YMMV / Girl Genius

• Adorkable:
  • Klaus has his moments. The best is when he's ranting to Gil about how women with the Spark are trouble and each one he's met has tried to kill him... And then Gil derails him with "Father... Maybe it's you." And Klaus looks hilariously dorky as he says "No... No, I don't think so..."
  • Fittingly, his son Gil tends towards this as well, particularly around Agatha but also whenever he gets excited about something sciency.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Let's just say there are good reasons why the character pages are divided by "Protagonists" and "Antagonists" rather than "Heroes" and "Villains".
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • Due to the Baron not telling Gil the truth about his parentage until he and Tarvek discovered his fake background records, he spent a large part of his childhood not knowing where he came from or who his parents were and being bullied by other kids in Castle Wulfenbach over it. This has no significant effect on Gil's character or his relationship with his father.
  • No one but Trelawney Thorpe openly mourns the death of Wooster. Gil's lack of reaction or regret to Wooster getting vaporized by Lucrezia is the most noticeable, as he had known the English spy from his time in Paris and destroyed their friendship to force him to help protect Agatha.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • Severe, in the case of the Mechanicsburg arc. The "Castle Heterodyne" storyline took five years to complete; in comic-time, only a day or two passed. In real-time, from the first page showing Mechanicsburg to the moment Tweedle drags Agatha (and Violetta and Krosp) through the cathedral portal just as Klaus's "Take Five Bomb" detonates is over six years.
  • A copy of Lucrezia was stuck in Agatha's head since January 2006, and it took until November 2019 for Lucrezia to finally be removed from Agatha for good after thirteen years.
  • The 2020 Christmas story ended up taking two and a half months to complete, holding up the ongoing plot until mid February of the following year.
  • And in 2022 the Foglios topped that by interrupting the main plot with a side-story starring Franz the Mechanicsburg dragon, which lasted a whole year.
  • After the two and a half year time skip in-universe, Agatha's quest to find a way to free Mechanicsburg from the time-stop that Klaus inflicted on it officially began in March 2014, and finally began to wrap up in 2024, a decade later.
• Archive Binge: Probably one of the most notable in webcomic history. Originally a print comic, when Girl Genius first became a webcomic it had two archives; one consisting of pages from the print comics, one consisting of the new pages produced after the website went online. When the version for people who started reading it online caught up with the version for people who'd read the print comics an awful lot of people read the newer half of the combined archive, the equivalent of four and a half books worth of pages, in one sitting. The website server went down for a long time.
• Can't Un-Hear It: The idea of BRIAN BLESSED voicing Castle Heterodyne. Or Master Payne.
• Catharsis Factor: After watching Clank Lucrezia once again boast non-stop about how glorious she is and how she's going to ascend to queendom, then attempt her standard method of overwriting Dr. Monahan's mind with her own, it is deeply satisfying to see her attempt fail due to Monahan (who was secretly working against her) having blocked her attempt, and then proceeding to kick her into a pool of deadly spark-goo while giving her a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech. While Lu does (unfortunately) survive this, Monahan's intervention threw a massive wrench in her plans.
• Crazy Is Cool:
  • Jägers are a race of Crazy Is Cool individuals.
  • Excited Sparks tend to act this way with an added Genius Bruiser flavor.
  • Snaug may also count. She sees dangerous, potentially-fatal experimentation as fun.
• Continuity Lock-Out: An odd example that is present from the very beginning of the comic. Several important aspects of the world and story (such as what are Sparks and Jägermonsters or what The Other is) aren't given clear explanations, leaving the reader to figure out what they are based on dialogue (and the comic tends to Avert As You Know and The Watson).
• Crosses the Line Twice: Bangladesh Dupree is an Ax-Crazy Dark Action Girl; Castle Heterodyne is A.I. Is a Crapshoot that's Gone Horribly Right; Vole is something verging on Omnicidal Maniac. They're all successfully Played for Laughs.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: At one point, a flipped-out Agatha directs a small army of Clanks, (including giant Transforming Mecha and Luggage) by playing a calliope. Behold.
