YMMV / Goblins

• Arc Fatigue:
  • The goblin group spend a good three years or so sneaking into a city and then getting out. Though the two other subplots going on at the same time helped even it out.
  • The Maze of Many/Well of Darkness arc. It took over two years before the main cast was seen again, as the plot kept jumping between Minmax's party and Dies Horribly instead of just sticking in one place.
  • The current dungeon crawl began in 2013. It has taken 11 years and it's still not finished.
• Fan Nickname: The various versions of Minmax, Kin and Forgath in the Maze of Many tend to get these, and there are a few others.
  • Scorpikin (a Kin with a scorpion's lower body)
  • Pipemax (a silent Minmax who constantly smokes a pipe, even in combat)
  • Psimax (a Psion Minmax)
  • Forghast (a Forgath with a Ring of Undeath that makes him hideous)
  • Browgath (a Forgath who constantly shouts "BROW!" and nothing else)
  • Evil Klik is also called Junior by the forumgoers, because it calls Dies-Horribly "Father".
• Genius Bonus:
  • The final panel of this comic uses a classic mathematical fallacy to prove that 1=0.
  • Symun, the friendly giant spider, really likes Forgath (he would probably be happier not knowing that a spider's pedipalps are used for taste, smell, and insemination)..
    Forgath: Ew ew ew! He's licking my face! Wait, do spiders even have tongues?
    Onyx: No, they don't.
    Forgath: Then what the hell is he licking me with?!
• Ho Yay:
  • Forgath mentions that nothing they do in the Maze of Many matters because of the time loop. Minmax's first instinct is to lift up the dwarf and give him a deep long kiss. Minmax claims this is okay because Forgath is played by a girl.
  • Les Yay between our Kin and Scorpion Kin in this comic and the next.
  • Kin 201 has feelings for◊ Kin 80, her alternate reality doppelganger, based at least partially on the fact 80 has what 201's dimension considers masculine Tertiary Sexual Characteristics.
• I Knew It!: Show of hands everyone who foresaw Psionic Minmax using the machine to come back to life.
• Jerkass Woobie: K'Sellis suffers a horrible death at the hands of Mr. Fingers.
• Memetic Mutation: "I'M SAD!", often used by critics who accuses the comic for being a bit too wangsty. Even lampshaded in universe by Minmax!
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • If Goblinslayer's sadistic tortures, Fantastic Racism and various bits of jerkassery hadn't already sent him over, he flies right past it when he lovingly describes how he constantly physically brutalizes and rapes Kin. Appropriately, this leads in short order to his Karmic Death.
  • Kore manages to cross this in the first scene he appears in, by murdering an orphaned dwarf child just because he had been taken in by an orc that took him in after killing his father. An orc who used his dying breaths to beg Kore to spare the innocent kid, no less. It's also quite likely that Kore has tracked down the Goblin Adventuring Party's village and killed every woman and child there.
  • Psi Minmax's attempt to use Kin's leash to force her to tell him what he wants to know, knowing full well how she feels about it.
  • Evil Klik gets one when he tortures and brutally murders Klik even after Dies Horribly begs him not to do so.
  • Until the end of the Well of Darkness arc, Duv comes off as a Knight Templar, but a really tame one compared to Kore and Dellyn — sure, using slaves to access the Well of Darkness and knowingly sending Dies-Horribly and K'sellis to a certain death is unsavory, but her actions are at least always justifiable from a practical standpoint. That is until she feeds the slaves she had promised to free to the Switchbeast for no real reason other than that they weren't goblins, and attempts to have Saves-a-Fox and Dies-Horribly executed for refusing to become her puppet chieftains, despite the fact that they were goblins, and had put their lives at risk to retrieve the Blue Orb of Bloodlight for her.
• Narm:
  • Quite common, particularly in earlier comics, and the loose, exaggerated artstyle doesn't help.
  • Perhaps the most infamous example was one unfortunate guard's complaint that "It hurts! It hurts like a sickness!", which the author herself decided to change after realizing that it sounded a bit too silly.
  • "MY ARRRRRRRM!" The largely hideous artwork and the overdone line combine to make this the most unintentionally funny moment since the Trope Namer.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Minmax was never quite The Scrappy, but initially he was just seen as a rather amusing and entertaining Jerkass — you liked watching him, even though you didn't like him all that much. But after the massive amounts of Character Development he got after his meeting with Goblinslayer and Kin showed that he DID have standards, he rapidly became one of the most popular characters in the strip, possibly even overshadowing the G.A.P.
• The Scrappy: Ruby the alternate Kin for breaking up Kin and Minmax, who had been leaning towards Official Couple status, due to her Fantastic Racism against all humans, which she accomplished by stealing Kin's necklace and then erasing it from history.
• Squick:
  • The Shield of Wonder and its myriad gory ways of killing people.
  • The way Mr. Fingers moves and that sound it makes. According to its stats Mr. Fingers does not have joints. It moves by constantly breaking and growing bone. Oh, also it eats by causing people it touches to slowly and painfully melt into goo.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Starts to creep in after Kore kills Chief. That arc was grim enough, but the following horrors happening to Dies Horribly's party and to Minmax's party in their respective dungeon crawls take the strip into full grimdark territory that makes it hard to care. Also Minmax and Kin's relationship is destroyed by giving it a reset through the actions of a third party, retconning away loads of character development, with a rape allegory during their "break up" as a bonus.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Dies Horribly is supposed to be viewed as The Woobie because he's destined to... well, die horribly. Except, in the world of Goblins most of the characters who die do so quite horribly, including most of the goblin war camp being slaughtered by adventurers, and K'Sellis (who was part of Dies's party) having one of the most Family Unfriendly Deaths in the comic. Moreover, most monstrous characters know full well they will probably die horribly one day, especially if they willingly engage player characters, and are still able to act brave and noble and lead rich lives, while Dies Horribly constantly acts like a coward and moans about his fate (even though at one point he tries to convince Fox he's accepted his fate already). It sometimes comes to the point where you really wish someone would just smack Dies across the head and tell him "just because you're going to die horribly, doesn't mean you have to live horribly!" This guest comic◊ actually sort of does just that (although without the smacking). On the other hand, there's horrible and there's horrible, and everyone else at least had hope.

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