Girls with Slingshots

Awwwww.

Girls with Slingshots is a Mundane Fantastic webcomic by Danielle Corsetto about the lives of Hazel and Jamie, their talking cacti, and their friends. The strip takes a lot of its humor from switching the standard gender arrangement of common sex comedy tropes.

The name appears to come from a rather strong drink.

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Tropes used in Girls with Slingshots include:

• 555: Poor Jim is given such a number by a girl.
• A Date with Rosie Palms: Masturbation is treated a as a casual, fact of life topic.
• Accidental Unfortunate Gesture: Hazel and Jamie imagine how Chris the Pirate attempting ASL could go horribly wrong.
• Actually, I Am Him: Hazel sends Erin to spy on Jamie and her "new boyfriend Aaron"...when Jamie's actually starting a lesbian relationship with Erin.
• Adorkable: Zach.
• The Alcoholic: Hazel, a petite woman, is to the point of showing no signs of intoxication until her ninth beer. Played for Laughs, big time.

Hazel: I'm a high-functioning drunk, Clarice. You know that.
Clarice: Yeah, but I've been counting bottles and you've crossed your faux-sober threshold.
Hazel: Eight? Holy shit, I leveled up!

• All Girls Like Ponies: Referenced in this strip.
• All Men Are Perverts: Jamie gets pretty much everything she wants from strange men, thanks to her endowments. When she covers them up, she is shocked that drinks suddenly cost more. Played creepily straight by every male customer of the porn store.
  • Hazel assumes what Zach wants when he offers to drive her home.
• All Women Are Lustful: Let's just say that when all the AA batteries disappear, a mob of women are seen wandering the streets as though society had collapsed.
  • It's started
    • "This is about as close to post-apocalyptic storyline as you're ever gonna get from me."
• Alt Text: Starts with strip 1054.
• Anatomically-Impossible Sex: Angel believes that if two women are having sex, they can't get STDs. Wow. Recent events show that she realized a bit too late that she was wrong.
• Anything That Moves: Zach's past.
• Art Evolution: Over time, the art style has become more stylized and loose.
• Asexuality: Erin, Jamie's girlfriend. The issues it causes makes this one of the few comics to tackle the difference between sexuality and romance.
• Bar Slide: Taken to extremes in this strip.
• The Bartender: Angel. Also Jameson.
• Big Beautiful Woman: Jamie, obviously, with a helping of Big Fun thrown in.
• Beta Couple: Jameson and Maureen become the stable background couple after they get married.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: Hazel has "length" and "girth" requirements for a man.
• Bill, Bill, Junk, Bill: With email.
• Black Comedy Rape: See Double Standard Rape (Female on Male). This may be the only webcomic where an attempted rape can end with a punch line, and people are willing to roll with it.
• Bottle Fairy: Hazel.
• Brains and Bondage: Clarice, one of the more intelligent members of the cast, is a dominatrix. But she dreams of being a librarian.
• Brick Joke: The wedding arc pulls obscure comments from earlier strips and turns them into punchlines. Jameson's remaining hair makes him look like a clown? His parents are clowns. Candy wanted to marry Jameson with as many things as possible made from baby seal leather just to offend Maureen the vegan? She replaces the wedding rings with "100% Baby Seal Leather" rings. The rest of the cast is not amused.
• Butch Lesbian/Lipstick Lesbian: Jamie's Coming Out Story arc had her visiting a gay bar full of Butch Lesbians. She ends up going home with Lipstick Lesbian Thea instead, and eventually decides she likes her girls girly.
  • Most of the major gay/bisexual girls are Lipstick Lesbians. Even Mimi is more Shorttank than she is butch.
• Buxom Is Better: Jamie, all the way.

Maureen: Jamie, your breasts are...legendary.
Jamie: You can say it twice. I consider them each a separate legend.

• Camp Gay: Darren, all the way, with a heaping helping of Have I Mentioned I Am Gay?. The rest of the gay cast are, by comparison, Invisible to Gaydar.
• The Casanova: Zach, who is arguably a trope subversion as he considers the three hundred women whom he has serviced as a gift to the community. Prior to hooking up with Hazel, he gave virgins a good first time and helped service the elderly to make them feel loved again.
  • Chivalrous Pervert
• Cast of Snowflakes: A variety of female (and male) characters with simple but wildly varying body shapes and faces. Even when they dress up as each other for Halloween, it's still possible to tell which character is which.
• Cats Are Mean: Discussed and then subverted.

Hazel: Cats only have two emotions - "feed me" and "fuck you."

