Comic Book / Asterix

These Tropers are crazy!

"The year is 50 B.C. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely... One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders. And life is not easy for the Roman legionaries who garrison the fortified camps of Totorum, Aquarium, Laudanum and Compendium..."

Asterix is the protagonist of a French comic book series, written by René Goscinny and drawn by Albert Uderzo, and now translated into over 100 languages and published around the world. The comics are also commonly referred to as Asterix and Obelix.

The Asterix comics take place in the year 50 BC. Julius Caesar has all but conquered Gaul (pre-medieval France plus some surrounding territory), except for a few pockets of resistance. One of those pockets of resistance is a small but plucky village in Armorica (modern Brittany), which — despite the vast numerical and military superiority of the Roman legions — has held back the invaders thanks to a Super-Strength-granting magic potion brewed by their resident druid. The Undefeatable Little Village happens to be the home of our hero, a small but plucky Gaul named Asterix. Along with his friend Obelix, a huge loveable lug and monolith craftsman, Obelix's tiny dog Dogmatix and the other inhabitants of the village, Asterix gets into all manner of adventures that usually involve foiling the schemes of the Romans — and, occasionally, Caesar himself.

The stories are published as "albums" (the series, which began in 1959, predates the term "graphic novel") and typically alternate between two themes. In many of the books, Asterix, Obelix and Dogmatix, sometimes accompanying or accompanied by another character, go on an adventure somewhere — these are often have titles of the format Asterix in.... These plots allow for the most satire of different cultures and nationalities. In the second type of plot, a new plan by the Romans or an unexpected threat from outside brings danger and excitement to the village. These plots allow character development of the various villagers and their relationships.

Occasionally, a small (but very persistent) band of pirates (a parody of another comic series, Barbe-Rouge) makes a cameo appearance; their ship was sunk by the potion-enhanced Gauls in an early story — since that initial appearance, they are usually seen either paddling frantically away from any Gauls they encounter, or coming across the Gaulish warriors during an incidental encounter and getting sunk again (or even scuttling their ship themselves to minimize damage).

Part of the appeal of the series is probably the variety of humor, which includes slapstick fight scenes, plenty of wordplay, thinly-veiled social commentary, and Iron Age and Roman antiquity versions of just about every European (and beyond) stereotype you can imagine.

The series has some of the best translations of any comic-book ever; they're smart enough to keep the basic story while making new puns in the appropriate language.

After Goscinny's untimely passing in 1977 aged just 51, Uderzo took over the writing as well. After decades of solo work, he retired in 2013 and passed writing and art duties to Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad. Uderzo himself passed away at 92 in March 2020.

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These tropes are crazy:

