El Goonish Shive / Tropes M to R

Tropes A to E | Tropes F to L | Tropes M to R | Tropes S to Z

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El Goonish Shive provides examples of the following tropes:

• Made of Evil: Aberrations are magically-created monsters of human origin. They are literally incapable of remorse and empathy and any attempt to cure them will only kill them as undoing their monsterhood undoes the magic keeping them alive. When they die, they turn into ash.
• Mad Scientist:
  • Tedd, at his most immature, is a scientist who uses his field of focus to indulge in his fetishes.
  • Dr. Germahn is a self-proclaimed mad scientist who is not above testing things on himself or his subordinates. Some of said subordinates, Amanda and Chika are examples in their own right. The former indulges in a lot of transformations while the latter has an amazing watch that she presumably made herself.
• Magic A Is Magic A:
  • The magical rules are being explained to the audience as the main characters learn them. Every time a new spell is introduced, the readers are told exactly what it is capable of. In addition, it has been explained how characters gain new spells, and how someone can gain access to magic to begin with (continued on the next two pages). It has also been stated that it is impossible to bring the dead back to life, create undead beyond telekinetically using a corpse as a puppet, and to travel through time (though according to the author, time travel is only impossible because Tedd having access to time travel would make him an Invincible Hero).
  • Later it is revealed that Magic itself has sentience (as well as a flair for the dramatic). Apparently, the rules of magic can occasionally require for one of multiple events to occur, which is when its consciousness takes over. It can also alter its own rules for how it works whenever it chooses, though usually some things will stay constant. One of the largest consistent rules of magic is basically 'anything magic has to do with something related to magic'; the will of magic's 'flair for the dramatic' comes from an inability to see anything that has not come into contact with magic, which includes large populations. This means it typically observes and takes data from Large Ham mad wizards when they're high from casting spells and powerless muggles cowering in fear, and assumes that's what humanity's two archetypes are.
• The Magic Comes Back: Magic has always made itself available in some form or another, but has many times suppressed the current magic system to prevent most humans from figuring out how to use it. When the Will of Magic realizes that keeping itself exclusive and a secret is no longer an option, it allows lost ancient magic to revive. That includes the Uryuom's unique brand of Earth magic, which the Will of Magic had blocked off long ago when they misused it.
• Magic Feather: Zigzagged with the glove that Tedd builds that can enchant other items (such as wrist watches) into magic wands that cast spells. Until Pandora tells him, he does not know that he is the one doing the enchanting, and the glove wouldn't work for anyone else.However, it later turns out the glove is useful in a different way. It lets Tedd precisely program spells, an incredibly useful feature when Magic's "not" changes resulted in spells shifting from auto to manual.
• The Magic Goes Away: Magic likes to be used, but only be a small number of people. When too many people figure out how to become spellcasters, magic changes its rules, leaving humans without any access to magic until a small number of them can figure out how to use it again. Additionally, it is implied that in the past, magical creatures were quite common and widely known, but that doesn't seem to be the case today.
• Magic Is a Monster Magnet:
  • The entire town of Moperville has become a magical monster magnet because the local area is now saturated with magic energy, it is gradually spreading and it is attracting magically inclined beings.
  • In Magus's world, magic is much stronger and commonplace. According to him, any world with that much magic comes with monsters, to the point that his world treats dragons as a natural disaster and has to train battle mages to keep them in line.
• The Magic Poker Equation: Justin, down to 1 life and with no hand, wins his Magickal Gatherings duel with Tensaided by drawing Unstompable Stompede, allowing him to do enough damage to take Tensaided from 20 life down to zero in one turn. Lampshaded.
  Tensaided: Well, it just goes to show that no matter how powerful and awesome one's deck is, there is always an element of luck with card games.
• Magical Sensory Effect: Raven mentions that he can taste magic, and the taste indicates what sort of magic it is.
• Magic Pants:
  • Justified. Uryuoms and those of Uryuom descent are shapeshifters, but their shapeshifting ruins normal clothes. To adress this issue, they developed special textile technology, producing clothes that shapeshift with them.
  • Literal and justified with magic-based shapeshifting. When anyone uses magic to shapeshift, they produce a field when doing so that extends to their clothes and causes the clothes to morph with them. There are some finicky rules attached, so it doesn't always work.
• Magitek: Tedd's research has allowed him to combine magic and technology to the point of being able to precisely program spells on a computer.
• Magnetic Plot Device: The city of Moperville is built on a site where ambient magic flows into another world. This isn't usually too much of a problem, but when someone deliberately blocked the flow of magic at that point, it resulted in an ever-increasing level of ambient magic in the area. This serves to draw magical beings to the area, and boost the power of those who are already there.
• The Magocracy:
  • In the other side of reality, authority is decided by magical power, primarily by those who have auras in the shape of a crown. The intention was to keep magic at the centre of political power. Many people resent said system, especially the non-humans since only humans have shown the magic aura of royalty, with the griffin Tara saying she thinks their ancestors dropped the ball when that agreement was made. With contact between the main universe and Gryphon World increasing, opportunists hope to take advantage of having access to another world to create a social revolution.
  • Played with in the main reality. Magic power is not a factor for determining leadership, being tangential at best. However, the idea of magic power equalling authority is so ingrained in the other side of reality that even dissidents who hate the magocracy system in their world think that the main world must be a magocracy despite the masquerade, and that the powerful magic users are hidden dictators.
• Mail-Order Novelty: One non-canon comic says that Catalina's very poor Gaydar is because she bought a literal gaydar device from a comic book ad that advertised itself as "100% accurate."
• Mama Bear:
  • Knowing that Adrian Raven is half-human and half-immortal, Abraham managed to draw only one conclusion, and mostly wrong one. The prospect of facing said immortal's reaction after he'd beaten her child within a hair's breadth of death somehow escaped his attention in all this haste… Isn't it surprising — where all those heavy boots flying toward his butt came from? And it's still not enough for her.
    Pandora-Chaos: Also? He hurt my son.
  • Diane takes a strangely maternal role to Rhoda, and is furious she was almost killed by a boar.
  Diane: It should burn. I'm having pork for lunch.
  • According to Nanase's mother when she's trying to get her a babysitting job, Nanase will go to extreme lengths to protect the kids she's babysitting.
  "No, seriously. She will defend your children with the ferocity of a mama bear protecting her cubs."
• Man, I Feel Like a Woman:
  • It's implied that Tedd does this on occasion just for fun, but so far no other character has. Later on it's pretty much verified Tedd is genderfluid and shifting into a woman is their way of expressing that.
  • Discussed in NP when Tedd writes a letter to ask the developers of Champions Online to add options for changing a character's sex to add additional customization, and again as part of a MythBusters parody when they decide to "test" whether the phenomenon is true. Elliot is not amused, since he's been genderbent enough that he wouldn't have the same response as someone who was genderbent for the first time, anyways.
• Mass Transformation:
  • Ellen eventually reveals she has a spell to perform a Mass Gender Bender on a group of people in close proximity to each other, but she hasn't used it yet.
  • In the "Family Tree" arc, the Arc Villain enacts a plan to perform Mass Hypnosis at a party by spiking their alcoholic punch. As part of this plan, a Mass Transformation is also performed to make his targets resemble Nanase, as part of his revenge against her aunt, Noriko.
• The Masquerade:
  • At least two — with magic and Uryuoms, and people aren't always allowed into both at once. Grace isn't really into it, though. It's too inconvenient, after all.
  • The Unmasqued World: More or less done. Pandora is now hellbent on causing this. Also, it will let her son Adrian participate fully in society. Whatever form it's going to take after this, anyway. However, A.J. Arthur says that the real secret hasn't been broken, yet — it's no longer about the existence of magic, but rather its accessibility (the point being that the existence of magic things might actually be widely known, but that ordinary humans can learn to use magic is not) that needs to remain hidden. The Will of Magic eventually concludes that due to how magic works, keeping both its existence and even how to use it a secret is no longer an option, and prepares for a world in which anybody and everybody can use it.
• Masquerade Enforcer: The Men in Black enforce the secrecy of magic, and when that was no longer practical, enforce the secrecy of its accessability. It is later revealed Magic itself enforces secrecy by changing the rules of magic when enough people become aware of it, but Tedd successfully convinces both Magic and the government spooks that in the Information Age, keeping the masquerade up is no longer feasible and the best thing to do is to allow the masquerade to break in a controlled manner.
