proves invaluable several times, and she is later promoted into the officer corps so that the company can make better use of her expertise.
• Delusions of Local Grandeur: Frank Hannibal from the Credomar space habitat is the anchor chief of the station's news network, and as such has an overinflated ego, naturally expects to need no introduction and thinks himself the voice of the people. Mostly he just goes out of his way to insult and then demonize the Toughs in the news after they don't give him the respect he thinks he's due, making their job to distribute food and other necessities more difficult than it already was. LOTA is quick to put him in his place after LOTA takes over as King of Credomar.
  LOTA: Now please stop pretending that you are the voice of the people. You just happen to be loud, and wearing a microphone.
• Democracy Is Bad: Multiple:
  • Kevyn Andreyasn just wants to Save The Galaxy, but the UNS just wants Blackmail material. Nothing Can Save Us Now except a Godlike AI (with the help of some trustworthy Private Military Contractors).
    Kevyn: It's always about advantage, and never about the greater good. Government is useless for anything outside of warfare, and is only barely competent at that.
  • Later, there's Credomar, a habitat founded on the principles of democracy that was completely corrupt and near anarchy with at least six competing factions by the time the Toughs got there. They ended up electing a robot dictator who actually got things done.
    LOTA: A democracy? Tell us, when was the last time the results of a free election here in Credomar were adhered to?
    Frank Hannibal: [silent]
    Lota: Now please stop pretending that you are the voice of the people. You just happen to be loud, and wearing a microphone.
• Description Cut:
  • Seen here:
    Cop 1: What makes Timmons think that perp of his is hiding in here?
    Cop 2: He escaped into the river and he looks like a giant turd. Waste-water treatment is a logical place to look. Besides, he's a criminal. Dark places for dark souls.
    [cut to their target sitting under a tree in a sunlit park, a happy smile on his face]
  • And here.
    Murtaugh: Schlock will have to manage things at the villa without us. Besides, Doctor Bunnigus is there to provide him with a functioning moral compass.
    [cut to the villa]
    Doc Bunnigus: It's probably nothing, but I still want you to be ready for brunch at the zero-evidence buffet.
    Schlock: Talk, kill, eat. Got it.
• Destroy the Security Camera: A boarding party teleports between enemy lines and starts shooting out the many, many security cameras to hide their approach from the terrorists in the command center. One of the terrorists immediately recognizes the pattern; the other...
  Tro: And there goes the 100-meter camera along the same approach. And now the 75 is gone. Oops! And the 50! This is annoying. We won't know if anyone is sneaking up on us.
• Destructive Teleportation: As described in strip 2001-03-24, teraporting:
  Kevyn: The teraport requires very little real mass, and can be carried in your hand, It perforates space-time with quadrillions of tiny worm-holes. Because you can carry it, you can depart from any point in the universe. You'll travel faster, and be able to go places where there are no wormgates.
  Kevyn: But because you can't fit through these tiny worm-holes in one piece, the teraport converts your ship into a standing gravitic wave, and then splits that into gravitic packets that can be transmitted through the tiny wormholes.
• Determinator: Howard Tayler, the author. Nothing can stop him from updating every single day. Not injuries, not software glitches, nothing. Even a transformer explosion at the server farm where the comic is hosted that took out two walls, several websites, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment did not stop Schlock Mercenary's update schedule; he just set up a temporary site until they got the main host back up. On one occasion, the comic was up several hours late. Howard apologized, and the strip was up by End of Business that day. One occasion in eleven years. And with the revelation on his blog that he had been suffering from depression all this time... Well, let us just say then that the respect due to him for publishing a strip daily no matter what is going off the scale.
• Deus est Machina:
  • Seemingly any AI should it gain enough processing power. Lunesby, the accidental offspring of a holographic Boy Band and Luna's millennium-old filing system immediately decides to start streamlining the moon's labyrinthine bureaucracy. LOTA (the Longshoreman Of The Apocalypse) does pretty much the same thing on Credomar. On the other hand, Petey is suicidally insane when the Toughs pick him up, but eventually becomes the core of the Fleetmind, a gestalt of countless Battleship Class A.I.s into one, big, (kinda) omniscient Uber-AI... that immediately decides to appoint itself guardian of the Milky Way Galaxy.
