Webcomic / VG Cats

VG Cats is a video game-themed Funny Animal webcomic by Scott Ramsoomair. Rather than directly emulate the Two Gamers on a Couch format that was popularized by Penny Arcade, this comic instead does humorous parodies of video games and anime with the main characters, Cloudcuckoolander Leo and Snark Knight Aeris.

The comic follows a gag-a-day format focused on Deep-Immersion Gaming segments, along with some strips set in Leo and Aeris' world. The main duo are occasionally joined by a small cast of recurring characters that includes the hapless superhero PantsMan, the serial Fan Boy Ternaldo, Doctor Hobo, and Krug the demon.

Ramsoomair spun off two subcomics: Adventure Log (2007), based on Final Fantasy XI, and Super Effective (2008), an Affectionate Parody of the plot of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen.

VG Cats was launched on 1 September 2001, averaging 25 comics per year at its peak. Updates fell off throughout the 2010s and the comic officially ended in February 2022.

Please note that the site does not use a permanent URL system for its archives, and so the links used in examples may no longer lead to the intended page. Ideally, along with a link, also give the issue number and title.

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Provides examples of:

• Added Alliterative Appeal: Crossing over with V for Vendetta, Leo comes to a house in a Guy Fawkes mask and does the same speech, only replacing V with H. #216 Aech

• Alternate Universe:
  • Scott ran a brief (very brief - like, not even into double digits) comic called VGKitties, exploring the notion that Leo and Aeris were ordinary housecats interacting in housecatty ways, rather than a pair of funny animals.
  • Also used in one of the actual comics, which depicted an alternate universe where Sonic was more popular than Mario, Mortal Kombat (now "Minor Konflict") was family friendly, and the eponymous cats were now dogs with their roles in the comics swapped.

• And Zoidberg: Ashley Williams of Mass Effect is specifically mentioned over the other species as stuff Commander Shepard would have sex with (except in her case, not).
• Animated Adaptation:
  • A flash toon attempt, but only one episode exists: check it.
  • To a lesser degree of "animated", there's the VG Cats Adaptation With No Name, which mostly adds voice acting to the existing comics.

• Anthropomorphic Shift: Early strips seemed to indicate that Aeris and Leo belonged to and lived with Scott, despite being anthropomorphic. Eventually it shifted to the two of them living independently as apparent college roommates, and in 2013-14 flashback strips showed them as children living in fully humanlike houses with their families.
• Arbitrary Equipment Restriction: "Wardrobe" has Aeris as Penelo find out the hard way about Final Fantasy XII's License System, finding herself stupidly wearing it on her foot. Leo as Vaan says without the XP, it's a wonder they can wipe themselves. With the hat on her face, she just wants to kill cactaurs until she stops being retarded.
• Arc Welding: #334 and #335 both take place in the same era (when Aeris and Leo were kids) but are unrelated. #336 ties them together and shows the aftermath of each story. Scott even says this was an arc weld, as he hadn't set out to do a three-parter, but changed his mind after writing the first comic.
• Art Evolution: Here is the earliest appearance of Aeris and Leo, back in 2001. And this is their early-2010 appearance. Yeah. Character style varies wildly from strip to strip.
• Artificial Stupidity: #277, Cheeseburger Apocalypse forces Leo, Aeris and Pantsman to play Left 4 Dead 2 with a bot playing as Coach, who proceeds to waste medkits on paper cuts, try to heal Aeris while she's standing in pools of Spitter acid or being punched in the face by a Tank, and generally make bad situations worse by ignoring Special Infected attacks outright or being easily distracted from them.
• Ass Shove: Solid Snake's attempt at solving the "temperature sensitive" keycard
  • Also, from #76, the second appearance of Johnny Evilguy where he talks Leo into buying his "Orange Sapphire of Might", (some guy's testicle) as an insta-kill item. Leo's attempt at using it on a high-level enemy results in this trope.
• Atomic F-Bomb:
  • This strip has Aerith setting up the apartment with speakers so she can get the best aural experience for Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, legal release dates be damned. Turns out the cops are prepared for someone watching it as a 1015 and just as Cloud and Sephiroth are about to get to their climactic duel... the player gets a disc read error. That's when Aerith lets out a LITERAL use of the trope.
  • In a not so literal example, Aeris gets scammed into buying a key that unlocks a crate that contains the same gun that she already owns. She lets out an F-bomb that's as wide as the comic before bursting into a Cluster F-Bomb immediately afterward.
• Attack Backfire: Used in this comic for using fire as a weapon in cold weather; pleasant for obvious reasons.
• Author Avatar: Pantsman was originally this, but over the years he's become less prominent, and Aeris has stepped into the role of Ramsoomair's megaphone.
• Author Tract: "Nerd Rage", an entire strip consisting of a tirade on how casual gaming is ruining the industry. Lampshaded here where other characters point out that flat out explaining your points makes a shitty allegory, though that didn't stop him from dedicating seven panels to it.

