History YMMV / MenageA3

* AlasPoorScrappy: Love her or hate her, it's hard not to feel sympathy for Yuki after [[spoiler: her breakup with Gary]]. Though some readers manage.

** In Issue #441, Yuki and Sonja fight over Gary and ask which of the two he wants. Gary, being Gary, says [[GirlOnGirlIsHot he wants both of them]], and he receives a ''double DeathGlare''. Fast forward to Issue #1200, over ''five years later'', and he actually ''does'' get both women in bed at the same time, but not entirely how he expected.

* StrangledByTheRedString may be played with or played straight when Zii and [=DiDi=] get together. Previously, ever since the comic began, Zii's attraction to [=DiDi=] appeared to be based entirely on lust, while [=DiDi=] treated Zii purely as a platonic friend; however, [=DiDi=] apparently convinces herself that they have a romantic bond (which is necessary for her to achieve orgasm), and after [[https://pixietrixcomix.com/menage-a-3/do-you-remember one strip of flashbacks to previous not-obviously-romantic events,]] Zii apparently agrees, leading both of them to treat what they have as a love affair. On the other hand, [=DiDi=] has never had much in the way of self-knowledge, while Zii's responses to her still seem mostly to be driven by her hormones, so the trope may yet be averted.

* EvilIsSexy: Most characters in this comic are good-looking and get a bit morally unreliable at times, but Senna, who is probably the most flagrantly amoral recurrent character, in a petty sort of way, also happens to be the one with an international modelling career. Also, Matt, who's just a bit of a jerk, seems to have slightly less spectacular success as a model, but still rates high for looks -- and Sonya, who was never less than sexy but who started out naive, has turned into a convincing (if still dim-witted) seductress as she learned to use her sex appeal selfishly.

*** By volume 10, it’s fairly well established that Sonya, while flawed, is pretty much a force of nature. Good or bad isn’t the point; she lives and exists for drama. In the end, she can only get a strong enough fix by migrating to a whole different ''genre''.

** By the end of volume 9, Sonya and Zii are together in a FriendsWithBenefits set-up — but then, Zii dumps Sonya for [=DiDi=], leaving the fandom to divide further. A lot of the audience sympathizes with Sonya, seeing Zii's dumping of her as cold-hearted and selfish, and hope that when she gets over her tears and starts working on some kind of revenge plot, they'll get to sit back and watch the ensuing spectacle. Others instead saw Sonya as UnintentionallyUnsympathetic, feeling that after having previously engineered the breakup of Zii's happy relationship for her own selfish ends the fit she threw was blatant MoralMyopia and what happened to her was a [[HoistByHisOwnPetard well-earned reversal of fortune]], while also pointing out that [[JerkassHasAPoint it made no sense for Zii to be in a relationship with someone she didn't feel anything for]]. Still others don't sympathise with either party, thinking they have too much jerk baggage to be sympathetic either way, but still want to see what comes of this new development.

* CryForTheDevil: Sonya had developed stalker-ish tendencies towards Zii, and her relationship with Gary was largely about using him for sexual satisfaction and to make Yuki jealous, (and she dumped him, fairly politely but ''in the middle of sex'', when she realised that she found him boring). But then, when she realized that Zii didn't reciprocate her feelings, she went back to sleep in Gary's bed, weeping and in need of a hug (February 19 2013, strip 710, NSFW). Likewise, when Zii dumps her for [=DiDi=] in volume 9, she ends up spending the night crying, with just Lita for company, and given that Zii has behaved quite appallingly here, Sonya gets a lot of fan sympathy.

** In issue #441, Yuki and Sonja fight over Gary and ask which of the two he wants. Gary, being Gary, says [[GirlOnGirlIsHot he wants both of them]], and he receives a ''double DeathGlare''. Fast forward to issue #1200, over ''five years later'', and he actually ''does'' get both women in bed at the same time, but not entirely how he expected.

* OneTrueThreesome: Around the start of volume 7, Gary and Zii began to show slight hints of a new mutual attraction, while Yuki referred to both of them together as her loves. This caused some fans to note that a relationship between these three might actually work quite well and even be stable.

