Webcomic / Leftover Soup

Jamie, Max, and Ellen.

Leftover Soup is a Webcomic published by Mason "Tailsteak" Williams from November 22, 2010 through April 10, 2017. It is a Slice of Life webcomic based on the life of Jamie the Supreme Chef, his roommate Ellen the Geek, and her best friend Maxine the polyamorous Lovable Sex Maniac. Other characters — for example, Lily, Ellen's boss, who Does Not Like Men — enter the scene as time goes on, but the primary focus is on those three.

Much like Tailsteak's previous comic 1/0, the strip is notable for delving into many philosophical and political issues, though with more breadth and realism than its predecessor. The characters are highly prone to navel-gazing and engaging in spiraling discussions about their wildly diverse personal philosophies. The author says his primary purpose in making the story is to encourage thought and discussion in his readers and often goes into a lot of depth in The Rant.

---

This series provides examples of:

• The Alleged Computer: Jamie has a "Linux clusterfuck" of three laptops that were supposed to act as one machine but in practice didn't work without all three active at once and was much less powerful than even one of them by itself. He apparently bought the mess for $50 and the original creator had died without leaving any documentation. Professional computer geek Ellen tries for a full day and night to make one of them work on its own, and when she hands him the working laptop, it's not actually the same one; the implication being she pulled one out of the back of a cabinet at work..
• Analogy Backfire: Discussed in 501, a bit in the comic and more in The Rant.
• Arc Words: Characters bring up variations on the "brother's keeper" line from The Bible throughout Jamie's personal arc, often resulting in Jamie analyzing its meaning. Jamie's arc explores the idea of personal responsibility, so this is fitting. Perhaps most notable is an instance where Jamie declares "I choose to be my brother's keeper," when justifying his decision to investigate Richard's murder on his own.
• Ate His Gun: Richard Knight's murderer attempted suicide this way, but missed his brain and spine.
• Aura Vision: Some characters claim to have it and that Jamie doesn't have an aura or a very scary one.
• Author Appeal: Jamie shares his creator's hobby of making homemade board games. His expertise in the kitchen is also inspired by Williams' interest in experimental cooking.
• Author on Board: Tailsteak tries hard to avert this at every turn by presenting everyone's point of view fairly, but when he feels strongly about something, it still tends to show.
  • Martial arts are a scam that don't teach you anything useful about self-defense. This surely has nothing to do with Tailsteak's stated dislike of martial arts. The exception seems to be Krav Maga, where he goes to the other extreme - apparently one month of classes is enough to make a five-foot woman a credible threat to a six-foot man with demonstrated fighting skills.
  • Polyamory is completely unproblematic and anyone who thinks otherwise is a dirty bigot. And also, everyone has always done it. Including your parents, so there! Why yes, Tailsteak is in a polyamorous relationship, what's that got to do with anything?
  • The police corps is filled with nothing but Obstructive Bureaucrats and Cowboy Cops that are apparently so committed to doing nothing right that even though they'll routinely pull over upstanding citizens for "driving while black," they'll also believe a Scary Black Man's side of the story if he and a nice-looking white boy are both brought in with injuries, without even getting a statement from said white boy. And then they'll forge a statement where he admits full guilt to cover their asses.
  • In relation to the last point, all of the main characters in Leftover Soup are in favour of the decriminalization, regulation and taxation of the recreational use of tetrahydrocannabinol, because all of the main characters in Leftover Soup are rational, intelligent human beings. Whereas the police are so much not rational, intelligent human beings that they will arrest you on charges of resisting arrest if they think you are involved with marijuana.
  • Tailsteak says in a comment that Cheryl is his good-guy cop character, which seems a bit like saying that the only good cop is an ex-cop.
• Being Good Sucks: Max's sentiment when the "Ethical" part gets in the way of the "Slut" part.
  Max: Goddamn it, being the good guy sucks ass.
• "Be Quiet!" Nudge: Jamie doesn't pick up on these, as discovered by:
  • Ellen, when she tries to stop Jamie from saying Max's pills are not ethical under her moral system:
  Jamie: Ellen, you uh... you're stepping on my foot, there.
  Ellen: Oh, that's impossible, Jamie. I only step on the feet of stupid people who don't take hints.
  • ...and Carol, when Jamie is about to tell her sister about Carol's polyamorous relationship.
