YMMV / Bone

Beware of unmarked spoilers!

Bone

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • "OH MY GOD! They've already MILKED you, haven't they?!!" And on page 69, no less.
  • From Treasure Hunters:
  Phoney Bone: "What are you doing?!"
  Bartleby: "We're smashing!"^note That is, to say, smashing Phoney's likeness onto gold coins.
• Adaptation Displacement: It's sometimes easy to forget that Bone is actually the second incarnation of the story of the Bone cousins. The original version was the comic strip Thorn, which ran from 1982-1986 in the student paper The Lantern. Though Thorn never saw an actual conclusion, most of the major characters appear, and especially in earlier issues entire sequences are taken wholesale from the strip — just put into a different context. You also see many of the story beats and plot details are repeated in Bone (including the revelation of The Hooded One's identity). Reading the strip is much like reading a less refined, less structured version of Bone with plenty of odd digression and a lot of Early-Installment Weirdness,
• Adorkable: Fone Bone is a terrible poet, can put people to sleep with his enthusiasm for Moby-Dick and breaks out into bashful blushing when interacting with his crush, Thorn. Coupled with his inherent kindness, all this serves to make him more endearing.
• Complete Monster:
  • The Lord of the Locusts was an ancient spirit of the Dreaming who desired physical form and the waking world for itself. Possessing the queen of dragons, Mim, the Locust almost destroyed the world before being sealed away. Remaining dormant and hidden, the Locust steadily converted others to its cause, including the corruption of the evil Briar Harvestar, with whom the Locust attempted to annihilate the ancient orders and royal lines of the valley. Failing to sway Rose Harvestar to its side, the Locust spitefully aged Briar into a withered crone for her failure, later participating in inspiring the uprising of Rat Creatures to massacre the Royal Family, save for Rose and her granddaughter Thorn. Pushing for Briar to liberate it and motivating all the deaths she causes, the Locust is willing to destroy the world and condemn everything that lives there to a nightmarish, tormented existence upon its freedom so it may rule the world with a physical form.
  • The Hooded One, really Briar Harvestar, is the Lord of the Locusts's chief servant who intends to free him, uncaring that he intends to end the world. As a young woman, Briar first attempted to free her master by using a river dragon as a distraction to slaughter a small town, all while she enacted her plot to overthrow her loving parents and kill her younger sister Rose. When spared despite her crime, Briar works as her master's spy, leading her niece and nephew to their deaths in an attempt to abduct her own grandniece, dying and being resurrected to take on the identity of the Hooded One in the process. Using her powers to force the Rat Creatures of the Valley into all-out war, Briar terrifies a General allied with her with the revelation she seeks to use him to wipe out all that lives in the area, before killing him for learning the truth.
  • Rose prequel: Balsaad is a sadistic river dragon who serves the Lord of the Locusts, working with Briar Harvestar to free it and bring humanity to destruction at its hand. Balsaad tricks Rose into helping him before revealing his true allegiances, trying to kill her as soon as his ruse is up. Balsaad later descends upon a small town and starts razing it for fun, and he's visibly annoyed at having to curtail his random slaughter on Briar's order.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Ed, Edd n Eddy. Given how similar the Bone cousins and the Eds are in both personality and appearance, Fone Bone and Edd both being the Only Sane Man, Smiley Bone and Ed both being The Ditz (though Smiley is more of a Genius Ditz) and Phoney Bone and Eddy both being the greedy Jerk with a Heart of Gold with a Freudian Excuse (Phoney being a orphan who stole to support himself and his cousins to survive and Eddy having been mercilessly bullied by his Jerkass older brother), crossover fan art made by fans of both franchises, while rare, can be found.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Fone Bone sounds a lot like Foney Boney - HEHEHEHEHEHEHE!.
• I Am Not Shazam: The name Bone doesn't actually refers to a certain character in the story - that happens to be the name of the species of the three main characters Fone Bone, Smiley Bone and Phoney Bone. (Keep in mind, the surname Bone is also shared among many others of their kind, if not all of them.)
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • The villagers of Barrelhaven are foolish, gullible people who are easily led into mobs, but it's hard not to feel sorry for them considering the sheer hell they go through once the real conflict starts. Wendell in particular, despite being a jerk many times in the past, constantly seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown as he endures the war.
  • It's a little hard to not feel at least a bit of pity for Kingdok as he suffers an ever-worsening Humiliation Conga over the course of the series. He once was a mighty king of the Rat Creatures, and was even willing to live in peace with the valley-dwellers and stay in the mountains. His clan was taken over by The Hooded One and he was forced to obey every command given. By the end of the series, having lost an arm, his tongue, been smacked by rocks, and bruised by stumbling around in the dark underground, he's actually demanding Thorn kill him rather than having to go on living the life he's been reduced to.
