Discussion DethroningMoment / WebComics

I pick Squirtle (Water starters for life), but there could've been a better result than just straight up killing the Bulbasaur.

Trust me. There are too many to count.

Friend, I read the next four updates. I've read every update. Justify it all you want. Lily made her public stand with a bully and con-man against her own sister, betraying the principles advocated by her own Messiah (who, it should be noted, had no compunctions about making a much bigger scene in church when the situation called for it) to do so. She's a traitor and a villain.

For the record, H. Lee Roller had already profaned the church with his lies and thievery. Even so, Penny resisted the temptation to say anything until he specifically targeted her for his bullying - something I've never even heard of happening. It's utterly beyond the pale. Any church I've ever been to would have turned on him immediately. Any family worthy of the name would have called him out right then and there, church or no church. But no, Penny had to defend herself - as she has every right to do - and she did it with reason. She was forceful, she was in his face, but she was under control (and yes, I'm looking at the strip where she calls him out right now). She didn't start screaming and swearing until her sister caught up with her in the parking lot and let her know, in no uncertain terms, that the fact she'd just made a scene in church was more important than the fact she'd just been targeted by a bully and con-man. That's not family. That's betraying your own blood. If I'd been in Penny's place, I would have started screaming and swearing, too - as would any family members who'd been there to witness such a disgusting display. And not at me, I can assure you. I can also assure you that I wouldn't be the one apologizing if the preacher ever wanted to see any of us in his church again. Or any of our friends.

Is Roller presented as right? No. But Penny is presented as wrong for standing up to him, even after he had specifically targeted her. That's worse.

This is going back up, and it's going back up as many times as you take it down. Hayes can survive having some criticism actually visible on the public parts of this site.

And also for the record, whether I'm overreacting or not is beside the point. Dethroning Moment of Suck is a subjective page. It's where you go to overreact if you want to.

Point taken.

Ah well, only time will tell what happens next. Although I will admit that the idea of Ben and Lily having a child sounds somewhat promising.

• Deep breath* Okay. Rage cooling.

The thing about the Dead Little Sister...I don't think it's an Ass Pull or an Author's Saving Throw. Those strips went up too quickly, and the story was too well-planned. I think Hayes had those strips all ready to redeem Penny from what he fully expected to be a Kick the Dog moment for her. I think he was shocked when it backfired, and he put up those strips very quickly (the same day, if I recall) in order to move past it as quickly as he could and get Lily back into sympathetic territory before too much of his fandom started to feel like I do.

...For what its worth, I now realize and admit I probably should've brought up my counterpoints here in the first place instead of axing it, then listing my counterpoints. Sorry about that. D=

But yeah, I respect your position now that I have the full story. Didn't intend to anger you or anyone, I was under the belief that DMOS's could be deleted if they had falsehoods in them, but I can see your side now. Again, sorry.