  • It turns out Jamie will finally get the hint after four of these, as discovered by Cheryl when he discusses his private investigation of the PCP dealer at work.
• Birthday Suit Surprise Party: Inverted, it's the ones yelling "surprise" who are naked, much to Maxine's delight.
  • After Tailsteak announced a "Rule 34 contest" for his 34th birthday, he later posted that a few real-life friends of his had propelled themselves to the first place by pulling the same stunt.
• Black Comedy Rape:
  • When Ellen and Jamie first meet.
  Ellen: I'm technically not supposed to let people in I don't know, but you don't look too creepy.
  Jamie: Um... thanks, I guess. I promise not to rape you or anything.
  Ellen: Yes, that's very comforting.
  • The joke is extended a couple times in the same storyline. However, in a subversion, Jamie does eventually get an earful from Lily about the inappropriateness of his behavior.
  • Max strongly implies that she has this in mind for Jamie in this strip as a joke. Jamie is not pleased by this.
• Bond One-Liner: During Max's RPG session, she offers to double the mayhem points Jamie earned for destroying a jellybean golem if he follows it up with a badass one-liner. "Bean there, done that."
• Brick Joke: Jamie's wall art for the bathroom at his and Ellen's place assumes a viewer of a particular height.
  • Jamie recommends that Max buys a tripod and later buys her one himself as a birthday present.
• Broken Treasure: Ellen discovers that she had used Nicole's handmade scarf to repair a broken sink. And immediately owns up to having done so.
  Author's note: Seriously, every sitcom trope is a cautionary tale. If you find yourself doing something you would expect to see in a cheap three-camera comedy, please, stop.
• Buffy Speak: When designing her homebrew RPG, Max describes her player characters'... for lack of a better word, psionic powers as being able "to fuck with things at a distance that, in theory, should be unfuckwithable."
• Call-Back:
  • Ellen tries a self-defense technique that Jamie taught her.
  • After a month in comic time (years in real time), Ellen finally asks how in the world Jamie reconstituted Rice Krispies back into rice.
  • Max explodes in turquoise bursts with yellow spots.
• The Cameo: Tailsteak will occasionally include characters from other webcomics, albeit only as a noncanon background shot or one-time character.
• Chekhov's Gunman: If a seemingly minor character has a name, they're probably going to show up later. Most notable is Cheryl, first introduced as a seemingly-throwaway police station worker who harasses Jamie after his run-in with Richard Knight. Turns out she's Carol's sister. Once Jamie starts interacting with Carol, he inevitably runs into Cheryl again, starting a long-term plotline where they are forced to work out their differences.
• Clue, Evidence, and a Smoking Gun: How Jamie "deduces" what kind of WoW character Ellen plays.
• Comic-Book Time: Mentioned here, in The Rant.
  Tailsteak: That's one of the issues with Leftover Soup, and one of the main reasons I eventually have to bring it to an end - the sliding timescale. I keep getting older, Max is still 24.
• Crime of Self-Defense: The longest arc in the series thus far involves Jamie getting mugged and his attacker pressing charges when he defends himself. The situation is eventually resolved quite neatly by Jamie's mugger dying of a drug overdose; because his testimony was the prosecution's only evidence, Jamie can't be brought to court. Much later, however, it is revealed that there's a lot more to the story — the kid who died wasn't the mugger at all, and the criminal is still at large.
• Deadpan Snarker: Most of the characters, to varying degrees. It is kind of a hallmark of Tailsteak's writing style.
  Max: It's an extension of the "you have communicated a problem, therefore I must solve it" mentality that dudes have. Penises have a way of simplifying the thought process.
  Jamie: Oh good. Lily was here earlier, but she didn't condescendingly generalize about male psychology enough, I was worried I might not get my daily dose.
• Dissimile: When Gina tastes a small amount of pure MSG, she says it tastes like "the number five beef and broccoli from the Chopstick House... but without the beef... and without the broccoli."
• Distinction Without a Difference: Cheryl insists that her identical twin Carol does not dress "like a whore" — but that if she herself were to dress like one for undercover work, one wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two.
• Distract and Disarm: Double Subverted in strip #943. Jamie is held at gunpoint by Roscoe Knight, who thinks Jamie killed his son Richard. Jamie recognizes the gun from earlier and asks Roscoe if he got a new firing pin for it, then grabs it out of his hands when he's distracted. Lucky thing he wasn't bluffing about the firing pin, though:
  Jamie: Wow, I am not as fast as I thought I was. You pulled that trigger, like, three times.
