The Alcoholic: Hazel, a petite woman, is to the point of showing no signs of intoxication until her ninth beer. Played for Laughs, big time.
Hazel: I'm a high-functioning drunk, Clarice. You know that. Clarice: Yeah, but I've been counting bottles and you've crossed your faux-sober threshold. Hazel:Eight? Holy shit, I leveled up!
All Men Are Perverts: Jamie gets pretty much everything she wants from strange men, thanks to her endowments. When she covers them up, she is shocked that drinks suddenly cost more. Played creepily straight by every male customer of the porn store.
All Women Are Lustful: Let's just say that when all the AA batteries disappear, a mob of women are seen wandering the streets as though society had collapsed.
Brains and Bondage: Clarice, one of the more intelligent members of the cast, is a dominatrix. But she dreams of being a librarian.
Brick Joke: The wedding arc pulls obscure comments from earlier strips and turns them into punchlines. Jameson's remaining hair makes him look like a clown? His parents are clowns. Candy wanted to marry Jameson with as many things as possible made from baby seal leather just to offend Maureen the vegan? She replaces the wedding rings with "100% Baby Seal Leather" rings. The rest of the cast is not amused.
The Casanova: Zach, who is arguably a trope subversion as he considers the three hundred women whom he has serviced as a gift to the community. Prior to hooking up with Hazel, he gave virgins a good first time and helped service the elderly to make them feel loved again.
Cast of Snowflakes: A variety of female (and male) characters with simple but wildly varying body shapes and faces. Even when they dress up as each other for Halloween, it's still possible to tell which character is which.
Hazel: Cats only have two emotions - "feed me" and "fuck you."
Character Development: Chris started out as a compulsive exaggerator who was universally known for wearing an eye-patch, but becomes a solid recurring character. One strip also hangs a lampshade on this trope when no one recognizes Chris until he puts on his eye patch, which he no longer actually needs. He remarks that he knows what his only distinctive characteristic is. It turns out he has another one, but he works pretty hard to keep that one under wraps.
Crossover: Davan attended Maureen and Jamison's wedding, and recently Sprinkles gave birth to Choo-Choo Bear's babies, one of whom went to Leslie and Robin.
A breakdown of the cats and their crossovers is included in this strip.
The Cutie: Jamie. Mimi makes a good case for herself too.
Absolutely not, despite what Jameson initially thinks. Candy tries to rape Chris, and gets knocked off her Straw Feminist pedestal quickly by a cast that agrees that she is absolutely wrong. Which still hardly excuses an attempted rape being played for laughs. Even though after a good week's worth of jokes, the strip finally gets around to saying 'seriously kids, rape is wrong no matter what the victim's gender is' it's still jarring.
A sequence where a female barber threatens to seduce Jameson, kidnaps him, and forcibly shaves him (smoking a cigarette afterward) is played entirely for laughs, probably because all she did was shave his hair, so it being played for laughs is excusable.
Drunken Master: Hazel is an amazing writer when she's drunk. Her publisher even tells her straight-up that she doesn't have to read an article to know it's quality as long as she knows Hazel wrote it drunk.
Early Installment Weirdness: In one early series, Hazel drags Jamie to spy on Jameson & Maureen's date. Jamie wholeheartedly disapproves of this, and leaves Hazel to spy alone. This is completely reversed (and ignored) later on when Jamie becomes a spying romance detective and Hazel is the disapproving one.
Even the Girls Want Her: Jamie, who eventually decides that she wants the girls too. But only from the waist up.
Fake Buzz: You'd think a high-functioning alcoholic like Hazel would be able to tell Fiona's flask was full of water.
The point was that Hazel was so uncomfortable around her that she'd accept any excuse to feel less weird even if it was patently false.
The Friend Nobody Likes: Candy. Candy Candy Candy. A rotten bitch to pretty much everyone, but she's an old friend of Jameson's, so they kind of have to put up with her when Jameson decides to bring her along. Then she pulled that stunt at Jameson's wedding, and Jameson woke up to the fact that "Hey wait, I don't really like Candy either."
Gag Boobs: Jamie. There's more to her than that, of course...