• Masquerade Paradox: A The World Is Not Ready variant. Under the current system of magic, anyone who knows magic exists can Awaken with sufficient time and effort, and will get spells customized to reflect their nature once they do so. Consequently, there is no middle ground between full-on concealment and giving dangerous magic to those who will most abuse it. As Mr. Verres puts it in the aftermath of Not-Tengu's defeat:
  Mr. Verres: You know that man in the ambulance right now? The man capable of, and having already done, absolutely horrible things? There is NOTHING special about him. He's just an average jerk who, when younger, stumbled on a way to gain use of magic that almost anyone on the planet could use. You want a real-life, non-hypothetical example of why there's so much secrecy? It's lying in the back of that ambulance.
• Mass Super-Empowering Event: A gradual, but inevitable case. Magic comes to realize that between modern technology and the way it itself works, keeping itself a secret is no longer an option. Magic's ability to restrict itself was also reliant on few people being able to use it. As such, it prepares itself for the eventual reveal by not only not deactivating the current system, but also reactivating all previous systems of magic that it had previously disabled in an attempt to keep itself a secret.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Not used in its traditional sense (everything here is magic, from the boobs to the clothes), but rather with regards to the existence of a capital-g God. Nanase's angel-looking 'Guardian Form' MAY be a gift from God, or it may just be another example of the way her magical potential is expressed by her personality. Of particular note if the fact that an ENTIRE COMIC consisted of nothing but Ellen silently praying for divine approval as she tried to use her Clone Beam to duplicate Nanase's Guardian Form. Was it necessary? Would she have been able to duplicate it anyway? There's no way of telling.
• Meaningful Background Event: While characters in the foreground discuss alcohol, something happens to a guy in the background. This, in an arc where Ellen and Nanase finally meet someone who has figured out that there is some kind of Masquerade.
• Meaningful Echo: Elliot explains how Ellen's moment of creation was simple with a simple "She's family, help her." So Ellen uses that exact phrase to explain how Susan meeting her probably-sister Diane is simple.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Assistant Director Liefeld is rather overmuscled.
  • Justin is very much into geek media. His last name, Tolkiberry, is a portmanteau of Tolkien and Roddenberry.
  • Nanase's last name is Kitsune and she ends up calling her magical clone Fox.
  • Also, Grace's last name, Sciuridae, is the scientific name for various species of squirrel. In addition, her codename is "Shade Tail," a rough translation of "Sciuridae."
  • A few minor characters, such as Susan's geeky boss Mr. Tensaided (ten-sided) and Ellen/Grace's math teacher Mr. Alephnull.
  • Tedd's last name, "Verres," is French for "glasses" and translates into Uryuom as "Bolloc" which is appropriate to his father's cover-up jobs.
  • Agents Wolf and Cranium.
  • Diane is a virgin.
  • Magic apparently has a sense of humor, and will make people more likely to get spells that are appropriate for their names. Hence the In-Universe explanation for why Catalina Bobcat has an affinity for cat based transformations.
• Mega Meal Challenge: During the "Hammerchlorians - 1" segment, Grace orders the "Pancake Mount Doom" breakfast, and gets her picture on the Wall of Fame after finishing it (making her only the fourth person ever to win).
• The Men in Black: Until the end of the "Sister II" arc, Mr. Verres was the head of the Paranormal division of the FBI. Now he is the "Director of Paranormal Diplomacy" a position that was created just for him when Kicked Upstairs because his extensive paranormal connections prevented him from being fired.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body:
  • About halfway. Gender Benders face the consequences of the new hormonal status and reactions on pheromones, whether they are comfortable with this or not. But Shapeshifting does not turn the subject mentally into a cat, guinea or squirrel. On the other hand, both innate and artificial Shapeshifting have some safeguards.
  • This trope is explored more seriously in the "Grace's Birthday Party" arc, when Susan allows herself to be gender-bent specifically to find out whether being male really does make people act like Jerkasses. (Answer: nope. Evidently her dad had no excuse for his jerkiness.)
  • Seems played straight but later averted with the transformation gun and sexuality. The gun is programmed to make straight people bisexual when transformed, because it was made to aid any species suffering a severe sex imbalance that risked species survival (or so Tedd speculates). Altered sexuality helps one adjust to such a necessity. Gay and bi people remain attracted to who they always were. Given the rules as set out, one could presumably program the gun to cause no such mental changes in straight people - which Tedd probably has no interest in doing, because (to him) it's a lot less sexy that way. Later he does program the gun, and his magic watches, to alter sexuality (and libido) more or less at will.
• Mind Screw: Lots of it. When done intentionally, usually involves attempts to project the normal family tree onto Ellen's case in several equally disturbing ways.
• Minions Customized at Creation: Summons whose forms are made from magic, usually also have a part of the Summon Magic being able to tweak the result with sufficient will.
• Minored In Ass Kicking: Mr. Raven is a teacher, and as a half-Immortal, isn't allowed to fight unless the situation involves magic or people near him are in danger, so he tends to stay out of the fight unless the situation is serious.
• Missing Mom: Tedd's mom Noriko isn't present in his life following the divorce from his dad Edward. Tedd hasn't seen her since then.
• Mistaken for Object of Affection: In one of the Summer Moments comics, Sarah is transformed into Grace as part of a plan to prank Tedd. Unfortunately, Tedd discovered Sarah as Grace a little too early, and kissed her, thinking she was the real Grace. The comic itself lacks any dialogue, but the commentary suggests that they decided to never speak of it again.
• Mix-and-Match Critters:
  • Uryuoms' eggs work this way producing Hybrid Monsters, thus Here There Be Chimerae. And then, part-lespuko chimerae.
  • Jeremy, the Verres' household's pet, is a housecat with hedgehog spines.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • Oh dear god. What started out as an arc based on Grace and Tedd going on a double date with Ellen and Nanase to keep Tedd's mind off of science ended up by showing that Tedd has a version of Lord Tedd's mechanical arm. And then, the next comic has Sarah and Susan… playing video games at Sarah's house. Ow, my metaphorical neck.
  • Heck, there's a comic titled "The Most Emotionally Unbalanced Comic EVER". What happened there is that Grace is angsting over her violent loss of control against Damien only for Ellen to interrupt that by glomping her.
    Ellen: I'm sorry, did I interrupt some drama there?
  • In this comic Elliot is on a simple movie date with Ashley and just 2 comics later it is revealed that Ellen is possesed by Sirleck and Elliot gets possesed by Magus.
• Mooks: The not-really-flaming fire summons. They are so harmless to Greg and Grace that they use them as training dummies to teach Grace a sleeper hold.
• Moon-Landing Hoax: The moon landing was emphatically not faked in this setting (the government may be covering up the existence of magic and aliens, but faking a moon landing is just silly). However, the comic has made a few jokes about it:
  • The first was in regards to a supernatural incident that proved rather difficult to cover up, namely a fight between a flying superhero and a fire monster that was videotaped by a number of people, and witnessed by many more. Things had progressed to the point that the only people who didn't believe the events in question were real were the kinds of nutjobs who believe the moon landing was faked.
  • The second such joke occurred when the Immortal Helena wanted to prove that Immortals were capable of lying, so she told a long string of Blatant Lies. One of those lies was, "The moon landings were a hoax."
• Morality Chain Beyond the Grave: Adrian Raven attempts to use his deceased father Blaike Raven as a morality chain towards his unstable immortal mother Pandora by pointing out "Father would hate what you've become." It has a fairly strong impact.
• Morality Pet: Lord Tedd looks almost normal and even rather nice when he looks for Nioi, as opposed to most other scenes with him, while Nioi is convinced he's not that bad and it's all only the corrupting influence of General Shade Tail.
• Most Common Superpower:
  • Justified with Ellen and all of Elliot's female forms since they're based on the FV5 setting on the TF Gun, which is a "perfect female form" as designed by a Hormone-Addled Teenager.
  • Discussed and possibly justified by Tedd, who hypothesizes that having magic energy can cause physical changes, which can include a larger bust. It's one explanation for why Moperville seems to be a World of Buxom.
• Motionless Makeover: Justin likes messing with Nanase's hair when her body's unconscious during the use of her Fairy Doll spell.
• Motor Mouth: Heidi, AKA Elliot's party girl alter ego, is perfectly capable of having long and fast-paced speech as seen here.
• Mister Descriptor:
  • Principal Verrückt (German for "insane") is a crazy Hitler-lookalike.
  • Dr. Physics Professor is a physics professor at a university.
• Mr. Exposition:
  • Dr. Germahn and Amanda during the Q&A segments, when they explain plot points or magic mechanics.
  • Tedd when he explains the TF/TG gun.
