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    Comic/Book series 
  • Accidental Innuendo: "When you really like someone, there's nothing worse than a naked signature." Said by Nate when Jenny didn't sign his yearbook with anything but her name, but even in context it sounds strange.
  • Alternate Character Interpretation:
    • Nate: Is he an It's All About Me Jerk with a Heart of Jerk with occasional Pet the Dog moments that's Feigning Intelligence, or a Brilliant, but Lazy, Small Name, Big Ego, Jerk with a Heart of Gold Butt-Monkey? The comic strip seems to support the former, while the books and animated show support the latter.
      • Some of Nate's outrageous behavior (notably regarding his failed attempts to get with Jenny) will prompt the audience to both applaud and shake their heads at him for his boldness. Given Nate has broken the fourth wall (once in a comic where he argues with the narrator, and in the TV series where he directly talks to the viewer) indicating he knows he's a character though, is Nate just that oblivious, or does he do so because he knows he'll get away with it?
    • Mrs. Godfrey: A Sadist Teacher who unfairly singles Nate out for punishment, or a reasonable Stern Teacher who responds fairly to Nate's goofing off in class? The strip itself seems to go back and forth on this.
  • Americans Hate Tingle: In Japan, the book series got negative reception due to Nate being messy, irreverent to school authority, and overall being seen as a bad role model. It does not help that the book series was marketed towards kindergarteners there, which caused further backlash. The series' localization was cancelled after only the second book as a result, and no other Big Nate media has found its way into the country.
  • Archive Panic: Big Nate has been churning out daily comic strips since February 1991 (when the Sunday comics started; the dailies started a few weeks earlier in January).
  • Awesome Ego: Nate's a total Narcissist, but still has lots of fans.
  • Base-Breaking Character:
  • Bizarro Episode:
    • One Sunday strip has Nate visit a beach, where his bike got stolen by a seagull. Most of the response/comments for this particular strip can be summed up as "...What?"
    • Another one, which is part of the Nate/Trudy strip series, has him walk away, smiling, until he literally starts floating up into the air.
    • This strip has Nate walk out in his underwear because he thinks he's dreaming, then get mocked by the others kids, leading him to go back to bed.
    • In November 2019, there was an arc in which Teddy wore a different outfit, causing Nate to gain Medium Awareness.
  • Cargo Ship: Francis and his Book of Facts, or Nate and Cheez Doodles, seeing how they are both unhealthily attached to the items.
  • Crosses the Line Twice:
    • One Action Cat comic had Dr. Cesspool run the cat over, fix him up, and then say that he hoped the cat's learned his lesson about getting hit by cars. Cue Action Cat walking away and another "Thump" off-panel.
    • A George Washington comic series that Nate once made included his men at Valley Forge. One man told Washington that some people thought they would have to resort to cannibalism. Washington thought this was a ridiculous idea, but then the other man notices his second-in-command is missing...
    • There's a strip where a bully threatens to knock down a sand castle Nate and his friends are making when they finish it... so they make sand Twin Towers instead. The strip, of course, was published on September 11th, 2011.
    • In October 2000, there was a story arc where Nate fakes having a family emergency in order to not do Social Studies homework. The 2000/10/20 strip, the second-last strip of the arc, has Marty find out about Nate's deception. His quiet, yet fierce threat to cause a real family emergency against Nate, combined with his sarcastic and aggressive smile when revealing what he had learned makes the situation disturbing, yet very funny due to the way it is executed, as well as just the gravity of Nate's actions in general.
  • Genius Bonus: Nate's character Dan Cupid has "love darts" that make people fall in love with each other, but in one strip he mentions that he has "anti-love darts" as well that make people hate and be hated by everyone. In Greek mythology, Cupid not only had golden arrows that made people fall in love, but also had iron arrows that had the opposite effect.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Between late April and early May 2020, there was an arc about the school district's art program being in danger of being removed, resulting in the kids protesting it at a town hall meeting regarding the education budget. At the end of the 2020-05-02 strip, Chad says "I don't want to get tear-gassed". Later that month, the George Floyd protests began, which resulted in mass civil unrest, including several tear-gassing incidents.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • After the 2016 US presidential election, the 2009 storyline where Nate runs for class president can be this, if you imagine Nate in the role of Donald Trump. Much like Trump, Nate didn't seem like a likely candidate, but ended up winning.