Tropes A to C

• Accidental Good Outcome: In "Asterix and the Magic Carpet", on a visit to India, Cacofonix (whose new-found ability to summon storms by singing is needed to trigger a monsoon) turns out to have lost his voice, and the doctors who examine him declare that he needs to spend all night soaking in a bath of elephant milk mixed with elephant dung and elephant hair, in order to clear his sinuses — which doesn't work. While he is sleeping in his tub, however, the villains capture him and dump him in a nearby Elephant Graveyard, figuring the elephants will trample him to death for intruding — but since Cacofonix now smells like an elephant, they instead accept him as one of their own.
• Acrofatic: Obelix, easily. As a side effect of the magic potion, he's also an insanely fast runner who can do acrobatics easily, since his weight is not a big deal. One of the more hilarious examples is when he tries to teach Dogmatix how to do tricks, such as playing catch using menhirs instead of a stick.
• Action Insurance Gag: The pirates frequently run into the Gauls on their brand-new ships which they just paid for or had to leave some of their crew as hostages/sell into slavery for.
• Affectionate Parody: The pirates are a parody of different pirates from another comic series, Barbe-Rouge (or Redbeard).
• Alternate Continuity: The movies. Both cartoon and live-action ones have used the same material, and stories sometimes get combined into one movie.
• Always Chaotic Evil: The Goths when they first appeared in Asterix and the Goths were treated as universally warmongering. Positive Goth characters however show up in later albums and avert it.
• Amusing Injuries: Nobody dies even when they are pummeled by Obelix's Super-Strength. A commentary by the authors mentions how someone asks if the violence in Asterix would be a bad influence to children, and they make a point how the whole idea of Asterix is standing up in defiance against imperialists with laughter and comedy. And how everyone that gets punched out cold, especially Romans, are drawn with a carefree smile, as if they've been released from the yoke of imperialism.
• Anachronism Stew: A lot. And deliberate, most of the time.
  • The Romans tend to wear segmented plate armor (called lorica segmentata by historians today) which was invented after Julius Caesar's time. However, the correct alternatives are also shown — chain mail for legionaries and Greek-style cuirasses or breastplates for officers.
  • In Asterix and the Golden Sickle, seeing an inn trashed by Asterix and Obelix, a Roman compares it to Pompeii... which won't be destroyed for another 125 years.
  • In Asterix in Britain, the city of Londinium (London) appears, despite not being founded for another century.
  • Asterix and the Banquet has a mail wagon with the modern logo of La Poste. The Michelin Man also appears in the international version of Asterix in Switzerland (replacing the Gaulish warrior-like mascot of French service station Antar in the original French version).
  • Several books feature the characters eating or preparing potatoes, which were not introduced to Europe until the 16th century. For example, in Asterix and the Goths, Valuaddedtax pulls some potatoes out of a cauldron, while in Asterix in Belgium we witness the invention of French (Belgian) fries.
    • This is addressed in the audio book adaptation of Asterix in Britain read by Willie Rushton, which includes a brief sequence describing an occasion when Asterix and Obelix accidentally land in the New World in one of their sea voyages, discovered the tubers, and decided to bring them back to the village. This may be a reference to Asterix And The Great Crossing.
  • During their voyage to Palestine in Asterix and the Black Gold, Asterix and Obelix are seen leaving Jerusalem by the Lions' Gate: this gate wasn't built until AD 1517.
  • The Flavian Amphitheatre, also known as the Colosseum, which features in Asterix the Gladiator and some animated adaptations (notably the one where Asterix and Obelix become gladiators), wasn't built until 70 AD. It was referred to as the Circus Maximus which was already built around that time, but its round layout is clearly based on the Colosseum.
  • The Gothic footsoldiers in Asterix and the Goths sing about Alaric leading the Visigoths to Rome, which happened 460 years later in AD 410.
  • There are several references to the "Roman Empire", which was not founded until after Caesar's lifetime. Caesar governed the Roman Republic; that said, the Roman Republic did call territories under their control the Imperium Romanum.
  • While the historical conquest of Gaul took place in 52 BC, it is depicted in the stories as taking place decades earlier than the main timeframe of the stories, notably when several middle-aged characters are depicted as being young at the time, and the villagers already fighting Romans when Asterix and Obelix were children. While the stories are not explicitly set in 50 BC, they are still set before Caesar's death in 44 BC.
  • The pirates use the Jolly Roger flag over 1700 years before it was invented.
  • The Norsemen who show up in Asterix and the Normans and Asterix and the Great Crossing showcase all the classic Viking stereotypes, despite the stories taking place several centuries before the Viking age.
  • Whenever Asterix is abroad, most of the peoples he visits have elements in their dresses that are more reminiscent of those of their modern age descendants.
    • The Helvetians in Asterix in Switzerland are wearing shorts with suspenders and funny feathered hats.
    • The Germanics in Asterix and the Goths wear helmets reminiscent of pickelhaubes.
    • The Britons in Asterix and the Britons wear knickerbockers (except the Caledonians).
    • Asterix and the Picts has the titular Picts wearing tartan kilts, which were around 1600 years away from development at the time the story is set.
    • The native Americans in Asterix and the Great Crossing look like the Indians of the old Wild West.
    • Oddly, the Iberians in Asterix in Spain look more like 19th century Mexicans (with horned helmets) than Spaniards.
    • The Corsicans in Asterix in Corsica look a lot more modern (including bandanas and switchblades) than they should.
    • Generally averted with the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians who may not be completely historically accurate, but nevertheless still lack these modern elements and look indeed as if they are from antiquity. Something similar could be said about the Indians in Asterix and the Magic Carpet, though the lines to the Middle Ages get more blurry here.
    • Also averted with the Gauls, the Belgians and the Northmen. While they might not be historically accurate either, they lack modern elements. The Gauls and the Belgians look more or less interchangeable^note Historically, the Belgae were a confederacy of Gallic tribes, though their similarity in the comics may also be a reference to the closeness of nowaday French and Walloon cultures; the Northmen look like Gauls with Viking elements thrown in.
• Animated Adaptation: Eight of them so far, of varying quality. Technically only seven are straight-up adaptations; The Twelve Tasks of Asterix and The Secret of the Magic Potion are the only Asterix films so far (live-action films included) to have been written directly for the screen. Sometime in the early 2000s there were ideas for a weekly Asterix series but Uderzo refused — he didn't want the character to become a recurring TV hero.
• Armed Farces: The bulk of the Roman army is portrayed as a bunch of incompetent and weak losers.
• Art Evolution:
  • Asterix and Obelix both started off quite crude and lumpy-looking but got more rounded, cuter features as time went on. Obelix also traded pointed helmet horns for small nubby ones, lost his body hair, and stopped carrying an axe.
  • Cacofonix went from looking like an older man to appearing to be in his late 20s or so. He became much skinnier and more angular, while his hair went from a smooth bob to an entertainingly anachronistic style akin to that of a '70s rock musician.
  • Fulliautomatix completely changed in both face and body, going from a rather plain overweight man in his late 40s with blond hair to a muscular, proud-looking character with hairy arms and red hair (although even then his hair color remained inconsistent). He also stopped wearing a shirt and replaced it with a leather apron.
  • In his first two albums as artist, Didier Conrad's work was very closely styled after that of Albert Uderzo. Starting with Asterix and the Chariot Race, Conrad began to take the artwork more in his own direction, making the character designs more angular and exaggerated, and making the backgrounds much more detailed than in most of the solo-Uderzo era.
  • Also happened with the movies — from Asterix Versus Caesar onwards, the quality of the animation improved significantly. Then again with Asterix and the Vikings, which even had shading, for Toutatis' sake! Shading!
  • This can even occur within books:
    • Take a look at Caesar in the first page of Asterix the Gaul, then flip to his appearance in the last two pages—he essentially looks like a different person.
    • A similar thing happened with Obelix's dog Dogmatix in Asterix and the Banquet, who went from a square, terrier-like look with drooping ears to a more anthropomorphised, Disney-esque appearance with raised ears.
• Artistic License – Geography: Sometimes real world distances were ignored and sometimes not (the latter usually when it's the basis of a joke). Rome tended to be treated like the next town over from wherever Asterix and Obelix were at the moment, especially if the script called for Julius Caesar to appear in the flesh.
• Artistic License – History: Historical inaccuracy in Asterix comes in a few flavours (see Anachronism Stew above) — Purely Aesthetic Era anachronisms for humour, deliberate Hollywood History, the fudging of dates to service plot points and occasionally just total mistakes. Though the creators did extensive research, visiting museums to speak with expert historians and read primary sources, much of this was promptly ignored in the name of humour.
  • Not every Gaulish man had a name ending with "-ix", and not every Roman had a name ending in "-us", but Theme Naming is fun.
  • The main characters would not have referred to themselves as "Gauls"; rather, they would have associated with a more regional tribal grouping. In fact, the word Gaul had not even come into use yet: it derives from a Frankish (Germanic) word for "foreigner"^note compare with Old English "wealh" which is the origin of the names Wales and Welsh and originated with the Franks' descriptions of the native inhabitants after they conquered the area at the end of the Roman period. In fact, Gaul and Caesar's Gallia, while superficially similar, are linguistically unrelated terms.
  • Historical language barriers are completely ignored except when the plot calls for it. This is justified to some extent with the Gauls understanding the Iberian, Lusitanian, Brittonnic, Hibernian and Belgic tribes, as many of these groups would have spoken related Celtic languages, but the Greeks, Romans and Vikings can also be understood by the Gauls, as can Persians and Indians. In fact, the only European group that consistently needs translation is the Goths.
  • It's interesting to see historical accuracy flop back and forth depending on how seriously the reader is meant to take a particular scene. For instance, most of the times we see writing in the series, the characters carve it into tablets, even for disposable things like memos or personal letters or teaching to children — mostly because it's funny to imagine a Roman bureaucrat having to carve twelve huge slabs of rock just to induct a new legionary. However, in one scene where Asterix is planning a bank robbery and makes a diagram of their plan of attack, he does it on a diptych wax tablet, which is what someone in his time period would actually have used for making notes that would have to be quickly disposed of later.
  • Some fudged details and dates — Pompey is still alive (although without any power) but Vercingetorix is dead (in reality, Vercingetorix was being kept in prison for several years and Pompey was assassinated during the military campaign we see take place in Asterix the Legionary, leading the English translator to assume he was dead); Cassivelaunos's troops lost to Caesar and Britain was occupied (in reality, his troops won, twice, with Caesar's successor Emperor Claudius instead finally conquering Britain); The Colosseum appears and/or gets mentioned numerous times despite the fact that it was commissioned by Emperor Vespasian more than a century after Caesar's death; Cleopatra and Caesar are husband and wife (Caesar had a different wife and Rome did not recognise marriages between Romans and non-Romans, although the upshot of this was that Cleo and Caesar's relationship was not considered adulterous)...
  • "Caesar" is often used by ambitious Roman officers as if it's a title, talking about "becoming Caesar". It wasn't — it was actually Julius Caesar's name. Caesar (the word, not the person) did eventually become a title, but that didn't happen until about a hundred years after the Gallic Wars.
  • The series often plays on current national or regional stereotypes, ignoring the fact that the cultural and linguistic landscape of Europe was drastically changed by the "migration period" that followed the decline of the western Roman Empire.
    • As an example, the Celtic Britons are given traits associated with modern-day English people. However, English identity is commonly held to have begun with the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons (a collection of Germanic tribes) in southern Britain. Those being mocked with "English" stereotypes in the series are in fact the cultural ancestors of the modern-day Welsh.
    • In Asterix and the Banquet, the characters visit Normandy, a region which derives its name, and some of its cultural heritage, from invasions by Danish and Norwegian Vikings ("Norðmaðr" or "North men" = "Norman") that would occur nearly a millennium later. This is rectified in Asterix and the Normans, which establishes that they come from Scandinavia.
• Ascended Extra: Brutus suddenly becomes the Big Bad of Asterix and Son after spending the entire series as a joke character. He goes further than any villain previous and burns the village down. Fortunately Caesar rebuilds it out of honor and gratitude. Not to mention, it's heavily implied he was trying to murder his baby brother in order to remain Caesar's only heir.
• As You Know: Seems like once a book, they have to remind us that Obelix isn't allowed to drink any magic potion because he fell into a cauldron full of the stuff when he was a baby. Eventually turned into a Running Gag (even lampshading it, with Obelix remarking "We'll never hear the end of it!").
  • To the point that the expression "il est tombé dedans quand il était petit" i.e. "he fell into it when he was a child", meaning that someone found his calling/passion/hobby while very young, has become very common in French.
  • In some of the later books, such as Asterix in Spain, when the subject of the potion comes up Obelix just grumbles, "Of course I don't get any because gnagna gnak...", counting on the reader to know the now-familiar backstory.
• Audio Adaptation: Many of the English translations of the albums were adapted as audiobooks, read by the comedian and actor Willie Rushton. After Rushton's death in 1996, Asterix and the Secret Weapon was released read by Andrew Sachs, but that was the end of the range.
• Author Tract: Asterix and the Goths. The third book of the series, published a mere 16 years after the end of WW2. Being French and Jewish, Goscinny wasn't too fond of Germans at that time. And therefore, the Goths are given an extremely negative portrayal that looks quite heavy-handed and out of place when compared to the later books. Goscinny seems to have realized this, as a Gothic recruit in Asterix the Legionary is portrayed in a much more positive light.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Non romantic example. The village hates Cacofonix's warbling and will resort to restraining him or smashing him over the head with a hammer to make him stop. However as soon as he's in danger they'll drop everything to save him.
• Badass Normal:
  • The Vikings. They can go toe to toe with Asterix and Obelix, even with the latter having drunk magic potion.
  • The Belgians. The plot of Asterix in Belgium has the Gauls pissed off because of a rumor that Caesar thought the Belgians more badass than anyone else in Gaul.^note  This is based on an actual throwaway line in Caesar's book De Bello Gallico They decide to pay them a visit, discover that the Belgians are indeed just as fierce as themselves with just beer and no potion, and quickly set aside their rivalry once they've trashed a lot of Romans together.
• Because Destiny Says So: Most of the village's Gauls are easily influenced by anything that theoretically predicts the future (like the false soothsayer and their own horoscopes). In particular, Asterix and Obelix's involvement in the plot of Asterix and the Chariot Race was kicked off specifically because of a soothsayer reading the lines on Obelix's hand, leading him to conclude that he must participate in a chariot race because the lines on his hand say so.
• Been There, Shaped History:
  • Tea is brought to Great Britain thanks to some strange herbs that Getafix gave Asterix before leaving Gaul in Asterix in Britain.
  • Belgian fries and mussels are invented in Asterix in Belgium when a Belgian chieftain sees a cauldron with oil boiling in a Roman camp and when Obelix later finds a piece of the pirates' ship with mussels on it.
  • In Asterix in Spain Asterix battles a bull with a red cape which accidentally fell in the arena, thus inventing bull fighting in Spain.
  • In Asterix and the Great Crossing Asterix and Obelix accidentally drift off on the ocean and unknowingly discover North America.
  • Obelix seems to be at fault for some historically known accidents, like the missing nose on the Sphinx or the broken part of the grand Colosseum (which did not exist in 50 BC).
• Berserk Button: A big part of the humour.
  • Don't call Obelix fat. Or hurt his canine pet, Dogmatix. Or Asterix. And while we're at it, never harm a tree in front of Dogmatix or the little canine will sink his teeth into your buttocks.
  • Cacofonix's singing acts as a Universal Berserk Button for the entire village. Especially Fulliautomatix.
  • Julius Caesar can get touchy about blemishes on his glory, starting with the invincible village that resists his conquest.
  • Don't mention Alésia (the last stand of the Gauls).
  • Never criticise the freshness or aroma of Unhygienix's fish. Since a lot of the Gauls will agree with you, and they fight rather chaotically, doing this almost guarantees the Big Ball of Violence. Lampshaded in Asterix and the Soothsayer, where the soothsayer was able to appear prescient by predicting a fight, and two happened minutes later (over the freshness of the fish whose entrails he had been reading).
• Better to Die than Be Killed: The Pirates occasionally fall back on a non-fatal example of this; when they realise that the Gauls are on a ship they were about to attack, on occasion the pirates have been known to scuttle their own ship, on the reasoning that the Gauls will do it anyway and this way the pirates don't get beaten up first. This becomes particularly amusing in tales such as Asterix at the Olympic Games and Asterix and the Magic Carpet, when the pirates scuttle ship when the Gauls weren't going to attack them (in the first case, attacking the pirates would have increased the costs of their current hired boat, and in the second the Gauls were just looking for food).
• Big Ball of Violence: Liable to get big indeed when the whole village gets involved in the fight.
• Big Guy, Little Guy: Obelix and Asterix respectively, the former is much larger than the latter.