  • Mr. Verres is An ENDLESS BARREL of exposition.
  • Jerry the Immortal when he explains the origins of the hammers.
  • Mr. Verres lampshades one of Grace's attempts.
• Mugging the Monster: After Sarah takes Grace out to buy clothes, the two of them are set upon by a mugger. This is how we are introduced to Grace's shapeshifting powers. And her telekinesis as well, although it's not confirmed until this strip.
• Multi-Gendered Outfit: In order to help Susan protest the new uniform dress code, Tedd (already androgynous and who later realizes he is gender fluid) comes to school in a uniform with the male pants and the female vest on, challenging why the vest is coded feminine in the first place.
• Multiple-Tailed Beast: Grace's omega form is a three-tailed squirrel-girl.
• Multitasked Conversation: Justin accidentally doing this here, where he's carrying an unconscious Elliot while talking to Melissa, where it's obvious that a mysterious person is Noah:
  Melissa: Hey! How did you know that was Noah?!
  Justin: Seriously?
  Justin: Come on, wake up...
• Mundane Fantastic:
  • Elliot's and Ellen's parents take all the weirdness around them in stride, to the point that Edward, a government spook, is flabbergasted they are calm, even indifferent, to some of Elliot's wilder antics.
  • Elliot himself is prone to this. He thinks he's relatively anonymous at school despite punching out goo monsters and doing Wall Runs just to avoid a crowd. Even meeting a griffon didn't strike him as unusual.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • Indiana Elliot And The Temple Of Swedish Furniture storyline consisted of Elliot shopping for a Swedish TV stand. 8 comics in, we have an epic chase sequence.
  • This strip turns a potato battery (and a rubber duck) into awesome science.
  • This comic has the most epic clicking of "do not like" ever.
  • Thanks to Grace's imagination, the Magickal Gatherings duel between Justin and Tensaided is made to look like a wizards duel instead of a mundane card duel, starting here.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Nanase uses her fairy doll spell mostly as a telephone.
  • Elliot finds out that he must transform before bed each evening to stave off unwanted magic buildups… so, Ellen sees an opportunity to try out new hair colors or make costumes for roleplaying with her girlfriend.
  • Elliot uses his martial arts skills to do a Wall Run. Why? Because a girl had dropped her phone and there was a crowd in the way.
  • Upon receiving her spell, Sarah's first thought is that she can use this to cheat on tests.
• Mutual Masquerade: The main cast hides the fact they have magic from Rhoda and Catalina. Rhoda and Catalina in perfect mirror hide the fact they have magic from them. The main cast for their part has reason to suspect Rhoda and Catalina have magic, but they can't be sure and are afraid of the potential consequences if they approach the two girls about it and they happen to be wrong.
• Mysterious Parent:
  • All that's known about Tedd's mother is that she's somewhere in Europe, and that there's some bad blood between her and her sister Mrs. Kitsune.
  • To a lesser extent, Susan's father. It's eventually explained that he left after being caught in an affair, which was the root of Susan's ultra-feminist tendencies.
• Mysterious Past: What the hell happened in France, anyway? Finally gets resolved as of here.
• Naked Apron: Tedd here (well, not naked, but skimpily dressed), and Elliot here.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Pandora Chaos Raven is generally not considered a friendly name, especially the Chaos part. "Refer to me as one or as all. I WILL live up to the name." Their first attempt at a name was meant to invoke this trope. It was "Box", and no one caught the reference to Pandora's Box.
• Necessarily Evil:
  • Abraham, due to his oath, considers himself bounded to murdering Ellen in spite of her lack of guilt in any wrong-doing and her not actually being a danger to the people around her. When given an out, he leaps at it to avoid having to commit murder.
  • Arthur calls himself monstrous and the whole thing of The Men in Black denying a lot of freedom to magic users and working without public accountability to be antithetical to the ideals of a free and fair society like the USA is supposed to be, but considers all that necessary to prevent the harm magic could do. With the irreversible public awareness of magic, he views Tedd as the provider of a better solution so that they no longer need a secret police for magic.
• Negative Continuity: Some of the EGS:NP storylines are explicitly not canon. Like this one.
• Nepotism:
  • The title of the arc where Justin tries to get Grace a job at the comic book store, referencing the fact that his uncle owns the place and the only reason Grace even got an interview with him is because her friend Justin set it up.
  • Downplayed. It's acknowledged in-universe that in addition to being the only other known Seer in the entire USA, Tedd being the son of Edward, a VIP in the magic community, is a large factor in them getting their government-funded lab for magic research.
• Never Heard That One Before: William and Gillian are annoyed to hear Elliot say he's having a fifth kind encounter when he meet them. He quickly realizes that was rude of him.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: The magic system explicitly allows any "Awakened" character to develop any power the plot needs, any time it's convenient. The characters acknowledge living in a world where Rule of Drama is an observable phenomenon akin to gravity.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Abraham and his great idea to make the Dewitchery Diamond. What he needed was to remove or suppress the lycanthropy of one guy. What he did is create a Booby Trap for unaware shapeshifters and users of cosmetic magic, with side effects that in turn suffer several other side effects in such a way that whatever problem caused its activation spreads. And it's nigh indestructible, so all this fun never ends. Oh, and on top of that, good ole' Abe thinks it might be intelligent!
• 90% of Your Brain:
  • In one strip of EGS NP, Susan complains about Lucy, saying it's "based on a 'fun fact' that isn't even true! You might as well make a movie about an assassin who uses daddy-long-legs venom!"
  • Later, in the main strip, an Immortal starts telling a series of Blatant Lies in order to demonstrate to a confused gryphon that Immortals are capable of lying. This is one of them.
• No Bisexuals:
  • The strip has a rather unusual take on sexual attraction and gender identity. In this comic, being subject to a Gender Bender causes one to gain heterosexual tendencies appropriate to the gender being changed into (basically, straight people become bisexual while homosexuals see no real change in which gender they're attracted to), so El Goonish Shive is an aversion of this, as much of the cast have been bi, albeit only temporarily. Ellen (a magical duplicate of Elliot permanently turned into a girl) is also bisexual but has decided that she isn't able to deal with dating men, largely because she realizes her attraction to guys is a purely artificial construct forced onto her by Sufficiently Advanced Technology. She now identifies as a homoromantic bisexual.
  • Zigzagged with Grace. She doesn't identify as a bisexual, as she's physically attracted to the opposite of whatever gender she's in at the moment. However, between that and the fact that as a chimera, her attraction is based more on mental concepts, regardless of gender, whether she is or is not bisexual is a matter of semantics (the fandom-culture formulation "Teddsexual" and the tumblr-culture formulation "demisexual" have also been suggested).
  • Ashley has dated both girls and boys, and her attraction to Elliot intensifies when she comes upon him switching gender. Despite this, she specifically refuses to describe herself as bisexual: "I don't like labels, or boiling things down to one word."
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • "Now now, Mr. Raven, I know you just think of me as a lowly intern with a remarkable resemblance to Zach Braff…"
  • The guy who loaned Elliot a lighter sure looks a lot like Silent Bob.
  • And of course, Raven himself looks like Alan Rickman's version of Snape.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Mr. Tensaided suffered a case of this when he gives Susan the rest of the day off to deal with a personal issue, only to get swarmed by a horde of grandparents in complete disagreement as to what constitutes "appropriate content" for their grandchildren. A good deed is usually fairly safe in this comic, but Tensaided had to go and tempt fate as well.
  Mr. Tensaided: It's Sunday anyhow. Mostly just returns.
• Noodle Implements: Two fold in a filler comic.
  • Minion explains that Dan was going to start a new storyline that had "ninjas, japanese bath houses, and hamsters. Lots and lots of hamsters." No other details are ever given.
  • Minion also explains that the reason why Dan is taking a break instead is because during the party, things happened. Police got involved and based on the police report, magic and science were heavily abused.
• Noodle Incident: Several, though older ones are gradually being resolved:
  • Susan and Nanase's trip to France and that trip's connection to the French speaking immortals went without any explanation for five years until explained in May 2010.
  • The series of events that led to Sarah becoming a Catgirl, which left her traumatized about transformations. The Catgirl incident was never told in sequence or flashbacked, but alluded enough to give a very good idea what happened. Few months before the comic started, while Tedd and Sarah worked on a project for school together. He was just joking around!
  • How Elliot's previous summer job at the grocery store left him freezing up at the mere thought of going back to it.
  • After Ellen and Nanase become "Meddling Teenagers" (Not affiliated with any meddling kids or their dog), we get this conversation:
  Elliot: I still can't believe Ellen and Nanase got invited to a party with college students.
