Please Forgive Me!!!
is a comic started in 2018 by Gobolatula and Josef. It is the sequel to Gob's previous comic, It Hurts!!, and follows an alternate version of the characters from that comic.
On January 26, 2019, Gob released a small spinoff game called Titty World, starring Pasqualo and Katie stuck in the titular video game.
Please Forgive Me!!! contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Pasqualo's dad returns in this series, as does his propensity for abusing his child. He's less into physical abuse and attempted murder this time around, but the fact that he now has a teenage daughter instead of a son makes his verbal abuse much more harsh; he frequently insults Pasqualo's weight and eating habits, and she's internalized it.
- Patience's father Wilbur Olmstead is a physically and emotionally abusive religious maniac whose default tone of voice is an enraged bellow.
- Martin, a physically abusive, unapologetically racist woman-hater who may have murdered his wife and expects his pregnant teen daughter to cook his meals for him.
- Alt Text: Started on page 153, as the Alt Text will constantly remind readers.
- It later ended on page 302, seemingly permanently.
- Art Shift: a two-fold example, the comic went to black and white when Pasqualo and Ally had a falling out, symbolizing how the color went out of Pasqualo's life, and also because Gob wanted to make doing the comic easier on himself since he was about to become a father.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: The universe this comic takes place in came about from Pasqualo's sacrifice in It Hurts, allowing all his friends and Aurora to lead normal lives at the cost of his own existence, because if he and Aurora exist in the same universe, the apocalypse is inevitable. Pasq's influence and attempts to make everyone happy are successful in some respects, but have severe unintended consequences in others.
- Most notably, this universe's Pasqualo who is actually Aurora allowed to grow up as a normal person. Pasqualo apparently failed to realize that plopping her in his broken, abusive home would cause her to similarly develop into a depressed wreck of a kid like he did. While Obtusangelo is less physically abusive and murderous in this universe, Aurora!Pasqualo has to endure his emotional abuse for several years longer than the original Pasq did, and he's specifically latched on to mocking her weight, a topic of severe insecurity for even the most well-adjusted teen girls. Where Pasqualo repressed the abuse for years by convincing himself his dad really loved him, Aurora!Pasqualo fully comprehends how much of a hateful piece of shit her father is and has vivid fantasies of murdering him. Also, unlike any other character, this incarnation of Aurora seems to have inherited some subconscious memories from her previous incarnation, particularly in her tendency to cause destruction around her despite her desire to care for everyone, and her singular romantic attraction for It Hurts!Pasqualo, a person who no longer exists. The former repeatedly causes her despair as her best efforts to help the people around her fail or only succeed through random circumstance and nothing to do with her actions. The latter prevents her from developing normal romantic relationships alongside her peers, and when she receives an anonymous love letter she feels nothing but a deep sense of dread. One has to wonder if the previous incarnation of Aurora foresaw how bad things would be for her, considering she outright said "It's not what I want" multiple times in It Hurts, when referencing Pasqualo's sacrifice.
- Allison and Tubsy admit their feelings for each other and start dating, allowing them to have the relationship they never truly got to have in It Hurts. However, Ally's increased attention toward Tubsy damages her friendship with Pasqualo. Pasq becomes intensely jealous while bottling up her feelings and refusing to address them in a healthy way, and Ally displays a severe lack of emotional intelligence during the honeymoon phase of her relationship, inviting Tubsy to traditions that were previously reserved just for her and Pasqualo and diminishing her relationship with Pasq by saying she now "has two best friends". Ally's affinity for violence and antisocial behavior have more serious consequences as she's a teenager and therefore not forgiven as easily as a younger kid would be. She gets institutionalized at one point because of it.
- Katie isn't a conspiracy nut and was able to write her "Cheese Forgive Me!" novel in the form of a highly successful YA fiction, under a pseudonym. However, she didn't make friends with Pasqualo in middle school and by the time she's in high school she's a cripplingly introverted misanthrope with no social skills, despite her book resonating with many of her peers. She gets better after making friends with the main cast and is well on her way to becoming Pasqualo's actual closest friend, but at her worst moments she's still noticeably meaner than It Hurts!Katie.
- Trisssh and Maddie, who formed an Odd Friendship in It Hurts, are step-sisters, but Maddie starts the comic hating Trisssh due to the multi-homicidal method by which their two families became integrated. The trauma of the family situation has turned Maddie into an Enfant Terrible bully who is the terror of her school.
- Speaking of Trisssh, the integration of post-apocalypse monsters as normal students at a New Jersey high school and among wider human society causes problems of its own. Trisssh and her snake-monster kin are just as murderous and seemingly incapable of empathy as they were in the previous universe, meaning that without some kind of external influence they have no moral issues with brutally killing people. Trisssh uses her intelligence to rule the student council as an abusive tyrant and is an extremely toxic "friend" to Pasq in one arc, Magma Spider returns as "Maggie" and is her normal wholesome self until she, like the giant spider monster she is, sucks a guy's organs out through his skull without a hint of remorse and goes to jail for it. That guy in particular really deserved it, but the implications of other monsters with that level of power existing out in the wider world is terrifying. The fact that mutants and supernatural creatures can exist without the apocalypse destroying the normal rules of reality allows for things like Pasqualo's hometown of Runoff Falls being locked in a Forever War against bloodthirsty giant mutant bears that repeatedly attempt to slaughter the city's entire population, only kept back by a standing military that apparently requires the service of high school volunteers, of whom Pasqualo herself is one.
- Bilingual Bonus: The Sailor Moon poster in Pasq's room reads "Suck My Dick!" in katakana.