• Cry for the Devil:
  • Admit it, you did this when Tarvek explained what Anevka really was.
    Tarvek: That was... harder than I'd thought.
  • Interestingly enough, this also applies to her distaff ancestor Andronicus ... or what's left of the man. He dies thinking he was reunited with his love.
    Andronicus Valois: Euphrosynia?
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Da Boyz, the Jägermonster trio. To an only slightly lesser extent, the entire Jäger horde. In fact, the first Jäger from back when the print comic first came out was meant to just be filler, but he got so much fans wanting to see more of them that the Foglios decided to Throw It In!.
  • Also the freaking nyar spider, of all things. Possibly because the spider managed to get Zola to shut up...
  • Airman Axel Higgs, due to an effective combination of stoic Seen It All-ness, sheer badassery, and the mystery surrounding exactly who and what he really is.
  • Really, all of the minor characters count as this trope since the Foglios give most of them unique designs and personalities even if they only appear for a few pages or even just a few panels.
• Escapist Character:
  • Agatha Heterodyne is a beautiful, kind and brilliant mad scientist, is pursued by Europa's royalty, commands an army of loyal minions, super-soldiers and monsters -one of them a dragon-, owns a sentient "haunted" castle and lives extraordinary adventures across the continent. She is also Kaja Foglio's avatar. (Though a more explicit copy of Kaja appears in the strip as well, at one point pretending to be Agatha...)
  • A side-story about In-Universe Heterodyne Boys fanfiction actually defends the role Mary Sues play in young girls' aspirational fantasies.
• Fan Nickname: The Dingbots don't have an actual name in-comic, other than "Agatha's little clanks" or the "pocketwatch clanks" (in the novelization) for the main ones. On that note, fans are considering dubbing groups of dingbots "devotions."
• Genius Bonus:
  • As befits the title, several strips offer incredibly obscure references. Examples include a flirtatious Jäger referring to a waitress as his little nokedli (it's a type of dumpling), and a scientist complaining about working with inferior coprolitic components (see Unusual Euphemism).
  • More a "Wisconsinite" bonus but when Agatha was listing Othar's supposed exploits she included "Savior of the town of Mt. Horeb from the rain of Mustard."
  • Brillat-Savarin, mentioned here, was a famous gastronomist and essayist - just the sort that a minor spark would crow about defeating.
  • Ardsley Wooster is named for Phil Foglio's high school and for one of his favorite fictional characters.
  • The Knights of Jove - Jove was a shortening of the name of the Roman god Jupiter (known by the Greeks as Zeus) who was the king of the gods and ruler of the sky - his domain including weather, such as storms.
  • Spot the typography Easter egg in the Geisterspeak on this page.
  • "If you analyze these vellum pages really thoroughly you get instructions on how to build a cow." And vellum is parchment made from calf skin...
  • The captain of the airship that transported Madwa and company is quite The Stoic. Not surprisingly, the airship is named Zeno of Citium.
  • In one scene, there is a passing mention of how someone tried to get Punch (in one of the Heterodyne Plays) to recite the Oration on the Dignity of Man by Giovanni Mirandola. The Oration was an obscure Renaissance-era philosophical text with themes of mysticism and esotericism.
  • Krosp refers to Gil as "Prince Myshkin", referencing the titular character from ''The Idiot".
• Growing the Beard: The novels. The first book, while not bad, is pretty much just a word-for-word adaptation of the comic. Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess adds footnotes and more in-universe epigraphs, as well as being more willing to get inside the characters' heads and depart from the comics a bit, and is a marked improvement.
• Harsherin Hindsight: Very narrowly (by this comic's standards) averted. In the novelization of the Sturmhalten arc, when Oggie runs into his great-great-grandson and pesters him about great-great-''great''-grandchildren., a footnote states that, due to Ognian's constant interference, his family line has all but died out. Many real-life years later, this little joke becomes incredibly upsetting when the comic reveals why it's so important to him: his descendants keep him connected to the world and his humanity, because they remind him of his long-gone but much-loved wife. Seven months later, A Mechanicsburg Solstice Story shows Ognian's family is anything but endangered, and has already produced a whole batch of great-great-great-grandkids.
