YMMV / The Trenches

• Accidental Aesop: While you can call Cora's attitude of "We can't betray the Players" admirable, a QA Tester leaking sensitive information about future plans to players that are likely to get enraged and possibly unsubscribe to a game just after release sounds like a lesson about not trusting QA Testers at all with critical information in case they think they know better than the people who made the game.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Was Isaac's framing of Marley a jerkass move done from purely selfish reasons, or was it a slightly grey move done to punish the lazy tester who made the problem and save the job of someone who didn't deserve to be fired?
  • Is Cora a good person for standing up for the players, or a jerkass for breaking her NDA, violating the trust placed in her by the developers and probably hurting the game as a whole by driving away subscriptions with the Rollback leaks?
  • Are Q's actions with the rollback him being a jerk or is it him doing what's necessary especially given that people on his own team are leaking information.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The comic story on Lawstarr MMO (parody of BraveStarr) became hilarious when a space-themed MMO called WildStar was released in 2014.
• Jerkass Woobie: Isaac. Despite often being rude or pompous, it's pretty clear that life has been beating him down hard recently.
  • It doesn't help that he lives in his car and works with people who give him no respect whatsoever.
• The Scrappy:
  • Gwen is such a Smug Snake that she's roundly despised by some. It doesn't help that she replaced Marley, who, while not an Ensemble Dark Horse, was a somewhat popular character.
  • Cora, given her self righteous nature and frequent insults and sniping against Isaac. Especially notable given that half the time her actions end up making things worse, and she seems to prefer blaming or yelling at Isaac to actually doing something like say admitting she was the mole or taking a principled stand. Not to mention badmouthing coworkers and the like.
  • Since coming back to the comic, pretty much all of Marley's character has been focused on him being a useless stoner. As opposed to his previous characterization, where he was more of a bored young adult and genuinely made a mistake during crunch time, his new characterization has been drawing some ire.

---