YMMV / Runaways

See Runaways (Rainbow Rowell) for tropes on the 2017 relaunch by Rainbow Rowell.

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• Alternative Character Interpretation: Does Victor abuse Chase because Chase reminds him of the jocks who picked on him when he was a kid, or does he secretly hate Chase because Janet's pregnancy ended up costing Victor and Janet their potential place in the post-Gibborum paradise they were promised? Or he could just be an asshole.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: This issue plagued the first arc of the Terry Moore-led reboot. The extremely cartoonish art by Humberto Ramos suggested that it was aimed at younger teens, which repelled longtime fans, but the not-so-kid-friendly storyline — involving Karolina being accused of complicity in the destruction of Majesdane, and ending with Xavin impersonating her and handing themselves over to her accusers — didn't really bring in many younger readers, and may have helped lead to the series' cancellation a year later.
• Bizarro Episode: The "Rock Zombies" arc features the kids fighting an army of zombies raised by Chase's evil boss. Out of Character moments abound, the ending is rushed, and aside from one line in the story "Mollifest Destiny", none of the events are mentioned again.
• Broken Base:
  • The Reveal at the end of Volume 1 that Alex was The Mole and his subsequent death caused a significant number of the series' early fans to denounce it. New fans came along in Volume 2, and it seemed like the fans who had left were just going to leave the rest of the fandom alone... and then Avengers Undercover brought Alex back, reviving the debate.
  • The inclusion of Chase and Nico in Avengers Arena broke the fandom in two. One side hates the idea that their favorite characters were sent to a Battle Royale rip-off and Demoted to Extra for a bunch of new characters. The other side, however, are glad they're in anything at all. Whenever or not they're even written in character in this series had sparked some heated debates as well. That they later appeared in the sequel only made things worse.
  • Runaways (2015) was similarly divisive - many fans are unhappy that the new In Name Only miniseries featured an almost entirely new lineup made up of characters like Bucky and Amadeus Cho, who could have easily supported their own series, with Molly Hayes as the only announced holdover from the original series, while other fans defend the reboot as being perfectly good in its own right.
  • Similar to the above, A-Force, in which Nico is a regular cast member, has also created a schism in the fandom. On the one side are fans who are happy that much-hated magical prosthetic Witch Arm was replaced with a more realistic prosthetic arm and hope that the series will rehabilitate her image after Avengers Undercover. On the other hand, there are many fans who worry that Nico is only being used as a token minority character, and that the other Runaways will simply fade into further obscurity. These fears have not been helped by A-Force starting out with Nico having become separated from the other Runaways.
  • Victor's appearance in The Vision has drawn controversy for its blatant retcon of Victor's history with the Runaways, saying that he developed a secret addiction to vibranium almost immediately after joining the team as a way of coping with the loss of his mother and chronic pain caused by his powers and superhero battles. Defenders insist that it's the kind of story that would fit in BKV's run, had he come up with it, and that Victor couldn't know he even can get addicted to vibranium. Meanwhile detractors argue that it's entirely out of character for Victor and doesn't fit in with previous continuity. Then there are people who claim he's been out of character since BKV left and are open to explaining it with the effect of the addiction.
• Complete Monster (Civil War: Young Avengers & Runaways (also includes Secret Invasion: Who Do You Trust's "Master of the Cube")): The unnamed warden of the "Cube" is a government-licensed Torture Technician who admits, since a child, he's always had an obsession with playing private, sadistic games. Now able to exert his childhood fantasies over a classified superhuman prison facility, the warden subjects many hundreds of prisoners to paranoia agents and torture for his own glorification. When some of the Young Avengers and the Runaways fall into his hands, the warden is positively gleeful that their unique physiology means he'll be able to effectively torture them for days. The warden's prize accomplishment is what he does to Noh-Varr; after cutting him off from the Kree hivemind, the warden "stomped around in his head" until Noh-Varr becomes a conditioned killer, still somewhat aware of what the warden is forcing him to do.
• Contested Sequel: Avengers Arena is theoretically a continuation of the Runaways' adventures after their visit to Avengers Academy, but many fans have complained that Dennis Hopeless' characterization of Chase and Nico in the series only makes sense if one assumes that the events of the post-Vaughan arcs, and the character development that Chase and Nico received therein, never happened.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Karolina is prone to bouts of severe depression and hypersexuality. It's unclear if this is due to bipolar disorder, a consequence of the stresses of being a Runaway, or a possible quirk of her Majesdanian physiology (though none of those answers are necessary exclusive.)
