Webcomic / Dragon Mango

Mango, Daughter of Passion

Dragon Mango is a "possibly funny" webcomic, set primarily in the Kingdom of Fafnir. When the human population was nearly wiped out a thousand years ago, the Dragon Slayers arrived to save them. Now a modern-day Dragon Slayer is anxious to prove her worth and restore her family's honour.

Her first challenge is to escape the pile of rock candy she just released from her dragon-shaped pinata.

The comic is in a Japanese style, though drawn by Canadian artists. The storyline switches from deadly serious to absurd, often on the same page, and has several arcs that are starting to come together. It's liberally sprinkled with pop culture and anime references, with quite a bit of very original humour. The artwork, especially in the early comics, is a bit inconsistent, so don't be put off by the first comics being mainly in black-and-white. Colour and animation are used for the more important scenes.

Dragon Mango is written, drawn, and produced by Mark Sprague, Crystal Kearns, Adam Lockhart, Doug Middleton, and Karen Hayman, who together compose Unpredictable Fish. A new comic is published every Thursday.

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This webcomic provides examples of:

• Accomplice by Inaction: The executives of Square One are a Villain with Good Publicity, but behind the scenes, they are terrifyingly evil psychopaths with God Complexes. Meanwhile, the immediate boss of the science division, Chocolate Explosion, is a Mad Scientist who has creative punishments for those who defy her. With the scientists of Square One facing a Morton's Fork between snitching on Chocolate Explosion's schemes against the executives or letting it be, they choose the latter. When Chocolate Explosion gets caught, they begrudgingly flee with her rather than face the Executives' wrath.
• Advanced Ancient Acropolis: Square One was humanity's first settlement and continues to be the most advanced city-state in the entire world. A Magitek accident isolated them from the rest of humanity, leaving their city unharmed but separating it from the world by stranding it in the center of a radioactive crater. They are leaps ahead of the rest of humanity due to the fact that they were one of the few countries that didn't ban Magitek and the fact that they had the inspiration to study gnomes, a race of short lived yet prolific innovators.
• April Fools' Day: On April Fool's, Cherry takes over the website, with the art often switching to a crayon style.
  • Most of the April Fool's updates consist of the "Bestest comic ever".
  • One of them is a simple platformer game.
  • In the 2022 comic, it comments on the obsoletion of Adobe Flash as medium for animations and games, along with the newer technology the website will be replacing it with.
  • The 2023 comic previews Dragon Mango, the live action movie! All created with AI art based on Stable Diffusion and edited with Photoshop.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The trope is discussed, with it being stated that most adventuring parties in that world are composed of 3, with 4 pushing it. When attempting to travel through a Portal Network that imposes a limit on how many people can go through at once, they complain about the trope and use Loophole Abuse to send two separate adventuring parties one after another.
• Badass Adorable: Peaches and Cherry.
• Beast Man: Attacked the farm.
• Because Destiny Says So: The rulers of Square One are initially unconcerned about the rumors of a rebellion in the lower levels, because the Records of Fate tell them that there will be no uprising. Cue them being Instantly Proven Wrong.
• Black Magic: Destructive magic. Its combat uses mean it's not evil.
• Big Bad Ensemble: There are multiple major antagonists, some of them directly related, some of them not.
  • There are hints of a troll king planning to obtain ultimate power by stealing dragon orbs.
  • Princess Phenylalanine plans to destroy the dragonslayer kingdom and doom the world by releasing the evil dragons from the seal.
  • The directors of Fenix Corp, who rule the city-state of Square One and are responsible for poisoning its underclass so that they can use them as living batteries. They are implied to be Godhood Seekers who plan to erase all of existence to remake it In Their Own Image.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Square One maintains surveillance cameras that allow them to detect troublemakers. They also built surveillance into the cybernetic enhancements they integrated their Super Soldiers with so that they can quietly detect and eliminate any who know too much or rebel.
• Big "NO!": Spoofed in this strip, when Pumpkin's father returns after a four-year journey into faraway lands and gives Mango a rare treat, called a "sweet swirl stick", which Cherry eats in one bite.
  "Wow, you're right, that was really good! Is there any more?
  "NOOOOOO!"
  "Okay, I was just askin'."
• Bilingual Bonus: A book on trapping demons has some Swedish text in it. The name of the book is, "hur att fängsla demoner," which is the literal translation (but grammatically incorrect) of, "how to imprison demons." A page in the book says, "Den som kan sova evigt är inte död," which means, "One who can sleep forever is not dead."
