"It's time to find that little piece of magic that makes xkcd so special, and kill it."
Making xkcd Slightly Worse is to xkcd what Square Root of Minus Garfield is to Garfield.
XKCDSW contains examples of:
- Anti Humour: Many comics simply remove the punchline from the original material, and instead portray completely mundane situations.
- #3687 "Logic Boat" offers the correct solution.
- #3699 "Nothing to Offer" just shows the original quote verbatim.
- Cruel Twist Ending: Often done to romance comics.
- Inverted Trope: The remix comics' attitute to science and mathematics is often completely contrary to the original. For example, #3051 "Connected".
- Overused Running Gag: Called "micromemes".
- "Well, it's better than Vista."
- "Listen. I wouldn't worry about that."
- "I've never been so turned on in my life" appears in the most bizarre of circumstances.
- "Our copy of the Kama Sutra has a couple mistranslations."
- Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: very often on the cynical end.
- Stylistic Suck:
- It's not called "Making xkcd Slightly Worse" for nothing.
- Original xkcd's command-line interface has an Evil Twin in SW-DOS, which as the name suggests, is modeled after MS-DOS — The Alleged Car of operating systems.
- Updated Re-release: #2433 "2009 Christmas Special" takes the original webcomic's 2008 Christmas special and finishes it.