Webcomic / Joe vs. Elan School

Joe vs. Elan School: A True Cult Classic is a Webcomic based on the Real Life experiences of its author, who wrote and drew it under the pen name Joe Nobody. The webcomic ran from November 5, 2018 to September 15, 2023, with an epilogue posted on November 6, 2023.

In the year 1998, a group of men kidnap a Missouri teenager named Joe from his bedroom in the middle of the night, and whisk him away to Elan School in Maine, a school ostensibly for "troubled teens." They've done this at the behest of his parents, who are apparently trying to get Joe out of a prison sentence after Joe and his friends are caught crossing state lines with marijuana.

As it quickly turns out, Elan School does not have any oversight, does not educate its students, and places the children under constant psychological torment through attack therapy conducted by unlicensed individuals — many of whom are current and former students — while clueless parents are forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition. And the worst part is, it all happened in real life.

The story is told in multiple parts:

• The first 62 chapters deal with Joe's life and abuse in Elan School.
  • Chapters 1 - 36 deal with Joe's initial encounter in Elan School.
  • Chapters 37 - 45 deal with Joe's adventures in NYC.
  • Chapters 46 - 51 deal with Joe's return to Elan School.
  • Chapters 52 - 62 deal with Joe's run as a coordinator in Elan School.
• Chapters 63 through 80 deal with Joe's life in the years immediately following Elan, as he deals with college life, his peer and familial relationships, and the severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his abuse at the school.
• Chapters 81 through 92 deal with a grown Joe doing what he can to raise public awareness of Elan School, and potentially end its abuses once and for all.
• Chapter 93 through 100 deal with Joe struggling with a lack of purpose in life after Elan's closure.

Following the official completion of the comic with Chapter 100, Joe has stated that he plans to publish a physical copy of the comic. He also added a "Epilogue" chapter chronicling his final thoughts on the project, describing some major events that took place while he was working on the comic, and what happened to some of the people described in the story.

It can be read here. Keep in mind, though, that it deals heavily with themes of child abuse, so viewer discretion is advised.

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Joe vs. Elan School contains examples of the following tropes:

