minus is weird like that.
A webcomic by Ryan Armand that ran for 130 episodes from February 2006 to July 2008. The original website is down, but it can still be found on archive.org
. Or These Mirrors
minus is an elementary school girl. She is sometimes mistaken for a boy. She has a very powerful imagination and can do anything she wants. The things she does are fickle and whimsical, as well as mischievous and vindictive. She is, after all, a child.
She has very few friends, apart from a green-haired girl, the beings that minus wills into existence, and the ghosts.
It should be noted that this webcomic is not recommended for grownups, who may find it disturbing.
Compare and contrast with "It's a Good Life".
Also, yes, both the character and the strip are spelled with a lower case "m".
Tropes:
- 108: minus dies in the 108th strip.
- Alternate History: Even without minus around making the laws of reality her servant, there are subtle hints that her world is not the same as our own. Of course,
she may well be responsible for that...
- Ancient Astronauts: Doubly Subverted: After hearing about the hypothesis, minus goes back in time to try to meet the aliens. She doesn't find any... but at the end of the strip it is revealed that yes, aliens were responsible for the human race. She just didn't go far enough back in time.
- Apocalypse How: Quite a few, but most famously the one that actually stuck, wherein minus resurrected the entire population of Earth, past and present, human and otherwise. It was crowded, to put it mildly.
- Artificial Afterlife: minus creates an Afterlife almost absent-mindedly after someone tells her about it. This becomes a case of Chekhov's Gun at the end when minus accidentally destroys the living world.
- Art Initiates Life: In #12, minus brings her own dinosaur drawing to life and her friend's robot drawing to life to fight each other.
- Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: minus tends to get easily distracted and then seems to... forget about her creations, or absent-mindedly wipes them out of existence.
- Back from the Dead: minus brings back everyone. This brings about the beginning of the end.
- Be Careful What You Wish For:
- Rule of thumb: never ask minus anything when she's distracted, and always remember to be precise, and think of the side-effects before you do.
- This comic demonstrates another rule: Make it short and easy to pay attention to.
- Black Knight: #74"Fool ! Do you think you can withstand the power of the Black Knight ?"
- Body Horror: minus turns a balloon selling guy into a balloon himself when he yells at her for popping all his balloons. Then he pops.
- Bittersweet Ending: The entire human race is destroyed, but lives on in the after life. Also, minus and the green haired girl look distinctly melancholy in the final strip.
- Blue and Orange Morality: Technically minus is a child, so doesn't have the same concept of moral responsibility an adult does, so does things which might seem like Fridge Horror or Disproportionate Retribution to adult readers. Possibly also justified given her reality-warping powers are pretty limitless and that she can also see ghosts (hence, death probably isn't a big deal). The closest it comes to any sense of logic is: minus just likes to have fun regardless of the consequences, and doesn't like it when things get in the way of that.
- Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: #79, where a carnival has great food, great rides, and even great food...... that you can ride!
- Call-Back: Sergeant Davy and his trusty steed, Prendon, are mentioned as having existed in the comic's world several strips after minus altered history to make Davy a war hero.
- Characterization Marches On: Despite, as can be told by most of the rest of this page, having a reputation for being dangerous, in truth, all things considered, minus stops doing more negative things very quickly - by halfway through the comic she's almost entirely neutral: only doing negative things out of naivete rather than intentionally doing them, and she often adds things to her some of the less positive things she caused to make them bittersweet or even good. She never stops callously making synthetic sentient beings, however.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The aliens. They first appear as the inhabitants of a random planet that minus visits on a lark. At the very end of the comic, it turns out that those same aliens were responsible for the evolution of humans.
- Cosy Catastrophe: There doesn't seem to be much worrying after minus accidentally causes the extinction of humanity. It helps that the ghosts are able to reunite with past loved ones who have died.
- Deus ex Machina: An In-Universe version in minus herself, who tends to solve any problems or requests with a somewhat tangential application of her powers. Anyone who doesn't know about minus is usually some form of terrified or curious at the seemingly illogical and irrational things that occur around her (that tend to really be... well... illogical).
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
- This guy successfully shoves minus into a briefcase, despite her Reality Warping powers.
- This guy
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: What adult humans who have been involved with one of minus's reality-warping events realise. For the children she plays with, it's more Pals with Jesus.
- Disproportionate Retribution: When a man shouts at minus after popping his balloons, minus turns him into a balloon and pops him.
- Driven to Suicide: In #35, a businessman jumps out of an office window while stressed at work. minus saves him by turning him into a bunch of tiny people to divide his work.
- Excited Show Title!: Temporarily, when minus becomes...wackier? The Rant for that comic is just a single exclamation point.
- Green Thumb: minus is sometimes shown to manipulate plant life. In the first comic she grows trees to stop bullies, and in another she turns grass between concrete tiles into a large plant.
- Idiot Hair: minus has an idiot hair that sticks up. It's realistically small at the beginning, but over the course of the comic it becomes longer and longer. In comic #120 she stretches it out to make a long curl.
- Inexplicably Awesome: It's never explained where exactly minus' powers come from.
- Intergenerational Friendship: One of the girls in minus's class is friends with Larry, an adult man.
- I See Dead People: minus can see and talk to ghosts. In one strip, she's talking to the ghost of a dead girl and her friend asks if she can see.
- Kids Are Cruel: minus doesn't generally doesn't recognize the consequences of their actions until they're presented to her, if they ever are at all. This leads to a lot of Disproportionate Retribution such as turning a man into a balloon and letting him pop, or moments like the creation of a miniature civilization in her tub only to destroy it when bathtime ends.