Hazel: ... But I asked twenty people the first word they thought of when they think of you, and all of them said "boobs". Even Your Mom, who added that the second word she thinks of is "boobs".
Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: Hazel has had to remind people of her hetero-ness more than once, especially in earlier strips when she isn't getting any.
Hot Librarian: Averted in Clarice, who tells everyone that she's a librarian when in reality, she is a porn-store clerk moonlighting as a dominatrix. She really does want to be a librarian, though.
Informed Ability: According to everyone who sees her photos, Jamie is a really amazing photographer. However, the audience hardly sees any of her work and what little glimpse we get by way of the background of her gallery show appears to be nothing more than some pedestrian pictures of flowers -not exactly the stuff of solo gallery openings (though the fact the gallery showing Jamie's work is apparently out of touch with the rest of the art world and hasn't had an opening in decades might count as a lampshading of this trope).
Innocently Insensitive: Hazel's not good with lesbians. Or remembering things that mean something to her boyfriend. She eventually gets called on this.
Joisey: Various cities and towns in New Jersey are mentioned as being close by. It seems to take place in the New Brunswick*
Not the province
area. When Hazel goes to the Big Applesauce she takes the train. The writer is probably a local.
Karma Houdini: Candy tried to rape Chris. Everyone's response? Get her a job as a dominatrix so that she has a healthy outlet.
She finally gets her comeuppance for everything—after her prank at the wedding, the entire group turned their backs on her. She hasn't appeared in the strip since...unless you count some stuttering steps toward redemption in crossover strips from Something Positive.
She recently reappeared, greatly alarming Jameson. The way he acted, you'd think he was the one she tried to rape (although it's possible the entire attempted date rape has entered Canon Discontinuity since none of the characters ever mention it even when mention other bad things Candy's done.
My Biological Clock Is Ticking: Hazel's ovaries start talking to her. She resists them at every turn, even threatening to cut them out and sell them if they don't shut up.
The Not Secret: Subverted - with Jamie "discovering" that Thea and Angel aren't just "playing board games". Only to discover on her "proof" video that it wasn't Thea with Angel on the tape.
One of the Boys: Hazel, to the point where she hangs out with the guys during the bachelor party and is repeatedly mentioned as actually being the guy in her relationship (including shallowness and refusal to think about the "future" beyond lovemaking).
Poisonous Friend: Candy, to Jameson. She tells herself that her vitriolic attempts to sabotage his relationship with Maureen are just harmless pranks that Maureen is too sensitive to appreciate, until finally she pushes Jameson to the breaking point at the wedding.
Also, Robyn from All New Issues is apparently Hazel's cousin.
Ship Sinking: Hammered home when Angel not only screws someone else behind Thea's back, but tells Thea they were never in a real relationship to begin with. Ouch.
Shout Out: Possibly unintentional, but both of Thea's romantic interests have had the same name as a character from RENT.
Technical Virgin: Jamie, despite having several dates that had "happy endings," has never gone all the way. She seems to believe as long as she has an intact hymen she counts as one since she had (implied disastrous) sex with her girlfriend Erin before she left for England but mentioned later when Hazel had an STD scare that she was still a virgin.
Token Minority Couple: A story arc built around subverting Type B: the two lesbians in the regular cast finally meet, with a long buildup to their first date...only to find that they have nothing in common. They do have a lengthy friendship with benefits, though.
Unnecessary Makeover: In-Universe. Maureen, after sex-toy-purveyor Clarice questions her ability to be sexy. Somewhat averted as the makeover doesn't take, and it is specifically stated that the makeover took away what made her sexy in the first place.
Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Hazel's at least close, especially early on. She often crosses the line from Deadpan Snarker into just plain being a jerk, and she's also pretty selfish, and this usually appears for the sake of a punchline. However, on other occasions she shows that she's a fairly decent person. This seems to have come to a head, in-universe, with Hazel and Zach having a major fight over her immaturity.
Unusual Euphemism: Angel and Thea playing board games in the back room.
is a Mundane Fantastic webcomic by Danielle Corsetto about the lives of Hazel and Jamie, their talking cacti, and their friends. The strip takes a lot of its humor from switching the standard gender arrangement of common sex comedy tropes.The name appears to come from a rather strong drink
0 reviews