  • Klara Prast has a great deal of difficulty socializing and can be prone to weird moods. Whether this is the result of the abuse she suffered or if there's some other factor at work is unrevealed. Avengers Academy hinted that she may have PTSD.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Several. Some like to pretend Runaways ended when Vaughan left, others at the end of Whedon's run, some discontinue everything from the start of Vol. 3 (to the point that there have been instances of people skipping it and calling the Battleworld series and the 2017 series the third and fourth Runaways volumes) and a pretty large part would like to pretend there is no such thing as Avengers Arena.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Pusher Man wears a pimp outfit with cape, pair of huge golden gloves and belt with golden PM initials on it.
• Friendly Fandoms: Fans of Young Avengers, New X-Men, Avengers Academy And Runaways fans tend to get along quite well. Half of the reason is attributed to friendly relationships formed whenever the Runaways meet any of those three teams, half to a big overlap in the fandoms.
  • Through they didn't meet, recently All-New Ghost Rider and Ms. Marvel joined in.
  • While owned by different companies, Gotham Academy picked up some Runaways fans, due to sharing several themes. When Gotham Academy ended, they headed back to Runaways.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • A lot of Jono's dialogue and interactions with Excelsior and the kids come off a lot worse when it turns out he was Geoffrey Wilder in disguise the whole time. The end of the "True Believers" arc, when Jono appears to let the kids go after an impassioned plea by Gert, is good example of this — Geoffery was always going to let them go, so the New Pride could destroy them at a later time. In fact, keeping them away from the kids is part of the reason why he infiltrated Excelsior in the first place.
  • The last issue written by Vaughan and drawn by Alphona has the entire staff working on the book answering the question of where they think the Runaways will be ten years from now. One of the comments was that at this rate they'll be all dead, except for Molly. It's been over 10 years since then, and it seems the Runaways are often treated as C-List Fodder, considering later events.
  • After possible future supervillain Victor joins the team in the second series, Nico assures Chase that if Victor turns out to be evil, they can always just rip his heart out. Fast forward to The Vision (2015), where Victor has his heart ripped out by his sister-in-law Virginia.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • This line of dialogue between Chamber and Molly;
    Chamber: Don't be scared, luv. I've got a pretty strict policy against harming helpless little birds like you.
    Molly: Who do you think that fakey accent is fooling?
    Chamber: Right then, so much for that policy.
  • It becomes much funnier when it turns out "Chamber" really is faking; he's actually the leader of the New Pride in disguise, and his accent is so terrible that his teammate, Stretch, is amazed anyone fell for it.
  • Everybody's jokes about how in ten years Molly or Victor will assemble a new team and the rest of the Runaways will be on some sort of Avengers team became pretty funny when in 2013, Victor actually did joined Avengers A.I.. Adrian Alphona even joked that one of the members will be a Security Daemon in search of the meaning of life. Victor's team has Doombot with exactly that motivation — who would later join the Runaways in the 2017 series.
  • Also, the jokes about adult Molly leading a superhero team, with Craig Yeung even providing her design for Runaways #150 cover, are pretty funny, since a grown-up Molly seemingly did join the X-Men in Battle of the Atom. Swerves back into Harsher in Hindsight once it's revealed that she's not on the future X-Men, she's on the future Brotherhood of Mutants instead.
  • Whedon got it wrong became this after Whedon took over Runaways and Vaughan went on to write Buffy comics.
    • It became even funnier after Buffy alum James Marsters was announced as a member of the Runaways TV cast.
  • When the Runaways look up supervillains who could be Victor's father, they consider Galactus. Four years later we meet Galacta.
  • Nico also considers Electro, saying he doesn't fit the "pure evil" description, but who knows what a guy could do in the next ten years. Since then Electro Took a Level in Badass at least twice.
  • The series starts off with Alex playing an MMORPG starring Marvel characters. Fast forward to 2013...
  • Ultron was sure that the Avengers would ask Victor (who's hispanic) to join them to counter their overall lack of ethnic diversity. One of the main complaints about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is exactly that (as well as lack of female characters).
  • Victor has a nightmare of Ultron brainwashing him and comparing them to Pinocchio and Gepetto. Fast-forward to the Avengers: Age of Ultron movie and Ultron himself is compared to Pinocchio.
• Ho Yay: Chase and Victor have a few moments:
  Chase: Vic's still got one member of his harem. And this one's got a big honkin' laser.
  • Then there's the time they had a heart-to-heart while Vic was naked...after Chase shrieked about how Victor's nudity was "gratuitous."
  "You're an electric chair with legs! Only, you know, instead of four legs, you've got, uh...three."
  • And the time they danced together.
  You're looking lovely tonight, Queer Eye.
  Hands where I can see em.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Gert, when drawn by anyone other than Adrian Alphona.
• I Am Not Shazam: "Runaways" was NOT originally the name of the team. During Vaghun's run, the book was called Runaways because they are runaways. The kids themselves did not have an official team name, usually being referred to as either "The Pride's kids" or "Those kids in L.A.," depending on the character. Later writers retconned this into making it their team name — a fact bemoaned by one of the characters in the 2017 revival:
  We didn't need a stupid super hero team name.
