The Adventures Of Dr Mc Ninja / Tropes T to Z

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Tropes T-Z (you are here)

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T

• Tactful Translation: In the prequel adventure, we see that the guy really needs someone to edit his words when dealing with gorillas he'd constantly accidentally offend.
• Take a Third Option: In AWOL MD, Gordito has to figure out which teacher at school is actually a demon. Since the demon only showed up recently, he checks which teachers are new, and finds that there are only two new teachers; the Gym teacher and the English teacher. He ends up being wrong either way, because the demon actually pulled a Dead Person Impersonation of the Math teacher. However, it is later revealed that the Gym teacher was also a demon. Or an everliving folktale. Still evil either way.
• Take That!: Blowing up US Congress results in King Radical receiving near unanimous praise.
• The Tape Knew You Would Say That: A poster that detailed the recent plot points to Chuck Goodrich ends with the text: "I KNOW YOU DIDN'T READ ALL OF IT. DO IT AGAIN."
• Technical Pacifist:
  • The Doctor takes his Hippocratic Oath seriously, most of the time.
  • Mongo, who has since learned the value of life and refuses to kill (he also learned that fire bad).
    • And Gorilla + Bazooka > Mongo
• Technobabble: In this page, the comic barely tries, simply having the Dr. say "science science", which is Lampshaded in the Alt Text.
• Theme Naming: The titles of Radical Land's knights are based on card suits. Ron Wizard is Sir Cowabunga of Clubs, King Radical/Charles 'Chuck' Goodrich was once Sir Sicknasty of Spades, Sparklelord was Sir Hellacious of Hearts, and there was also Dame Dudeical of Diamonds.
• Thrown Down a Well: King Radical overthrows the U.S. government and has Dr. McNinja declared an enemy of the state. He proceeds to have the Dr. imprisoned in a capsule at the deepest depths of the sea, rendering escape impossible for the Dr. on his own. Said location is also classified, to make it difficult for anyone to mount a rescue.
• Time Travel: Apparently there's evidence for it all over the place: Thomas Jefferson, Sparklelord, Chuck Goodrich, and King Radical have all used or been affected by it.
• Toasted Buns: In one Bad Future, a man using a jetpack has horribly burnt legs from the experience. The lack of safety is justified: as he was given the jetpack and set loose by dinosaurs who were paying to hunt him for sport, one would assume jetpack safety to be the least of his worries.
• Totally Radical:
  • Most of Sean's "cool" slang. Also the joke behind this priceless exchange:
    Dan McNinja: Come on! Let's go bust some asses! What, are you too cool to bust ass with your old man?
    Dr McNinja: Dad, that means farting.
    Dan McNinja: What, are you too cool to blast ass with your old man?
    Dr McNinja: Diarrhea.
    Dan McNinja: Damnit I want us to go injure people!
    Dr McNinja: That would be 'kick' ass.
  • Subverted by King Radical. Well, the latest one. The prior one went full bore.
  • And played straight by Ron Wizard
• Training from Hell: Doc's entire childhood and adolescence. Gordito gets a taste of it, complete with a Training Montage, when he visits the McNinja family
• Trust Me, I'm a Doctor: "You know who" feels it is important every once in a while to remind people who are having discussions with him that he's a doctor, even while arguing with Death.
• Trial by Friendly Fire: When the US military attempts to murder the Doctor and his clone on King Radical's behalf, a Radical Land soldier asks a human soldier why he isn't firing. He expresses fear of hitting his comrades, but is told to risk it. He ends up hitting a Human Shield, and the targets Lampshade the fact that Rock Beats Laser because the military's laser guns are not meant for close combat.

U

• Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Dark Horse Comics asked who would win; Dr McNinja, or Saxton Hale? The winner is...Saxton Hale, by a fair margin of votes. Oh well.
• Ultraterrestrials: The asteroid that wiped out most (though not all) of Earth's dinosaurs threw some of them to a distant planet. Crazy space radiation allowed them to evolve to sapience. In timelines where they rediscover a sufficiently intact Earth, they launch an Alien Invasion and treat humans as second class citizens.
• Unexpected Virgin: It's strongly implied that Doc is secretly a virgin. Twice judging from the definition of "maidens".
• Unicorns Prefer Virgins: "Doc Gets Rad" features Sparklelord, a unicorn from another universe who takes the form of a motorcycle when he enters the McNinja universe. He teams up with Doc McNinja against their mutual enemy, King Radical. At the end of the chapter, Doc's sidekick Gordito asks "Don't unicorns only approach virgins?" Doc doesn't like the implications and quickly changes the subject.
• Universal Driver's License: Doc has operated everything from light aircraft to earthmoving equipment. Dan McNinja might have one too.
• The Unreveal: We never see Dr. McNinja's face.
• Unsound Effect: CREEPEDOUTENOUGHTOBEEASILYTHROWNFROMTHEBIKE.
  • Also CEASE AND DESISTED at the end of the first story.
  • Doc Gets Rad. gave us SICKNASTY! driving.
  • Also, WHCRUNCH. The alt text parodies this by claiming it wasn't actually a sound effect and Doc just painted it on the ground, where someone landed there, face first.
  • MAGIC!
  • YOINKAROO
  • THE SWEETEST DUNK
  • BANISHPOOF
  • EXECUTIVE POWER
    Alt Text: Other sound effect choices include "HIGHEST OFFICE IN THE LAND"