Tropes A-D

• Abortion Fallout Drama: Happens in Chapter 71 when Joe cries for a week over Eva breaking up with him and casually mentioning her abortion. We only see Joe's side of it, though; it's such a big deal to him because he'd built it up in his mind as the beginning of an idealized nuclear family scenario, when the reality would have been anything but.
• Accidental Misnaming: The man who signs Joe up for the Dovetail "first time offender" program during Joe's court date in Chapter 71. He first calls Joe "John", then later calls him "Josh" even after Joe has already corrected him.
• Affably Evil: Ron is a particularly dark example. He psychologically tortures kids under the twisted belief that he's helping them and happily crushes them when they step out of line. In spite of that, Joe notes that he can be surprisingly personable and friendly so long as you play his game; and he's able to charm unsuspecting parents with ease. Joe even compares him to a charismatic cult leader whose larger than life presence helps keep the operation running smoothly.
• All Crimes Are Equal:
  • Joe notes that Elan's "treatments" aren't tailored to whatever brought an inmate in. So you'd get this mishmash of inmates who were sent to Elan for violent crimes, or you'd get inmates who were sent to Elan for talking back to their parents or having experimented with alcohol or pot once, and they'd all receive the same amount of abuse through the school's "therapy."
  • Anyone caught breaking a rule at Elan, no matter how slight, will be immediately demoted back to a non-strength rank of zero, which takes months to get out of. This also includes if someone escapes or rebels on your watch^note Which is what happens to Peter when Joe escapes, or what happens to any coordinators who don't help quell the Elan 8 riot, leading all Elan inmates to distrust one another.
  • Gino learns to exploit this trope. He quickly discovers that any expediters that lose their clipboards get shot-down, so he takes to stealing their clipboards.
• All for Nothing: Joe gains enough of a rank at Elan to get an overnight trip with his parents, with an escort from Elan to keep him in line. After his parents refuse to listen to him, he escapes his parents and Peter (the Elan "Support Person" escorting him on the outing), hitchhikes to New York City, and makes plans to make his way back home and lay low until the heat is off. Against all odds, though, Elan has him recaptured within three days, and his rank is reset to zero upon his return.
• All Just a Dream:
  • During his parental outing in Chapters 36 and 37, while they're riding in the car, Joe falls asleep and dreams that he jumps out of the still-moving car and is hit by a truck. The Catapult Nightmare briefly alarms his mother.
  • At the beginning of Chapter 54, Joe wakes back up in his bed, goes downstairs, and talks to his sister. Turns out, it's all just a dream and he's still in Elan. He then explains this in the narration, saying that it happened multiple times.
    Joe: [narrating] The human brain craves the comfort of home and it will bring you home in your dreams and make it so damn real that you'll even have memories in your dream of leaving or escaping the hell you're suffering...
  • Double subverted at the beginning of Chapter 63. Joe wakes up back in Elan, and realizes his graduation was just another dream like before...then wakes up for real in a hotel room on his way back home, and realizes that it actually happened.
• All of the Other Reindeer:
  • In Chapter 65, during a neighborhood get-together, Joe has a pleasant conversation with one of the neighborhood fathers. The moment is ruined when Joe becomes very aware of three other neighborhood fathers staring him down from across the room and not masking their dislike. Nothing is said, but Joe immediately realizes that the stigma of being sent to Elan has followed him home.
  • Happens again in Chapter 67, when Joe tries to pick up a girl. Once again his lack of social skills causes him to not only word-vomit his experiences of Elan (which went horribly last time), but to steal the girl’s cigarettes out of a misguided attempt to help her. Her response? Tell Joe to get the fuck away from her and call him a psycho to the rest of the girls in her dorm. This causes every girl in college to avoid him like the plague, and almost all the boys to avoid him because he repels the girls they’re trying to score with.
• All Therapists Are Muggles: In Chapter 71, to help his PTSD, Joe goes to see a therapist about his Elan experiences. Because Elan's cultish methodology is so intense and surreal — which Jay Cirri had undoubtedly designed to invoke Cassandra Truth for any outsiders — Joe's therapist visibly shows signs of being in over her head and refers him to a psychiatrist. Joe walks away from the experience realizing the frustration of accurately defining his Elan experience in ways that regular people can understand.
• Alone in a Crowd: Joe at the end of Chapter 63, when he's at the party with his sister; he says that observing the other partygoers makes him feel like he's observing aliens. He makes small talk with a girl outside the party but doesn't hear anything she says; in a moment of bravado he excuses himself, goes inside, and immediately gets overwhelmed by everything going on. Then the Elan conditioning seeps into his brain and causes him to start judging the partygoers based on what Elan called "image."
• Ambiguous Time Period: Events in the comic typically don't have defined years. Any inconsistencies or ambiguities in the timeline may be justified due to Joe fudging finer details to help conceal his true identity.
  • At the beginning of the story, Joe tells another inmate about Eminem; late in the story Joe is forced to put up signs for Jay Cirri's gubernatorial campaign. However, Eminem's first major hit wasn't until 1999 when The Slim Shady LP was released, and the real-life "Cirri's" last run for Maine governor was in 1998, though he lost the Democratic primary in June of that year. Later on, Joe's post on Reddit as u/gzasmyhero says that he started at Elan in 1998, although Joe's narration in the comic adds that he fudged identifiable personal information when writing the post.
  • A later chapter brings the story up to at least 2009, as that's the date listed on a Huffington Post article that Joe reads. Elan's closure definitively happens a couple of years later on April 1, 2011.
  • The final chapter brings the story up to 2018, as Joe decides to begin producing the webcomic itself.
• Amoral Attorney: One of Joe's accusations in Chapter 81, when he reaches out to Maine lawyers about getting a case going against Elan, with the hopes that one of them would be a Crusading Lawyer. But Joe is repeatedly told that the statute of limitations on felonies in Maine is five years, and Joe grimly concludes that the lawyers see no money in helping him stop Elan.
• Anachronic Order: The story is told in rough sequential order, but Joe will throw in interludes and asides as he remembers them. The reason for his being sent to Elan isn't told until several chapters in.
• The Announcer: Elan higher-up Caesar is, in Joe's words, a "whole other level of creepy" example of this. He'd show up for Ring events and gleefully act as the announcer. In case it's not clear, Caesar would make special to attend and participate in the events where the kids beat each other up.
• Angrish: In Elan, "getting off your feelings" means primally yelling at your target with focused anger, not giving rhyme or reason to logical argument but purely making an emotional outburst. To an outsider, however, it sounds absolutely bonkers; when Joe screams at his mother Elan-style to call her out for sending him there, she passive aggressively ignores it because he sounds like a lunatic. Joe's narration wryly notes that his is probably by design since it invokes Refuge in Audacity.
• Anticlimax: Elan's closure. After dealing with Elan's abuse firsthand, as well as years of enduring PTSD, Joe has thrown himself into advising parents on removing their kids from Elan, continuing his online anti-Elan campaign, and fending off Elan's hired PR firm. He even makes plans with another former Elan student to create and air anti-Elan ads on local Maine television stations. Then he wakes up to find that Sara Tarron has thrown in the towel and announced Elan is set to close on April 1, 2011; the school simply has parents pick up their kids and then all the staff completely abandon it. Joe is still very happy and even does an interview about it for TIME Magazine, but he finds Maria's relative indifference to it off-putting.
• Art Shift:
  • The artwork typically shifts to more abstract iconography whenever Joe is in a tumultuous situation. The most jarring shift occurs in Chapter 51, when Ron forces Joe to fight as Elan's "champion" in an Elan 7 Ring — even the typeface itself becomes completely deranged as Elan's conditioning causes Joe to blank out and fall into extreme Moral Myopia as he beats the other kid senseless.
  • As Joe's time at Elan goes on, he shifts away from solid shades, and adopts additional gradients and textures. After he leaves Elan, he starts incorporating more color.
  • Katie's chapter (set in Elan) reverts to the original style of the comic, with simple monochromatic shades, very few textures, and the occasional pop of color to signify something negative or positive.
• Backstory: Most of the characters don't have one, but there are a handful who do.
  • Joe's own history prior to Elan is largely alluded to with offhand comments peppered throughout the narrative. The closest we get to a full backstory is when Joe shares the story of the incident that caused his parents to send him to Elan in the first place. However, the end of Chapter 80 reveals that the entire tale up to that point had been a backstory leading up to Joe deciding to do something about Elan School once and for all.
  • Ron gets some backstory when Joe briefly tells about how Ron was a hoodlum from Detroit who ended up in Elan in the 1970s and became one of Jay Cirri's right-hand men.
  • Joe goes into great detail about Jay Cirri's history, including his Disappeared Dad, hedonistic youth, time at Daybreak Village, founding of Elan School, and rise to power and riches.
  • Gino gets some backstory when Joe tells about how Gino was a High-School Hustler who was sent to Elan after bringing a gun to school to confront some boys who had robbed him.
  • Joe's college roommate Ezra gets a little bit of backstory when Joe briefly describes Ezra's cult upbringing.
• Bad Boss:
  • Ron threatens Christy that he'll to go to "the top" — meaning Meredith, Caesar, and Larry — to get Joe to graduate, knowing that Christy would be intimidated by the threat. Katie later says that "even Christy didn't dare get in [Meredith's] way."
  • In the final chapter, Joe works for a shady pawn shop owner who threatens him during the job interview. During his first day on the job, the owner berates the employees about their sales figures. Two days into the job, the owner and his wife scream at their employees over laziness. Joe simply gets up and leaves, pausing to tell the other employees that they don't have to deal with this abuse, causing the owner's wife to shout at him that they're not paying him for his two days on the job.
• Bad Job, Worse Uniform: Escapees and new (male) students are forced to wear yellow T-shirts and pink shorts. The shirts are to keep them visible if they attempt to escape, and the pink shorts are for humiliation.
• Bait-and-Switch: When Joe leaves Sofi at the start of Chapter 97, he says that he "kissed her goodbye...forever." He doesn't say that it's what he thought at the time. The chapter ends by revealing that he ultimately returned to stay with her and was still with her after two years.
• Because You Were Nice to Me:
  • It's implied that this is why Gino doesn't name Joe when Gino confesses everyone's "guilt."
  • For his "graduation" ceremony, Joe is allowed to choose who will speak at the ceremony. He invites a teacher who, unlike Elan's other teachers who did the barest minimum (if even that), this teacher "...not only had the wits to notice something was off, but who actually went out of his way to do something about it...and that mattered."
  • Invoked by Elan — almost to the point of deconstruction — when they kick out the Determinator that Gino tells Joe about. After fourteen straight months of torture, Elan expels the kid, but not before isolating him in a trailer, giving him all the food, clothes, and movies that he wants.
    Gino: It was like Elan knew they had tortured this kid to within an inch of his sanity and they were now shamelessly attempting to butter him up so he'd not leave angry.
• Becoming the Mask: Joe says in Chapter 57 that Elan has effectively institutionalized his mind and he's come to rely on their twisted moral compass. He says that the scariest part of his Elan experience was when he realized that wasn't that he was no longer pretending to be one of them — "I was one of them."
• "Begone" Bribe: In Chapter 66, Joe's narration glumly says that his parents buy him a used car for college, "...surely as some kind of 'this will shut him up!' bribe."
• Beware the Nice Ones: As Joe comes to find out, any students or staff acting "nice" and offering to help Joe escape are immediately suspect.
• Big Brother Is Watching: A major part of Elan's psychological warfare, and one of the first things that Joe notices when he looks at the posters on the walls. No matter where you are in the compound, someone is watching you and more than willing to report your "guilt" to get themselves out of trouble. Even rare phone calls are closely monitored by SP's listening in on your side of the call, so before you can say anything alluding to the abuse, they'll cut the call and punish you severely. Joe says that it makes North Korea look like amateurs.
• Birds of a Feather: Without going into detail, Joe mentions that Eva had some "real demons," as did he, and that they both had "a very crazy energy brewing inside of us." He says that's probably why they got along so well.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • Elan as a whole - they've perfected ways of making it look like it's a lovely rehabilitation facility for troubled teens, effectively covering up the abuse.
  • Specifically, Ron is this. Joe lists several of Ron's abuses, and says he's a complete psychopath, "...but when that man was on your side you really felt something special." During Joe's parents' first visit he's amicable and personable to Joe's parents, but when they leave the room, Ron smugly tells Joe that he thinks Joe's dad is a closet homosexual and that his mother is a slut. The final irony is Ron's giving a speech at Joe's "graduation" that Joe's mother finds so touching that it sends her into dramatic hysterics; and his last words to Joe are a hollow, "You are enough."
  • Christy. On Joe's graduation day, she berates and threatens him an about an hour before giving an impassioned speech about how Joe is a "hero" and a "shining example."
  • During Katie's chapter, Meredith cusses up a storm when Katie's mom shows up in a two-seater Smart car, then puts on a cheery facade to go talk to her.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: In an interview with the Dark Dark World podcast, Joe says that he did have some genuine issues before going into Elan, as did several other children there. In the comic itself, Joe points out that Gino was sent to Elan after being caught carrying a gun to scare some bullies. However, Joe also repeatedly points out that Elan's methodology is far, far more sadistic and evil than any of its inmates needed or deserved.
• Bland-Name Product: When talking about where Cirri learned attack therapy, Joe explains that "for legal reasons" he is going to call the facility "Daybreak Village," as the real life facility he's alluding to is still operational as of 2021.
• Boarding School of Horrors: Elan School, which is barely a "school" to begin with. They convince parents to sign away guardianship rights and let their kids be kidnapped in the middle of the night and whisked over state lines, dropped off in front of strangers who force them to strip naked and verbally abuse them, before being screamed at by other teens and adults. And that's just at the beginning of their stay.
• Brainwashing:
  • A particularly nefarious example. As Joe comes to realize, Elan has perfected systems of operation that are designed to prevent escape, prevent successful escapes from staying successful, convince students that they not only deserve their abuse but must abuse others or face certain punishment, and foster such a sense of reliance — namely, that students cannot survive the outside world without Elan — to keep former students on as underpaid staff.
  • What's worse, they've perfected ways of brainwashing inmates' families, since every body in Elan means more money paid to the school — Joe's parents, in particular, give Elan thousands of dollars during his three years there.
  • And worse than that, they're so successful with their brainwashing that lying on the school's behalf becomes ingrained as a survival mechanism. Joe's narration notes that even if law enforcement were to raid Elan, most of its inmates are so far gone that they'd refuse to tell the truth, and many former students to this day still defend Elan with almost religious fervor.
• Breather Episode:
  • Arguably Chapter 63, the first post-Elan chapter, as it features Joe enjoying his newfound freedom, returning to his own bedroom, and reuniting with his sister and Chloe. It does feature the first examples of Joe's post-Elan PTSD, but given what he's been through and what's yet to come, it's comparatively peaceful.
  • Chapter 76 deals with Joe raising Apollo, helping Rory, passing his music evaluation, and traveling abroad, and only barely references his Elan trauma. It's relatively peaceful until the foreboding cliffhanger at the end.
  • Chapter 80, big time: it deals with Joe falling in love, cleaning up his bad habits, and moving on with his life, before seguing into a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue covering the fates of several other characters. However, like Chapter 76, it ends with a scene where talk of Elan creeps back into Joe's life in 2009, leading to a cliffhanger saying that the whole story isn't over just yet.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • After lifting a bottle of beer from a neighborhood get-together shortly after returning from Elan, Joe runs into his childhood bully Darren hanging out with some other kids. Darren steals Joe's beer and mocks him, and Joe coolly tells him, "If your mouth touches my beer, I'm going to punch it." Darren laughs it off and starts to drink it, and Joe lays him out in one punch.
  • In a broader sense, anyone who says anything against Elan School's abuse goes up against Cirri's dirty money and the school's brainwashed acolytes. Maura Curley had to leave the country after her damning biography of Jay Cirri was published; when Joe starts his own campaign, he does so anonymously.
• Burn Baby Burn: Joe talks about journaling about his time at Elan shortly after returning home, but mentions that he burns the journal (and several other Elan artifacts, including his "diploma") after finding it again some years later.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Ron leaves Elan for an extended period of time, and newer residents of Elan 8 come to think of him as some kind of ghost story. Then Ron returns to Elan, clean-shaven and strung out, and tries to get Joe to leave with him. After a shouting match with Christy, Christy tells Joe that he's "graduating."
  • At the end of Chapter 64, Joe gets a call from Peter, the Elan escort he had maced and escaped from in Chapter 38 (and who was subsequently shot-down for letting Joe escape), who is in his neighborhood and wants to visit.
  • Gino shows up at Joe's dorm at the end of Chapter 68, and they go back to Maine together in Chapter 69. Following this, Gino continues to be a Drop-In Character at various points until his death in Chapter 98.
• But We Used a Condom!: Subverted; Joe and Eva knew the condom broke, but the audience didn't until Eva brought it up.
• Call-Back: Chapter 81 has several. Joe chooses the pseudonym "Dave Westminster" after seeing the Westminster Dog Show and partially because he misses Apollo; he mentions that he wants to punch out the journalist that has been leading him on, like how he punched out Darren; he compares his frustrations with cowardly journalists to his frustrations with Cathy's drug class; and he talks about how overcoming being told that he couldn't pass his college music tests was a cakewalk compared to his struggles getting people interested in stopping Elan.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Joe finally does this to his mother in Chapter 66 when she threatens him with an Elan support call; he yells at her and berates her Elan-style, but it doesn't work since to an outsider it sounds like nonsensical rantings (likely by design).
• Cannot Talk to Women: Joe as of Chapter 64. He sees a girl his age at the library and realizes that his Elan conditioning is causing him to be scared of girls his age. As he says, "And really, I don't mean 'normal scared', I mean post-traumatic-stress-disorder, shaking, scared." This comes back to bite him two chapters later, where he horrifies a girl at his college with small talk about "the Ring."
• Cassandra Truth: Enforced by Elan, which coaches parents to regard their children's claims of abuse as hyperbole. When Joe has his first outing with his parents and an Elan student named Peter (who is the "Support Person" there to monitor him), Joe steals his mom's pepper spray, sprays Peter, and then tries to tell his parents about the abuse. But they refuse to listen and only berate him for being "out of control."