  • This could be Howard's idealistic side shining through the series' prevalent cynicism; organics are flawed, but machines just want to do what they're designed to do - make their creators' lives better. And given the opportunity, that's just what they'll do.
• Deus Exit Machina: According to comments by the author, it's hard to keep Petey's near omnipotence from slicing through a perfectly tangled Gordian-knot plot. This may explain why Petey was given a reason to avoid contact with the mercenaries at the end of Book 9 (they were made to remember him having abandoned them by a UNS rewriting of their memories), and in Book 11 he has to use all his god-like power to fight the Pa'anuri of Andromeda and cannot spare any to act as Deus ex Machina for the protagonists.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • One of the most common plot complications. For example, the gang didn't see a rogue Ob'enn hijacking the PDCL coming. Petey didn't see the UNS making the mercs think he'd abandoned them coming. You get the idea.
  • The narrator goes so far as to say, at one point, that good intel for any non-AI-directed military mission usually amounts to, "Crap, I think they heard us coming."
• Digital Avatar: Characters tend to have their digital avatars match what's also shown in meatspace, whether it's two A.I.s talking to eachother, a human hacking its way into an AI-AI conversation by lowering clock speed, or the many physical sophonts that get uploaded into a digital computer to avoid a galactic disaster.
• The Dinosaurs Had It Coming: Petey points this out, and a later strip shows they did see the asteroid coming... far too late:
  Ennesby: Why do Earth people name their largest spacecraft after craters and comets?
  Tagon: Lots of people name weapons after scary things.
  Ennesby: Nope. "Extinct people don't have space programs."
• Discriminate and Switch: In the 2004-06-06 strip, a wonderful example when Tagon fires a pair of insectoid soldiers immediately after their eggs hatch, without giving much reason for it. When the Reverend chews him out for his apparent intolerance, he defends himself by saying essentially that a warship is not a place to raise a family: "It's not that they're weird, or that they're mating, or that they lay eggs. It's that they laid the eggs, and the eggs hatched, and now someone has to watch kids."
• Dismembering the Body: The hacked security drone that assassinated General Xinchub then spent fifteen minutes methodically incinerating his head so his brain couldn't be preserved and put in a clone body. It's still not enough.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Schlock Mercenary plays with this a lot, although it's often subverted by the fact that in military operations, "overwhelming force" is not at all an unreasonable place to start from. One in-universe saying is "There is no overkill. There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload.'" A few of the straighter examples of the trope:
  • A reality TV host for a glamour show makes fun of Elf while she's shopping. His miniature camera ends up somewhere that medical help is needed to remove it.
  • A planetary legislature hasn't allocated funds to replace their orbital defenses, a couple months after god-like AI Petey defended them from attempted orbital bombardment. Petey finds this irresponsible, and exiles them to the Andromeda galaxy.
  • The Obenn at one point decide to grind one of the protagonists into sausage. Because he was insufficiently polite during his interrogation.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Happens frequently around Elf, Breya, and Doctor Bunnigus, and sometimes weaponized by them in return.
  Doctor Bunnigus: I'll only hand myself over to a real torturer. A scientist who knows the art, and who has a taste for a challenge.
  Hap: You won't be much of a challenge.
  Doctor Bunnigus: Hah! Says the guy who can't even make eye contact lest he lose track of my heaving bosom. You've been getting stupider ever since you tried to hit puberty and puberty hit back.
• The Ditz: A number of clients, especially those from the government.
• Don't Explain the Joke: Get it?
• Don't Ask, Just Run:
  • Maxim 3 of the Seventy Maxims for Maximally Effective Mercenaries reads "An ordnance technician at a dead run outranks everybody." This is Truth in Television at explosives-producing facilities. In the strip giving us the maxim the ship's demolitions tech has set up perimeter mines designed to trigger in the presence of large heavily armed vehicle (the fail-safe was left as a project for the junior officer). Cue the large, armed robot who happens to be the team's assignment to protect...