• Ho Yay:
  • Gil and Tarvek, during the disease arc. Semi-naked, snarky, and walking arm-around-arm? Oh yes.
  • This looks suspiciously much like an Almost Kiss, and if it isn't, it's still slashy as hell.
  • When Tarvek realizes that Gil was kidnapped by the Baron, he tries to rationalize the importance of keeping him before he just admits to himself and Agatha that they could've kept him safe with a look of utmost worry and concern.
  • After Gil goes through a whole lot of trouble to rescue Tarvek from the time stop he hangs out and chats with Tarvek while Tarvek is bathing and then carries him in a Bridal Carry to a bed when everything finally catches up to Tarvek and he passes out dead asleep.
  • After the Library captures Tarvek shortly after Gil frees him, Gil is very determined to steal him back. Tarvek seems a little surprised by his vehemence.
  • When he saves Tarvek yet again, he peacefully doses off next to him. In his current state he often spends up to a week without sleep, being constantly winded up, and Tarvek is the only prson besides Agatha whose presence can finally put him at ease.
  • Tarvek makes a jibe at Gil saying "On our honeymoon I'll be sure to tell her you said so" clearly meaning his honeymoon with Agatha. Gil quickly turns it around as though Tarvek meant his honeymoon with Gil, which Violetta calls out as flirting.
  • The Foglios have thrown fans another bone. Nobody expects Othar/Gil!
  • There's always been a fair bit of Les Yay between Agatha and Zeetha, but the one-off strip has some fans seeing Agatha/Kaja.
  • Though Played for Laughs, Colette Voltaire apparently flirts with Agatha at one point, just to later invite her over to her Chateau to stay.
  • Later, Agatha mentions Colette in the same breath as Gil and Tarvek, when she says there's things she can only talk to with other Sparks. And she's stammering when she says it.
• I Knew It!: In general, fans reward each other for correct predictions with "Moxana points" (much like winning Internets).
• Iron Woobie: Tinka. Yes, yes, it's also a pun: but she struggled with her 'disability' desperately to help Agatha reunite with her last (known) surviving sister. Then she was destroyed offhandedly, and her parts presumably packed up in a closet for Tarvek to try to reassemble when he got back…which he never has.
• Like You Would Really Do It:
  • Klaus Wulfenbach, apparently killed in a random attack on the hospital, and his body hasn't been identified. Nobody, least of all the characters, believes that he's dead.
  • Similarly, pretty much no one bought that Violetta was murdered off-panel.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • "Fairy Tale Theater Break: Cinderella": Sleeping Beauty Snow White Rapunzel Ozma Rose Red Riding Hood Rumplestiltskin whom everyone called "Cinderella" is reimagined here as a brilliant Mad Scientist. When the kingdoms’ twin princes create a science fair, Cinderella’s cruel stepmother steals her inventions for the ugly stepsisters to use and grounds her. Initially content to miss the fair, Cinderella decides to go after her Fairy Godmother tells her that the winner will marry one of the princes. Showing her brilliance by fixing the Godmother’s wand in order to set up a grand entrance to the fair, charming the princes and exposing the stepsisters’ lies. When the princes reveal that their kingdom has no real defences, Cinderella reveals that she had actually sent a lifelike clank to the fair and reveals her “science fair project” to be an army of battle clanks she uses to conquer the kingdom, bribing the king into not objecting.
  • "Homecoming King", by Cheyenne Wright:
    • The Ht'Rok'Din is the first Heterodyne, famed and feared for his status as a brutal conqueror and a brilliant inventor. Summoned from the past, the Ht'Rok'Din attacks several students before learning that he is in a school owned by his descendant. He collects a number of devices, including one he famously used to teleport his army behind enemy lines in the past, to build a machine. When the machine is finished, he declares that he will conquer time itself, before sending himself back to his normal time to sire a son and begin the mighty Heterodyne family.