• Bilingual Bonus: A great many names. For example, the character Okéibos, an athlete with a thuggish appearance is "Okay boss" in a French accent.
  • The Britons' chief Mykingdomforanos is originally called Zebigbos.
  • The original French versions are a delight to those who can read the language: the characterisations and use of language speaks volumes about how sophisticated metropolitan Paris views the French regions, and how the French view their neighbours around Europe. This is done in ways which are not obvious or signposted in the translations. Regional dialects around France are signalled by variant more phonetic French in the captions; Languedoc is treated as carrot-crunching yokel country, for instance, and the appalling ways France's neighbours mangle the language is depicted in tortured and fractured French in the captions. A parallel would be the accents and intonations used in WW2 comedy 'Allo 'Allo!.
  • In the second live-action movie, Edifis and Artifis, both powered-up by the magic potion, get into an impromptu kung-fu fight, complete with this brief gem:
    Artifis: [in Cantonese] I'll show you Roman kung-fu is stronger!
    Edifis: [in Mandarin] I don't know what you're saying I only speak Mandarin.
  • In the german edition, the racer who is the competitor of Asterix and Obelix in "Asterix in Italy" was renamed "Caligarius", which in english means Shoemaker and in german "Schuhmacher".
• Birthday Buddies: Asterix and Obelix have been friends since day one because they were born on the same day.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: When Obélix is suggested to eat his boar with Garum Lupus brand sauce on it, he tastes a single drop from the small jar he is given. It's so strong that he runs to the nearest tap.
• Blood Knight: The entire village. They'll fight the Romans as long as they have the magic potion, and fight each other without it. And most of the other non-Roman cultures are various shades of fight-happy, with the legionnaires as the usual target.
  • The one who really enjoys a fight is Obelix. He may seem just a big bully, but in his twisted, childish way he seems to genuinely appreciate the legionnaires he beats up. Also, in one particular issue, the Romans managed to get hold of a cauldron of magic potion. Obelix seemed more eager to fight than ever.
• Bloodless Carnage: No matter how many swords and axes are carried into battle, the Gauls will always knock out the Romans with their fists.
  • Actually the only blood that ever appears in the whole series is the one running from the Romans' noses after they have been badly beaten.
• Blood Sport: The gladiatorial scenes, obviously, but also rugby, as described in Asterix in Britain, is a very simple game: "Each team may do just about anything to bring the ball behind the other team's goal line. The use of weapons is prohibited, unless agreed in advance." And it gets even more violent when magic potion is involved.
• Book Ends: Zig-zagged. Many fans got the impression that Asterix and the Falling Sky was going to be the last album since the cover is remarkably similar to that of Asterix the Gaul, mirror-reflected. Albert Uderzo then stated it was not the case — and a short story collection, Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book appeared in 2009. After that, however, it was confirmed that Udzero would retire and hand over to a new creative team, meaning that Falling Sky would indeed be the final Asterix story with any active involvement from either member of the original creative team.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: In Asterix And The Olympic Games Asterix's village decides to participate with the Olympic Games since they could technically be considered to be "Romans", as being part of the Roman Empire. They celebrate this by shouting "Hurray! We are Romans!". A Roman legionary who spies upon them is flabbergasted and then borrows Obelix's catchphrase: "These Romans are crazy!"
• Boulder Bludgeon: Obelix sometimes uses a menhir ^note  A large, pointed, prehistoric rock to bludgeon or crush his opponents. In Asterix and the Big Fight, this tactic comes back to bite him however when he tries to hit some Romans with a menhir, but ends up hitting Getafix instead, giving the druid amnesia.
• Bound and Gagged: Near guaranteed to happen to Cacofonix at the end of every book starting with Asterix and the Golden Sickle (the second book in the original French).
  • With Cacofonix, this trope is usually subverted or averted if he does something good, or if the plot of the story bears greater precedence. Examples of subversions include Asterix and the Normans, where Fulliautomatix is tied up and Cacofonix is allowed to play because he was responsible for saving the day; and Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield, where instead, Vitalstatistix has had to abstain under threat of violence from his wife. Examples of complete aversions include The Mansions of the Gods, in honour of his role in clearing the tenants out of the eponymous apartment block; Asterix at the Olympic Games, although he is clearly nervous about sitting next to Fulliautomatix and his hammer; Asterix and Caesar's Gift, in a reflection of the new sense of unity in the village; and Obelix and Co., where he is buried under a menhir.
  • In Asterix and the Falling Sky. Unhygenix and Fulliautomatix are wrongly accused of destroying Cacofonix's treehouse. Their punishment is to restore it, then be gagged and bound themselves and forced to listen to Cacofonix's music at the banquet, which is seemingly held to celebrate him getting his home back (no-one remembers the events preceding it).
  • Asterix and the Roman Agent is a special case of the series inverting and playing this trope straight. During the first banquet, somewhere in the middle of the book, there's an implied Imagine Spot where Cacofonix is the only person who was not bound and gagged, representing him being the only person completely oblivious to Convolvulus' efforts to sow dissent in the Gaulish ranks. In the final banquet, although he is bound and gagged, he is still sitting at the banquet table rather than under his tree or next to his house.
  • In Asterix and the Missing Scroll Cacofonix is rewarded for his actions in recalling Asterix, Obelix and Getafix to the village with being allowed to attend the banquet albeit next to Fulliautomatix, who is seemingly warning him not to perform as he might wake Getafix who is sleeping under Cacofonix's usual spot after a rare involvement in battle. This album also reveals that Cacofonix is kept around because he is very useful in sending distress signals whenever the village is in danger and the Druid is not present. This may explain why the villagers are so protective of him.
  • In short, Cacofonix is left unbound and ungagged on an average of once every four books.
  • Melodrama in "Asterix and the Great Divide" is bound and gagged when she is kidnapped by the villain Codfix.
• The Boxing Episode: Asterix and the Big Fight
• Braids of Barbarism: Obelix, amongst others.
• Brains and Brawn: Subverted for laughs by Obelix (and Idéfix) in Asterix and the Normans; Uderzo then gives it the first degree in The Great Divide.
• Bragging Theme Tune: "Asterix Est Là", made by Plastic Bertrand for Asterix Versus Caesar.
• Bratty Food Demand: In Asterix in Spain, the Romans bring Pepe to Gaul as a hostage and they remember a time when he demanded oysters while weeks away from the sea, threatening to hold his breath if he doesn't get his way. He actually does, and he does so again while demanding wine from Asterix, which makes him sick.
• Break the Haughty: Happens to an entire garrison of troops in Obelix and Co. These troops had only just arrived from Rome and were high on morale. Unfortunately, they also ended up as Obelix's birthday present as a direct result of Asterix deliberately provoking them into marching on the village. The subsequent thrashing by Obelix and Dogmatix left them in the exact same manner as the troops they relieved. Caesar did not take their battle report well.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • The earlier albums tended to draw the village banquet from multiple different angles, but starting with Asterix and the Laurel Wreath the depiction became standardized (always at night, characters mostly in silhouette, seen from ground level, table only visible from one side, and tree on the right) with only one exception (that was plot-relevant). The albums written by Didier and Conrad started varying this again.
  • Deliberate Artistic License – History aside, most of the series features exactlty one fantasy element (the magic potion which gives a super strength). At the time Uderzo worked alone on the series, he added more of them in the albums' plot, like a flying carpet in Asterix and the Magic Carpet, Atlantis and a youth potion in Asterix and Obelix All at Sea, or two distinct races of aliens in Asterix and the Falling Sky. Besides a Nessie expy in Asterix and the Picts, the albums released after Uderzo gave the series to Ferri and Conrad have returned to the more mundane roots of the series.^note Interestingly, the non-canon adaptation The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (which has been made while Goscinny was still alive) features even more supernatural elements (two distinct variants of priests with hypnotic powers, a cave full of monsters, Roman gods, and undead Roman legionnaries) than the mentioned albums made during the solo Uderzo era Firmly driven home with Asterix and the Griffin, where even the magic potion doesn't work, and which features Doing In the Wizard as a major twist. Had it been an Uderzo story, the griffin would likely have been a real mythological creature, with a more classical design.
• Briefer Than They Think: All of Asterix's adventures are set within the period between the conquest of Gaul and Julius Caesar's assassination, a grand total of six years (50-44 BC).
• Brown Note: Cacofonix's singing voice is so horrible that slaves would rather choose the whip, and it can scare off an entire forest's worth of wildlife, including a dragon. It has also been known to cause raining, and when he tried to defend himself by singing in a house, it started raining in the house. That said, the Gauls have used his voice as weapon at times, as well as bringing rain to a drought-stricken country.
• Butt Biter: Dogmatix's favorite move against Romans.
• Butt-Monkey: The Pirates are the resident butt monkeys, and anyone wearing a Roman legionnaire's uniform is likely to be one as well.
• Call That a Formation?: The Roman legions tend to have disciplined and realistic (unless Uderzo has decided to make them form up in some silly shape as a joke) formations, but the magic potion allows the Gauls to smash through them and then defeat the Romans in the chaotic melee that follows.
• Canis Latinicus: Most of the Roman characters' names.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: Obelix gets drunk very easily, and loses his common sense with it. For example, one (admittedly quite large) drink of wine in Asterix in Britain and he begins hiccuping, speaking and singing with No Indoor Voice, sobbing that Asterix doesn't like him anymore when the latter tells him to keep the volume down, and jumping down to bash in a Roman patrol that hadn't even noticed the Gauls and their British host, Anticlimax, until Obelix attacks.
• Captain Obvious: Obelix, very much. "You know, Asterix, I think we've been scammed."
• Cardboard Prison: Thanks to the magic potion, it's extremely rare for a prison, any prison, to keep the Gauls in or out any longer than they feel like it.
• Catapult to Glory: Astérix once loaded himself into a Roman catapult to escape them (as they didn't know he was out of potion).
• Catchphrase:
  • Obelix's line "These Romans are crazy!", often used by other characters, or with another ethnic group substituted for the Romans. (French: "Ils sont fous ces Romains!") In the Italian translation, it is "Sono pazzi questi Romani", punning on SPQR, the Roman initialism.
    • In Asterix the Legionary, Obelix has to utter "We Romans are crazy!" as they have just joined the Roman army.
    • In Asterix and the Olympic Games the Gauls suddenly decide to adopt Roman citizenship in order to enter the games causing a nearby Roman to say "These Romans are crazy!" Later on, when Obelix fails to understand a plan that's been cooked up, he comments "Since Asterix and Getafix went Roman, they went crazy too".
    • The French version is less conventional and more endearingly comical than the English translation: "Ils sont fous, ces Romains" (a peculiar grammatical order of words often used in oral speech, which can be roughly translated as "Those Romans... they're mad!", but literally means, "They're mad, those Romans!").
    • The Dutch version too has become a fairly well-known phrase outside the albums, due to it sounding rather less conventional and more endearingly comical. It goes "Rare jongens, die Romeinen!", roughly translating to "(What a bunch of) weird guys, those Romans!".
  • "Who are you calling FAT!?"
  • Also Obélix: "Good, some romans!" right after he spot them, and get ready for the inevitable brawl.
  • Each time the Pirates are scuppered, they (Redbeard, Pegleg and Baba) have a similar dialogue as they float in the wreckage berating each other. Generally, Pegleg will make some comment in Latin, the Baba puns on it, and the captain tells the other two to pipe down. Rather hilariously, they actually swap roles at least once.
  • "'Join up', they said. 'It's a man's life', they said."
• Cat Fight: Subverted and defied. Even though the women in the village are not as battle-happy and quarrelsome as their husbands, if a fight occurs things can get physical. In that case, expect them to use any weapon at hand (fishes, rolling pins, baskets...) to pummel each other senseless. Most times, the men will try to separate them instead of sitting back and watching.
• Celebrating the Heroes: Each episode ends with the heroes receiving a feast to honour them.
• Chameleon Camouflage: Caesar's spy in the animated version of Asterix and Cleopatra. He can even shapeshift into building stones or other scenery elements.
• Character Name and the Noun Phrase
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Basically, this is the reason why the Corsicans and the Belgians are resisting the Roman invasion (combined with strong determination). Which kind of diminishes the Gauls' effort to resist it with the aid of magic.
• Cheaters Never Prosper: Played with in Asterix at the Olympic Games
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: At the end of Asterix and the Actress, Dogmatix finds a mate and has puppies. They don't appear in the next albums.
• City with No Name: The indomitable Gaulish village is never named, only described by that phrase.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Dogmatix is a canine equivalent; he snarls at girls that get close to Obelix, more so if Obelix shows an obvious interest in them.
• Comically Inept Healing: In Asterix in Switzerland: The corrupt Roman governor Varius Flavus needs to get rid of a quaestor he poisoned, so he summons the doctors of the local garrison, whom he claims are deadlier than a legion "armed to the teeth" when united. When the doctors are first removed from their drunken orgy, they then spend time arguing about who's the best suited for the operation, then suggest multiple contradictory treatments (one of which has "if the patient survives..." in the middle), many of which would likely kill him on the spot. Thankfully the collector is "kept hostage" by the Gauls^note Getafix realized immediately that the quaestor had been poisoned, and uses the "hostage" bit as an excuse to keep him safely away from the governor until Asterix comes back with the cure.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • In the album Asterix and the Big Fight, Asterix orders Vitalstatistix to do jogging, as training for the fight. Vitalstatistix takes this as "let four men carry you on your shield".
  • In The Mansions of the Gods, the Romans are trying to build a block of flats in the forest in total secrecy, but the Nubian slaves can't work without singing very loudly, so the Romans reluctantly exempt them from working. Then another slave walks up to the Romans and says "'Scuse me, I'm Lusitanian. I can't sing, but I could do a recitation if you like."
• Congestion Speak:
  • In "Asterix in Switzerland", when Obelix believes that he's caught a cold from a lake, his speech bubble spells "from" as "frob".
  • In one comic, Obelix has hayfever and asks for "bagic" (magic) potion.
• Continuity Cavalcade: The beginning of Asterix in Corsica saw the Gauls inviting a lot of their allies to visit their village to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Gergovia, with characters from earlier books including the Banquet, in Britain, in Spain, in Switzerland, the Gladiator and the Chieftain's Shield showing up again. This was presumably either because Corsica was the 20th Asterix album released, or because it was the last story published in Pilote magazine.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment:
  • In Asterix and Caesar's Gift, a legionary who's about to be discharged and get a plot of land as all veterans at the end of their service is caught insulting Caesar. Caesar punished him with the eponymous gift: THE GAULISH VILLAGE.
  • It's not the first time Caesar uses them as a punishment: in Asterix in Corsica, he mentions to the Roman governor of Corsica that if he fails at bringing the tax income of the island to Rome he'll get reassigned to guard a certain Gaulish village...
• Copycat Mockery: In one book, a Roman has a habit of saying, "like" and "y'know", so when Brutus gives him an order and he replies, "And if I, like, say no, y'know?", Brutus replies, "Then, you'll, like, get to be dinner from the lions in the circus y'know!".
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • Played around with Ekonomikrisis, the Phoenician merchant. He often scams people with contracts to 'work' in his ship, and in fact once expressed his intent to sell Asterix and Obelix as slaves instead of taking them to their destination according to his words. But when they saved his merchandise, he called them friends and has provided the occasional assistance to Asterix and Obelix since.
  • Preposterus sent to do an economic takeover of the village. Totally not a young Jacques Chirac.
• Creator Cameo: Uderzo drew himself and Goscinny a few times, most notably with Ben Ephisal in The Black Gold (as a somewhat major character was a nice posthumous homage to his friend).
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Surreptitius and Dubbelosix are shown smeared with honey and running from bees in the arena at the end of Asterix and the Black Gold. Though played for laughs, this was a genuine, and cruel, means of execution under some of the later emperors.
  • Admiral Crustacius in Asterix and Obelix All at Sea. He is trapped in stone form and unconscious, and in case he recovers is placed in the middle of the Circus Maximus's ring.
• Cuckoo Finger Twirl: In this series, the gesture's equivalent is repeatedly tapping the side of the head - usually Obelix while spewing his catchphrase.
• Culture Clash: Several of the "travel" stories of Asterix have this aspect. Especially to Obelix who often finds people from other countries' behaviour strange, which leads to his catch phrase: "These Romans/Goths/Belgians/Britons/Helvetians/Hispanics/Greeks/Egyptians (whichever people he is in presence with) are crazy!"
• Cut a Slice, Take the Rest: In Asterix and Cleopatra, Obelix is asked to cut three slices from the cake. He cuts out two normal-sized slices and takes all the rest as his own piece. ("Well, I did cut three slices, didn't I?") Since the cake was poisoned (To the point where in the animated version the recipe consists of things that are either toxic, unpleasant, both, and some orange juice - the cake didn't even have eggs or flour in it; also, smoke shaped like skulls come out of Obelix's ears afterwards), it's probably just as well.