- Knight of Cerebus: Subverted. Red top-hat guy appears to warp minus's mind somehow, and she dies two pages later. minus returns as a ghost, but accidentally kills everyone (except Larry) soon afterward. Everyone lives on in her strange afterlife, though, and the tone never really changes. #123 appears to poke fun at the comic's own ongoing lack of seriousness.
- Kraken and Leviathan: Alien invasion? Zombie apocalypse? Famine? Summon a kraken!
- Lady Looks Like a Dude: After being mistaken for a boy, minus amps up her femininity. She's back to normal in the next comic.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Quite often happens when people get on the wrong side of minus. Sometimes subverted given her general lack of moral responsibility and the resultant Fridge Horror, like the balloon-seller's fate.
- Little Miss Almighty: minus isn't really confirmed to be God in the comic - just a girl with limitless unexplained powers. But she does create the Afterlife, and is shown to run it whenever she isn't busy having fun.
- Mugging the Monster: More specifically, Bullying A Reality Warper. Happens in the first strip and several others, such as #15.
- Nigh-Invulnerability: Larry somehow survived the entire Earth being covered in every animal that ever lived, which killed everyone else, so apparently he has this characteristic for unexplained reasons. He first appears in a city recently destroyed by a giant octopus, totally unconcerned by his situation.
- Nothing Is the Same Anymore: Starting in strip #119, courtesy of minus killing almost all life on earth and causing The End of the World as We Know It.
- Only Six Faces: If it weren't for hairstyle, the characters would be indistinguishable.
- Perfect Health: minus had never gotten sick before, so she wills herself to. She finds it highly overrated.
- Perspective Magic #95. Also #14.
- Physical God: minus doesn't just seem to be a god — she kind of seems to be the god. She runs the afterlife, at any rate.
- The Rant: An appropriately strange one, some having such inexplicable content as sketches of men making weird expressions, or "aoifhasfugrfiawugfafashofihoiehrogiehrgoiehfoshf."
- Reality Warper: minus can warp reality based on her imagination. Some examples include changing her own appearance, creating life, manipulating plants and structures, causing or curing sicknesses, transforming herself or other people, forcing people to smile, Time Travel, creating new worlds, and bringing people Back from the Dead.
- Reed Richards Is Useless: minus's omnipotence can't solve the world's problems due to her short attention span.
- Retconjuration: minus rewrites history as she chronicles the exploits of "Sergeant Davy." The teacher contradicts themselves as they attempt to explain the rapidly-changing story.
- Retraux: minus is deliberately drawn in the style of a turn-of-the-century newspaper comic, only without the limitations on space or color.
- Reused Character Design: Most of the unnamed characters look like the characters from another one of the artist's series, Great.
- Rewriting Reality: here and anywhere else in the comic. Continuously.
- Scenery Porn: The backgrounds are positively beautiful,
particularly by webcomic standards. - Shout-Out:
- Various references to anime here. In order of lines, the immortal who wants to be human is from Soul Hunter, the second one sounds vaguely like a quote about immortality from Galaxy Express 999, the one about the witch giving up her powers is Ojamajo Doremi, and the quote about everything coming easy sounds similar to a lament made in Magic User's Club by Takeo's gay friend.
- The dishman who was out dojo-hunting obviously battled a practitioner of Panzerkunst.
- In the description of Strip #116:
Hi everyone! How's it going? This. Beat. Is. Non. Stop. - Various references to anime here
- The Slow Path: #25 and #26. Slight subversion as she wouldn't make it back at all; minus brings her back in her old age to say good bye.
- Silence Is Golden: While there are a few strips that have talking in it, many strips are pantomime.
- Sociopathic Hero: minus, in as much as all children are kind of sociopathic. The strips are full of people whose lives she has ruined or casually tormented over a minor slight or just because she was playing around.
- Tempting Fate: In #66, when a tour group suddenly runs away from minus holding a camera, the tour guide tries to explain to them that it's not going to steal their spirit. The tour guide allows her to take a picture of him, so that's what she does. The next panel shows his smiling ghost in a camera picture.
- Unstoppable Mailman: The paper cutout man minus creates will deliver her the candy she asked him to get, no matter what.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: If the red-haired ghost hadn't demanded that minus bring her back to life, the end of the world might not have happened.
- Viewer Gender Confusion: Even the in-universe characters have trouble pegging minus. Even Word of God has commented on it.
- A Wizard Did It: Since minus's powers are, literally, whatever she wants, "minus did it" is a perfectly valid solution to any Fridge Logic.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: This couple appears to believe that minus is a rules lawyering Literal Genie, quite forgetting that she's really just a naive little girl with a rather short attention span.
- You Gotta Have Blue Hair: And Green hair, and red hair, depending on minus' mood it seems. Some of the normal characters have green or (bright) red hair regardless of minus. Interestingly, no character ever has yellow hair, and the color yellow is rarely used in the comic, so perhaps the green-haired characters are meant to be blonde. minus is the only character who ever has blue or pink hair.
- You Never Asked: Referenced in #120. One ghost claims he knew what was about to happen (in this case, minus causing everybody to die), and when another ghost points out that he never mentioned this, the first ghost just says that the other ghost didn't ask.
- Zombie Apocalypse: Here and here. It's more of a childish prank than a full-blown apocalypse, though.