• The Chain of Harm: Enforced by Elan. Because of the school's rank and caste system, there's always someone higher up in charge of someone else kicking downward and perpetuating the abuse. Most, like Joe, are forced to do it out of survival.
  • Going back further, it's mentioned that this cycle started with Synanon in California, whose practices were then spread and implemented at Daybreak Village in New York, which is where Jay Cirri picked it up. Cirri then used what he learned at Daybreak to co-found Elan School.^note Joe also notes in his Dark Dark World interview that since every aspect of Elan's "therapy" was ingrained into every inmate, then any inmate could (and would) then take what they'd learned from Elan to create their own schools and programs elsewhere, skirting lax or nonexistent regulations, and thus continue the cycle of abuse.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: As recounted in Chapter 66, Joe takes up chain smoking in college, and says that smoking is one of the things that helps bring him peace.
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: A major part of Elan's "therapy" is the constant reminder that if you don't complete the program, you'll end up as a drug addict. Yet Ron, a graduate of Elan in the 1970s, shows up to quell the Elan 8 riot with fresh track marks on his arms; Joe surmises that Ron had been shooting up when the call about the riot came in.
• Co-Dragons: Senior directors Meredith, Caesar, and Larry, former Elan inmates who are second only to Jay Cirri. Joe mentions that Ron is the unofficial fourth member of this group.
• Color-Coded Eyes: In a comic that is primarily Deliberately Monochrome, a handful of characters are given specific iris colors.
  • Green and Mean:
    • Christy is usually seen with green eyes.
    • There's also one-off character Anthony from Chapter 48, a kid who was sent to Elan for beating up his pregnant girlfriend and stabbing someone.
    • Ditto an unnamed female Elan staff member who screams at Joe in the following chapter.
    • Cathy, the unkind teacher in charge of the court-mandated drug education class that Joe attends as an adult, has green eyes. Joe even points out that he gets serious Christy vibes from her.
  • Icy Blue Eyes:
    • Gino is depicted with icy blue eyes; his moral ambiguity becomes a plot point several times during the story. Specifically, Gino is seen in Chapter 59 with blue eyes as he gives Joe "the weirdest fucking stare ever. It was...unsettling."
    • Jay Cirri is also depicted with icy blue eyes in flashbacks to his past. However, when Joe meets him later on, Cirri's eyes are colorless and lifeless to reflect that he's become an Empty Shell.
    • Joe's college Love Interest Eva, a drug addict who Joe says initially started off "for sure just using me" before entering into a toxic relationship with him, has icy blue eyes as well.
  • Innocent Blue Eyes:
    • Joe's former "big brother" Matt from Chapters 20 and 21, who mercifully refuses to fight an already beat-up Joe during Joe's first Ring, is depicted with blue eyes.
    • One-off character Brian from Chapter 48, who lost his parents as a baby and was sent to Elan by the state after continuously running away from abusive group homes, also has blue eyes.
    • Katie, a teenager forced into Elan by her Wicked Stepfather about a decade after Joe's time there, is depicted with blue eyes.
  • Ron is often seen with brown eyes.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Elan and its mental conditioning are represented by shades of red, black, white, and gray, with the occasional splash of yellow and hot pink to represent the uniforms used to humiliate non-strength students.
  • Blue is often used for a pop of color, depending on the situation, although it usually shows up whenever Joe talks about the outside world, the sky, or the Great Power. Shades of purple are used as well, sporadically.
  • Aside from Christy's eyes, green is sometimes used as a more positive, naturalistic color. Green and several cool colors are also used during a brief scene where Joe is seen having calm conversations with Gino, explaining that it was the only "real" thing in his life.
  • Joe's hallucinations are usually multicolored.
  • After Joe's graduation, a much more varied, less monochrome palette of colors is used to show how much of a shock post-Elan life is.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: It's definitely played with as to how Elan's prisoners come to accept the constant abuse and psychological warfare. For Joe in particular, when he first arrives, he can't get over how truly bizarre the school's caste system and attack therapy is. By the time he leaves after three years, he's normalized it to an extent, even though it ends up leaving him with heaps of PTSD and emotional issues.
• The Confidant:
  • Joe regards his older sister as one. She's the only person he talks to on the phone when he escapes Elan, and she seems to be sympathetic to his situation. It's one of the major reasons Elan forbids Joe from talking to her.
  • Against Joe's better judgement, a rebellious kid named Gino — who openly sees through and rejects Elan's bullshit — also becomes one. Joe acknowledges that his need for Gino's confidence is almost like an addiction, as it's one of the only "real" friendships he makes in Elan. This almost comes back to bite Joe when Gino starts naming people who'd confided in him, although Gino ultimately doesn't name Joe.
  • After leaving Elan, Joe's friend "Quiet Bill" becomes another confidant, quietly listening to Joe's stories about Elan, and asking him the kinds of questions that indicate he's genuinely interested.
• Confusion Fu: When Joe and Gino drive up to Maine, their "plan" to disrupt Elan essentially boils down to somehow avoiding all the guard posts, sneaking or forcing their way into Elan 8, yelling "FIRE", and causing enough chaos to get multiple kids to run for it. Joe mentions that if they were to help one kid escape, then they'd see it as a win. They don't actually go through with it, though.
• Content Warnings: Chapter 99 has a trigger warning for suicide; the scene depicts Joe witnessing a jumping suicide near him in the "dragon city," and how deeply it affects him. The warning also says where the reader can skip ahead on the page if they choose.
• Cool Big Sis: Joe's older sister, who he feels like is his protector and confidante. His affection for her is weaponized by Elan; they forbid him from talking about her, forbid him from talking to her during one of his rare phone calls home, destroy all the letters she writes him, and don't invite her to his "graduation." The one time he's able to communicate with her during his ordeal is when he's on the run, when she tells him that P and B got a plea deal.
  • She keeps this up after he graduates Elan. She makes frequent visits from college, doesn't press him for details about what happened in Maine, and gently pushes him to go to a party so he can get back to being social.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Joe describes Larry, one of three higher-ups between the heads of the Elan houses and Jay Cirri, as giving off this vibe. More specifically, Larry's vibe was described as "sociopathic Wall Street trader who'd slit his mother's throat to get ahead."
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Implied when Joe's sister tells him that his best friends P and B lawyered up and did community service, and weren't sent to places like Elan, because their parents had heard horror stories about those kinds of places. Later played completely and horrifyingly straight in Chapter 64 when Joe discovers that his own charges were dropped three months into his Elan stay, yet his parents decided to leave him in Elan anyway. When he asks his parents about this, they tell him that he was "out of control" and brush him off.
• Crush the Keepsake: One of the crueler things that the Elan staff does to Joe is show him that he received letters from his sister, read them quietly in front of him, then rip them up in his face while taunting him by saying he doesn't "deserve" them.
• Cult: The tagline for the comic is "A Cult Classic," and Joe calls it a cult in the opening line; Elan is very much a cult of the mind. Very early on in the story, Joe recognizes that Elan stealing his clothes is a way of taking away his identity, and he notes that it's very "culty."
  • Joe comes to find out that his college roommate Ezra had been raised in a fanatical fringe religious cult that believes in arranged marriages and "royal favor" in the afterlife.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Discussed in Chapter 64, when P comes down from college to visit Joe, and very visibly sees that something is wrong with Joe. At the end of his visit, he brings up how broken Joe seems, and Joe is about to open up about Elan — starting off with how lucky P and B were that their charges were dropped — when P tells Joe that Joe's charges were dropped, too.
• Deducing the Secret Identity: Elan and its administrators apparently never figure out that Joe was actually "Dave Westminister" and u/gzasmyhero. However, during a video call some time after Elan closes, Gino flat-out asks Joe whether he was "Dave Westminister," and Joe is so stunned by Gino's brazenness that he instantly confirms it.
• Defeat as Backstory: Peter, the Elan Support Person who escorts Joe on his first parental outing, and who threatens Joe with severe consequences should Joe escape. Joe later maces and escapes from Peter in Chapter 38; upon returning to Elan, Peter is shot-down because he "let" Joe escape. He is last seen in Chapter 48 as a non-strength staring daggers at Joe. This makes it ever the more chilling at the end of Chapter 64, when Peter drives six hours to Joe's street and calls Joe up specifically to tell him and set up a meeting. Given the severe fallout of their last encounter and the ominousness of how the chapter ends, Peter's intentions seem very shady, at best, and Joe is Genre Savvy enough to turn the offer to meet down.
• Delivery Not Desired:
  • In Chapter 70, Joe takes to drafting letters to his parents about Elan, but never sends them. He does note that just simply writing them makes him feel a little better.
  • After his divorce from Maria, Joe drafts several emails to her that he never sends.
• Dénouement Episode: The Epilogue chapter serves as this, with Joe reflecting on his time working on the comic, and telling about where he and a few other characters ended up.
• Department of Child Disservices: A social worker spooks Joe's parents and convinces them to send Joe to Elan rather than attempt a plea deal, and several kids at Elan are supposedly "problem kids" stuck in the foster or juvie system, who are dumped into Elan to get them out of social workers' hair.^note Joe specifically mentions the kids for cash scandal at one point when talking about it.
• Despair Event Horizon: Because of Elan's cruelty, Joe has to overcome Despair Event Horizons over and over and over and over and over again. He hits a major point of despair when he's recaptured and abused after his escape. He despairs yet again when his parents fully buy into Elan's lie that Joe needs to stay past age 18 to "complete" the program.
• Determinator:
  • When they first reunite, Gino tells Joe about another kid who had rebelled against Elan for fourteen months straight without breaking,^note Joe's narration mentions that the longest holdout he personally saw at Elan was eight months alternating between sitting in the corner and fighting in the Ring and only being allowed the worst scraps of food, before the school gave up on him and kicked him out. Before releasing him, though, they isolated him in a trailer and gave him whatever food, clothes, or movies he wanted in order to get him to keep quiet about the abuse. Gino was one of the few inmates allowed to be an SP for this kid, but Elan threatened Gino not to tell anyone else about him.
    Gino: This was probably the first kid in five years who rebelled his way into getting kicked out, but they couldn't let that secret out or else every kid in every house would copy it.
  • Later, Joe becomes one after 2009 when he reads a Huffington Post article about the "troubled teen" industry and decides to take down Elan for good. He throws his weight into flooding search engine results with pages and blog posts about how bad Elan is, he puts together and posts an abridged version of Duck in a Raincoat online, and he devotes himself to uncovering and researching current inmates so he can reach out to their families to try and help them.
• Disaster Dominoes: What leads to Joe getting sent to Elan School:
  • Joe's friend P had been trying to score some pot, and met up with some seniors in the woods who jumped him.
  • After this defeat, the boys decide to pool their remaining money and buy weed from B's cousin, a reliable weed connect. They end up getting a 1/4-pound brick of marijuana, which they decide to divide into dime and nickel bags to sell at school to get their money back and have some weed left over. They decide to do so discreetly in P's parents' summer cabin one state over, and Joe borrows his sister's car to drive them there.
  • The boys drive by the only cop on patrol in the county, who pulls them over because of "reasonable suspicion the driver is underage." The cop then coerces the boys — who are understandably nervous — into letting him search the vehicle, where he finds the paraphernalia.
  • When he's brought in for questioning, Joe can't claim ignorance since it's his sister's car and he doesn't want her to get into trouble, so he says the drugs were all his and that his friends had no knowledge of it. Unbeknownst to each other, P and B also separately say that it's theirs and no one else's, showing the True Companions angle to the classic Prisoner's Dilemma.
  • The boys get slapped with drug trafficking charges, and Joe's parents (who are beyond pissed at Joe) hire a social worker. Said social worker convinces Joe's parents that the judge will want to make an example of the boys, and gives them pamphlets for "troubled teen" academies — including one for Elan School.^note In his Dark Dark World podcast interview, Joe said that it was the judge who gave his parents the Elan pamphlet, and he brings up the kids for cash scandal.
  • And to make things worse, after Joe has been sent to Elan and the charges are dropped anyway, his parents are so offended by his behavior, and have had so many lies thrown at them about the program's efficacy, that they leave him there for three extra years.
• Disproportionate Retribution: It's ultimately played with; Joe admits that he probably did need some kind of intervention with structured therapy as a teen, but he didn't need or deserve anything close to Elan's abuse. What happens is that Joe's parents are completely beside themselves when the police catch Joe and his friends crossing state lines with marijuana, because they're concerned with what the neighbors think. They heavily berate him, then a social worker convinces them to send him to Elan in lieu of a supposedly assured prison sentence. Then, after his charges are dropped three months into his stay, they keep him there for an extra three years to punish and "reform" him further. Joe later confronts his parents about it:
  Joe's Dad: Well, the charges were irrelevant.
  Joe: What? Dad?
  Joe's Mom: Joe, you were out of control and everyone just agreed that since you were already at Elan getting help...actually, we don't need to explain ourselves. Let the past be past.
  • Meanwhile, his friends P and B stay out of trouble because their parents are much more understanding, know that their boys don't have a record of criminal or troublesome behavior, don't buy into legal intimidation, and get a lawyer to broker a plea deal that ultimately drops most of the serious charges and leaves P and B with a slap on the wrist.
  • Played straight when Joe goes to visit his former Elan classmate Randall in Chapter 68. Randall seeks out, attacks, and hospitalizes another college student over harassing a girl.
• Don't Say Such Stupid Things!: After Joe listens to Casey's Vietnam War story, Joe quietly says that it made his experiences at Elan seem like nothing by comparison. Casey calls him out on this, and is probably the first person to ever tell Joe that Elan's abuse was unequivocally wrong.
  Casey: HEY! Bullshit. You stop with that! Stop with that bull. Listen boy! And you listen good! Don't you never let nobody tell you that you can't be sad 'cause some bonehead somewhere else has been sadder. That's stupid. That's dumb as saying you can't be happy 'cause someone, somewhere else has been more happy. It ain't no contest, Joe, and don't you never forget that. Never. I heard your story and you were wronged, boy. And them feelings you feel, they ain't wrong, okay? They ain't wrong.
• Dream Intro:
  • Chapter 54 opens with Joe walking downstairs and seeing his sister, who offers him weed and then screams at him; it turns out he's still in Elan and dreaming.
  • Chapter 63 opens with Joe dreaming that his graduation hadn't actually happened and that he was still trapped in Elan.
  • Chapter 90 begins with Joe dreaming about storming Elan with a small army, only to be stopped by the inmates who are led by Gino.
  • Chapter 93 begins with Joe having another Elan nightmare, which his subconscious then subverts when he remembers that Elan School had closed.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Joe notes that suicide has been attempted a few times at these schools and it's one of the reasons that sharp objects are kept away from the kids. This made pens a common item in attempts and one kid even attempts it during a riot at the end of Joe's stay.
  • Sadly, many of the former Elan students also end up killing themselves as adults; Joe says that one of the frequent causes of post-Elan "tragic deaths" is suicide.
• Drugs Are Bad:
  • The comic is generally critical of this mindset, especially as the inciting incident for the whole affair is Joe getting busted for marijuana possession, which leads to outrage from Joe's parents, and eventually his incarceration at Elan, which the comic makes clear is a disproportionate response. Several of the kids at Elan are stuck there for drug use or possession, their lives ruined by the war on drugs and an uncaring justice system. Later on, Joe is extremely critical of Cathy's inaccurate Reagan-era anti-drug diatribes, and does what he can to shift the Dovetail class' focus more towards discussion rather than soapboxing.
  • The trope is played straighter with other characters, though the comic still treats addiction with a degree of sympathy. At Elan, Joe observes how Ron's heroin addiction degrades his mental and physical health. After Elan, Joe struggles with alcohol and drugs to cope with his trauma after Elan, and gets sick from taking 12 pills that Eva gives him; and his friend B is visibly damaged thanks to an addiction to harder drugs like meth.
  • The comic also shows how drug deals can inherently go sideways. P tries to score some weed from some high school seniors and gets robbed, Joe gets into several shady situations with dealers, and Wilma and the other Elan survivors get robbed after attempting to score some heroin.
• Drugs Are Good:
  • After returning from Elan, Joe finds that a marijuana high completely drowns out his Elan conditioning and his PTSD-induced anger, and takes him to a "good place." He describes his Elan conditioning as an off-tune "evil instrument" playing awful music, and weed as a plunger mute that "...made it easier to push them into the background noise." Later zig-zagged in college; as becomes more of a hardcore user, his aggressiveness also increases, causing him to terrorize another student. Eventually, he decides to cut off drinking after being isolated from his peers, but realizes that alcohol was the only thing that helped him deal with his panic attacks.
  • Played straight with Ezra. When he tries weed on his and Joe's last day being roommates, it helps break him out of the spell that his own cult had him under, and he parts ways with Joe resolving never to return to that cult. That said, he also does tell Joe that smoking pot once in his life is more than enough.
• Drunk Driver:
  • The van driver, "Casey Jones," who picks up Joe after Joe escapes from his parents and Peter. The driver constantly drinks from a 40 of Olde English malt liquor, and at one point takes a hit from a marijuana pipe. They ultimately don't get into a wreck, and Casey is able to safely drop Joe off in Brooklyn.
  • Joe later becomes one in college. He admits that this is a terrible idea, though, and regrets doing it.
  • When Joe and Gino drive up to Maine, Gino drives and throws back beer like it's nothing. Gino eventually picks up on how uncomfortable it makes Joe, and lets Joe take over driving.
  • Joe looks Peter up some years later and finds that Peter survived a drunk driving accident that killed a girl in his car.
• Dude, Where's My Reward?:
  • As Joe points out, it's possible to be stuck in Elan for years doing exactly what they tell you, and not receiving any promotion or graduation date.
  • When Joe becomes a re-entry student, Elan gives him a part-time job doing manual labor around the campus, and tells him that they're putting his pay into a bank account. When he graduates, he doesn't get access to this account at all, if it even existed, meaning he essentially did unpaid labor for the school.
  • In college, Joe and his roommates spend a lot of time and money fixing up their slum. The landlord praises them for their good work, then promptly evicts them in favor of new tenants.