• Bold Inflation: A liberal amount of words are for more or less arbitrary reasons bolded. Usually nouns.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Eclair, Candy, and Cupcake fall victim to Princess Phenylalanine's powers and are reduced to her mind controlled slaves. Her control over them has grown strong enough to completely usurp their minds whenever she pleases, but since this eliminates the creativity that makes them so effective to begin with, the Princess usually settles for keeping their loyalty by manipulating their memories. As a result, they now act as antagonists to the dragon slayer parties, believing they need to kidnap the dragon slayer princess to save the world.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The Schedule Slip is referred to by the characters. And exploited, since it allows the characters more time than the In-Universe time would otherwise give them.
• Calling Your Attacks: The dragonslayers do it because modern "dragon slaying" is largely just for show, and they want to make sure their "opponent" is ready for it, but it is hardly limited to them and is a fairly common trait. Steen Dragonsbane Lampshades how inefficient it is that dragonslayers tend to advertise their every move.
• Celestial Deadline: The raw power of the stars' alignment.
• Chainmail Bikini: Downplayed with Mango's armor, which is steel around her vital spots and boring leather covering everything else.
• Cold Iron: All types of fairies, including Elves, are extremely vulnerable to iron and magnetism, but can learn to resist it through Training from Hell. Afterwards they use iron armors as a Power Limiter. Half-Elves are completely immune to it, likely due to their human half's iron-based blood.
• Collapsing Lair: The count's lair collapses exactly like Castlevania.
• Comically Inept Healing: The White Mage in charge of healing the tournament contestants, Colleen, is pretty clueless about treating any condition that requires mundane healing rather than magic and keeps trying to treat said conditions with her mallet.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Called "Snow Dancer Syndrome" by Berry, and referred to as a scientific principle. She mentions that if a previously formidable enemy attacks en masse, they're all a lot less powerful.
• Deliberately Distressed Damsel: The princess of Stalashen wears a t-shirt that invokes the trope, saying "Kidnap Me ♥".
• Deliberately Monochrome: Black and white. sometimes with splashes of color
• Distressed Dude: Chapter 10, "A Wuss in Distress", features Prince Badass offering himself as a Virgin Sacrifice to appease Lecithin.
• Doctor's Orders: An injured gladiator is not allowed up.
• Dominant Species Genes: While never explicitly stated, this appears to be the case for Oni, with the results of Human/Oni pairings always appearing to be full fledged Oni.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: How Dug initiates the revolution against the Square One government, broadcasting a speech with a signal too powerful to be jammed to every receiver.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: When a mysterious voice coming from a bright light explains to Mango's party how portals work, Bleu, not buying the explanation, complains about it. Not knowing who the voice belongs to, Mango asks Bleu not to pick a fight just in case said voice is a god or a powerful wizard, though the voice turns out to just be a gnome stuck on a lamp post.
• The Dragonslayer: Dragonslayers are an actual species. They are much stronger than humans, have innate magical abilities, and are the ones most easily able to deal with dragons. In actuality, they are dragons, who decided to assume human-like forms, befriend humans, protect them from their brethren, and use them as easy meal tickets.
• Edible Theme Naming: Most of the major characters are named after things you can eat, mostly fruits and other grown edibles for humans and dragonslayers, and desserts for elves. There are exceptions, and Lemon Lampshades it, commenting on what a stupid name Steve is.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Part of how the comicverse works. Pumpkin, an earth dragonslayer, is unable to transmit her earth magic through water, meaning she cannot levitate any rocks that have sunk into it. Likewise, Lecithin, an energy dragon, is weak against earth-based attacks and his own attacks are less effective against Pumpkin.
• Engineered Heroics: The Dragonslayer deal.
• Empire with a Dark Secret: Word of God describes the upper levels of Square One as a pseudo utopia, with most of its residents unaware that their lives are supported by the suffering of others. Square One's top research facility is supposedly a gathering of their top scientists, responsible for developing the innovations that allows Square One to survive despite being trapped by a radioactive accident. In truth, their innovations were taken from 32 gnome colonies who are treated like lab rats, and that isn't even the worst of their secrets. The city itself is Powered by a Forsaken Child, extracting energy by mutating humans with chaos energy and imprisoning them in People Jars. When the truth gets out, it becomes the trigger for a Civil War.
• Equippable Ally: Female Oni are able to transform animals and even dragons into weapons.