• Ctrl Alt Del's miscarriage plotline. Taking a comedic comic that largely centers around the wacky antics of a bunch of people, and interject a huge chunk of overblown drama, while not really having the talent to pull off it off in the first place, followed up by a severe case of Mood Whiplash with a return to the comedic sociopathy strips. —(Explanation by Peteman)
• For me, Suicide For Hire's moment was the ending of the Paradise arc. I can handle Wangst, but when that Wangst causes Character Derailment, that's when I get mad.
• Grim Tales From Down Below gives us this monstrosity, which doubles as a Moral Event Horizon, in which Mandy caused 9/11, the ensuing wars, Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 tsunami in order to get Grim back in his game. Yes, it wasn't meant to be offensive (it's not presented as a joke), but some things just hit too close to home. And do you know what makes it worse? The creator actively defended this. But wait! IT GETS WORSE. He had a vote amongst his fans regarding whether to keep it or not, and most decided it was fine and dandy. I have never been made to feel physically sick by any Webcomic before, but sure enough...
• For the past eight years, Schlock Mercenary has had a Schlocktoberfest of creepy, Halloween-inspired horror, or else tense drama...always exciting and tension-filled. In 2008, we get treated to a Filler arc about Tagon bummed because he's getting old. Way. To. Fail.
• El Goonish Shive: It is revealed that Elliot has been temporarily Blessed with Suck - magical powers in exchange for being forced to transform multiple times per day. Ellen laughs when she hears about this. That isn't the dethroning moment, however. Once Ellen laughed, debates started raging on the forum as to whether Ellen was totally in the right, a bit of a jerk, or a complete bitch who needs to shut the fuck up and be grateful to her kind, supporting brother. After Ellen actually realised how bad Elliot's situation was, she apologised - and Elliot said he wanted her to tease him because it made the situation feel more normal. Absolutely no hint of this was given before the comic, and Dan hadn't seen fit to mention it in any of the arguments. Nice Ass Pull there, Danno.
  • For me, the point of no return is the Nanase / Ellen / Abraham storyline. It's one thing to have Nanase temporarily give up her magic to save Ellen from a threat. It's another to shunt out the entire rest of the cast for a fucking year (and without much Schedule Slip at that), while having senseless, ill-defined melodrama about the two of them's relationship and a couple of characters in Abraham and Raven who we've barely seen and have no reason to identify with. Oh, and tossing aside Chaos's fun, childlike villainy character to have her decide she wants to destroy the world. And she's Raven's mother. The worst part, though, is how huge an indicator the storyline is of EGS's main problem. Forget all of the interesting characters; forget Elliot, Tedd, Sarah, Justin, Susan, Catalina, and Grace, this is the Lesbian Melodrama Show and it always has been. Oh, and that whole thing about Nanase giving up her powers? That involved lifting Abraham - who hadn't actually done anything yet besides get his ass kicked by Raven - and then staring at him until he gave up. To come to the defense of Ellen, who after the beating Abraham had just received should've been a-okay to handle herself given her apparently forgotten powers. Oh, right, if it's not turning into a fairy doll or turning someone into a woman, Dan isn't letting you use your powers.
  • I can completely agree with this one. Prior to this storyline, Nanase and Ellen were just two characters who got a bit more attention then some of the others in the main 8 (Justin and Sarah in particular). Before Abraham showed up, there was a fun, interesting storyling going on in the other High School with Susan having an interesting struggle against the establishment and Tedd having his Crowning Moment Of Awesome. Then Ellen and Nanase have their first quarrel and everything else got derailed. The other characters fell off the face of the Earth, and Ellen and Nanase were propelled, as if by rocket, from being "Oh, Dan gives them more attention because they're Hot Lesbians" to total, remorseless Spotlight-Stealing Squad. I for one spent the entire storyling wondering when they were going to cut back to Elliot and the rest of the group, maybe having them band together to find Abraham, but it just kept going and going with these two. If it weren't for the Newspaper comics, I'd have assumed Dan had forgotten Tedd and Grace existed. Before I simply thought Ellen and Nanase were bland, now I really can't stand them. It's been more then a year since we've seen anyone from the Main 8 besides these two. When are they getting back to the other characters? To be fair though, I really loved the Raven/Abraham fight. Raven has easily become the coolest thing about this whole affair.
• Ah, Megatokyo. Largo, a goofy, chaotic, frequently brilliant, gloriously angst-free character and the sole brake on the main character's habit of endless mopey introspection: in January 2005, he sits down to have a wistful heart-to heart about feelings. I never looked back.
  • Not to mention how every character started having major personal problems in one way or another. When Largo suddenly got seriously drunk, and seemed to have lost it after an encounter with another girl, the web comic pretty much reached its point of no return. I picked up the series for its HUMOR, not its DRAMA (and not even a good one at that). There's already more than enough manga that focuses on a story about relationship-building and people facing personal life problems. And considering that Piro is supposed to more or less reflect Fred Gallagher... *shudders*. Four volumes, dropped it, and never looked back again.
• The infamous DominicDeegan Orc-Rape storyline. If you're somehow unfamiliar with it, the gist is that situations in the extremely sexist orc culture conspire to force a teenage Stonewater to rape a 14 year old Melna to save her life (he had to "take" her as his bride or they would kill her, as she was orphaned). The ensuing storyline... well, the most charitable thing anyone has ever said about it was "Well, at least The Author had the guts to try it."
  • Later on, probably meant to mollify this, Melna states that the culture and laws were meant for consenting adults; the reason things happened to her the way they did is because the Doma chief was a douchebag.
    • Which makes the Doma co-conspirators in upholding the rape and humiliation of one of their own, and Stonewater and his father idiots for not knowing what was being perverted (maybe not Stonewater so much, since he was a young man, but wasn't his father a chief or something?)
    • Well, it's explained that the Doma chief basically had home-field advantage, and the visiting Alheera chief had to adhere to their laws. As for the rest of the Doma, well, he was still the chief, and therefore what he said was what happened; and while the laws were intended for consenting adults, they might have been ambiguous enough (i.e., not specifying ages) that he was technically correct in enforcing them.
  • The main storyline and characters took a backseat to follow Gregory around while he starts up, wait for it... A metal band. It seemes very much like an excuse for Mookie to gush endlessly about how he loves the genre, and any of the characters that object to or dislike the music are presented as petty whiners. The one character who actually made a valid statement about why she didn't like it was shown to be secretly enjoying it. Aside from being somewhat annoying, it's also incredibly boring.

