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Webcomic / Unintentionally Pretentious

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Unintentionally Pretentious is a weekly joke-a-day webcomic about a blind girl named Mia and her slightly off-kilter roommate (Syd) living in New York City. Much of the humor is derived from subverting expected disability tropes, along with a fair number of references to geek subculture. The comic was sadly discontinued in October 2015, but was revived in May 2019.

You can start reading it here


This show provides examples of:

  • Art Evolution
  • Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Syd suffers from this. Or makes others suffer from it, depending on the circumstances.
  • Big Applesauce
  • Blind Mistake: A frequent source of humor at Mia's expense.
  • Disability Superpower: Both played straight (as when Mia detects Syd going for a midnight snack) and subverted to hell and back.
  • Disabled Love Interest: Mia is this for Luthor, and it is implied that she was for quite a few people before him. In fact, between her and Sydney, Mia is not only widely considered to be the most beautiful (and isn't afraid to take advantage of her status as a disabled person to win sympathy points from men she finds attractive), but is also the one vastly more interested in sex and romance. At times, she can act downright slutty, which can be a shock to people expecting a blind girl to be saintly and timid by default.
  • Disabled Means Helpless: Mercilessly mocked, as for example when a passerby on the street insists that she can't talk to the blind Mia because she doesn't know sign language—after having several pages of perfectly normal conversation with her.
  • Disabled Snarker: Mia again.
  • Career-Ending Injury: Parodied, alongside many other tropes relating to disability. One day, Mia mentions to her boyfriend having a scar on her forehead from a childhood accident which she doesn't like talking about. Luther immediately imagines a heartbreaking, tearjerking scene of young Mia going blind after some horrible accident, crying for her mother. At the same time, Mia remembers having walked into a wall and having to get sutures because of it. She was born blind, doesn't mind it, and only doesn't like talking about the accident because it was embarrassing.
  • Glass Eye: Luthor freaks out when he thinks Mia is searching for one of these. It turns out that it's actually just old Halloween candy. Mia still has her natural eyes.
  • Important Haircut: Subverted like everything else, of course. Sydney just wanted one, despite the creator's objections that she needed to have an in-universe reason. Mia is surprised that she gets away with it.
  • Inspirationally Disadvantaged: Subverting this trope to hell and back is practically the webcomic's point. The main character, Mia, is blind, but she is not merely shown as being capable of functioning perfectly well in modern society but as being every bit as capable as any other character in the comic of making funny mistakes, humiliating herself, acting selfishly, playing (and being the occasional subject of) mean jokes, chasing men, acting coquettish, and otherwise being a regular person, with all the good and the bad that that entails.
  • [[Main/Opera]]: Mia and Luther go from being fans of operatic metal to actual opera—though they can only afford seats so far up that they're offered oxygen masks.
  • Pals with Jesus: Mia and Syd go back in time to meet Jesus briefly. To Syd's frustration, Mia asks Jesus if he knows who is going to win the playoffs, rather than to cure her blindness. Mia actually mocks Syd for thinking that's what she wanted.
  • Prematurely Bald: Luthor, much like his namesake. Though the Luthor in this comic isn't a supervillain . . . as far as we know.
  • Ridiculously Human Robots: Well, ridiculously canine robot, serving as Mia's service dog, smartphone, and GPS. The attempt to make a rediculously human robot version of Luthor comes out a bit . . . [[Squick squickier.]]
  • Schedule Slip: Eventually resulting in UP becoming an Orphaned Series.

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