Digger/YMMV

• Acceptable Professional Targets: Among the feats ascribed to The Good Man by the people of Saltlace are healing the sick, raising the dead, speaking to wild beasts, and converting politicians...

Digger: Okay, now I know this is a myth!
Murai: There may have been some creative embellishments. It's been a thousand years.

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Lets look at Digger. Is she really having these adventures or is she, as she herself initially feared, merely trapped in a hallucination caused by cave gas and lack of food and sleep as she dies slowly, all alone and trapped deep, deep, under ground?
  • "You can even tunnel in circles until you drop dead. It's nasty stuff."
    • "I assure you, I am not hallucinatory." "Says the talking elephant statue."
• Complete Monster: Sweetgrass Voice is the closest thing Ursula can get.
• Crazy Awesome: Surka, former pirate shrew who guards bridges and rides trolls for a living. A-yup.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: The Statue of Ganesh, the Ocular Slug, the Grotesque Cute Skin-lizards, the Hag. Boneclaw Mother!
  • Surka, the greatest troll ever.
  • Ed, Ed and Ed. Word of God is that he was originally supposed to be just a throwaway snarling monstery thing to attack the protagonist, and that he just happened to be a hyena because she couldn't draw a bear properly.
• Fridge Brilliance: On the way back from the monastery, Digger, Murai, and Grim Eyes are hurrying, knowing that they are weeks away but feeling as if there is a savage urgency to their return. Only when they arrive, it is only an hour before disaster -- there was.
• Iron Woobie: Ed.
• Moe: Murai.
• Nightmare Fuel: He-Is was manipulated by a demon into nearly killing his mate and killing their child in the process. Then he was exiled, and broke free of the manipulations long enough to request a Mercy Kill, but it wasn't enough, because the demon kept him alive against his will. Poor guy...
  • Particularly, his heart. In-story, Digger is about the only person who isn't intensely disturbed by it.
• Paranoia Fuel:

"No--one--leaves--the deeps."

• • And later...

"It--is--foolish--to run. We--do not--tire. The--blood--of our--master--sustains us."

• Stoic Woobie: Digger.

"Dammit, Murai, It doesn't matter! If I have to stay in this god-riddled land of lunatics until I drop dead of--of--sheer frustration, then that's just life! I'll get over it! Not everybody gets to go home!"

• Ugly Cute: Ed, the trolls, the skin lizard things, and the Shadowchild. Maybe the vampire squash as well.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Digger is drawn as a minimally anthropomorphized wombat: she wears a vest, uses tools, and stands on two legs, but she's still a short, burly, fur-covered mammal without prominent secondary sex characteristics. There are some subtle gender cues in her design, but it's easy to miss them.
  • With the hyenas it's deliberate: Digger has to check the sex of who she's taking to sometimes because, well, that's what spotted hyenas are really like.
  • When the ghost-wombat Descending Helix appeared, many readers found it difficult to determine his gender as well, for all the same reasons as Digger. It took the in-character use of personal pronouns to settle the issue.
  • At the beginning of the comic, Digger was drawn more visibly female, but as the art has progressed she has become less anthropomorphic. Which makes sense, considering Digger (and all wombats) is a marsupial, and would have no use or explanation for external breasts to begin with.
• The Woobie: Ed, kind artist and exiled victim of fantastic misandry and spousal abuse. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. He manages to function pretty well for all he's been through.
  • In a variation on the typical fan treatment of a Woobie, fans don't want to just comfort Ed, they seem to want to KILL ANYONE WHO HARMS HIM! Despite no Digger Hurt/Comfort Fic being known, certain commenters have made it clear that if any did appear, the time between it appearing and a decisive PPC response would be measured in nanoseconds.
  • And then he rocketed up the Echeladder when facing down Sweetgrass-Voice. Ed isn't nameless any more.
    • Not that he's going to have a chance to use it any longer...
  • Murai. She had a bad encounter with a god that's left her sanity in a somewhat fragile state, she's bearing the responsibility of a quest on her shoulders, and she's only a teenager to boot.