  • In the book The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance, Breya's starship was being repaired in a stolen-and-resold Ob'enn fabbery. A pair of Ob'enn Thunderhead Superfortress-class ships were bearing down on them, causing Breya and Kevyn - on board the ship - to hit the throttles and tear out of there in the hopes of at least DISTRACTING the attackers. Aboard the fabbery, Warrant Officer Thurl sees the ship leave, and immediately heads for the lifeboat at a dead run, encouraging the rest of the engineering squad to keep up. He comments, "If the Athens left like there's no tomorrow, then there probably won't be."
    Crewman: So when that little voice in your head says "run," you just run?
    Thurl: Do you see these gray hairs, kid?
  • Lt. Pibald may be certifiably crazy, yet he knows what it means if Sgt. Schlock suddenly bounces by, a plasma cannon in grasp and not stopping for explanation:
    Pi: Wait, are we having a Maxim 2 moment?
    Narrator: Maxim 2: A sergeant in motion outranks a lieutenant who doesn't know what's going on.
    Pi: (running after Schlock) Stupid, Pi, stupid! If you have to ask, then yes, you're having a Maxim 2 moment!
• Double Standard: The standard outcome of an accidental insult or reflexive lechery from a male mercenary to a female mercenary is for her to break several of his bones. There's never any repercussions, and none of the men have ever assaulted any of the women.
• Dramatic Irony: In the "false memories" plot the doctor and reverend are crushed to learn that their memories of their wedding are false, and they aren't really married. The reader knows that they are really married; the actual wedding was part of what was written over, and they had it performed specifically to make sure that would be the case.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Karl Tagon's comment after telling the heartbreaking story of the death of most of his family to a weaponized nanomachine attack: "They don't make bottles big enough for this kind of empty."
• Duct Tape for Everything:
  • Seems to be Pronto's favourite method of restraining prisoners, and is stated as such explicitly:
    Kevyn: Does the Serial Peacemaker even have a brig?
    Tagon: All I need is Corporal Pontucci and some duct tape.
  • Kevyn apparently took notes, later used when he takes command after Tagon's death:
    Captain Kevyn: General, would you like to join me for the unwrapping of Pharaoh Ductapamun and his embalmed pets?
  • An annotation notes that of the classic jury-rigging Holy Trinity of baling wire, Bondo, and Duct Tape, "Duct Tape has actually seen the most change during the intervening centuries. For instance, it can now safely be used to fasten and seal duct-work. Just be sure to lose the handy-dandy spool with the built-in tape cutter before it trims the tape just above your first knuckle."
  • Even useful for restraining nanomachine-based zombies.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: The Unioc commander in the arc beginning here. When faced with a Pa'anuri warship so massive its mass alone is sufficient to destabilized the orbit of an ice giant^note a planet about the size and composition of Neptune and fling it off into space, his only thought is to charge into a hopeless Last Stand with cameras broadcasting in hopes that someone out there is watching and can learn enough from his action to figure out how to destroy it.
• Dynamic Entry: A given, considering that they're mercenaries, and sometimes end up entering an already contested battlefield, but there can still be some noticeable moments:
  • One storyline has the Toughs fighting suborned JSC cops/military, and — while rescuing some tourists — Schlock enters the scene in the background... while airborne... and dual-wielding hammers.
  • A later storyline has Elf make a deliberately-showy entrance, since "Somebody has to be the first to showcase our new gear".
• Eager Rookie: The Toughs run into this problem and promptly extract the solution out of it:
  Tagon: You said most of the new recruits went charging down the hall, right? That's great! Enthusiastic cannon fodder like that just needs cautious leadership.
  Shodan: And where do I find that?
  Tagon: Promote everyone who hung back to corporal.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The early strip had a LOT more Fourth Wall humor, with characters frequently having discussions with the narrator and complaining to the artist. After the first few years of the strip that kind of thing faded away, with only occasional uses afterward with Kevyn in The Sharp End of the Stick, and the time immediately before Brad's being killed in the first Credomar arc.
  • In the first story arc, Schlock feels nauseous after drinking a 4-liter soda. Much later, amorphs are established as masters of biochemistry, able to digest anything short of Grey Goo.
