YMMV / Sluggy Freelance

• Archive Panic: Even if you skip the Filler Strips, you still have around a decade.
• Cliché Storm: Doctor Nofun is a blend of several villain stereotypes all packed into one character.
• Crazy Is Cool: Torg's moments of victory prior to when he Took a Level in Badass - for example, his apparently inane practice of keeping around "Emergency Pants", which go on to become absolutely vital a few strips later.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Lots of characters of varying major-ness. As far as the main cast is concerned, Sasha. At the other end of the spectrum there's Pasquirlio, the squirrel that was Kiki's business partner and turned out to be Donald Trump's living hairpiece.
• Epileptic Trees: Just read the forums. Especially about Oasis, whose precise nature has probably been specc'd on more than anyone in history except religious figures and the Doctor.
• Fan Nickname: Before we found out anything about it, the 4U City dimension was nicknamed "The Dimension of Rain", rhyming with Dimension of Pain and because it rains constantly.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Steve Irwin Captain Ersatz "The Demon Hunter" gets stabbed in the chest with a nautically-themed spear. Could also qualify as Crosses the Line Twice, as it does happen a second time, when his assistant/wife betrays him. Needless to say, these strips ran years before Irwin's real life death in a disturbingly similar manner.
  • The gag week where UN weapons inspectors are incapable of finding Bert living in the house was based on then-current events: the UN's inspectors in Iraq had reported that Saddam had no WMDs. This sounded pretty unlikely at the time and the inspectors were widely mocked. After the war, though, this gag week got a lot less funny when America didn't find WMDs either.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The arc where the group first meets the Lysindra vampires was funny enough in 1998. Come 2005 and Twilight, and the attack of the vampire Kullen and the fact that Torg has a mind that vampires can't read, and it's hilarious how well The Twilight Saga gets mocked.
• I Knew It!:
  • The use of the Minion Master as a Chekhov's Gun was figured out by the forumites fairly easily.
  • This trope is the reason the forum has a separate section for fan theories that Pete Abrams does not look at.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Pete had told the fanbase for years that Zoe was going to die. By the 4U City arc, she was brutally burned, drugged into a coma, and Riff was told that she cannot survive off of the machines keeping her stable. However, this information has been relayed to him through a character known for duplicity and the use of a surveillance tape. Eventually, Riff used time travel and nanobots to bring her back.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Played straight and subverted by the same action: Oasis murders Monica, someone the readers know is an evil spy trying to bring about the downfall of the main cast. However, nobody (including Oasis) knew this fact. And up to this point, Oasis had not done any permanent damage to anyone the main cast would identify as innocent, meaning that for many of them (and Oasis herself) the event has become a Moral Event Horizon. Also subverted when she burned Zoe alive. Zoe ultimately got better and Oasis has since made efforts to redeem herself.
  • This could also be seen as the end of an extended MEH crossing by Dr. Schlock, who not only set Oasis off again by ordering the death of Feng, but manipulated Riff to go against Oasis, and blocked out Torg's call to Riff thus depriving Riff of vital information.
  • Bestseid crossed the horizon when it was revealed he has been feeding ZHOAS (Jane) brains again. Made even worse by the fact that they are probably the brains of "innocent" random minions. Either way Jane is crazy enough when lucid that this is a bad thing.
• Nightmare Fuel: Some of Oasis' darker descents into insanity, especially during the "Fire and Rain" arc.
  Oasis: GOD WHY DID YOU MAKE TORG LIE TO ME?
  • JESUS! Poor Tyler...
• Seasonal Rot: Opinion varies on where it started, what exactly's been going wrong, or whether it's still "good," and while many people feel that it's nowhere near what it was in the nineties and early 2000s, others think that despite the changes it's just as good as it ever was. A regular target of this criticism is the "Oceans Unmoving" arc due to it being the first time Pete admitted that he was actively struggling to finish his storylines due to their complexity having grown too much.
• Shallow Parody: The Harry Potter parody arc is often cited as one of the strip's lowest points, in part because it both said nothing new about the series it was making fun of and because several of its jokes were about things that weren't even true (like claiming Hogwarts semesters only last a week).
• The Woobie:
  • Torg, for being unable to be with the woman he loves due to circumstances beyond his control. Zoe, for her perennial Butt-Monkey status. Even Oasis has her Woobie moments, despite being an Ax-Crazy Stalker with a Crush.
  • Also, some believe Zombie-Head-On-A-Stick is quite pitiable.
• The Writer Thinks of Everything: The forums are always filled with much debate as to how much is really Pete's advance planning and how much is just Continuity Nods. The explanation of how a character who made his debut by suddenly arriving in Timeless Space got there (along with another character from the Oceans Unmoving arc) seems more like the latter. The big reveal about Oasis, however...definitely the former.