• Bad Santa: Santa's Bad List is, but of course, written in the Death Note.
• Better by a Different Name: In some Author Tract, Pantsman declares his hate for Inuyasha, saying it was better when it was Fushigi Yuugi, then calling it "Dragon Ball Z for girls".
• Beyond the Impossible: Aeris aborts Leo from time - and he recovers from it.
• Bizarro Universe: In the aptly-titled "Bizarro!", where Sega won the Console Wars, and the protagonists are VG Dogs with flipped personalities. Damn you, Sliders!
• Black Comedy: In one of the parodies of One Piece, Chopper tries to tell Zoro he has to remove his colon after one of his battles.
  Zoro: What's that, Chopper? "Band-Aids Heal Everything"?
  Chopper: [holds up a colostomy bag] This is going to be your new rectum.

• Boob-Based Gag: This strip showing Phoenix having an Imagine Spot where everyone in the courtroom gets Mia's chest size.

• Brick Joke: The rat flail. Starts as a "weapon" during a D&D strip. Becomes a plot point when they re-enact Bleach as Ichigo!Leo's weapon.
• Bringing Back Proof: Parodied in a strip ribbing on video games' tendency to assign quests around this theme, where Johnny Evilguy appears as a quest giver who tasks Aeris with assassinating Tommy Goodboy and retrieving one of his testicles as proof of the kill. Aeris gives him the requested body part, but it turns out that she didn't actually kill him for it — she just got him blackout drunk and obtained the quest item while he was unconscious.

• Cats Are Snarkers: Aeris the cat is easily the most sarcastic character in the webcomic.
• Cheeky Mouth: Intentionally invoked on Sonic the Hedgehog and some of Leo's expressions. Seen less on Aeris and some of the more exaggerated expressions.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Krug. His last appearance was between issues 269 & 270... which was a guest comic to parody Ghostbusters.

• Con Recap.
• Continuity Nod: In the ever-popular "The Perfect Gift", Aeris owns figurines of the monstrosities Leo created in "Wright to Life". They sit just below her Haruhi Suzumiya girls Playboy Bunny poster and next to a Lucario figurine.

• Couch Gag: The strip resumed in September 2020 with Leo digging his way out of the couch.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The "First Comic" and "Last Comic" buttons are in the middle, between the "Previous Comic" and "Next Comic" buttons. This may be the only webcomic on the internet to do this.

• Deep-Immersion Gaming: Spoofed in one issue (#311 "Dress Rehersal") where Aeris and Leo, who are already dressed as Princess Peach and Luigi, are asked to put on the cat suits from Super Mario 3D World over top their existing costumes.
• Defictionalisation: The "Wright for Life" comic led to the actual Spore team creating their own◊, replacing the drawn aliens with ingame ones, and later on physical models were made. Of course, Spore players can attempt something like this as well.
• Different World, Different Movies: This comic shows a world were Aeris and Leo are dogs with swapped personalities (Leo is now the exasperated straight-man and Aeris is the excitable simpleton) who play games such as Minor Konflict and the Shadow the Hedgehog-esque Yoshi the Dinosaur.

• Don't Explain the Joke:
  • Aeris's response to Leo when he makes an incredibly misogynistic joke about why girls like stories about vampires and feels the need to spell out what he's talking about. Leo does this a lot. "Recurring, if you will."
  • And again in #367 (Moostache), rather than letting it speak for itself Leo has to make absolutely certain we understand that the gag is that the guy doesn't just milk female Pokémon, but males as well.
• Double Entendre: "That is the BIGGEST barrel I've ever seen, is it pump action?"
• Dumbass Has a Point: In #155, after Leo mocks Aeris for playing an online MMORPG:
  Aeris: Online RPGs are about social interaction, damn it!
  Leo: Yes, social interaction, of course.
  Leo: "SPARE MONIES FOR A NEWB?"
  Leo: "HEAL PLZ?"
  Leo: "HOW I MINE FOR FISH?"
  Leo: [turns to Aeris] "HAY A GRL LETS CYBER!"
• Easter Egg:
  • That password in "Nerd Rage" really works for Mega Man 2, all bosses, full e-tanks.
  • In the 100th Comic flash video, one can access a scene where Pantsman does a mockup of Strong Bad Email... and since he's actually using Strong Bad's Compy, Strong Bad himself appears and tells him to get out.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: As the Trope Namer, it discusses the terrible implications of the alien face-huggers that clamp to one's face and put their offspring in one's stomach.

