Follow TV Tropes

Following

Verbal Tic / Webcomics

Go To


  • Adventurers!: Chookie inserts "chook" to random places when he speaks. It is a trait shared by his species.
  • Awkward Zombie: Deconstructed. As Aloy demonstrates in this comic, having a particular speech pattern that never stops gets real old real fast with her getting tired of Milduf's smithing-themed vernacular quicker than a hammer meets steel.
    Aloy: Yeah, got it, your people have a rich and thematically-consistent culture.
  • Brawl in the Family:
    • Captain Falcon is compelled to cry "Falcon [verb]!" before performing any action: "Falcon pray!" "Falcon sneak!" "Falcon bluff!" "Falcon Sleep!"
    • Waluigi's constantly peppers his speech with "WAA".
  • Com'c: Garry the dragonfly says "shithead" about once per sentence or so.
  • Digger: When she's first introduced, Grim Eyes frequently rolls her r's. She does it much less frequently post Heel–Face Turn. Some fans have theorized the rolling was due to a growl. Honored Murai always refers to everyone as Honored Such-And-Such, which looks a bit odd when she mentions several names in a row... especially given her companions', uh, informal approach. Presumably it's cultural.
  • El Goonish Shive: Elliot and Ellen use "Za?" in places where most people would say "Huh?"
  • Homestuck: All the protagonists have a specific typing quirk when chatting online (which is carried over to real world conversations as well), usually tied to their personality. Notably, their typing quirks also represent the way they speak.
    • Among the main kids, John uses no capital letters, Rose writes in an overtly correct manner, Dave eschews both capital letters and punctuation, which also represents his monotone and rambling speaking habits, and Jade multiplies her punctuation and uses lots of smileys to match her cheerful and excitable nature.
    • The trolls use more complex ones:
      • The shy Tavros tYPES IN REVERSE CAPS LOCK and uses commas rather than periods, often inserting them where they don't go, to represent a stuttering and hesitant manner.
      • Sollux, obsessed with doubles and bifurcation, types 2's instead of s's and "ii"'s instead of i's. This also visually represents his pronounced Fang Thpeak.
      • Karkat and types in all caps, representing how he's always shouting.
      • Nepeta, a Genki Cat Girl, begins every sentence with a cat smiley emoticon and makes free use of cat puns.
      • Kanaya begins each word with a capital letter and uses no punctuation. She is stated to enunciate each word carefully when speaking, just like she types.
      • Terezi speaks in all caps and replaces the letters A, E and I with 4, 3 and 1, "the numerals that the blind prophets once used".
      • Vriska draws out words for emphasis, which she represents by typing out vowels and question and exclamation marks in groups of eight.
      • Eridan speaks with a "wavy" accent spelled out by doubling up the letter v and w.
      • Feferi replaces h's with brackets )( (referencing her Zodiac sign, Pisces, and the shape of her horns) and precedes capital E's with a hyphen to make them look like her weapon of choice; and so on.
    • Furthermore, the quirks make their way into sound effects — for instance, when Tavros uses his communing superpower to Mind Control animals, the sound effect is "cOMMUNE,"
    • More traditional tics: Aradiasprite's "ribbit", Gamzee's "honk", and Feferi's "glub". Even though they're actually typing.
    • Vriska's quirk — typing some letters and punctuation eight times for emphasis and replacing Bs and "ate" sounds with 8 — seems to be contagious, since John has picked up on the former, and hereditary, since Marquise Mindfang did the latter. It also infects John's sound effects, with the Fluoride Octet-enabled late-stage Warhammer of Zillyhoo making a "8ONK" sound.
    • Jade later picks up another verbal tic in the form of going "woof" when excited or making other involuntary noises like laughter, after she attains Dog Tier.
    • John also splits up compound words into their component parts, even when they're names, leading to constructions like "dave sprite", "bat man", and "what ever".
  • Hyperbole and a Half: Spaghatta Nadle, the protagonist of the Dada Comic Within a Blog, raplaces mast vawal sands wath 'a'.
  • The Last Days of FOXHOUND. The Pain's half Verbal Tic, half-Catchphrase... "I'M COVERED IN BEES!"
  • Looking for Group: The Bloodrage tribe's leader constantly says "Heh" either at the beginning or end of his sentences. Sometimes in mid-sentence.
  • Oceanfalls: Five speaks slowly and with lots of pausing and hesitation. She also speaks in third person.
  • The Order of the Stick: Malack goes "Hrrrrm" when he's thinking.
  • Outsider: The Loroi pilot Talon, who like all Loroi speaks in their Trade Language when she has to speak verbally, tends to pepper her statements with "I think maybe".
  • Polandball: Singapore talks with an exaggerated accent that makes him say "lah" at the end of every sentence.
  • Questionable Content: Early on, Faye would speak without using any contractions, as a way to try to hide her accent. It got phased out rather quickly as she became more comfortable around people.
  • Skin Horse: The Killotron robots no longer want to Kill All Humans, but they still use the word "destroy" in place of random verbs. It's considered a bit intimidating in-universe.
  • Transformers Kre-O: Vortex ends all his sentences in -ex.
  • Unichat had the AI @hena, who compulsively spams the letter "G" in IMs due to a glitch. This is no longer true in the rebooted comic, but m1ndh1ve1's overuse of "lol" fills a similar function.
  • You've Gotta Be Kitten Me!: Mino has a habit of saying "Goro" at various timea.


Top