Immaterial is a webcomic by Sarah Ellerton, the author of Inverloch and The Phoenix Requiem. It explores attachment to people and things.
Alex moves in with her cousin Claire and Claire's extremely introverted roommate Ethan. As she's standing on the balcony, pondering, a possum with its head stuck in a green teapot falls out of the sky.
Then things get weird.
Read it here
on the official page or here on Webtoon.
Immaterial has been finished, but there's a sequel, Quantum Entanglement, following Alex and Ethan after a time skip.
These tropes have been lost. Please return them:
- Accidental Kidnapping: Grimnir didn't mean to take Alex along, she just got into the portal by mistake. Later, he takes her to the parallel world at her request, and accidentally pulls Ethan along.
- Acid-Trip Dimension: In addition to being a Super-Sargasso Sea, the parallel world has buildings hanging from the ceiling, random gaps in geometry (Grimnir says that's how the world looks "from this angle", suggesting it's literally somewhere away from "here" in an unusual geometrical dimension), glass shards that float in the air and is inhabited by Mix-and-Match Creatures and Animate Inanimate Objects (sentient, in some cases talking).
- Animate Inanimate Object: Constructs are made of piles of (seemingly) random junk. Wastewalkers (those big shaggy monsters) are similar. Except they're actually lost people.
- Bad Bedroom, Bad Life: Ethan's is Mess of Woe, full of remainders of hobbies he's taken up and given up on, because he felt he was going nowhere with them.
- Benevolent Monsters: Wastewalkers, who look scary and can't really speak, actually aren't malevolent.
- Big Damn Heroes: Grimnir and Yrsa in chapter seven arrive in the nick of time to bring down the giant wastewalker who was menacing Alex and Ethan - or so they thought.
- Caged Inside a Monster: Alex gets captured, briefly, by a wastewalker and stored in a dumpster incorporated in it.
- Canine Companion: When he ends up in the parallel world, Ethan meets a dog-like critter made of socks, plastic forks, bits of blanket and an old camera. The critter becomes the Team Pet - Ethan names him Shutters.
- Chekhov's Gun: Alex's toy bunny. She loses it as a child, and later on the wastewalkers give it back to her, helping her find the team again.
- Chronic Self-Deprecation: A symptom of Ethan's depression. He dismisses compliments, gives up anything he can't do well on first tries and avoids the risk that social interactions pose.
- Crack in the Sky: They appear whenever something travels between dimensions and look like a painted glass cracked and showing the black background. Alex and Ethan use one of these to get back to the parallel world in chapter six.
- Dimensional Traveler: Grimnir's job involves returning forgotten things to the real world, so he is a dimensional traveler by necessity and by preference, since he loves this job.
- Dismissing a Compliment: Ethan genuinely thinks he doesn't deserve any.Alex: That... was pretty cool.
Ethan: Uh. Not really. I mean, it's not like I'm good enough to pick a real lock. That one was cheap and-
Alex: Ethan... I'm trying to give you a compliment. Just say thanks. - Emotionless Boy: Ethan, who's on antidepressants. The parallel world does crack his facade, though.
- Extradimensional Emergency Exit: Grimnir sends Alex and Ethan back home when fighting a wastewalker in chapter five. They end up in an underground tunnel, Alex on tracks - Ethan rescues her in the nick of time.
- Falling into the Plot: Grimnir. Onto Alex's balcony. With a teapot stuck on his head, which she helps him remove, thus falling into the plot (or the parallel world) herself. There's actually quite a lot off falling (sometimes, jumping) in this story.
- Gender-Blender Name: Alex, short for Alexis. Ethan thought "Alex" the new roommate was going to be a guy (due to tuning out a part of that conversation with Claire).
- Genki Girl: Claire is a primary school teacher with the energy to match the kids. She also doesn't beat around the bush and won't have anyone talk her down. Alex is quite energetic, even plucky, as well.
- Gleeful and Grumpy Pairing: Alex is relentlessly optimistic and stubbornly friendly, Ethan is a clinically depressed Deadpan Snarker who immediately gives up when things don't go his way and prefers to stay away from people.
- Greed: What motivates wastewalkers. They collect everything they can and are very possessive about what they collected. Or this is what it looks like, but the truth is more complicated. The person actually motivated by greed is Grimnir, who hoards stuff because he likes it.
- Hidden Depths: Due to selling himself short and having had many hobbies in the past, Ethan's got a number of handy skills he never talks about, like lockpicking. He's also the one to ask questions about the parallel world workings and figure out some answers. And he can be more classically heroic, with proper motivation.
- Improbable Falling Save:
- While Alex is climbing down from the roof, she slips on the balcony rail and Ethan catches her hand. He does needs Zach's help to actually pull her up, but Alex is completely unharmed save for mussed hair. This is their first conversation in the story.
Ethan: Are you crazy?
Alex: Yes! Now pull me up!- He does that again when she almost falls down the Inevitable Waterfall in chapter six. Without help, too.
Ethan: I... can't... lift you...
Alex: Yes you can. - Intangibility: As yet another side effect of Grimnir's "mistake", Alex becomes intangible after the second trip. Not all the time, but at random moments. This stresses her a lot.