V

• Vichy Earth: In the dinosaur timelines, a lot of the dinosaurs would love to just Kill All Humans, or at least deport them to someplace terrible. But enough dinosaurs are ambivalent or even sympathetic enough that the dinosaurs' government is forced to tolerate humans as second class citizens, at least until they can find someplace suitable to ship them to.
• Villainous Breakdown: King Radical hides under a blanket when he learns the nature of the Doctor's new motorcycle.
• Villain Team-Up: In the final arc, all of the Dr.'s major enemies ally against him, including King Radical, Dracula, Frans Rayner, McBonald, and the Dr.'s own clone, Old McNinja.
• Villain with Good Publicity: King Radical is starting to become one.
  • Arguably he could just be showing what's Beneath the Mask as an outlaw with good intentions, very much like the Doctor (the difference being is that the Doctor isn't officially an outlaw; he just has to call "BASE!" to keep his record clean). Until The Reveal that is.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: Sparklelord is a Omnicidal Maniac who wants to destroy everything to take revenge on King Radical and possesses or manipulates people into being evil in order to do this. He's the only villain who isn't Played for Laughs and nearly uses his power to make Doc evil.

W

• Walking Shirtless Scene: The abs guy (Justified in that there are probably no shirts that can accommodate his Organic Jet Pack) and Mongo.
• The Watson: Chuck Goodrich becomes one so that Dr. McNinja can review what has been going on in the last few arcs, via a large poster.
• Weaksauce Weakness: McNinja threatens to reveal that one of the more humiliating vampire weaknesses (namely being compelled to count grains of rice) is real if they try to turn him
• We Can Rebuild Him: Frans Rayner, after getting impaled through most of his body.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: The Doctor's motivation for most of his interactions with his family (mainly his mother), until he gets fed up with them.
• Wham Episode:
  • The reveal of the true identity of King Radical.
  • "First Generation Ninja American" reveals why Doc's name is unknown and what happened to his grandfather.
  • King Radical has been killed for good.
  • The building that Dr. McNinja was in has been blown up, and with the good doctor having a combination HeroicBSOD/HeroicRROD at that moment, there's a good chance he simply let himself die.
• Wham Line:
  • Chuck Goodrich, CHRONONAUT
  • "Did I do something wrong?" "You did indeed, Doctor! You failed."
  • When King Radical laments that turning Cumberland into a giant mech didn't work because it only summoned Ron. Ron's response? "Oh my king...make the robot do something."
  • King Charles "Chuck" Goodrich: The Most Radical Man in the Radical Land
  • Pretty much any time the line "Charles 'Chuck' Goodrich: (description)" appears.
  • Radical.
  • "Sparklelord."
  • "Patrick. My name is Dr. Patrick McNinja." And then subverted in that Sparklelord is completely unimpressed by this revelation.
  • "We need to kill Dr. McNinja."
  • "Do it."
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Subverted and played for gallows humor: The Doctor thinks (almost) nothing of occasionally killing security guards and drug-enhanced ninja mooks, and he gets chewed out for this, big time. This is a major plot point in the first arc, where the Doctor actually has nightmares of all the mooks he killed coming back as zombies to get him. When the zombies actually DO come, he truly believes they wanted to came back to life just to get revenge.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • Doc has no moral conflicts about unleashing his awesome-fu on anything the Hippocratic Oath doesn't cover (robots, zombies, etc.)
  • Bearclaw is haunted to the point of paranoia by his previous treatment of dolphins when a group of them rescue him.
• What Measure Is a Non-Unique?: Subverted when Doc insists that they save his clone ("He's just as much your son as I am!") Then played straight to help Doc justify killing all of the clones to himself.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In addition to the above,. "You know you've been a pretty terrible doctor lately, right?"
  Gordito: You blew up his helicopters. You blew up the train car. You knocked out a crowd of McDonald's customers. You wrecked a pharmaceutical lab. You cut the faces off several pirates. You stole a shipment of potato chips. You chloroformed me and left me on top of a mountain to fight a robot bear in the rain!
  • And when McNinja learns that a future disaster he's asked to prevent (hyper-intelligent dinosaurs take over the Earth) is not a scheme of King Radical, and thus in that future King Radical's plans have failed, he suggests he might not be interested in preventing it. Gordito subtly shows his disapproval.
  • And when Doc distracts his brother, who is in the process of fighting dinosaurs.