  Justin: Well, they did save their mascot while solving the mystery of the haunted locker room.
  • Diane got drunk at a new years party once.
  • When Tedd is pointing out all the reasons people notice Elliot, we see him taking on bullies, fighting the Goo (how people know about it), attacking the Evil Monkey, and... talking to a griffin? When did that happen?! ^note This, too, has been partially de-noodled.
  Tedd: In retrospect, that griffin was probably noteworthy.
  Elliot: She was just asking for directions!
  • And another, when Tedd is talking to his father about magic, he realizes that one time, Edward faked a seizure to avoid explaining something.
  Mr. Verres: If you ask me a question I cannot answer, either because I don't know or can't safely say, I will say so. Or change the subject. Or fake a seizure.
  Tedd: That was fake?
• No Infantile Amnesia: Justified due to magical shenanigans. Ellen is capable of recalling even memories of being a baby from her "Second Life."
• "No. Just… No" Reaction: Sarah's reaction at the thought that Elliot might be like a sister to her in his female form is to be stunned and then reject any notion of it.
  Sarah: (Beat Panel) NOPE. Not considering it.
  Susan: It could explain a few—
  Sarah: NOPE.
• No Mouth: Until the second story arc, Tedd's mouth wasn't drawn unless he was yelling or grinning.
• No Ontological Inertia: After a summoner is killed or rendered unconscious everything he summoned (including even projectiles launched by the summoned creatures) vanishes.
• No-Sell: One of the abilities of a Seer is that they have incredible magic resistances compared to everyone else, allowing them to outright resist a lot of enchantments.
• No Social Skills:
  • Grace. She was raised in a lab, and it took her a long time to realize why everyone in the main cast was uncomfortable with her nudity. Also lacks what should be common knowledge.
  • Also Noah, as Elliot has noticed when they first met. You have no idea how to handle this, do you? Also, were you aware squirrels ate nuts? We don't know much about his past, but judging by similar symptoms, weird hair and connection to Damien he may well have essentially the same case as Grace.
• Not Helping Your Case: When Mr. Verres has given permission for Grace to have a birthday party while he's away, on the condition that Elliot supervise (instead of Ellen). Ellen tries to defend herself when Edward uses her crazed look as evidence, but her excuse that it could mean any number of things fails to sway his opinion.
  Mr. Verres: That doesn't help your case.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore:
  • At the end of Sister 2, cracks started showing through The Masquerade, and the main characters' hometown became a hot spot for conspiracy theorists and supernatural enthusiasts.
  • During New and Old Flames, more cracks showed, and the existence of magic could no longer be denied, though it's ease of accessibility remains unknown.
  • During End of an Era, Elliot and Sarah broke up. Status Quo Is God is clearly not in effect.
  • During Sister 3, Pandora's actions results in the complete and utter shattering of The Masquerade. Additionally, Tedd manages to convince the Will of Magic to go along with its reveal, resulting in The Unmasqued World. This in particular is actually an odd example, because it involves making sure the rules of magic didn't change in an attempt to cling to The Masquarade. As Elliot put it:
  Elliot: For Magic not changing, a lot of stuff is changing.
• Not So Above It All: Susan, who knows that jealousy is a logical, biological trait among people and unsurprised she feels this way towards Elliot, is very surprised to have found Catalina kissing him to be a turnon.
  Susan: A female friend who once asked me out kisses a male friend that I'm attracted to, and I think it's sexy. Where's the damn logic?!
• Not So Omniscient After All: The Immortals. They may be capable of special insight and intuition, but that doesn't mean they can't make mistakes.
• Not That There's Anything Wrong with That:
  • One of Justin's fangirls is sad that he's gay. But only because she can't ask him out. Even though she already has a boyfriend.
  • "Wait, do lesbians have to say that?"
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Averted — Dan decided to concede and call his not-exactly-a-vampire thing a "vampire" because he knew the readers would accuse him of trying to pawn a vampire off as something else. Translated, in-universe, to Susan giving in and (grudgingly) calls it a vampire when she realises Grace and Sarah will keep calling it one regardless of anything she says to the contrary.
• "Not Wearing Pants" Dream: Early in the "Squirrel Prophet" arc, Grace is getting chewed out by an old-fashioned teacher for using the Internet in her research assignment. The teacher then points out she forgot to get dressed, at which point her clothes disappear. Ridicule ensues.
• Not What It Looks Like:
  • Inverted when Lisa is physically close to herself in the context of fanservice, "This is exactly what it looks like."
  • Also played with when Nanase's mother walks in on her and Ellen kissing in the hospital. Ellen tries to cover it up by claiming they were rehearsing a play about CPR, but Nanase refuses to hide their relationship and her mom didn't buy the cover up anyway.
• Now Allowed to Hug: Susan, as part of her Defrosting Ice Queen arc, went from not wanting to be touched (let alone hugged) to trying to get over her discomfort, and eventually succeeding.
• The Nudifier: Dr. Germahn once invented a potion that caused your sweat to dissolve clothes.
• Oblivious to Love:
  • Done thrice, played with and played straight, with the same character. In an early storyline, Elliot pretended to be unaware that Sarah was in love with him, in a complicated (and failed) attempt to spare her feelings when she found out he had a girlfriend. They work it out. He also seems to be genuinely unaware that Justin has feelings for him. And after breaking up with her, Elliot finally acknowledges both his growing attraction to Susan and that he thinks of Sarah as a sister. The latter realization breaks his brain, but he's unaware Susan is attracted to him as well.
  • Edward Verres misses the fact that his secretary, Lavender is into him during New and Old Flames. No longer; they are a couple as of the 2019 Party arc.
  • This trope may also one of the reasons why Justin never had a boyfriend for the longest time until he asked Luke out at the end of "Squirrel Prophet - Final Battle. He seems strangely unaware of a certain someone's interest in him, despite the chemistry between the two being patently obvious to both Sarah and Grace. He's just as oblivious about George's obvious bouts of jealousy.
  • Discussed and Justified — because Justin acknowledges that 90 percent of the population is heterosexual (despite the comic itself being Cast Full of Gay), he feels he can't just assume someone he's interested in is gay, even if the signs are there. Even when Grace convinces him someone might be interested in him, he worries he'll scare the person away if he shows overt interest.
• Odd Friendship: Susan and Tedd. One is the result of a Straw Feminist upbringing. The other is an enormous pervert who openly objectifies women. To say they got off to a rocky start would be an understatement, but once they found common ground (Parental Abandonment and Star Trek), they actually get along okay.
• Of Corset Hurts: Never demonstrated, but conversed between background characters when discussing corsets that hurt to wear.
  "…So basically, the difference between traditional corsets and the modern faux corsets is the absence of evil."
• Offer Void in Nebraska: Played for Laughs in this comic's commentary. Dan says the comic has the "recap seal of approval" and is valid everywhere except Arizona.
• Official Couple:
  • Tedd and Grace are so official that other characters commented they're practically married, from their friends to Pandora.
  • Sarah and Elliot were official since early in the comic's run. That is, were. They have run aground on the Westermarck Effect on Elliot's part and have broken up. Their relationship lasted over half-a-year in comic and over ten years of the comic's run.
  • Nanase and Ellen are an item too. They had some issues in Sister II, but they worked through them.
• Offscreen Crash:
  • More like an offscreen explosion.
  • And a really big one.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The first one ever came in this comic, when Elliot says it in response to Tedd's sexual comment.
  • Raven realizes things can go poorly when his mother, a half crazy all powerful immortal, vows to "destroy the world as it is now known" for the sake of creating a world where he's accepted. And what scares Raven is that he knows a) she's serious and b) she most definitely has the power and knowledge to do such a thing.
  • "Oh Hell," actually, when Jerry turns around and discovers that Susan has gained a ( somewhat freaky looking) hair-Battle Aura after he pointed out that he created the hammer system not to prevent inappropriate comments, but to encourage it.
  • Elliot/Heidi, realizing that he just kissed his girlfriend's sister when in an alternate identity. After calling her sexy. On TV. Yes, it was just a goodbye peck on the cheek, and he could blame it on his magical disguise messing with his head, but there's still reason to be concerned, as Elliot's girlfriend is very insecure when compared to her older sister.
  • Raven gets a silent one here when he realizes the boar wants to be big and Grace just told it they could make it small again.
  • Nanase's expression here, when she realizes Sarah doesn't know how Elliot and Nanase's relationship ended and its implications.