Tropes E-K

• Elephant in the Living Room: Mentioned at the end of Chapter 74, as Joe explains that by the start of his senior year of college, the topic of Elan School is consciously avoided whenever he visits his parents because it always leads to a fight.
• The End... Or Is It?: Chapter 80 is called "The End" and even features a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue detailing what happens to several of the characters. Then this is derailed when Joe — who by this point is happily married and about a decade out of Elan — sees some reader comments about Elan on a 2009 Huffington Post article. Joe's "present day" narration then delivers a Wham Line that the comic has actually been building to this point. Previously, it was "Elan School vs. Joe" (recounting Joe's time in Elan), then "Joe vs. Joe" (recounting his post-Elan struggles up until he met Maria and forced himself to leave his bad habits behind), meaning that the true "Joe vs. Elan School" is about to happen.
• Enemy Eats Your Lunch: Subverted. After Joe returns from Elan, Joe's childhood bully Darren swipes a beer from Joe, and Joe decks him when Darren goes to take a sip.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Joe has one in Chapter 87 — appropriately titled "Epiphany" — when Dee-Ray says that any Google results for his own name only show his time on the Elan track team. This gives Joe the idea to start Googling high school track team results for Maine and Elan. This gives Joe enough names to start secretly researching people using his workplace's people searching engine.
• Even Evil Has Standards: During one of Joe's Heroic BSODs, he's completely blanked out and doesn't respond to Christy yelling at him. She immediately orders to other kids to hog-tie Joe and call a general meeting; Ron then intervenes, calls them off, and sends Joe back to the corner instead to cope.
• Evil, Inc.: Joe isn't complimentary in his depiction of Elan School. Elan is a for-profit institution that abuses and neglects the young people in its charge, while raking in millions in tuition money for its sociopathic owner and overseers.
• Evil Teacher: Zig-zagged. The school's administrators know exactly what they're doing perpetuating abuse and torture, but they don't care. Any hired staff from outside Elan (like tutors) either don't know the full extent of the abuse, know about it and do what they can to help the kids, or are fired after raising objections.
• Evil Versus Evil:
  • The infighting between Ron and Christy gets a lot of attention. Ron is maybe slightly better in that he's somewhat less sadistic and slightly more reasonable than Christy, but he still directly participates in most of the abuse at Elan.
  • Joe's parents, who had hitherto appeared to have been in sync about their social status, self-righteousness, and treatment of Joe, have a big argument between themselves in Chapter 75 when Mrs. Nobody gets mad at Mr. Nobody for declaring that the last "favor" he's going to do for Joe is drop him off at the military recruiting station. By the time of the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, they've gotten divorced, which Joe surmises is because he left home for good and "they had no one else to project their failures onto."
• Failure Is the Only Option: When it comes to rebellion or escape. Run into the woods surrounding Elan? There's guards everywhere who know the woods and will recapture you. Go out with your parents? Elan will send an escort who, if he fails, will be verbally abused and demoted back to zero rank. Escape to New York City? You can't blend in; Jay Cirri has enough influence to offer a bounty to whomever brings you back to Elan, meaning you're returned in less than a week. Tell an adult that you want to get your parents' permission for "the Ring"? He's already called them, told them some bullshit, and gotten their approval. Turning 18? Elan has already convinced your parents that you have to "complete the program" at the school's discretion, and your parents are more than willing to disown you and leave you penniless if you walk out.
• False Friend: Joe is Genre Savvy enough to recognize this when Peter calls him, pretends to be chummy, and claims to be in Joe's hometown to have a friendly chit-chat. Joe picks it apart in his mind: here is an individual who had a reputation in Elan for being cold and petty, had an acrimonious history with Joe, won't identify themselves (but Joe recognized their voice anyway), somehow knew Joe was out of Elan, tracked down Joe's address and phone number, drove 500 miles to specifically see Joe, and very likely didn't come alone. The major tell is when Peter gets agitated and desperate when Joe makes excuses.
• Fatal Attractor: Joe's narration lampshades this in Chapter 68 when he examines why he's so attracted to his drug-addicted college classmate Eva, saying that Elan's brainwashing may have subconsciously caused him to seek out Broken Birds so he can "save" them.
• Fate Drives Us Together: Joe attributes his becoming college roommates with Ezra to the Great Energy, as he's able to understand what Ezra went through as another victim of a cult, and helps break him out of it.
• Felony Misdemeanor: Joe has often pointed out that while there were several bad apples, or a few troubled kids (like himself) who probably needed actual therapeutic intervention, a lot of Elan's inmates were otherwise good kids without criminal records who were sent to the school for petty reasons. This included children who had talked back to their parents, teens who had experimented with alcohol or pot once, girls in religious families who had been caught hanging out with boys, foster children dumped there by social services — and a major issue was that Elan's methods were universal and weren't adjusted to match the supposed offenses.
• Fire-Forged Friends: This seems to be the case with Joe and a few of his Elan classmates, as they were forced to endure the school's abuse together.
  • Gino and Joe remain friends because of their time together at Elan, with Joe even naming Gino as his best friend, and Joe noting that Gino is the only person who can really get him laughing after Elan. However, Ron's continued presence in Gino's life strains their friendship for Joe.
  • Wilma and Joe also remain friends after Elan; Joe and several other former Elan students go visit her in Denver a few years after leaving the school.
  • Billy and Joe are also this, partially because of Elan, and partially because of their experiences while visiting Wilma in Denver. Joe notes that he and Billy are still friends today, and Billy even helped him remember some details about the Denver trip when it came time to write those chapters.
  • Averted for Ron and Joe. On Joe's graduation day, one of Ron's parting thoughts is that he believes that he and Joe will remain lifelong friends, ostensibly because Ron himself had gone through the school's "therapy" some years before. Joe ultimately wants nothing to do with Ron.
• Foil:
  • Gino for Joe. He's a few months younger than Joe, and because he's forced into Elan to get out of a supposedly worse sentence, he's arguably in a similar predicament that Joe was in at the beginning of the story. By the time Gino shows up, though, Joe has been in Elan for a few years. Gino openly ridicules many of the things about Elan that Joe himself ridiculed at the beginning of the story, and this serves as a brutal contrast to what Joe has become. Later on, though, it's turned on its head: Joe leaves Elan still hating Ron, while Gino has not only bonded with Ron (due to Stockholm Syndrome), but has also gone into "business" with Ron. To cap it all, when Joe Googles Gino's name after seeing Gino wracked with religious guilt, he finds that Gino was listed as an Elan recruiter by another Elan survivor. Gino eventually dies of a drug overdose a few chapters after Joe talks about cleaning up his own act. However, Joe lampshades this trope in the final chapter, saying that Gino wasn't written as an explicit counterpoint or to advance Joe's own story.
  • P for Joe's parents after Joe returns home. P very clearly sees from Joe's behavior that whatever happened to Joe during the three years was very traumatic, and asks him about it. Joe's parents, on the other hand, either can't tell or are actively ignoring that anything's amiss with their own son, and callously brush off Joe when he brings up their leaving him at Elan.
  • As it turns out, P and B are foils for each other. After Joe's return, P comes to visit Joe, brings him some weed, and shows some genuine concern for his well-being. B shows up a few chapters later looking far worse for wear, gives Joe some LSD, and offers Joe some crystal meth; unlike with P, Joe says that the "'spark' of friendship wasn't there and that sucked."
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • Based on what he says in the narrative, we know that Joe eventually gets out of Elan after about three years, and that his experiences severely strain his relationship with his parents.
  • Anyone with any knowledge about the school also knows that Elan would remain open until 2011, and that most if not all of its staff — including its founder Joseph Ricci (called "Jay Cirri" in the comic), who would eventually die a rich man in 2001 — won't face justice for their abuses.
  • In a story where Anyone Can Die (like Wilma later does), we know that Joe's classmate Billy survives to the present day, since Joe's narration mentions that he consulted Billy when writing the chapters about their trip to Denver.
  • Zig-zagged: at the beginning of Chapter 84, Joe makes a quick mention about writing and drawing the webcomic "while juggling a full-time job, marriage, and kids." This is stated at a point where Joe's and Maria's tensions are beginning to bubble up, making the statement ambiguous. The conclusion becomes much less foregone after they initially separate, then becomes ambiguous when they get back together, and ultimately leads to a situation where we know Joe will meet someone new after he divorces Maria and says he never sees her again.
• Foreign Exchange Student: Joe becomes one in Chapter 76 when he begins a study abroad program in Vrátskajeki.
• Foreshadowing: Joe mentions that there's a crazy reason he introduced his college roommate Ezra to the story, but doesn't tell why right away. He also mentions that his first run-in with the police while out driving around and smoking weed ends without incident, but also mentions that he doesn't learn anything from the incident and his luck will soon run out.
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • Joe's narration mentions that if he hadn't been sent to Elan, a Relationship Upgrade would have been very likely for him and Chloe.
  • Joe spends a good portion of Chapter 74 wondering about the "what ifs" surrounding his Denver trip, including what would have happened if he hadn't gone^note He would have been home when his ceiling collapsed onto his bed, and he could have been injured, or if he hadn't freaked out and bolted during his Mushroom Samba^note He would have been robbed along with Wilma, Billy, and everyone else.
  • Joe ends Chapter 97 by saying that if a local wino hadn't found his passport after it had been discarded by the thieves who stole Joe's backpack, then Joe would have missed his flight to get back with Sofi and he would be "living an entirely different reality."
• From Bad to Worse: All the damn time.
  • At age 16, Joe and his friends are caught carrying a brick of weed across state lines. His parents berate him about it constantly. Then he's kidnapped in the middle of the night — traumatizing on its own — and then hauled to the utter madness that is Elan School.
  • After escaping during his family outing, Joe gets recaptured in Brooklyn and hauled back to Elan. Then Ron drags him in front of a three-house general meeting, where he gets hours of verbal abuse. Then he's put into a three-house Ring. Then he's sent to sit in the corner for months.
  • In college, Joe goes to Denver, has a horrifying mushroom trip, gets dropped off at the hospital by the cops, and returns to find that Wilma and company have been robbed. Then, after an exhausting bus ride back home, he comes home to find that his bedroom ceiling has caved in, forcing him to relocate to a corner of his house's common area.
  • Joe meets Maria, gets married, and they move to New York; even though they live in a squalid apartment and Joe is working dead-end temp jobs, Joe seems to have found some stability. When he starts working to subvert Elan, he starts getting death threats that worry him, even though he's working anonymously. Joe and Maria decide to save up to emigrate to Italy, and fill out the required paperwork, only for the Italian authorities to laugh in their faces. Joe and Maria separate, get back together, use up the last of their savings traveling around Europe, then part ways. And then Joe finds himself back where he always ends up: living in his childhood bedroom, completely miserable.
• Gaining the Will to Kill:
  • When Ron drags Gino in front of a general meeting to name other people's guilt, Joe readies himself to harm as many people as he can in case Gino names Joe. Gino names another kid instead and Joe gets a reprieve, but Joe notes how painful and horrifying it is that he even got to the point where he was willing to harm innocent people in order to turn himself into a liability for Elan.
  • After Joe returns home, before he goes to bed each evening, he starts keeping a baseball bat within arm's reach, as well as a lighter and a can of hairspray. As he says, "I didn't want to burn someone to death, but murder was definitely on the table if anyone ever, EVER tried to take me against my will again."
• Gideon Ploy: A variation during Joe's efforts to take down Elan. Elan's online presence touts an attendance figure of 150 residents in three houses, but Katie tells Joe that the recession actually brought it down to approximately 35 students in one house.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Joe experiences this firsthand when he's forced into "the Corner," and he later watches it happen to other inmates as well. He notes that it's a torture he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy, including his torturers at Elan, and that it's much worse than standard solitary confinement because anyone put in "the Corner" isn't allowed to even move.
• Gray-and-Gray Morality: Joe's power struggles with Cathy at the Dovetail drug class. Joe is kind of a dick about it, but genuinely wants to have a discussion about drug usage while fighting his own demons. Cathy is controlling and is caught up using outdated curriculum with an outdated mindset, but does what she does because of her history with AA.
• Greater-Scope Villain: For most of the story, Elan's founder Jay Cirri, and Joe goes over why in Chapters 46 and 47. Cirri started out as a petty thug and addict, learned abusive "therapies" from the Synanon-inspired Daybreak Village in the 1960s, then founded Elan School based off of these "therapies." By the time of the story has spent over twenty years bilking parents and state governments out of millions while convincing them that problematic children need his school. He's so intimidating, and has so much clout, that a highway trooper turns a blind eye to Joe's second kidnapping upon hearing Cirri's name. That said, three weeks from graduation, Joe finally meets Cirri while doing manual labor on his estate, only to find that the man has dementia, is little more than an Empty Shell, and is very visibly sick — although Joe grimly notes that Cirri is still surrounded by a very evil air.
• Hand Wave: The cliffhanger ending to Chapter 74, and the first part of Chapter 75, deals with Joe's parents declaring that his college education is being cut off due to his Denver hospital bill, and escalates into another fight when they refuse to listen to him about seeking solace from other Elan survivors. He kicks a hole in their wall and drives back to his college town; however, more than halfway through the rest of Chapter 75, Joe notes that his parents ultimately flake on forcing him to leave college.
• Happy Ending Override: Starting at the end of Chapter 80, after the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue concluding the story's first two acts.
  • Joe has fallen in love with Maria, stopped his risky habits, gotten married, and moved away from his parents for good to New York City, and is living his best life. However, sometime around 2009, he reads some internet comments about Elan School; this leads to a brand new Heroic BSoD, which ends with Joe's angry resolution that something needs to be done to stop Elan School for good. His crusade, along with his dead-end jobs and and his family's poor living conditions, takes a toll on his mental health, which makes him and Maria decide to move to Italy. However, the bureaucrats in Italy refuse to let Maria and Joe emigrate, and Joe and Maria's marriage gradually falls apart.
  • Also for Gino. Joe notes in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue that Gino hangs out with Ron and earns a lot of money. But Gino's well-being is called into question when Gino comes to visit Joe in New York, is shown to be strung out on drugs at one point, has an existential chat with Joe about the Great Energy, and may in fact be a recruiter for Elan. Gino eventually dies from a drug overdose some years later, the day before he's scheduled to go to prison for an undisclosed crime.
• Happiness in Slavery: During his brief time on the run, Joe goes to a library in New York City and reads about Stockholm Syndrome, and recognizes that 25% of kids he saw at Elan who were the most degraded developed a special bond with their abusers. His narration also wryly notes that a good number of Elan's longtime prisoners would have professed their love for the school if it had been raided by the cops, rather than say anything against it.
• Harmful to Minors: Hoo boy. Imagine your child being constantly berated by staff and peers, forced to endure constant humiliating punishment for perceived slights, not receive an adequate education, and the occasional mandated "ring" fight with boxing gloves. Imagine this torture getting into their brain, eroding their empathy, putting them into a raw "survival" mode, leaving them (at best) with PTSD, or (at worst) leading them to a worse end. Then imagine the cult-like efficiency that this place has perfected to keep this big lie operational, including pulling the wool over your eyes as they convince you that your child's stories are exaggeration — to which you don't know they'll be SEVERELY punished for if they do say anything — that teenagers are "happy" there (under threat of extreme punishment if they don't perpetuate this lie), all while they gleefully take your money while convincing you that he or she "needs" this. And it's all run by sociopathic monsters who (at best) think they're doing the right thing or (at worst) don't give a damn about your child's actual well-being.
• Hate Sink:
  • While there's a number of detestable people running Elan, Christy's cruelty gets a lot of attention. She's one of the heads of Elan 8, and she directly causes much of the hardship that Joe endures, including showing him a complete lack of any respect, and extending his stay at the school only because she'd become reliant on Joe to do her dirty work. At the end of his time at Elan, Joe is allowed to invite staff members to speak at his graduation, and makes a point of not inviting Christy — which doesn't matter anyway because Christy invites herself.
  • Joe has absolutely no problem vilifying Elan School's owner Jay Cirri. Cirri started out as a petty thug, got roped into the Synanon-inspired Daybreak Village in the Sixties, and walks away with it with enough knowledge of its methodology to co-found Elan School. From Elan, Cirri rakes in millions of dollars in tuition fees at the expense of the children's well-being, and personally oversaw its earliest punishment methods, which included horrors like dumping buckets of human waste on its residents. Joe alleges that Cirri burned down several buildings he owned at Elan and at his racetrack to collect the insurance money, drove his wife to a breakdown that required a hospital stay, and has enough clout in the Maine political scene to keep law enforcement at bay.
  • Joe's parents take over this role in the story not long after Joe leaves Elan, as their constant stubbornness and selfishness up against Joe's struggles leads to a very unflattering portrayal.
• Heel–Face Turn: Ron, seemingly. Towards the end of the story, a strung-out Ron shows back up at Elan after having been missing for months, and attempts to get Joe to escape with him. However, Joe doesn't buy it for a second — he has plenty of bad history with Ron, and knows that Ron is a Manipulative Bastard who could be "testing" him, and knows how Elan loves to move the goalposts with regard to a "graduation" date to continue conning parents out of money — so Joe refuses. Ron then storms into Christy's office and gets into a shouting match about how Joe should be allowed to leave.