  Roscoe: What the hell's the matter with you?
• Does Not Like Men: Ellen refers to Lily as a real-life "feminazi" — which is not true, as Lily denies being a feminist.
  Ellen: You know, some would say this isn't a very feminist thing to do.
  Lily: I'm not a feminist. I'm a misandrist. There's a difference.
• Door Dumb: Lily implies Ted Peterson would fall into this trope, based on his established propensity to either not read or deliberately ignore the fine and not-so-fine print on coupons.
• Drinking Game: Ellen and Maxine make one in-universe from one of Jamie's homemade board games.
• Dude, Not Funny!: In-Universe, Jamie's homebrew games Cat Burglar and Hungry Hungry Hitler, about being an animal hoarder and running a concentration camp, respectively. Ellen was offended by Cat Burglar and sarcastically posited the plot to Hungry Hungry Hitler as a hypothetical way to top it in terms of vileness; whereupon Jamie revealed he had done such a thing.
• Eats Babies: According to the info page, Maxine's Dungeons & Dragons character "Ate a baby, managed to convince GM she was still neutral good." This is explained late-ish in the comic — Max's character was a member of an insect-like people who considered "reclaiming protein from a malfunctioning spawnling for the benefit of the hive" to be a moral and reasonable act.
• Elevator Failure: Starting here
• Embarrassing Voicemail: Ellen leaves her ex-boyfriend and roommate such a voicemail when she finds out he's cheating on her. He promptly turns it into a Voice Clip Song titled "Answering Machine Bitch."
• Especially Zoidberg: "Does that include actual babies?" "Especially babies."
• Ethical Slut: Max is a vegan, works at an animal shelter, and has a genuinely loving relationship with the four partners in her Polyamory relationship. She also has a well-defined set of philosophical principles that she adheres to. She is also so committed to being a slut that she forced herself to become bisexual purely to increase her number of available sexual partners.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Jamie's cover story for trying to get PCP (long story) is to say he needs it for medical research-curing Alzheimer's Disease, to be specific. One of the street thugs says that his grandma had the condition and agrees to help.
• Exact Words: While in a hospital, Jamie disposes of the gun Roscoe Knight threatened him with in a nearby sharps bin, justifying it by pointing out that it is a "malfunctioning"^note it's missing its firing pin item intended to "cause a change in human biology"^note aka killing people, which is "dangerous"^note it's a gun and they "do not need it"^note Roscoe was only threatening Jamie to get answers that Jamie was inclined to provide anyway, which to Jamie's understanding, is the kind of item you put in a sharps bin.
• Extreme Omnivore:
  • Ellen is the first variant. Her palate is... less refined than Jamie's.
  • Max considers veganism to be the inverse of this trope. She needs nutritional supplements and otherwise perfect health to make it survivable.
• Fanservice: Ellen and Max in the shower, together. And the drunk kiss the evening before. ^note However, this was apparently not intended as such, according to Tailsteak's commentary in a later strip.
• Flock of Wolves: Cheryl tells Jamie about an incident where an undercover cop posing as a prostitute ran into one posing as a john; neither recognised the other so they ended up trading innuendo for hours, each trying to bait the other into propositioning.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Jamie's mugger is adamant about taking Jamie's entire wallet, identification and all. Turns out he already pulled the same trick earlier that night, meaning that the police got false identification when they searched his wallet: he's not Richard Knight at all. This means he's still at large after Knight's death, a fact that's also foreshadowed when Wallace is pulled over for resembling a black criminal.
  • Ellen is awfully possessive of Jamie, discouraging him from going on a date with Gina. Unsurprisingly, her feelings for him aren't as platonic as she likes to think they are.
  • "They say it's going to rain this wee--
• Forgiveness: A common theme in the characters' interpersonal conflicts. Notably, Ellen chooses to counsel a skeevy Casanova Wannabe after seeing how devastated he is by her crushing rejection, when she could easily walk away and leave his self-image in tatters.
• Freudian Trio: Ellen=Superego, Jamie=Ego, Max=Id. Lampshaded in Tailsteak's commentary here.
• Friend to All Living Things: There has yet to be a single character, human or animal, that didn't seem to like Max to at least some extent, and in return, she seems to genuinely believe that there is no such thing as a "bad" person or animal, only ones that are misguided or not smart enough to know any better.