  • Elliot's expression when he realizes he's attracted to Susan.
  • Elliot's anthropomorphic representations of his brain when Super Elliot reminds them that Susan and Sarah are watching the whole scene that Catalina is doing.
  • Tom gets a couple when Susan realizes that he was trying to manipulate her.
  • Arthur has that look when he learned even after Magic's rules have severely changed, one in seven million people in a population of over seven billion people will be able to learn the new rules since they are seers.
  • Both Tedd and Arthur get the look when they learn exactly what changes magic is making as part of it's reveal.
  • Often lampshaded in the author commentaries, where Dan Shive will post an "Oh Snap!" graphic◊ after a massive reveal.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: Upon learning Elliot fought a monster at school, Mr Verres' reaction is to be upset it happened again.
  Mr Verres: What is it with you kids!?
• Older Than They Look: Raven looks 40-50, but he's old enough to have taught Nanase's mother. These comics make it clear that in his base form the trope is more pronounced as he looks like he's in his twenties. Being half-immortal basically means eternal youth apparently.
• Old Master: Discussed. Greg considers it shameful that even though he is an anime-style martial arts master, he is not an old man (or a pervert).
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Abraham created the Dewitchery Diamond, a seemingly indestructible gemstone that gives form to cursed abominations in the process of separating the affected from their curse. This led to him having a reputation where "every properly trained wizard's heard of Abraham, the idiot apprentice."
• One-Gender Race: While some Uryuoms living on Earth adopt gender roles, they really are ambisexual; any two Uryuoms can form an egg together, which can then be 'fertilized' with any available DNA sources.
• One-Sided Arm-Wrestling: Nanase vs Man-Susan ends quickly in Nanase's win.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • While played straight for the most part, was averted with a one-off joke with two Toms. One's a Manipulative Bastard, the other's reportedly a really Nice Guy.
  • Later, Elliot lampshades this trope, assuming he is the only Elliot Dunkel around but Edward assures him people can have the same names.
• One-Word Title:
  • Sections:
    • Fluidity
  • Comics:
    • Speechless
• Only Six Faces: Maybe not six, but it's here and is only aggravated by the "shapeshifting into some similar form" theme. However, he got better.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Tedd invokes this on himself after offering to turn Susan into a guy.
  Ted: I am defying everything I am in an effort to help!
  • Adrian Raven consistently refers to his mother as "Mother." Right up until Sister 3 Part 22: Apocalypse, when she breaks immortal law, and effectively dies, and he cries out "MOM!" in anguish.
• Opaque Lenses: Tedd's glasses are drawn as not see-through.
• Open-Minded Parent: The Dunkels, whose idea of punishing Elliot involves deciding he can only have one brownie with dinner, then forgetting that decision when the time comes and letting him have as many as he wants. They didn't even care, or acknowledge, the part where he broke into a government facility. There's also a Running Gag where something utterly bizarre happens (like Elliot turning into a girl for the first time) and they respond with indifference, amusement, or immediate acceptance, usually after everyone else has made a much bigger deal of it.
• Our Clones Are Different: The Dewitchery Diamond is meant to remove a curse from a person or entity, but does so by A) regarding any magical deviation as a "curse", even a simple cosmetic spell, and B) creating a duplicate of the person in their enchanted form, effectively transferring the "curse" to the clone. This accidentally results in the creation of Ellen when Elliot Dunkel uses it to reverse his Gender Bender transformation early, and of Kaoli when Nioi accidentally touched it while using a color-change spell. Clones have all the memories of the original, but from the moment they are split by the diamond they are separate individuals, and the clone gains a brand new soul. The clone also has the ability to "spread their curse", which for Ellen means she can act as a human Transformation Ray by shooting a beam out of her hand. And while Ellen initially fears she will only live as long as Elliot's original transformation was meant to last, this proves not to be the case. Magus later uses this on purpose to gain a new body by possessing Elliot and touching the Dewitchery Diamond, and retains all his abilities from his original universe when this occurs. There's also Clone Degeneration from the dissonance between a brand-new soul having a lifetime of memories, which drives the clones to insanity without intervention.
• Our Dragons Are Different:
  • There are a lot of summons that resemble dragons.
  • True dragons are not believed to have ever existed. However, within the Dewitchery Diamond, there is a mysterious scale containing very special magic which the protagonists speculate may have come from a dragon. And while in modern times, supernatural creatures are very rare, Pandora's flashback suggests they were once part of every day life, and that dragons were among them.
• Our Elves Are Different: Elves are what you get when you breed humans and immortals (originally called fairies) together, with all the power that implies. Raven happens to be one, which explains how he's been teaching since Nanase's mother was in high school. Elves are bound to similar rules as immortals, being disallowed from directly interfering with mortals except when magic is involved and/or innocent lives are in peril. Raven's mother is trying to break The Masquerade partially to get rid of these limitations. She claims she's doing it for him, but it seems like she might just be doing it out of boredom.
• Our Fairies Are Different: This comic reveals that immortals used to be referred to as fairies. They're shapeshifters with reality warping powers who mostly view mortals as a source of entertainment and set up a series of rules to control their interactions with the mortal world. It is unknown when they changed their name.
• Our Mages Are Different: The story uses different technical terms for magic users and familiar terms have specific technical meanings:
  • Awakened means anyone who can get new spells from continuous magic use.
  • Dreaming means anyone who has access to magic without being Awakened.
  • Wizards don't mean any human magic user. Wizards specifically refer to those that can copy the spells of others. They are born with that distinction.
  • Seers don't mean people who can see into the past, future, or faraway places. Here, Seers are a rare subtype of Wizards. They have high magic resistances and magic energy, can't awaken, can't gain spells of their own, and can see magic and how spells work.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The creature that attacked Susan and Nanase in France. It's strongly emphasized by Susan that it wasn't really a vampire, but it was vampire-like enough that they may as well call it one. While they aren't The Undead, aberrations do use Immortality Immorality. All aberrations are The Sociopath, lacking any sympathy and desire for companionship. The comic eventually makes vampire an official synonym^note  or hyponym, it isn't unambiguously clear yet for aberration. This trope also applies within El Goonish Shive itself, as "aberration" is an umbrella term for a broad variety of different monsters.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Instead of only transforming during full moons, people cursed with lycanthropy actually transformed every night. They were hunted to extinction hundreds of years ago, though, so not much more information is available.
• Outsourcing Fate: Magic is a Sentient Cosmic Force that wants to be used, but not by everyone. If too many people figure out how to use magic, a council of seers will be called. Seers are extremely rare, and only seers who have used magic but don't know about the council can be a part of the council; the average is less than one seer per council. The seers then must present their case to magic with firm logic and convince it of what major changes should be made to prevent magic from being mainstream, or to allow it to just change slightly to accommodate the reveal. Either way, every seer in the world (one in seven million, so about a thousand total as of the contemporary era the story takes place in) will become aware of the changes and the reason behind them. The problem is that magic doesn't really understand humanity, so it's difficult to convince it of anything. After a few initial missteps, Tedd manages to dramatically and bombastically explain that keeping a masquerade is simply not an option; with modern technology, anyone can share the secrets of magic in a second. There's no way they can keep a thousand seers quiet. Magic agrees, and the reveal becomes permanent.
• Painful Transformation: Sometimes — seems to depend on specific forms and method.
  • Boy-to-catboy was painful but not quite incapacitating with an early model and acceptable with TF gun — Sarah complaining about catgirl incident mentioned every possible problem but this. Human-to-human (Gender Bender or normal female to female v5) is "Wait -- I feel more jiggly than I should..."
  • An attempt to transform from living genetic salad of six kinds of beings to human was nearly lethal for Vlad. Part of Grace's design supposedly was to counter this problem. Though it may be partially because Project Lycanthrope seyunolu were not just made by eggs but also tinkered with.
• Palm Bloodletting: When Edward Verres wants someone to demonstrate a healing spell that doesn't work without an injury to heal, he slices the palm of his hand open.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • Parodied; aliens avoid detection by wearing T-shirts with phrases like "Homo sapiens." This is later Revisioned into just being part of a Lie to the Beholder effect, using illusions that they call projections.
  • Aliens? What aliens?
  • "The Ecology Of Anteaters (Not a Spellbook)."
• Parental Abandonment: Mr. Verres is often away from home on government business, and the former Mrs. Verres is in Europe somewhere and won't even visit for Christmas. Meanwhile, Mr. Pompoms has only been seen in Susan's memories, and significantly, his face is always obscured. Finally, all of Grace's parents are dead; her human gene-mother actually having died before she was conceived, her Uryuom father being murdered by Damien, and her other two parents being non-sentient lab animals which presumably would not have survived.)