  • Schlock is also seen early on collecting sexy magazines and ogling Breast Plates, when it's later firmly established that amorphs do not experience physical lust.
  • Early adventures were much shorter and self-contained than they would become in later years. It was originally common for a story to take a month or less; now they tend to run the length of a book, or approximately a full year of daily updates. It's one of the things that killed the once-annual "Schlocktoberfest," where the story would take a darker turn for the month of October; once storylines started getting longer, they just interrupted the flow.
  • Early on, starship AIs and skin-tight power-assist uniforms with flight capability were introduced as revolutionary novelties, but become entirely ubiquitous later on.
  • Tagon, very early on, had a rule about "No women in my command structure." This, alongside a bit of misogyny, was dropped.
• Ear Worm:
  • The Macarena has been banned dozens of times since its creation because it's proven to be catchy enough to literally be infectious. Even when you change the words. Not even LOTA is immune.
    Kevyn: Explosive mayhem would actually be safer than some of those showtunes you used, but that's beside the point.
• Easily Forgiven: Several times. Tagon's Toughs can be ruthless to people actively shooting at them, but when it comes to grudges they are rigidly pragmatic and accepting of loose allegiances. A surrendered enemy is usually let go, and if something horrible needs shooting and a person who did them wrong is nearby willing to take aim, they might grumble about it at first and need reassurance later on, but in the moment they'll usually hand them a big gun and let them join in. Several core members of the Toughs are people who were enemies, like Murtaugh, or even personally betrayed them in the past like Ventura and Chinook, but got folded back in once they were needed for a new crisis. Likewise, few other parties in the galaxy are unwilling to forgive if being stubborn is costlier.
  Murtaugh (on hiring her old firm, who the Toughs once stole from): "If they let a good grudge chase off better money, then they're not who we want."
• Easy Sex Change: One of the many possible modifications offered by GavCorps Diversity Engineering division.
  • Major personality modification was part of the package the subjects signed up for, which would probably make the transition rather less traumatising.
• Eating the Enemy: Sergeant Schlock routinely eats enemies he doesn't care to leave alive—or their ashes, if he had to shoot them first.
  • Or if they happen to be delicious.
• Edible Ammunition: "Come get pie!"
• Egocentric Team Naming: Appears to be popular among mercenaries. Tagon's Toughs (named after Kaff Tagon) and Pranger's Bangers (under Col. Drake Pranger) are notable examples. Breya Andreyasn originally intended to have the company renamed for her ("Breya's Bruins") after the Andreyasn siblings' buyout of the Toughs but ended up deciding otherwise...the company's business cards all had the Toughs name on them already. (This was the strip where Schlock made the Title Drop, as a proposed "compromise".)
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Paa'nuri are strange dark-matter creatures that can't be seen and threaten to destroy the galaxy. It takes advanced science and lots of collaboration to fight back.
• Electronic Telepathy: One of the relatively minor characters is from a species that evolved a natural form of this, specifically an organic radio transmitter/receiver. The one shown has a single consciousness split across two bodies, and with a little added hardware to enable communication via hyperspace nodes his range is extended to the point where he can pilot two separate tanks simultaneously with a level of tactical co-ordination that normally only an AI can manage.
  • The Esspererin, being essentially biolgical machines, have the ability to communicate via radio in addition to sound.
• Enemy Mine: Several times, most often with General Xinchub.
  Maxim 29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Most of the villains in the story don't actually consider themselves villains, which mostly makes their attempts at humanity even worse by comparison. Professor Pau is a particularly vile example, as he conducts medical experiments on abductees, but for "the greater good" as he sees it.
  Pau: They're happy. They are unaware of their physical state, and are enjoying full-immersion sims. You don't think I'd hang people from the ceiling, bloat them with chemicals, harvest their blistered hides, and then leave them miserable, do you?
  Ennesby: Sorry. Our bad. We'll get your sainthood application processed right away.
• Everyone Can See It: Between the mind-clones of Captains Tagon and Murtaugh. It Makes Sense in Context, we promise. Even unnamed aliens who live in interstellar space can see it.