• Held Back in School: Exploited. Elan regularly holds back its students in order to extract further tuition fees. The school forces Joe to repeat his senior year, and when it looks like Ron is "testing" Joe, Joe mentally notes that the oldest person at the school at that time is 22.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Joe's first experiences with Elan-induced PTSD occur when he's on the run in Brooklyn. He finds that he can't sit on the inside of a restaurant booth surrounded by people without panicking. He also has a panic attack when he's in the park and makes eye contact with a young person holding a clipboard like an Elan coordinator; the person turns out to be a volunteer taking names for a petition.
  • Joe gets into a series of BSOD's after his recapture. He spends weeks in the corner, guarded by another Elan inmate, induces hallucinations through oxygen deprivation, and has a series of existential crises that cause him to go slowly mad. He also breaks down and blanks out on his 17th birthday, and receives heavy verbal abuse from Christy when he doesn't respond to her.
  • After leaving Elan, Joe's sister takes him to a house party. Joe gets overwhelmed by the noise and the partygoers, and swiftly runs out of the house and hides behind a parked car for three hours.
  • At the end of Chapter 80, Joe stumbles upon a 2009 Huffington Post article about the troubled teen industry being hit by the economic recession. Under the article is a comment from a fellow ex-inmate from Elan relating their own experiences with their time there, and stating their hope that the place finally goes under so that no one else has to suffer the through the same atrocities they were subjected to. Joe completely shuts down and starts crying. He is so out of it that he doesn't notice his wife repeatedly asking him what is wrong, and it isn't until she starts physically shaking him that he snaps back to reality.
  • Joe gets interviewed (with his face blurred) for a documentary about Elan called The Last Stop. However, when he sits down to watch it, he gets a panic attack about three minutes in; he can't even bring himself to fast forward through it to his interview, as even brief snippets of Elan imagery set off his PTSD. He notes that he still can't watch it to this day.
• Heroic Safe Mode: During an extreme punishment at Elan, Joe turns inward and develops a concept of the "Great Energy," which gives him drive and determination to play along with Elan's cruel game and gives him the drive to survive. Then it's somewhat subverted when Joe gains a high rank at Elan, and notices that Elan's conditioning is interfering with his concept, and is leeching from it like a parasite.
• Hero of Another Story: "Casey Jones," the van driver who picks up Joe hitchhiking, although calling him a "hero" is a stretch since he's clearly up to something shady with the snippets of his covert activities that Joe witnesses in Boston and Brooklyn. But he's nice enough to give Joe a ride, listen to his story, and give him some cash.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Joe relies on this when he's laying low in New York City. Since the city is so big, he thinks that he'll be able to blend in with the crowd. It's then frighteningly subverted when Joe is recaptured on his second day in the city (and third day on the run). To this day he still doesn't know how this was even possible, although he speculates that a bounty was issued, and that Jay Cirri had enough connections to pull it off.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: Joe drops acid in Chapter 67, and has revelations about life, death, and the relationships between life-defining moments and how daily decisions affect the course of one's life.
• High-School Hustler: Gino, both before and during Elan. Joe describes Gino's backstory getting rich from "pretty much every hustle that was around and available to a kid in New York City," and talks about the ways Gino uses his smarts to turn Elan's rules against other inmates.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Joe's parents thought sending him to Elan School would reform him and make him more docile; instead, it effectively ends his childhood, deprives him of a normal coming-of-age, causes emotional difficulties, and causes such severe PTSD that he gets heavy into drinking, drugs, and cigarettes to cope (the very things they were hoping to avoid).
• Honest John's Dealership: During one of his temp jobs while living in New York City, Joe works at a sketchy call center that sells junk to elderly people, and celebrates using deceptive tactics to do so. He finds that this place doesn't delete caller info even if the caller requests it, and often keeps buyers' card info on file so they can be upsold and charged without knowing it. Joe is absolutely disgusted by this, so he figures out the hotkey for permanently deleting callers' contact info, spends four days doing so while pretending to make sales (which the center doesn't check), and then walks out for good.
• Hope Is Scary: Played straight when Joe faces ways to leave the program. Graduation in particular renews a glimmer of hope, but along with that comes his white-hot fear that the school will do whatever it can to screw him over and hold him hostage for longer, which isn't helped by Christy's near-constant threats. Joe doesn't let his guard down until the moment he leaves Elan's gates as a graduate.
• Hope Spot:
  • The first time Joe tries running away, another Elan student finds him in the forest and pretends to help him so they can escape together. Except it's a ruse to bring Joe back to Elan.
  • During his first outing with his parents, after they react with hostility to his accusations about Elan's torture, Joe flees from them and his Elan monitor, makes his way through the woods, hitchhikes to New York City, and is sheltered by a Brooklyn teen. While in the city, he goes to the library to research Elan's methods, phones his sister to tell her what's going on and to learn about his friends' dropped charges, and comes up with plans to make his way back home and lay low. Then some goons find him a day later and drag him back to Maine.
  • A twofer surrounding Joe's 18th birthday, which he knows is a way out of Elan since he can sign himself out as a legal adult:
    • He wakes up back home and speaks to his sister. She comforts him, then tries to get him to take a hit of marijuana. When he objects, she turns hostile. Then he wakes up, and he's still in Elan.
    • Not long after this dream, he talks to his parents on the phone to discuss his coming home. Except Elan has already advised them that he needs to see the program through to its nebulous "graduation" day, or he'll end up as a criminal and drug addict. So Joe's parents threaten to disown him and leave him penniless on the streets if he doesn't see the program through.
  • By the time of his "graduation," Joe has become so used to enduring these that he knows that, until the exact moment he leaves Elan's gates with his parents, all it takes is one slip-up for Christy and Elan to give his parents some excuse to get back on the plane home and leave him there longer. When he finally leaves Elan at the end of Chapter 62, he thinks he's leaving for good, but as the narration states, "I was so fucking naive..."
  • At the beginning of Chapter 75, Joe tries to explain to his parents what Elan did to him and the others in his situation, and how it traumatized him. Joe is acutely aware by this point that his parents will latch on to any tiny excuse as a reason not to believe him and wave the whole thing away, so he tries to remain as calm and concise as he possibly can. When his parents don't interrupt him, Joe takes it as a good sign. Encouraged by this, he then go to on to say that he is in regular contact with other Elan survivors, and they are considering a class-action lawsuit against Elan, and he adds that if his parents are willing to support it, they have a chance of getting their money back. He then offers them that he can show them both the evidence of what happened to him and the information about the class-action suit on his computer straight away if they ask. His mother says that there is no need for that. Joe breathes an internal sigh of relief; finally his parents believe him. His mother then adds that any kook could write anything on the internet so she see no reason to look, before his father says that he will drive him down the military recruitment center, calling it the last "favor" he will do for him, triggering a vicious argument between him and Joe's mother. As they argue, Joe watches them, stunned in utter disbelief; even when he tried to be as diplomatic as he possibly could, they still wouldn't listen.
• How We Got Here:
  • Chapter 34 interrupts the story for a flashback to the brick of marijuana that Joe and his friends are caught with, prompting his parents to send him to Elan.
  • When Joe talks to the van driver who picked him up hitchhiking, the plot flashes back to The Vietnam War as the van driver tells his story.
  • While on the run in New York, Joe goes to the library a couple of times to research Elan's methodology. While there, he reads about the Synanon cult, and later reads about Stockholm Syndrome, the Milgram experiment, and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Each time, the comic then goes into a brief history about each.
  • Another later comic would flashback to Jay Cirri's loose connection to Synanon and his founding of Elan School.
  • Chapter 87 goes over what happened between Joe and Maria first moving to New York, and Joe doing temp work. This includes Joe's original plan to become an artist, Joe's first job selling posters, and how Joe ended up with the temp agency following the start of the Great Recession.
• Hypocrite: Joe describes himself as such in Chapter 58, although not proudly. During Ron's absence, Joe has fallen so far into Becoming the Mask that he's not only ruling Elan 8 with an iron fist, he's actively screwing over other kids in order to maintain his rank. He's doing this while concurrently befriending Gino, explaining that Gino's friendship is the only "real" thing in his life and it's like a drug, knowing full well that this kind of "contract" is explicitly against Elan's rules.
• Immoral Journalist: In Chapter 81, Joe contacts several Maine journalists about going after Elan School, imagining scenes of journalists confronting Elan staff on camera, figuring it would be compelling investigative journalism. All but one of the journalists who Joe reaches out to brush him off, and the one he talks to keeps Moving the Goalposts on what information he needs from Joe.
• Immune to Drugs: In Chapter 68, Joe's love interest Eva pops 18 pills at once for recreational usage, saying that she's so used to the drug that she has to take that many to feel any effect. This comes after telling Joe to take 12.
• Implicit Prison: Elan is ostensibly a reform school and has no bars, but it is heavily guarded and effectively a prison. The major difference is that the length of your "sentence" is up in the air since Elan can change it on a whim.
• Improperly Paranoid: Joe after graduating from Elan. On his way home, he barricades his hotel room's door, and is extremely leery of a group of middle-aged adults in the hotel's breakfast area. After he gets home, he can't bring himself to go out, and he begins sleeping with the door locked, a desk in front of the door, and with improvised weapons within arm's reach. When he drums up enough courage to walk down the street one day, he gets extremely nervous about a van pulling up close to him; he nearly goes into fight-or-flight mode until it turns out to be his close friend Chloe from before Elan.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Joe's frustration with his parents, combined with his frustration at the world's seeming indifference to the suffering and PTSD caused by Elan, leads Joe to steal a beer from a neighborhood party and buy a six pack from a convenience store.
• Inherent in the System: At multiple points throughout the story, Joe is extremely frustrated by how broader societal systems are set up to be indifferent to or complicit in allowing places like Elan School to operate. Law enforcement is disinterested in child abuse, lawyers don't see any kind of potential financial windfall from taking down child abusers, journalists are too indifferent or afraid to take on the story, and the broader public just doesn't seem to care. He especially reserves a segment of his ire towards the government of Maine, saying that their laws are so poorly designed that Elan could operate without having to worry about things like surprise inspections, and that a con artist like Jay Cirri could be openly applauded in the Maine legislature for overseeing what amounts to therapeutic quackery.
• Innocence Lost: A major theme in the comic. Joe gets hauled to Elan at 16 and loses three years of his teenage life there; when he gets out at age 19, he realizes that his friends have moved on with their lives normally, and that he missed out on experiences — like socializing or talking to girls — that a normal teenager would've and should've experienced. It also causes him to lose faith in the United States justice system, as he comes to discover that it is ignorant of, complicit in, or powerless against the systems in place that allow hellholes like Elan to operate.
• Interclass Friendship: Joe and his college friend Quiet Bill. Joe comes from an ostensibly middle class family in the American Midwest, and Bill is the son of a Los Angeles multi-millionaire. Joe finds out about Bill's background when he accompanies Bill on a trip to Los Angeles during Spring Break.
• Internet Counterattack: During the third part, Joe uses digital means get the word out there about Elan School, utilizing blogs and websites, and figuring how to manipulate search engines so that his articles are higher up in the search results than Elan's propaganda. It's slow going until he posts on r/self under the user name "gzasmyhero" and his post goes viral.
• I Should Have Been Better: Former Elan staff member Jerry — who Joe remembers fondly, because Jerry was kind to the inmates — tearfully apologizes to Joe and Gino, saying that he was fully aware that Elan School was "a horror show," and that he'd been sucked in and forced to go along with the abuse just like everyone else.
• It's All About Me: After his and his friends' arrests, Joe's parents are more concerned with their own public images than even trying to get him a plea deal like his friends P and B got, or listening to stories of his abuses at the hands of Elan's staff; as it turns out, they're more than willing to keep Joe in Elan even after his charges are dropped because the criminal charges are utterly irrelevant to them. It's very telling that whenever Joe's parents berate him, they keep saying, "WHAT WILL THE NEIGHBORS THINK?"
• I Will Fight No More Forever: Despite having successfully led the charge to shut down the Elan School, Joe ultimately makes the conscious decision not to rejoin his "core group" in further pursuing former Elan leadership or fighting against other troubled teen facilities, as he wants to focus on his own healing and peace. However, he does laud their continued work.
• Just Following Orders: Gino mentions this by name in his Kirk Summation to Joe in Chapter 57.
• Just Giving Orders: Discussed in Chapter 56. Joe mentions that Elan's staff usually ordered kids to brutalize each other, and never directly manhandled students, in order to maintain plausible deniability. He brings this up when he sees Ron directly manhandling a student during the riot, and says that it makes no sense, "...like the Mafia godfather with a gun in his hand, robbing a little corner store."
• Just Testing You: During Joe's time in the beach city, Ax-Crazy marijuana supplier Niels sucker punches Joe for being close with Laura and tells Joe that they're going to fight. When Joe instinctively gets into a defensive posture, Niels relaxes and explains that he wants to offer Joe a job as a drug courier, but he wanted to see how Joe would react to a violent confrontation first. Seeing that Joe had something "cold" and "fearless" inside of him convinces Niels that Joe is a good fit for the position.
• Just the First Citizen: Ron has a role in the Elan School hierarchy comparable to this. Officially, he's just another counselor. Unofficially he's one of Jay Cirri's four second-in-commands. He just keeps his lower rank so he can be more hands on with the students.
• Juvenile Hell: Elan School, and then some. Children are berated by staff and their own peers near constantly, they are forced to fight each other in "the ring," and they have to be on alert 24/7 for their duration. Worst part is, some of the residents are actual child criminals, but the majority are in for minor crimes (like Joe), or are innocent orphans dumped there by a foster system that can't be bothered to care for them.
• Karma Houdini Warranty:
  • Legally speaking, Jay Cirri never faces any punishment for what he did to all the kids who suffered through Elan School, or all the stuff he did before Elan. However, he suffers from dementia for a few years before dying of cancer at the relatively young age of 54.
  • Similarly, Jay's widow Sara Tarron also never faces any punishment for her role in continuing Elan's abuse or swindling Cirri's heirs out of his estate. However, Joe notes that she spends her last years of lucidity watching her cash cows — Elan School and Scarborough Downs — implode before her eyes, before she dies from Alzheimer's disease.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: In-Universe, in Chapter 64, Joe goes to the library to find a copy of Maura Curley's Duck in a Raincoat so he can show his parents proof of Elan's abuses. The librarian tells him that their library system doesn't have it, that it had a low print run, and that new copies are $500 a pop because of its rarity. Upon seeing his disappointment, she gives him an AOL free trial CD and suggests that he try to find a copy online. Later on in Chapter 83, Joe receives an anoymous email to his "Dave Westminster" Gmail that contains a full PDF of Duck in a Raincoat.
• Kirk Summation: Gino delivers a pretty heavy one to Joe in Chapter 57:
  Gino: This place is pretty wild, Joe. I can't lie, you do realize you're in a cult, right? You think this school is in bumble-fuck Maine for no reason? It's actually kinda interesting, we're just human Guinea pigs in an experiment and there's no way the clowns running this place are actually keepin' up with the long term results. I'm just sayin'. I mean, there's nothing we can do at this point, it's like being put in an insane-asylum and tryin' to convince them that you're actually sane. Well, that's just what a crazy person would say! You get me? I mean, why do ya' think they make you stay up all night just watching me? Could've just locked me in a fucking windowless room, but they need the higher-ups sleep deprived. Ya' get it? Scrambled-eggs brain. Keeps you soft. Just Following Orders, am I right Joe?
• Knight Templar: What makes Ron so dangerous is that not only is he a graduate of Elan like the kids (and has more insight into their mindset) but he also sincerely believes in the program. Even as he rakes in cash from their misery he's completely convinced that he's building them up to succeed.
• Knight Templar Parent: Subverted by Joe's parents. While he's actually in Elan, he thinks that they think Elan will actually help him, and are simply ignorant about what Elan is actually like. He also thinks that part of the reason he's in Elan is to avoid the criminal charges over the marijuana possession. Once he gets out, though, he learns that the charges were dropped only three months after he was enrolled in Elan, and his parents chose to keep him there for three extra years to punish him further. He contrasts his friend P's parents' reaction to the weed charge — amused disinterest, i.e. "We smoked weed at your age too!" — with his own parents, who berate him, throw away his music, complain about what the neighbors will think, call him a disgrace, and say "I Have No Son!". Then, after all that sturm-und-drang, they have him kidnapped and sent to Elan, and get talked into forcing him to stay at Elan past his 18th birthday lest he be formally abandoned and disowned. Once he's finally out of Elan and it turns out he isn't a completely well-adjusted young adult ready to go to college and chase a respectable career, his parents begin emotionally mistreating him, and insist that he's lying every time he tries to talk about what Elan was actually like. It also turns out that Joe's father is worse than his mother; at one point his father threatens to drop him off at a military recruiter and disown him, leading to a terrible fight between his parents.^note In a post on Patreon, Joe comments that as of March/April 2020, his mother finally apologized, implicitly for sending him to Elan and for not believing him when he told them what happened. However, this comes after 20+ years of disbelieving him and the mountains of evidence and testimony, during which Joe made several failed attempts to cut his parents out of his life entirely, and it's unclear even to Joe how much she believes of what everyone is saying. No mention is made of Joe's father apologizing or regretting anything, either.