    • Professor Bosewichte is a brilliant and proudly evil teacher at Transylvania Polygnostic University. When the Ht'Rok'Din is summoned by a pair of students, Bosewichte ambushes and ties them up and aids the Ht'Rok'Din in building his machine. Bosewichte attacks the students when they try to stop the machine and when the Ht'Rok'Din sends himself back in time, he explains that he was ordered by Lady Heterodyne to ensure that the Ht'Rok'Din is returned safely.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Klaus Wulfenbach and Old Man Death have earned the status a few times over. And Axel "The Unstoppable" Higgs.
  • Notably, Klaus Wulfenbach appears to have this status in-universe. When he threatens to kill someone while immobilized in a hospital bed with only the power of his mind, even people who've worked closely with him are only mostly sure he can't do that.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Moxana points ^ExplanationThe imaginary "points" you get from correctly guessing where the comic's storyline will go, basically like "brownie points." They're named after Moxana, Muse of Mystery, and the term originated on Yahoo! Groups.
  • Sneaky Gate ^ExplanationA gate the Jägers used to covertly get into Mechanicsburg, first mentioned in Vol. VII of the comic. It's also the fan euphemism for a way to access new strips before they're actually posted (by changing the YYYYMMDD codes on the .JPG files of pages instead of on the actual main comic webpages on the site).
• Moe:
  • Violetta. Look at the last panel, awwww, she just wants a pretty dress.
  • Sanaa's having a cute moment here.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Let's start with the Queen of the land beyond that horizon: Lucrezia. It isn't even For the Evulz or Card-Carrying Villain - it's more as if a Starfish Alien with no concept of human decency or morality were given human form. If some theories are correct, it's exactly as if that.
  • Merlot was an unrepentant Jerkass about being sentenced to Castle Heterodyne. He banished Agatha from Transylvania Polygnostic and burned everything, including the cryptographers, related to her importance. And then he got mad at her about it, like he didn't directly cause it all.
  • Avoided, barely, by the end of the Tarvek and Zola fight. She was already down and Tarvek kept on going; if not for some last minute interference, he would have strangled her to death with his bare hands. Despite the numerous arguments in favor of him doing so — that she had killed many people already, that she had just tried to kill Agatha, that she could neither be let free nor safely taken into custody — quite a few members of the audience were nonetheless queasy at the sight of one of the 'good guys' strangling a semi-conscious woman to death. Gil's last-minute interference saved Tarvek from a(nother?) possible moment.
  • Klaus has apparently done to Gil what Lucrezia did to Agatha and copied himself into his own son as a method of control. That being said, the novels imply that Other!Anevka ordered him to do it.
  • Even before the above, Klaus was at least skirting the line with his brain coring experiments: Klaus would take a Spark, and remove chunks of their brain, one at a time, until they either 1) no longer had the Spark or 2) were so badly brain damaged they couldn't function independently anymore. It's hinted at that the Baron reserved this fate for only the most dangerous of Sparks, but unfortunately "dangerous" and "unsympathetic" are not synonymous. Not helped by also being, by his own admission, one of the few tasks left to him that he genuinely enjoys. To his credit, he does seem to be mindful of his test subject's "quality of life", post-experimentation, giving them quarters and menial jobs, and claims he's "getting much better" at it.
• Never Live It Down: Tarvek's... "adorning" of Lucrezia-controlled Agatha. Even Gil heard about it. He still does it in his head sometimes, so he has only himself to blame for it.
• One True Threesome: Agatha/Gil/Tarvek. Initially, both of the gentlemen are eager to reduce it to a One True Pairing, but agree to tolerate each other's presence due to dangers of Castle Heterodyne. By the end of the Mechanicsburg arc, there are signs that Gil and Tarvek are coming to accept that they're both important to Agatha. And then there's this page, which has Tarvek expressing very genuine fear and regret over Gil, and Agatha consoling him. The Cinderella side-story indicates that the authors are at least okay with a "keep them both" scenario. It's been suggested as a possibility in the story, too.
• Paranoia Fuel: Between stealth!Revenants and Lucrezia's liberal use of mind-downloads, you never quite know who you're talking to at first.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Hoffmann and Larana's endless sitcom-level miscommunications during the Paris plot-arc.