• Iconic Sequel Outfit: Nico Minoru's famed Elegant Gothic Lolita costumes didn't appear until the second series.
• Jerkass Woobie: Intentionally or not, Xavin can come across as particularly mean. But, on their very first appearance it's heavily implied that their parents never let them have any friends and then when they get to Earth they face a whole other plethora of issues, including a gender identity crisis, before eventually being hauled of to space jail in the place of their lover. Poor Xavin.
• One True Threesome:
  • Nico/Karolina/Xavin brings together Nico and K's on-again, off-again tension and Karolina and Xavin's Official Couple status. The closest the actual series gets to this is Xavin shapeshifting into Nico for Karolina.
  • Some fans have started to float the idea of Karolina having a three-way relationship with Xavin and Julie Power, her most recent girlfriend.
  • Other go one step futher and put Karolina with all 3 love interests Xavin, Julie Power and Nico
• Only the Creator Does It Right: The post-Vaughan/Alphona stories have not been as well received.
• Rainbow Lens:
  • In the original series, Karolina's grappling with the discovery that she is an alien was a not-at-all subtle metaphor for her growing realization that she's a lesbian. The second series decided to stop beating around the bush and had her come out to her friends.
  • Klara's Green Thumb abilities are weak when she is still a self-hating homophobe, and then get exponentially stronger as she learns to value herself and as her Pseudo-Romantic Friendship with Molly develops, with some of her more impressive displays of power occurring when she wants to protect Molly from danger. It's also worth noting that her power usually manifests itself in the form of red roses, which are traditionally a symbol of intense romantic love.
• The Scrappy: Topher, the vampire from the original miniseries, who is almost universally reviled by the fandom for manipulating Karolina into sacrificing herself, and who only existed because Vaughan knew that Joss Whedon was a fan of the series and wanted to troll him a little by having a vampire nearly kill one of his favorite characters.
• Seasonal Rot: Pretty much everything after Vaughn left the book.
• Spiritual Successor: Vaughn was never shy about acknowledging the debt the series took from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, enough to welcome Joss Whedon himself to write an arc.
• Squick: 12-year-old Klara is married to a middle-aged man when the kids find her. And he abuses her. And when she says that she does not enjoy her "marital duties". At one point, Klara comments that a misogynist idiot holding a radio studio hostage reminds her of her husband. Molly doesn't miss the implications on that one.
• Strangled by the Red String: Karolina Dean and Xavin. The entire basis for their relationship was that she was a lonely, depressed teenage lesbian, and Xavin was able to assume a female form, and also, they had an Arranged Marriage that had to be consummated or else three different worlds would be destroyed, the result of Karolina's evil parents' machination. Later on, Terry Moore put Xavin on a bus.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: How some people felt about the shuffled lineup compared to the original, specifically having Alex revealed to be evil and dying while Gert ultimately gets killed off. Their places were effectively filled in by Victor and Xavin, who do have a good amount of fans (especially the former), but for those following it since the beginning it was hard to take in.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The Pride themselves. Despite making compelling villainous foils for the Runaways and established as some of the most powerful supervillains in the Marvel universe, their relationship with their children is barely explored, and they all get unceremoniously wiped out after the very first volume.
  • Excelsior, introduced in the first issue of Volume Two, are a group of former teenage superheroes who try to help their members adjust to a normal life. Introduced as a well-meaning but still antagonistic faction who try to bring in the kids "for their own good," they get briefly mentioned once or twice in the next few arcs and then are never seen again — outside of a six-issue miniseries that doesn't involve the Pride's kids' at all.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • By the time Vaughan's run was ending, the fallout from Civil War was just ramping up. Vaughun's final issue has Iron Man and a legion of "Cape-Killers" ready to bring in the kids as unregistered felons. How do our young heroes get away? Who knows — next issue (Whedon's first), they're in New York, having traveled the entire United States completely offscreen with absolutely no mention of what happened in-between.
  • Moore's first issue is no better — after traveling to New York off-screen, the kids proceed to go all the way back to LA the same way. No mention is ever made of what the kids actually did during the months they were out on the road, and they have little involvement in the events of the 50-State Initiative or Dark Reign — which is odd, as you'd think a group of characters who practically embody teenage rebellion against corrupt authority figures would be all over that.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: It can feel like the team only goes through one dismal loss after another, with little being accomplished. Common for BKV works.
• Tough Act to Follow: After Brian K. Vaughan, there was Joss Whedon, whose run is divisive. Terry Moore followed afterwards and started with a Whole-Plot Reference to an earlier Young Avengers story to kick off Volume 3. It's like he knew he was doomed following in those footprints.
• Toy Ship: Molly and Klara are really close to each other and they're nearly inseparable.