    • Chad Applewhite is an adorable but short and physically unfit kid. He couldn't be more different from the strong and charming but mean Chad who all the girls allegedly prefer to the "nice guys". Became even more amusing in a 2019 arc in which Nate hypnotized Chad into having a persona more like the stereotypical Chad.
    • In "Big Nate: Strikes Again", Nate mentions having once built a replica of the Roman Colosseum out of LEGO. Guess what was released in November of 2020.
  • Humor Dissonance: Both Francis and Teddy often get a kick out of making fun of Nate. Viewers do find it funny, but when they carry it on for too long it makes it come off as straight up bullying to the viewers, to the point where it makes them question why Nate is even friends with them and vice-versa. This is apparent when Nate breaks up with Trudy just so he can hang out with them again, and Teddy and Francis make fun of him for it.
  • Ho Yay: Derek Nack idolizes Nate...a little too heavily. He's only appeared in two arcs, but he's managed to get plenty of odd lines in.
    Derek: Want to exchange locks of hair?
    Nate: Well, gotta go...
  • Informed Wrongness: Whenever Nate gets into conflicts with people, he is usually the one portrayed in the wrong regardless if he's actually in the right, particularly whenever he's being treated unfairly by Mrs. Godfrey such as when she gives him detentions for the most trivial reasons like stretching in class.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Nate's not a nice person to say the very least, but his friends often tease him, his teacher constantly yells at him and gives bad grades, and it just seems that the universe hates him. There are multiple times Nate's just minding his own business and something bad has to happen to him or his friends purposely screw him over for amusement.
  • Like You Would Really Do It: One arc centered around Mr. Rosa losing his job due to budget cuts. Given that he's a prominent supporting character and one of the few teachers Nate actually likes, there was no way he was going to leave permanently. Sure enough, Nate and his friends manage to get the school board to reconsider the budget cuts, saving his job.
  • Romantic Plot Tumor: Nate trying to win Jenny's heart ended up becoming this, particularly when she and Artur became a couple. Nate's constant pursuing of Jenny comes off as more desperate and creepy than funny and does nothing but bring out the worst in him, along with the fact that Jenny hardly has any character outside of a Satellite Love Interest which doesn't exactly make her a good love interest for Nate, and the fact that this subplot has been going on for twenty-five years with not a single change in their relationship especially doesn't help. So much so that in 2016 when Lincoln Peirce announced that he would be ending the Nate & Jenny storylines, there was nothing short of praise from readers after waiting so many years for a departure from it.
  • The Scrappy:
  • Seasonal Rot: Starting in the late 2010s, the series found itself stuck in this as it recycles plots and humor like Nate finding a girlfriend and failing, Nate losing his temper in class and getting sent to detention, and Nate getting picked on for how his hair looks. It also has been relying too heavily on Kafka Komedy while making it mostly needlessly mean-spirited and unjustified like Nate continuously being manhandled by Kim with her suffering no consequences, his friends treating him more like crap and being no better than bullies like Randy or Gina, and random background characters beating on and threatening Nate for petty reasons. Arcs also end too early with predictable endings that offer very little growth or variety to the series as a whole, and they don't really try to make a single attempt to bring out new ideas.
    • Some felt that the seasonal rot started even earlier, around the early 2010s. This coincided with the Lighter and Softer books being released, and the comic strip consequently became a little less cynical and more child-oriented to closer match the books' tone.
  • Squick: Coach John collects kidney stones and loves showing the kids his knee surgeries. "And the bone was poking through the skin!!"
  • Strawman Has a Point: In Lives It Up, Gina expresses her disdain of comics, prompting Dee Dee to remark she should mind her own business and Nate to realize he should do similarly and not make fun of Breckenridge and his botany hobby - except, unlike Gina, Nate had to spend the better part of a week listening to Breckenridge about it, so he has a right to be annoyed about it somewhat. Even then, Nate still never got to Gina's outright condescending level of disdain, seeing botany as a weird curiosity as best and keeping his opinion to himself instead of saying it to Breckenridge's face.