• Everybody Knew Already: When Dr. Chocolate Explosion is about to confess to the fact that she has been sponsoring Ashes, the researchers of Square One reveal that they already knew. After all, their new developments kept showing up in Ash's hands.
• The Exile: King Citrus, at the urging of his advisor, forbade dragonslayers from learning the arts of war. A secret society of dragonslayers formed, in which they secretly passed said knowledge on to the next generation. But many of said younger generation grew deeply resentful of King Citrus's edict and attempted to launch a revolution. It was put down by a dragonslayer currently known as Ginger. She made King Citrus spare their lives, sending them into exile instead. And disapproving of King Citrus's edict herself, she went with them.
• Explosive Leash: Fenix Corp is run by psychopaths, but they use the well-intentioned as duped Super Soldiers. Since their soldiers would inevitably turn on them if they ever figured out the truth, Fenix Corp has secretly designed their cybernetic enhancements to kill them in the event that they turn on them.
• Flat "What": The reaction of one of the Fenix Corp's directors, when informed that the G.R.I.D. building had transformed into a giant robot and was currently running from the military.
• Flung Clothing: In this page, Lemon manages to take all of her clothes off in a single dramatic pull. Apparently it's a ninja thing.
• Formulaic Magic: An accountant, also known as a Financial Wizard, is a mage who has achieved at least level 4 in White and Black magic and specializes in using magic based on math. An accountant can, for example, use magical math equations to blow up everyone in the area with a height divisible by some number. They are extremely powerful, but are rarely used in combat due to the high rate of friendly fire.
• Four-Fingered Hands: Averted with most characters, but played straight with gnomes like Dug.
• Gainax Ending: Let's just say Cherry's Ultimate magic spell screws with reality. Off its hinges. And then the story arc immediately ends Happily Ever After because she said so!^note Despite the two dozen plot holes she ripped open in the process...
• Genghis Gambit: Junior's entire motive for launching the Goblin Invasion is to unite the monsters of the forest by showing that together, they can beat even Mango, who is legendary to them due to them having never successfully stolen a single chicken from the farm she guarded.
• Giant Mecha: Originally invented by Dr. Chocolate Explosion of Square One. The Cell Knights pilot these gargantuan robots into battle. They are powered by summoning a Heroic Spirit, which also means that Only the Pure of Heart can use them as the Heroic Spirit will not react otherwise.
• Global Airship: Mango's Player Party acquires an airship from Princess Awesome as a reward for defeating Lecithin, allowing them to travel to the deadly island they believe Ginger to have made her new home in. The comic's title describes it as the quest entering the "Open World" stage.
• Good Old Ways: Mango fights monsters, the way dragons used to.
• Half-Human Hybrid:
  • The half-Dragonslayers, of whom Mango is the first. Since the dragon slayers' population had been in decline, the discovery they can mate with humans is considered to have saved their race and has in fact more than doubled it in only 20 years. They are slightly weaker than purebloods, but unlike purebloods, who are actually dragons themselves and require human blood to take human form, half-dragons are born with human-like forms and can learn to assume dragon form later.
  • Female Oni, such as Peaches, are close in that they have human mothers, though this is in fact a thing that is inherent to their race since female Oni are only able to bear sons.
• Hard Head: Some characters' concussions are expected to just "wear off."
• Healing Potion: using fighting the count — and when Mango is found in the woods.
• The Herald: As soon as the girls are accepted as Lolita Knights, a cloaked figure appears to urge them to reject it for a greater challenge.
• Hypocrisy Nod: Dr. Chocolate Explosion admits that it's a bit hypocritical to betray Square One out of outrage at them using her inventions to make the city Powered by a Forsaken Child and then steal some of those so forsaken to power her own escape when she gets caught.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: To the goblins, Mango is a terrifying goddess of death and destruction.
• Immune to Mind Control: High Priestess Raisin and Bonbon, Chocolate Cupcake's pet pig, are immune to Princess Phenylalanine's powers.
• Impossible Item Drop: Parodied; Mango receives a suit of fashion plate mail for swatting a mosquito, then wonders how killing a bug made armor appear. (Answer: it was a drop bug.) She later has to assure her mother that she didn't hack anyone for it.
• Industrialized Evil:
  • The Oni created a free-range farm of oblivious humans to cannibalize and rape. In the event of a riot, they will reset the farm by purging most of the humans and kidnapping fresh travelers.
