Subnormality - TV Tropes

Subnormality is a webcomic with a whole lot of words created by Winston Rowntree. Created in 2007, this comic is a Deconstruction parade, where the author deconstructs everything from video game characters to tropes themselves, such as Cannot Spit It Out. Most of the events appear to take place in the city of Toronto, although other locales are used, such as Hell or some undefined time in the past. Some of his works are hilarious, some are depressing, and others are all over the spectrum, where the comic and your reactions change by the panel.

Rowntree also writes the irregularly updated sister comic Abnormality for Cracked; it's accessible from Rowntree's author page. Its strips are narrower (to fit the website's layout), generally shorter and rarely plot-driven. Many of them are humorous infographics. For convenience all page images taken from Abnormality link to this page. He also contributes to Cracked's After Hours series, providing illustrations for Michael's brain. Also on Cracked's Youtube channel is Winston's animated web-series People Watching, which deals in similar themes.

Subnormality can be found here.

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Provides examples of:

• Adam Westing: Cited here, as "The Emperor has no clothes — and he knows it. But he's not pretending to have clothes, and he plays to the crowd, who appreciate his honesty."
• Affably Evil: The Sphynx is an unapologetic man-eater, but is usually rather polite. (And she got upset once because no-one appreciated it.)
• Afraid of Blood: Roundtree declares that he "faints at even the description of blood." This factoid is also incorporated in this strip in reversed text.
• Alternate History: Various popular counterfactual scenarios are displayed in the Museum of the Theoretical, such as what humans would look like if Neanderthals had become Earth's dominant species or a map of Operation Downfall, a land invasion of Japan that in real life was scrapped in favor of the atomic bombs.
• Alternate Universe: One where your size is proportional to your intelligence.
• Angry Chef: In comic 424, the waitress describes the restaurant's cook as a huge skinhead with a hair-trigger temper and a tendency to headbutt people and throw kitchen appliances at waiters who get on his nerves.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Various times. Hollywood is a giant brightly colored man who steals books, television is a woman who tells amazing stories before suddenly screaming at her friends for all their imperfections for two minutes, and the News Media is a really depressing and weirdly spiritual boyfriend.
• Artistic Licence: All in the name of humor of course. One of the early comics shows the Sphinx killing Oedipus Rex, then when Jocasta comes running being outraged at the fact that she stooped to marrying her own son. Aside from the Death by Adaptation bit, neither character was aware of their blood relationship until The Reveal, and they didn't get married until after Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx.
• Author Appeal: Most of the comic's women are drawn with hairy arms and legs.
• Asshole Victim: In this strip, one wonders why anyone would agree to pay five dollars for a snow removal service that will heavily damage the property in the process — then you see who the house belongs to.

  Mrs. Smith: Five dollars?! Well it's coming out of your pay! Clearing the walk is supposed to be your job, Luisa! Did you weasel out of your snow shoveling in La Paz, too?
  Luisa: Come here, Janey! Let's go to the basement for a second!

• Bait-and-Switch:
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Characters with selfish and mean interiors have wrinkled faces, snout noses, and/or pointed teeth. Characters meant to be bland and generic will look exactly that. Sympathetic characters, even those employed by hell, will either be beautiful or Ugly Cute. Curiously, this actually works well within the comic's style. The artist clearly enjoys drawing grotesque, insane things. One notable exception to this is the author self-insert comics, Rowntree seems to be happy to depict himself honestly. And, well, for the sake of politeness lets just say he's not exactly a super-model.
• Beneath Notice: One strip begins by focusing on a glamorous James Bond-like man while the narration describes the lifestyle of a spy. The ending reveals that the actual spy is a very plain, forgettable man that nobody really pays attention to, aiding him in his job.

  And I don't hide in plain sight. I don't hide at all. I just live in the blind spots that everyone has — the places you would never look because you assume — you know — nothing could be there. You can fit quite the little career in a blind spot.