• Rory turning out to be exactly the kind of person Ethan made him out to be. It would have been nice to see, for a twist, Ethan being wrong about his brother, or at least show he had development since their childhood, but no. He has to have him being completely right about his brother just so he can show what a great guy Ethan is so we can be distracted from the fact that Ethan has actually shot people with a bolt gun and screwed his friends.

• Suicide For Hire just stepped into this territory with a Spousal Abuse arc that in and of itself dragged on, but combined with Schedule Slip it took OVER A YEAR just to get through her story (which was easily filled with far more Narm and Nightmare Fuel compared to the other tales because of this client's relative innocence) And the sad part is that when the client's story gets to the present day, that means we're only halfway through this plot...
• The "Oceans Unmoving" arc of Sluggy Freelance. A tedious yawnfest with a character who'd worn out his welcome quite some time before.
  • For me, it was the ending of the Paradise arc. I can handle Wangst, but when that Wangst causes Character Derailment, that's when I get mad.
  • This troper gave up in despair when the comic became a one-note song and that note was "ka-click".
• Artist and furry enthusiast Jay Naylor's got a few:
  • While there's several storylines in Better Days that were considered horrible, they paled in comparison to the storyline in Chapter 21 ("Father's Footsteps"). Fisk learns that his father didn't die in Vietnam, but was instead killed in action as part of a covert group of assassins, many of whom are former government agents, that act outside the purview of the government; essentially, they're American terrorists. And when Fisk learns the truth AND is offered a spot in this group, he takes the spot without hesitation and without so much as any sort of acknowledgement about what he's become and how his father really died. This chapter was so bad that it led many of Naylor's critics to get a lot more vocal about how bad they consider his work to be.
    • What makes this worse is that one would think he would show some of Fisk's "work" after joining the group. However, the closest we get is the chapter "Persia"; Naylor not only decided against showing Fisk at "work" for the rest of Better Days, but his line of work has not once been brought up in Original Life and is pretty much an afterthought. (Granted, this is likely done to distance himself from the Unfortunate Implications of Fisk's "work", but still.)
  • Original Life (the successor to Better Days) has a strip that could be considered a Dethroning Moment, and it's early on in its existence: Strip #20.◊
    • There's also Strip #64◊, in which Elizabeth completes her transformation from a likeable character into an unlikeable one by proving how much of a child-hating jerk she's become since marrying Fisk and having kids of her own.
  • The moral of Strip #82? "Don't trust women with big tits; they're just a bunch of ignorant freeloaders."◊ Naylor's misogynistic tendencies have slipped through in both Better Days and Original Life before, but never has it been so blatant and outspoken than it is in that strip. Some have surmised that this is even a potshot at some of his old girlfriends.
• Love Hina's furry webcomic equivalent Las Lindas has had too many of these to list over the past two years. This troper believes the entirety of page 218 deserves mentioning in this article, as it is a perfect example of how far downhill the writing would later end up going. Not only does the page attempt to suddenly portray resident arrogant lecher Miles as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold while leaving out the "heart of gold" part, it also features Sarah acting VERY out of character in order to push a dysfunctional, evidence-lacking, out-of-nowhere Takahashi relationship involving Miles and Rachael, a girl who very strongly and quite openly despises Miles and any man like him. While Miles' fans viewed this as a great example of character development accompanied by a wonderful idea for a pairing, most others, especially those outside the comic's official forum, simply saw it as a moment of pointless ego-stroking—Miles is an evolution of the writer's fursona—containing a blatant and somewhat desperate attempt to advertise a terrible pairing idea. It also didn't help that on the very next page, Miles follows up a sappy Nice Guy inner monologue with more of his typical perverted behaviour, this time hinting at plans to manipulate Rachael during her time of emotional weakness into falling for him.
  • The Big Three's decision to give several interesting, well-written, and even touching and emotional expository bonus comics the axe while the aforementioned Jerkass Miles gets to keep his (despite the ending being perfectly clear to anyone with a functioning brain), and "Breasts Are the Best" - based solely around excessive fanservice - keeps going strong, despite having absolutely no direction anymore and resorting to such pandering tactics as clothing that dissolves when hit by water and an oiled-up naked guy turning a lesbian straight. Thank you, Big Three, you've helped fuel the negative stereotypical view of furries without even trying.
    • There's also lesbian character Tootsie's sexual orientation recently being retconned. Now the audience is supposed to believe she's straight. All the lesbian affection she's shown for Alejandra? Yeah, apparently she was simply wishing her boss was a man this whole time. That explains perfectly why she loves huge cow boobs so much, right?
  • The part where Miles acted like a douchebag to Team Mom Taffy during the Festival Arc, then dumped her, did the webcomic in for me (That was before said Rumiko Takashi-esque pairing thing. *shakes fist angrily* After that, I had absolutely no sympathy for him. (read: I wished for him to die, even if to just spite his obnoxious fans.)
    • Miles had become so obonoxious during the Festival Arc that even [SoulKat] wanted him to get punched (and thankfully Minos delivered.). Miles is [SK]'s avatar.