  • The humans of Square One manage to Eviler than Thou the above cannibals by enslaving entire colonies of oblivious gnomes and using them to develop scientific research by subjecting them to various disasters and plagues until they invent a solution the humans can plagiarize. They are also willing to reset colonies. What the Square One government does to the gnomes isn't even the worst of their crimes. The city was originally powered by Magitek reactors, but due to their instability, they were insufficient to meet their needs. They eventually discovered that it was possible to mutate humans with massive amounts of chaos energy, imprison them in People Jars, and extract power from them, meaning that the city is Powered by a Forsaken Child.
• Ironic Name: Most of the royal family of Stalashen has these. King Sensible and Queen Prudence come up with rather foolish plans, and Prince Badass is brave, but rather sickly. Nevertheless, they still manage live up to their names in unusual ways. As stupid as King Sensible and Queen Prudence's plans were, they still worked due to the enemy dragon's lack of attention for detail. And while Prince Badass is naturally weak, he is able to become a He-Man Expy with the aid of a magic sword.
• I Want Grandkids: Bleu's father wants her to find a husband and continue their line. Bleu would rather focus on school.
• Jedi Mind Trick: The Baloney Stone is a relic that allows any who have it to tell magic lies almost everyone believes. Steve used it to make himself famous, but Lime ends up stealing it fron him.
• Just Between You and Me: Count Baklava explains his evil plan in complete detail to the kidnapped mayor, to get it off his chest and ensure he doesn't blab it to an actual hero who might use it against him. The mayor tells the heroes instead. Baklava expected him to, and left out a few key bits.
• Just Think of the Potential!: Square One has come up with a number of very creative, very evil uses for a number of the inventions developed by Dr. Chocolate Explosion. Inventions that were originally intended for completely benign purposes.
  • Her Humongous Mecha was originally intended to give Square One a way to do work in the Polluted Wasteland surrounding the city, allowing them to recover more resources. Square One gets the idea to use them as weapons of war against the revolutionaries. By making said mecha restricted to Only the Pure of Heart, she was able to limit the damage they could do, but they were still able to work around it by manipulating Unwitting Pawns.
  • The invention Dr. Chocolate Explosion intended as a Healing Vat gets repurposed to mutate victims with chaos magic and harvest the resulting energy, allowing the city to be Powered by a Forsaken Child.
• Leaked Experience: Cherry gains a Character Level from Mango's combat encounter, despite not doing anything herself.
• The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday: The Tarrasque shops apparently have a reputation for this, and licenses are required for such shops. It helps that they can literally be packed and unpacked from enchanted suitcases. The shops set up in popular locations are more likely to linger.
• Magitek: Magitek is technology that is powered by magic-generating reactors. It was outlawed in most countries after a Magitek reactor blew up the technologically advanced city of Square One^note The capital survived, but the surrounding areas are now a magical-radioactive wasteland that hasn't died down in 200 years.
  • As a by-product, Magic produces chaos energy, which causes the laws of physics to shut down. The minuscule amount generated by typical spells is harmless, but Magitek reactors generate massive amounts of magic, and by extension, massive amounts of chaos, which could theoretically result in continent-wide destruction.
  • And then there's the chaos filters; by using human sacrifices in technology-based magic siphoning, Magitek can achieve greater power generation than a thousand Magitek reactors.
• Meaningful Name: The government of Square One calls itself Fenix Corp, after the legendary immortal bird. The revolutionaries opposing them call themselves "Ashes", which is what they plan to reduce them to, permanently, without letting them rise again from them.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: One of the many main characters summoned a hippogryff — half-hippopotamus, half-griffin.
• Money Spider: Mango goes off fighting the monsters of the forest in hopes of getting enough money for fashion armor. The "cheapskate" monsters drop little cash, but one small bug does have a literal Impossible Item Drop of fashion armor.
• Monster Lord:
  • There exists a recent new Troll King.
  • Junior is the King of Goblins, and is an especially big, strong, and intelligent member of his kind.
  • Female Oni are rare and though smaller, are also much more powerful than the males, usually ending up in charge of their tribe.
• Monster Protection Racket: Having long since sealed most of the genuinely evil dragons, the Dragonslayers do this to continue to receive funding and glory. With the added twist that they are the dragons.
• Morphic Resonance: Dragons are capable of Voluntary Shapeshifting into the form of any creature they have tasted blood from, but they always retain a few draconic traits, like horns or tails.
• Mysterious Stranger: Subverted. Chocolate Explosion reveals the truth in the same panel where she appears.