• Furry Confusion: Lampshaded. Despite living in a house with a toilet Leo still does his business in a litter box much to the confusion of Areis.
• General Failure: In one of the strips, an idiot general makes plans that involve bombing his own infantry. He is the page image for this trope and overthrown by the end of the strip.
• Geo Effects: Parodied in "High Ground", where standing on the high ground actually gives Obi-Wan a statistical advantage over Anakin, to which Anakin cries, "Hax!"
• Gone Horribly Right: In a parody of the 2016 US Election, Dr. Eggman wins the Mobius election, but the last panel shows that whatever his plan was, he didn't want to win the election for real.

• Good Eyes, Evil Eyes: Leo's eyes are wide and somewhat goofy. Aeris, while not evil per se, is deeply cynical and dangerously unstable, and has narrower, unconnected eyes.
• Grammar Nazi: In The PUNisher, a man is kidnapped, gets his ear cut off, and is pistol-whipped repeatedly for using Leet Lingo, poor spelling, and poor grammar on a forum post.

• High-Pressure Blood: This comic shows a Worms game going on... normal, right? Well, when part of the ground was destroyed by a rocket, we cut to... Leo in pain and blood stains behind him. Take a wild guess what happened. Also counts as Bowel-Breaking Bricks when you think about it.
• Homage:
  • Leo's reaction to Dr. Hobo's death is an homage to Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
  • Before that he created a Comic replacing Byakuya and Ichigo with Aeris and Leo, and recreated the scene where Ichigo first used his Bankai.^note strip number 224

• Human-Focused Adaptation: Discussed in this comic.
  Starring a cast of two-dimensional characters no one cares about! With special guest stars the Transformers.
• Hypocrisy Nod
  Yes, I am aware of the hypocrisy!

• Identical Panel Gag: Very frequent, usually doubled as Beat Panels. Notably used when Aeris watches an illegally downloaded copy of Advent Children before it's cut off with a disc read error, which she stares at dumbfoundedly for four panels before letting out an Atomic F-Bomb.

• I'm Cold... So Cold...: This comic has Pea-Steve say this before dying while he and Pea-Bob wait for Potato-moto.
• In Name Only:
  • At times. Some comics have only gaming, others have only cats, and still others have neither. Lampshaded in #77 (I'm gonna get sued for this..), at least as far as it not being relevant to gaming goes.
  • The shortlived VG Kitties had nothing whatsoever to do with gaming, though it had plenty of Aeris and Leo.
• Jackass Genie: What happens when you ask the Monkey's Paw for Duke Nukem Forever. Three wishes left...Two if you include Leo's wish for a large wiener.
• Just One More Level!: This strip has Aeris getting in a "quick" game of Civilization. By the time she's reached the Bronze Age, she's not only gotten ridiculously old, but an apocalypse happened that involves soldiers fighting a giant mutant version of Leo.
• Kick the Dog: In #194 ("Cuddly Little Cubby"), Leo is curious about how Pooh manages to eat honey despite being a stuffed toy and dissects him alive For Science!
  Pooh: (lying on the operating table, disemboweled) Oh, bother. It seems I'm still alive. Be my mercy angel, Piglet.

• Let's Mock the Monsters: You know, maybe we shouldn't be jamming the helpless critters into airtight balls and hemorrhoids.

• Lionsand Tigersand Humans Oh My: Funny animals, regular animals, and humans exist together in this webcomic.
• Mad Bomber: Red Link goes on a bomb-fuelled rampage for Force Gems.
  Red Link: Come on, Guy, I just wanna make you go pop!

• Mundane Solution: When playing Five Nights at Freddy's, Aeris pokes holes in the whole scenario, and rattles off several simple ways to counter the robots: dressing up in animal costumes to fool the robots, which is redundant as Aeris and Leo are furry animals to begin with, turning off some of the extra equipment to save power, or guarding the building from outside.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Aeris rants about how characters in Fire Emblem: Awakening are making out on the battlefield and asks if anyone wants to die having sex. Tharja does.

• No Dead Body Poops: Averted. When Leo wants to learn "poop", he opts to forget "breathe". He suffocates and then uses "poop" to no avail.
• Not Rare Over There: Used as part of a rant when Ash gets sick and tired of Team Rocket chasing after his Pikachu for ten years while it's not even special and he has about eight more of them, not to mention loads of other Pokemon as well.

