Swamp Thing/YMMV

The comicbook:

• Author's Saving Throw: The first arc of the fourth series is dedicated to undoing everything that occurred in Brian K. Vaughan's run.
• Complete Monster: Anton Arcane. His worst crime: sending his own niece to be tortured in Hell. The runner-up: taking the form of her husband for a long period of time, going so far as to even sleep with her before doing so.
• Crowning Moment of Funny: Batman explaining to the mayor of Gotham that insisting on Interspecies Romance being illegal is somewhat ridiculous, concerning the fact how many aliens and other beings that aren't exactly human run around on Earth. Especially funny beacouse of the incredibly snarky way it was delivered by Batman.

Batman: No exceptions, I see. In that case I suggest you start rounding up all the other non-human beings who may be having relationships outside their species.
Mayor: What? What do you mean?
Batman: I mean, if you want to take this all the way, non-humanity doesn't end with the Swamp Thing. Let me see... You'll possibly have to arrest Hawkman... And Metamorpho... And there's also Starfire, from the Titans. Her race evolved from cats, I believe... The Martian Manhunter, obviously... Captain Atom... And then of course there's What's-His-Name... The one who lives in Metropolis.

Mayor: *gapes*

• Fanon Discontinuity: People tend to view the series solely in terms of the Alan Moore run, which may partly be due to the fact that the rest of it has either never been collected in trade form or is otherwise notoriously difficult to find. It's generally accepted that the Wrightson-Wein run is pretty good, if much more straightforward and smaller in scope, while the Brian K. Vaughan run...isn't.
• Moral Event Horizon: Swamp Thing's daughter Tefé burns through all audience sympathy when she enforces a Sadistic Choice on a man who started a forest fire.
• My Real Daddy: Len Wein helped create Swamp Thing (and more), but Moore's complete rewrite of the character is the one that lasted.
• Nightmare Fuel: Nukeface, introduced during Saga of the Swamp Thing #35? Very little information is given about the guy, which ultimately makes him more disturbing. And then there's the scene where Wallace Monroe, accidental "creator" of the nuclear vagrant, discovers his heavily pregnant, gentle and very religious wife actually found Nukeface out in the swamp and tried to keep him warm with her shared body warmth, resulting in him and the police with him backing away from the now heavily-irradiated woman, who has no idea why they're running from her and begging them to tell her what's going on...
  • Abby learns the reason her husband Matt Cable has become much more assertive, capable, and passionate: he's been possessed by her uncle, Anton Arcane. The fact that she'd unknowingly had sex with her evil uncle isn't the worst part. Matt was possessed willingly as he lay dying after a car accident.
    • Abby's reaction also belongs here: after increasingly hysterical attempts to wash herself clean of Matt/Anton's touch, she tries to scrape it off with a wire brush.
  • There's also the bit at the end of Moore's run on the series where a Corrupt Corporate Executive responsible for disrupting Swamp Thing's connection to the Green, effectively killing him for a while, makes the mistake of eating a sandwich with lettuce as Swamp Thing's consciousness returns to Earth.
  • The stories set in Hell is more than a little frightening. We have Anton Arcane's torment mentioned down below but beyond that, we see corpses impaled on giant hypothermic needles, nasty demons that go far beyond the more traditional descriptions, mutilations, rape, and more.
  • Meet Sethe, the new Big Bad ^{[dead link]}
• Squick: Anton Arcane, especially after he possesed Matt Cable's body.
• Tear Jerker: "Pog". Notable in that the characters aren't even regular cast members, and in 23 pages...well, damn.
  • To go into further details, the short story "Pog" revolves around a bunch of strange-talking Funny Animal aliens (essentially a sci-fi Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of the characters from Pogo) landing in the Louisiana swamp. The Captain Ersatz version of Pogo explains to Swamp Thing that he and his friends are the only survivors from his world, forced to flee after the monkeys went insane and took over, first socially restricting the other races, then using them as medical experiment test subjects and food, and they hope to find a new world to settle on. Swamp Thing, unable to communicate verbally with the alien, instead leads him mutely to the nearby human town of Houma, where the captain breaks down weeping that the same thing that drove him and his people from his world is happening here.
    • And then there's what happens when the Albert Alligator expy finds some Louisiana alligators and rushes to them, calling them kinsmen. Being Earth gators they are, naturally, not sapient, and so he is promptly killed by them, forcing his friends to bury him on an alien world and fly away to continue their lonely search.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: During the Swamp Thing's botanical assault on Gotham City... where was Poison Ivy?

The television series:

• Memetic Mutation: Of the Opening Narration. "Do not bring your evil here."

The animated series:

• Ear Worm: "Swamp Thing, you are amazing..."

The video game:

• The Problem with Licensed Games