  Number One: I thought the pair-bonded captains were in charge.
  Number Two: While aboard their ship. Also, the pair-bonded captains do not seem to realize they're now pair-bonded.
  Number One: You're sure these are all sophonts.
  Number Two: They heavily filter their self-awareness, but yes.
• Evil Laugh:
  • Here.
  • If you buy a creepy AI template, the evil laugh comes standard.
• Evil Lawyer Joke: "Yes, we know they're all lawyers. You're supposed to be rooting for the friendly human one."
• Exact Eavesdropping: Lampshaded, even. "Well, that was a bit more convenient than I could have expected."
• Exact Words: After Schlock is sent to fight a crypt spider.
  Kevyn: Sergeant, did you pick a fight with one of Ventura's crypt spiders?
  Schlock: Nope.
  [beat]
  Kevyn: I asked that question incorrectly. I shall rephrase myself. Tell me about your activities of the last twenty hours, starting with anything you enjoyed.
  Schlock: You senior officers are getting good at crimping all my wriggle room.
• Expendable Clone: Uncountable gate clones are tortured and murdered off-screen over all the time the F'sherl Ganni gates were the galaxy's only practical form of transportation. Their bases being in secret locations and Petey defending them in exchange for their cooperation with his larger war against Andromeda's dark matter entities are the only reasons the other races haven't exterminated them in revenge.
• Expospeak Gag: Usually done by Kevyn, but others can do this too; even Schlock(!).
  Elf: That seems like a pretty crude mod to an elaborate plan.
  Schlock: I can call it suppressing fire if you think it'll sound more complicated.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Kevyn learns that there is a right time and a wrong time to invoke this on someone here.
  • Used in a broader sense a couple of other times where the Toughs will be talking over a scenario or predicting the worse thing that could happen. There's a fairly good chance that said horrible event is well underway already.
  • Discussing why Tagon is willing to hunt down Breya for money.
    Kevyn: That doesn't excuse selling Breya out. It just shows what your price is.
    Tagon: Let me finish. After we're out of the way, who do you think Xinchub will send after your sister?
    Kevyn: I don't know... Some unimaginative, trigger-happy rear admiral, probably. Oh, crap. I can't believe I just now figured that out.
• Explosive Decompression: Done fairly realistically rather than the usual popping skulls.
  Schlock: Explosive decompression sucks.
• Extremely Cold Case: Bunni discovers that one of her patients, an immortal with brain damage, had his brain modified by his enemies in order to suppress his Proud Warrior Race nature that rendered him incapable of living peacefully under any circumstances. While bringing his memories (but not the violent programming) back, she notes that this is like resuscitating a murder victim, and wonders if the murderers should be prosecuted. Petey points out that it happened eleven million years ago. Yes, all the murderers are still alive, but the axe has been buried, the hole subducted, and half the continent became magma.
  Bunni: This immortality thing is going to get weird.
• Extreme Omnivore: Sgt. Schlock, best summarized here. he even gets a descriptor-upgrade, as his comrades found 'omnivore' insufficient.
• Extended Disarming: Sergeant Schlock is caught carrying weapons inside the Gavcorps facility in Random Access Memorabilia.
  Gus: Sergeant Schlock here seems to be little more than an ambulatory weapon depot.
• Extinct Animal Park:
  • There's a mention in one strip of a news story about a sick Apatosaurus at a zoo vomiting on a crowd.
  • A precursor civilization evacuated a sapient species of dromaeosaurs before the asteroid struck (which was accidentally their fault), and set up a few reserves in their worldship for them and their Domesticated Dinosaurs. Including tyrannosaurs.
• Eye Scream: Eye injuries are extremely common.
  • Tagon alone has lost at least two over the course of the strip, the same one in the same book (medical cloning). One of them is a nice demonstration of how much of an unstoppable badass the captain can be.
  • Others who have lost eyes include (but aren't limited to) Andy, Ch'vorthq, Ebbirnoth, Chisulo, Schlock (a special case - he can always go to his home planet and pick some more), and any number of anonymous enemy grunts. Given the state of medical technology, these are almost always either Amusing Injuries or the least of their worries.