• Of Corset Hurts: Parodied with the belly slimmer from the Re-Invention channel, which squishes organs and disfigures the body for the sake of beauty. One woman even wears it around her neck.
  Ms.Dipshits: You don't need oxygen when you look this good...
• Oh Wait, This Is My Grocery List: Strip #304, parodying Slender, has the Slender Man accidentally take one of the creepy pages to the supermarket and leave his shopping list pinned to a tree instead, where Aeris and Leo find it.
• Orphaned Series: Not the main strip, but Adventure Log stopped at eleven strips and was deadlinked over a year later. According to Ramsoomair, the Adventure Log update schedule was directly tied to each release of the official Final Fantasy XI newsletter (which included the comic as an insert). The game always had rather shaky support from Square, and when they stopped making new newsletters, Scott stopped making new comics.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: Aeris is literally pink. Leo is gray, but his preferred color of clothing is blue. Possibly a Genius Bonus, as there are certain breeds of cats - thanks to specific recessive genes - that have grey fur, and the technical term for this is a 'Blue' cat.
• Poe's Law: It's really, really hard to tell if "Nerd Rage" is an Author Filibuster or a Stealth Parody, as people have voiced every one of those complaints without irony.

• Ret-Gone: Aeris attempts to do this to Leo by going back in time and aborting him from his mother. He gets better.
• Self-Deprecation: He's fond of this, typically with a heaping helping of Hypocritical Humor.
  • In addition to the randomized "Updated whenever" comments in the title bar, this, and the first strip of 2012.
  • After calling out Sonic's new design being suspiciously similar to the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the following panels reveal that Aeris and Leo are not too different from a certain other webcomic duo...

• Shout-Out:
  • Remember Elcor's ramblings in this strip? "To which he replied... I'm not left-handed... either. Pointless narration... and then..."

• Oh, and the main characters are named Aeris and Leo... both of which are Final Fantasy characters who are killed by the main villain of their respective games.

• Aeris's shelf in this strip is home to Gurren Lagann, Lucario, and Spore creature figurines. On the wall is a Haruhi Suzumiya poster.
• Speaking of Gurren Lagann, a scene is re-enacted in this strip.
• One of the update lines says the world ends with Update, if you want to enjoy life, expand your update.
• To Friendship Is Magic in this strip, this one, and most obviously this one.

• Aeris is wearing a BMO shirt while Leo is clearly seen playing FTL: Faster Than Light in this strip.
• Conglaturation has Dot Matrix and Phong with a bunch of nulls, two of which used to be Bob and Enzo.
• This strip features a wanted poster that looks directly like one from One Piece, complete with the Marine inscription.

• That One Level: In-universe, this comic has Aeris going through her old games and remembering why she never finished them.

• Too Dumb to Live: Leo is this very, very often, going so far as to forget how to breathe in order to learn how to poop in one comic strip.

• Unexplained Recovery:
  • Leo, after Aeris "Aborted [him]... from time". Blatantly lampshaded, to boot.
  • Doctor Hobo as well. (Strip 327 That Show that's not Bob's Burgers)
• Uninstallment: Inverted. There are many missing numbers in the archive, but you can find some of those in the "Misc Other Comics" section. Except for #200, which never existed to start with - for a time, there was an estimated release date next to the number, even as Ramsoomair released strips #201 & onward, but eventually he changed it to "TBA Never", suggesting he had some kind of blowout planned like the animated music video released in lieu of #100 but never finished it for some reason.

• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Nobody in-universe seems to notice Leo and Aeris are walking, talking cats until the three-hundredth strip.

• Vague Age:
  • Aeris's ID in the (very brief) Animated Adaptation simply reads "Legal". She might at least be going to college, given this strip.
  • The first published version of this strip indicated that Leo was 21 years old; Ramsoomair later edited the figure to the less precise "many years earlier", as Leo himself has yet to reach that age to begin with.
• Vandalism Backfire: Aeris talks about how Leo had once been scammed into buying a console called Boxxors-O-Roxxors (really just a box of rocks) and had used Aeris money to pay for it. Aeris promptly beat the crap out of him with the box, and Leo has been attempting this trope as petty revenge. Unfortunately, Aeris saw it coming.
  Leo: So I've secretly been peeing in her coffee ever since!
  Aeris: So I've been switching our coffees ever since.
  Leo: [drinks coffee] Mmmmm!

• Vitriolic Best Buds: Aeris and Leo, for all her antagonism and his dim-bulb moments, do care for each other. Shown in this comic.
• Walking Techbane: This strip has Leo bragging about how he not only red ringed Aeris's Xbox 360, but that they just die when he touches them.
• Wanted: Leo Leonardo, dead or alive. Reward: 90,000,000 dollars.

• What Did I Do Last Night??: Samus Aran gets this after a Christmas party. The answer is "Master Chief."

• You Have Researched Breathing: Leo knows four Pokemon-style moves — Eat, Sleep, Breathe, and Videogames. He forgets "Breathe" in order to learn "Poop" and promptly faints.
• You Monster!:
  Leo: Do you think Sims feel pain?
  Aeris: You're a MONSTER, and you're going straight to hell.
  • And another
    Aeris: Did you just feed him his parents? ... Yeah, I'm taking this for a while.

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