  • Unintentionally Sympathetic: While Mrs. Godfrey is often harsh with Nate, Nate often does things that would seem just as bad to her when looked at from her perspective, such as drawing mean cartoons and blatantly disrespecting her in front of the class.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Francis and Teddy were seen as rather ungrateful and insensitive after Nate's breakup with Trudy, especially after he mentioned it was so he could hang out with them.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • The characters' mean-spirited and abusive traits are this in the current era of the series. Back then, acts of violence against people weren't as taken seriously nowadays such as hitting or strangling people and came off as mostly comedic relief in pop culture. But nowadays, acts like that aren't really taken as comedy as much as it used to be, especially when it's happening to kids since bullying has become a major hot topic issue. In fact, many states in the United States have elevated strangling a person to a felony charge. The fact that a lot of the characters in this series tend to have a lot of moments of being abusive to other characters like how Kim and Gina have strangled Nate a couple of times, or when a character threatens to assault someone like when Dee Dee once threatened Randy when he got stage fright during a school play, most modern audiences will less likely to find this stuff hilarious and instead wonder why haven't any of these kids been sent to juvenile detention.
    • Kim's treatment of Nate also flies into this with how characters like Nate's dad react to it so calmly. In the comic, Kim's abusive and manhandling treatment of Nate is laughed off, while in real life, this kind of relationship would be seen as a toxic and abusive relationship. Also in real life, if a father saw their child being treated this way by their boyfriend/girlfriend, they would furiously report to the police as an assault case instead of batting an eye while viewing the relationship as lovable.
    • Even though it's debatable whether the teachers are intentionally favoring Gina and singling Nate out or not (especially regarding Mrs. Godfrey), if this were to happen in real life, the teachers would face losing their jobs, as well as the principal for neglecting to enforce equality among the students and staff.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: While the series was never aimed solely at adults, when it started off as a newspaper comic the target audience was definitely meant to be older than the grade school age that the books and TV show are aimed at today. Notably, when the comics got printed into collections one early strip was omitted from publication due to its more risque content.
  • The Woobie: Mr. Rosa. He's an overworked and underpaid art teacher who has to work at ice-cream parlours during summer vacation (where his manager is younger than him), gets little respect and recognition despite having three Bachelor degrees, a Masters and being a generally Nice Guy. It's implied he actually hates his job, especially when a lot of his former students are now more successful and doing better in life than he is. Nate mentioning that teachers have it easy causes him to snap and start Laughing Mad.

    TV series 
  • Awesome Art: While this series is CG animated, its art direction is intended to go for a stop motion style with the character animation and designs, and the Big Nate comic art style translates very well into this show's animation as a result.
  • I Am Not Shazam: Nickelodeon itself, on its YouTube community channel, refers to the main character as "Big Nate", even though he is never called that In-Universe - in fact, it wouldn't even make sense to do so, as the "big" comes from a childhood nickname Peirce called his big brother, while Nate doesn't have a younger sibling.
  • Memetic Mutation: Big Nate is sus. Explanation 
  • Nausea Fuel: The show gives the franchise the Grossout Show treatment, so this is to be expected.
    • "Valentine's Day of Horror" is based around the school being hit with a wave of food poisoning, turning the episode into one, long onscreen Vomit Chain Reaction; the only comfort is that it's animated as the same generic green slime.
    • "The Pimple" is about Nate discovering his giant zit is a good luck charm, so he proceeds to slather it with greasy food to make it last longer, and we even see the pimple absorb the oil like a sponge. And when it finally gets popped, while it wasn't the pus explosion Nate was fearing, seeing that is about as pleasant as it is for a real pimple popping.
    • The short "Bad Hamster" has Chad's hamster Elton GIVE BIRTH to a flood of baby hamsters like she's FARTING THEM OUT. The Mushroom Samba aspect of the entire dream sequence doesn't help.
    • Martin's worsening allergic reaction to gas station sushi in "Wait Until Dark" is as gross as it is terrifying. It isn't hard to see why Nate would mistake him for a zombie.
    • Mr. Galvin slipping on DIRTY DIAPERS in "Nate on a Hot Tin Roof". Made even worse when they land on him and we see the green baby shit spew out.
    • "Nate Wright's Day Off" has an entire musical number about you need to check a dogs' anal glands, or their butts explode… yeah… mad even worse with how Nate actually had to massage Spitzy's butt glands…
  • Salvaged Story: Teddy and Francis were seen as a With Friends Like These... duo, as fans felt that their harmless teasing of Nate could go too far. The TV series has them be more friendly towards Nate and less vitriolic with him.

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