• Belief Makes You Stupid: Let's just say that Winston is definitely one of those atheists, though it doesn't come up much.
• Benevolent Boss: Deconstructed. They're actually the worst kind when you have a terrible job, since they make you feel good about it in spite of things.
• Blatant Lies: The Sphynx, after saving a woman's life, tries to pass it off as an attempt to show that she's evil after all because she, uh, can recognize the value of human life and just chooses to ignore it when she's hungry. The woman doesn't buy it.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Sphynx, apparently. It's fine for her to kill and eat people since she's not human, whereas a human cannibal is shown to have ended up in Hell. Her "reasoning" is that she's simply higher on the food chain. Of course, the Sphynx isn't actually dead yet.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: In one strip, a spa employee is giving a new visitor an introductory speech in which she quickly slips in a mention that, if you through the wrong door in the spa, they sacrifice you to a dark god.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
• Brick Joke:
• Brutal Honesty:
• Butterfly of Doom: Present in "Consequences" literally as the mark of possibilities. Also along one of the pathways; if the apple core distracts the butterfly then a typhoon is averted for now.
• Casual Time Travel: Among other instances, to Ancient Egypt. "People will travel back in time to previous eras and blend in with the locals because even a theocratic Bronze Age dictatorship seems more sophisticated than their own society sometimes."
• Cerebus Syndrome: The comic's gotten far less lighthearted and more serious as it went on. Nowadays it is rare to see the campy style of the early comics.
• Character Development: Exhibited by a few of the recurring characters. Compare the Sphinx here and here.
• Crapsack World: Well, it does seem like roughly half the population of this place consists of evil beings who try to lure the other half to their doom. But not all of them are mean about it.
• Curse Cut Short: The damned soul in "This Job Is Hell" displays one of these on his shirt, which shows what he's currently thinking.
• Cute Monster Girl: Some of the demons in hell. Except when they find out the damned souls are liking it, at which point they can turn frumpy just to screw with them. And the Sphynx, who looks awfully cute even as she thinks up new ways to devour humans.
• Deconstructor Fleet: As stated above. Tons of tropes are deconstructed.
• Demonization: Apparently, Margaret Thatcher is a Xenomorph who is obsessed with nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, prefers to express himself through freestyle rap. The joke being that both were run through an "exaggeration engine" thus apparently explaining their grotesque forms and bizarre behavior... only to be revealed that said engine wasn't even turned on, which only somewhat destroys the point.
• Despair Event Horizon: Aside from "Not Worth It!", the Sphynx opts to use this as a means of calming her meals, making them Driven to Suicide. Those poor baby chicks... And she gave up this tactic because people no longer found her stories depressing.
• Distracted by the Sexy: The demon-date, an intellectual version.
• Disturbing Statistic: There's a game show called "Not Worth It" which uses this trope in its quiz questions.
• Dominance Through Furniture: In a comic, an average joe goes to multiple job interviews, but keeps getting turned down. These constant failures wear him down and his posture gets worse with each new interview until he's finally so slumped over that the last manager uses him as a footrest.
• Easter Eggs:
• Even Evil Has Standards: Sure, the Sphinx kills and usually eats passerby, but she would never dream of having sex with her own son.^note 
• Expository Hairstyle Change:
  • In this strip, the pink-haired girl's decision to quit her soul-crushing waitressing job results in her instantly getting her pink hair back.
  • And in this strip, applying for the flight attendant job switches it back to brown.
• Extreme Doormat: The Pink-Haired Girl - see Too Dumb to Live for more, plus The Boardgame!
• Failure Is the Only Option:
  • The entire point of "Can't Win", where a sinner insists he'll be the one to best Hell, much to the annoyance of Devil #76. He doesn't.
  • The TV game show parody Not Worth It has a twist: it's actually easy to win, but it's so soul-crushingly depressing that the winners wish they hadn't played.

    Game host: You've done it!! You've won the maximum prize money!! A dollar for every 50 dead Armenians!