  • Neatly subverted in the "AWOL MD" arc After explaining that he and Chuck faked their deaths to ultimately hide from the demon (Chuck) and infiltrate King Radical's gang (Doc). Gordito and the McNinja family point out the effects this had on them. Doc then states that the future King Radical told him that present day KR was up to something. When Doc becomes part of the gang, he can see what was going to happen.
  • Judy gives Mcninja another one later on when he cuts down the haunted forest for King Radical
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Dracula has grown bored with life, so he's planning to effectively commit suicide soon. But first, he wants to know what awaits him in the afterlife.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?:
  • Averted and lampshaded when King Radical contracts the mummy curse and asks Dr McNinja (undercover as Dr McLuchador) to cure him.
    Dr McNinja (to himself) I could just let him die. Moral Quandry!
    Radical's Mook: (points a gun at McNinja's head) No Quandaries!
    Alt Text: That fixes that little corner I wrote myself into.
  • Rayner plays around with this: he tries to shoot Doc to avoid actually fighting him, despite knowing that he will probably use his ninja reflexes to dodge the bullets (he does).
• Willing Suspension of Disbelief: The sheer ridiculousness of most of the comic's storylines means that most fans eventually reach a point where its too much, and they can't believe it any more. The recommended therapy is to keep reading; it will pass in time.
• Winds of Destiny, Change!:
  • Christina can cause "miracles" to happen, defined as mundane events with a low posibility of occurance.
  • One of the ghost wizards appears to be able to do this. He threatens to cast a spell that would stop the billions of coincidences required for someone to stay alive and well for years: "You will be cursed. The universe will turn its back on you." It's never made clear what exactly would happen, as he's thwarted at the last second.
• A Wizard Did It: Anything completely illogical regarding the McNinjas can be filed under "ninja tricks" and of course Rule of Cool.
• Withholding the Cure: Dracula tells Doc he found the cure for cancer, and then hid it on Mars. He thinks it'll be really funny when humanity finds it and realizes just how obvious it is.
• The World Is Always Doomed: If the various Bad Futures that the various Chucks keep coming back to fix are any indication. Stop a zombie apocalypse, evil robot uprising. Stop that, dinosaur invasion. Stop that, sentient vacuum cleaners. Stop that, etc.
• World of Badass: What King Radical wants to turn the city into. As it turns out, Dr. McNinja's dimension sits halfway between King Radical's awesome world, and a really mundane one. Ours. Or at least, one much like it.
• World of Chaos: Dr. McNinja's world is already a World of Weirdness. The Radical Lands take this up to eleven. Everything follows Rule of Cool, the rituals are bizarre, and nearly everything is sentient, including the land itself. In fact, the Radical Lands are so awesome, that Dr. McNinja's world has to force any element of them that gets imported to be reduced to something more mundane, just to avoid breaking reality.
• World of Weirdness: The nature of the setting, due to the Dr.'s world existing between our mundane reality and the awesome Radical Lands. While the world lacks an actual Masquerade, the people of this world act highly adverse to weird stuff and much of it is suppressed or avoided. But it eventually becomes the new normal thanks to King Radical's efforts.
• Worthy Opponent: KING RADICAL — the only character capable of giving the protagonist a run for his money in the coolness department.
  • This is Ron's plan to open the portal to Radical Land. Since a giant ass robot isn't radical enough on its own, it needs a radical foe to fight.
• Would Hit a Girl:
  • Gordito, apparently. She had it coming.
  • Also, Dr. McNinja has no problem either. Hortense had it coming. Arguably, it was also just an easy opportunity for Gordito to not only follow up, but follow up on his follow up.
• Wrong Insult Offence:
  Old: You soft nurse!
  Dr. McNinja: Oh, you can't seriously try to insult me with that. Doctors prescribe, nurses provide, dummy! Respect!

Y

• You Didn't Ask: Why Dracula didn't use his moon base laser during the dinosaur invasion.
  Dracula: They usually don't like the laser.
• You Fight Like a Cow: Dr. McNinja: A properly executed pre-mortem one-liner is vital to our health.
• Your Head Asplode:
  • Happens to one of the steam-punkesque sky-pirates after being told that his sword is Awesome, but Impractical, his Goggles Do Nothing and his Anachronism Stewed outfit bears Unfortunate Implications. Also, he dropped a sprocket and someone said Queen Victoria was stupid.
    Dan McNinja: Boy, I didn't understand a word of what you said back there, and it made a man's head explode.
  • The author thanked a David Malki! of Wondermark in the Alt Text for helping him make fun of Steampunk.
  • Happens to a student in this strip.

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