YMMV / Sticky Dilly Buns

• Adorkable: Ramona may be a plump, shy, geeky fangirl, but she’s kind of cute at minimum (and Jung is clearly very taken with her).
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Dillon himself is a one-character base breaker.
    • He's a very Camp Gay, and some readers find him cute and funny while others regard him as a tiresome, self-absorbed, manipulative Jerkass. This perception may have started with his repeated teasing of Gary in Ménage à 3, but he took to treating Ruby similarly (if not so flirtatiously), which had the potential to cause more trouble than with Gary, if her emotional fragility had come to the fore. (Fortunately, she held up well enough, and even started unintentionally causing him problems right back.) He's also been perceived as blocking Amber from pursuing her interest in Gary, although that's maybe more of a concern from the point of a Ménage à 3 reader.
    • Mostly, though, Dillon just irritates some readers, to the point of triggering fantasies of violence towards him which then annoy other people on the discussion boards. Other readers don't go that far, but certainly dislike him. However, the creators say that they find a lot of enthusiastic Dillon fans at conventions and elsewhere; this apparently led them to create strips which emphasized Dillon's flaws (notably his hypocritical claim to have seduced twenty-seven straight men away from their girlfriends, when he supposedly hates infidelity, though this turned out to be the result of them lying about being single and him being led to believe it’s socially acceptable for married straight men to sleep with other men discreetly), to show that he was supposed to be imperfect — which of course means that people who already disliked him just got even more angry with him.
    • He's also sometimes been perceived as more resistant to character development than any other major character in the setting, making his status as a flawed title character troublesome. However, this problem — and indeed the general problem of Dillon's unpopularity with some fans — has been much reduced in volume 2 of the comic (strip 151 onward), in which he developed some kind of active conscience and willingness to think more about others, apparently partly due to Ruby's influence. (Ironically, this sometimes led to him being more restrained than Ruby wanted him to be, for reasons of her own, showing some of her less likable tendencies.)
  • Ruby too can cause divisions:
    • She can be abrasive, judgmental, and prudish, especially in her early appearances, and she is often intolerant of anything Amber does. Meanwhile, her supposed intelligence sometimes seems like an Informed Attribute at best.
    • She's certainly imposing on Amber (and to a lesser extent on Dillon) by claiming space in her apartment purely on the basis of being family. However, she has her Freudian Excuse, and Amber arguably owes her several years worth of huge favor.
    • Hence, some readers just find her annoying and petulant in those early strips, while others have some sympathy for her — her personality has been explained as the result of trauma, for which Amber arguably bears responsibility — and find her relationship with Amber interesting. She does have her own moral code, and she's clearly on some kind of Character Development arc. Readers who like her regard her as more complex and interesting than the title character or her sister.
    • Scenes where she proves susceptible to Cuteness Proximity (as here) may or may not serve as effective Pet the Dog moments for those who dislike her.
    • Unfortunately, her nervous discovery of her own libido brings out her selfish and manipulative side. For some readers, this makes her look bad again; for others, it's just a down-slope on her roller-coaster development track.
    • And is she a Deadpan Snarker, or at least trying to become one? She certainly manages some digs at Dillon... But some readers don't see these as snarks. However, once she gets her act together a little more, she proves able to hold her own.
  • The problems with both Dillon and Ruby led in turn to a division of opinion over why to read the comic at all. To judge by the discussion boards, there's a divide among the fans between those who are basically reading the the thing because of Dillon, and those who come to it for Ruby. The fanbase hasn't gone to war yet, strips featuring both Dillon and Ruby may or may not interest both factions, and there are probably lots of readers somewhere in the middle — but there have been disagreements.
  • A much lesser example which caused some spats on the comic's discussion boards was Angel's Ambiguous Gender. Some readers were convinced that they knew what gender Angel was; others pointed to the uncertainties. Eventually, a slightly unusual gender reveal closed out that problem.
• Creator's Pet: Dillon isn't really a full-on case, but there are occasional mutters from some fans. He's the title character, and the comic was specifically created because the writers wanted to do more with him than was possible in Ménage à 3. But as other notes on this page explain, he's not 100% popular with all the readers. The writers certainly seem to favor him:
  • Amber clearly loves him like a brother, and tries to avoid pursuing a man on whom she knows Dillon has a crush, even though the man in question is entirely straight and has made the fact clear.
  • Jerzy rapidly falls for him, despite seeing him throw some camp tantrums.
  • He more or less implies that Ruby acts like a porn slut. Up until then, Ruby has been depicted as a neurotic virgin who despises her sister's porn career, and who isn't slow to react to provocations with anger — but she lets this go with barely a murmur. She then lets herself be bounced into going along with his ideas, if only to stop him throwing another tantrum.
  • In this scene, an accident leaves Andy and Jerzy soaked, Ruby even more embarrassed than she was before, the waitress inconvenienced — and Dillon completely untouched.
  • The supposedly non-gay Andy not only starts hero-worshipping Dillon for no clear reason, and looking to him for advice on heterosexual dating, he displays a willingness to kiss Dillon the moment Ruby seems to be suggesting that.
  • By strip #150, Dillon has imposed on Ruby in countless ways, and then annoyed her deeply by a flagrant (if unconscious) display of hypocrisy. Furthermore, she's a nervous virgin with a short temper who has had her sleep disturbed by sharing a bed with Amber recently. However, when Dillon asks if he can sleep in her bed for emotional comfort, she agrees with barely a quibble.
  • On the other hand, his inability to preserve a stable relationship, and the way that Ruby is able to dismantle his self-image with a few sentences (without any actual malice), show that he isn't actually invulnerable.
• Fan Nickname: "Ma3treal" (or “Mà3treal”) is used to refer to the comic's version of Montreal, particularly when it comes to the Artistic License aspects.
• I Knew It!: Several strips fairly heavily foreshadowed the reveal that Angel was gender-fluid, and a number of readers on the comic's discussion boards noted that their presentation was ambiguous, they used a women's toilet despite having presented as probably-male up until then, and the characters who knew Angel best never seemed to use gendered pronouns for them. And yet, other fans insisted loudly that Angel was obviously male.
• Strawman Has a Point: Ruby may be Comically Serious at best, a Sour Prude at worst; she is definitely happier once she eventually gets Andy into bed; she certainly has issues. But when she tells other cast members that not everything is about sex and that it's possible to be happy as a "self-actualizing ugly stepsister", it's perhaps easier to side with her than the writers intended — especially when those arguments are addressed to Amber (an ex-porn star with problems forming a satisfying emotional life) or Dillon (who some readers regard as tiresomely camp).
• Unnecessary Makeover: Some readers at least felt that Amber and Dillon's efforts with Ruby actually reduced her appeal.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Deliberately created by the writing for a significant period, but now resolved; see the notes on Ambiguous Gender and Ostentatious Secret in Angel's entry on the Characters page.

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