• Rooting for the Empire: Even if Klaus is not the main antagonist. Definitely an invoked trope. Klaus isn't the former Trope Namer of The Extremist Was Right for nothing, and iron-fisted ruler of half of Europa or not, it's pretty clear he's only an antagonist at all because he severely misjudged Agatha's role in the story, and a combination of fate, escalation, and stubbornness worked to keep him from ever reconsidering.
• Shocking Moments: The Castle Heterodyne arc just kept escalating further and further to the Big Finish. To put it in perspective, the immediately following sequence, despite involving time travel, a twisted future resulting from Agatha's absence, and Hunting the Most Dangerous Game, was a relative relief by comparison.
• Signature Series Arc: The Mechanicsburg Arc, wherein Agatha struggles to reclaim her heritage and then fights to drive a horde of mad scientists and an empire out of it, introduces the most iconic location in the series and is the best remembered storyline.
• Squick:
  • Lucrezia's behavior towards Tarvek in Sturmhalten is very disturbing. She deliberately stays half-dressed and keeps making obviously sexual remarks, while wearing the body of her own daughter. Once she realizes that he's uncomfortable with this, she purposely teases him. The whole thing is made even more disturbing by how Lucrezia keeps comparing him to his father (who was obsessively in love with her to the point he tried to download a copy of her mind into his own daughter) and to Klaus (her former lover). It's even suggested that she actually planned on bedding him in Agatha's body, taking additional glee from the fact that he was in love with her daughter and still hoped to save her. Oh, and apparently Lucrezia was the one, who designed Tarvek as her ideal Storm King candidate, possibly planning to marry him later in Agatha's body.
  • Likewise, her suggestion to Klaus at the Corbettite base: steal their kids' bodies permanently and work together again, relationship implied. Thankfully Klaus will have none of it.
• Strangled by the Red String: Zeetha and Higgs' relationship. The Mechanicsburg story line lasted over six years so their romance had a decent amount of time to develop, but in-universe they had only known each other for less than a day before they declared their love for one another. (Or at least had sex.) Slightly subverted after the time skip, where they are still just dating; all of the proper bonding after the initial "head over heels" phase presumably happened off screen.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The near collapse of the Wulfenbach Empire, the Storm King conspiracy's plan to turn Gil into their next public leader and the new war with the Other were all set up to be important plot points when the time skip first happened but were quickly pushed to the background or even forgotten about shortly after.
  • Despite Punch and Judy being revived and reunited with Agatha, they offer her no new insights on her parents, her uncle or their conflict with the Other, and haven't shown upon again after Agatha sets out on her mission to free Mechanicsburg.
  • After years of the readers waiting for Agatha and her companions to get to England...they promptly get shuttled off to an enclosed lab and caught up in a conspiracy, while barely anything is seen of Londinium or its people; the most we get is Gil and Trelawny Thorpe taking a brief stroll through the streets. Since Trelawny mentions that English people are far more accepting of Sparks, as without them the Sunken City wouldn't be able to exist, it's a shame that we never get to see much of English culture and society, in comparison to the time that Agatha and her companions spent roaming around and under Paris.
• The Un-Twist:
  • Supposedly the Baron died when the battles in Mechanicsburg started and the hospital got bombed. Very few were surprised when the Baron showed up, very much alive, some time later.
    Gil and Tarvek: I knew it!
  • Lady Margarella. Readers should know better. She lives and survives in a Decadent Court and was the wife of an important person(?) Just look at her character's spoiler-ed bits. Seeing that some families in the comic are even color-coded, it wasn't too difficult to figure out who she belonged to.
    Violetta: ... It's okay Auntie. You can drop the act. The Lady Heterodyne knows what our family's like.
• Ugly Cute:
  • The toothy, beady-eyed, eight-legged little revenant-detectors that were re-engineered from weasels.
  • Quite a few of the Jägers count as well.
  • The artwork itself can be this for some people, straddling the line between cute and Gonk.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Tarvek "shuts down" the Anevka android with scarcely a concern about the act as murder; any psychological torment he seems to have over it is due to her connection with his late sister, the fact that she's a self-aware being in her own right and clearly afraid seems to be of no consequence whatsoever to him.

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