• Parental Substitute:
  • Mr. Verres to Grace, due to promising her biological grandfather he'd look after her.
  • Diane to Rhoda. She helps her with teachers, protects her from creepy reporters, and is absolutely murderous when Rhoda is hurt by the boar ("It should burn. I'm having pork for lunch"). On top of that, Rhoda is specifically keeping the fact that she's bisexual and dating a girl a secret, exactly like you'd hide that kind of thing from a parent. For the record, her actual parents wouldn't care.
• Parodies for Dummies: Grace is seen in a cover page holding a book titled "Untying Knots for Squirrels.
• Partial Transformation: Grace can transform to any stage between full squirrel and full human, can selectively morph away her furry antennae, as well as routinely pull off various Shape Shifter Mashups with any or all of her continually growing number of humanoid forms.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: A group of dissidents from Griffonworld plot to lift one of their own to Royalty using a Power Parasite staff on a person with the same power from the main universe, preferably on someone unpleasant enough for them to not feel guilty about it, though some of them aren't so picky.
• People Fall Off Chairs: Done twice with Noah in shock in response to Grace-related revelations. The first time is here and the second time is here. The second time is especially absurd as he was sitting upright on a sofa and ends up upside down.
• Percussive Maintenance: Dan uses a lot of hammering to fix his computer in this filler strip.
• Personality Powers: In this 'Verse, the current magic system is based on "who you are and what you're doing" — at least normally. However, in the past, other systems of magic existed, and when magic is exposed to the world at large, the Will of Magic makes the other systems available again.
  • This is also Deconstructed to an extent, as one of the biggest reasons behind the government keeping the existence of magic a secret from the general public is that the most dangerous and destructive spells are very likely to end up in the hands of people who both desire them and won't care about the morality about it, as caring even slightly about the harm you could cause others can prevent you from gaining access to certain spells, as shown when Pandora couldn't grant Ashley any spells that fit her desires of transforming others because of her inherent goodness. The authorities unfortunately also have plenty of evidence to back up their concerns about the misuse of magic should it become widespread, with Not-Tengu being one such example of a normal man gaining magic and using for his own twisted desires.
• Person as Verb: 2017-05-22: Read more comics ... if you're going to Cheerleadra. (Be a superhero).
• Pheromones: Some of the Transformation Ray variants (especially Ellen's Venus Beam) cause the target to produce super-pheromones, which makes them attractive to everybody regardless of gender and sexual orientation. The effect wears off after about 48 hours. One result of this was that Nanase acknowledged her feelings for Ellen by rationalizing them to be a result of the latter's pheromones, then found out that there were no such things.
• Phone Booth Changing Room: Elliot demonstrates how out-of-date his superhero knowledge is by searching for a phone booth when changing away from his superheroine form. Because the comic takes place in the modern age of cell phones, he doesn't find one and has to settle for a gas station bathroom.
• Phrase Catcher: Tedd is either a narcissist or just that girly.
• Physical Attribute Swap: A set of magical scales capable of this appeared in one sketchbook entry. The scales reappeared in a non-canon side story where Sarah and Nanase use them to swap things like height and hip size to be able to fit through small passages, press far-off buttons, and ultimately escape from the room where they found it.
• Pietà Plagiarism: Grace and a guy she just knocked out with a sleeper hold.
• Pirate Girl: At least one convention attendee cosplays as this in the EGS:NP storyline "EGS-Con 2006".
• Playing with Fire: Damien was able to generate intense heat from his body. This is why Grace's Omega form was designed to be Immune to Fire.
• Playing with Syringes: Zig-zagged with Project Lycanthrope. It was a secret shady science operation to breed Half-Human Hybrids for use as shapeshifting assassins. However, the "syringes" part was accomplished entirely with uryuom Bizarre Alien Reproduction.
• Please Get Off Me:
  • Done with Tedd and Grace. "I appreciate your affection, but you're crushing me. Get off please???"
  • After Diane tackles Noah for following her around, Noah explains that he's her brother (in a sense), then adds "it would be appropriate to dismount."
    Diane: (jumping back) There had to have been a better way to put that!
    Noah: And yet, I am free.
• Please Put Some Clothes On: The standard response to Grace's early nudism. Playing with the trope — she actually takes it as people thinking she's ugly. It's not until Susan explains to her what the usual reason people would see each other naked is that Grace understands why it makes people uncomfortable.
• Political Overcorrectness: The strip originally called "Politically Correct to the Bitter End, though Ironically, I Think the Bloodgrem's British"
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • The Identity arc features this (and more broadly the nuances of people communicating) as a recurring theme, as the commentary makes clear — though mostly in aversion. It has the aftermath of Elliot and Sarah's surprisingly clean and angst-free breakup, Ashley and Elliot cutting short a lot of drama by simply admitting that they like each other right there and then and Susan managing to trip up an attempt to manipulate her simply by being honest about her feelings and intents. On the non-aversion side, it also features a nearly-disastrous attempt by Catalina to counter helping spread a false (though she believed it at first) rumour about Elliot that she decided on her own without telling anyone and Tom's deceitful manipulations backfiring on him, destroying any chance of a friendship with Susan.
  • Discussed in Question Mark. Pandora tells Sarah she should tell her friends about her new spell as otherwise, it would lead to, in Pandora's words, "subpar sitcom hijinks" from the lack of communication.
• Popcultural Osmosis Failure:
  • Because of her upbringing, Grace misses a lot of pop-cultural references, and even stuff that's not so "pop" such as not knowing who's Santa Claus.
  • Elliot apparently didn't pay much attention to The Matrix, in spite of owning the film.
  Mr Tensaided: (wearing dark glasses) Hello, Mr. Anderson. Welcome to the video store.
  Elliot: Hello! It's, uh, Dunkel, actually. Elliot Dunkel.
• Porn Stash: Implied; Diane is warned by her sister to stay out of a folder on the computer called "Gender Studies" before she is legally an adult.
• Post-Historical Trauma: Done self-consciously for Grace's first day at school. Subverted when it turns out to be not about World War II as such, but related personal experience.
• Post-Modern Magik: A key plot point is how modern technology and magic intersects. In particular, modern technology made it impossible to keep the existence of the supernatural a secret. Eventually, Tedd manages to convince Magic itself that the Information Age means that the very mechanics of how it changes the rules of magic, which includes informing all one thousand or so Seers who weren't previously part of the magic community of how the new rules work, means changing magic with the intention of keeping it a secret will catastrophically backfire, resulting in it deciding to go along with making magic public in a slower and more controlled manner.
• Power at a Price: A key feature of the magic system is the value of attributes. Some spells can be easier to cast if you make temporary sacrifices, so long as the trade-offs makes sense to the caster. For example, a spell to increase strength can be easier to cast at the cost of reason if that genuinely makes at least some amount of sense to the caster.
• Power Copying: In this setting, wizards are specifically people who can copy the spells of all others. Not all spells can be copied.
• Power Gives You Wings: Nanase's angel form, which comes with a power boost, also comes with angel wings.
• Power Glows:
  • Mostly subverted. The glow is optional and only used to indicate that said person is using his/her powers. This is the case with Nanase's fairy doll, and by Word of God, with Elliot's and Nanase's martial art skills.
  • The reason or meaning of occasionally glowing Tedd when he thinks of Grace is (as yet) unknown. As is his glowing during a Eureka! moment and a personal revelation. Apparently it's a real glow and not artistic convention, as Grace can see it too. In fact, Tedd nearly blinds someone who was looking for auras. And who was looking at a guy near him. It might be due to Tedd being a seer, especially the latter moment, but has not been explicitly explained as such as of 2022.
• Power Incontinence: If a magic user awakens improperly, they have to temporarily deal with energy buildups which forces them to use spells to use up excess magic energy.
• Power Perversion Potential:
  • Tedd has access to an alien gun that can transform people. What does he do with it? Tedd showers as a girl.
  • Also subverted. Elliot can turn into a girl, but fails at perversion.
  • Discussed Nanase could practically undress almost anyone in a second.
  • Agent Cranium has the ability to perform remote viewings, and has used it in exactly the way most people would.
  • One of the Patreon Pinups features Ashley straddling Elliot and calling him while he's shape-shifted in his Cheerleadra form, in which his phone and its functionality - including vibrating alerts - become a part of him. Dan even mentions in a comment that the only thing keeping this scene from being canon is that they haven't had an in-story opportunity to do it yet.