Tropes D to I

• Dated History: Obélix is a menhir delivery man (and carver) by profession because in mid-20th century, when the comic was created, historians still believed that Celtic people (including Gauls) erected megaliths. But since the 21th century, it been established that European megaliths were older, and dated actually from the Neolithic.
• Darker and Edgier: Some stories, most notably Asterix and the Laurel Wreath, though it depends on a lot on black comedy.
  • The overall least comedic book in the series has to be Asterix and Obelix All at Sea. Obelix turns to stone after another overdose of magic potion and there are genuine concerns raised that he may be dead. We get a very depressing scene where Asterix sits by the lifeless Obelix's bed while Getafix unsucessfully tries to find a cure. The book also includes one of the only times in the series where Asterix's life is actually put in genuine danger by Roman legionaries (they knock him unconscious and prepare to throw him overboard while Obelix watches helplessly... at first). It's also a rare instance in any Asterix book where the antagonist unambiguously dies.
  • Asterix in Switzerland. This volume is a rare dark episode in that the plot involves the heroes' efforts to save an innocent from being murdered. Quaestor Vexatius Sinusitus' potential death, poisoned by the embezzeler Varius Flavus, offers a jarring but refreshing sense of drama to the otherwise frivolous comedy strip. Stories featuring similar moments of deadly menace include Asterix and Son, where the village is decimated, and the impending threat of Orinjade's execution in Asterix and the Magic Carpet.
• Death Glare: The Corsicans are really good at this.
  Corsican: You can't tell the difference between a wild pig and a Corsican clan leader?
  Obelix: I don't know, I've never eaten Corsican leader and please stop looking at me like that, it's giving me a headache.
• Delicious Daydream: In one of the books, Asterix and Obelix are in a dungeon and Obelix is hungry as usual, so he has a thought bubble with some roast meat in it.
• Deranged Animation:
  • In Astérix et le coup du menhir (that's Asterix and the Big Fight in English), when the druid Getafix is testing potions in his crazy state on a Roman soldier, the following series of scenes are not only deranged, but also contains crazed human experiments. Said Roman was transformed into animals, shrunk down almost to be eaten by a worm and finally forced to float in the air forever.
  • The cave scenes in the Twelve Tasks.
• Deus ex Machina:
  • In the Asterix and the Black Gold, Asterix goes on a quest in the Middle East to find rock oil, an important and crucial ingredient for the magic potion. After weeks of travel, he and Obelix finally return with the precious oil, but Roman agent Dubbelosix spilled the oil in the sea and secretly informed Caesar that the village couldn't produce magic potion anymore. Our worried heroes return to the village and are surprised to see the Romans being routed by magic potion powered villagers. Getafix explained that during their quest, he conducted experiments and found that beetroot juice perfectly replaces rock oil.
  • In Asterix and Obelix All at Sea, Obelix, who had been turned into stone by a magical potion overdose, regains life with a medicine from Getafix, but he has the body of a six year old, with no supernatural strength. Later, while still in his child form, a totally helpless Obelix witness how Asterix, unconscious, is about to be thrown to the sea. Suddenly, in a matter of seconds, Obelix turns again into his adult form and his formidable strength, thus being able to save Asterix. When Asterix asks Obelix how he recovered his adult body just in time, Obelix guesses that it was from the fear of seeing him in danger. No further explanation is given about how in Earth seeing a friend in danger could revert the effects of Getafix’s medicine.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: At the end of Asterix and Son. The Gauls have their usual banquet... with the most unexpected guest: Julius Caesar himself! The Gauls themselves are also guests at this particular banquet, though. The actual host is Cleopatra!
• Diminishing Villain Threat: The Praetorian Guard through the course of Asterix and the Laurel Wreath. At first the plan to waltz into Caesar's Palace to get the laurel wreath is dismissed by Asterix because even with the potion they wouldn't stand a chance against them. Later on, on the other hand... Justified, though, by the fact that Obelix initially wanted to burst into the Palace and take on the entire guard all at once. They later get in by stealth and are able to take out each guard individually and by surprise.
• Direct Line to the Author: In Asterix and the Missing Scroll, it's revealed that Caesar recorded Asterix's adventures in a missing scroll of his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, which was recorded in Druidic oral tradition and passed down the generations until it reached Goscinny and Uderzo...
• Disneyfication: The series uses Politically Correct History for mostly comedic purposes, such as with no deaths even with all the armies that show up, the Gauls being big-hearted, childish rebellious party animals rather than the cruel fans of human sacrifices of history, pirates and gladiators who end up unable to commit crime and violence, Caesar and Cleopatra being a bickering couple rather than two parts of a really complicated love triangle, and even slavery is depicted in a family-friendly way.
• Disproportionate Celebration: * In Asterix the Gaul, Getafix and Asterix are captured by Crismus Bonus and are forced to brew their legendary Super Strength-inducing magic potion for him. Instead, they brew a dud potion. Deciding to test if the potion worked, he tries to lift up a fallen tree, only to fail. Thinking he set his sights too high, he tries and fails to lift successively smaller and smaller objects until he finally lifts a small pebble with his natural strength, then begins to cheer, thinking he's obtained super strength.
• Disqualification-Induced Victory: In Asterix and the Olympic Games, Asterix finishes last in the Romans-only 24-stadia dash, but still ends up winning the prize because every one of his competitors illegally imbibed the magic potion. The proof is that they all have blue tongues because of the blue coloring Getafix added to the potion.
• Distracted by the Sexy: In Asterix the Legionary, Obelix is distracted by the lovely Panacea walking by, and walks into a tree... knocking it over.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: Obelix at times. The door gag comes to mind. Obelix tends to knock out doors even when using a single finger to knock on them.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: The villain behind the sickle-trafficking gang in Asterix and the Golden Sickle: He appeared time and again before the reveal? Check. Was he Beneath Suspicion? Check. It is a surprise both to the heroes and the audience? Check. Does it make sense with the general theme of that album? You bet, because this is the only way the not so bright members of the sickle-trafficking gang could get away with an operation like this for so much time. And who was it you ask? The Roman governor, who did it out of boredom.
• Doing In the Wizard: In Asterix and the Griffin, the latter one is revealed to be a dead ceratopsian dinosaur, found preserved at the bottom of a frozen lake.
• Doing It for the Art: An In-Universe example occurs in Asterix and the Cauldron. Asterix and Obelix end up in an avant-garde theater troupe and Obelix manages to get them all arrested for shouting "These Romans are crazy" during a performance watched by a senior Roman official. Later on the two track down where the actors are being imprisoned and despite the fact that they've been sentenced to be fed to the lions, they don't want to be rescued. After all, they're going to perform in the Colliseum! It takes a really dedicated actor to do an execution for the art.
• Doorstop Baby: Asterix finds a baby on his doorstep at the beginning of Asterix and Son. It turns out he's Caesarion (full name "Ptolemy XV Philopator Philometor Caesar"), son of Cleopatra and Caesar.
• The Dreaded:
  • The Romans get to the point where they recognize Asterix and Obelix's names, and are understandably terrified of them. Asterix in Britain has Asterix appear and call out to the Romans, whereupon the entire contingent huddles together, talking nervously about him, and how Obelix must also be nearby — much to the exasperation of the Roman commander (and Obelix, who yells at the Romans to listen to their leader and come fight already).
  • Any mention of the village or the indomitable Gauls will cause a cringe from someone, at least in later albums. Caesar once has a fever dream about the Gauls. As his physician is taking him out for some fresh air, Asterix, Obelix and Cacofonix fly by on a magic carpet ("Oh hey, Julius!"), leading to both Caesar and the doc going straight to bed.
  • The Pirates in particular will run (or rather, sail — when they don't scuttle) away like madmen at the first mention of Gauls in the area.
• Dreadful Musician: The villagers have even used Cacofonix as a weapon. And as a rainmaker in Asterix and the Magic Carpet.
• Drives Like Crazy: Naturally present in Asterix and the Chariot Race... except, of course, for the Britons (despite one of them being named Madmax).
• Drunken Glow: Legionary Tremensdelirius and Caesar's gift. Other characters in Asterix who've been drinking are sometimes show with red noses as well, but Tremensdelirius is consistently drawn with detailed pitting on his nose that really does look like rhinophyma.
• Drunk on Milk: Obelix drowns his sorrows in goat's milk after having a fight with Asterix.
• Dub Name Change: A lot, at least from French to English, most likely to keep the understandable humor of each Punny Name intact. For example:
  • Assurancetourix^note "Assurance tous risques", **All-risk insurance** → Cacofonix (Some early translations used Malacoustix instead)
  • Panoramix → Getafix (notable as while the name change makes sense since it indicates his role, the original French name would have been just as serviceable in English)
  • Idéfix^note "Idée fixe", **Slight obsession** → Dogmatix
  • Cétautomatix^note "C'est automatique", **It's automatic**→ Fulliautomatix
  • Abraracourcix^note "A bras raccourcis", **With full strength** → Vitalstatistix (Some early translations used Tunnabrix instead)
  • Ordralfabétix^note "Ordre alphabétique", **Alphabetic order**→ Unhygienix
  • Many names are changed in the Scandinavian and German dubs, notably Getafix → Miraculix (a play on the latin word "miraculus"), Cacofonix → Troubardourix, Vitalstatistix → Majestix and Geriatrix → Senilix (a play on 'senile') respectively Methusalix.
  • It happens in pretty much any translation to different degrees. In Spanish most of the main characters names keep the same phonetic reading, but the spelling is different (The names displayed above are all examples), but when it comes to supporting characters the Spanish translators came up with punny names that followed the same style as the names in the original French (the Gauls names ending with "-ix", the Roman names ending with "-us", and so on).
• Dumb Muscle: Played with. Obelix isn't really that dumb, he's just slow, childish and carefree, but has proven to be quite smart on occasion (for example, in Asterix and the Normans, he figured where the absent Cacofonix was, much to everyone's surprise) but he acts as the "dumb" foil to the usually smarter "straight man" that is Asterix.
  • He's also spoken Latin without any trouble with false cognates; speaking both Gaulish and Latin could be compared to speaking both Welsh and French (although they have since diverged away from the common ancestor language two millennia further than Latin and Gaulish had).
  • Occasionally, a straight example of this type will appear as an opponent for Asterix and Obelix.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The first album Asterix the Gaul has:
    • Asterix, Obelix, Getafix and Cacofonix are oddly-drawn, while Fulliautomatix looks nothing like he does in later books. Obelix carries an axe, doesn't say his famous line "These Romans are crazy" yet (that was introduced in book four), actually warns Asterix to be careful of getting into trouble with the Romans and hardly appears at all. Getafix also lives in a cave outside the village, which is never mentioned again. The village dances merrily to a song led by Cacofonix, and also allows him to attend the banquet at the end of the story (although one of the villagers sitting next to him has angrily covered his ears, while the one on his other side appears to be threatening violence if he doesn't stop singing).
    • Fulliautomatix is shown hammering metal using his bare hands, implying the Gauls use magic potion even in everyday tasks. Additionally, Asterix goes looking for Getafix to receive a daily dose of the potion. In later appearances, the magic potion is shown as something to be used only in special situations, mostly defense against the Roman soldiers.
    • The magic potion is shown as having effects lasting at least an hour. Later appearances have the potion seem to last only a few minutes, though that’s inconsistent. It may have to do with how much potion someone drinks, as before big fights everyone drinks a ladle full (And the permanent effect on Obelix was the result of a cauldron full while a child), while Asterix generally has to ration a small flask of potion across an entire adventure when away from the village.
  • In the first book, Obelix is just a friend that Asterix talks to, who doesn't really participate in the adventure at all. In second, Obelix joins Asterix's quest because he's related to the smith Asterix is traveling to meet and can provide an introduction. In the third, Obelix tags along with Asterix because it's the slack season for the menhir business and he has some free time. From the fourth book onward, everyone just takes it for granted that if Asterix is going on a quest, Obelix is going to join him.
  • Asterix and the Big Fight also features the different-looking Fulliautomatix, and Vitalstatistix's wife (seen for all of two panels helping get him ready for his meeting with Cassius Ceramix) is clearly not Impedimenta.
  • Dogmatix isn't introduced until the fifth book, Asterix and the Banquet, and isn't actually a character in his own right until the following book, Asterix and Cleopatra (in his first appearance he just follows Obelix around in the background, possibly because he smelled all the meat in Obelix's sack).
  • In Asterix and the Goths the Goths (Germans) are all depicted as villains and unsympathetic, and even the heroes have no qualms throwing them against each other into a never-ending war. Later albums show more positive Goth characters.
  • Unhygienix isn't a character until the fourteenth book, Asterix in Spain, and the first fish-related fight has nothing to with the quality of his goods. The iconic low quality of his fish wasn't a running joke until Asterix and the Soothsayer, which is the nineteenth book. Before then, comments about fishy smells had more to do with the fact that a man who spends all day catching and selling fish would naturally smell like fish.
  • Vitalstatistix falling off his shield for various reasons doesn't really kick in until Asterix and the Roman Agent, where it happens repeatedly.
• Eaten Alive: In Asterix and the Laurel Wreath, our heroes are about to be thrown to the lions in the Colosseum, as part of a Batman Gambit to steal Julius Caesar's laurel wreath. Obelix asks the jailer for some oil to rub himself with, so he can look good.
  Jailer: Don't you think mustard would be more appropriate?
• Eating Contest: In "Asterix and Switzerland", there was an event to see who could eat, drink, and sing the fastest. Obelix wins the eating and drinking parts, but gets too drunk to sing.
• Elite Mooks: According to Asterix, Caesar's palace is guarded by these, which is why they can't simply go in and grab the laurels.
• Engrish: "What he says?" (Amusingly, the movie inverts the comics: the Briton is incomprehensible, while the Goth is perfectly understood.)
• Episode Tagline: The book Asterix the Legionary features an Egyptian guy named Ptennisnet who says in his language (rendered as hieroglyphs), "Old hairy [rhyming body part]" as a response to questions.
• Et Tu, Brute?:
  • Rhetoric was not expecting one of his allies to set up on his own. Mostly-blunt head trauma ensued.
  • The actual Trope Namer is turned into a Running Gag where Caesar ends a statement with the words ("Sit down, everyone. You too, my son."), Brutus playing with a knife, and the occasional "One of these days I'll up and..." thought bubble from Brutus.
• Every Episode Ending: A big feast with all the Gauls, usually but not necessarily in the village, and probably with Cacofonix tied up (see above).
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion when he was a Little Boy (an illustrated text story rather than a comic strip, so not usually counted in the series proper) tells the story of, er, how Obelix fell into the magic potion when he was a little boy.
• Expressive Accessory: Asterix's helmet; the wings droop when he's depressed, twitch when he's excited, etc.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: In The Big Fight, after Getafix has been concussed by a menhir, Asterix wonders whether he'll know of a magic potion to fix himself...
  Asterix[realizing Getafix has amnesia]:THE POTION! THE MAGIC POTION THAT GIVES US SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH!
• Eyes Always Shut: The Corsicans. They only open them when they're surprised or overjoyed.
• Facial Profiling: Especially in some of the foreign adventures. Nationalities closely-related to the Gauls (Britons, Belgians) look just like Gauls, but Greeks have the distinctive Grecian nose, etc.
• Failure Is the Only Option: The comic is a case of this for both sides. Obviously, the Romans can never defeat the village, no matter what force/schemes they try to apply. On the other hand, we know from history that Gaul remained part of the Roman Empire for centuries, and had acquired an indelible Latin culture by the time the empire collapsed, meaning that the villagers are simply delaying the inevitable. (That said, they don't seem particularly concerned by this.)
• Fed to the Beast: The lions and other predators of the Circus Maximus regularly are mentioned. The example above in Eaten Alive ends up with the beasts eating each other as Asterix gives up on entering the arena, given Caesar isn't there for them to steal the laurel wreath.
• Feud Episode: Asterix and the Roman Agent, in which Caesar sends an agent, Tortuous Convolvulus, to the Gaulish village. He is a natural troublemaker who can cause dissension and stir up fights between anyone, and soon nearly the entire village is feuding. Even Asterix and Obelix get angry at each other... for about four panels.
• Finger Poke of Doom: Obelix frequently does this.
• Flanderization:
  • Chief Vitalstatistix started as a very serious character with an occasional embarrassing moment here and there. Somewhere after book 16, he can't spend two minutes without a Humiliation Conga.
  • Fulliautomatix was developing into a character with a very diverse personality. However, at one point the creators simply stopped, and it many late stories it appears that all he ever does is either mock Unhygienix's fish or look for a reason to bash Cacofonix.
  • Cacofonix starts out as an average bard — Asterix blows off listening to his music once (which annoyed him) and the people sitting near his performance at the final banquet are cringing with their hands over their ears, but the villagers also perform a plot-important traditional dance to his music with every indication that they are enjoying it. As the comic progresses, other characters (especially Fulliautomatix the blacksmith) start beating him up to prevent him from singing, which develops into a running gag, and he's shown to live in a hut at the top of a tree, where no-one can hear him. By the time Uderzo took over writing, he was so bad that he causes rain whenever he plays, which develops to the point where he ends up being so bad that merely playing a few notes creates an apocalyptic rainstorm that lasts for days.
  • For about three-fourths of Asterix and the Magic Carpet, Obelix's personality is reduced to jokes about him being hungry all the time.
• Fleeting Demographic Rule: A "hotdog" joke that was used in The Great Crossing is reused in Asterix and the Falling Sky (this is in the French version).
• Flintstone Theming: All people of a specific ethnic tends to have names with the same suffix."Ix" for gauls (and "ine" or "a" for women), "us" for romans, and so on. Plus the "ix" suffix is often added to gauls institutions.
• Flower from the Mountaintop: The main plot for Asterix in Switzerland.
• Foe-Tossing Charge: As shown in the page image of the trope, this is the Gauls' signature move after everyone in the village has gotten their share of the magic potion. The lead characters (especially Obelix) also occasionally do it with unfortunate sentries when getting into one of the Roman camps, though then the Megaton Punch is the traditional approach.