  • The entire Rat Creature race counts. According to the Two Stupid Rat Creatures, they were happy to just live peacefully in the mountains and honor the treaty and didn't start acting evil until the Hooded One showed up and started manipulating and controlling them into going to war. As Smiley points out, the Hooded One basically corrupted a fairly peaceful race into a warlike insect cult.
• Memetic Mutation: "Stupid Stupid Rat Creatures!" became one in the early days of the internet.
• Moral Event Horizon: Kingdok eating Thorn's mother alive. Kingdok even points out that it's a Moral Event Horizon in his attempt to get Thorn to kill him. It doesn't work until he bites into her leg to impede her progress.
• Narm:
  • In book 9, Briar is shown doing a dance where she has her hands clapped up over her head and with her leg extended, almost like some kind of pagan-dance. Given the seriousness of the series at that point, it seems funny for the wrong reason - especially since it comes out of nowhere.
  • The penultimate scene in Rose has the Lord of the Locusts possess Briar's body after revisiting every instance Rose was favored over her. Sure, most of them show some moments of justified animosity, but among these moments is Briar crying as a baby because her parents are feeding her sister before her. Come on, really?
• Narm Charm: The aforementioned scene of Briar dancing, while certainly funny, can also be bizarrely disturbing when you consider its context (a vision of the Lord of the Locusts being released from its prison), which makes it an (arguably intended) example of Mood Dissonance.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: While Out from Boneville was met with average to mixed reception upon release, The Great Cow Race fared better with more positive reception than the first game.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • This came out in the midst of The Dark Age of Comic Books - despite having some mature themes (see What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?) it basically defied the tropes common to the dark age of comic books. It also happened to be very popular amongst school-aged children from those learning how to read all the way to high school and thus found its way in libraries and schools all throughout North America and outside, and it still remains in libraries and bookstores to this day. A modern reader might not appreciate just how important it was, since comics as a medium were banned on sight in most academic settings, in part due to their image of being exploitation shlock.
  • While the series was far from the first instance of Cerebus Syndrome^*Ironically, Jeff Smith would eventually come into conflict with the author of the trope namer, being basically The Hobbit of the 90s, the comic's aforementioned availability in school libraries meant it was the first time many readers got to experience what seemed like an ordinary comedy about a Comic Trio evolve into a sprawling fantasy epic, and enchanted with its a complex lore, character development, and strong female characters. Modern audiences, however, having watched cartoons like Adventure Time and countless webcomics with similar structure, could find Bone's story to be a rather bog-standard High Fantasy adventure, with its tale of Rebellious Princesses, Chosen Ones, Fantastic Racism, and Ancient Evils being no more complex than a standard modern Disney film.
• Signature Series Arc: "The Great Cow Race" is most commonly cited at this.
• Squick: In Old Man's Cave, Rock Jaw reveals to the reader exactly what he did to Kingdok in the fight from the previous volume
  "Cat got your tongue?"
• Ugly Cute: Rat Creatures. They're vicious Rat Men, but they look absolutely adorable at times, and their Affably Evil Punch-Clock Villain personalities are endearing. Special mention goes to Bartleby.
• Signature Scene: Say it with me now...
  Fone Bone: "Stupid Stupid Rat Creatures!"
• Vindicated by History: Arguably, the series never really got into the public eye until the colorized re-prints and the one-book version were released. Part of the reason being that it was very hard to find beforehand.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The comics were not originally created with children in mind, but they are usually slotted under the "young readers" section in bookstores, which often ignores the rampant themes of genocide and the often-bloody Family-Unfriendly Violence rampant in the series, particularly when the Hooded One or any of her servitors come into the fray. That it's an illustrated graphic novel instead of an all-text book makes the on-the-nose violence even more bizarre.
• Woolseyism: The Norwegian translation is full of them; translator Jens E. Røsåsen is a veteran in translating comics and seems to have had a field day with this one. He even managed to add a couple of jokes, adding a bit of edge back to one scene after Smiley's "lamaze and bungy-jumping" line was cut.
  English:
  Smiley: Remember th' first time you got us run out of town? You opened up a chain of franchises — Bone Environmental: Nuclear reactor and endless salad bars!
  Phoney: That wasn't a silly idea! Th' lettuce wouldn't spoil for decades!
  Smiley: Well, it was pretty silly.
  Phoney: Oh yeah, you're a brilliant judge.
  —
  Norwegian translation:
  Smiley: Remember the first time you got us chased out of town? You started Bone Environmental, which combined a nuclear power plant with a chain of salad bars.
  Phoney: That was a brilliant idea! The lettuce kept for several decades!
  Smiley: The people who ate it didn't.
  Phoney: Details.

Stupid Stupid Rat Tails/Tall Tales

• Accidental Innuendo: Big Johnson Bone's name is either this or a Parental Bonus. Think about it.