• Game-Breaker: Ellen does this to every game they play. For example, Max's homebrew tabletop game system is easily broken by the fact that Mayhem Points can be used to double the outcome of a roll, and deal double damage for each 10 points they beat the target's defense — with no cap on either of these. Ellen hoards her Mayhem Points throughout the entire game, only using them when they meet the adventure's Final Boss to retcon a "test shot" she took several scenes ago into One Hit Killing him with a modified attack roll of 256 dealing damage in the millions.
  • The boss himself was a game breaker, meant to be invincible to anything except breaking the system. Max KNOWS her players...and pointed out a couple of holes in this game-breaking plan.
• Gender-Blender Name:
  • Exploited by Jamie (Benjamin) to gain a chance to rent a room from Ellen, despite her "Female Roommates Only" requirement.
  • Max(ine) also uses a Gender-Blender Name because she goes by Max.
• Gendercide: In Lily's sci-fi Utopia Florenovia, men have gone extinct due to a convenient genetic disease in the Backstory. Obviously.
• Good Bad Girl: Max, to the... max. She'll sleep with just about anyone and her only requirement is that her current steady lovers approve of the person. However, she will also care for and nurture just about anyone (or anything) in any other way she can, as well. She'll also flatly refuse if they're trying to hurt themselves in some way (ie, booze, drugs, sex, etc).
• Goomba Stomp: How Gina deals with the "pirahnocerous" in Max's RPG session. The game's mechanics allow for using enemies to break one's fall and converting the negated fall damage into attack bonuses. In this case, it's enough to turn it into Chunky Salsa.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: The Best Roleplaying Moment for Ellen's character.
• Griping About Gremlins: Ellen believes in gremlins who cause computer troubles - but they don't infest machines, they infest people.
• Heinz Hybrid: Ellen's D&D character, a "half-celestial half-dragon half-nymph half-elf."
  • Later referenced when Ellen refers to Funky Harvest as "half juice bar, half rec center, half head shop."
  "Seriously, did a fraction kill your father or something?"
• Henpecked Husband: John, who is physically smaller than Nicole, obeys her every whim and only agreed to go on his first date with her because she'd kept him chained to a couch for a week. Subverted in that he seems perfectly happy with it. If you read closely, you can figure out Nicole helped John recover from a drug addiction, which might explain that.
• Identical Panel Gag: Often used with Beat Panels, such as here.
• If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her...:
  • Jamie gets at least four.
• Ignoring by Singing: Jamie takes Simon's suggestion a bit literally.
• I Like My X Like I Like My Y: The cast page describes everyone's taste in romantic and/or sexual partners via this. Notably:
  • Lily: "Likes her men like she likes her coffee: Roasted, ground up, and soaked in boiling water."
  • Maxine: "Likes her sexual partners like she likes her coffee: First thing in the morning, and then ideally several more times over the course of the day."
• I'm a Man; I Can't Help It: Averted in the strip itself, but both Lily and Max believe that this is the case. The difference is, Max considers it a positive trait.
• Improbable Weapon User: Jamie Halligan's weapon is, appropriately enough, a Halligan bar.
  Tailsteak: In terms of D&D stats, the Halligan bar would be considered an improvised weapon for anyone else (-4 penalty), but Jamie is considered proficient in its use. It does d6 damage, which can be bludgeoning, slashing or piercing. Jamie's particular copy is considered masterwork.
• Inelegant Blubbering: Nicole's big announcement leads to open-mouthed bawling from Gina.
• Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: In the backstory, when Ellen was "up at an inadvisable hour, under the influence of inadvisable substances" after a bad breakup, she "made an inadvisable phone call", which got uploaded to an internet sound board and (presumably) got made into several Voice Clip Songs, though the only one actually appearing in-comic is a mashup with Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot". Which Max uses as her ringtone.
  When the pimp's in the crib, ma, cram a scorpion up your urethra!
• Infernal Retaliation: During Max's RPG session, Nicole somehow gets set on "unfire" and decides, rather than use her turn to extinguish herself, to hug one of the monsters they're trying to dispatch, thus setting it on unfire as well. Max rewards her with a Mayhem Point for her wild thinking.
• Instant Web Hit: Ellen is Answering Machine Bitch.