• False Reassurance: Sure, she was lying about the skinhead cook, rat poison in the soup, and rival biker gangs wrecking the place - but the table legs ARE made of frozen rats.
• For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: As the demon girl puts it, "God, Halloween's fantastic. For one day you can wander around freely and everyone just thinks you're wearing a costume. It's really rather nice." Frankenstein's Monster is also showing up as himself on that occasion.
• Fourth-Wall Observer: This pair have a habit of doing so.
• Funny Background Event: Rowntree likes to fill the background with various signage and headline gags. As with MAD, these are often funnier than the main dialogue or situation of a given comic, and are stuffed with Genius Bonus.
  • Here's a good example. Note the guy taking a picture and what happens to him.
  • The background of the comic under Nice Job Breaking It, Hero! has "Pizza Building", presumably due to Sphynx complaining.
• Genre Blind: The man in this strip thinks it a good idea to buy a newspaper with the headline "Local Man Devoured by Newspaper Box" from a newspaper box. No points awarded for guessing what happens next.
• Godwin's Law of Time Travel: In full force in this strip. In fact, it's used as instantly recognizable evidence that time travel has occurred.
• Going Commando: Justine casually admits she lost her underwear while trying on a swimsuit and just decided to go without. "But is underwear even really necessary these days?... Maybe I'll just go ahead and 86 the panties in the future."
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: The Sphynx kills humans all the time, but it's played for laughs. It helps that she seems to dine mainly on Asshole Victims.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In-Universe. Pointed out in the Alt Text for the 43rd strip concerning the appearance of one of the characters:
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Hitler gets frequent attempts on his life from time travelers — all fail. However, the guard assigned to his chambers starts to wonder if maybe this is a sign that they aren't on the side of good after all.
• Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Subverted, as the Horsemen presented turn out not to be the biblical ones, but the Horsemen of the "Atheist" Apocalypse, respectively Science, Progress, Reason, and Equality (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens). Rather than heralding the end of the world, they create a utopia.
• Humanity on Trial: In strip #187, the pink-haired girl is summoned to speak on her galaxy's behalf before THE EMPEROR OF THE UNIVERSE, who threatens to blow it up after getting a complaint from the next galaxy over. He spares the Milky Way galaxy after rewriting reality to make himself everyone's obnoxious boss and clients.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Expressed by many characters, especially the Sphinx. However she does mention they have redeeming qualities in Monsters Playing Poker.
• Ill-Fated Flowerbed: Exploited in-universe in Hell: in "Can't Win", a damned soul's punishment consists of being put in an area where, no matter what he does, he will always end up enraging a large, violent man who is standing right behind him. The soul figures all he has to do to avoid this is not do or say anything... until the last panel reveals that he's standing on top of said man's flowerbed.

  Large, violent man: MY PRIZE PETUNIAS!

• I'm a Humanitarian: A guy that ends up in Hell admits to having been a cannibalistic serial killer, but denies not cleaning up after his dog.
• Implausible Hair Color: The pink-haired girl... unless she's working at a soul-crushing job in which case it spontaneously shifts to a dull brown.
• Infinite Canvas: Most entries prefer to be the standard vertical scroll. The occasional comic extends several screen-widths, in addition to several screen-heights.
• Innocent Fanservice Girl: There's a recurring female character (later revealed to be named Justine) who is both incredibly attractive and tends to wear very tight-fitting clothing, low-cut tops, daisy dukes, etc. However, she seems to be largely oblivious to the effect she has on men, who are usually so gob-smacked by her geeky interests that they spontaneously explode.
• Ironic Hell: On one occasion a misfile causes a guy to be signed up for the wrong ironic punishment, which is immediately corrected when he takes offense to being buried in dog feces (having always made it a point to clean up after his dog, even if he did kill five people). In another one, Hell's latest tenant frustrates the demon assigned to him for orientation because here, yet again, is some dipshit who thinks a single lifetime of being a dull little guy has given him the guile to outwit millenia-old beings who have honed the craft of eternal suffering; then his attempt to prove his point ends up seriously screwing his pooch.
• It's All About Me: this fitness center owner is bothered by the Sphynx's mass killing spree - because it's ruining his business.
• Jackass Genie:
  • "I would like everything I could ever need!"
  • Lampshaded: "So you're one of those genies."
• Kaleidoscope Hair: The pink-haired girl switches between neon pink and brown, once in the middle of a conversation with another character. Her explanation is just "I do this a lot."
• Laser-Guided Karma: Occurs in an appropriately titled strip.

  General Pete: So yeah, cheers! Fuckin' cheers. Here's to karma. And here's to the bullied. Because they don't need to inherit the Earth — it's already theirs.
  Redheaded Fan: Man... I fully came over here to just intensely hit on you, but now I'm too distracted by that story.
  General Pete: So much karma...