• Food Porn: Whole roast boar dripping with grease features prominently, along with enormous hams, kilometers of sausages...
• Foreign Queasine:
  • How British food is depicted. Even Obelix wouldn't eat that boiled boar with mint sauce. The Roman governor threatens to throw his inept military commanders "to the lions, with mint sauce!". Their reaction is "But that's horrible!" "Yes, the poor beasts!"
  • The Native Americans eat dog, leading to a "hot dog" joke later.
    Obelix: [pointing at his bowl] Gobblegobble?
    Chieftain: Woofwoof.
• Foregone Conclusion: Every one of Brutus's appearances make it clear that inevitably, he will kill Caesar.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Brutus is always playing with knives. "He's starting to annoy me with those classical references of his! One of these days I'm going to up and..."^note In The Twelve Tasks of Asterix French dub, Caesars says "Arrête de jouer avec ce couteau, Brutus. Tu vas finir par blesser quelqu'un un jour", litterally "Stop playing with this knife, Brutus. You will harm someone one day."
  • In Asterix And The Olympic Games one Greek says to another that the Romans' arrogance really irritates him. The other Greek responds: "Ah, just wait, what will be left of their civilization in a few centuries!"
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Besides having a Darker and Edgier tone than usual, Asterix and the Laurel Wreath takes place entirely outside the Gaulish village (save for the very last page) and features none of the usual characters other than Asterix and Obelix (save for a couple of scenes with Vitalstatistix and Impedimenta during the How We Got Here portion of the story).
• Friendly Enemy: Although Caesar's main goal in the series is to take over the village, he will return the favour if Asterix helps him.
• Full-Boar Action: It's the Gauls' favorite food. Obelix isn't fond of places who don't have it, or cook it wrong. To Goscinny's regret, many people thought it'd be a good and original idea to invite him for roasted boar. Note that Goscinny was Jewish. (Uderzo wasn't keen on roast boar either, and was similarly often invited to dinners where it was served.)
• Funetik Aksent: Some populations talk this way, such as the Britons who are represented as French vocabulary written with English syntax ("Ici nous sommes" for "Here we are"); Iberians litter their otherwise normal speech with "Ay, ay, ay!"s and "Olé!"s.
  • It's also common for other "languages" to be written syntactically correct, but in another font:, Egyptians speak in hieroglyphics, and Goths speak in Gothic Script. The Greeks talk in classic angular letters, the Norse uses å's and ø's.
  • Occasionally Asterix and Obelix need to communicate with those foreigners, or need to blend in. This is usually shown as mangled versions of that foreign language, such as misplaced diacritics, or childishly drawn hieroglyphics.
• Funny Background Event: Frequently.
  • The most common involves the village chickens being put to various abuse. Notably, a hen falling in love with Vitalstatistix's winged helmet after a few shield mishaps.
  • The adversarial relationship between Cacofonix and Fulliautomatix is often good for funny background events, such as Fulliautomatix cheerfully smashing a horrified Cacofonix' lyre on his anvil in their first scene in Asterix and Caesar's Gift, or Fulliautomatix pounding Cacofonix into the ground like a tent peg as the villagers watch Asterix and Obelix set off in Asterix and the Great Crossing.
• Gender-Concealing Voice: In "Asterix and Son", a male legionary disguises himself as a female babysitter, and thus speaks in a falsetto voice, occasionally slipping up.
• Genre Shift: While Goscinny's stories were more history-based in that outside of the Druid's magic potion, there were no fantastic elements, Uderzo's stories after his partner's death in 1977 tend to include more fantastic elements (fakirs with telekenetic powers, flying cows, centaurs, dragons, etc.) and treat the Asterix world in a much more fantastic light:
  • Asterix and the Great Divide, Uderzo's first solo effort, has a much more fairy tale/moralistic vibe to it, while the other stories are all about the comedy.
  • Asterix and the Falling Sky, which departs from the usual historical themes into Science Fiction.
  • The stories by Ferri split the difference; while there is the occasional appearance from a fantastical creature (Nessie in Asterix and the Picts, and the unicorn in Asterix and the Missing Scroll), the tone is much closer to the older stories. The first two also give readers the benefit of the doubt as to whether they are fictional are not, due to occasional scene shifts to modern times.
• Gentle Giant: Obelix, at least some of the time
• George Lucas Altered Version: The books were reprinted in 2004 with several changes: most notably new lettering and recolouring of different character's outfits in early stories to match those in later ones.
• Giant Mook: The Normans are noted by Obelix to be considerably more resistant than the usual Romans.
• Giftedly Bad: "The Cacofonix" was one of the proposed titles for this trope.
• Gigantic Gulp: Obelix drinks wine straight from the barrel. This combines badly with Can't Hold His Liquor.
• Give Chase with Angry Natives: A boar comes up with a plan to dodge the Gauls: lead them across a Roman patrol.
• Gladiator Games: Asterix the Gladiator
• Gold-Colored Superiority: Roman centurions often wear golden chestplates and helmets to indicate their higher rank.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Normans wanted to find out about fear lending wings. They succeeded.
• Graceful Loser: Caesar often takes well the defeats. If not, he'll shout angrily but give up and\or leave.
• Grand Finale: Asterix and Son was intended to be this, with the village burning down, Caesar making peace with the Gauls and his agreeing to rebuild their village as thanks for protecting his son. However, the series continued after that.
• Grandfather Clause: Black people are consistently drawn with big red lips. This caricature is considered extremely racist nowadays, but the series has continued it into the 21st century, partially because the pirate in the crow's nest has this appearance and it would be too iconic to change.
• Gratuitous Latin: Frequently. Justified, in that it is set after the Roman conquest. Several of the albums have also been translated to Latin, which is partly this, partly a subversion, and part justified as studying aids.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Julius Caesar is this very often when other Romans are an episode's main antagonists.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: This is Obelix's standard move for fighting, and not only Romans.
• Guile Hero: Is thumping a viable solution? Nobody. Is thumping not a viable solution, or insufficiently poetic? Asterix.
• Happy Rain: At the end of Asterix and the Magic Carpet, Cacofonix's rain-inducing voice finally finds a suitable use.
• Have a Gay Old Time: After rescuing a child taken hostage by the Romans in Asterix in Spain, Obelix is disgusted that they were "molesting a child".
  • The word "orgy" is thrown around liberally (particulary in Asterix in Switzerland) using the older meaning of "rowdy indulgent party".
• Heroic Dolphin: Asterix gets saved by a dolphin in the sea in Asterix and the Actress.
• Hero Stole My Bike: During Asterix and the Banquet, Asterix and Obelix steal a boat with its owner in it to get across to the next town, despite the person's protests that he had just gotten a good room with full-board. When they reach their destination, the poor sap decides (because of the weather forecast) to haul his boat back via land. Specifically, they go from Nicae (Nice) to Massilia (Marseille), which are 125 miles (200km) apart. Poor guy.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Asterix and Obelix show some interest in women, but it seems like they still prefer to stay single and go on more adventures together. They were even born at the same time on the same day according to the short story "Asterix's birth", which the druid Getafix proclaimed to be a sign that they would be best friends forever.
• Historical Domain Character: Julius Caesar, Cleopatra and Brutus are the main ones.
• Historical In-Joke: Lots of them.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: The comics give this to Gauls as a whole.
  • The historical Gauls who resisted and escaped Roman imperialism were not as the comics paint it, simple plucky villagers but were incredibly violent tribesman. A chronicle by a Greek merchant visiting the region before Caesar's conquest mentions that the Gauls decorated their huts with the heads and limbs of their enemies, which the merchant did admit was tastefully done so that "you get used to it after a while".
  • Getafix as a Druid is also painted as a wise man and brilliant wizard, with none of the Druidic tribes involvement in Human Sacrifice mentioned or dealt with. Now admittedly the accounts of Human Sacrifice came from Roman accounts, and it was hypocritical (because the Romans tended to downplay and whitewash their own history of sacrificing people to the Gods, which they did most notably after Cannae) but archaeological evidence has confirmed that they did do that.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: Brutus in Asterix and Son, to go along with the somewhat idealised image of Caesar and Cleopatra. He has no pretensions of republicanism here, he's simply a power-hungry would-be murderer looking to remove potential rivals who threaten his prospects of succeeding Caesar as ruler of Rome.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In Obelix & Co, the Romans plan to undo the village's social structure backfires when one Roman citizen wants in on the craze, resulting in unrest in Rome and the devaluing of their currency, the Sestertius.
• Hollywood Costuming: The Gaulish women dress much more like women from the 1950s, with bias-cut and fishtail skirts as the standard (with some teenage girl background characters wearing circle skirts). In reality, Gaulish women dressed very similarly to Gaulish men, though usually with longer clothes. This is lampshaded in a strip drawn by Uderzo for Elle magazine in which the narration describes historically accurate Gaulish fashion while Geriatrix's wife is posing about looking like a 1950s movie star. She even has a beehive hairstyle, while all the other Gaulish women have historically accurate (but timeless) long or plaited hair. Almost definitely unintentional is that the shoes worn by the Gauls would be more at home in the 11th Century.
  • One story hinges on a Straw Feminist liberating the village women by persuading them to wear trousers rather than skirts. Historical Armorican women and men both wore trousers under layers of tunics - it's much warmer, and northwestern Europe is cold.
  • Used for deliberate stereotyping in other cases, though - Asterix's Britannic cousin Anticlimax wears baggy tweed trousers (as the historical Britons did) but his shoes have long ties that wrap tightly around his legs up to below the knee, giving his trousers the distinctive shape of plus-fours.
• Homages:
  • In Asterix in Belgium, a full-page panel depicting a banquet is an altered version of Pieter Bruegelthe Elder's painting "The Peasant Wedding".
  • In another album, the pirate crew recreates "The Raft of the Medusa" after their nth ship is sunk by the Gauls. "We've been framed, by Jericho!" Which is by the way a very clever Woolseyism of the original French "Je suis médusé" (I'm stunned).
  • Asterix and the Soothsayer manages to sneak in a recreation of "The Anatomy Lesson" by Rembrandt van Rijn.
  • The whole plot of Asterix and the Banquet was inspired by the Tour de France bicycle race (it even borrows the name for the original French title: Le Tour de Gaule d'Asterix), and uses some plot points from Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days.
  • Done ad nauseam in the 50th anniversary book.
• Home Base: The Gauls' village.
• Honest John's Dealership: Asterix and the Banquet has an used chariot dealer selling Asterix and Obelix a spanking-new ride with a strong black stallion... only problem is, the chariot falls apart within a few minutes, and the strong black stallion turns out to be a weakly white horse painted black, its paint washing off when it starts to rain.
• Horns of Barbarism: Horned helmets are very common among the various barbarian peoples, even though their real-life counterparts wore no such things, in contrast to the Romans' standardized and less flamboyant armor. The Gauls and Bretons wear helmets with small horns and sometimes wings, the Goths ones resembling WWI German helmets adorned with larger horns, and the Iberians ones with flamboyant horns resembling those of longhorn cattle.
• Horny Vikings:
  • In Asterix and the Normans, the Normans all wear horned helmets.
  • In The Great Crossing, they run into Danes, who act more or less the same as Normans.
• Horrorscope: In Asterix and the Missing Scroll, Obelix' horoscope, as read to him by Wifix, states that he should avoid conflict and go easy on the roast boars. For a Blood Knight and Big Eater like Obelix, this news outright terrifies him. Nevertheless, he tries his best to stick to the advice, untill it's revealed his horoscope was mixed up with that of Geriatrix.
• Hot-Blooded: Obelix. He is very sensitive (about his weight, and about anything threatening Asterix or Dogmatix), and very quick to anger.
  Obelix: Hooray, the Romans are coming!
• Hour of Power: The magic potion, and indeed all of Getafix's concoctions, is potent but its effects are only temporary. Unless you fell into it when you were a baby, that is. Though the duration varies from a few hours in the albums to just 10 minutes in the first live-action film (in which the village fell under siege, so the villagers had to take it constantly).
• A House Divided:
  • In Asterix and the Goths, Asterix and Getafix decide to make the Goths fight each other to prevent them from invading other countries.
  • This is Tortuus Convolvulus' specialty. He is implied to sow discord For the Evulz, and Caesar attempts to weaponize him. Convolvulus succeeds in invoking A House Divided with the pirates, and almost succeeds with the villagers, but the Gauls ensure it blows up in his face.
• How Unscientific!: Asterix and the Falling Sky with aliens landing at the village.
• How We Got Here: Asterix and the Laurel Wreath
• Hurricane of Puns: Everywhere! In the names, the dialogues, the locations,... Some of them from the original are too difficult to translate into other languages other than French, so each language gets its own version of this.
• Hurt Foot Hop: Vercingetorix fake-surrenders to Julius Caesar not by dropping his weapons at Caesar's feet... but on his toes. And then Caesar "went away to other conquests"... by hopping on one foot.
• Hypocrite: Cleopatra. She chews out Caesar for sabotaging the construction of his palace claiming that he shouldn't cheat... while claiming that she CAN use the Gauls to have the palace built in three months as planned. Never mind that the whole thing was to prove that her country was not decadent as Caesar said, yet it's thanks to the Gaulish intervention correcting the blueprints and their magic potion that the palace was built that fast and without falling apart, since Alexandria's best architect was inept.
• Hypocritical Humor: In Asterix and the Roman Agent, a fat No Name Given woman comments that Obelix is a terrible influence to Asterix, as he only cares about food. Note that she said that while she was gurgling herself with a cake made of boar fat.
• Idea Bulb: Usually rendered as an oil lamp.
• Identity Amnesia: Getafix suffers from this after Obelix accidentally gives him "a Tap on the Head" (flattens him with a menhir) in Asterix and the Big Fight.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: In English, all but two of the main books in the series contain the name "Asterix" in the title. (The exceptions are The Mansions of the Gods and Obelix and Co.) How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion When he was a Little Boy also counts, although it's not part of the main series. Though probably just a coincidence, it's still notable that, on the covers of the books whose titles don't bear his name, Asterix is bearing a very similar scowl on his face.
• I'll Never Tell You What I'm Telling You!: In Asterix in Corsica, the legionary Salamix is conspiring with the Praetor to load up goods from the warehouses onto a ship and then escape before the Corsicans attack, leaving the legionaries behind. When he tells two soldiers that he's been working all night, the following exchange happens:
  Soldiers: Working all night? What at?
  Salamix: I'm not saying! The Praetor told me not to tell anyone we're clearing the warehouses.
• I'll Take Two Beers Too: Obelix. With beers and boars. A Running Gag is Obelix having a tendency to overindulge in alcohol and getting drunk when he's offered plenty, at which point he speaks (more so than usual) in Malapropisms and gains a slurred lisp. It is stated in Asterix in Switzerland that Obelix is normally a teetotaller, preferring goat's milk. Maybe he doesn't want to risk hurting his friends by losing control of his strength at home, but feels he can cut loose a bit when travelling...
• Improbable Weapon User: Obelix occasionally uses menhirs, to great effect.
• Improvised Weapon: Best known are menhirs and fish. One time Asterix even used a high-speed champagne cork on a Roman.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: The pirates reach the point that they're not even really villains as much as victims anymore.
• Inexplicable Language Fluency: Gauls can speak to most foreign peoples without any difficulty. Either everyone can speak Gaulish, or the Gauls can speak other languages, but either way is downright impossible.
• In Harm's Way: Asterix once suggested that it would be nice if Caesar simply accepted that the village can not be conquered, removed the Romans around and just let them live on their own, enjoying their simple life and their forest. But for Obelix, life without Romans to take down seems a horrible idea.
• In Medias Res: Asterix and the Laurel Wreath begins this way.
• Instant Roast: In at least one SNES platformer, punching a boar turned it into a roast, healing the player character when eaten.
• Instrument of Murder: Cacofonix uses his ordinary lyre as a blunt instrument whenever he fights, be it in a village brawl or combat with the Romans.
• Invincible Hero: Every single battle between Romans (or, really, anyone) and Gauls have the Gauls curb-stomp their opponents, thanks to their magic potion that grants Super-Speed, Super-Reflexes, Super-Strength, and arguably Nigh-Invulnerability. Plus, even in case of a shortage, they have Obelix, who doesn't need to drink any potion since he fell in it during his childhood, and the effect never wore off. As a result, the Romans never, ever, in any comic, manage to gain the smallest durable advantage over the Gauls.
  • Most plot tension actually comes from Asterix being excessively prudent and avoiding confrontation with Roman troops, even though he and Obelix are more than able to defeat hundreds of Elite Mooks on their own, and have already done so a few times.
  • When trying to steal Caesar's crown, Asterix states that the magic potion doesn't protect from being harmed by Roman weapons. Whether it's true or not is unclear, but they never seem to be hurt anyway.
• I Resemble That Remark!: A very nice example, with Julius Caesar scolding his closest advisors:
  Caesar: Look at you! You have become decadent! All you think about nowadays is eating and sleeping!
  Senator: [waking up] What? It's lunchtime already?
• Irritation Nightmare: One comic shows the main cast as seniors, but then it turns out to all be a Shared Dream that everyone was having. Obelix considers the dream to be a nightmare because he only has chickpeas to eat (he's a Big Eater who wants variety in his food, and especially favours boars).
• I Should Write a Book About This:
  • In Asterix and the Missing Scroll, said scroll contained a lost chapter about Asterix's village in Caesar's "Commentaries on the Gallic War". A druid memorized it before it was censored (as Gallics ignored writing); and druids repeat it to each other generation after generation. Until the 20th century, when an old man (presumably a druid's descendant) tells the whole story to the authors, Goscinny and Uderzo, who of course conclude they must do the first written version of it.
  • In Asterix and the Cauldron, when they're trying to raise money quickly, Obelix suggests that they charge people to get to hear their stories - "the Adventures of Obelix the Gaul". Asterix outright rejects the idea, saying nobody will ever pay for that.
• I Surrender, Suckers:
  • According to the comics, Vercingetorix surrendered to Julius Caesar not by laying his weapons at Caesar's feet but by throwing them on Caesar's feet.
  • Obelix accidentally does this when he beats up a Roman camp... then Asterix has to remind him they came in with a white flag.
• I Thought Everyone Could Do That: Obelix has permanent Super-Strength, so he has trouble seeing why his dog might have trouble fetching menhirs. In a similar vein, he once arranged for Geriatrix to deliver them in his absence.