• Nominal Importance:
  • After Eclair passes her trial, two girls waiting in line note that she had to, because she was the only character with a name. After a Beat, they then turn directly to the audience and introduce themselves as Candy and Cupcake.
  • Lampshaded here, when two characters introduced in a way that heavily suggested that they were cannon fodder found themselves alive a number of comics later.
  • Also lampshaded here, when Bleu figures that the overly designed guy is more likely to have plot-relevant information than the highly generic townspeople.
• Not Hyperbole: Many years ago, a barkeeper bragged that his ale, Dragon's Breath, was potent enough to knock out a dragon. The visiting dragonslayers who are dragons disguised as humanoids took that as a challenge and soon learned that he wasn't kidding.
• Not Quite Dead: Chocolate Explosion
• Nudity Equals Honesty: During the Pockfighting competition, Lemon is accused of using the Baloney Stone for cheating by Steve (And he's right) and she decides to prove him wrong by stripping off her clothes on the spot to 1. prove she doesn't have it on her 2. make Steve faint by the sight of her naked 3. Getting the crowd Distracted by the Sexy and too busy Eating the Eye Candy to notice the obvious lie.
• Only the Pure of Heart: In order to ensure Square One wouldn't abuse her invention of the Humongous Mecha, Dr. Chocolate Explosion designed them to be powered by Heroic Spirits, who can only be summoned by the pure of heart. Unfortunately, it turns out the pure of heart can be rather naive, so Square One works around this by manipulating well-intentioned dupes.
• Our Angels Are Different: Heroic Spirits can be called via Summon Magic by a sufficiently pure-hearted hero. Dr. Chocolate Explosion's narration of one depicts a Winged Humanoid. Square One uses them to power the Cell Knights.
• Our Demons Are Different: They've occasionally been referenced, but not much has been revealed other than that they are a type of entity that can be called via Summon Magic.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Dragons are giant flying reptilian creatures. Each dragon is born with specific traits, such as frost dragons, which can breathe ice, and dream dragons, which function as selectively tangible illusions. They are extremely tough, but they are somewhat weak against magic. In the ancient past, dragons would prey on humans, and some still do, but peaceful wild dragons are also known to exist. The so called "dragon slayer" species is actually an entire civilization of dragons who have secretly shapeshifted into human-like forms and integrated into human society.
• Our Elves Are Different: A Long-Lived pointy-eared species with a weakness to Cold Iron. High Elves tend to be drug addicts.
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder: Gnomes are a race of short humanoids with slightly pointy ears. They have a natural talent for engineering and innovation. For an intelligent species, they have a remarkably short lifespan of only nine months. As a result, other sapient races find it difficult to relate to them and treat them like wildlife. Humans mostly see them as pests due to the fact that they tend to build colonies near human settlements and mess with their plumbing. But some have taken notice of their ingenuity and observe them, copying the results of their successful experiments.
• Our Gryphons Are Different: They're really cute. (And half-hippo).
• Out-Gambitted: Ashes had a plan to prove to one of the Cell Knights the crimes the Phoenix Corp. were committing and have them - heroes of the people - expose them to the public. Dug managed to get Agent Catalina to go along with the plan... only for Catalina's cybernetics to prove to be booby trapped, killing her and making it look like Ashes murdered a Cell Knight.
• The Pardon: Long ago, Passion fell in love with a human man. The other dragonslayers demanded that she marry another of their kind because of their declining birth rates, but she ran away instead, leading them to permanently exile her from the dragonslayer areas. Even using her discovery that dragonslayers and humans can breed didn't lessen their anger for defying them in the first place. King Citrus eventually grants her a pardon on her daughter, Mango's behalf.
• Partial Transformation: One dragonslayer technique is to only partially use their dragon forms, while remaining largely human, allowing them to use their full strength even while disguised. Mango gets the inspiration to use it once during a competition. It is later revealed that the legendary dragonslayer Ginger used it on a regular basis. However, it requires a great deal of focus to maintain, and Ginger is the only dragonslayer in history to have enough to make practical use of it.
• Portal Network: The Tarrasque item shops are linked by these to a warehouse, which is why the proprietors can afford to set up shops in very isolated locations.
• Power Crystal: There is a naturally occurring crystalline substance which can be used to conduct and focus magical energy. It is often used as a material for magic staffs and crystal balls. They form natural Ley Lines of magic power that can be tapped by sufficiently skilled magicians.