  • It is also one of the few things Schlock has to worry about. As he notes when being shot by a sniper, only a hit to his eyes would even bother him.
  • Here is a demonstration of what happens when human eyeballs are exposed to the wash from a plasma cannon, courtesy of Danita, one of the modified Gav gate clones.
• Face Palm: Something of a regular occurrence. In particular, Major Murtaugh's palm winds up more or less glued to her face while she's trying to get used to having Schlock in her command. Also, Captain Tagon a few times.
  Ennesby: That's why I was careful to drop a copy of the message straight into his mailbox, too.
  Kaff Tagon: *Face Palm*
  Jevee Ceeta: I have this personal rule about not starting flame wars with people who ride around in Battleplates.
• Fake Memories: Part of the deal made with Admiral Emm in exchange for not killing the Toughs is that the company members have their memories altered, with false memories implanted to replace the real things. It's later reversed, with Petey's help, for most of the crew.
• Famed In-Story: Kaff Tagon gets a reputation as "a killer of Battleplates". His father, realizing the target this paints, understandably has an Oh, Crap! reaction.
• Family of Choice: When "Marshall" Gungro^note One of the Toughs, but needed to be the "face" of the operation for 'legal reasons'. fully realizes that the success of the current mission depends on her being in charge for what happens, instead of just acting like it, states "These people are my family now."
  "Our next conversation with Mom is going to be weird."
  • This also sets the stage to help start a social revolution; their (spiritual) leader was hoping for someone that wasn't as tradition-bound.
  "One of your mates recently obtained provisional clan status for your family. [...]The application was for a clan of six, and after reviewing the speech you gave, I believe you're on your way to six thousand."
• Fan Disservice:
  • Naked General Xinchub is, In-Universe, enough to send Kevyn Andreyasn fleeing to the bar to purge the memory of the view from his mind.
  • Elf gets a nude scene. She also doesn't have her skin on, since she's regenerating at the time.
• Fanservice:
  • Lots and lots of gratuitous bikini shots while the mercenaries are on vacation, which are hilariously lampshaded here.
  • Chelle's Incredible Flying Bikini, during the Barsoom arc.
  • Circumstances conspire to put Kathryn in a hospital gown and underwear while running an armed rescue in an enemy base. Karl (one of the rescuees) is quite appreciative.
• Fantastic Drug:
  • Captain Tagon mentions, in a reminiscence about what happened to a unit given far too much room for their quarters, a greenhouse full of "hyperjuana" and a dozen "smack" labs, which from the names are probably some kind of extra powerful marijuana equivalent and something like crack cocaine.
  • For collateral damage to the conscience, there's Ovalquick. Or, as Schlock calls it, "the tub of Happiness".
    Glucose, fructose, corn syrup solids, concentrated cocoa-bean extract, assorted methylxanthine alkaloids (including caffeine, theobromine, and theophylline), sodium laureth sulfate, Minoxadyl, buckminster fullerene, codeine, hyper-ephedrine, nicotine, with BHA and BHT added to preserve freshness.
• Fantastic Racism: Multiple:
  • Beyond a variety of "Race X hates Race Y and is trying to subjugate or destroy it," there's also a few cases of an extremely negative view of artificial intelligences, especially from Reverend Theo. Though he eventually came to terms with Petey (mostly) and had nothing against Lota becoming a supposedly benevolent dictator.
  • Also, as seen in multiple strips, there are always elephant jokes:
    • strip 2002-05-26
    • strip 2008-04-18
  • There are broader criteria, such as Andy's "They're all Terrans. They all look alike".
  • A bunch of Gavs used cutting-edge tech to "diversify" themselves, giving themselves new bodies (even changing sex in some cases) and implanting new personalities and skills into their minds. They did this because they were having difficulty coming to terms with being one of a crowd of identical people. They also are convinced that every Gav secretly feels this way, and look down on "baseliners" somewhat as being in denial. Ironically enough, a baseliner suspects that this attitude was specifically added in to make them like the change.
  • At least one caste of the ancient Bradicor actually received special treatments to enforce xenophobia, presumably for military purposes. In order to avoid a violent variation of senility, the few surviving Bradicore eventually started repressing many mental traits, including this one.