Tropes J to R

• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Obelix uses it (successfully) on a corrupt ferry captain in Asterix and Cleopatra.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Tortuous Convolvulus is a dubious one since the last time we see him, he is imprisoned by the Romans after he was framed by Asterix and shipped back to Rome to be executed. He is such a good agent of discord though that he still causes chaos and the lions will still fight each other instead of eating him...
  • Julius Caesar seems like one, always walking away from trouble no worse for wear, with him suffering at worst a blow to his ego. But historical references tell another story...
• Large and in Charge: Most of the time, centurions are either overweight or tall muscular individuals.
• Large Ham: Anybody in a position of power: Vitalstatistix, Ceramix, the Roman centurions... Bumped up to infinity in the animated adaption of Asterix and the Big Fight where the centurion was voiced (in the original English dub) by none other than BRIAN BLESSED.
• Laser-Guided Karma: In Asterix and the Picts, after being held captive by Maccabea for most of the book and later freed by the Gauls, Camomilla gets to uppercut him when she gets a sip of the magic potion near the end.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Many times Obelix has wanted to just bash their way through a problem and Asterix has had to convince him to do the smart thing. Once, Obelix forgot they were there to parley and proceeds to bash the place up.
• Lethal Chef:
  • The Britons and their food boiled with mint sauce. And their warm beer.
  • The cook in Asterix the Legionary is an unusual example, because he's actually a superb chef. He cooks badly on purpose to keep the troops in a bad mood (naturally, the Briton finds it delicious). That is, until Asterix and Obelix "persuade" him to cook up to his abilities.
• Light Feminine Dark Feminine: In Asterix and the Actress, a Roman actress named Latraviata pretends to be village sweetheart Panacea with the goal of retrieving some treasure unwittingly fenced by the Gauls, and vamps the character up significantly. Although she is a Honey Trap, it's apparent from early on that she's not a bad person, and she ends up being something of a sexy, clever love interest for Asterix, where Panacea is an innocent, delicate love interest for Obelix. Both Latraviata and Panacea start out as rivals but end up as best friends by the end.
• Lightning Bruiser: Obelix. He's strong and nearly invulnerable, but he's also pretty fast. He is occasionally portrayed as being more of a Mighty Glacier, however.
• Literal Metaphor: In Asterix and the Cheftain's Shield, Asterix and Obelix are about to be attacked by a garrison of Romans, but Obelix knocks out the leader before he can order his men to charge. The garrison promptly does nothing, because they've lost their Head, and "People who lose their heads don't know what to do".
• Literal-Minded: Fear gives you wings. At least that's what the Normans believe who don't know fear, and so they set out on an expedition to Gaul to learn about fear and thus become able to fly.
• Live-Action Adaptation: Four of them so far, most notably featuring Gérard Depardieu as Obelix (other members of the main cast have been changed around often). They boast high production values and have been successful at the box office, but they have been received mostly poorly by critics and "hardcore" fans, who have often decried the use of rough humour compared to the one found in the books. Apparently Uderzo, dissatisfied with the first two movies as well, supervised the production of the third, but it didn't save it from receiving the "top" prize of the French equivalent of the Razzie Awards in 2008. A fourth movie came out in Autumn 2012.
• Loophole Abuse: On learning that only Romans can participate in the Olympic Games, the Gauls are quite dejected... until they realize that, given how Caesar claims he's conquered Gaul, they qualify as Romans (and compete as the Gallo-Roman team).
• Love Across Battlelines: Histrionix and Melodrama in Asterix and the Great Divide.
• Low-Speed Chase: In Asterix in Lutetia, Asterix and Obelix are chasing an ox cart on a Roman highway, but since the cart goes at a leisurely walking pace, they easily catch up with it. Yet the ironic caption for the panel is "And the breathtaking chase begins!" Obelix stops the cart by dovetailing it and stopping in front of it, which obviously is not impressive at all when done at 5 MPH.
• Magic Cauldron: Getafix mixes his potions in a cauldron. Obelix fell in such a cauldron when he was young, with lasting effects. (Asterix and the Cauldron, however, doesn't involve a magic cauldron — that one is of interest because it contained money, not magic.)
• Magic Potion: The Gauls' main advantage over the Romans is the magic potion that Getafix brews in his cauldron, which gives its drinkers superhuman strength. Its recipe is a closely guarded secret, but it's known to include mistletoe cut with a golden sickle, lobster (for taste), reasonably fresh fish, and rock oil (substitutable with beetroot juice). A few stories are set off when a crucial ingredient runs short and Asterix and Obelix are sent off to a remote location to gather more.
• Manchild: Obelix, who tends to get mad easily when things don't go his way.
• Man in the Iron Mask: In The Movie Asterix & Obelix Take On Caesar, Julius Caesar is locked in an iron mask and thrown into a dungeon by the traitorous Detritus.
• Manly Tears:
  • In Asterix and the Cauldron, Asterix is ostracized from the village until he recovers the money that has been stolen while he was on guard duty. At first, Obelix does not apprehend what is happening or where Asterix is going, but, when he learns that Asterix is leaving for a long time, he runs after his friend, determined to go wherever Asterix goes. Asterix tries to convince him to go back to the village, Obelix refuses, and they end up hugging each other and crying loudly (twice), with Dogmatix howling by their side. A few panels earlier in the same album, Cacofonix and Geriatrix are also seen crying in the background because of Asterix' banishement.
  • In Asterix and Obelix All at Sea, Asterix cries in distress when Obelix is turned into stone. Strangely enough, the other villagers seems quite unfazed and even make lame puns about Obelix state.
• Map Stabbing: The first panel of every album has a map of Gaul with a Roman Standard pinned in the middle, clearly representing Rome's dominance in the region.
• Mascot's Name Goes Unchanged: Every character has a different Punny Name in every language except for the two iconic protagonists, Asterix and Obelix (and any historic domain character that appears).
• May–December Romance: 93 years old Geriatrix and his unnamed wife, many decades his junior. A less pronounced instance between Caesar and Cleopatra.
• Megaton Punch: Justified by the fact that the people who do these punches are under the effect of the magical potion.
  • Except for Obelix, who is not allowed to because, etc.
  • Obelix once drinks (three drops of) the potion in Asterix and Cleopatra in order to enhance his strength even more to move a solid stone door. He sees no difference, yet he keeps asking for potion subsequently anyway.
    • The Animated Adaptation attempts to explain it by having him complain that now that he finally got to taste the potion, the amount was so small that he didn't have time to really find out what it tasted like.
• Mercury's Wings: The wings on Asterix's helmet; those worn by other Gauls such as Abaracourcix the chief.
• Me's a Crowd: In order to defeat the villain of the first live-action film (who had taken the potion himself), Getafix makes a variant that creates many duplicates of Asterix and Obelix. They all merge back together in the end.
• Metronomic Man Mashing: Asterix himself has been known to do it, though Obelix uses it more frequently.
• Mighty Whitey: In Asterix and Cleopatra, the noble Gauls come and provide architectural expertise and Magic Potions to the Egyptian and help them build structures without whipping their workers.
• Miniature Senior Citizen: Geriatrix and the elderly Corsicans.
• Mistaken for Insane:
  • A Running Gag is someone assuming that a particular nationality or ethnicity is crazy due to cultural confusion or the behaviour of an individual in that group.
  • In "Asterix Conquers America", Asterix and Obelix try to mime their personalities due to a Language Barrier with the Native Americans. The Native Americans assume that the heroes are crazy and tap their heads.
• Mistaken for Related: In "Asterix and Son", when Asterix asks the chief Vitalstatistix, his wife Pedimenta, and the druid Getafix why there is a Doorstop Baby at his place, they all assume the baby is Asterix's. (Despite the title, Asterix is not in fact the baby's father).
• Mobile Shrubbery: Frequently used by the Romans to spy on the Gauls. In one episode a Roman soldier disguises himself as a tree and hijinks ensue when an owl begins to stalk him.
  Nimbus: MAGNIFICENT, BY JUNO! THE ART OF CAMOUFLAGE IS STILL ALIVE AND WELL IN THE ROMAN ARMY!
  Felonious: Er... centurion... that's the garden hedge. The camouflaged detachment is over there. [indicates patrol of legionaries who have simply wound some twigs around their ears and bits of their armour]^note  Said pathetic camouflage being a ham-fisted attempt to get out of having to go out and capture Getafix.
• Mook: Boy howdy the Roman legionnaires. Whether it's by the Goths, the Gauls, or civil wars, they always wind up either unconscious and piled onto each other or with Amusing Injuries.
• Morton's Fork: Whenever a Corsican asks a man whether the latter likes his sister. Always involves a Death Glare and a switch-blade knife.
• The Movie: Several Asterix films, both animated and live-action, have been produced. A few are straight The Film of the Book, others combine two or more books in a single plot.
• Mugging the Monster: A Running Gag with the poor pirates who always end up attacking the ship the Gauls are on. They most often end up punched a bit and their ship sinking. After a while, they'd rather sink the ship themselves to avoid the punchs.
  • Before the pirates even made an appearance, in Asterix and the Golden Sickle, Asterix and Obelix are traveling toward Lutetia and are attacked a few times by brigands or barbarians. The two Gauls don't even deign making a pause in their conversation and keep walking while they casually slap around the first group of muggers.
• Multiple Demographic Appeal: Children can enjoy the madcap adventures and slapstick comedy, while grown-ups would appreciate (among other things) the multi-layered puns and societal satire, and the attention to historic details helps it get love from academics.
• Napoleon Delusion:
  • One of Psychoanalytix's patients Asterix and the Big Fight suffers from this. Of course, Bonaparte didn't live until centuries later, so no-one knows who the man thinks he is.
  • Not a delusion, but in Asterix in Corsica, chief Ocaterinettabellachichix suddenly strikes a Napoleonic pose and starts talking about "my grumblers" and "the eve of Osterlix". Later he sends Caesar a message that "the Corsicans will only accept an emperor if he is a Corsican himself."
• National Stereotypes:
  • The populations that Asterix and Obelix encounter are affectionate parodies of nearly every French and European stereotype around. (Less affectionate in the case of the Germans, who are depicted as goose-stepping, pickelhaube-wearing Goths, complete with banners reminiscent of the Third Reich, though later books have a few examples of more sympathetic German characters. Like the German(ic) "tourists" in Spain.)
  • Lampshaded in the preface to the English edition of Asterix and the Britons, where the writers point out "if we were Britons satirizing the Gauls, we might say they all wore berets, ate frog's legs and snails, and drank red wine for breakfast. We might add that they had hopelessly relaxed upper lips, and that phlegm was not their outstanding characteristic."
  • Asterix in Corsica conscientiously piles on every single "Corsican" cliché known to French culture, after warning in the preface that this is what they are going to do, and adding that Corsicans are touchy about insults.
• Needle in a Stack of Needles: In Asterix in Britain they lose their barrel of magic potion amongst identical barrels of Gaulish wine. Hilarious Intoxication Ensues when they try to find it again.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: In Asterix and the Magic Carpet, Cacofonix's musical "skills" now induce rain. Conveniently the story is about our heroes stopping an Indian drought. It remains in the follow-up.
• Newspaper Comics: Five of the albums (Asterix the Gladiator, Asterix and Cleopatra, Asterix and the Great Crossing, Asterix and the Big Fight, and Asterix in Spain) were re-edited to create a syndicated daily strip for American newspapers, titled Asterix and Obelix, that ran from 1977 to 1979.
• Noble Demon: Caesar
• Nobody Can Die: A number of characters are said to be thrown to the lions in Rome's circus, but deaths are never shown. Arguably, Admiral Crustacius in Asterix and Obelix All at Sea. As a rule, characters are never killed in the Asterix books, but his fate, namely being trapped in stone form (supposedly for good, unless Getafix pays a visit) in the middle of the Circus Maximus's ring, is the nearest the series comes to genuinely offing a character.
  • Not to mention based on Obelix's experience, he doesn't appear conscious or aware of his surroundings either.
  • Surreptitius and Dubbelosix are shown smeared with honey and running from bees in the arena at the end of Asterix and the Black Gold. Though played for laughs, this was a genuine, and cruel, means of execution under some of the later emperors.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Cleopatra looks like Elizabeth Taylor, Dubbelosix is Sean Connery, Preposterus is Jacques Chirac, Toon is Mickey Mouse and, of course, Harald Wilssen is... Harold Wilson. (but you guessed that one, dear reader!) "Taillefine" (Mrs Geriatrix) appeared in the first books in The '60s and has a suspicious resemblance to Brigitte Bardot as she would have appeared in films of the time. Bardot's hair in films like Viva Maria! was that same red-shading-to-blonde.
• No Indoor Voice: Centurion Nebulus Nimbus, in Asterix and the Big Fight. In French his name is Langelus, a prayer announced by ringing the church bells.
• No Name Given: Geriatrix's wife. Uderzo even lampshades that she is not supposed to be named. A woman needs her secrets.^note Despite this, in the Parc Asterix Theme Park in France, her impersonators sign her name as "Taillefine" ("thin waist"), which also happens to be the name of a popular brand of fat-free yogurts.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: Julius Caesar. In contrary to his ineffectual sympathetic Mooks, he is always treated as a serious opponent to be reckoned with, plus he's the only person in the whole Roman army who the Gauls really seem to respect.
• Non-Lethal Warfare: Romans, Gauls and other nations are constantly at war, and most books feature on-screen fighting, but no-one is ever killed.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Usually, Uderzo's characters are drawn in a more cartoonish style that's slightly nondescript for most non-recurring characters, but there are two situations where this style changes:
  • One is when he inserts real life celebrities into the comic; while these characters look rather distinct and in some regards deviate from other figures (though they still blend in pretty well).
  • And the other is when characters are supposed to be pretty - usually it's female ones (Panacea, Melodrama, Geriatrix' wife, basically all Greek women, but there are also a few men (Tragicomix, Histrionix) who are not only remarkable for their faces with their unusually small noses (for Uderzo's standards, whose characters oftentimes spot a Gag Nose), but also for having a Heroic Build with more reasonable proportions (muscular characters who lack the "pretty"-shtick - like, say, Brutus - generally have huge upper boddies but ridiculously tiny legs).
• Noodle Incident: Nobody ever explains exactly what happened to the Roman tax collector who dropped by the village at some indeterminate point before Asterix and the Cauldron, but whatever it was the Gauls did to him, he never came back. It was actually revealed in Asterix and Obelix Take on Caesar (as long as it can be considered canon). The Gauls presented the tax collector a collection of the many, many Roman legionary helmets they had stolen from their battles while laughing themselves off and commenting on how they could use those as payment. This terrifies the tax collector so much that he flees from there leaving his tax money behind him.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Present in all English dubs of the movies, with a few exceptions.
• Nouveau Riche: All the people in the village become this as part of a plan of a Roman Manipulative Bastard who happens to look like a young Jacques Chirac. It backfires.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Obelix, see Dumb Muscle.
• Offhand Backhand
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The Gaulish-Gothic interpreter has a great one, when Getafix reveals to the Goth chief that he speaks Gothic.
  • The soothsayer of the animated Asterix and the Big Fight has one, too, provoked by a Roman centurion. The centurion says all Gaulish soothsayers are to be arrested, and gives him a test to see if he's the real deal, which the soothsayer insists he isn't... he flips a coin, asking heads or tails. The soothsayer replies "Neither", smiling in his belief that this would be impossible. Naturally, the coin gets stuck in the neck of an amphora, and the soothsayer has a grand old Oh, Crap! moment.
  • This was taken from a nearly identical moment in Asterix and the Soothsayer. In this case, the captured soothsayer is told to guess the outcome of a dice roll. He picks VII^note The most frequently occuring roll with two dice. Roman era soothsayers apparently don't have a good grasp of the laws of probability (unsurprising since the underlying mathematics wasn't formally studied in Europe until the 1600s). and thinks he's safe due to "never having been lucky at gambling". The dice land reading VII, and the panicking soothsayer desperately trying to cover his ass by saying that if he really had predicted that the dice would read VII, he would have said VIII so he would have been set free. Near the end of the comic, the enraged optione asks him to guess the dice roll again. He predicts VIII. The dice read VII. Cue a very confused optione and the Centurion telling the Soothsayer that he's being too showy and he has to lay low.
  • The Pirates have a Mass "Oh, Crap!" moment whenever they realize that that one group of Gauls is on board the targeted vessel. Their captain gets a priceless one in the Asterix in Britain movie, when he sees the entire Roman fleet heading towards them.
    • Astérix in Corsica gives them two: The pirates agree to ferry three passengers and a dog to Corsica. As they sneak belowdecks at night to toss them overboard, they recognize their passengers and promptly jump ship. Later, as the governor has hired the pirates to be his escape route if the Corsicans attack, hear that the Gauls are among the attackers. They immediately jump into the harbor and swim for their lives.
  • Caius Bonus, in the Asterix and Obelix versus Caesar film, has this reaction whenever he sees Obelix. This happens several times.
• Oh, My Gods!: Since in those days, all religions in Europe were polytheistic.
  • Justforkix says this word for word when the Normans come.
  • Joked about early in Asterix and the Soothsayer, where the Gauls are said to have hundreds of gods, and created a code number system to simplify things.
  • Also played with in Asterix and the Magic Carpet, when the two fakirs start cursing each other while in the magical equivalent of a Blade Lock. Asterix says something like "If they are going to call upon all of their thirty million deities they'll be at it for a while."
  • Also played with in Asterix and Cleopatra, where a conversation between the Gauls, Edifis, and a Roman Centurion has every statement by any party end with "By <Random god of relevant culture>". At the end of the conversation, Artifis shows up with up his assistant Krukhut and ask "Could we go home now, by any chance?".
• Once an Episode:
  • All end in a big banquet at night around a fire. (Except for Asterix and Son: the village has been destroyed, so Cleopatra hosts a banquet on her barge.)
  • Cacofonix gets Bound and Gagged and can not be part of the party; there are a few exceptions (most notably Asterix and the Normans in which Cacofonix basically saves the day for once, so he deserves it).
  • The pirates get their ship trashed (though not always).
  • Romans are bashed lots.
  • Obelix, magic potion, cauldron, baby, blah blah blah.
  • Vitalstatistix falls off his shield.
  • Fulliautomatix makes a disparaging comment about the quality of Unhygienix's fish, which causes a fight to break out. This one even gets lampshaded in Asterix and the Soothsayer. Asterix commented that any time people discuss the fish, a fight breaks out. Unhygienix claimed this wasn't true. Fulliautomatix said that it wouldn't happen if the fish was fresh. A fight breaks out.
  • Asterix and Obelix arguing Like an Old Married Couple. It usually goes like this: the former will point out the latter's lack of tact on a certain situation, while the latter will whine that the former never lets him do anything.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Happens with Alésia. It was the place where the Gauls were defeated by the Romans, and as such, it is a taboo subject. Whenever Asterix asks about it in The Chieftain's Shield, people scream angrily that they don't know where Alésia is (and the comic claims this is the reason no one knows today where it is located).
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Obelix does not like it when the Romans fight among themselves, or when they get ill, or when someone else is fighting them and he was not invited: he is the one who should be having fun with them!
• Only One Finds It Fun: In Asterix the Legionary, only the British guy likes the soup served at the Romans' training camp.
• Only Sane Man: Asterix and usually Getafix. Obelix tends to agree with them.
  • It's worth noting that Chief Vitalstatistix tries SO hard to fit this trope. He was actually this (along with Asterix and Getafix) for the first 8-10 books. Then he slowly developed into a pompous, agressive Butt-Monkey.
  • Convolvulus from Asterix and the Roman Agent.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Subverted in "Asterix the Legionary", where Asterix is worried that something is wrong with his best friend Obelix due to him losing his appetite when he's normally a Big Eater. As it turns out, however, there's nothing wrong with him; he just has a crush.
• Order Versus Chaos: The fun-loving, chaotic Gauls versus the Roman Empire. The neutral Helvetians also cop their share of problems.
• Ornamental Weapon: Asterix is always shown with a sword but he only ever uses it once in a blue moon, notably in a sword fight with a drunk Roman in Caesar's Gift. He prefers to let his potion powered fists do the talking.
• Out-of-Character Moment: Asterix and Obelix All At Sea is the first album in which Obelix drinks the magic potion, the one thing he never did before, other than Asterix and Cleopatra, in which Getafix gives him a few drops in the pyramid.
• Painting the Frost on Windows: In a mini-comic, there is a particular spirit of Spring whose job it is to push up the plant stems and so on and so forth.
• Painting the Medium: While Gaulish, Brythonic, and Latin are represented with the same letter type, other languages are represented with different fonts:
  • Proto-Germanic is represented by two different fonts, depending whether it's a Scandinavian dialect or not.
    • Asterix and the Goths features a "Gaulish-Gothic translator", but all that is different between the two "languages" is that the Goths speak in a Gothic blackletter type, so they're still speaking the same language. At one point Getafix (who has been captured by the Goths to get hold of the Magic Potion) is shown to master the Gothic language (shown by using the Gothic font in his speech bubble), exposing the interpreter as a liar.
    • Norsemen, meanwhile, talk with diacritics, spelling all their wørds Scåndi-style — even their døg bårks in diacritics. Asterix tries to duplicate this but puts the diacritics on the wrong letters.
    • One of the Norsemen's Gaulish slaves has learned to speak Norse, but with a heavy accent: his å's have squares instead of circles and his ø's have the diagonal line go the wrong way.
  • The Egyptians of Asterix in Egypt speak in hieroglyphs which, where possible, correspond to what they're saying in a B-Roll Rebus/Visual Pun way. Obelix's shaky attempt to speak the language look like children's drawings.
  • Greeks talk in angular letters. (And unlike the above examples, the Gauls understand them, so it's probably just an accent) In ~50BC, most people spoke Greek: Latin was the official language of the empire, but Greek was the one used for trade.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Obelix tries a number of these in attempts to get a taste of the magic potion in Asterix and Cleopatra, failing miserably every single time. He fails to figure out how Getafix keeps recognizing him, despite the fact that he weighs about five times more than any of the Egyptian laborers who the potion is supposed to be going to, or that his disguise is a striped headdress instead of his helmet.
• Pelts of the Barbarian: The Normans wear furry clothing. In contrast Roman standard bearers are the civilized version, who wear more stylish lion skin capes.
  • One goth in Asterix the Legionary turns out to be wearing a freestanding fur cape as his only clothing.
• People of Hair Colour: All Armorican Gauls and Britons have either blond or red hair, all Picts red, all Scandinavians blond, all Spaniards black. (Romans and non-Armorican Gauls get more variation.)
• Pictorial Speech-Bubble: The comic books use speechbubbles with different typefaces to represent characters speaking in various languages. Egyptians speak in hieroglyphics. Once, when Obelix attempts to speak the Egyptians' language, his speechbubble is filled with badly drawn animals and stick-figures.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Asterix is one of the village's best warriors, and is a strong fighter even without the magic potion.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Other than get their ship sunk.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: The film Asterix and the Big Fight combines the original story of the same name with Asterix and the Soothsayer. Also, the gag with the dice is changed to a Heads, Tails, Edge gag, as the dice gag wouldn't be as visually impressive in animation.
• The Precious, Precious Car: In the "Obelix's Family Tree" segment of Asterix and the Class Act, Goscinny and Uderzo have met Obelix's descendant Obelisc'h, and plan to take him to Paris to visit the Pilote ofice. When Obelisc'h asks where he can put his luggage, Goscinny replies that he can put it on the luggage rack of his nice new car, not knowing that he was bringing a menhir, which crushes the car's roof.
• Prized Possession Giveaway: At the end of "Asterix at the Olympic Games", Asterix gives his laurel wreath to the Roman athlete and his centurion, claiming they needed it more than him (to ward off Caesar's wrath at the Roman team not winning a single event).
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Pretty much any "barbarian" people is some shade of this. Those nominally under Roman control tend to have their own Undefeatable Little Village.
  • A list: Gauls, Normans, Germans, Iberians, Britons, Corsicans, Belgians... Also quite a lot of Romans.
  • Spoofed in Asterix and the Black Gold, where, when lost in the middle eastern desert, they encounter a succession of warbands from different regional ancient peoples... who all happen to be at war with at least one of the other warbands encountered. And except for clothes/armor, they all look the same.
• Pun-Based Title: Astérix chez Rahàzade. The English translation goes for Asterix and the Magic Carpet instead, but the Brazilian one decided to go for the pun (The 1001 Hours of Asterix).
• Punch-Clock Villain: The majority of the Roman legionaries. They are mostly just conscripts who are often forced to engage the Gauls. In several albums it's shown that the soldiers manning the four forts prefer to just sit out their tour of duty.
• Punny Name: Absolutely everyone who isn't a historical figure, and some who are (such as Pontius Pirate in the English translation). Impressive when you think they had to make new puns in every different translation.
  • The briefly-featured Cassivellaunos is notable for being a historical figure who only sounds like he has a Punny Name (in French, it reads Blackcurrant-bicycle-wedding).
  • There are at least two names in which the military rank helps the pun: the Romans have a General Motus, and in Germany the magic potion inspires a man to say "I will become General Electric!".
• Purely Aesthetic Era: Most of the classical antiquity cultures presented in the series are actually just stand-ins for modern nations.
• The Quisling:
  • Cassius Ceramix, chief of the Gallo-Roman village of Linoleum in Asterix and the Big Fight, who the Romans get to try to take over a certain Gaulish Village by challenging Vitalstatistix.
  • Chief Whosemoralsarelastix of Asterix and the Cauldron. Seems to subvert it, when he admits that he does indeed sell wares to Romans - but demands twice the price he'd take from Gauls. Then immediately double subverted when he notes that the Romans buy everything he has, hinting that he's really what he seems.
• Race-Name Basis: Used regularly. Characters of different ethnic backgrounds call each other only by their race name if they don't know their actual names – particularly Gauls and Romans towards each other.
• Rage Against the Author: At the beginning of The Golden Book, Albert Uderzo ages his characters by fifty years, thinking it would be funny. Obelix registers his disapproval with his fist.
• Rapid Hair Growth:
  • In the first comic, Getafix creates a potion to restore lost hair, which works much too well. He ends up selling it to the Romans who have captured him as the magic potion for strength. An entire Roman camp — and a small dog licking up the dregs — becomes excessively unmilitary-looking, thus presenting a slovenly appearance to Caesar when he pulls a surprise inspection.
  • In Asterix and Cleopatra, the henchman of the villain Artifis vows never to shave his head again until the pesky Gauls are killed. The rate at which his shaven skull becomes extremely hirsute then becomes a running gag.
• Reassigned to Antarctica:
  • In Asterix in Corsica, it's explained that the island's garrisons are a dumping ground for hopeless elements of the Roman Legion.
    • And this demonstrates the attention to research, as it's historically accurate
  • Also, at the end of Asterix the Gaul, a displeased Caesar reassigns an officer to an outpost in Mongolia(!) (Brutus gets the same treatment in Asterix and Son).
  • In Asterix vs Caesar, an overeager young officer is transferred to a post in the Sahara, as punishment for an unauthorized raid that captured Vitalstatistix's niece Panacea, which his centurion (correctly) believes that the Gauls will consider grounds for leveling the camp.
  • The beginning of the plot behind Asterix and Caesar's Gift revolves around this. The Roman guard are to be given plots of land for serving twenty years in the ranks, but Tresmendelirious is a drunkard who has never been sober for any of them. As punishment, Caesar decides that his plot of land should be "a little village by the seaside in Armorica... surrounded by fortified Roman camps". Technically averted when Tremensdelirious gives his plot of land to an innkeeper for a hunk of bread and a few mugs of wine.
• Rebus Bubble:
  • Egyptians and Kushites are presented as speaking this way. For example, the Egyptian in Astérix the Legionary "speaks" a tennis court (the original name was Courdetenis), which is then translated as Ptenisnet.
  • Whenever anyone swears. An amusing instance in Astérix and the Goths has Getafix swear in symbols, which gets a Note from Ed. describing them as "ancient Gallic insults which we refuse to translate". Then one swears in Germanic (more angular spirals, the skull is wearing a pickelhaube, etc.) and the "translation" is given as the same rebus from earlier.
• Reclining Reigner: Most noble Roman patricians are drawn in a reclining position at some point in the series. The most prominent among them are actual rulers Caesar and Cleopatra.
• Red Shirt Army: The Romans, justified as most are seen in peacetime or are Reassigned to Antarctica.
• Reference Overdosed: The series is full of references, in-jokes, shout-outs, homages,... to the Antiquity itself, the Roman Empire, the Gaulish culture, Latin language,... but also history and culture of several centuries later, including our own time.
• Relax-o-Vision: Particularly savage fights take place off-panel. One even drops a flowery curtain over the Bloodless Carnage.
• La Résistance: The Gaul village itself, obviously. But Asterix and Obelix often meet other rebels against Roman rule wherever they go. Said rebels are usually of the Badass Normal variety, causing trouble for the occupant without any equivalent to the magic potion.
• Retcon: Uderzo's solo stories have plenty of this.
  • In Obelix & Co., the village celebrates Obelix's birthday, without any mention of anyone else's. In Asterix and the Actress and the short story "The Birth of Asterix", Asterix and Obelix are shown to have the same birthday.
  • Vitalstatistix is depicted as a child as when Asterix and Obelix are born in "The Birth of Asterix", as most of the other villagers are. The earlier story "How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion when he was a Little Boy" shows him as a young adult when Asterix, Obelix and others are only a few years older.
  • "The Birth of Asterix" also is said to take place in 35 BC, that is 'Before Caesar', and are said to be 35 years before the adventures of Asterix and Obelix began. However, Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield and How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion when he was a Little Boy both depict the Roman invasion as having happened decades before Asterix and Obelix's adventures.
  • In several books, the Scottish are satirized as the Caledonians, but are instead depicted as Picts in Asterix and the Picts.
• Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony: Cleopatra does this at the opening of her new palace in Asterix and Cleopatra.
• The Right Hand of Doom: Verses the Persian from The Twelve Tasks Of Asterix.
• Right Out of My Clothes: A Running Gag with Roman soldiers whenever they get sent flying. At best they'll merely get punched out of their caligae sandals, at worst they'll lose their entire armor and end up in underwear.
• Roger Rabbit Effect: In a 1976 interview, Pierre Tchernia (a good friend of the original authors)welcomed animated versions of Astérix and Obélix. They then leaved to let their "fathers", Uderzo and Goscinny, be interviewed in their turn. Uderzo even managed to hold Astérix's helmet in his hands until it somehow fly away.
• Rugby Is Slaughter: Even before you give the players Magic Potion. Obelix enthusiastically comments that they must bring this wonderful game back to Gaul.
• Running Gag:
  • Fulliautomatix hitting Cacofonix when the latter tries to sing.
    • It gets hilarious when, in Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield, Asterix and company leave the village quietly, without informing the rest of the Gauls and avoiding a big farewell feast. When Fulliautomatix notices their departure, he quickly runs to Cacofonix's house, wakes him up, tells him about the company setting off, waits until the bard gets up, takes his harp and attempts to sing — and then he proceeds to the traditional bashing.
    • Even more hilarious is when, in Asterix and the Secret Weapon, Cacofonix gets ready to leave the town because he's offended they have brought another bard to teach the kids, and Fulliautomatix, feeling guilty, agrees to let him sing if he stays. Then Cacofonix takes Fulliautomatix's hammer and starts beating the hell out of him while shouting "No, you won't make me sing!" (When Fulliautomatix bashes Cacofonix, he usually shouts "No, I won't let you sing!") In the French version, "Non, tu ne me feras pas chanter!", which also means "No, you won't blackmail me!" (blackmail in french is "chantage", so the relevant verbs are essentially one and the same).
  • Obelix being very sensitive about his weight.
  • There's a joke template in which a bunch of characters (usually Roman legionaries) are lined up, each one making a different pun based on the subject on hand.
  • Rotten fish. See Shamu Fu.
  • Whenever Brutus appears, he's playing with a knife, sometimes hurting himself by accident. Caesar never sees anything suspicious about his behaviour. On one occasion, he berates his son that "there's a time and place for stabbing things."
    • Caesar always uses "Et tu, Brute" when talking to Brutus, which annoys him to the point of thinking "One of these days I'm going to up and...".
  • A few books ended with the sentence "And for once, for once, X is happy", where X is a character usually suffering from the Gaul's antics, such as the pirates or Caesar.
  • The album Asterix the Legionary has two concurrent running gags:
    • Obelix falls unhappily in love with Panacea. Whenever someone cries (often in frustration over the Gauls), someone asks if they're unhappily in love.
    • When going to join the legion, Asterix tells Obelix to stand back while he speaks to the guard, as they need to be nice to the Romans. Asterix subsequently loses his temper with the (extremely overbearing) guard and punches him, and through the rest of the story, "being nice to" someone means to thump them.