• Intoxication Ensues: It doesn't last long, but Ellen manages to get a dangerous dose of nutmeg.^note This is, in fact, perfectly possible, and not fun.
• Ironic Echo: "What are you doing?" "I want my ten damn Mayhem Points, that's what I'm doing."
• Ironic Name: Wallace White is black. This becomes a minor plot point when a person he's arguing with on the Internet suspects the photo he provided of his interracial funk band was just the result of a lucky Google search for "funk band black white" ("black" coming from one of their song titles, and "funk" being part of the band's own name).
• I Thought Everyone Could Do That: A downplayed version. Jamie is well aware that his cooking abilities are extraordinary, but he sometimes forgets how extraordinary. The basics are so instinctive to him that he forgets to teach them to Cheryl - as their boss puts it, teaching her to sprint before she could crawl - which causes her problems in her cooking career.
• It's Been Done: Jamie invents a card game called Piña Colada Panic, but it turns out it already exists.
  • Ellen and Gina discuss this trope while trying to work out a new D&D character.
• It's Not You, It's My Enemies: Ellen accuses Jamie of this.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Jamie and Max's first meeting.
• Low Count Gag: When describing how the story of the Ark led him to leave the creationist church he grew up in, Jamie refers to "both of all of the sloths".
• Ludicrous Precision: Discussed — and, in fact, justified — in the commentary to #201.
• The Maiden Name Debate: Nicole's husband changed his name when they got married.
• Major Injury Underreaction: "Okay, well NOW I need medical attention..."
• Meaningful Name: Williams has admitted to doing this twice by accident — the owner of a computer that Lily found shotacon on was named "Greenwood", and Max's doctor at the sexual health clinic is "Dr. Ho" (mentioned in the transcript only). He also mentioned that Max is aptly named because she never does anything by halves.
• Misplaced a Decimal Point: Max's older brother Mark died because he misplaced a decimal point during training and caused an accident.
• Mistaken for Racist: When Jamie meets Wallace after his scuffle with Richard Knight. He quickly discovers that the newspaper has published a rather creative interpretation of the events, casting Jamie as a white supremacist who assaulted a minor unprovoked. Later, Jamie discovers that Cheryl holds this conviction as well, and he doesn't manage to completely convince her of his side of the story.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Their session of Max's homebrew RPG features a "turanturilla" (tarantula+gorilla) and a "pirahnocerous" (piranha+rhinoceros, presumably) among the monsters encountered.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • From goofy Pulp Fiction take-off to critically injured pet in two pages.
  • Later:
  Jamie: Beautiful night, isn't it?
  Richard: (pulls gun) Sure is. Gimme your wallet.
  • Max's depressive episode is a very dark and serious storyline in an otherwise lighthearted strip. The shift is quite abrupt.
  • Max's Crazy-Awesome RPG storyline (which starts with a bear driving a bulldozer through a wall and ends with Ellen One Hit Killing a zombie foetus on a giant robot body) segues into a heavy discussion about who gets into heaven and hell and why. This is interrupted in the middle by a "suprise orgy" for Max.
• Morton's Fork: Wallace uses an inverted version to justify throwing Max a surprise orgy. Max, being Max, wholeheartedly approves of this logic.
• Naked People Are Funny: Especially when they come running in announcing that their naked name is "Empress Cum Diva."
• Nature Lover: Combined with Lovable Sex Maniac, this is Max's entire schtick.
• Never Tell Me the Odds!: Defied in this page's author notes.
• Nobody Poops: Lampshaded in The Rant.
• No-Dialogue Episode: For four pages, starting here.
• No Medication for Me: Harshly, harshly averted and involuntary. Max gets stuck in an elevator before she can take her next dose of the variable cocktail of pills that keeps her extreme psychosis and manic depression in check.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: ...no documentation, no original creator, no sense...
• Original Position Fallacy: Max, trying to come up with a way to "reassociate intelligence with how many kids you're allowed to have" (i.e. eugenics, but she wants to be non-evil about it) suggests a test of basic math and reading comprehension skills, with those who fail having to pay extra taxes. She's obviously assuming she'd pass, but Ellen points out that the lottery, which Max plays, is functionally equivalent to such a test.
• Old Media Are Evil: The local paper hides behind Weasel Words to slander Jamie and keep it legal.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Ellen doesn't believe Christianity will survive the next century, let alone another millennium or two.