• Order Of The Stick: Celia suddenly going from "sassy lawyer babe who twists the rules to get her friends off the hook" to "retarded goody-two-shoes". What, was having her be as smart she she was when she first showed up just not interesting enough, or did we need yet another chick in that arc who can't go five minutes without talking about fashion and generally getting Haley in trouble by being an inconceivable moron?
  • The circumstances of Varsuuvius's Moral Event Horizon / Shoot the Dog Idiot Plot. Blatant Genocide Dilemmia Railroading aside, the fact is that the webcomic wildly swings from What Measure Is a Non-Human and Always Chaotic Evil without blinking, usually for humorous effect. Seriously, Roy and friends chew through the Punch Clock Villains without a second thought—the people up in Heaven don't even give a care. Or further down the villainy scale, Redcloak is painted as a Well-Intentioned Extremist but hasn't crossed the MEH either despite having a larger body count. Or how Belkar's Heroic Sociopathy is treated in mostly a humorous light despite doing just as bad things. But now we're suddenly supposed to believe that Varsuuvius committed some sort of unforgivable crime even though characters in this strip routinely off Mooks to accomplish goals? Give me a fucking break, Burlew. This is exactly why you don't straddle the fence on issues of morality.
    • this arc is this troper's most hated moment too but mostly because it completely derails Varsuuvius as any kind of likeable character. Before this arc when he made a joke about fireballs solving problems and casting Explosive Runes then it was funny. Now it makes me question whether he's more evil than fricking Belkar!
• Eight Bit Theatre: the Comic Heard 'Round the World. The Light Warriors and Dark Warriors were about to square off when the game was called due to sleepy time, with the implication being that the entire comic was All Just a Dream, complete with great big "The End!" final panel. To make it about ten times worse, all the front page news posts for that day had to say was, "Well, that's that". And on top of that, he skipped the next scheduled update. And on top of that, the title of the next comic was "Hook, Line, Sinker". The fandom was in an uproar the likes of which we've never seen before. Half the fans called the quote-unquote ending a triumphant, bold stroke and a fitting way to end the series. The other half had even measures of disbelief, astonishment, and virulent rage. As much as I'd like to meet Clevinger in person, I'd be kind of afraid to after seeing that this is the kind of thing that lets him giggle himself to sleep at night.
• Penny And Aggie becoming Best Friends Forever. Their endless hate for each other is what made the comics funny and fueled most of the conflict in the plot. And sure, the entire point of the comic was to lead up to the moment where Penny and Aggie realize they're Not So Different and stop hating each other; fair enough. The thing is, they're still two completely different people, and both of them being friends feels so forced and sappy. In fact, the two cliques becoming BFF and creating their rules for a better high school feels even more forced and sappy, and has sucked almost all the conflict out of the comic. It feels like the entire strip should have ended at the conclusion of the Popsicle War, and yet it keeps going.
  • What really dethroned it for this troper is the way that since then they seem to have been setting the foundations for a Penny/Aggie ship in an incredibly heavy-handed fashion. Aggie's◊ Coming-Out Story was appallingly clunky and angsty - not least for Aggie's angst-induced unpleasantness to Lisa's level-headed worldview, but her moment of realisation came with all the worst possible, least concrete reasons for realising one's sexuality - you had a crush on the same guy as a girl who turned out to be gay? You had a nominally gay dream that wasn't even with an actual woman? Please. Considering how well Sara's storyline was handled, this was a major disappointment.