Tropes S to Z

• Sandal Punk: Modern appliances are often recreated with Bamboo Technology. For instance, chariots are treated exactly like cars, including tow trucks or mail vans versions of them.
• Saved by a Terrible Performance: Cacofonix's Dreadful Musician status is sometimes used to save the day (to his chagrin, as he's convinced he has real talent that's wasted on the village barbarians):
  • In Asterix And The Normans, he ends up teaching a bunch of Vikings the meaning of fear (they aren't afraid to die or get hurt, but the thought of sitting through another of his recitals turns their legs to jelly).
  • In Asterix And The Magic Carpet, his singing is so bad it causes rain to start falling. An Indian mage hears of this and asks for his help to fight a drought in the Ganges.
  • In Asterix And The Secret Weapon, his singing is the last straw for the female Roman legionaries, who refuse to fight any longer.
• Scenery Porn: Uderzo has a great hand when drawing ancient Rome, Athens or Jerusalem. In Asterix in Corsica, Uderzo and Goscinny were so impressed with the scenery of the island when they vacationed there that they decided to make this album just to put it in.
• Seadog Peg Leg: Triple-Patte (Three-Legs), originally from the French comic Barbe-Rouge but far better known for his appearances here. In both cases he functions as The Smart Guy, giving out appropriate Latin quotes and hitting people with his crutch.
• Secret Ingredient: All the ingredients of the magic potion are secret except for lobster and mistletoe. Getafix only reveals other ingredients if he's running low on one and is unable to acquire it himself, and thus has to send Asterix to get some.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: In Asterix and the Black Gold, the village runs out of magic potion for lack of petroleum, an essential ingredient. Asterix and Obelix set off to the Middle East in search of it, obtain enough to fill a waterskin, but lose it just before they return home. However, Getafix had just substituted equally efficient beetroot juice instead. There's an Ironic Echo of Getafix and later Asterix having a stroke.
• Shamu Fu: When the village gets into a fight, it's often started by Unhygienix's thrown fish.
• Shields Are Useless: The only characters who ever use them are the Romans, and given that they're fighting Asterix...
  • In big fights involving the entire village, there's inevitably at least one Roman being bashed with his own shield.
  • Vitalstatistix hits people on the head with his shield whenever he's involved in a village brawl, but never uses it for defense.
• Shield Surf: Vitalstatistix uses this as his primary conveyance of choice. Once an Episode he falls off.
  • Or the shield bearers are in a hurry and rush out without him on it. Or he forgets to duck and hits his head on the lintel, since he's standing at least five feet in the air.
  • On one occasion, he's in the middle of having a bath when a Roman consul arrives wishing to speak to him. His wife won't allow him to dodge having a bath, so his shield bearers are forced to carry him out in the bath.
  • Another time he appoints Asterix and Obelix as his shield-bearers (it's supposed to be an honor), but their absurdly mismatched sizes result in it being carried on a slant, with Vitalstatistix clinging to the high end. He then changes to simply having Obelix alone carry him around on the shield exactly like a high-class waiter carrying a tray of food, one-handed. (In the English version, at least, this similarity is lampshaded; Vitalstatistix at first protests that only having one shield-bearer would make him feel like a "half-pint chief", then when Obelix says he has menhirs to make anyway, he explodes "So you refuse to serve your chief, do you? By Toutatis, I'm a mild man, but this makes me very bitter!" So when another Gaul asks Asterix what Obelix is doing, he gets the reply "Serving a half-pint of mild and bitter.")
• Shorter Means Smarter: Asterix is much smaller than his pal Obelix, but is the brains of the duo.
• Shout-Out: There are actually so many it would require its own page...
  • In Asterix in Britain, the heroes come across "four very famous bards" who look like The Beatles. And Bacteria's original name is Iélosubmarine.
  • In Obelix and Co., two Roman legionaires have the faces and mannerisms of Laurel and Hardy.
  • Tintin gets several:
    • In Asterix in Belgium, they are warned of Caesar's arrival by the Thom(p)sons, who even use the detectives' signature dialogue: "[Sentence]." "To be precise, [mangled version of sentence]."
    • Tintin also gets a call in Asterix the Legionary: when a Belgian removes his helmet, he has the trademark hair of the reporter.
    • In Asterix and the Magic Carpet Cacofonix starts singing the Jewel Aria from Gounod's Faust, which is Bianca Castafiore's Character Signature Song. A caption informs us: "He is confused with a different comic strip."
  • In Asterix in Belgium, the courier being sent out to notify the clan leaders all over Belgium of this event is none other than cyclist Eddy Merckx (sans bike); and then there's the kid who's quite reminiscent of the famous Manneken Pis statue in Brussels in more than just his appearance.
  • There's also a character (a druid/Roman spy who has a prominent role in Asterix and the Black Gold) who looks like a (wiry) Sean Connery... and is named Zerozerosix (Dubbelosix in the English version).
  • In Asterix and the Magic Carpet, one of the villains expresses the desire that, "like my cousin Iznogoud, I will be Rajah instead of the Rajah" (Goscinny created both comics).
  • The live action adaptation of Asterix and Cleopatra gives one to Star Wars, among other things. The scene? A Roman military camp, where a centurion has just suggested retreat to the resident field general due to a humiliating first defeat at the hands of the Gauls. The general's response? Swiftly choking the centurion while berating him for his lack of faith in a deep, echoing voice, after which he quips: "When the Roman Empire finds itself under attack... The Empire Strikes Back!". We also see the general's cape and helmet from the back for a second or two in an homage to the classic backshot of Darth Vader's helmet, while a quick snippet of the imperial march ominously plays in the background. There are many more.
  • The game Asterix & Obelix has so many references to other video games that it has its own page.
  • While The Great Crossing already takes place in Denmark, it takes the opportunity to shout out to Hamlet''. Twice.
  • In Asterix and the Vikings, the viking chief's wife is named Vikea (she even asks him to raid some furniture!), and their daughter's name is Abba.
  • In Asterix and the Chieftain's Daughter, while pursuing a Gaulish renegade, in the same panel Fulliautomatix throws his hammer and Vitalstatistix throws his shield. Remind you of something?
• Siege Engines: The Romans sometimes bring siege engines to battle. It doesn't turn out too well against the Gauls, but somewhat effective against the Belgians before Asterix and Obelix take them out. They were also effective in Asterix and Cleopatra before Cleopatra reprimanded Caesar for attacking the palace.
• Significant Anagram: The names of the two alien races in Asterix and the Falling Sky, Tadsilweny and Nagma are anagrams for "Walt Disney" and "Manga", respectively.
• Simple Solution Won't Work:
  • Asterix and the Big Fight: Having failed to conquer the Gaul village, the Romans hatch the plan of having Cassius Ceramix (a Gaul chief who has accepted Roman rule and adapted to be more Roman), challenge their chief Vitalstatistix through the Gaul tradition of the Big Fight for rulership so he can have them surrender to Roman rule once he takes over. This creates problems for the Gauls as Vitalstistix must fight without using the magic potion (which they don't have anyway since Getafix is temporarily insane) and Ceramix is much stronger than he is. At one point in training Vitalstatistix notes he could just temporary abdicate in favour of Obelix who would easily win, only for Asterix to explain the rules of the Big Fight specifically forbid that trick. Vitalstatistix ends up running in circles around the ring to tire out Ceramix, then hits him with a Megaton Punch (without potion even) once he hears Getafix is back.
  • Asterix and the Laurel Wreath: While in Rome to look for Caesar's laurel wreath, Asterix has to hold Obelix back when he wants to just go into the palace and beat up the guards until they find the wreath. What follows is a series of zany plots to get in the palace, none of which work.
  • Asterix and the Roman Agent: During a brainstorming session on how to deal with the Gaul village, Caesar notes that although the Gauls are famous for their internal squabbles, the village always sticks together. Thus they send a Roman specializing in causing strife and discord (he was sentenced to death, but just being around him made the lions eat each other) who almost succeeds in destroying the village until Asterix turns the tables on him.
• Slapstick: The series is about about a couple of overpowered people defeating hundreds upon hundreds of notoriously powerful soldiers, but keeps it all child-friendly and cute due to how all the violence is slapstick (such as the iconic scenes of the Gauls punching Romans out of their sandals). The Gauls also pick on Cacofonix like this a hell of a lot. The women in the village are less often on the receiving end of this but it does happen.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Very idealistic. Conflicts are always worked out and there are even moments where Gauls and Romans get along.
• Sliding Scale of Plot Versus Characters: The series has a lot of characters with distinctive personalities, but the stories are very plot-driven. This is particularly true in albums where the characters travel, which are often driven by a need to rescue or assist someone. Characters who do drive the plot usually only exist for that particular album.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Cacofonix is the musical equivalent of Uwe Boll.
• The Snark Knight: Asterix in the first live-action movie adaption.
• Speech Bubbles:
  • Speech bubbles turn green as characters are influenced by the seeds of discord sewn by Convolvulus in Asterix and the Roman Agent.
  • When a character is deemed to be speaking with particular (and often sarcastic) pleasantry, the speech bubble is always decorated with flowers, music notes and birds.
  • When a character is speaking coldly, icicles form at the bottom of the speech bubble.
  • And in one truly strange example, the tax collector that Asterix robs in Asterix and the Cauldron speaks in forms:
  Tax Collector: Are you:

  A: Ordinary passersby?
  B: Motivated by friendly intentions?
  C: Bandits?
  Asterix: Give us your money if you don't want to get thumped!
  Tax Collector: Are you:

  A: Ordinary passersby?
  B: Motivated by friendly intentions?
  C: [checked] Bandits?
• Spiked Wheels: Dubbelosix's chariot in Asterix and the Black Gold.
• Springtime for Hitler:
  • In Asterix and the Laurel Wreath, Asterix and Obelix need to get close to Caesar and get themselves taken on as slaves by who they think is one of his advisors. He turns out to have nothing to do with Caesar so they attempt to get themselves dismissed. One attempt is by cooking the most revolting dinner they can think of with the worst possible ingredients; it turns out the Gauls accidentally create the ideal hangover cure.
  • In Asterix and the Soothsayer, all of the phony soothsayer's attempts to convince the Roman General he's not a really a soothsayer only convince him even more that he's a real soothsayer.
• The Starscream: Invoked by Asterix, Obelix, and Getafix in Asterix and the Goths; Getafix and Asterix realize that the Germanic peoples would ransack them too, and so stir up a little civil war.
• Status Quo Is God:
  • The village is destroyed in Asterix and Son, but by the end of the story, Caesar promises to rebuild it as thanks for the Gauls protecting his son. He even joins the Gauls in their ending feast... but he still tries to conquer the village in later stories.
  • In some regards averted when Uderzo took over the comic and altered a few things. Examples being: we got to know why Obelix wasn't supposed to drink any magic potion (too much of it turns people to stone and later into children), we got an extra comic about the childhood of the heroes in the village, the bard gained the ability to summon rainstorms with his song etc.
• Stiff Upper Lip: The Britons' defining cultural trait.
• Stout Strength: Obelix. He's the most "well-covered" but also the strongest character.
• Strange-Syntax Speaker: In the original French, the Britons keep the adjective-noun order of English, so it comes across as this to a French speaker. One sign for a tourist agency reads "Here we speak Greek, Briton Spoken, -Egyptian Hieroglyphs-".
• Straw Feminist:
  • Bravura in Asterix and the Secret Weapon. Although she makes some valid points.
  • The secret legion.
  • Abba invokes this in Asterix and the Vikings, to rouse up the other Normans and be allowed to join her father Olaf Timandahaf's raid. He isn't fooled.
• Symbol Swearing: All the time, leading to a great gag in Asterix the Legionary where the interpreter translates Centurion Purpus' expletives into Gothic and then back again. Goscinny has a habit of making them quite intricate and grotesque.
  • And in Asterix and the Goths, Getafix Symbol Swears, which the footnote explains are ancient Gallic insults unsuitable for print. The Goth chief asks what he's saying, and gets a Goth-icized version (the skull now has a spiked helmet, etc).
• Take That!:
  • The Nagma in Asterix and the Falling Sky are intended to be a swipe at Japanese comics in general. In contrast, the Tadsilweny are a not-so-subtle Affectionate Parody of Americans, and as such are treated much more sympathetically than the Nagma (although there is a parody of foreign policy).
  • The contribution album Uderzo croqué par ses amis also had a swipe against manga, the page showing the village surrounded by the camps was changed to depict Europe being invaded by "manga".
  • Asterix and the Secret Weapon was pretty much one big Take That! to the Feminist movement.
• Tampering with Food and Drink:
  • Asterix in Switzerland opens with with the Roman governor Varius Flavus poisoning the food of Quaestor Vexatius Sinusitus in an attempt to dispose of him before Sinusitus can uncover Flavus' embezzlement.
  • Also the Special Iced Arsenic Cake from Asterix and Cleopatra, which isn't so much poisoned as it is made entirely out of poison.
• Teeth Flying: The humorous version.
• Terrible Trio: The pirates (with the captain, lookout and wooden-leg guy as the trio part).
• Theme Naming: The ending of most of the characters' names, depending on their ethnicity.
  • Gauls (including Belgians and Corsicans) -ix; Britons -ax;^note plus -os and -ix for Hibernians and Caledonians; Picts' names all start with "Mac" Romans -us; Normans -af; Danes -sen; Greeks -os and -as; Goths -rik...
  • Gaulish women: -ine^note Falbala/Panacea is an exception, perhaps she's from a more Romanized family?, changed to -a in the English translation.
  • Roman (and most other) women: -a
  • Egyptians and Phoenicians: -is, although theme naming was averted with some characters in the translation.
  • Iberians: Spanish-type double names combined by an "y".
  • Truth in Television: Still today, many Frisians and Danes have last names ending in -sen.
  • Lampshaded somewhat in Asterix and the Normans: Asterix reports to the chief that the Normans have landed, and Obelix adds that amusingly, they all have names that end in -af. The chief then calls several of the Gauls all with names ending in -ix to tell them about this silliness.
  • Asterix and Obelix are connected by more than just the ending: asterisk and obelisk (a.k.a. 'dagger') are the punctuation marks used to indicate first and second footnotes – * and †
    • And there's more than a passing similarity between an obelisk and a menhir.
• Third-Person Person: Caesar, based on the fact that he wrote his (real life) memoirs in the third person.
  Centurion: He's great!
  Caesar: Who?
  Centurion: Er... you.
  Caesar: Oh, him!
• This Is Gonna Suck: Any incident in which the Romans end up herded towards the Gaulish village without some kind of massive advantage typically has them moving forward as slowly as possible and sweating a lot. In particular, Caius Bonus, in the film Asterix and Obelix versus Caesar, gets to do a lot of facial expressions that are variations on "today is not going to be much fun".
• This Is What the Building Will Look Like: Edifis shows Getafix a blueprint of his palace with a pointed roof, to the druid's displeasure.
• Throw the Dog a Bone:
  • On three occasions, Cacofonix actually saves the day. The villagers' response? Rather than tie him up (as they usually do to keep him from playing his music during victory celebrations), they tie up Fulliautomatix to keep him from hitting him.
  • Cacofonix also attends the feast in Asterix the Gaul and Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield, even though he did not contribute anything to help save the day. He didn't try to sing (as far as the readers can tell); that's good enough.
  • At the end of Asterix and the Cauldron, the pirates get the gold-filled cauldron after having been unfairly accused of stealing it and beaten up by Asterix and Obelix when in fact they were actually trying to go legit. Even the narrator exclaims, "And for once the pirates are happy!"
  • Occasionally one or more Roman legionaries get one. The most notable example would be Asterix at the Olympic Games where, after spending the entire book dicking with the Romans pretty much because they could and ultimately winning pretty much by cheating, Asterix gives his victor's wreath to the local Roman camp champion, causing Caesar to reward both him and his centurion.
• Time Skip: Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book has a scene that takes place 50 years after the normal timeline of the books, depicting the characters as old men.
• Token Romance: While this almost never happens in the actual books (just once: Obelix is briefly smitten with Panacea in Asterix the Legionary), it is surprisingly common for the various film adaptations to add some sort of unnecessary romance subplot. To count those:
  • Asterix Conquers America: Asterix and Obelix are tempted to stay in America because of a beautiful Native American chieftain's daughter. In the book, they want to leave because Obelix was terrified by the prospect of romance, let alone marriage, to the daughter of who they thought was a Roman.
  • Asterix and Obelix Take on Caesar: Obelix's attraction to Panacea is a subplot. This is taken from the books, but it is played much more seriously here. In fairness, Panacea is played by Laetitia Casta which might explain why she has magical doubles of herself, a plot point which wasn't in Asterix the Legionary (the book from whence Panacea comes).
  • Asterix: Mission Cleopatra: Asterix is given a love interest in the form of Cleopatra's handmaiden Givemeakis (who was not there in the book).
  • Asterix and the Vikings: Justforkix is given a love interest in the form of Chief Timandahaf's daughter Abba.
  • Asterix at the Olympic Games: The whole plot is altered so that the Gauls enter the Olympic games to help a Gaul named Lovesix to win the heart of the Greek princess Irina, or else she'll have to marry Brutus. Irina and Lovesix are little more than Satellite Love Interests for each other.
  • The live action adaptation of Asterix in Britain gives Obelix a love interest as a middle-aged British Lady in Waiting, and Asterix unsuccesfully tries to hook up with various British ladies.
• Too Dumb to Fool: In Asterix and Caesar's Gift, Tremensdelirius gets arrested for drunkenly insulting Caesar the night before he's supposed to be honorably discharged from the Roman Army. When Caesar learns of these, he decides to release the man and "gives" him the deed to Asterix's village, knowing that the Gaul's would surely beat up a Roman soldier if he walked in and claimed he owned the place. However, Tremensdelirius sees the ownership of a whole village as worthless, and sells it to an innkeeper in exchange for some food and drink.
• Too Dumb to Live: The legionaries in Asterix and the Goths; once they realise that the "Goths" they are looking for are disguised as Romans, chaos ensues and they run around capturing one another. Not so funny for their leader, the unhappy General Cantankerus:
  Cantankerus: [sobbing] They're all quite thick, and I'm their leader!
• Too Important to Walk:
  • Chief Vitalstatistix is carried by two shield bearers. Frequent running gags are made of the facts that he's rather overweight and his bearers are of different heights.
    • There's the additional running gag in which he falls off the shield for some reason at least once per story.
    • There was one story where Vitalstatistix's shield bearers quit, and he appointed Asterix and Obelix as their replacements. Since the height difference between them is even greater than the usual shield bearers', this didn't work out so well.
    • Pity the shield bearers when Impedimenta decides she wants to come, too.
  • Also, whenever Cleopatra suddenly shows up some place, she's always sitting on a gigantic golden sphinx-shaped chair on wheels pulled by slaves flanked by dancers and trumpeters. She has at least once referred to one such appearance as "dropping by incognito". (A Shout-Out to Elizabeth Taylor's spectacular entrance into Rome in Cleopatra.) The one time she showed up on a more traditional (yet still quite ostentatious) litter that was still accompanied by a handful of dancers, she acted like someone who ran out of the house embarrassingly under-dressed. Not quite as absurd as it sounds as she has at least twice performed a Stealth Hi/Bye this way!
  • A chief of a Gallo-Roman village has four shield-bearers. When he turns his back on someone (and says so out loud), the shield-bearers interpret it as an order and also turn - which leaves him facing the person he turned his back on.
• Too Qualified to Apply: The Gauls tell the Romans that they have every intention of entering the Olympic Games (as Gallo-Romans) and win with their magic potion. The Romans give up on training (which spreads to the other athletes) until they learn such substances are banned, which gets them back into training while the Gauls decide Asterix will only participate in the footrace. However, the Romans don't win a single medal, which leads the Greeks to realize this will hurt their tourist industry, so they create a Roman-only event. As Asterix still can't guarantee a win, the Gauls trick the Romans into drinking tongue-staining magic potion to get them disqualified. However, in the end Asterix gives his medal to the Romans, avoiding Caesar's usual You Have Failed Me reaction of getting thrown to the lions.
• Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: In Asterix the Legionary, Obelix eats two boars instead of his normal three because he has a crush on a woman.
• Top-Heavy Guy: Roman centurions and the non-Plucky Comic Relief legionaries have enormous hairy arms and chests, on normal-sized legs.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Obelix will often ask for wild boar in really unfitting situations. But in the movie "The twelve tasks of Asterix", him being this fond of his favorite food saves him and Asterix! When he finds out that there are no boars on the Isle of Pleasure, Obelix is able to break free from the spell of the priestesses. And so, both he and Asterix (who would have been stuck there forever otherwise) can just leave the isle.
• Trading Bars for Stripes: Some of the Roman centurions. The legionaries assigned to Corsica felt they'd prefer the other option (and in some cases, had).
• Tsundere: Cleopatra acts like one towards Caesar.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Geriatrix is (canonically) 93 years old, and yet his wife is the second-sexiest woman of the village.
• Undefeatable Little Village: The town where Asterix lives is probably the Ur-Example of this trope.
• Underling with an F in PR: In Asterix in Corsica, the Roman governor is planning to pull a Screw This, I'm Outta Here with the year's taxes (and leaving the garrison to their fates) when the Corsicans inevitably attack. Unfortunately, the one soldier he uses as his co-conspirator for his idiocy also shouts out the plan unprovoked when two other Romans talk to him, leading to the garrison demanding an explanation, rebelling when they find those explanations unconvincing and putting him in the (very) front line against the Corsicans.
• The Uriah Gambit: Crismus Bonus's sentence.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: One of the Twelve Tasks imposed on Asterix and Obelix is to spend a night on a heavily haunted deserted battlefield where hundreds have perished in years past. When a ghostly Roman legion appears intent on scaring them both to death, Obelix cheerfully sees just another Roman legion to punch around (which fails because they're immaterial ghosts). Asterix then angrily berates them for being noisy and cutting into their sleep.
• Vacation Episode: Not really vacations, but Asterix and Obelix travel sometimes to other countries for one album, giving the creators a chance to reference various aspects of the local culture and poke fun at National Stereotypes. They're usually there on a mission, but still act as tourists most of the time.
• Villain by Default: Roman Prefects are more often than not corrupt, greedy, scheming and decadent.
• Villain Song: Le pudding à l'arsenic in Asterix and Cleopatra. English version: The Arsenic Cake Song.
• Vitriolic Best Buds:
  • Asterix and Obelix have an argument or falling-out pretty much Once per Episode. It never takes long for them to make up, though.
  • The entire Gaulish village have been known to brawl with each other when they're bored and no Romans or other outside foes are available.
• Wall of Text: In Asterix and the Actress, there was a Roman civil war, and Obelix asked why were the Romans fighting against each other. Asterix explained with a wall of text: Caesar, Pompeius and Crassus once ruled in the First Triumvirate, until the death of Crassus. Then, Caesar removed Pompeius and became dictator. Pompeius remained as Caesar's enemy, and he was gathering allies within the Romans in Gaul, to fight against Caesar and get to the government, which is the reason why Asterix and Obelix were encountering Romans fighting among themselves. Obelix, did you understand? "No. The only thing I understood is that THOSE ROMANS ARE CRAZY!".
• Wallpaper Camouflage: The spy in the animated Asterix and Cleopatra.
• War Comes Home: While the Gaul village is surrounded by Roman camps, the Romans are well aware that any engagement with the Gauls result in a crushing defeat, and so mostly leave them alone. There are a few times when they do move against the village itself, but these never last long.
• Weapons of Their Trade: Every Gaul fights with his instruments: Fulliautomatix the smith with hammers, Cacofonix the bard with horns, Unhygienix the fishmonger with a fish, Obelix the menhir carver with menhirs...
• What Happened to the Mouse?: In "Asterix in Switzerland", Obelix has a red nose and is talking in Congestion Speak, claiming that the lake gave him a cold. However, after getting drunk, his nose and speech patterns return to normal and he never seems sick.
• What's Up, King Dude?: Caesar is all pompous and grandiloquent, like a Shakespeare character... and then Asterix and Obelix always appear with some "Hi, Caesar, ol' boy! Are the laurels fresh today?" and the whole climate is broken.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: While Asterix's village itself is fictional(?), the most accepted location of the place would be where the village of Erquy is since present-day Amorica would be the region of Brittany. When the local tourism got carried away marketing Erquy as Asterix's village despite this conclusion being based on guesswork rather than archaeological facts, the authors had to step in to prevent the place from being destroyed by tourists.
• Who Would Want to Watch Us?:
  • Pointed out by a supporting character.
    Impedimenta: If anyone were fool enough to write the story of our village, you can bet they wouldn't call it The Adventures of Vitalstatistix the Gaul!
  • There's also the moment in Asterix and the Cauldron, where Obelix wants to tell stories about his and Asterix's adventures to raise money, but Asterix sees no monetary value in it.
    Obelix: We could call it The Adventures of Obelix the Gaul and...
    Asterix: Oh, shut up.
• William Telling: Subverted in Asterix in Switzerland by the arrow hitting the bull's eye of the intended target, when it looked like it might have hit the apple on the kid's head. The eyewitnesses feel disappointed, but can't explain why.
• Windbag Politician: The Helvetian assembly consists of one chieftain making a speech and every other one sleeping deeply. When they switch out, the new one even says "I will be brief..."
• Woken Up at an Ungodly Hour: In "Asterix and Son", a legionary disguised as a nanny tries to kidnap the baby at night. When the baby starts crying, the legionary tries to sing him to sleep so that the villagers wake up... only, they wake up from his singing and yell insults like "Call that singing?!".
• World of Pun: Both the original French and the English translations are full of puns.
• Worthy Adversary: Julius Caesar walks the line between this and Magnificent Bastard. It helps that all his competitors and would-be successors are shown as hopelessly corrupt and evil, which means he and the Gauls often end up on the same side.
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl:
  • Julius Caesar's secret weapon in Asterix and the Secret Weapon is an all-female army, intended to exploit the Gaulish code of chivalry against striking women.
  • Memorably bypassed when the village's women turn the whole plan inside out in a manner that must be seen to be believed.
• You Mean X Mas: Any song that is based off of a Christmas song has "Christmas" replaced with "Solstice". Because that's what most people were celebrating at the time.
• You No Take Candle:
  • In Obelix and Co., Caius Preposterous has to resort to this, when his attempts at giving a straight explanation of how economics work to Obelix fails. Obelix gets the impression that all businessmen speak like that, which is how he explains the economic system to the people he hires.
  • The Nagma in Asterix and the Falling Sky speaks in stereotypically broken English, as Obelix helpfully points out.
    Obelix: He doesn't talk like us, either! He talks funny!
• Zebras Are Just Striped Horses: In Asterix and the Chariot Race, Princesses Nefersaynefer and Kweenlatifer from the kingdom of Kush use zebras instead of horses to pull their chariot.
• Zorro Mark: In Asterix and Caesar's Gift, Asterix duels with a Roman and carves a Z into his tunic. With dialogue lifted from Cyrano de Bergerac. The English translators lifted dialogue from Hamlet instead, as they felt the audience would not be sufficiently familiar with Cyrano. The Roman also brags that he served in the Pontifex Maximus' Guards, footnoted as "A sort of Cardinal of the period."

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"Sindoi Romanoi esont baitoi!"^Gaulish"These Romans are crazy!" though "Romanoi" and "esont" are conjectural.