"Short comic strips of a mermaid in the modern days~"
—Description on Webtoon
The Little Trashmaid is a webcomic created by s0s2. It centres around a mermaid named Tidy, and her interaction with all the pollution and garbage in the ocean as well as her human friends Ricky and Spencer.
Can be found on Webtoon here
, on DeviantArt here, and on Tapas Media here.
This webcomic provides examples of:
- An Aesop: Texting while driving sends Ricky off the edge of a cliff and totals his car.
- Accidental Kiss: Spencer and Ricky get one when they fall after trying to put a seagull's nest back where it fell from. Both of them are red as tomatoes afterwards.
- Barbie Doll Anatomy: None of the merpeople have visible nipples. Possibly justified since mermaids might not technically be mammals. They do have navels though...
- Bathos: A work that deals both with the depressing effects of ocean contamination and a ditzy mermaid that finds fascination with all the trash she finds.
- Bland-Name Product: Among the candy wrappers that Tidy uses to spell her name are Twax and Mild, and her wardrobe of plastic-bag tops include brands like 11-Twelve, Malmarkt, BestPrice and Goal. Her dad wears a Chicken King crown.
- Bucket Helmet: Tidy wears one of these, and carries a trashcan-lid shield and pitchfork when she goes to fight "Ursula"... who is simply a tangled mass of old fishing nets and other trash.
- Comically Missing the Point: On seeing a long-sleeved shirt with a Seashell Bra design, Tidy (who wears a bottomless shopping bag as a shirt) proceeds to... use the shirt as a shopping bag.
- Cute Little Fangs: Tidy has prominent canine teeth compared to her human friends. Neptaan (the boy merperson) goes straight past this into More Teeth than the Osmond Family.
- The Ditz: Tidy isn't the brightest bulb thrown into the ocean. Her reaction to being given a bag with a shirt in it was to wear the bag like a shirt.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The comics up to "Mighty Twine" uploaded to DeviantArt as well as the animated teaser avert the examples in Bland-Name Product seen above, so Tidy's main top is clearly a 7-Eleven bag, and her father is wearing a Burger King crown.
- Green Aesop: A more effective example than most. The comic is based around ocean pollution, and the effects it has on marine life. Ricky gets hit with the realization of how big the issue is when he cuts some twine from Tidy's wrist, only for her to promptly bring more animals for him to cut free... by the time the sun sets he still hasn't finished.
- Hammerspace Hair: Tidy's hair can contain a phenomenal amount of trash.
- Image Song: Tidy has two of them - "Fun in the Ocean" and "Just Wonderin'".
- Impossible Pickle Jar: One strip features Tidy working out in order to build the muscle to open a jar. She fails and takes it to Ricky for help, who reveals that she was simply turning it the wrong way.
- Luminescent Blush: Spencer's and Ricky's faces are entirely red after their Accidental Kiss.
- Monster Organ Trafficking: Downplayed: After Neptaan loses a tooth, Ricky finds he can make a crapload of money selling them to his classmates (they look like shark teeth), leading to Neptaan having empty gums for a while (fortunately he can grow them back and live on applesauce).
- Mourning an Object: When Tidy finds a deflated dolphin floatie sinking in the sea, she mistakes it for an actual dead dolphin and holds a funeral for it.
- Mundane Object Amazement: Tidy would be a firm believer in "One man's trash is another man's treasure" if she knew what "trash" was. A lot of comics are about how Tidy is fascinated by the garbage around her, thinking of them as treasures.
- Must Have Nicotine: Tidy gets addicted to eating cigarette butts due to eating some dumped in the ocean.
- Ocean Punk: has elements of this, the protagonist is a mermaid living in a polluted ocean who builds stuff out of human junk.
- Pictorial Speech-Bubble: When characters speak it's generally shown in this way, since Tidy doesn't understand English, or perhaps human languages in general.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Ricky and Spencer, respectively, and it's reflected in the colors they wear. Ricky tends to have a quicker temper, particularly towards Tidy's cluelessness of human life, while Spencer remains calm and keeps Ricky in check.
- Running Gag: Tidy's attempts to sing generally end with a full garbage bag being thrown at her.
- Shipper on Deck: Tidy tries to act as a wingmaid for Ricky and Spencer, much to the former's embarrassment.
- See Water: Averted. Tidy attempts to get Spencer to help with Neptaan's predicament by dragging him down to the seafloor... which fails because his vision is too blurred to make out what she's showing him.
- Shout-Out:
- Many to The Little Mermaid (1989), such as the title of the comic, font and all.
- The teaser for the comic is a parody of "Part of Your World" with the wave breaking behind Tidy being full of trash and gasoline.
- Ricky's first meeting with Tidy plays out similarly to that of Eric's first meeting with Ariel. In this case, however, his reaction is to freak out and run away.
- From "Fancy Wardrobe Part 2" to "Gas-o-line", Tidy wears a The Little Mermaid top.
- The "A Mermaid's Tale" two-parter is about Tidy being shown the movie, and being afraid of Ursula. After seeing the aftermath of Tidy's brawl with an Ursula-shaped heap of trash, Ricky and Spencer decide not to show her the sequel.
- The teaser for the comic
- Many to The Little Mermaid (1989), such as the title of the comic, font and all.
- Super Fly Reflexes: Tidy is capable of "spitting" down mosquitos like an Archer Fish.
- That's No Moon: Inverted. After being shown The Little Mermaid (1989) on Disney+, Tidy believes that a large black-and-purple octopus-shaped heap of trash is actually Ursula, and has an intense one-sided off-screen fight with it.
- Trash of the Titans: The coast Tidy lives near is unbelievably polluted, no matter how often Spencer and Ricky try to clean it up. It doesn't help that people literally fling their trash out the car window as they drive past.
- Wham Episode: "Bandaid". Trashdad was forced to break off his tail and caudal fin to get free of the net as three pairs of eyes watch on.