  • The massive shift in the strip from a Slice of Life-esque teen strip with some tiny hints of Ho Yay and one major gay character, into what is basically a Cast Full of Gay. Sara's coming out was handled very well, and made her one of the strip's best characters overnight. But Aggie's? With half a dozen other characters going all gay at the same time? Now something like 50% of the main cast is homosexual, which is mostly out of nowhere, and what's worst- it seems like it was done solely to please the fanbase, with it's vocal minority of gay readers.
• Misfile has had its share of dumb moments, mostly during the Aiden storyline, but the present tale of a group of drivers trying to keep people off of the main road they drive on has got to be the king. First we have a group of drivers keeping people off of a public (albeit not in use) road - somehow. Presumably they intend to attempt vehicular homicide on sight, who knows. From there we have Ash win a Curb Stomp Race that's supposed to be for the road only to be told afterward he has to race someone else entirely and that was just practice or something. Cue Ash constantly complaining about having to defend the road (despite the fact that he honestly doesn't have to, despite what everyone else seems to tell him when he brings it up) and, probably worst of all, Kate Shilling the Wesley by telling Ash how, as evil as she was back in the day, she would never try and keep someone from driving... despite the fact she basically attempted vehicular homicide on a regular basis and was nowhere near as civil about setting things up as the group Ash is dealing with.
  • It Got Worse. First Ash's rather justified hatred for being dragged into the situation suddenly vanished in favor of him, while in his car, screaming about how it is his road and he loves helping people and blah blah blah. Now Sheldon's attempting to claim Ash cheated to beat him after having smashed up his car with a rock, which carries quite a few stupid elements, such as everyone instinctively believing someone who's already openly cheated once (with the sub-in driver) and no one bothering to check to see if Ash's car has any damage too.
    • It Got Better. Rumisiel got it all on tape.
• Penny Arcade: Lookouts. The first Lookouts wasn't that bad, but the recent followup is the DMOS. Albeit, the strip being hijacked for something completely different is nothing new. (Cardboard Tube Samurai, Twisp and Catsby, etc. are all examples.) But Lookouts only seems to be entertaining if you've got some sort of paternal instinct. Sure, Jerry and Mike are real-life fathers now, and the strip has always been part: "Jerry and Mike's Illustrated Blog (with occasional talk about video games)," but the Lookouts strips aren't charming, cute, nor are they parodying or satirizing anything, they're just boring and uninteresting. "It's like the boy scouts, but FANTASY!" Maybe this troper is in the minority, because apparently this serial scored well on a popularity poll against two other ideas, but I'd be very happy if we never got another Lookouts story ever again. (And some more Automata would be nice.)
  • This troper wasn't a fan of the Lookouts arc either, but had to admit that the art was some of the best Gabe has ever done.
  • Also, the "plotline" were Tycho kills his wife using a Splinter Cell move on her was a bit tasteless (although the premise was interesting) and the resolution not funny. Tycho himself admitted in a blogpost attached to the comic that they were kinda lost when doing that.
• Least I Could Do: the trip to China and BP scandal arcs were way too long and very unnecessary. The trip to China especially, not featuring any meaningful moment at all, nada.
• Elf Only Inn: For this troper, the dethroning moment of suck was after the artist had a breakdown in August 2004 citing annoying fans making the comic process not fun for him, when he came back in September 2006 and responded to the apologies by screaming that the apologizing fans were wangsty egomaniacs and should never talk to him or read his comic again lest we ruin his good mood. Many fans, myself included, proceeded to do just that.
• xkcd Where do I begin? Oh, right, here. The average person is in fact actually quite capable of understanding the difference between millions and billions you egotistical ass. What makes people so offended is that 165 million is still a disgustingly large amount of money to give as a reward for essentially screwing up the entire economy and ruining numerous lives.

