Trope Talk: The Noodle Incident

Should there be a different name for a serious noodle incident compared to a comedic one? Or is it funnier if it’s still called that?

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Ooooooooooooooooh, okay I understand how to do it better now o.o

I first read Calvin and Hobbes when I was little. Even though it's cliche to say this, I can honestly say it changed my life. It opened up a whole new way to tell stories, introduced me to various philosophical and ethical concepts, and, most importantly, made me laugh and showed me that it's often the simplest things that are enormously fun. While I can't pick a specific favourite strip, since I have so many favourites, I can at least list a few storylines that were particularly stand-outs. The early story of the little baby raccoon, the one with the trip to Mars, Calvin turning himself into a tiger [just identical to Hobbes, except Calvin-sized], turning the Transmorgifier into a Duplicator, resulting in five Calvins running around, causing chaos, and the Snowgoon saga. Exactly how much is Calvin's imagination and how much is reality is quite interesting to think about, especially sine we're never given any kind of answer. There's numerous strips that point evidence towards Hobbes being real after all, but since Bill Watterson smartly refused to answer that, it's ultimately up to the reader to decide on their own. I have a few Noodle Incidents in my own stories, such as, 'why did the primordial personifications' avatar decide to build a city out of crystal?', 'what happened when the very first planet got flooded?', 'where did Mimics come from?', and 'what are anti-waffles and why are they so dangerous that even the protagonists' parents won't talk about it?'

When you dropped the "how I got this scar" line in a comic, I thought you were going to eventually do a tangent on The Dark Knight's "you wanna know how I got these scars?" It's an interesting inversion of the trope, since the Joker *keeps telling us*, is *obviously lying*, and it just makes him *more out-of-context* every time. I don't think I've ever seen anyone else do that. It's telling that Batman "solves" the riddle by not caring about the answer. Because the Joker's entire backstory is a noodle incident. It doesn't matter and it has never mattered.

To be fair to Solo, a lot of the stuff revealed in the movie was actually revealed decades earlier in Legends, and Solo was just confirming that a lot of it was still part of the New Canon. Him being a former Empire Solider who probably went outlaw after saving Chewie was at least highly suggested back in the Han Solo Adventures in the late-70s/early-80s. The Kessel run was first said to be through a black hole cluster at least as early as the first New Jedi Academy book (the trilogy with the buttplug that destroys planets). None of these are painfully detailed origin stories, those books came later. Solo is one of those parts of New Canon that existed to streamline and clean up the overly complicated and goofy bits of Old Canon before bringing them over. Ironically, some of the dumber explanations are actually changes for the better. People joke about the Imperial officer giving him the name Solo because he needed to fill a spreadsheet and decided to get poetic. IN LEGENDS, Han is THE LAST IN THE LINE of space royalty and sorting out his then unknown family history is--I think--an entire trilogy of books. And like most things in Legends, it is technically considered canon but any details that other writers don't like are treated like they never happened.

Love Calvin and Hobbes. I even had a stuffed tiger named Hobbes as a kid