• Prophecy Twist: High Priestess Raisin predicts that the dragonslayer princess will break the Sealed Evil in a Can and doom the world. To prevent this future from happening, she tries to kill Cherry (extremely ineffectively). It turns out there's a second dragonslayer princess, and while Cherry does accidentally crack the seal, its Princess Phenylalanine who wants to force Cherry to break the seal entirely.
• Propaganda Machine: The main reason Fenix Corp is a Villain with Good Publicity. Word of God states that Fenix Corp has a stranglehold over the media of Square One. Most of the Square One upper class are decent enough people, who have no idea that their lives are being supported by the suffering of the underdwellers. Meanwhile, the underdwellers themselves consider themselves to be lucky to even be alive after the Magitek accident, and are under the assumption that everyone else is just as bad off as them, little realizing the ways in which Fenix Corp is taking advantage of them. Anyone who says otherwise is written off as a Conspiracy Theorist.
• Pyrrhic Victory: The Executives of Square One manage to identify the true masterminds behind La Résistance and thwart their plans for revolution, but Dug the Gnome narrowly survives their assassination attempt, leaving him free to continue causing them problems. Having been exposed, the masterminds proceeded to destroy much of the research data the Executives needed for their own plans and escape.
• The Quest: Two at once. Mango, Bleu, and Cherry, are sent out to recover Ginger, the only dragonslayer still tough enough to stand up to the evil dragons threatening to break out of the seal. Pumpkin, Lemon, and Lime's group is sent out to gather the closest descendants of the seven sages to repair said seal.
• Raygun Gothic: What the technology of Square One has developed to.
• Revenge: What the beast-men are seeking.
• RPG Mechanicsverse: There are references to stats, Hit Points, item drops, Character Levels, and Save Points, though these are treated more like gags than consistent rules.
• Running Gag: Statues of Mango always get smashed, it's gotten to the point that they come in packs of two now.
• Sacrificial Lion: Cell Knight Catalina. Introduced, implied to be the lynchpin to Ashes' master plan and murdered within seven pages.
• Santa's Sweatshop: In one of the Christmas comics, Satan Claus kidnaps a bunch of elf children and uses them as slave labor to build cheap toys for export.
• Schedule Slipinvoked: Character can get through a maze in a month — from the readers' point of view.
  Damn this erratic update schedule!
• Schmuck Bait: Free Meat! In the middle of a large red target. Next to a "Free Meat" sign. Directly under a sixteen-ton weight. And poisoned. In response:
  Claw: You let the princess eat raw meat off the floor?!
  Mango: Sorry! Sorry! It's just... well... Have you ever tried to get between that kid and a hunk of meat?
  Claw: Okay... I have to admit you have a good point there.
• Screw Destiny: Barring temporal shenanigans, the rulers of Square One, implied to be the most dangerous antagonists in the Big Bad Ensemble, are destined to win if the timeline goes the way it is supposed to. Dug the Gnome however, and his ability to travel through space and time, make him a major Spanner in the Works
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The dragon slayers defeated most of the dragons that plagued the world and helped seal them away. The seal is protected by a prophecy, making it so that only the dragonslayer king's heir can break it. Several villains have and are attempting to break said dragons out of the seal for their own purposes. Bleu even suspects that there might be a traitor among the dragonslayer council. When Cherry accidentally cracks it, Mango and her friends are sent out on a quest to find the only dragonslayers that still have the training to fight the evil dragons and find the descendants of the sages who created the seal.
• Secret Shop: Tarrasque shops can get set up in some absurdly obscure locations. One member of the dragonslayer council mentions that he found one behind a wall in a dungeon he had to blow up with a bomb to find.
• Shout-Out: There are often two to five references to other works per page. Some of them are:
  • Mango wishes the goblins would come and take Cherry away right now!
  • When Cherry summons a bunch of rabbits, one of them is wielding a switch blade, which is presumably a reference to Bunbun of Sluggy Freelance.
  • When the prospective Lolita Knights take out the boss of a castle, it crumbles very much like the titular Castlevania does at the end of every game.
  • Mango defeats a bunch of monsters, and after that she gets a Final Fantasy win messages, complete with the Final Fantasy VII win fanfare.
  • While looking for her sword, Mango comes across what's totally not the Master Sword, because if it were, someone might sue. And the triforce is upside down.
  • Her own sword is found in a Sword in the Stone routine.
  • Raisin performs the Ritual of Contravity daily and thus has infinite lives. It's Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start.
  • Sharkey, God of Cheating, is a reference to the GameShark.
  • There's a sign for the World Gladiatorial Federation, with the word Federation crossed off and replaced with Entertainment.