Tropes L-R

• Last Girl Wins: Sofi is Joe's last love interest in the story, who Joe marries and is still with today.
• Last Stand: Joe prepares himself for one of these. Gino turns on kids who had confided in him, and gets trotted out in front of a general meeting to confess everyone's "guilt." Joe knows that if Gino tells anyone about Joe's thoughts of the "Great Power" or any of their other conversations about how full of shit Elan is, that Joe will immediately lose all his status and progress. Joe, knowing that this would give Elan an excuse to keep him longer, prepares to shut off his conscience and go into a full-on berserker rampage to destroy everyone and everything he can to get himself out. It doesn't get to that point, though — Gino keeps mum about Joe and rats on another kid.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: At the end of Chapter 69, Joe moves out of his freshman dorm and into a new apartment; it's essentially a slum, but to him it represents freedom. He's also fully expecting to break up with Eva since her hometown is four hours away. Then he learns from Eva that she's pregnant.
• Love Makes You Dumb: Eva offers Joe a "private party" at her dorm; Joe is so infatuated with Eva that he gladly takes the 12 pills that she gives him to help him "party" (despite not knowing what they actually are). What's worse, he gets in the car with her to drive around and smoke weed while waiting for the pills to kick in. He does have enough common sense to call off the "party," take her back to her dorm, and force himself to vomit up the pills, but then the next day he calls Eva back up to go out smoking weed again. Joe's narration doesn't hesitate to point out how stupid he's acting, and he says that episode would be typical of their relationship.
• Madden Into Misanthropy: Joe starts noticing this at the end of Chapter 63. When Joe's sister takes him to his first party post-Elan, he gets overwhelmed by the other young people there wearing flashy clothes and having a good time. His Elan conditioning causes him to start to judge and hate everyone there based on their "image", and he comes to the (incorrect) conclusion that inmates at Elan were much more "real" without "image." A chapter later, when P comes to visit and brings some marijuana, Joe gets internally furious when his Elan conditioning goes up against a seemingly carefree world.
• Make an Example of Them: Pretty much how Elan keeps everyone under control. Breaking a rule or refusing to follow Elan's orders brings down swift, sudden, and severe punishment upon the offender from their own peers. Avoiding punishment by perpetuating it becomes a survival mechanism.
• Mama Bear:
  • Katie's mom listens to "Dave's" plan for speaking with Katie, and confirms with Katie (via code) that Katie is being abused. A few days later, she calls Elan to allow Katie to take an emergency furlough to see a dying aunt, and screams at Meredith to allow Katie to leave in a two-seater car without an SP. And to top it off, she tells Katie that she's never going to go back to that place (and none of her aunts are dying).
  • The mother of the third child rescued from Elan investigates Joe's claims, hops on a flight to Maine, then dispenses with any kind of pretense and just flat-out demands her daughter.
• The Man Behind the Man: Ron is outranked by Meredith, a senior director and former Elan resident who Joe thinks is angling for Jay Cirri's role as head honcho. Jay Cirri himself is at the top of the mess, profiting off of child abuse.
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Eva is a deconstruction in the same manner as Marla Singer. At the time of the story, Joe is head over heels about her, but his narration notes that, in hindsight, "She was actually completely crazy, a real drug addict, and obsessed with getting into very serious and dangerous situations."
• Medium Blending:
  • From time to time, Joe includes hyperlinks to blogs and online resources about Elan. He also occasionally integrates scans of his non-digital artwork and sketches, and occasionally includes scans of Elan-related documents.
  • Chapter 99 goes a step further and includes a photo of Joe sitting with his music lesson setup (with his face out of frame), and a photo of his Elan sketches laid out on a tabletop.
  • Chapter 100 shows the initial stages of the webcomic itself, with screenshots of Photoshop as Joe cobbles together a mosaic of shouting teenagers, which he then converts to an artistic rendering, leading to the creation of the webcomic's banner image (as seen in the page image above).
• Mirror Character:
  • "Casey Jones" for Joe. Just like Joe, Casey had a happy, carefree youth before being whisked away to a hellish environment. And Casey's PTSD years later — abated by alcohol and long road trips — is not at all unlike what Joe will later experience in the post-Elan chapters.
  • Joe and his college roommate Ezra, as well. Just like Joe, Ezra is very secretive, socially awkward, and seems to be going through the same inner struggles with college life and daily functioning that Joe is experiencing. Joe can't help but pick up on the similarities. It eventually turns out that Ezra had been raised in a religious cult, with a "Book of Decency" meant to punish sins much like Elan's "guilt" system.
• Misery Builds Character: This is the apparent goal of Elan's attack therapy, and this mindset is indoctrinated into every student, but the problem is that it almost certainly doesn't work in the long run. Sure, it may provide adults with a more docile child, but it leaves said child with PTSD and issues reintegrating into society.
• Misery Poker:
  • Ron does this before Joe's first time in The Ring, saying that his own experiences in Elan were much more unstable and cruel than how it was when Joe joined up.
  • Refreshingly defied. Some time after Joe tells the truck driver Casey Jones about his initial nightmare of a stay at Elan, Jones shares a story of his own—one about his manic and chaotic days in the Vietnam War. Joe feels a little guilty for even talking about his own experiences, but Jones shuts that down immediately and tells him not to be just because someone had a worse (or better) time at one point.
• Mistaken for Afterlife: Played for drama. While in Denver and under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms, Joe hallucinates that two cops have murdered him, and begins to see visions of "Heaven," including angels. He also vividly experiences a vision of a beautiful waterfall, which is actually wet — and then he comes out of his hallucination, the "waterfall" is just an IV he's pulled out of his arm, and the "angels" are actually hospital nurses.
• Monochrome Past: A variation. The majority of the comic is Deliberately Monochrome with lots of pops of primarily red. However, some comics do feature smaller splashes of color (particularly with characters' eyes), the flashback to Elan in The '70s in Chapter 18 is tinted with monochrome sepia and brown tones, and later pages mix in more colors to reflect Joe's mental state.
• Moral Myopia: Discussed at length. In order to survive, Elan inmates — Joe included — adopt a general strategy of watching out for themselves first. This involves perpetuating the abuse to keep themselves out of trouble; Joe mentions on multiple occasions that his coordinator role required him to abuse other students. He doesn't state any of this proudly, though, and explains his immense guilt at being forced to take part in this cycle.
• Moving the Goalposts: Joe comes to learn that a solid "graduation" date is complete crap, since it only occurs at Elan's discretion; at any point they are fully able to convince parents that the student still needs further "treatment." He even mentions in Chapter 61 that he "...once saw a kid get shot down on his graduation day and they just cancelled the whole thing, sent his parents back to the airport and everything, like it was NOTHING!" He says that hard work to achieve the goal was utterly meaningless; he'd seen people who'd been in the same position for years without "graduating." He also says that this is the school's "most brutal and devastating weapon" (as evidenced by Christy making threats in his last days), and that it's ultimately a con; the longer an inmate stays at Elan, the more money the school brings in.
  Joe: [narrating] Elan didn't give out release dates. You just fell through the program. Never knowing when it would end. You didn't have a "sentence" like an inmate put away by a judge. You were completely at the mercy of the Elan "program". Period.
  • During one chapter, Joe is forced to write down his "guilt." He comes up with a few convincing-sounding items, but the people in charge mark through it and say that it's not detailed enough. So he adds details, then a general meeting is called and he's taunted anyway.
  • In Chapter 81, after running into dead ends with police, lawyers, and journalists, Joe gets into discussions with one journalist about doing an exposé on Elan. The journalist asks for three sworn testimonies from other former Elan students, so Joe reaches out to several and gets five. The journalist briefly ghosts Joe, then demands Joe's real name — and Joe gives him a pseudonym — before telling Joe that he won't move forward unless he gets sworn testimony from people who'd left Elan in the past three years. And even after Joe manages that, the journalist still demands more information.
• Mushroom Samba: Joe has a truly horrible reaction to his mushroom trip in Chapter 73, fleeing Wilma's apartment when he starts believing that Diego is going to murder him, while simultaneously experiencing time dilation and vivid flashbacks to his pre-Elan memories and feelings. Then, when he gets to the street, he starts hallucinating Elan expediters in the streets. His narration describes the circumstances leading up to it as the perfect storm to cause his Elan PTSD to explode.
• Music for Courage: Joe credits a Grateful Dead box set sent to him from his sister for pulling him out of his stress-induced funk during his senior year of college. In particular, he finds that the song "Morning Dew" brings him peace.
• My God, What Have I Done?: A downplayed example. After returning from Elan, Joe punches out his childhood bully Darren for stealing his beer and making fun of him. Joe describes it as a "humble-brag" since it only took one punch and Darren arguably had it coming, but Joe also immediately internalizes the effect this has on him personally.
  Joe: [narrating] This moment really scared me...of myself. I'd told myself to punch him if his lips touched the bottle, and that was it, it was programmed. Written in stone. Consequences be damned.
• Never Going Back to Prison: Or "Never Going Back to Elan School." This is what drives Joe's successful (but temporary) escape during his parental outing. After Joe "graduates," he sleeps with his door barricaded and with makeshift weapons within reach, including a baseball bat, and a lighter and a can of hairspray. Joe explains that while he didn't like the idea of having to burn someone to death, he would have still done it if the choice was between that and going back. When someone shows up banging on Joe's college dorm door while yelling about hauling Joe back to Maine, Joe grabs a baseball bat, asks his roommate Ezra to help him fight, and prepares to do battle. Elan's that bad.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • One of the sicker aspects of Elan's program. If you refuse to follow Elan's rules or orders even while doing the unambiguously moral thing, Elan penalizes you. Case in point: a character named Matt shows Joe mercy by refusing orders to jump into the Ring to finish off an already beaten and bloodied Joe; this is met with a general meeting, where everyone is forced to scream at Matt — Joe included.
  • Mentioned word-for-word in Chapter 70, when Joe allows the police into his friends' house party, and eventually gets arrested when they find and bait him with his one-hitter marijuana pipe.
• Non-Indicative Name: Elan School. The word élan (which is stylized without the accent in the comic) generally means "liveliness with enthusiasm" and is supposed to have positive connotations. It's also not much of a school, either.
• Noodle Incident:
  • In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue in Chapter 80, Joe says that, like him, Eva also had a super crazy life after their breakup, but declines to say what all happened to her, "...because it's her story to tell."
  • We aren't told specifically why Katie was sent to Elan, other than her stepfather wanted to send her there and manipulated her mother into agreeing to it. It's also not stated why Sandra was sent to Elan, although her mother insinuates that Sandra needed some kind of structure in her life.
  • Joe declines to say just what exactly John does to get the crooked school review sites to remove Elan from their pages.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Discussed in Chapter 65. Joe learns about PTSD on the internet and follows a suggestion to write a journal about his trauma while it's fresh on his mind. He ends up producing hundreds of pages about Elan. However, when he finds this journal years later, he has a panic attack and destroys most of it, along with some other Elan-related memorabilia. Still, he mentions that it helped him remember a lot of things about the school that he otherwise would have blocked out, and that the comic wouldn't exist had he not kept a journal in the first place.
• No Social Skills: This is presented almost to the point of deconstruction after Joe leaves Elan. Joe has a nervous breakdown at the party his sister takes him to, which causes the party guests to laugh at him, and he finds that he's unable to talk to or be around girls his own age. His narration even explicitly mentions that Elan robbed him of "the most formative years of high school and relationships" and skewered anything he already knew.
  • Further deconstructed during Joe’s college years. His idea of trying to connect with girls is to dump his trauma onto them and apply Elan’s lessons to them, leaving them utterly terrified and/or disgusted of him. The aggression he learned at Elan, coupled with his drug habits, makes him look like a violent jerk to the guys. Both of these facts together make almost nobody wanting anything to do with Joe, isolating Joe from anyone that could have helped him deal with his baggage. He later remarks that by the time of the third act, he has adapted to social situations, and has learned not to talk about Elan with others.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: Joe often has to remind readers that he's not exaggerating any part of his story, that Elan really was as bad as he describes. Oftentimes he'll include photographs whenever he can, he frequently cites other accounts that corroborate his narrative, and he's included a "Proof" page on his site with articles and videos about Elan.
• Not Used to Freedom: After Joe is finally released, he spends most of his time in his room, partly because living in an environment where everyone was pitted against each other and even the tiniest infraction resulted in punishment has made him afraid of everything outside and partly because he's completely unused to deciding for himself what he wants to do.
• Not What I Signed on For: Joe mentions this of the poor parking lot attendant he disturbs while tripping on mushrooms and seeing Elan expediters all over Denver.
  Joe: [narrating] The man in the booth was like: Nope, I certainly don't get paid enough to deal with this shit. And he immediately picked up his phone and punched in three numbers.
• Offscreen Romance: Joe and Eva get a Relationship Upgrade from drug buddies in Chapter 68 to a full relationship at some point during Chapter 69, but it isn't depicted in the comic. It's only brought up at the end of Chapter 69, when Eva tells Joe on the phone that she's pregnant.
• Oh, Crap!: Joe, when he comes back from an outing, and discovers that Gino has been busted for secretly making alliances with other inmates, both strength and non-strength. Gino hasn't listed everyone he made these "contracts" with, and Joe keeps his composure during the conversation, but because Joe had secretly been making friends with Gino, "The alarm bell ringing in my head was fucking deafening."
