Trivia / Girl Genius

Trivia tropes:

• Ascended Fanon: The Reddit AMA provided one:
  PKSchefflera: Goofy question: Was the bonsai hedge maze in the Storm King opera actually a stage translation of Mechanicsburg's thorn wall?
  Phil: It is now.
• Creator's Favorite: The Jaegers are apparently so loved by the authors that they keep involving them in the plot. Not that anyone's complaining.
• Defictionalization: Some of the better in-comic T-shirt designs find their way into the Foglios' store. ("Fools! I will destroy you all! (Ask me how!)"). SF author Charles Stross is shown wearing one of these shirts on his trope page.
• Demand Overload: The creators did it to themselves, and it takes a bit of explaining. Basically, it started off as a print comic. When the Foglios turned it into a webcomic, they had two different archives updating at the same time: the "101 archive" where they digitized the original print run, and the "advanced class archive", where they continued the story where the print run left off. In July 2007, the 101 archive caught up with the beginning of the advanced class archive. The volume of readers archive binging the advanced archive was enough to crash the comic's server.
• The Merch: Some shirts are available; one of them says "FOOLS! I will destroy you all! Ask me how!"
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: As the website's page for the "original" Heterodyne Boys explained, Phil's old idea for Girl Genius was a near-future setting instead of the neo-Victorian Gaslamp Fantasy that they actually went with.
• Throw It In!
  • When Phil was drawing the scene which first introduced the Baron, he filled an "empty" spot with a rather scruffy-looking soldier. As soon as anybody saw him, they liked him and wanted to see more. Thus were born the Jägers.
  • Maxim of the Jägers was originally a silly little drawing of a Bishounen jäger for Kaja, who promptly informed him that he WOULD appear in the comic.

Misc. trivia

• Agatha is a Latin name, coming from a Greek word meaning "good". However, the famous St. Agatha of Sicily was a third-century martyr, and her many patronages include...er...the bosom. Very apt, even if unintentional.
• The Danish Army's elite soldiers are called the Jaegers. And they speak English like that.
  • "Jaeger" in Germanic/Norse languages generally means "hunter". It's historically been quite common for such nations to call select elite or light units "Jaeger".
• Dolokov's name may or may not be a reference to the Manipulative Bastard and Karma Houdini of War and Peace.
• The whole story is full of modified historical domain characters:
  • Master Payne is a real person, who has several personas and performs amusing magic tricks.
  • Van Rijn, master Spark, artisan, the creator of the Muses, though few nowadays know his full name, "''Rembrandt'' Harmenszoon van Rijn".
  • The circus cook, when his calming pie works — magnificently — on Agatha, exclaims, "Take that, Brillat-Savarin!" Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) was a famous French expert on high-quality eating, famous for advocating a high-protein, low-carb diet (thus likely to disapprove of pies in general). He's also the origin of the saying, "You are what you eat."
• Othar Tryggvassen's name comes from the 10th Century Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason.

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