- Last-Second Word Swap: While almost drowning in a lake:Alex: Oh - ship.
- Love Imbues Life: Constructs are piles of well-loved but lost things. Or actually emotions and memories associated with those things.
- A Minor Kidroduction: The prologue gives us adorable kid!Alex, and then a Time-Passes Montage to nineteen-year-old Alex. In chapter one, she's twenty.
- Mistaken for Quake: Everybody thinks the quakes caused by dimensional mumbo-jumbo are seismic. In Australia. The denizens of the parallel world know that tremors mean something big's come through, which is probably trouble.
- Mirror Chemistry: She's not mirrored at chemical level (she's shown eating normal food with no indigestion afterwards), but after Grimnir gets Alex back home for the first time, she starts seeing all writing mirrored and her handedness is reversed, making her clumsy. She also begins to see black dimensional fissures and odd distortions. Grimnir later explains this is because he made a mistake and that Alex needs to see Yrsa in the parallel world to fix it. When she finally does have the opportunity, Yrsa explains Alex is "facing the wrong way" - so it's literally her chirality that's wrong.
- Mix-and-Match Creatures: Grimnir, who looks like a rucksack-wearing possum (ish), is the least mix-and-match in the parallel world, actually. Some denizens are a jumble of animal or plant parts, some are a jumble of forgotten objects, like socks, power cords and cameras held together by the residual emotions invested in the things. When emotions fade, the constructs collapse.
- Mundane Object Amazement: Grimnir, a keeper of forgotten things, has no idea what most of those things are for and is utterly amazed at toy cars or kids' drawings.
- Narnia Time: Five minutes in parallel world equals all night in real world.
- Nice Girl: Alex is friendly, understanding, patient and polite to everone, and she refuses to gossip on the grounds that it's disrespectful to people's privacy. She also asks whether she can bake cookies upon being shown the kitchen.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Yrsa doesn't really see the distinction between people and things, so she treats Ethan and Alex as things. When Alex gives her a piece of her mind regarding that, Yrsa throws her into the vault, since she's troublesome.Alex: Yeah, great job, Alex. Annoy the one thing that could have fixed you.
- No Social Skills: Ethan, who overthinks social interaction so much he ends up staying in his room, berating himself. Alex brings him out of the shell, somewhat.
- Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Alex, who has genuinely good intentions, nevertheless manages to rub Ethan the wrong way a couple of times.
- Pajama-Clad Hero: On her first trip, due to being whisked away while preparing for bed, Alex is wearing a dressing robe. This proves embarassing when Grimnir unceremoniously dumps her on the roof of the building. And the entrance is locked.
- Pictorial Speech-Bubble: Wastewalkers have speech bubbles, but they contain pictograms and occasionally slurred, misspelled words.
- Plucky Girl: Alex, a friendly optimist who won't give up.
- Psychometry: By touching an object, Yrsa and Grimnir can tell who it belonged to and what the owner associated with it, especially the emotional significance. Yrsa can also tell where it's supposed to be. Since they both have a rather murky understanding of the difference between person and thing, and assign emotional states to objects, this might also cound as Empathy.
- Ridiculously Difficult Route: Grimnir treats Wasteland as one because of the wastewalkers, but he can't afford the griffon flying fee, so they have to go on foot.
- Romantic Ribbing: It's a sign of how their relationship progressed when Ethan, who was extremely awkward with Alex hugging him earlier, can playfully dump flour on her. They both flirt quite snarkily.Alex: (to Grimnir) You can't get everything you want by being cute!
Ethan: You would know. - Scenery Porn: The parallel world is incredibly lush.
- Shout-Out:
- Super-Sargasso Sea: The parallel world is haphazardly put together out of ill-assorted reflections of the real world. Things that were lost or forgotten in the real world tend to pop up there unexpectedly, nobody knows why. Yrsa and her lot catalogue and return them. If, and only if, there's nobody to return things to, they reuse them. Some forgotten things spontaneously form sentient constructs.
- Sweet Baker: Alex, who makes cookies and pancakes and is a Plucky Girl.
- Symbol Swearing: Grimnir after he crashes into Alex's balcony with a teapot stuck on his head.
- Talking Animal: Grimnir resembles a possum.
- Talking with Signs: Yrsa's door guard uses road signs to communicate.
- That's No Moon: Deep in the wasteland, the group finds more junk...Ethan: Um... guys? (staring at a giant hand visible among the trash) I don't think this is a pile of junk.
- Cue Finger-Twitching Revival...
- Three-Point Landing: Grimnir does it after jumping off a giant wastewalker's back.
- Wacky Parent, Serious Child: Somewhat, as Alex's mom, Rebecca, is not very good at holding down a job, a relationship or a living place. She doesn't really worry about this, but it results in Alex being (at nineteen) more traditionally "adult" than Rebecca is, as well as hesistant to get attached to anything. Alex decides to stop moving around with her at twenty.
- Was Once a Man: While discussing the second trip, Ethan figures out the huge wastewalker might be a person lost in the parallel world. He's completely right.
- Womanchild: Rebecca, the Maternally Challenged moocher. Notably, Alex is touchy about being compared to her and worried she might be similar to her after all after she tells Grimnir off.
See you around, bunny girl.