• One-Steve Limit: Averted; there are two characters named Gino in the story. The first is one of the two goons that recaptures Joe and hauls him back to Elan; this one is a one-off minor character. The other is an Elan inmate who appears later on during Joe's stay at Elan and has a major role in the plot.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: In the disclaimer at the end of Chapter 77, Joe says that he received legal advice to say that This Is a Work of Fiction. He then goes on to say that "there was no Elan School," which is patently false.
• Out-Gambitted: Whenever an inmate thinks they've fooled Elan, the school already has a solution in place, which Joe notes is because the school has decades of experience under its belt. Want to escape? The other students will stop you. Want to escape at night? There are frequent bed checks. Make an attempt in between bed checks? There are guards in the woods. Don't want to be Elan's champion in the Ring because your parents wouldn't want it? Ron has already called your parents to tell them some bullshit and they are fine with it.
• Parental Obliviousness: Joe really drives home the point that Elan is horrifyingly good at covering up its abuse, because it's able to censor its captives, and it uses the threat of severe punishment to keep anyone from acting out whenever their parents or prospective parents are around.
  • For Joe's parents in particular, it's almost as if they want to remain ignorant of the abuse, even as everyone else sees how badly messed up Joe is, since they shut down any talk of Joe's time at the school. Joe mentions that his mother's reaction to a staph infection he brought home isn't a reasonable, "What kind of hellhole would leave my child's staph infection untreated?", but rather, "Joe, you need to get out of the house and go to a neighborhood get-together." It's so bad that he mentioned in his Reddit AMA that his parents still think he's exaggerating.
• Past Experience Nightmare: Due to his PSTD, Joe has recurring nightmares about suddenly waking up back at Elan, convinced everything that happened since his gradation has merely been a dream, and that he ever actually escaped from the place. In his narration, he notes that he would regularly be haunted by this kind of nightmare for about a decade after he got out of Elan. After Elan closes for good, however, Joe realizes during a nightmare that the school isn't around anymore, and he simply walks away from the dream version of Christy.
• Path of Inspiration: Jay Cirri apparently co-founded Elan to help people break their addictions or bad behaviors. However, through years of duping parents and state advocates into thinking that the school is a legitimate and state-of-the-art rehabilitation facility, Cirri and his cronies (and later Sara Tarron) take the bulk of the profits, set themselves up as demigods, and leave inmates with scraps. The school itself stays largely self-sustaining thanks to the program's hierarchical system and the recidivism of many former students returning as staff.
• Pay Evil unto Evil:
  • Happens when Joe maces his parents and Peter to escape going back to Elan, especially given how Peter treats Joe, and given what Joe says about his parents later on.
  • Closely averted: Joe prepares to go into full berserker mode if Gino rats on him, and is fully willing to tear apart as many people as possible to get away from Elan. He doesn't get to this point, though.
  • Discussed: after leaving Elan, returning home, and receiving a call from Peter, Joe realizes that he's actually not all that concerned about whether Peter harms his parents, since Joe's still pretty pissed at them for leaving him at Elan for three years and dismissing any discussion about it.
  • Played straight when Joe lays out his childhood bully Darren in one punch for stealing Joe's beer and taunting him with it.
• Pink Is for Sissies: Guys at Elan, if they're an escape risk, a new student, or a problematic student, are forced to wear hot pink short shorts as a form of emasculation and humiliation.
• Place Worse Than Death: Joe is quick to note that even prisoners in jail don't get 24 hours of abuse and brainwashing like he got at Elan — even POW's have rights under the Geneva Conventions — and that prison would have been the preferable option. He also tells of a suicide attempt when a young kid stabs himself with a ballpoint pen rather than stay at Elan any longer.
• Plea Bargain: Much to Joe's surprise, his friends don't get sent to reform schools over the drug charge. In fact, as his sister tells him on the phone during his New York escape, his friends' parents — who had heard horror stories about places like Elan — hired a lawyer, who got Joe's friends a plea deal that included dropping the drug trafficking charges, supervised probation, and a hundred hours of community service each. They don't miss any school whatsoever and continue living their lives.
• Police Are Useless:
  • After Joe's recapture, the goons stop at a gas station. Joe screams at a nearby state trooper that he's being kidnapped. When the trooper comes over to investigate, the goons namedrop Jay Cirri, and the trooper is frightened into letting them go.
  • In Chapter 66, Joe calls his local 911 to report Elan; he gets redirected to 311 (the non-emergency number), who refuse to help him since Elan is in another state. He tries the emergency number for Poland, Maine, but the person on the other end is completely hostile. Joe says he can't confirm for a fact whether the police there were actively working with Elan, but he feels that it's highly likely.
  • In Chapter 81, after methodically gathering all his information about Elan, Joe finds that the Maine in police definitely act corrupt, and are more interested in learning his identity (which he doesn't want to give up out of fear of reprisals) than investigating child abuse.
  • While trying to recover his passport from the shady English tutoring firm he works for, Joe gets detained by the police in the "Dragon City", who yell at him in their native tongue and keep him detained while forcing him to sign documents he doesn't understand. Joe has to get a coworker from his English tutoring service to help get him out, and this coworker later tells Joe that the country is notoriously corrupt and "money solves."
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • When Joe's parents come to visit him in Elan, as soon as they leave the room, Ron makes some snide homophobic and sexist remarks about them in an attempt to get a rise out of Joe.
  • When Christy is seen in Katie's chapter, she denies Katie's dorm breakfast for not correctly dusting the lampshades, makes sexist remarks by yelling about how girls are "supposed to be better than the boys at these things," then rants about how the girls will all end up as irredeemable prostitutes if they don't comply with her demands.
    Christy: Listen girls, I only want the best for you. Dirty boys grow up to become drug addicts but they can sometimes find a way to beat that, they can be whole again. Afterwards, they can be clean again. It's forgiven. Do you get that? But you know what dirty girls become? PROSTITUTES! And you think there's any coming back from THAT? Huh?
• Poor Man's Porn: In Chapter 46, Joe discusses what it's like being cooped up as a hormonal teenager in a place where every expression of sexuality is strictly forbidden, including looking at someone of the opposite sex in the "wrong" way, and how it's probably another thing that did weird stuff to his psyche. He recalls that he sometimes would flip through Elan's math textbooks to see if there were any female stock photo models in them and if they had any kind of exposed skin, noting that even the sight of a female ankle would be enough to make him feel hot and bothered.
• Price on Their Head: Joe speculates that this may be part of why he was recaptured so quickly in New York City, noting that a $20,000 bounty would have been pocket change to a multi-millionaire like Jay Cirri.
• Prisoner's Work: Elan residents, if they're indoctrinated and broken enough to not become a flight risk, are required to do manual labor as a part of their "therapy." Joe in particular is forced to do maintenance work at Elan, put up campaign signs for Jay Cirri's run for governor (and steal Cirri's competitors' signs), and do landscaping work on Cirri's estate.
• Private Profit Prison: Elan is Jay Cirri's and Sara Tarron's cash cow. Since the school requires a yearly tuition of tens of thousands of dollars for an inmate, each soul being tortured there amounts to millions of dollars of profit.
• Properly Paranoid: All Elan really does is convince anyone that rebellion is met with extreme punishment, including a full demotion of any "status" that was achieved. To that end, no one trusts anyone, and Joe learns to distrust any students that speak of rebellion. The one time he trusts someone (Gino) with his secret about the "Great Power," he almost loses his shit when Gino later starts naming other people's "guilt."
• Put on a Bus:
  • B shows up at Joe's house in Chapter 70, looking drugged out and desperate for money, offering Joe a carrying case of CD's as collateral. Joe gives B $80, and never hears from him again. Even worse, B is still alive and refuses to talk to Joe for unknown reasons; Joe's narration talks about how Joe finds B on a Facebook business page years later. Joe sends a Facebook message to B's wife, who agrees to pass along a message, but then promptly blocks Joe.
  • Eva and Quiet Bill disappear from the story before Joe's trip to Denver, although Eva later gets a mention in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue in Chapter 80.
  • Rory goes to Vrátskajeki with Joe, but leaves at the end of the first semester and isn't seen in the story again. Similarly, Apollo is rehomed when Joe goes to Vrátskajeki, then stays absent even after Joe graduates college and returns home, likely because Joe returns to live with his parents.
  • After being freed from Elan, Katie is not seen again as a character. Sandra is also later freed a few chapters later; both Katie and Sandra are last mentioned in Chapter 93.
  • Joe divorces Maria for good in Chapter 93, where he notes that even though they were together for five years, he never saw her again. However, he later receives a birthday email from her, where she wishes him well and says that their time together was happy.
• Rationalizing the Overkill: When Joe asks Randall why the hell Randall straight-up attacked another kid at a dorm party, Randall simply says, "That guy was harassing this girl I know."
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Katie's mom, who Joe notes is "a unicorn" because she is, initially, the only parent to hear him out about Elan's abuse, the first to agree to communicate covertly with her child, and the first to actually rescue her child. She's shortly after followed by other parents who conspire to rescue their own children. Contrast this with previous parents, law enforcement, lawyers, or journalists, who consistently stonewall Joe.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: By God, are there so many instances of this.
  • First off, Elan itself. There are actually varying levels to this trope; The first one is called a "Blast", which is a 1-on-1 variation, usually the straightest example of this trope. The second one is called an "Encounter Group", which is a circle of people, in which a participant screams at the person sitting opposite to them. The third one, and by far the most exaggerated form of this trope, is called a "General Meeting", which has everyone scream at you in the house, with at least four people standing behind a broomstick just to yell at you.
  • Joe doles out two of these to his parents, calling them abusive for sending their son to what is essentially a cult. The first one is actually invoked by Elan; Joe had to perform a "blast" to his parents just to get away from the campus.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • Elan's punishments are so over-the-top that parents — including Joe's — don't believe that they could be real.^note Joe has noted several times that his parents still don't believe him about the abuses he suffered, and this has strained their relationship over the years. What's worse, Elan recognizes this and in fact advises parents on this; they tell that their addict children will say anything outrageous to get out of there and back to their supposed addictions.
  • It's even more nefarious after Joe leaves Elan; in Chapter 66 he lampshades this by talking about how his mother is able to shrug off Joe yelling at her Elan-style:
    Joe: [narrating] But the sad reality is that people like Jay Cirri knew about this loophole in human nature and exploited it by being extra, over-the-top crazy because that ensures that most people will never believe it. If it hadn't happened to me...I'm not even sure if I would.
  • Turned on its head much later when Katie's mom goes to pick her up from Elan, and screams at Meredith to let Katie leave the school without an SP.
• Remember the New Guy?: Due to the anachronic nature of the comic, Joe will, time to time, introduce entirely new characters he encountered during his time at Elan, but who hadn't been mentioned up until that point.
  • In one of the last chapters before his "graduation," he talks briefly about some sadistic staff named Meredith, Caesar, and Larry, who'd apparently been around for a while; and in the graduation chapter he mentions inviting a hitherto unmentioned teacher that had shown compassion and made Joe's situation a little more bearable.
  • In Chapter 63, the first chapter after his Elan graduation, a character named Chloe is introduced as Joe's childhood friend, someone he'd known his entire life. He goes on to explain that she was literally a Girl Next Door, and they'd "done almost everything together up until the day Elan took me."
  • Chapter 68 introduces Randall, a level-headed former Elan classmate of Joe's, who Joe regarded fondly while in Elan. It also mentions another Elan classmate of theirs named Eliza, who Randall says was a "tragic death" (meaning overdose, suicide, or death related to a criminal act) less than a year after she graduated from Elan.
  • Chapter 69 introduces Jerry, a former Elan staff member who Joe regarded fondly, who felt immense guilt over being powerless to help the kids being tortured there, and who was fired from Elan for being "too nice."
  • Chapter 73 introduces Billy and Wilma, who are each described as having been a "good friend" of Joe's while in Elan. It also introduces their "classmates" Melanie, Vinny, and Diego.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: In the first post-Elan chapter, Joe's friend Chloe tells him that, among other things — including that he'd moved to California or been sent to prison — she'd heard rumors that he was dead.
• Riddle for the Ages:
  • Joe mentions that he's never been able to definitively figure out how Elan was able to recapture him in New York City so quickly, how Peter was able to track him down after graduating, or how Gino always knew exactly where he was living at any point in time.
  • Enforced: After Gino's death, Joe refuses to look into whether Gino had worked for Elan School as a recruiter.
• Roman à Clef: Joe has changed all the names in the story, including his own. According to Joe, he's done this not to protect the names of the people involved, but out of extreme fear of retaliation. The only blatantly clear parallels are the characters Jay Cirri and Sara Tarron, who are clearly renamed versions of the real-life Elan owners Joseph Ricci and Sharon Terry.
• Ruritania: Late in college, Joe does a study abroad program in a big city he calls "Vrátskajeki" in the comic. There's no such city called "Vrátskajeki" on the map, but the name seems Eastern European, and Joe even mentions that he spends his second semester living in what the American expats call "the Soviet Projects."