** Volume Five received complaints of this nature, due to an overfocus on Yuki, along with seemingly switching the focus of the strip from "People having sex" to "People getting interrupted while trying to have sex." Volume Six may have reversed this problem for many with a massive plot switch and the return of some popular minor characters, albeit maybe at the cost of some loss of a sense of realism.
** The "Gary Giving James a Blowjob" arc is widely panned by fans, who accuse its story of being insultingly stupid even by the comic's ''amiably uncomplicated'' standards. For context: When Tracy asks Gary, a grown, patently heterosexual man despite everything else he's been through, to give her boyfriend a blowjob because her boyfriend idiotically misinterpreted Gary's attempts to pitch blowjobs as an enjoyable experience, Gary simply can't find the nerve to say “No” to Tracy's face. What follows is then a story of a grown man trying to fake a blowjob while keeping the appearance of a friendly guy to his co-workers. Also, [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking the punchline isn't all that funny]].[[note]]Adding insult to injury, the beginning of Volume Ten brings back this plotline, with James wanting ''another'' blowjob from Gary, who still cannot say "No" to Tracy, infuriating many readers.[[/note]]

** Gary, throughout. Though his woobie status becomes highly questionable in Volume Six, when he's having sex with a lingerie model while on a free trip to Paris. The fact that many of his problems actually arise from his lack of backbone, rather than the hostility of the universe, has not only become increasingly obvious at this point, it ends up being explicitly {{lampshade|Hanging}}d in strip #795 (September 24, 2013, marginally NSFW).

* FaceOfTheBand: Although the other members of Zii’s bands may have their own parts to play in the comic’s story, the audience call out Zii’s name when they play a good gig — and both Yuki and Sonya acknowledge that she’s the leader.

* FetishRetardant: Don't like HoYay? Or [[HoYay Les Yay]]? Or [[HetIsEw straight pairings]]? Don't read this comic. ''Webcomic/MenageA3'' serves up straight, gay, and lesbian hijinks alike with abandon.

* AuthorsSavingThrow: Appears in two contrasting cases:
** In early volumes, Gary suffered some terrible luck, often through no fault of his own, and even some of the good things that happened to him ended up having drawbacks down the line. This culminated during volume five with Gary and Yuki's one-sided relationship, which led to the fanbase blowing up and an increasing number of readers complaining that Gary's suffering had long since crossed the line from slapstick to unfunny. Volume six, though, has things going fairly smoothly for him, with most of the bad things that happen to him being clearly because of his own blunders instead of bad luck. As time goes on, his luck seems more ''weird'' than uniformly hostile.
** Conversely, in those same early volumes, Zii seemed to some readers to be able to do whatever she wanted with no repercussions. However, she subsequently had her past come back to bite her in the ass from multiple directions, with ''two'' stalkers among other problems, along with her worldview being seriously shaken when she first falls hard for a guy and then finds out what Gary's been up to. [[https://pixietrixcomix.com/sticky-dilly-buns/real-books This scene]] in ''Webcomic/StickyDillyBuns'' also showed her being a reasonably cool and likeable person when her own appetites weren't in play, and [[https://pixietrixcomix.com/sticky-dilly-buns/grabbing-a-show having a functional conscience of sorts]]. Her life subsequently involved a fair number of ups and downs; while she can evidently get away with a lot, it’s hard to argue that she’s totally immune to the consequences of her actions.
** One of Zii's most controversial actions was when dealing with an underage internet troll she finds his home address and proceeds to go there, sleep with the child's mother, and causes the kid's parents to get divorced ... and ''that'' was the joke, that she broke up some poor kid's parents because he was an A-hole online. This gets a revisit much later in the comic, however, when Zii meets back up with the kid and while he admits the divorce was difficult, he admits that his father really was a total bastard and now that they were divorced, his mother doesn't cry at night like she used to. It helps that during the second interaction Zii actually tries to genuinely apologizing for crossing the line, showing that she knew she crossed it, and the kid to instead thank Zii for helping his mother find happiness again.
** The whole notion that the authors make changes to their story in reaction to fan complaining (and that the previous examples prove it) is, however, highly debatable -- as Giz [[http://oi67.tinypic.com/6xuold.jpg has confirmed]] that neither she nor co-author Dave pay much attention to the forum and the opinions expressed there by the fans.

* CriticalResearchFailure: Zii is sometimes described as a "punk rock chick", but this is an InformedAttribute at best, as she is never shown listening to punk music, instead seeming to favor metal or classic rock. This may just be sloppy use of terminology (by the characters if not by the writer), but it can jar enough to ''look'' like a research failure.

* IdiotPlot: The comic's plots are frequently driven by the fact that few of the characters are terribly smart, and even the fairly bright ones are prone to being driven by their hormones. One notable repeated example which turns this up to eleven is Gary's unwillingness to tell Tracy that he's not the sexual guru that she seems to think, and that he didn't want to offer her boyfriend James oral sex, coupled with Tracy's muddle-headed attempts to manipulate the two men and James' willingness to believe whatever he's told (except that Tracy would actually ''like'' to give him oral sex herself). Eventually, this plot gets a dose of SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome when Gary, in a surprise twist, actually [[GrewASpine grows a spine]] and walks out of the would-be threesome when things get too weird for him, with some sensible comments as he goes -- but it took a lot of idiocy to get to that point.