• Character Development: Chris started out as a compulsive exaggerator who was universally known for wearing an eye-patch, but becomes a solid recurring character. One strip also hangs a lampshade on this trope when no one recognizes Chris until he puts on his eye patch, which he no longer actually needs. He remarks that he knows what his only distinctive characteristic is. It turns out he has another one, but he works pretty hard to keep that one under wraps.
• Comically Missing the Point: Hazel in this strip.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Jamie makes Tyler dress as a fairy and return all the batteries he stole.
• Cool Old Lady: Hazel's neighbor who has upstaged and hijacked her parties more than once.
• Crash Into Hello: How Thea and Mimi meet.
• Crossover: Davan attended Maureen and Jamison's wedding, and recently Sprinkles gave birth to Choo-Choo Bear's babies, one of whom went to Leslie and Robin.
  • A breakdown of the cats and their crossovers is included in this strip.
• The Cutie: Jamie. Mimi makes a good case for herself too.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: Hazel freaks that her comment was supposed to be "inner dialogue."
• Did the Earth Move For You, Too?: Played with in this strip.
• Did You Just Have Sex?: Hazel get laid? Hazel get laid!.
• Dirty Old Woman: Hazel's neighbor, who has ordered strippers and had to have her stomach pumped after a wild party.
• Disabled Love Interest: Chris and Melody, although it is played very well and the relationship is fleshed out and realistic.
• Disability Superpower: Do not question Soo Lin's Daredevilness.
• The Disease That Shall Not Be Named: Played with. Thea catches a STD from fooling around with Angel. It's just Restless Leg Syndrome.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Hazel uses it on Zach.
• Dope Slap: Jameson gets one.
• Double Standard: Even though Candy tried to rape Chris, Jamie seems horrified at the idea of him macing a girl.
• Double Standard Rape (Female on Male):
  • Absolutely not, despite what Jameson initially thinks. Candy tries to rape Chris, and gets knocked off her Straw Feminist pedestal quickly by a cast that agrees that she is absolutely wrong. Which still hardly excuses an attempted rape being played for laughs. Even though after a good week's worth of jokes, the strip finally gets around to saying 'seriously kids, rape is wrong no matter what the victim's gender is' it's still jarring.
  • A sequence where a female barber threatens to seduce Jameson, kidnaps him, and forcibly shaves him (smoking a cigarette afterward) is played entirely for laughs, probably because all she did was shave his hair, so it being played for laughs is excusable.
• Drag Queen: Darren
• Dresses the Same: Thea at Mimi's party. For bonus awkwardness, it's the same top as her girlfriend's mother.
• Drunken Master: Hazel is an amazing writer when she's drunk. Her publisher even tells her straight-up that she doesn't have to read an article to know it's quality as long as she knows Hazel wrote it drunk.
• Early Installment Weirdness: In one early series, Hazel drags Jamie to spy on Jameson & Maureen's date. Jamie wholeheartedly disapproves of this, and leaves Hazel to spy alone. This is completely reversed (and ignored) later on when Jamie becomes a spying romance detective and Hazel is the disapproving one.
• Even the Girls Want Her: Jamie, who eventually decides that she wants the girls too. But only from the waist up.
• The Faceless: Tyler's mother, whose face is always covered by her speech bubbles.
• Fake Buzz: You'd think a high-functioning alcoholic like Hazel would be able to tell Fiona's flask was full of water.
  • The point was that Hazel was so uncomfortable around her that she'd accept any excuse to feel less weird even if it was patently false.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Candy. Candy Candy Candy. A rotten bitch to pretty much everyone, but she's an old friend of Jameson's, so they kind of have to put up with her when Jameson decides to bring her along. Then she pulled that stunt at Jameson's wedding, and Jameson woke up to the fact that "Hey wait, I don't really like Candy either."
• Gag Boobs: Jamie. There's more to her than that, of course...

Hazel: ... But I asked twenty people the first word they thought of when they think of you, and all of them said "boobs". Even Your Mom, who added that the second word she thinks of is "boobs".

