YMMV / Saga

The Band

• Awesome Art: The album cover for ''Images At Twilight''◊.
  • ''Silent Knight''◊ has an amazing cover as well.
• Epic Riff: Ian Crichton provided a lot of these. As heard in and not limited to "It's Time", "On the Loose", "Goodbye (Once Upon A Time)" and "Giant".
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: To the point where most of Saga's touring these days is around Germany exclusively.

• Signature Song: Their most popular song is "On the Loose", which topped at number 3 in the US Mainstream Rock chart.
• Squick: The alternate cover for ''Pleasure and The Pain''◊
• Tear Jerker: "Goodbye (Once Upon A Time)", the final track from Behaviour. A song lamenting childhood and written shortly after the death of Michael Sadler's father. A very personal song, it's still enough to well up strong emotions in him to this day during live performances.

The Comic Book Series

• Accidental Aesop: Read as intended, Saga preaches about the futility of violence, and how being violent will always come around to bite you in the ass. Unfortunately, it also seems to make a good case that pacifism will lead to fatal loss of conviction at crucial moments.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Do The Will and Gwendolyn genuinely have feelings for each other? Or is The Will motivated by obsessive lust, and is Gwendolyn stringing him along to help her political ambitions?
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Not even the creators thought the comic would last more than a couple issues, let alone became one of the most acclaimed and financially successful ongoing series of the modern era.
• Awesome Art: Fiona Staples has won a couple of very well-deserved industry awards for her art.
• Crosses the Line Twice: And a few more times after that.
  "Just to be clear: your exact words were 'Please shoot it in my twat'."
  • What else could you use to describe a full-color, plot-relevant, splash page of a dragon sucking its own dick?
  • "Abortion Town"
• Fetish Retardant: Everything on Sextillion.
• Friendly Fandoms: While the Coheed and Cambria fandom is relatively small, the similarities between the band's comic/album concept The Amory Wars and Saga has led to some Amory fans checking out this series in-between waiting for installments of their own series. They both feature fiercely devoted parents and badass, morally ambiguous bounty hunter antagonists IN SPACE! It kinda helps that both are heavily influenced by Star Wars.
• Genius Bonus: The title of Heist's novel The Opposite of War—which refers to sex, not peace—is a direct allusion to the writings of Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that sex and warfare were two of humanity's primary means of channeling their inherent aggression, though with completely opposite aims (one devoted to creating life, the other devoted to ending it).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Gwendolyn's introduction is very similar to that of a new Star Wars character introduced in the Marvel/Disney comics: Sana Solo, Han Solo's previously-unmentioned wife. Suddenly, all the Star Wars comparisons are even funnier.
  • Speaking of Star Wars, The Will's rescue and adoption of Sophie reminds one of another cape-wearing mercenary taking a traumatized child under his care...
• Ho Yay:
  • Marko and Prince Robot frequently bicker Like an Old Married Couple even though Marko is "supposed" to do that with Alana.
  • Ghüs was apparently helping Prince Robot raise his son Squire on Quietus after the events of Issue 36.
• Jerkass Woobie: The Will progressively becomes more and more of a woobie as the comic goes on. Seriously, this guy's whole life is a Trauma Conga Line. The Jerkass part comes from the fact that he's okay with killing children for money.
  • Sophie (the former Slave Girl) had a terrible life on Phang and was traumatized by being forced into sex work as a child. However, as she grows she's begun emulating Gwendolyn's arrogance (which leads directly to The Brand's death), and fully swallows Gwendolyn's lies that Marko is an "abusive creep."
• Memetic Mutation: LYING. It's become a popular reaction image for when you think someone is, well, lying.
• Moe: Ghus is so adorable it's unfair.
• Misblamed: Issue #12 wasn't for sale on the iOS version of digital comics storefront Comixology due to two panels depicting gay oral sex on Prince Robot IV's screen. People originally pinned this on Apple forbidding it, but it turned out that Comixology forbid it based on their interpretation of the Apple rules. Apple then said that they never banned it, and the comic was reinstated.
• Nightmare Fuel: Marko losing it and trying to slaughter a group of soldiers after he mistakenly believes they hurt Alana.
  • The gas we see in a flashback that causes its victims to explode. Prince Robot had to watch a poor medic who got caught in it without a gas mask burst apart at the seams, splattering blood all over him.
• One-Scene Wonder: Thus far, King Robot has directly appeared in the comic exactly once, and this meeting with Prince Robot perfectly encapsulates his son's Freudian Excuse and goes a long way towards foreshadowing the Prince's Character Development.
• Signature Scene: Marko and Alana's post-sex argument in issue 11 seems to be frequently cited as "Saga in a nutshell". Not surprising given that it has some of the comic's funniest lines.
  • Marko and Hazel's reunion.
  • The scene where Sophie is snuggling up with Lying Cat. Sophie starts talking about how her time as a prostitute has made her broken and gross and it's all her fault, and the cat replies "Lying." Sophie hugs the cat tightly.
• Squick: The series isn't afraid to engage in this from time to time.
  • The giant that Marko and Klara encounter in issue 7 and 8 has a pair of gigantic, prominent, and hairy testicles. This is not figurative. They are literal huge dangling monster balls that take up maybe twenty percent of a splash-page. Vaughan's script for his first appearance has been released, showing that Vaughan actually apologized to Staples for making her draw it.

• The Will's preferred means of attack seems to be bisecting people. The Lying Cat has been shown eating the skin off a victim's face.
• The close up of Prince Robot's wife giving birth.
• Marko cutting his new baby's umbilical cord... with his teeth.
• Of course you wanted to see that full-color splash page of the male dragon sucking its own penis, right? What do you mean, no?
• The plentiful amount of exploding heads in the series. Bonus points to the pimp who the Will does this to with his bare hands.

• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: By issue 54 the series has become borderline misery porn. New villain Ianthe gloats about killing and turning poor Sweet Boy into a rug? Okay, well, that's Saga for you, I guess. Then comes the abortion storyline which at least tries to handle the obviously dark subject matter respectfully in its own bizarre way. Oh, Ianthe is taunting Doff with homophobic slurs before killing him? Not cool at all, but having a "no one is safe" policy makes the series exciting right? Well not even two issues later fan favorite Sir Robot is decapitated by The Will, who then kills Marko the very next issue just in time for the series to go on a three-and-a-half year-long hiatus. By this point many readers are more exhausted than shocked and killing off characters both minor and major in such a fashion comes off as gratuitous and even mean-spirited instead of serving the greater story. And then Sophie gets killed off, meaning even children are just grist for the mill at this point, and it starts to seem like nothing good could possibly come out of the continuing plot anymore.
• Ugly Cute: The Lying Cat.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Issue 48 has Hazel talk about fidget spinners, which was already a pretty dated fad by 2017. It sticks out even more so given the Space Opera setting.
• The Woobie: Prince Robot, especially as we learn his backstory. Also Sophie, the slave girl who's literally introduced being forced into child prostitution. Even after being freed, she cannot quite shake off the mentality that The Will is her master.

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