• Painting the Medium:
  • Any time a character doesn't know how to spell something, it's misspelled in their speech balloons as well:
    • Jamie, like most first-time knitters, doesn't know how to spell "purl" so it comes out as "pearl".
    • The rhinoceros-piranha chimera that featured in Max's own homemade RPG is spelled "pirahnocerous", suggesting she can't spell either of those words.
    • Nobody knows how to spell Lily's sci-fi setting "Florenovia" at first besides her, and all of their best guesses are different.
    • And when the chef tells Cheryl to make mirepoix... "Right. Meerpwa." Doubles as a pronunciation guide for the French-disinclined.
    • When talking about the Linux clusterfuck's system backups Jamie's speech balloon calls them "disks" and Ellen's "discs". This is because Ellen thought they would be compact discs but they were actually diskettes.
  • Max's word balloons turn various flavors of weird when she's having a depressive episode.
  • Muffled speech is signified with blurred words.
• Parent-Induced Extended Childhood: During the Florenovia game, Nicole is motivated to oppose the Population Control-flouting outlaw group Right to Motherhood when she realizes that they're artificially delaying their children's growth to keep them "cute".
• Police Are Useless: The track record of the police in the comic is 1) trying to put Jamie away for murder by any means foul or fair (he was innocent), 2) pulling Wallace over for driving while black (he hadn't done anything), 3) harassing pot-smokers, also by any means foul or fair (which is at least targeting actual criminals for once, but Tailsteak has made it clear that he thinks that laws against pot are objectively, inarguably bad) and 4) arresting a harmless guy for tresspassing in an abandoned building (again, an actual crime, but of the decidedly victimless variety) and doing so with a helping of borderline police brutality besides.
• Polyamory: Max is currently in an open ... fivesome?
• Power Trio: Max, Jamie and Ellen represent Tailsteak's Id, Ego, and Superego respectively, according to this rant.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: When Ellen and Max are arguing about whether Max is allowed to flash the liquor store cashier or not.
  Ellen: We. Are. In. Public.
  Max: They. Are. My. Tits.
• The Rant: Generally worth reading, as it is frequently used to delve deeper into philosophical issues brought up in the strip, or to explain story details that couldn't fit in the strip itself (such as the intricacies of Florenovia's economic system).
• Real Men Cook: Jamie is shown to be a talented cook and enthusiastic about food in general. His room mate Ellen, not so much.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: Sarcastically lampshaded by a pair of law-and-order types.
  O'Reilly: Riot last night.
  Cheryl: Riot?
  O'Reilly: Oh, sorry, not a riot. A peaceful protest with some door-to-door canvassing and it randomly happened to coincide with vandalism, looting, and property damage.
  Cheryl: Ah, one of those peaceful protests.
• Ridiculously High Relationship Standards:Gina's ideal relationship involves pushing "virginity until marriage" up to eleven with "our first kiss at the altar". Her friends are appalled when they learn of it and suddenly understand why a dating website had just banned her for unrealistic standards.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Jamie's boss tests Cheryl's cooking skill by asking how she would brown some celery; she says she'd get some brown food dye. The boss assumes this meant she knew you can't brown celery because it doesn't contain enough sugar for the Maillard reaction; considering she just learned the basics of cooking that morning, it's more likely she didn't know what "browning" something means.
• Robosexual: Lily is apparently not attracted to either men or women, only to inanimate objects. Presumably for this reason, everyone in the Utopia she has invented are likewise uninterested in sex with other human beings but make liberal use of Sexbots.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: Not quite, but both the characters and the author frequently discuss matters in D&D terms. The author mentions here that each of the Power Trio has an 18 in one D&D stat. So far, Jamie's is Dexterity, and Max's is Constitution.
• Rule of Three: Jamie is put at gunpoint with the same gun thrice, each by a different person. True to the trope, by the third time, he's so sick of it that he just chews out the person doing so.
• Rules Lawyer: Ellen. (For those in the audience not familiar with AD&D 3.5, The Rant contains a helpful analogy.)
• Running Gag:
  • The profusion of things abbreviated as "TP".
  • The aforementioned coffee gags on the cast page also count.
  • After his Crime of Self-Defense, Jamie's name is almost invariably taken to be "Benjamin Halliganiv", rather than "Jamie Halligan IV".
    • Jamie counters this by calling Cheryl "Cheryla"^note Cheryl A. until she stops calling him "Halliganiv". (She never did.)
