YMMV / Shen Comix

• Foe Yay Shipping: Shen/Life is a thing. No, really. There are people out there who ship an Author Avatar with the Anthropomorphic Personification of Life itself.
• Friendly Fandoms: Usually with Sarah's Scribbles, also a webcomic about relatable young millennial problems.
• Growing the Beard: For a good chunk of its early lifespan, while popular, the comic faced an ever-increasing backlash for relying too much on personification-based "relatable" gags that started feeling same-y and enabling self-pity, reaching its peak with the whole "bike cuck" incident. Following this, Shen focused much more on upbeat/offbeat and experimental humor, proving he was capable of breaking the mold (he even went on record saying he would've liked to do this earlier had his "relatable" gags not become his most successful content). He also started dabbling in horror, which has also gotten him a sizable fan base.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • In general, the comic is a very popular source of meme templates, thanks to the heavy use of Expo Labels making it easy to turn one metaphor into another for almost any situation.
  • Parodying Shen's work as repetitive self-pitying comics where the protagonist easily gives up in front of problems. Including his portrayal of "Life" as the villain.
  • "Missed the Point", where an optimistic man tries to convince an angry man to be more positive and express what he likes, only to become angry and violent himself when he doesn't like his reply.
  • "All life is precious", where the protagonist first decides to take a bug outside gently, but squashes it in his fist when it says something he hates.
  • "My bike got stolen recently" is possibly the biggest meme of all. One comic has Shen's avatar finding out his bike got stolen, and after some soul-searching, he decides to take it positively because the thief was at least happy to have his bike. The comic got shared and widely criticized, with Shen being accused of being a doormat and having a self-destructive view on life. It received tons of parodies and mockery, and Shen got nicknamed "bike cuck". For what it's worth, after having public breakdowns, Shen has since taken the meme in stride, and it motivated him to heavily tone down the amount of self-pitying in his work.
  • "Crimes Johnson", originally from a comic Shen deleted because he was unhappy with it, is a popular meme template. A gang leader introduces a new member to progressively scarier gangmembers; Stealin' Steve, Murdering Mike and Crimes Johnson. Crimes Johnson did [X].
• Moment of Awesome: The "Fly to the Heavens" arc in which Life and Shen fight. Also serves as a major Tear Jerker and Heartwarming Moments in which in the ending Shen names all of his creations, making them real.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • For Halloween 2018, Shen started to make his avatar progressively more unsettling everyday for 11 days until Halloween. The first couple of days weren't so bad, but it's around the 3rd or 4th day that it starts to get really terrifying, culminating with the 7th day being a completely emaciated face bearing a Ghostly Gape. Then the next day, creepy eyes and a set of teeth appeared in the background, followed by realistic eyes and realistic hand sticking out of his mouth before it cuts to black on the 10th day. The final day is a rendition of his avatar with realistic eyes, hair and teeth filling his mouth. You can see the progress here.
  • Very subdued, but this comic depicts Shen's robot vacuum "malfunctioning" upon entering a closet and backing out after detecting something on its path. What makes it scary is that the closet is completely dark, so we don't know what the robot detected, if it even detected anything at all.
  • "Big Door, Little Door". We never find out why the little puppet man wants you to open the door...
• The Woobie: Poor Lilith from Public U. Art Club just can't catch a break, from being blamed for the destruction of a statue to being The Friend Nobody Likes to having her Patreon money stolen and spent on an NFT by her sister.

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