• Powers as Programs: A significant breakthrough that Tedd developed for magic is the ability to program spells on a computer for installation into wands, an extremely useful feature when magic switched from automatic to manual.
• Practice Kiss:
  • The trope is referenced in this strip where an imaginary Ellen shown an imaginary Grace a book on practicing kissing.
  • And when Sarah considers what Tedd (shapechanged to look like Grace) might think goes on in women's restrooms, the first and only thing she thinks off is girls practicing kissing.
• Practice Target Overkill: In the strip for 2-21-05, Nanase Kitsune is practicing her ki-powered martial arts attacks at Sensei Greg's dojo. After repeated strikes, she notices that the punching bag she's been hitting has been destroyed. She apologizes to Sensei Greg, but he tells her not to worry about it because he buys them in bulk.
• Precision F-Strike: Grace pretty much swears for the first time here.
• Premature Aggravation:
  • In this strip, Elliot starts out consciously trying not to be prejudiced against Melissa for wronging Justin but thinking about it makes him angry to the point that when he actually meets her, his greeting is dripping with barely suppressed rage.
  • More Premature Sadness than Aggravation, but in this strip, Sarah recognises that Elliot is planning to break up with her (because she was planning to break up with him) and while she starts off thinking that simplifies things, she then starts wondering why, so by the time they actually meet up, she's got Puppy-Dog Eyes.
• Prescience by Analysis: All sufficiently powerful Immortals can do this. Actually seeing into the future is impossible, but Immortals have incredible means of gathering information and get smarter with age. This means that they can extrapolate the outcome of most situations based on what they already know. Unfortunately, they also get increasingly unstable with age, leading to one mad Immortal trying to trying to create situations so chaotic that she can't predict the outcome.
• Prescience Is Predictable: Chaos only helps out Magus because she wants to make things as unpredictable as possible.
• Pretending to Be One's Own Relative: When Elliot gets turned into a girl by Tedd, and the transformation gun used to do this breaks so he'll be stuck in that form for at least a month, he poses as his cousin "Ellen" to be able to continue going to school.
• Protectorate: Though she's gotten more assertive on her own behalf over the last several arcs, pretty much the only surefire way to piss off Grace is to threaten her friends. You may not get the chance to do this more than once.
• Psychoactive Powers: When someone makes Grace explode (metaphorically), something is going to explode (literally).
• Psychotic Smirk: Along with Evil Laugh, played to the hilt with Raven though he was just being creepy and weird.
• Pulled from Your Day Off: The events of the "So a Date at the Mall" storyline, involving an encounter between a superhero and a griffin in the middle of a busy mall, result in reporter Carol Brown getting called to the scene. However, as the audience was shown in an earlier storyline, Carol was supposed to be having dinner with her parents and younger sister that evening. This probably contributes to her frustration when she arrives on the scene to find that the superhero and griffin both left the scene almost immediately before she arrived.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: When Raven makes it clear that Grace living is more important than him living. DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND. ME?
• Puppy-Dog Eyes:
  • When done by Susan on purpose, it's mostly used for shock effect. It scares both Jeremy and Justin. When she does it accidentally, it's much more effective.
  • Susan gets hit by seven sources of puppy dog eyes during Grace's party None Can Stand Alone Against a Septet of Puppy Dog Eyes!
  • Grace convinces Ellen and Nanase to go on a double-date with her and Tedd through the power of puppy dog eyes.
• Put on a Bus:
  • Lord Tedd, who was shaping up to be the Greater-Scope Villain before Dan decided to shelf the character for now (as in, decades). Lampshaded in one strip.
    Mr. Verres: Elliot, your concerns are based on incomplete and false information. We have been addressing the Lord Tedd situation, and I can assure you, it wouldn't make sense for him to be behind it.
    Elliot: You have?!
    Mr. Verres: Of course I have! Did you honestly think my strategy after hearing that someone from another universe was allegedly out to kill my son was to ignore it and hope for the best?!
    Elliot: That… seemed like what we were doing…
    Mr. Verres: Well, it wasn't. But that's not important right now. This is all complicated enough as it is with-out dragging Lord Tedd into it.
  • Dr. Germahn, who slowly went Out of Focus in the Fourth-Wall Mail Slot compared to Amanda and Lisa. Also lampshaded/hand-waived by the man himself here. The Bus Came Back now that Germahn has appeared in an actual canon story comic.
  • Guineas, Hedge, and Vladia; Grace's siblings. After Painted Black they get taken in by the government and out of the story. The readers do get to get caught up with them come Grace's birthday where its discovered what they are up to and that they might even be let out "soon", but nothing comes of that afterwards, even after months of in-comic time. Granted, there always is the chance even if Grace's siblings are released they won't settle down in Moperville due to everything happening, but a lack of dialogue explaining that means they are currently lost in the ether. Vladia has since returned as part of the task force searching for Magus, but Guineas and Hedge are nowhere to be found.
• Randomized Transformation: The Magic Mirror in the "Title Pending" arc has the ability to save any magical transformations it sees and copy them for later. Due to the mirror's faulty design however, it became overloaded when it copied too many spells and released a pulse that transformed almost everyone present into someone else at random. Although given the kind of comic they're in, most of them are used to being transformed by that point.
• The Rant: The commentaries on some comics, which may explain a plot point, a technique used, or Dan's opinion on Scrubs and Family Guy's different styles of Indulgent Fantasy Segue.
• Rapid Hair Growth: In the 6-20-13 strip Nanase's head hair starts growing as a result of using one of Tedd's magical watches. And growing. And growing.
• A Rare Sentence: Grace decides the theme she wants for her birthday party is for most of her friends to use alien technology to temporarily swap their genders, which isn't nearly as crazy as it would be in a more realistic setting but nevertheless takes a lot of people out of their comfort zones:
  Sarah: Part of me just wants to "get a room" with her. But that's just crazy! I don't want to lose my virginity as a guy, and I sure as heck don't want to risk getting Elliot pregnant! Which, by the way, is a sentence I never thought I'd say.
• Rash Promise: Abraham vowed to destroy every creature created by the Dewitchery Diamond, an object that he created to break curses that accidentally split them off into their own monsters. He never considered that it would be used to break a harmless gender-bending curse, and force him to try to kill the resulting innocent Opposite-Sex Clone Ellen.
• Read the Freaking Manual: Spellcasters are usually given their own spellbooks when they start learning magic, and new spells will occasionally appear in them spontaneously. It's something of a Running Gag for certain characters not to keep checking their spellbooks for new updates.
  Susan: Neat. I may attempt to do that later^note Take conscious first-person control of a magic duplicate of one of Nanase's fairy dolls after thoroughly reading through my spellbook.
  Nanase: Later? Awww...
  Susan: We're talking about transferring my consciousness into a magic construct with a very finite existence. I'm reading the instructions first.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Raven can be quite accommodating of his students when its clear there are special circumstances involved, even if he doesn't know what those circumstances are.
• Red Herring:
  • Eric, who was introduced at the start of the New and Old Flames arc, initially appears to be the one who summoned the fire creature, but we quickly find out that it was really Dex, who only appeared to be an odd background character. And it turns out that Dex wasn't the Big Bad, either. He was being possessed.
  • Given Pandora's reputation and the symbolism involved with Dex's pendant, Raven concluded afterwards that Pandora marked Dex, gave him the pendant, and manipulated him. But it's later revealed that Voltaire, another Immortal did those things instead.
  • Readers as well as characters In-Universe are led to believe that Susan and Diane are twins separated at birth due to their physical resemblance, being born close in time to each other, the reborn immortal Jerry acting as if they are sisters, and the two having the same magic affinity. Edward reveals early into Sister 3 that they're not twins because when he did a background check on Susan, he saw the hospital records confirming Susan is an only child and not adopted. The timing of their births is pure coincidence. The reincarnation of Jerry is also quickly revealed to have no special insight and happens to be wrong about Susan and Diane being sisters. The truth is revealed during the Apocalypse part of Sister 3. Pandora reveals that through Adrian, Susan and Diane are both their descendants, with Susan being a distant one while Diane is Adrian's daughter.
  • We are introduced to Camdin, who has smoke-based powers he uses for sneaking around, and who is interested in learning about Grace's magical secrets. In a later comic, we meet "Smoke," a person using a smokey disguise who was eavesdropping on a conversation involving magic between Grace and Sam, and is interested in seeing them transform. They are not actually the same person. "Smoke" is, apparently, a wizard, who in this universe can copy other people's spells. It later turns out that Smoke was actually Jay, another student at Moperville South and a Power Copying wizard.