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Tailsteak says that he loves writing these, like in this one.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The entire arc of the comic is one. Jamie makes a personal crusade out of finding Not-Richard-Knight and doing something about him, despite being told by several other characters that there's nothing he can reasonably do. He finally finds Not-Richard... just after he's apparently killed himself. Jamie monologues that his plan was to force a Heel–Face Turn on Not-Richard, and Not-Richard suddenly turns out to be just barely alive. Jamie gets him to the hospital and declares that the plan is back on. Then Not-Richard dies in the hospital without regaining consciousness. The end. Jamie accomplished absolutely nothing, and nor does he seem to have learned anything....Until you realize that this put him into contact with someone who tells him what he needs to learn...and all the character growth is shown in a montage. Which is still pretty anti-climaxy. Tailsteak just generally seems to enjoy a surprising anticlimax.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Wallace believes strongly in being well-dressed and well-groomed. That makes him the first port of call for Ellen when she has to arrange an emergency makeover for Jamie, who is not this trope.
• Shipper on Deck: Max freely admits she ships Ellen and Jamie.
• Shout-Out:
  • To Homestuck, when Ellen wears some of The Merch in a few strips.
  • Also this. "I AM CORNHOLIO!"
  • To Alanis Morissette in this strip. It's raining on Ellen's father's wedding day, and Jamie likens it to finding out you'd gotten a free ride just after paying, or good advice that you couldn't take. Promptly Lampshaded.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Richard Knight's fate.
• Status Quo Is God: Double Subverted in the notes to 221 and 222. Though as it turns out, it was a bit more complicated than that...it's actually "the" story arc!
  Tailsteak: ALL PROBLEMS ARE NOW SOLVED FOREVER.
• Success Through Insanity: invoked Max is a fan of this trope. When she invents her own RPG system, it involves a lot of this. In particular, the GM (her) can reward "Mayhem Points" (action points, essentially) to players for doing crazy things.
  • Turns out, she is this in real life...and it's deconstructed. She is on a LOT of pills.
• Supreme Chef: Jamie has been cooking since he was five years old, and thus can do things with food that would equate to biblical miracles. For example, he can turn Rice Krispies back into rice, and make bread pudding without bread or eggs. Though the rice turned out to be from a homemade hacky sack. Which is actually nearly as good.
  Ellen: The man has done things to this bacon that would make a rabbi convert.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Discussed early on in the context of the Black Comedy Rape joke.
• Theme Naming: When Jamie makes up pseudonyms for his investigation of Richard Knight's death, all of the names he chooses are Richard plus a chess piece: Rick Bishop, Dick McQueen, Richie Pawn. He also briefly mentions the codename "The Rook", which he doesn't end up actually using.
• Too Many Halves: Ellen has a propensity towards this, as demonstrated both by her D&D 3.5 character and her description of the Filthy Hippie.
  Jamie: Seriously, did a fraction kill your father or something?
• Total Party Kill: Orchestrated by Lily to force the gaming group to update to 4th edition D&D.
• Twincest: Defied by Carol; she may be in a polyamorous relationship, but incest is still too much.
• Virtual Paper Doll: One of the old donation incentives posted in the art gallery is an Ellen dressup doll.
• Visual Title Drop: Near the end, Jamie says "I think I've got some leftovers at home ... Let's go see what we can turn them into." The next page, with no dialogue, shows a pot of soup on the stove.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: Nicole tries to throw up some pills she took into the toilet because she's worried they'll hurt the baby she's pregnant with. Her husband suggests she thinks up something gross but she can't. So he makes a gross suggestion for her which works.
• Walking Techbane: Ellen discusses the trope here
• Wham Shot: Here we see a picture of Richard Knight that looks nothing like the man who mugged Jamie.
• Wham Line: Here.
  Nicole: Kiss [Jamie], you say? [...] Cute, you say? Like... ask him to shampoo the cat cute?
  Ellie (quietly): God help me, yes.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Apparently, Max's half-fey thri-kreen bard in their 3.5e D&D character has found this to be a great pickup line. Twelve times and counting.
• Will They or Won't They?: Ellen and Jamie. Ellen says, "Absolutely not, never, no way." Max has twenty bucks on "will". Odds may or may not be in Max's favor.
• You Need to Get Laid: Max has this opinion about Gina.