  • Colleen, Sandwich, and Bleu Berry are dressed as a White Mage, Black Mage, and Red Mage respectively.
  • One opponent in the tournament is Grateman, who bears more than a slight resemblance to The Shredder.
  • The poster of the Sherbert School of Incredibly Dangerous Swordplay has He-Man on it in a pose closer resembling Conan the Barbarian with a girl clinging to him.
  • The first thing hat happens when Lady Strawberry Cheesecake and Mr. Tea Biscuit enter the Sherbert School, tetriminoes fall on them.
  • The explanation for what magic is is suspiciously similar to the explanation of The Force, including something controversial that starts with "midichlori—".
  • The goblins get rolled up like a katamari.
  • The password for the safety of Vinegar's cellblade is THX 1138.
  • When trying to cheer Mango up, Cherry brings several familiar object, such as a 1up mushroom (which has also appeared previously), a six-pack of Maltese Falcons, ruby slippers, the Creation Matrix, Rapunzel (the pony), and some lost footage from The Magnificent Ambersons.
  • When Mango is sentenced to death, Berry objects, complete with properly formatted red "Objection!" text and pointy finger.
  • The temple of Sharkey is hidden by a Somebody Else's Problem Field.
  • Pockfighting is described as a sport where kids go out and capture wild animals and make them fight for entertainment. If that's not familiar enough, one of the characters uses an electric hamster, which is described as a starter mon. There are a bunch more references as well.
  • There's a girl named Peaches. Just like Momotarō, she's got three animal friends, and she fights oni.
  • One of the many times Mango falls to the ground from a great height is a clear reference to Yamcha's memetic fall in Dragon Ball Z. Japanese text included.
  • The Little Red Riding Hood shows up to buy some wolf repellent for her trip to her grandma's house.
  • When the trainee Lolita Knight party is on the verge of breaking her mind control and about to expose Princess Phenylalanine's plans, she assumes direct control.
  • When the power suddenly goes out after a huge explosion, one of the executives of Square One demands to know what is happening in Vecna's name, who happens to be an evil god inside of Dungeons & Dragons.
• Slave Race: In Square One, humans, elves, dwarves, and dragonslayers are recognized as citizens. Gnomes, centaurs, satyrs, and dragons that haven't learned to disguise themselves on the other hand are treated by Square One's rulers as experimental test subjects. It should be noted that most of Square One's citizens don't even know that any are in the city-state in the first place, with Fenix Corp keeping this well hidden.
• Soul Jar: It isn't their usual or intended purpose, but a dragonslayer's dragon orb contains a portion of their soul, which theoretically makes it possible to resurrect a dead dragon slayer if they left theirs behind.
• Squishy Wizard: Like all dragon slayers, Mango has natural magical abilities. When the attacking Oni see Mango use a fire blast, they assume her to fit the trope. Mango quickly proves them wrong, stating that the back row magic specialist is Bleu while she's a straight up fighter.
• Staged Populist Uprising: A rare heroic example. As much as they would like to rebel, the underdwellers of Square One are far too beaten down to provide any real resistance against Square One's evil experiments. So a few sympathetic members of Square One's middle level management fake a revolt and come to quietly sponsor a real one.
• Star Scraper: What Square One has developed into. A Magitek accident stranded them and left them trapped in a radioactive wasteland. As a result, they are unable to build up their city state horizontally and have to build their city vertically instead. The city of Square One has been converted into a gargantuan spire that reaches up to the heavens. At this point, it has gotten so tall that they are only able to stabilize it using anti-gravity technology.
• Summon Magic: They are called callers. Summoning tends to require Geometric Magic, but a sufficiently skilled caller can make do without it. Especially skilled callers can manifest dream creatures.
• Take That!: Makes fun of Pokémon over the fact that it is Strictly Formula and resets the entire plot every season or two, making all previous development meaningless.
• Tap on the Head: Used to enforce the Doctor's Orders.
• Thoughtcrime: All rumors about V.E.R.G.E. have been flagged by the AI as misinformation. Magitek is completely safe. Fenix Corp has no plans to erase reality. By viewing this untruthful disinformation with no basis in fact, you have been placed on a list. An officer will be with you shortly to check your thinking.
• Tomato Surprise: The Dragonslayers are all shapeshifted dragons, the occasional dragon attacks are just to keep dragonslayer funding. It doesn't come at the end but does mark the end of an arc and the start of some of the bigger ones.