• Like Parent, Like Spouse: Parodied in a comic which featured various mutations on spousal archetypes. The "spouse who resembles your opposite-sex parent" panel humorously insinuates that women want an affectionate man while men want a woman who manages their lives.
• Medieval Morons: Lampshaded in this comic. "These are the pyramids had ancient people actually been as stupid and primitive as people assume they were".
• Medium Awareness:
  • These guys know the title of the comic they appear in.
  • And these guys know what trope is being used in the comic.
• Meet Cute: Deconstructed, then reconstructed in the comic of the same name.
• Model Scam:
• Monster Clown:
  • "Heyyy kids! It's me, Sweeny the fuckin' clown! Who wants to see what the inside of a larynx looks like?"
  • In "The Service", the pink-haired girl's new coworkers at her awful workplace culminate with Emil the Dancing Clown from Hell, who handles employee evaluations.
• Morton's Fork: Hell is like this for anyone who goes there, but apparently, there are always a few guys who won't take the staff's word for it...
• Ms. Fanservice: Justine, who was initially unnamed. Found here, here and here, but has since shown up almost as much as Sphinx and Pink-Haired Girl at this point. Although, because she seems unaware of her effect on the opposite sex, it overlaps with Innocent Fanservice Girl. In the third one, it shows that she is saddened by the fact that every man she might like disappears. She's wearing the man's hat when she sighs at the bus stop.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Eddie gets fired for giving the Sphynx a case of Fridge Brilliance.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The embodiment of Equality looks a lot like David Duchovny, for whatever reason.
• No Kill like Overkill: The guys who clear snow from people's houses with the freaking Tsar Pushka.
• No Name Given:
  • One of the central characters, initially pictured with pink hair, has always gone unnamed, and according to the artist in one comments string, always will. Her official moniker is Pink Haired Girl, abbreviated as PHG.
  • Most of the other characters have been named, but only very subtly. Sometimes so subtly that their names are only found in the titles of the comic's image files—a good example: Ms Fan Service is named Justine, seen only in the filename of this comic◊.
• Odd Friendship:
  • The Sphinx and Pink Haired Girl. It's working out quite well for them.
  • Also Ethel and Pink Haired Girl. Their first impressions of each other would've prevented each other from ever talking to each other in the first place.
• Only Useful as Toilet Paper: The No-Bullshit Emporium sells copies of L. Ron Hubbard's ''Dianetics' pre-printed on rolls of toilet paper, available in both regular and quilted.
• Our Sphinxes Are Different: The Sphinx is about three thousand and four hundred years old, and around the size of a small elephant. She also eats people — she doesn't seem to eat anything else — and gets very prickly when people object.
• Overt Operative: Subverted here, in which the actual spy is sitting behind the James Bond expy.
• Period Piece, Modern Language: Discussed; the comic points out that all the characters in fantasy and historical films tend to speak in Flowery Elizabethan English... except the token black sidekick, who always talks like they're from Atlanta circa 1995.
• Periphery Demographic: Discussed In-Universe in a strip on the omnipresence of subtle weirdness, which gave that page its picture.
• Personal Raincloud: Played with in one strip. One panel, labeled "how fortunate you might feel", shows a morose monster sitting under a small localized raincloud, and being drenched in rain. The next, labeled "how fortunate you might be", shows that the monster is surrounded by fire and being kept safe by the cloud.
• Platonic Prostitution:
  • In this strip, a man hires a woman to write a short horror story on commission in a manner otherwise written exactly like streetwalking prostitution.
  • Downplayed strip 505. The client visits a "sex stop" for precisely the reasons one would expect and he and the worker there end up doing the deed at the end, but he spends most of the strip venting about a very traumatic tour of duty.
• Pointy-Haired Boss: The Emperor Of The Universe is the ultimate pointy-haired Bad Boss. "YES!!! AN OPPORTUNITY TO INFLICT SUFFERING!!"
• Postmodernism: Experiments with everything from Genre Savvy characters (as seen here) to bizarre, artistically-inclined layouts, and Deconstruction of say, videogames. If this comic doesn't qualify as "Post-modern" then somebody has redefined "Post-modern" behind my back.
• Pragmatic Villainy: The Sphynx has spared humans a few times, claiming it's because they're small and not worth the effort. (She doesn't eat children for the same reason. "Barely a meal", as she says.)