• Gargle Blaster: The titular slingshot.
• Gender Blender Name: Hazel mistakes Jamie's girlfriend Erin for a man named Aaron.
  • Which makes panel three here something of a Brick Joke.
• Girl-On-Girl Is Hot: So hot it causes spontaneous combustion.
• Gone Horribly Right: Tucker was trying to get Clarice's attention. Boy, did he get it.
• Gonk: The Bearded Lady Fetishist that followed Darren home.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: We see Thea's here.
• Grammar Nazi: Maureen cuts Jameson off over a grammar mistake.
  • Thea corrects one of Hazel's speech bubbles.
• Groin Attack: Candy jokingly suggests Clarice do this when meeting men to see if they are into BDSM. Clarice momentarily considers it.
• Halloween Cosplay: One year, the characters in-strip go the route of pop culture, dressing as Ghostbusters and Smurfs at Halloween. The next year, all the female characters dress as each other. This ends about as well as one might expect. The year after that, they dress as internet phenomena, including Rick Astley, Homestar Runner, Two Girls One Cup, and more.
• Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: Hazel has had to remind people of her hetero-ness more than once, especially in earlier strips when she isn't getting any.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": hee hee, come.
• Hollywood Sex: Mostly averted, except when it's funny. One strip even has Mimi explaining the ways lesbians protect themselves during sex.
• Hot Librarian: Averted in Clarice, who tells everyone that she's a librarian when in reality, she is a porn-store clerk moonlighting as a dominatrix. She really does want to be a librarian, though.
  • As of recently, played straight.
• Hulk Speak: This strip.
• Hypocritical Humor: After insisting that they couldn't sell a cat food that wasn't nutritious, Hazel buys Twinkies.
• I Have Boobs - You Must Obey!: Jamie. She even forgoes using a coat in the winter because she can't function without the attention.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Hazel needs one at the end of this strip.
• I Want Grandkids: Both Hazel and Zach's mothers. His much more so.
• I Taste Delicious: Hazel and Maureen get a moment of this after they get into a fight and spray each other with root beer.
• If Jesus, Then Aliens: Bizarre form.
• Imagine Spot: What Clarice would really like to do to bad customers.
• Indulgent Fantasy Segue: The Revenge of the Porn Store Queen.
• Informed Ability: According to everyone who sees her photos, Jamie is a really amazing photographer. However, the audience hardly sees any of her work and what little glimpse we get by way of the background of her gallery show appears to be nothing more than some pedestrian pictures of flowers -not exactly the stuff of solo gallery openings (though the fact the gallery showing Jamie's work is apparently out of touch with the rest of the art world and hasn't had an opening in decades might count as a lampshading of this trope).
• Innocent Inaccurate: Oddly enough, with a grown woman.
• Innocently Insensitive: Hazel's not good with lesbians. Or remembering things that mean something to her boyfriend. She eventually gets called on this.
• Insistent Terminology: Clarice is a librarian working at a book store.
• Instant Web Hit: Jamie's "I Just want somebody to Ravage me" outburst.
• "It's Not Rape If You Enjoyed It": discussed.
• Jerkass: Candy. Hazel has her moments of this.
• Joisey: Various cities and towns in New Jersey are mentioned as being close by. It seems to take place in the New Brunswick^[1] area. When Hazel goes to the Big Applesauce she takes the train. The writer is probably a local.
• Karma Houdini: Candy tried to rape Chris. Everyone's response? Get her a job as a dominatrix so that she has a healthy outlet.
  • She finally gets her comeuppance for everything--after her prank at the wedding, the entire group turned their backs on her. She hasn't appeared in the strip since...unless you count some stuttering steps toward redemption in crossover strips from Something*Positive.
    • She recently reappeared, greatly alarming Jameson. The way he acted, you'd think he was the one she tried to rape (although it's possible the entire attempted date rape has entered Canon Discontinuity since none of the characters ever mention it even when mention other bad things Candy's done.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: Poor Thea.
• Lethal Chef: Hazel can start a fire boiling water. Protip: Don't do it in a cast-iron skillet in the microwave.
• LOLcats: Hazel's "special" cat is shown to think in LOLspeak.
• Marshmallow Hell: Jamie's ...tracts of land are so large that her poor kitten frequently ends up lost in her cleavage. One strip, however, implies that in a former life, the kitten was a soldier who died a virgin, so in a way, he's getting his wish. He also wanted to come back as a kitten. If that soldier is that kitten, I'd call this a definite hero's reward.
• Maternally Challenged: Hazel.
• Meat Versus Veggies: Candy Versus Maureen.
• Meganekko: Maureen.
• Medium Awareness: Here.
• My Biological Clock Is Ticking: Hazel's ovaries start talking to her. She resists them at every turn, even threatening to cut them out and sell them if they don't shut up.
• My Breasts Are Down Here: Jamie sums it up perfectly.
• Naked People Are Funny: Hazel's trip to the nude beach and Strip Scrabble.
• Nice Hat: Jamie's bear hat.