• Reinventing the Telephone: Nanase uses her Fairy Doll to have a magical means of communication with her friends. With inevitable commentary on this by the rest of the cast.
• Relationship Reboot: Towards the end of the Sister arc, Ellen and Nanase do this, though Nanase doesn't get it at first. Ellen then goes on to reintroduce herself to the entire cast, with Nanase threatening to bitch slap anyone who laughs.
• Relax-o-Vision:
  • Used in-universe and weaponized by Jerry to stop Susan from rampaging mid-angst-induced awakening. Causes both calming and illusory fluffy animals to cuddle.
  • Used straighter in Q & A 7, where pictures of cute animals are used in lieu of pictures regarding healing injuries with the TF gun or other transformations.
• Remembered I Could Fly Grace spends a few panels trying fruitlessly to escape from a full nelson before realizing that she's a shapeshifter, and she can easily slip out by turning into a tiny squirrel.
• Remembered Too Late: In "So a Date at the Mall," Tara the griffin is manipulated into attacking Elliot by an Immortal because she mistakenly believes that Immortals are incapable of lying. The catch is that she should have already known that this is incorrect. Her wife Andrea previously informed her that one of the differences between their world and the main world is that Immortals in the main world can lie all they want. Unfortunately, she was too distracted to maintain this information, and was only reminded long after it ceased to be relevant.
• Replacement Goldfish: Grace's entire existence is due to Dr Sciuridae replacing the original gene sample that was to be used for Shade Tail with one from his daughter, after she was killed in a car accident, so he could have a replacement daughter.
• Required Secondary Powers:
  • Greater chimerae seem not to have much problems with identifying people they know in different forms. Uryuom once failed at this, but it may tell more about mental changes in Tedd after acquaintance with Grace.
  • Most transformation spells also include a "form acclimation" effect, which adjusts muscle memory and such to compensate for altered height, limb length, weight distribution, etc.
  • Prior to the "un-change", many variables for complicated spells were automatically handled by magic itself. In the wake of the "un-change", this level of interference became infeasible, and those variables switched to manual control.
• Reset Button: Referenced as the Doylist reason why Time Travel is impossible in EGS. All drama is undermined if the cast has access to a convenient way to undo the consequences of anything they did.
  Sarah: Grace finally snapped and destroyed half of Moperville.
  Tedd: TO THE UNDO BUTTON!
• Retargeted Lust: In the Superhero Science arc, following a Suggestive Collision and a bout of uncomfortable attraction, Elliot suggests to Tedd, "We should go find our girlfriends."
• Revenge Myopia
  • The creator of the dewitchery diamond was so enraged by his master's avenger being slain by a werewolf that he vowed to destroy any being created by the diamond to atone for creating it, including Ellen.
  • On a related note, the immortal Pandora helped rid the world of werewolves after one killed her husband, while her son calls her out for not attempting to find a cure.
• Revision: Melissa was introduced as some girl that Justin dated once as a freshman who became a Stalker with a Crush in denial and who outed him. Later, we get details where she's an Unlucky Childhood Friend who after one failed date (when he realized he was gay) let his secret loose. And then the other side of the story where she couldn't deal with losing the boy she wanted to marry nor the aftermath of confiding in her gossipy sister while emotionally devastated by the break up and became delusional.
• Revisiting the Roots: The 10th anniversary sketchbook is an upgraded redo of the first comic strip.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder:
  • Wondering about something while talking to a summoned creature may quickly end up in Too Much Information.
  • And this bit of dialogue:
    Tedd: Who ever gave you that idea?
    Grace: Everyone I have ever known ever.
  • And in EGS: NP...
    Nanase: [angrily] How would Grace like it if I had a magic watch that could make me look like her!?
    Tedd: She'd be thrilled.
• Right Behind Me: While Susan and Sarah talk about Matt, Susan discovers he's right behind her.
• Right-Hand Cat: Played with. No one present is evil, but Ellen invoked the aesthetics of the trope for when Elliot discovered what Grace decided on the theme of her party, stroking their cat Brownie while giving a maniacal laugh.
• Right on Queue: The side-story "EGS-Con 2006" starts with Sarah and Susan talking about the line to get into the convention, and includes a second.
• Romance-Inducing Smudge: Subverted when Ellen goes to wipe a smudge off Nanase's face and she freaks out because she was having trouble admitting her attraction to Ellen, and moments like that only made it more awkward.
• Romantic Spoonfeeding: While Tedd is feeding pizza to Elliot after Elliot injures his hands is a platonic display of affection (well, mostly platonic), that doesn't stop Mr. Verres from suspecting it might be romantic.
• Rousseau Was Right: After Tedd calls out half the school for making fun of Susan when she's the only one trying to change the uniforms, most of them are quick to apologize, with one saying that "we aren't a Borg Hive Mind." Earlier, when Grace runs out of class (due to not having heard of WWII) and is very embarrassed upon coming back, the other students are quick to offer their condolences over her leading such a sheltered life, and are angry at the people who subjected her to that rather than her. In fact, this comic demonstrates in many places that, with a few exceptions, high school students aren't the bastards that most media would have us believe. They're just normal people, with basically good natures.
• Rule of Drama:
  • It's been stated explicitly that magic is "overly dramatic," such as when all dark blue dye from Susan's hair ran out of her hair and into her clothes, followed by the magic making dark blue her natural hair color. Just because.
    Grace: But why did her hair grow?
    Jerry: See "over the top emphasis."
  • Tedd eventually deduces that magic isn't technically overly dramatic, it just doesn't understand humans and isn't good at subtle, so when it wants to communicate something it has to do it BIG.
• Rule of Fun: The author's stated reason for just why transforming is ridiculously, absurdly safe.
  Amanda: (Evil glare) It's more fun that way. [KRAK-A-THOOM!]
• Rule of Funny: Why else would THIS happen?
• Rule of Sexy: "Why haven't you buttoned up?"
• Running Gag:
  • The Demonic Duck started as a running gag where a character would point to a Demonic Duck of some kind to make a distraction. Cerebus Syndrome eventually made him an actual, albeit mostly lighthearted, part of the story.
  • Elliot and Ellen (and in one strip Tedd) saying "Za?"
  • "Either I'm a narcissist, or I'm just that girly." "Either way, it's a disturbing revelation."
  • Lesbians Are Neato! (Though one time it was Thespians). Even when the full phrase isn't used, it still comes up.
  • According to the author's commentary here, "that grin can now be considered a, um… well, the gag's certainly not running… A glacial drift gag?"
  • Attempts to build a genealogy tree for Ellen in several different, but equally ripe with Mind Screw ways. She's an Opposite-Sex Clone created by a magical artifact in conjunction with Gender Bender Magitek, but those around her keep trying to describe her parentage with traditional mother/father roles. For example, Ellen could be considered the daughter of Elliot and Tedd. Elliot's the mom because Ellen came from him and Tedd's the dad because he made it happen. Or she's a daughter of Elliot and Dewitchery Diamond, so one can discuss which is her "mom" and which "dad", etc. Turned serious with this strip.
  • "READ or the owl will eat you."
  • "Zappa the kitty!"
  • "Withdrawn!"
  • Girls who have kissed Sarah count. (currently 3)
  • Noah will hit the floor whenever he receives shocking information. Even if he's sitting down.
  • Elliot not keeping up to date on his spellbook. Expanded to also include Susan and Ellen. Apparently Nanase is the only member of the main cast who bothers to read spellbooks (both her own and Ellen's).
  • "What were you just thinking about?" "Baseball. You?" "Also baseball."
  • There's several to do with Ashley.
    • People (most often Nanase) suspecting her of having a secret dark side, usually followed by a humourous demonstration of her niceness.
    • Anytime something weird happens, someone asks her if she has any questions, to which she answers yes. Then she proceeds not to ask any questions out of politeness.
    • Multiple people have described her as being the devil (including herself) for various reasons despite her niceness.
• Running Gagged:
  • The Hammers, Demonic Duck, and for a while Ted's androgyny were killed for a short while. Tedd's androgyny eventually came back as part of his character development instead of as a gag.
  • Zig-zagged with the "Lisa has a crush on Amanda" gag. As of Q&A 6, Amanda has known that Lisa is a lesbian for a while, but whether she knows of Lisa's feelings for her isn't clear.
• Running on All Fours: Grace during the "Painted Black" arc. She encounters Vlad while infiltrating Damien's underground lair in her half squirrel/half human form and gets down on all fours like a squirrel to run away from him.

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