• Fantastic Ship Prefix: Merchantships get the designation MR, for Merchant Registry. Since ships are usually referred to as 'she', much fun is had among merchant sailors by pronouncing the prefix as 'Mister' and using the pronoun in the same sentence.
• Fantastic Slurs:
  • Referring to an uplifted Gorilla (aka 'Rilla) as "Kong" is extremely offensive. Even if it was innocently given as a nickname because it's part of the full name, as Corporal "Mac" M'Conger had to explain to Schlock.
  • Referring to members of the purple-skinned Human Subspecies as "Purps" is perfectly polite. However, using the modern slang of "perps" meaning "criminals" is quite offensive to Purps for obvious reasons.
• Fartillery: Discussed in one strip:
  Kevyn: During this time you [Pi] are not to discharge anything more energetic than a sneeze.
  Ennesby: Sneezes move at about forty-two meters per second, sir.
  Kevyn: ...how fast does a fart move?
  Ennesby: *shocked* Mother of methane! Farts are flammable!
• Fantastical Social Services: Before the invention of the teraport, interstellar travel was enabled by the portal network run by the Gatekeepers, who closely guard their secret to wormhole generation in the name of galactic security. Successive Plot Twists reveal that they're less sufficiently advanced than they let on and their wormholes only look impossibly large and efficient, they've secretly murdered the entire population of the galaxy, several times over, by duplicating disposable copies of everyone who uses a portal and secretly interrogating them to protect their monopoly, and finally this plan was part of a secret armistice with the Pa'anuri, who threatened galactic annihilation if baryonic species continued to use widespread teraport technology.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: The nature and socio-political impact of the Teraport is a major theme of the series. The Wormgates also turn out to have far more plot significance than mere transportation.
• Fatal Family Photo: Referenced in this strip, and ultimately averted (if barely).
• Fetch Quest: The "Quest for Second Sight", when Schlock had to go back to his homeworld to pick up a new set of eyes.
• Fictional Document: The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. It was Defictionalized as part of the Kickstarter.
• Fictional United Nations: The "League of Galactics", source of countless "back-patting tales of heroic diplomacy", represents thousands of governments throughout the galaxy. None of its activities, though, have any significant effect on galactic events.
• Field Promotion:
  • Happens a lot due to characters dying off.
  • When an emergency happens and Massey (the only judge on payroll) has to recuse himself from a case, he promotes a random Sanctum Adroit soldier who happened to be in the audience.
    Avernebb: This looks complicated.
    Landon: It's simple. Sign it, and then say "court is in recess until further notice."
    Avernebb: "It's simple, Justice Avernebb."
    Landon: I'm sorry, I was out of order, your honor. Please sign it?
    Avernebb: I'm glad we both learn quickly.
• Finishing Each Other's Sentences: Tagon and Ceeta (which scared them).
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: While we had already seen it used in the backstory a few times, the heroes get access to technology to digitize people en masse almost immediately before it's needed. In-universe it's about a day.
• Flame War: Referenced when Ennesby responds to a terapedo (which he disabled) with a very harshly worded message, using his Weapons-Grade Vocabulary.invoked
  Ceeta: I have this policy about not starting flame wars with people who ride around in battleplates.
• Flashy Teleportation: The 2001-11-25 strip reveals that the Destructive Teleportation of the teraport, is not instanteous. For the Post-Dated Check Loan, it takes six seconds.
• Fling a Light into the Future: The galaxy discovers a number of these lights in the final few books. Subverted in that they are of mixed usefulness and the flingers are Not Quite Dead.
• A Fool for a Client: At one point during the HTRN takedown storyline, Massey resorts to this when speaking for the Toughs, for whom he is their legal council. While Fleetmind jurisprudence doesn't allow lawyers to represent defendants, he was also a co-defendant in the hearing.
  Petey: You know, they say that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.
  Massey: HAVE YOU SEEN WHO I WORK FOR?!?
• Forced Friendly Fire: After General Xinchub captures his old enemies Captain Tagon and Colonel Jaksmouth, just for fun he has his ship (a battleplate) manipulate Tagon's gun arm with its tractor beams to make him shoot Jaksmouth.
