The aptly-named Random Verb Noun Comic
is a pseudo-Interactive Comic where all commands are supplied by a random word generator; one verb, one noun, with no regards to how senseless the resulting command sounds. Hilarity Ensues. Later, another character is introduced who takes commands in the form of two random Emoji.
DESCRIBE TROPES
- Art Shift: Happens on occasion. At one point, Mr. Owie is drawn as a bald man with a cleft chin when he says sunglasses make him look good.
- As the Good Book Says...: Feigned by Owie when he demands Hat Lad to give him his pencil, and Hat Lad says he's not being polite. "John 4:30: 'If a man accusest thou of an act of rudeness, yet whilst denying a favour of utmost importance, let it be certain that such a man is a hypocrite.'" note
- Author Filibuster: Parodied and defied. When a stand-in for the author literally states her intention to insert a long filibuster about how Religion Is Wrong (and tells Hat Lad to "grab a drink if you're thirsty, maybe pull over a chair"), Hat Lad knocks her out with his thesaurus.
- Badbutt: Mr. Owie has bragged about, among other things, sneaking into free screenings of R-rated Christian movies.
- *Bleep*-dammit!: Quoth the doppelganger of Mr. Owie during a particularly heated dispute: "JESUS SAID BE NICE TO UR NEIGBORS U D***M FUK"
- Body Pocket: The author avatar, a cartoon ghost, inexplicably has one, which Hat Lad pulls a piece of rope out of when he needs to fulfill the command "UNTIE BOOR".
- Caps Lock: ALL THE TEXT IN THE COMIC IS TYPED LIKE THIS. AS A GAG, SOMETIMES OBVIOUSLY COPY-AND-PASTED DESCRIPTIONS OR PLACE NAMES WILL BE IN NORMAL CASE (E.G. "YOU HAVE TO CALCULATE THE PRECISE NUMBER OF PISCESES (PISCI?) IN Heard & McDonald Islands.")
- Cool Shades: Mr. Owie's sunglasses. Normally, they're completely opaque, but some art shifts render them see-through.
- Discriminate and Switch: When Owie sees the author in her new design, he complains about "impressionable ghost kids" being so distanced from God as to call themselves... atheists.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Hat Lad ultimately kills the Mr. Owie clone for hiccupping in earshot of him.
- Embarrassing Nickname "Mr. Owie", rather fitting for a badbutt gangster. He's completely oblivious to this, of course.
- Everything Is Racist: Parodied. When the white curly-haired boy is told to fuck off for his ableist tirade about sunglasses being for snowflakes, he cries about how, as a white boy of America, he will be placed in a gas chamber and "shamed for [his] ethnicity and racial purity!".
- Evil Doppelgänger: Mr. Owie runs into one when he exits his starting room. It's mentioned that he has a father who would show him boomer comics on Facebook, implying he's either his own person or inherited every aspect of Owie's life.
- Eye Scream: Owie at one point presses his feet into Hat Lad's eyes when he's laying face-up in front of the author.
- Gosh Darn It to Heck!: How Owie and Hat Lad typically cuss.
- Insane Troll Logic:
- A one-shot character argues that, since sunglasses might be worn by people with visual sensory issues, anyone who wears sunglasses is encouraging people to have disabilities, and helping the "SWJs" prevent kids from being fully abled.
- Mr. Owie figures that if God is connected to every being with a soul, then atheists must be either robots or autonomous gasoline pumps... and searches in vain for an unleaded button on one.
- Knows the Ropes: Hat Lad briefly uses a piece of rope as a whip weapon against Owie's clone.
- Ludicrous Precision: At one point, Mr. Owie's doppelganger is attacked by a fairy with a magic wand, and the comic proceeds to explain every little effect the attack caused (including changing his answer to the Rorschach inkblot test had he not already taken it a very specific amount of time ago)... then it ambiguously states that he "lost some health from his health bar".
- Nested Story Reveal: The comic up to Hat Lad's head exploding was all part of a tabletop game. Then his head explodes again, and it's revealed they were playing a tabletop game ABOUT a tabletop game. (The events of the game-within-a-game were apparently based on what actually happened to them, though.)
- Ontological Mystery: How or why the characters got where they are is unclear. The building itself is even titled "LARGE STRANGE BUILDING WHAT THE MAIN CHARACTERS ARE STUCK IN".
- Person with the Clothing: Hat Lad. Mr. Owie is also referred to as "Sunglasses Guy" once.
- Purple Prose: Used as a Running Gag. For example, when looking at a table: "It would be in your best interest to acquire an enhanced perspective of the furniture."
- Self-Deprecation: The Author Avatar, is portrayed as narcissistic (to the point of refusing to recognize a badly drawn panel as hers) and insane, with the implication that she drugged and kidnapped the protagonists to gather material for a zany CYOA, and claiming to have received the stigmata of... Charles Darwin.
- Sistine Steal: Used when Mr. Owie reaches for Hat Lad's invisible pencil, after a scene where Owie obviously makes up a Bible passage.
- Shout-Out:
- When the focus shifts to another character, it's typically indicated with a freeze frame where the screen goes gray and red "WASTED" text appears over the current character.
- The response to "BOOTLEG INFLAMMATION" mentions a warehouse of 7 Grand Dad cartridges being destroyed in a fire, and how that lead to a long series of events that resulted in "one of the guys running Siiva Gunner" running for U.S. senator.
- Hat Lad, upon brandishing his new whip, brings up how much he'd like to quote Devo's "Whip It" as a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner if he knew the lyrics.
- The scene where Mr. Owie asks Hat Lad where the keypad is resembles the "Drake, where's the door?" scene from Drake & Josh.
- Both times Hat Lad's head blows up, he's asked if he wants his possessions identified.
- Show Within a Show: "The Submarine in Yellow", a crossover of Yellow Submarine and The King in Yellow. We never get to actually watch it, for better or worse.
- Stylistic Suck:
- The scene right after Mr. Owie's clone dies. Hat Lad gets a blurry zoom-in, and then Hat Lad and Mr. Owie's heads are badly superimposed above the clone when they insult him.
- When Mr. Owie looks for the Bermuda Triangle on the table in the tabletop game room, his head is scaled to an obscene size and rotated, whiting out part of the scenery. The scenery remains whited out when he returns to the exact pose he was in one panel ago.
- The Treachery of Images: "I'm a digital stand-in for the author of this webcomic, or the author of this webcomic."
- Throw the Book at Them: Hat Lad tries hitting a wall in his starting room with his thesaurus, to little effect. He later manages to knock out the author stand-in with it.
- [Trope Name]: The author owns over a dozen copies of a movie titled SOME CHEAP ASS HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER. Mr. Owie remembers seeing it, and mentions how bland and generic it was.
- Virtual Soundtrack: Virtual soundtrack cues are used briefly when Hat Lad battles Mr. Owie's clone, and they quickly devolve into telling the reader to listen to a song that has nothing to do with the comic, and then asking if they can "pick up groceries while you're out."
- Your Head Asplode: Hat Lad's head is highly prone to exploding in the tabletop game worlds when Owie so much as slaps or throws a dice at him, due to his Minmaxing.
- Your Other Left: When the ceiling collapses on Hat Lad and Mr. Owie, and the door on the viewer's left is clearly where they have to go to advance the plot, they run to the left... their left, leading them into the same room Owie started in.
