Penny and Aggie/YMMV

Subjective Tropes related to Penny and Aggie.

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• Arc Fatigue: "The Popsicle War" stretched out so long that many readers expressed concern over the extreme length of the plotline, which dominated most of the year it ran. Subsequent plots have been much shorter, with larger story arcs broken into more manageable chunks.
• Base Breaker: Aggie, Daphne, Helen, Lisa, Marshall and Stan have been these, for varying lengths of time and to different degrees, as is clear from debate on the comic's forum.
  • Aggie: Principled activist, or preachy hypocrite?
  • Daphne: Genuinely loving towards Sara, and genuinely sorry for once having believed the worst of her? Or spiteful, jealous ditz who's only interested in Sara for the sex?
  • Helen: Misunderstood woobie, or spiteful, self-pitying traitor?
  • Lisa: Entertaining and insightful Genki Girl, or annoying, Totally Radical-talking Mary Sue? (Note: fan opinion, though once sharply divided over Lisa, has mostly shifted to the first view; she's now more of an Ensemble Darkhorse.)
  • Marshall: Essentially kind and patient guy who means well? Or wangsty Emo Teen who can't get past his Mommy Issues? Unlike with Lisa, the fandom grew more negative to his perceived blandness and wussiness over time, despite the fact that T Campbell liked the character.
  • Stan: Genuinely repentant, former self-centered user who at least tries to act more selflessly, even if he doesn't always succeed? Or perpetual Jerkass whose attempts at reform are merely cosmetic?
  • The endgame Relationship Upgrade: Inevitable, or shameless Fan Service? Do the title characters have chemistry as a couple, or does their relationship seem forced?
• Complete Monster: Cyndi Kristoffer is a dark twist of the Alpha Bitch archetype. She gets a sick enjoyment in driving people to suicide, as seen when she encouraged Michelle's body issues to starve herself to death, and planned to destroy Sara and Daphne's relationship in the hopes they would kill themselves while using Meg (a former member of their own clique) as "practice". Her worst act by far is manipulating Charlotte into committing suicide by using her Mommy Issues against her, grinning and gloating about how she plans to do the same to her Morality Pet Duane as she bleeds to death. A darker character for a high school series, Cyndi rightfully earns the contempt of everyone she encounters.
• Creator's Pet: Marshall was beloved by T Campbell, but not so much by the fans. One fan poll had him rated very low, and T himself has acknowledged that most people just didn't care for him. Unlike other Creator's Pets, however, he disappeared from the strip after "The Popsicle War".
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Duane shows unexpected nobility, wisdom and charm towards the conclusion of "The Popsicle War" and in ":-)" Lisa is just so... her. Jack Kirk, despite his silent and self-deprecating nature, will surprise you with his wisdom and pragmatism.
• Evil Is Sexy: Karen, Cyndi
• Fanon Discontinuity: Fans dissatisfied with the strip after "The Popsicle War" have declared everything past that point to be this trope. They use the fact that T Campbell initially considered ending the strip there as justification.
• Heartwarming Moments: The last page of "Missing Person." Also a Tear Jerker.
• Ho Yay: Virtually a defining concept of the strip - Two openly gay relationships, and the numerous characters that simply have the subtext, such as the main characters themselves. Even characters who had shown virtually no hints of homosexuality often have "twinges" towards it at certain points.
• Jerkass Woobie: Ah, Karen. Oh, Charlotte...
• Moral Event Horizon: Cyndi's manipulating Charlotte into attempting suicide. Many fans felt she'd already crossed that horizon in "The Popsicle War," when she exploited Michelle's body issues and manipulated her into developing an eating disorder, though it was also hard to tell at that point in the story whether she was deliberately doing so out of pure evil or whether she was simply a puppet of Karen. "Missing Person" confirmed that she was a willing participant and actually wanted to go even further.
  • Karen has done a lot of awful shit before, but she didn't cross it until the last chapter of "The Popsicle War" when she willingly cheats on her boyfriend Marshall, whose relationship was her only remaining redeeming trait. It's no coincidence it all came crashing down after this.
  • Many fans thought Marshall crossed the line when he not only rejects Aggie in a harsh manner, but brings up the subject of her parents, leaving her devastated. Not surprisingly, she refuses to have anything more to do with him, and he disappeared from the strip not long after.
• Nightmare Fuel: All of Chapter 3 of the Missing Person arc. Page 12 may well cross the line into High Octane Nightmare Fuel, but pretty much every page has something horrifying on it.
• Painful Rhyme: "Boys find it way sick when those girls get Lasik."
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Charlotte.
• The Scrappy: Darren Danforth. Nearly every reader on the forum disliked him for his lack of discernible traits other than clumsiness, and for his perceived role as a plot device meant to help Aggie get over Marshall.
• Unfortunate Implications: Yun-Sung's first appearance in the epilog depicted her with her eyes closed for the entire page (and thus an entire update). The lack of time between a page showing her with her eyes open (as they were in her remaining appearances) led some readers to believe that she was being drawn with slanted eyes because of her Korean nationality.
• The Woobie: Charlotte, who despite being a psychotic religious fundamentalist, is heavily implied to have had something traumatic in her past which might have stemmed from an abusive father and at some point might have included a rape. Whether she really is this or not is actually a point of debate between some of the characters in the strip. It says something for her that even when she was trying to kill Cyndi to prevent her from ever hurting anyone else again, she's still presented sympathetically.
  • The whole cast has shades of woobie from time to time. Hell, Karen's broken gaze into the past at the end of the War is sad, even when she was such a horrid witch. Also, Helen, for whom becoming part of the Something*Positive cast was actually a step up for her.
  • T confirmed in the forum that Charlotte was, in fact, sexually abused.