• Unintentional Period Piece: It's set in the early-to-mid 2000s. Because the characters are well-off teens, they're very immersed in the pop culture of the time, resulting in references that date the comic to that era.
  • Alex is playing an MMORPG with a fee. Nowadays, most MMORPGs are free to play with microtransactions (including Marvel's own, short-lived one) and it's harder for an MMORPG to get away with a monthly fee - just doesn't draw the crowds like it did then.
  • All the references to Saddam and the Iraq War.
  • The slang, such as referring to one's parents as "'rents".
  • The vampire arc from the original series hinges on the notion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer being the first thing anyone thinks of when they think of vampires. BTVS ended about a year later, and people are more likely to associate vampires today with The Twilight Saga.
• Values Dissonance:
  • If one accepts that Xavin is genderfluid, Karolina and the others' need to make them take on a definite gender is at best insensitive and at worst oppressive.
  • The pejorative language used by the cast in the early days, in an attempt to sound like modern and realistic teenagers, is full of terms and words that are now considered homophobic, sexist, and ableist slurs, as well as using terms like "gay" negatively. This was how teenagers talked in the early 2000s, but since social progressivism has become more common and in general, using language like that has become more frowned upon, having sympathetic teens (including characters who are meant to be a Nice Guy type) use such terms would immediately make them unlikeable and unsympathetic to the audiences.
• The Woobie: Just about all of the kids could qualify. A brief summary:
  • Nico grew up in a strict Christian household, only to find out that her parents were secretly dark magicians. To defeat them, she had to take up dark magic herself, and using it requires her to hurt herself regularly. As if this weren't bad enough, her first boyfriend turned out to be working for the Pride. And then he got horribly killed. And then she gets stuck as the leader for a group of traumatized kids, during which time she watches as one of them leaves and another dies, and in a desperate bid to regain a sense of control over her life, she allowed her evil ancestor to torture her in exchange for more power. And then she and Chase got kidnapped by a supervillain and forced to compete in a Battle Royale rip-off, during which she got her arm blown off. And then, while she was trying to put her life back together, she got drafted into A-Force, which led to her getting stuck in the middle of Civil War II and accused of murder.
  • Chase was abused by his parents to the point where he has repressed memories, and he may have accidentally run someone over with his van. With the Runaways, he got a girlfriend, but she was fated to be horribly killed in the future, which led to some strain in their relationship. And then his girlfriend died, sending him into a downward spiral that nearly ended with him being killed by godlike beings. He almost recovered from this, only to lose his beloved pet dinosaur, the only memento he had left of his girlfriend. He eventually got his pet back, but then he got kidnapped and forced to compete in a battle with other superheroes, during which he got stuck with an evil artifact that briefly caused him to go bad.
  • Karolina's movie-star parents never wanted her, and were in fact alien thieves who secretly plotted to sell her into marriage to alien warlords when she came of age. She didn't learn about the whole "sell into marriage" thing until after she realized that she was gay, which was accompanied by her facing a painful rejection from her crush. And then her fiancee showed up, and depressed and bewildered, she agreed to follow her new fiancee back to space, spending months isolated from her friends. The wedding was a disaster, resulting in the destruction of two planets and she had to return to Earth with her fiancee, who seemed to go out of their way to annoy her friends. Things got better for a while, but then her parent's people showed up and accused her of being an accessory to genocide, and to save her life, her fiancee offered themselves to her accusers.
  • Victor was created by Ultron to become a mass-murdering supervillain. Thanks to the Runaways' intervention, he avoided this, but watched as his mother was burned alive in front of him. He developed feelings for Gert, but this brought him into conflict with Chase. They got over this, but then Gert died, and Victor ended up in a relationship with Nico which fell apart when she decided that he was compromising her ability to lead the team. He turned to drugs to cope, which eventually caused him to leave the team and sent him on a downward spiral that culminated in him accidentally murdering his nephew and then being murdered in turn by his sister-in-law.
  • Xavin was forced to become a Child Soldier to fight in a war started by their warlord parents. In a bid to end the war, they travelled to Earth to fulfill an old marriage contract that they thought might encourage their people to sue for peace. But their intended bride, Karolina, was not attracted to their natural form, and they had to adopt a new form to keep the marriage pact from falling apart. The marriage almost succeeded, but last-minute hostilities caused the war to flare up again, and this time Xavin's homeworld was destroyed, forcing them to follow Karolina back to Earth, where they struggled to fit in. And then, just when things were starting to go well, Karolina's people returned, demanding her arrest for her role in the destruction of their world, and to save her, Xavin impersonated her and handed themselves over, knowing that this would mean losing Karolina.
  • Klara was pushed into a marriage with an older, alcoholic man who physically and sexually abused her. She joined the Runaways, but was not really psychologically equipped for dealing with the lifestyle of a fledgling superhero and, combined with her previous trauma, she ended up with PTSD. And the kicker? She's only twelve years old.

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