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: In-Universe. The Pink Haired Girl states outright that she's okay with the Sphynx killing people as long as the Sphynx is nice to her personally. Though this isn't to say she didn't agonize at length over the dissonance of her acceptance of the Sphynx as a friend all the while knowing that the Sphynx eats people and is perceived as a dangerous menace.
• Psychological Horror: Used for plot basis on occasion, notably in Ethel Blackmoore; Horror Fiction Lady of the Night, A Christmas Eve in the Future and Choose Your Own Adventure.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: The Covid-19 epidemic causes the Pink-Haired Girl to lose her job as a stewardess as airlines cut back.
• Reality-Breaking Paradox: This strip features a scientist who creates an "anti-Gandhi" who is dressed in a fancy business suit, has thick red hair and a beard, and practices "violent nonresistance." The idea is so stupid that the Earth blows up.
• Riddling Sphinx: Lampshaded. As this early strip shows, the Sphynx was actually the original one, but she gave up that routine a long time ago (and a few strips clear show that nowadays, she tends to look back on it as something dumb she did when she was young).
• Schmuck Bait: "Local Man Devoured By Newspaper Box". You can just guess what happens when a guy tries to buy a paper to find out about this story...
• Shout-Out:
• Shown Their Work: Moscow Metro is portrayed rather accurately, with proper Russian words and even with an allusion to a cult Russian film.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Meanders all over the scale, often multiple times within a single comic.
• Smarter Than You Look: Here a scruffy blue collar woman gives a lengthy, philosophical discussion on a rich person speeding.
• Speech-Centric Work: It frequently lampshades its tendency to rely on walls of text and copious dialogue, and even provides the page image for this trope.
• Stable Time Loop: A man is selected by his religious organization to travel back in time in order to conduct an experiment in storytelling. He eventually comes to the realization that he was the founder of this religion.
• Static Character: "Character Evolution" illustrates Character Development by medium, depicting Comic Strip characters as so unchanging that they're gathering cobwebs.
• Stealth Pun:
• Straw Character: Saturates the entire comic. If Rowntree has an Anvil to drop, it will usually be dropped on a misrepresented effigy of that which he dislikes.
• Take That!: Hell features the music of KISS, not because KISS is satanic, but because their music "sucks".
• Temporal Paradox: "We're going to [time-travel] to the year 2204 to prevent the invention of time-travel!"
• Terrible Interviewees Montage: It doesn't get more terrible than the Dating (Russian) roulette: Six speed dates in a row, you have to settle on ONE mandatory date without seeing the others after you make your choice or being allowed to pick someone you already rejected. Hope you don't land on the bullet!^note 
• Textplosion: Several instances go beyond Wall of Text and straight into this trope.
• Those Two Guys: Bernard and his associate, who start out small but eventually work their way into helping people for its own sake.
• To Serve Man: The monsters — most notably the Sphinx — have a taste for people and are not remorseful about it. The weirdest part is, human witnesses seem to take this in stride; one guy who gets angry at the Sphynx is mad not because he thinks it's evil, but because she's hurting his business by preying on his customers! (Still, that would be kind of bad for business...)
• Villain Protagonist: The Sphynx is likely the closest thing the strip has to a protagonist. She's an ancient monster who eats people, although she isn't without redeeming traits, like her unspoken friendship with pink-haired girl.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Best Friends Who Hate Each Other variety gets lampshaded.
• Wall of Text: The most prominent feature of the comic. It's even lampshaded by the comic's subtitle, "Comix with too many words". This one has to take the cake.
• What Have You Done for Me Lately?: The Chimera fails to understand what people are good for, aside from meals.
• When I Was Your Age...: Parodies the "Uphill Both Ways" line in this comic. Turns out it is possible to walk to school and back uphill both ways, if you have a ridiculously tall house.
• Wiki Walk: Utilized in the upper-right portion of this strip, where a man goes from Wangari Maathai, to coral reefs, to torture in the span of an evening.
• Wrench Wench: Ms. Fanservice appears to like a good lawnmower as much as a skimpy outfit.
• You Bastard!: Rowntree still appreciates it when bastards read his webcomic, though.
• Your Costume Needs Work: At Halloween, Frankenstein's Monster gets criticized because he's "trying too hard" to get his costume right.

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