Tropes S-Z

• Sadistic Choice: Every day in Elan. Typically the choice is between "help brutalize your peers" or "get severely brutalized yourself."
• Satellite Love Interest: Eva, Maria, and Sofi are Joe's love interests in the story; their interactions with him help show what Joe's mindset is at different points during his life.
• Saying Too Much:
  • In Chapter 66, Joe goes to a freshman mixer after going off to college. He's approached by a nice-looking girl who initiates small talk; without thinking Joe eventually spirals into a conversation about Elan and "the Ring." The girl is horrified by Joe, backs away carefully, and very pointedly rushes away from him whenever she sees him on campus afterward.
  • It happens again thirty chapters later, when Joe verbal-vomits about his Elan experiences to his new love interest Sofi, fully cognizant of how this made girls avoid him in college, but unable to stop himself. However, Sofi listens to his story and expresses compassion and sorrow that he went through such an ordeal.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Jay Cirri, as described in Chapter 46. Joe quotes a former Maine parole officer who was told to keep quiet about Elan, and who saw several mandated reports of abuse get buried due to Cirri's political connections in Augusta.
  Parole Officer: I was told by one official in my department that anyone causing problems to Elan could "disappear like Jimmy Hoffa."
  • In that same chapter, Joe also quotes a passage from the book Duck in a Raincoat that describes how Cirri got out of insurance fraud charges when buildings he owned mysteriously burned down right after he'd taken out insurance policies.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Joe and Gino take a road trip up to Maine hoping to disrupt things at Elan, but start having more and more doubts the closer they get. When they get to Number 5 Road, Gino just quietly drives past. Joe says he can't blame him, and that he would have driven past, too.
  • When Elan finally closes on April 1, 2011, the administrators send away the children, then promptly and completely vacate the campus, "...like guilty criminals running from their crime scene."
• Seppuku: Happens a total of two times throughout the webcomic. The first time, Joe explicitly states it was seppuku, but with a shitty pen instead of an honorable katana.
• Sequel Hook:
  • John, a former coordinator who is shot-down for taking part in the Elan 8 riot and for getting another coordinator named Gina pregnant, spends some time hogtied and snarling death threats at Joe, before getting unpersoned by Elan a week later. Joe notes in Chapter 57 that "...unlike Gina, I did hear about John again later in my life...but...you'll hear about that."
  • In Chapter 67, when Joe talks about how he got his college roommate Ezra, he explains that there's a super important reason he's introducing Ezra ("A truly mind-bending reason, one I couldn't possibly have known when I let him move in that night."), but he doesn't yet say what it is.
  • In Chapter 85, Joe narrates that he doesn't know how best to describe his emotions over the accusation that Gino was an Elan recruiter, so he says, "Let's just put a pin in this."
  • In Chapter 87, Joe spends 500 hours working on his "flagship" art piece, but pixelates it in the comic and says it's censored "for now."
• Shameful Strip: Elan does this to Joe when he first arrives, and again when he is recaptured in New York and brought back. Elan says that it's done for hygienic reasons, but it's just another weapon in their arsenal to humiliate their victims and take away their identities.
• Shame If Something Happened: Christy tells Joe about his graduation in three weeks, then immediately reminds him, "Anything can happen in Elan, don't forget who is in charge. I'll have my eye on you." She then continues these veiled threats every single day up to his graduation date, and Joe knows the implications.
  Christy: Winners sprint when they see the finish line. Or...they may end up still losing.
• Shockingly Expensive Bill: At the end of Chapter 74, Joe finds out that the hospital bill from his overnight stay in the Denver hospital has found its way to his parents' house, and they're so pissed off that they're cutting off his college education at the start of his senior year.
• Shout-Out: When Joe has a fantasy of him jumping out of his parents' car and getting hit by a truck, the "WASTED" visual effect from Grand Theft Auto appears.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Leans very heavily towards the cynical side, and Joe even points out why he's cynical. Joe becomes jaded that so many systematic failures and societal apathy allow child abusers to continue to operate with impunity and get rich doing so. This doesn't stop him from working to take down Elan in the third part, however.
• Small Role, Big Impact:
  • P's presence in the narrative isn't very large, but it is far-reaching whenever he appears: he is there for the drug charge that gets Joe sent to the Elan School in the first place; he tells Joe that the drug charges were all dropped three months into Joe's stay at Elan; he introduces Joe to Reddit, which becomes instrumental in helping Joe and the "core group" take down Elan for good; and he asks Joe for specific details about Elan's abuse, leading Joe to create the webcomic itself.
  • Dee-Ray agrees to provide testimony about Elan, casually mentioning that he wouldn't believe that he endured Elan if not for track meet results on Google. This gives Joe the idea to Google recent track meet results for Elan School, and to use that data to comb through his call center's databases and find contact info for the kids' parents. This directly leads to Katie's rescue from Elan, which in turn leads to Sandra and other children being rescued, which contributes to Elan's eventual closure.
  • Billy Crowe's role in the story isn't very large, but he does get Joe involved with Elan's running team. Joe then keeps up with running even after leaving Elan; he runs to alleviate his stress and depression in college, and later on he routinely runs for exercise and exploration while traveling the world.
• Social Services Does Not Exist: Joe goes out of his way to show that social services, at best, are completely useless; they have to give Elan prior notice before inspecting the facility, giving the staff enough time to cover up abuse and threaten the kids. Even surprise inspections by authorities or journalists are useless, as the main facility is deep within the forest, with lookouts and cameras at the front gate there to signal the staff in enough time to cover things up. At worst, social services are complicit in the abuse.
• So What Do We Do Now?: After Elan closes down in Chapter 92, Joe cannot help but notice that it feels like somewhat of an Anti-Climax. Chapter 93 goes on to explore this in depth, as Joe notices that Elan getting closed down is by all means both a net good for the world and a great personal victory, and he feels both relived that it happened and proud that he played a part in helping to prevent more kids from going through the same hell as he did, but at the same time, he also faces a major existential crisis as he doesn't know what to do with himself and he is left with nothing else but his hectic everyday life in New York, a life he realizes he feels increasingly trapped and worn down by.
• Spoiler Title: As it turns out, according to the end of Chapter 80, the very name of the webcomic is one. The first part in Elan School was "Elan School vs. Joe," and the second part in college and right after was "Joe vs. Joe". Joe then says that the actual "Joe vs. Elan School" is about to happen and the story is not yet over.
• Stalker with a Crush: Deconstructed. Joe is elated to hear about Eva's pregnancy, because his barometer for what constitutes a healthy relationship is so skewed, and he makes plans to get a ring and propose. She gradually starts ending his calls and getting harder for him to reach, so he presses on, and a couple of times drives four hours and parks outside her house.
• Starting a New Life:
  • When Joe graduates college and returns home, he notes that his sister has moved away to another state and started a new life. Facing toxicity alone while living with his parents, Joe buys a plane ticket, sells his car, and sets off to the coast to start a new life for himself as well.
  • Shortly after marrying, Joe and Maria move to New York City to make a life for themselves. They later attempt to emigrate to Italy to start over, but when that falls apart, they separate for a time.
  • After divorcing Maria for good, Joe returns to the "beach city" for a time, then decides to reinvent himself and his worldview by traveling the world and working remotely.
• Stealth Pun: Joe's best friends from before Elan are called "P" and "B", meaning that the three of them together are "PB&J."
• Stepford Smiler: In order to survive, you have to play Elan's game and pretend like everything is okay and that you don't hate it there; if you don't follow the Elan line, you are severely punished. Joe specifically mentions times where he'd be forced to give tours to prospective parents and pretend that Elan had "helped" him, and how guilty he felt about perpetuating the lie and causing further abuse, noting that it was done out of pure survival instinct.
• The Stoic: Enforced by Elan. Students are penalized for showing even a wisp of emotion.
• Stranger in a Familiar Land: A recurring theme in the post-Elan chapters. Joe returns home to find that all his friends got to finish high school and live their lives normally. In particular, Girl Next Door Chloe has a new boyfriend, and P is off at college three hours away.
• Surprise Pregnancy:
  • Gina, a coordinator at Elan. Completely a surprise since boys and girls are forbidden from even looking at each other. Joe never finds out what happens to her.
  • Eva, Joe's college girlfriend during his freshman year. Joe apparently didn't think much of a condom breaking, and Joe was expecting to break up with her anyway.
• Switching P.O.V.: Chapter 88 is narrated by Katie, a teenage girl who is in Elan about a decade or so after Joe, as she tells the story about her rescue from Elan.
• Sympathy for the Devil: In the Epilogue chapter, Joe takes some time to ruminate on the fact that Ron eventually passed away at the age of 71, while Joe was still in the process of writing and publishing the comic. He admits that, in spite of everything, a part of him still feels sorry for Ron, who he ultimately sees as Elan's worst victim and he hopes he was able to find some semblance of peace in his final years.
• Thanking the Viewer: Chapter 100, the final chapter, is simply titled "Thank You". In his post-script notes, Joe once again thanks his readers, telling them that the comic wouldn't have been what it was without their support.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: A downplayed and arguably deconstructed example. Right after returning from Elan, Joe finds pretty much no sympathy or comfort from his parents or law enforcement, so he starts smoking weed and drinking, because why not. Barely a year out of Elan and Joe has taken up chain smoking, alcohol, drugs, and tattoos as coping mechanisms to deal with the social stigmas and PTSD he's enduring. Effectively, the abuse, indifference, and lack of sympathy has caused Joe to fully embrace self-destructive vices; Joe's narration even points out that a year earlier he never would have imagined himself going down this path.
• There Are No Therapists: All of Elan's "therapies" are handled by students and staff who have no professional qualifications of any kind. Chapter 11 explicitly mentions that the attack therapy wasn't overseen by any licensed professionals.
• This Is a Work of Fiction: Said word-for-word in the disclaimer at the end of Chapter 77, upon legal advice pertaining to what he's going to write about in subsequent chapters. Joe then doubles down and says that there was no Elan School.
• Thoughtcrime: Part of Elan's methodology for extracting its inmates' "guilt" is that they have to confess to every negative or prurient thought, and that whatever students confess is never enough.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Towards the end of Joe's stay, despite being in a position to do so, Gino doesn't rat on Joe at a general meeting, saving Joe from having his rank reset to 0. Not long after, Christy tells Joe that Elan has set a graduation date for him.
• Time Skip:
  • Chapter 63 through the first part of Chapter 66 detail Joe's first month away from Elan, as he deals with re-acclimating to his old life, his post-traumatic stress, and his deteriorating relationship with his parents. Midway through Chapter 66, the story skips ahead to the first part of his freshman year of college, where he has become detatched from himself, has gotten himself tatted up, and has taken up chain smoking to ease his anxiety.
  • Chapter 80 has a few. It starts with Joe talking to Maria about a year after he graduates college, skips ahead to their marriage a year later, briefly glosses over their eventual relocation to New York City, then skips ahead to both a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue about several other characters, and Joe in approximately 2009 reading some online comments about Elan on a Huffington Post article.
  • Chapter 93 skips from shortly after Elan's closure in 2011 to a year later in 2012, when Joe divorces Maria and leaves New York City.
• To Be Continued: Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, and while the webcomic was still ongoing, the newest chapter always had "This is not the end" at the bottom of its page.
• Tomato Surprise: Towards the end of his stay at Elan, Joe is forced to do manual labor at Jay Cirri's estate, and eventually comes face-to-face with the Greater-Scope Villain himself. Despite spending the entire story thinking that Cirri is pulling the strings behind the scenes, Joe instead finds that Cirri is instead a very sickly Empty Shell with dementia.
• Too Much Information: Played for Drama. After Joe goes to college, his inability to talk to women leads to him talking about his time in Elan in great detail. This invariably freaks out the woman he's talking to, and ultimately gets him labeled as a creepy lunatic pariah among the female campus.
• Training from Hell: Discussed and ultimately deconstructed. Any positive lessons Joe learned from his time in Elan were heavily outweighed by the harm it did to him. As he puts it, being stranded on a deserted island for years might teach you survival skills, but it doesn't make it any less traumatic.
• Trauma Button: Joe mentions that certain photos or smells can bring back his Elan PTSD with a vengeance. He says that he burns most of his Elan memorabilia and post-Elan journals after running across them in adulthood (including his "diploma"); and mentions that he can't sit through The Last Stop documentary about Elan, even on fast forward, without having a panic attack.
• Trauma-Induced Amnesia: Joe notices in an aside in Chapter 46 that there are some things from his time at Elan he simply cannot remember consciously. Sometimes, purely by chance, a trigger, like a sound or smell, can bring some fragment of them back, and they are usually quite horrible. Some so horrible, that he says up front that he refuses to depict them in the comic.
  Joe: [narrating] My mind has very literally blacked-out large pieces and entire chapters of my Elan life; shoved them into some pit where I can longer address them like normal memories.
• Traumatic Haircut:
  • Joe doesn't delve on it too much, but he lists haircuts as one of the things Elan takes away from you at your induction in order to erase your identity as an individual, and while Joe depicts himself with medium long hair in the first chapter where he is abducted, he is shown with his hair chopped short for the entire time he is at Elan.
  • In Chapter 88, Katie says that Sandra previously had long hair that had never been cut in her life, and the first thing Elan does is demand that it be chopped off. When Sandra reacts negatively, Elan calls her attention-seeking, deceiving, and manipulative; after her hair is cut, she loses her mind and spends almost all her time afterwards in the Corner.
• Tropaholics Anonymous: The director of the Dovetail program orders Joe to attend five Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as a condition for returning to Cathy's class. Joe later remarks that AA is quite nice if one ignores the "weird culty" aspects of it, since it's basically about broken people opening up about the issues that led to their drinking.
• True Companions: After being caught by the police with the brick of marijuana, Joe is separated from them and confesses to owning all of it. When they're all three together again, both P and B laugh and say that they did the same. This makes it all the more tragic after Joe leaves Elan, when he gives B $80, never hears from B again, and years later eventually determines that B doesn't want to talk to him even via a Facebook message.
• The Unfought:
  • Though he builds up Jay Cirri as the main villain behind Elan School, Joe doesn't oppose Cirri himself at any point during the story. Rather, Joe's work to take down Elan begins about eight years after Cirri's death. The only time Joe meets Cirri, the man is sick and addled, and Joe is in no position to oppose him anyway.
  • Peter tracking down Joe after Elan and calling him on the phone seemingly sets up a later confrontation. This never happens; Joe looks Peter up some years later and finds that Peter survived a drunk driving accident that killed a girl in his car.
• Unknown Rival: Joe for Elan School, especially in the third part. He intentionally invokes the "unknown" part to avoid being harassed or harmed. This works for a time, but the end of Chapter 91 has him speculate that, following the rescue of three kids from Elan, as well as the Internet Counterattack from Reddit, Sara and Meredith eventually take to Google and find his online campaign.
• Unperson: Joe notes that sometimes kids would disappear from Elan, and all traces of their having been there would be completely wiped away. There's also an unspoken rule that the inmates are not allowed to talk about the disappeared kids ever again.
• The Vietnam Vet: "Casey Jones," who picks up Joe hitchhiking and takes him to Brooklyn, and tells Joe his story.
• The Villain Knows Where You Live: Joe knows that there is absolutely no good reason for Peter to know his address or phone number, and to be in town wanting to visit and "catch up," given their bad history. Joe spends the rest of the night and the next several days paranoid and on-guard.
• Villain with Good Publicity:
  • Elan to a T, because they know how to put on a good show and threaten its students into showing how "helpful" the facility is.
  • Jay Cirri is also this; he's seen as a pillar of the state for his "good work" with Elan School, he's well-known enough to warrant an ultimately failed run for Maine state governor, and he's commemorated on the floor of the Maine legislature after he dies in 2001.
• Villainy Discretion Shot:
  • In Chapter 47, when Joe mentions that Elan's methods were worse in the 1970s and 1980s, he says that he refuses to depict it in the comic "...out of respect for those who went through it."
  • He also refuses to depict the three-house Ring he's subjected to, saying that he's uncomfortable with drawing the Ring again. Instead, he tells the reader to imagine the first Ring he drew, but much bigger.
• Violence Really Is the Answer: A very, very twisted example. "The Ring" forces a rebellious kid to put on boxing gloves and fight other kids who are chosen to represent Elan, and it is meant to teach students that Elan will always win. It's another tool that Elan uses to not only demoralize students, but to allow students to brutalize their peers for the sadistic glee of their captors. What's worse, no one is allowed to opt out.
• Walking the Earth: In Chapter 95, Joe leaves the "beach city" for good and travels around the world, living a minimalist nomadic lifestyle while working remotely, in order to find and reinvent himself. He actively chooses to go to places off of the beaten path and outside of his comfort zone, and never returning to a place he'd already been.
• Wardens Are Evil: Ron and Christy stand out as the most abusive to Joe during his time at Elan 8. There's also Jay Cirri and his widow/successor Sara Tarron, who own the school but act as The Man Behind the Man. Joe also talks about senior staff members named Meredith, Caesar, and Larry, all of whom he admits he's still terrified of to this day.
• Weirdness Censor: Played for Drama and lampshaded in Chapter 60, when Joe's narration notes that Elan's maintenance men, nurse, gym teacher, schoolteachers, and head cook are all completely oblivious to the school's abuses:
  Joe: [narrating] Realizing how far some people will go to ignore the strangeness going on around them was a lesson that I've never forgotten.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy:
  • Joe pushes himself to succeed in college, spends two successful semesters in Vrátskajeki practicing self-care, graduates college, and returns home with a new lease on life. His parents don't acknowledge any of this, and continue not only treating him like a child, but as a child doomed to failure that they don't actually want to know anymore.
  • Quiet Bill idolizes his rich and important father, who keeps blowing him off for dinner during his and Joe's Spring Break in Los Angeles. The one time Bill's father actually shows up to go to dinner, he completely ignores his own son and spends the entire evening talking to other dinner guests.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 64 has P in town visiting Joe, and he tells Joe about the drug charges being dropped three months into Joe's Elan stay. It's then further revealed that Joe's parents considered the dropped charges "irrelevant," kept him in Elan anyway to punish and "help" him, and are completely uninterested in discussing it. It also reveals that any information about Elan School is very sparse at the time, and that Maura Curley's book Duck in a Raincoat — which Joe wants to use to try and convince his parents about how abusive Elan is — is quite rare. It then ends with a phone call from Peter of all people, who drove six hours to Joe's street and really wants to visit.
• Wham Line:
  • At the end of Chapter 62, after graduating and leaving with his parents, and finally letting it sink in that he'd made it to the other side, Joe's narration says, "I was never going to have to deal with Elan again! I was so fucking naive..."
  • In Chapter 64, P drops in to visit Joe. When Joe starts to tell P about how he and B were lucky to get out of their charges, P says, "Wait wait wait. Joe. Your charges got dropped too! I know that for a fucking fact. I was part of it!"
  • In Chapter 72, Gino casually tells Joe that he's headed to Las Vegas to party with Ron. Hearing this rattles Joe to his core.
  • In Chapter 98: "Gino died 3 days later. He overdosed while partying the night before he was supposed to turn himself into prison."
• Wham Shot:
  • Peter is seen in full as the person calling Joe at the end of Chapter 64.
  • At the end of Chapter 74, a year after Joe's trip to Denver, Joe's mother is seen angrily holding out the hospital bill, which has found its way to Joe's parents' house.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Though the Epilogue includes information about the fates of characters like Ron and Sara, it doesn't include information about what happened to Katie after she was freed, or what happened to Christy after Elan was closed.
• When It All Began: A significant chunk of Chapter 34 is devoted to the incident that got Joe sent to Elan: when he (along with his friends P and B) were arrested driving across state lines to smoke a brick of weed they'd purchased shortly after another weed deal had gone awry.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: There are two:
  • The first happens in Chapter 80, when Joe recounts what happens to multiple characters from the story:
    • Joe's sister has a family and lives far away from Joe, but still talks to him all the time.
    • Mr. and Mrs. Nobody get divorced, and "have no redemption arc in this story."
    • Eva reconnects with Joe as friends, and apparently had a crazy life after their breakup (just like he did), but he declines to say what happened to her.
    • Slick Rick moved away but now has his own family.
    • Joe looks Peter up some years later and finds that Peter survived a drunk driving accident that killed a girl in his car.
    • Gino moved away from New York, and still comes to visit Joe, but remains vague about how he earns money, and is still friends with Ron. This is subverted later on when he visits Joe, goes through some kind of existential crisis, is shown to be addicted to something, is (as Joe finds out) recruiting for Elan, and dies of a drug overdose the night before reporting to prison.
    • And as for Joe: he's relocated to New York City with his wife, Maria, and he's happily living his life. But then this epilogue is subverted for Joe after he reads a 2009 article online and sees a comment under it about Elan's abuse from a recent survivor, which pulls him down a rabbit hole of working against Elan to the detriment of his marriage and sanity.
  • In addition, the "Epilogue" chapter set after the end of the story reveals more about the characters:
    • Ron dies in 2022 just shy of his 71st birthday, and Joe mentions that Chapter 85 would've been the last thing he'd read if he'd been keeping up with the comic.
    • Sara Tarron dies in 2021 after years of struggling with Alzheimer's disease.
    • Joe has long since forgiven his parents for everything that he went through. He says that his mother read the comic, tearfully apologized for everything she'd put him through, and commended him for saving Katie and Sandra. Joe's father is ailing and not long for the world, and Joe has decided not to show him the comic.
    • Joe mentions Maria, reiterating that he's never seen her again, but talks about his guilt concerning their divorce, and a dream he had about her.
    • Apollo was rehomed with the parents of one of Joe's college roommates, enjoyed a happy life with two other dogs, and died at age 88 (in dog years) happy and beloved.
    • Not long after starting Joe Vs. Elan School, Joe gets a new job that he works at until about Chapter 86, and Sofi gets pregnant with a son. The webcomic's Patreon support allows him and Sofi to eventually buy a home.
• World Tour: Joe discovers the joys of international travel in Chapter 76, as he and Rick go to Amsterdam and Berlin. Later in the chapter, Joe begins a study abroad program in a city called Vrátskajeki. After graduating college, he travels abroad again; after his divorce he becomes a nomad and travels to different cities around the world.
• Worst Aid: Elan refuses to give its inmates any proper medical care. Julian impales his own abdomen with a Bic pen and isn't taken to the hospital, and only gets a bandage. Joe himself gets a painful staph infection on his torso that Elan initially says is a bug bite, then says is an allergic reaction to laundry detergent after it spreads; and they give him one Motrin to get him to quiet down about the pain.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Joe has escaped Elan during an outing with his parents, and has made his way to New York. From there, he starts coming up with mental plans to lay low and eventually make his way back home. Except, against all odds — within two days of his running away from his parents and Peter — he's located and sent back.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Ron escorts Joe to Elan 7 and forces him to fight another student in "the Ring," and Joe not only does it, he detaches himself and flips into full survival mode. He then annihilates the poor kid, while feeling like he'd regained control over his life. Seeing a random girl's look of disapproval and pity snaps him out of his fervor. A day later, he's promoted to a "Coordinator" position at Elan, putting him in charge of other students, turning him into one of Ron's right-hand men and making his misery worse.
• Yo Yo Plot Point:
  • Lampshaded in Chapter 79 shortly after Joe leaves his hostel in the "beach city," as Joe examines the half-decade of his life after leaving Elan, and notes a distinct pattern of highs and lows repeating themselves.
  • No matter what he does, Joe's post-Elan life usually ends up with him back living with his parents and in the depths of misery.
  • After graduating college, Joe often winds up living overseas in the "beach city" again. However, after returning there following his divorce from Maria, he ultimately decides to defy it once and for all, leaves the "beach city", resolves never to return there, and begins a nomadic lifestyle traveling the world and working on himself.

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