I think you miss the point of the xkcd one. It's like the 1 dolar and 99 cents thing, everyone knows that the prize is really 2 dollars, but its still dishonest to report the prize that way, since its tailored to make it seem less than what it is at a first glance.

Can someone tell me why we removed these? They seem fairly reasonable gripes to me.

All entries now need to be signed.

Quite the opposite, in my interpretation. It was intended to be taken completely seriously, but it also wasn't actually anti-RPG at all.

The crap in the middle is the gameplay of the RPG. Whether you like JRP Gs or not (I do, incidentally) you have to admit the gameplay isn't exactly riveting. It's basically "get in a random encounter, click menu buttons until the monster dies, repeat."

The bells and whistles are why you play. They're the story, characters, customizing of characters, strategy, presentation, things of that nature. If you think that admitting that means admitting that JRP Gs suck then...well, to be blunt, you're simply, objectively wrong. Unlike, say, a first-person shooter where the gameplay is inherently engaging, JRP Gs NEED those bells and whistles to be good. At the same time, because of their simplistic (and usually team-based) nature, it is also much easier to build an intriguing plot and interesting characters from a JRPG then it is to do so from any other game.

Basically the argument was that while a First Person Shooter can be completely stupid and still become hugely popular because the gameplay is fun, if you take away the plot, characters, music, and strategic thinking from an RPG all you're left with is crap.

That's what I believe. I'm sure others will disagree but for my money if you honestly thought Subtlety was a vitriolic anti-JRPG rant then you didn't understand it. Hell, she even says "these are the games you treasure, the games you look back on with fond memories and love." That hardly sounds like bashing to me. That actually sounds like the exact opposite of bashing. I strongly disagree with putting that strip on the Dethroning Moment of Suck page, at least for reasons of it being "anti-JRPG." Of course, this is a YMMV page, so it's not like it's my choice.

I interpreted it similarly, but slightly different.

I took the "these are the games you treasure" as a set up, to the punchline, "If you take away the bells and whistles, the games you 'treasure' are just crap." That's what turned -me- off to that comic, anyway, the implication that they're not "real" games or something.

Yes, except in this case it's more like "If you take out all the plot, setting, and characters the 'brilliant' Lord of the Rings is barely even a story at all." It's not really a critique of the work so much as it is stating the obvious. She wasn't saying "This is why JRP Gs suck." She was saying "Stop making sucky JRP Gs."

Admittedly, that point probably could've been made in a better way. Calling things like plot, characterization, and presentation "bells and whistles" sounds insulting, like they're just trivial BS. I don't think that was the intention, I think the intention was that you CAN polish sh*t and make it real nice, but that modern RPG designers aren't bothering, they're just selling the sh*t as normal sh*t because they know people will buy a Final Fantasy game no matter what.

Like I said, this is just my opinion. It's a Your Mileage May Vary page so I can't stop people if they want to post it, but I don't believe a strip should be considered a Dethroning Moment of Suck just because someone didn't get the joke.

Some people feel anyone who they perceive to be insulting them is egotistical? I don't know.

The new example (signed by me, though it's mostly a reworded version of the previous troper's example) doesn't include the word anyway. Incidentally, I do feel the example should still be reworded...