• Training from Hell: Lord Sherbert teaches the ''Sherbert School of Incredibly Dangerous Swordplay''. He is said to have "more fatalities than graduates", but an Elf who makes it through can withstand wearing an iron armor without even twitching from pain, while a simple direct contact with iron can kill an untrained Elf.
  
  His current pupil, an alumnus from another such school, asks for more: When he learns the girls are in danger, he asks Sherbert to crank it up to eleven so he can quickly graduate and rush to their help. Even Sherbert is surprised.
• Transformation Trinket: There exist special objects called dragon orbs. Dragons have the power of Voluntary Shapeshifting and can assume the form of any creature they have tasted the blood of. However, this requires a great deal of concentration to maintain. To ease this, dragons will use a ritual to create a dragon orb. The dragon orb contains a tiny fragment of their soul, as well as all the extra mass and magic of their true forms, allowing them to remain shapeshifted as long as they need to. They can return to their true form by fusing back with their orb. Count Baklava, an elf, somehow managed to acquire one and was able to fuse with it to become a dragon himself.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Dragons can assume the shape of any creature they have tasted the blood of.
• Undressing the Unconscious:
  • Dr. Yong-Yi changes an injured and unconcious Mango to treat her. When she realizes this she has a delayed Naked Freak-Out and doesn't accept his insistence that he's a doctor as an excuse and enters Pervert Revenge Mode, sending him flying out of the building and with him saying he doesn't feel he deserved that.
  • Happens to her again not long after with Mango falling unconscious after a fight◊. This time when she wakes up, Dr. Yong-Yi tells her he made sure he healed her with his eyes closed and had female nurse dress her.
• Unwitting Pawn: Only the Pure of Heart can pilot the Giant Mecha Square One uses as weapons of war. As such, the Villain with Good Publicity that is Fenix Corp uses a bunch of well-intentioned dupes to fight terrorists.
• Waddling Head: Candy's summoned bunnies are basically giant rabbit heads.
• Wanted a Son Instead: Blue Berry's father technically has two sons, but he's still unhappy Blue is a girl because she was his second wife's firstborn and ended up giving her a name considered to be masculine.
• Webcomic Time: Occasionally Lampshaded when updates are slow, such as when some characters navigate a deadly maze instantly In-Universe because the comic was updating so slowly.
  • Lampshaded here◊ where a character notes the out-of-universe time that has passed since the last strip was posted.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Junior wants to organize goblinkind into a civilization, but is willing to resort to forcing other goblins to obey him, taking hostages, and even killing Mango on whom he has a crush. Fortunately, a happy compromise is found when goblins discover the true value of their large reserves of gold and are given newfound respect by gold-hungry humans.
• When the Planets Align: Occurs once every one thousand years. With all the planets aligned, it causes all of their star system's Ley Lines to converge, which in turn can wreak havoc on delicate spells and hardware.
• White Mage: White mages can use Healing Hands. Notably, this doesn't necessarily mean they can heal everything with magic or know anything about mundane healing. One white mage attempts to heal a concussion with a hammer, while Bleu makes some well-intentioned efforts on Mango's many wounds that eventually require a real doctor to fix.
• White Magic: Also, Holy Magic. It heals.
• Why Am I Ticking?: When Agent Catalina becomes a case of He Knows Too Much, Fenix Corp remote detonates the Explosive Leash they quietly planted in her body. She notices her instruments claim that everything is normal, but feels a strange power surge. She guesses what is happening just quickly enough to push Dug through his portal, asking him to avenge her, as the explosion annihilates the building she was previously standing in.
• World's Strongest Man: The dragonslayer currently known as Ginger is considered to be the strongest dragonslayer to have ever lived. Pamplemousse says that destroying thousands of mountains would be nothing compared to her.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: The goblin king refuses a sack of gold and demands something useful like a chicken or a box of donuts, saying that they have literally whole walls made of the that "worthless gold". Then, war is averted with a happy ending when the true worth of gold is explained to him (and almost immediately goblins are reclassified from monsters to people by surrounding nations)
• Would Hurt a Child: Even when it's Cherry, that's bad.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: More or less the nature of Mango and Bleu's relationship.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: Popular legend claims that bane dragons can feed on souls.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Square One's government doesn't give a damn about its lower class, and would rather invest in military assets to crush them with than in recovering more resources to appease them with. Needless to say, the Square One government defines the revolutionaries as a terrorist uprising, but at least a few heroic figures are sympathetic to them. Given just how evil Square One's government is, they have very good reasons to rebel.

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