- Bland-Name Product: There's the Goofle search engine, sticks of Pocko, and a Redbox-like kiosk that switches from "redthing" to "hotbox" to "tub'o'discs". Though oddly the Wawa convenience store still makes it in unchanged.
- Brick Joke: At the end of It Hurts, Harmony and Chaos made an offhand reference to Mark loving chess so much that him NOT being a grandmaster chess player is impossible to change even in a completely rewritten universe. In this new universe, Mark isn't a sex pest and is shown destroying Pasqualo at chess club.
- Eliza returns as the owner of a pet store, and while she's less of a vocal Straw Feminist this time around, the men's restroom in her store has its sign defaced to say "women", leaving nowhere for males to go to the toilet in her establishment.
- Calling the Old Man Out: During Pasq's breakdown in "Seasonal Depression", she finally has enough of her father's verbal abuse and snide remarks and really lets him have it, ending in her bashing his face in with a baseball bat. Subverted since it was a daydream, and she only meekly tells her dad to leave her alone while he just shrugs and leaves.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Even by the standards of the series, Melanie operates on a completely different wavelength than everyone else. It's heavily implied that it's a way of blocking out her father's tragic death in a plane accident and that the whole town encourages it to keep her from having to relive it. Occasionally she's lucid enough to, in her own way, offer Pasqualo advice or begin to recall her dad's death.
- Deconstruction: While the story initially presented Trisssh's family situation as Black Comedy (ie. her father killed her stepfather's wife, causing him to kill the former and marry Trisssh's mother), the incident soured Maddie on life completely and caused her to lash out at her schoolmates.
- Enfant Terrible: Trisssh's step-sister Maddie, who turned into a volatile and cruel bully after her family situation upended her life.
- Lighter and Softer: While the story is plenty crude and wacky, and while death and destruction is used in spades, it's a lot less dark than It Hurts! was even in its early strips.
- Monster Clown: Clownathan's father, known only as "The Clown" looks extremely creepy, and while he hasn't done anything directly, Pasqualo's dad considers him to be: "the most impressively evil creature I have ever known".
- Nonstandard Character Design: Horely Shorely is this incarnate. He is the only character in the series presented with magazine clippings serving as his body, both in monochrome or color. This fits his role in the story, where he inexplicably appears with all the characters acting like he's a normal part of the crew, says and does some cryptic shit, and then disappears, erasing everyone's memories of him and of most of the events that happened while he was around.
- Otaku: Like in the previous series, Pasqualo is a big manga and anime fan, apparently regularly referencing it and foisting it on an unenthusiastic Eliza.
- Redundant Parody: At one point, Pasq and her younger cousin discuss how much they liked The Neverending Story, to which her father complains about the story being about nothing but "a fat kid escaping the real world to run away from their problems". The book already addresses this complaint with the entire land of people from Earth who became Empty Shells after wasting their wishes and trying to take over Fantastica, which also threatens to happen to Bastian as his personality becomes more toxic.
- Shout-Out:
- Pasq tries to show off One-Punch Man as an example of decent manga to get into.
- Trisssh mentions watching Uma Musume with Pasqualo and hating every second of it.
- One of the clubs at Harrison High School is The Anime Club.
- One of Pasq's cousins, Anglew, looks an awful lot like Chainsaw Man's protagonist Denji. Another one of her younger cousins carries around an action figure of My Hero Academia's Izuku Midoriya.
- Slice of Life: Seems to fit into this genre, with the comic focusing mostly on Pasqualo's school life, though time will tell if it stays this way considering what happened with the previous comic.
- Stepford Smiler: Pasqualo, while not literally trying to smile all the time like the previous universe's version of Aurora, masks her trauma by acting as publicly cheery and helpful as possible, gifting people handmade origami, being kind to everyone and remembering their birthdays regardless of who they are or how well she knows them, and spending all her free time on either volunteer work for various organizations or showing up early to school to help others. None of this leaves her fulfilled at the end of the day, and her self-loathing conversations with herself in the mirror and fantasies of beating her dad to death show her as probably being more messed up inside than It Hurts!Pasqualo ever was. Over the course of the comic, despite making a few new legitimate friends and achieving small personal victories, her mental state steadily declines to the point where she starts making OOC suicide jokes that clearly disturb Ally, who knows how unusual that is for Pasq. She refuses to see a doctor for a serious head injury (that even her dad tells her she should get checked out!) and forces herself to stay awake for weeks on end.
- Third Wheel: The core of the drama with Pasqualo and Allison. While Pasq wants Ally to be happy, which includes getting with her longtime crush Tubsy, Pasq is afraid of being left alone and watching her relationship with her best friend drift apart. While Ally worries about the same thing and tells Pasq as much, the story does prove Pasq right—Allison does start to hang out with Tubsy more, leaving her with less time to hang out with Pasq.
- Wham Episode:
- Chapter 16: Pasqualo, out of her mind after not sleeping for five days straight, blacks in and out of consciousness, and among her black-ins we see her hallucinate the world ending, her having a falling out with Ally, her screaming at her father, her climbing a tree to dare God to kill her, and her trying to drown herself, only to wake up at the hospital. Then the real Wham Line drops: Pasqualo's father was murdered. Pasqualo can only manage a few nonplussed 'huh's in response.
- Chapter 17: Pasqualo is the prime suspect in her father's murder, Katie's dad is now her legal guardian (and tells the authorities to back off on investigating her or else) and Pasqualo adjusts to living with family that actually cares about her.
- Chapter 20: Pasqualo and Ally have a knock down, drag out fight over them growing apart that ends with Ally walking away, flipping the bird, as the color goes out of Pasqualo's world.