  Tagon: Not five minutes ago I wanted to do that. How is it possible for you to suck the fun out of everything?
• Foreign Queasine: Multiple:
  • The ape-style rock-a-stack with real termites.
  • Smutto (a mixture of natto and corn smut) would also be a good example.
  • Subverted with chupaquesos. They are delicious, if unhealthy. (The listed ingredients are several types of cheese, and butter (which is technically a very soft Cheese, given that it comes from milk). And it all gets grilled in a skillet. ....yum.)
• Foreshadowing: Multiple:
  • The fact that Kathryn is an ex-UNS captain was quite heavily foreshadowed several times, starting with her exceptional competence at planning and subterfuge, along with her adeptness at using firearms while rescuing Karl Tagon.
  • Para is foreshadowed to be a UNS agent.
  • "Sis, that's long enough that the thing could have flown here from Andromeda." Guess where the wormgate being discussed goes to?
  • This leads to this which is actually what Xinchub was working against.
  • Here, Tagii says she has "plenty of processing cycles to spare", to which Ennesby replies that "Idle CPUs are the devil's workshop". Over two years later, Tagii is driven insane by being disconnected and trapped in her processor bank with nothing to do.
  • "Do you have any idea how many successful mutinies are associated with the ship's plumbing?" Maybe not instrumental to the plan, per se, but later that year, we do learn of at least one mutiny that did involve the plumbing...
  • "The karmic debt we're accruing could destroy a planet." In the very next arc, a planet (Oisri) is destroyed.
  • "Sunshine is just another weapon."
  • General Tagon is shown wearing a shirt with postscript/71st maxim on it nearly three years before the end of The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries was revealed as part of a Kickstarter reward.
  • Chinook did warn them what would happen if her friends all suddenly died.
  • There are so many cases of various levels of foreshadowing in the strip a running statement is "If what was said is not relevant now, it eventually will be."
  • In this strip, Archie claims that building a galaxy-scale telescope is the beginning of the end. It's true- the power Petey uses to launch the mission that the telescope is for is so great, it allows the Pa'anuri to get a toehold in the galaxy, kickstarting the final battle.
• Fourth Wall: Gets progressively thicker as the series progresses. In the first volume, characters actively try to decide who's going to die on the basis of when they were introduced, who gets punchlines, and whether they're named. By later volumes, the wall gets nudged much more rarely, and fleetingly.
• From a Single Cell
• Freudian Couch: Reverend Fobius tries to therapize Captain Tagon on one, but the Captain is too tired to do more than fall asleep.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": Brightly-coloured party hats and noisemakers are the attire of choice at General Xinchub's funeral.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • From the eyetree quest storyline, there are the two Bradicor males Really Old Dude, or Rod, and Very Old Guy, or Vog.
  • Lt. Flinders and Enesby were ordered to come up with a manual of operations for the Toughs to standardize actions. This strip shows the results: Toughs Handbrain Of Operations: Senior Officers, or THOOSO; Toughs Handbrain Of Operations: Platoon Officers, or THOOPO; Toughs Handbrain Of Operations: Grunts, or THUG (treating the double O as a U, not letting language stand in the way of a memorable acronym); and the master volume that combines the previous volumes into one work: Toughs Handbrain Of Operations: Master.
    Enesby: THOOM, if you will.
    Comodore Tagon: Well played. I think we all will.
  • Book 17 includes a brief reference to the offices of "Rear Echelon Methodology and Framework," or REMF. In the real world, that acronym is short for "Rear Echelon Motherfucker," slang for Soldiers at the Rear
• Fusion Dance:
  • Amorphs use this to exchange memories, to fight, and to reproduce.
  • There's also an interesting one when Schlock tries to trade memories with a timeclone of himself - the intellectual thought-processes recognize two unique Schlocks, but the biology thinks it's recovered an errant fragment of the same amorph unit. What ensues is described (to give us non-amorphs perspective) as being sort of like trying to resist throwing up, except backwards, and with about the same inevitability of outcome.

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