• No Fourth Wall: Often and explicitly.
• Noodle Incident: "Best ER story ever."
• Non-Human Sidekick: McPedro,the talking Scirish cactus. McPedro's mustache is, in turn, a Non-Human Sidekick himself, as he runs away from McPedro and travels the world. And he's French. And gay!
• The Not-Secret: Subverted - with Jamie "discovering" that Thea and Angel aren't just "playing board games". Only to discover on her "proof" video that it wasn't Thea with Angel on the tape.
• The Nudifier: Lasers that remove your clothes, and save them for later, used in playing Strip Laser Tag.
• One of the Boys: Hazel, to the point where she hangs out with the guys during the bachelor party and is repeatedly mentioned as actually being the guy in her relationship (including shallowness and refusal to think about the "future" beyond lovemaking).
• Painting the Fourth Wall: "I've never seen so many stars come out of one woman's crotch!"
• Poisonous Friend: Candy, to Jameson. She tells herself that her vitriolic attempts to sabotage his relationship with Maureen are just harmless pranks that Maureen is too sensitive to appreciate, until finally she pushes Jameson to the breaking point at the wedding.
• Prince Charming Wannabe: Jim doesn't get that his romantic gestures come off as creepy.
• Punny Name:
  • Tweeney Sodd, who eventually robs Jameson of his remaining tuft of hair.
  • Melody, who is deaf.
• Rule 63: Done by the artist herself! She thinks boy-type Jamie is very cute.
• Scotireland: McPedro's accent is supposed to be Irish, but he speaks stereotypical Scottish.This may be due to his existence as a drunken delusion of Hazel's, although he later points it out and refers to his accent as "Scirish."
• Selective Obliviousness: Hazel can't seem to grasp that lesbian sex isn't limited to strap-ons.
• Shared Universe: With Something*Positive (and by extension, Punch an Pie). And by extension of those, with Shortpacked (the mascot kitties of Something*Positive and Girls with Slingshots had a litter, one of the kittens is adopted by Leslie in Shortpacked.)
  • Also, Robyn from All New Issues is apparently Hazel's cousin.
• Ship Sinking: Hammered home when Angel not only screws someone else behind Thea's back, but tells Thea they were never in a real relationship to begin with. Ouch.
• Shout-Out: Possibly unintentional, but both of Thea's romantic interests have had the same name as a character from Rent.
  • One in poor taste in a guest comic.
• Shrinking Violet: Maureen.
• Silent Snarker: Melody.
• The Speechless: Maureen's sister, who is deaf. She can still sign and text people, though.
• Stalker with a Crush: Jamie's secret admirer.
• STD Immunity: Averted with Angel and Thea, where the latter picks up a scorching case of restless leg syndrome.
• Stealth Pun: They don't get it.
  • The graphing calculator has functions.
• Straw Vegetarian: Maureen gets ill at the mention of eating meat.
• Strip Poker: Strip Scrabble and then later Strip Laser Tag, complete with lasers that remove your clothes.
• Technical Virgin: Jamie, despite having several dates that had "happy endings," has never gone all the way. She seems to believe as long as she has an intact hymen she counts as one since she had (implied disastrous) sex with her girlfriend Erin before she left for England but mentioned later when Hazel had an STD scare that she was still a virgin.
• The Talk: Hazel and Clairce give it to not only Tyler but also his mother when they discover neither knows where babies come from.
• Token Minority Couple: A story arc built around subverting Type B: the two lesbians in the regular cast finally meet, with a long buildup to their first date...only to find that they have nothing in common. They do have a lengthy friendship with benefits, though.
• Too Kinky to Torture: Threatening to beat a dominatrix has no effect except her admiring your weapon.
• Umbrella Drink: Because even a Gargle Blaster tastes better with umbrellas.

"Everything tastes better with an umbrella."

• Unnecessary Makeover: In-Universe. Maureen, after sex-toy-purveyor Clarice questions her ability to be sexy. Somewhat averted as the makeover doesn't take, and it is specifically stated that the makeover took away what made her sexy in the first place.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Hazel's at least close, especially early on. She often crosses the line from Deadpan Snarker into just plain being a jerk, and she's also pretty selfish, and this usually appears for the sake of a punchline. However, on other occasions she shows that she's a fairly decent person. This seems to have come to a head, in-universe, with Hazel and Zach having a major fight over her immaturity.
• Unusual Euphemism: Angel and Thea playing board games in the back room.
  • "Giant Sea Cucumber!"
• Victoria's Secret Compartment:
  • Jamie. She keeps the world's luckiest kitten in there.
  • And Fiona, Jamie's sister. She keeps booze in there.
• What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?: Angel gave Thea Restless Leg Syndrome! *GASP!*
• Wholesome Crossdresser: Darren, the resident Drag Queen.
• Will They or Won't They?: Hazel and Zach, Thea and Angel.
• Worth It: Seen here.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Tucker thinks his stalking behavior will work because of romantic comedies.
• Your Mom: seen here.

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1. ↑ Not the province