YMMV / Digger

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Let's look at Digger. Is she really having these adventures or is she, as she herself initially feared, merely trapped in a hallucination caused by cave gas and lack of food and sleep as she dies slowly, all alone and trapped deep, deep, under ground? Thankfully, some pages are narrated from other characters' points of view, making it much less likely that it's all in Digger's head.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Statue of Ganesh, the Oracular Slug, the Grotesque Cute Skin-lizards, the Hag. Boneclaw Mother!
  • Surka, the greatest troll ever.
  • Ed, Ed and Ed. Word of God is that he was originally supposed to be just a throwaway snarling monstery thing to attack the protagonist, and that he just happened to be a hyena because she couldn't draw a bear properly.
• Fan Nickname: Shadowchild is often referred to the fans as Shadolescent/Shadowlescent, after its encounter with Sweetgrass Voice.
• Fridge Brilliance: On the way back from the monastery, Digger, Murai, and Grim Eyes are hurrying, knowing that they are weeks away but feeling as if there is a savage urgency to their return. Only when they arrive, it is only an hour before disaster — there was.
• Harsher in Hindsight: At one point Ed meets another hyena, who treats him like an Un-person until Digger demands that she be polite. Ed's immediate reaction to the whole scene is pretty sad. And then we find out that the hyena in question is Ed's daughter. And the reason he was made an Un-person is that he murdered someone who was abusing her.

• Nightmare Fuel: He-Is was manipulated by a demon into nearly killing his mate and killing their child in the process. Then he was exiled, and broke free of the manipulations long enough to request a Mercy Kill, but it wasn't enough, because the demon kept him alive against his will. Poor guy...
  • Particularly, his heart. In-story, Digger is about the only person who isn't intensely disturbed by it.
    • And that's probably because she was quipping non-stop to stay calm.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  "No—one—leaves—the deeps."
  • And later...
    "It—is—foolish—to run. We—do not—tire. The—blood—of our—master—sustains us."
• Stoic Woobie: Digger.
  "Dammit, Murai, It doesn't matter! If I have to stay in this god-riddled land of lunatics until I drop dead of—of—sheer frustration, then that's just life! I'll get over it! Not everybody gets to go home!"
• Ugly Cute: Ed, the trolls, the skin lizard things, and the Shadowchild. Maybe the vampire squash as well.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Digger is drawn as a minimally anthropomorphized wombat: she wears a vest, uses tools, and stands on two legs, but she's still a short, burly, fur-covered mammal without prominent secondary sex characteristics. There are some subtle gender cues in her design, but it's easy to miss them.
  • With the hyenas it's deliberate: Digger has to check the sex of who she's talking to sometimes because, well, that's what spotted hyenas are really like.
  • When the ghost-wombat Descending Helix appeared, many readers found it difficult to determine his gender as well, for all the same reasons as Digger. It took the in-character use of personal pronouns to settle the issue.
  • At the beginning of the comic, Digger was drawn more visibly female, but as the art has progressed she has become less anthropomorphic. Which makes sense, considering Digger (and all wombats) is a marsupial, and would have no use or explanation for external breasts to begin with.
• The Woobie:
  • Ed, kind artist and exiled victim of fantastic misandry and spousal abuse. He had no family and no friends for a long time until Digger stumbled across him. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. He manages to function pretty well for all he's been through.
  • Murai. She had a bad encounter with a god that's left her sanity in a somewhat fragile state, she's bearing the responsibility of a quest on her shoulders, and she's only a teenager to boot.