** James, especially after his StrawFeminist tendencies have been {{Flanderized}} to the point that he can't grasp the idea that women might enjoy giving blowjobs to men, thinking of it as an obscene, phallocratic act, and stops Tracy from giving one when she straight-out tells him she wants to. (Even after that, he immediately interrupts her and still insists on saving her from the "too degrading" act despite all her protests.) It's hard to tell whether or not the fan hatred for him on this basis was intentional, but the fact that an ongoing story arc hinges on his WhatAnIdiot nature, and that Volume 10 opened with a focus on him, Tracy and their still nonsensical relationship issues rather than a number of hanging plot threads from the end of the previous storyline, and that both of which have left some readers hoping for any excuse to be rid of him, was most likely ''not'' intentional.

* IdiotPlot: The comic's plots are frequently driven by the fact that few of the characters are terribly smart, and even the fairly bright ones are prone to being driven by their hormones. One notable repeated example which turns this UpToEleven is Gary's unwillingness to tell Tracy that he's not the sexual guru that she seems to think, and that he didn't want to offer her boyfriend James oral sex, coupled with Tracy's muddle-headed attempts to manipulate the two men and James' willingness to believe whatever he's told (except that Tracy would actually ''like'' to give him oral sex herself). Eventually, this plot gets a dose of SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome when Gary, in a surprise twist, actually [[GrewASpine grows a spine]] and walks out of the would-be threesome when things get too weird for him, with some sensible comments as he goes -- but it took a lot of idiocy to get to that point.

** Gary too inspires debate. It's not exactly a love/hate division, but he's still pretty base-breaking in the sense of having readers who like him the way he is, readers who like him but wish he'd grow a spine already, and those who find him bland and boring due to his lack of assertiveness or any other strong personality features. The fact that he bordered on CosmicPlaything with his ButtMonkey credentials does NOT help, and his escape from that status is more a matter of luck than effort on his part.
** Senna has been seen by readers as, variously, cute if vain and ditzy through to cute but downright psychopathic, but that's not her really base-breaking feature. The trouble really blew up when she let Gary get drunk (arguably through carelessness and inattention rather than deliberately), and then seduced him. (To be fair, she was pretty drunk herself too.) This led to, let's say, a fair bit of debate on the boards over issues of consent and responsibility. Her UsefulNotes/{{transgender}} status confused the issue further, as Gary identifies as heterosexual; some readers doubted that he'd willingly have sex with someone with a penis while he was sober, even if she did look like an international lingerie model, whereas others noted that he always seems to have found her very attractive when she was dressed, despite having seen that penis.

** The creators do have an ''acknowledged'' soft spot for Dillon, but that has been expressed by giving him [[Webcomic/StickyDillyBuns his own comic, qv]], where he gets his own CharacterDevelopment.

** For a long time, [=DiDi=] was one of the strip's sweetest characters, before her quest for an orgasm brought out a nastier side to her personality. Re-examining how she treated her past boyfriends, along with implications that their failure to satisfy her might be partially her fault, some readers still think that she's a genuinely nice woman whose ditziness and effects on other people make it difficult for her to know how to properly interact with them. Others began to feel that she's a selfish person who only knows how to ''act'' nice, and that she ultimately only cares about her own gratification -- an impression that has been hugely reinforced by her weird relationship with Kiley.

* UncannyValley: [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/img_0659.PNG Kiley looks really off in this picture.]]

* DarknessInducedAudienceApathy: While more mundane than most instances, as the rest of the page can attest, every significant character is heavily flawed, or at least heavily controversial. There have been some readers who gave up on the strip because they reached the point where they felt that they couldn't truly sympathize with anyone. Alternately, some readers only find Gary sympathetic, and get fed up because they feel the nicest character is the one who suffers the most.

* ShippingBedDeath: Massively averted, largely because this is a SexComedy much more than it's any sort of romance, whatever some fannish shippers might want. The characters get into ''[[EveryoneHasLotsOfSex relationships]],'' but these are generally short-lived or incredibly unstable, and are frequently obviously bad ideas from the first; hence, they may crash and burn, or just fizzle due to bad communication. Any pairing that the shippers might suggest (''[[EveryoneIsBi any pairing]]'') can happen, but it probably won't end anything much. Even when the lead character who started the comic as a desperate virgin got laid, it involved a previously minor character, the relationship promptly crashed, and the ex-virgin didn't change much as a person. It's assumed by most of the fan base that most of the main cast will end up in long-term relationships when the comic comes to an end, and various final pairings are discussed from time to time, but it would be dangerous to bet on anything.