YMMV / Kevin & Kell

Adorkable: Harcourt definitely has his moments. A good example is when he used a presentation to apologize for failing to compliment Coney on her new haircut. The gist of it is that he's not good at communicating yet, and it takes time for him to respond properly.
Coney: So...you're like an Easy-Bake Oven?
Harcourt: Trust me, this isn't easy.
Alternative Character Interpretation: In the Red Herring situation at the start of their sophomore year at Beige University in 2016, the accepted assumption was that Fiona initially thought that a bulge in Greta's midsection meant that she ate her boyfriend, Todd. But a minority opinion of fans was the thought that Greta got pregnant with Todd, and was carrying an egg.
Anvilicious: It comes with the territory when the titular characters are in a Maligned Mixed Marriage, but it can cover whatever Holbrook is obsessed with at the time. Bill loves to beat his readers over the head with the aesops he's trying to push. And he also makes little effort to obscure his own biases. Obviously the most common anvil is the racism metaphor at the center of the strip, with a general overall recurring theme of accepting differences. Non-racial anvils dropped have included advocating for community wi-fi (that originally came complete with advocacy site launched along with the strip!), slamming anti-vaxxers and protesting whaling. The community wi-fi one was particularly frustrating since it came out of nowhere, lasted for all of a day, then disappeared and is never mentioned again, making the issue clearly something Holbrook wasn't invested in for very long.
Archive Binge/Archive Panic: Going back to 1995, this is one of the longest-running webcomics with over 9,000 strips and still counting. That's 29 years of DAILY strips.... You don't need to read the full archive to understand the newer strips but you have to read them if you want to get the full story.
Ass Pull: Many, many storylines end with one of these to avoid having to grapple with the full implications the storyline has accidentally stumbled into. One of the more frustrating examples was the "Kevin getting a recall election," storyline, starting here. The whole thing is built up so that all rabbits are divided on how the ears are portrayed- ears up is one side, and ears down is the other. Both sides hate each other with the same vitriol as opposing political viewpoints. Kevin has one ear up and one ear down. So Bill Holbrook has the option of either going into a storyline that delves into politics and Kevin struggling to find compromise and balance in the system... or he could have every rabbit in the world suddenly have ears like Kevin with absolutely no explanation, getting him re-elected and preserving the Status Quo. Guess which one Holbrook went with.
Base-Breaking Character: Danielle... both versions of her. Not because of anything she did specifically, but because especially the second Danielle's storyline about her becoming a rabbit and joining the main cast ended up upsetting the furry fanbase that just wanted a simple furry slice of life comic and didn't want any more action storylines and especially the sci-fi "human world" concepts interfering with it. This basically led to every single strip Danielle was in being full of angry comments on the mailing list even if she didn't say or do anything besides continue to exist. If she ever referenced her actual background, there would be even more furor (such as the last panel of this strip where she remarks that the only thing that would ever make her go back through the portal would be to protect Francis' life). Even some of Bill's collaborators began assuring fans they would "talk to him" about her, implying they would lobby him to have her and all future "human plots" removed. Notably readers who did like these deeper and more thoughtful storylines about the universe's lore that by now had been running for more than half of it's then 10-year existence did like Danielle and were rather upset that eventually the anti-human brigade won by sheer force of will. Eventually basically everything about the human world vanished, except for Francis, and he was given a huge loophole to ensure that storylines like "instinct loss" would not return. Danielle never talks about where she comes from and her plots are as simple as anyone else's. And guess who suddenly turned into The Scrappy in the eyes of those fans when he suddenly became the sole human in a "furry comic"...
- The controversial nature of Danielle is noted in the comic's Unofficial FAQ, which notes "The death of Danielle Kindle and the appearance of Danielle Kendall have caused more debate, discussion, and acrimony on the K&K mailing list than perhaps any other topic in the comic." It ends with a quote from Holbrook who has largely stayed silent except to say “I didn't think there was anything constructive I could add, except to say that I never mean to hurt anyone with my strips.”
Broken Aesop: Holbrook has long used changing species or diet as a in-universe analogue for being transgender. While it's always been a little awkward and isn't meant to be one-to-one, it's been explained that nobody cares about gender or sexuality that much due to species and diet classification being considered more important. Initially the only character to go through this was Bruno, whose arc played out over several years and showed him going through a massive emotional arc as well as eventually embracing surgical transition. This is not the Broken Aesop, the fans overall thought this arc was done tastefully. Flash forward to a much later example in which Ophelia unironically became "trans-turtle" simply because she wore a turtle-shell as a disguise once. She has this overnight revelation and massive lifestyle change in a week. Bill seemed completely ignorant that he'd just written a character that is an example of the transphobic stereotype of a "Transtrender." She also faces none of the discrimination or difficulties Bruno did, seemingly either ignoring or retconning it. This went a step further when she married a gopher, George Gopher, who gets disowned by his gopher family for wanting to marry her. After a group of turtles convinced George Gopher that he should transition to fit in when he married Ophelia, even transgender fans called this out for being incredibly insensitive and again, for using a transphobic stereotype (this time of transpeople "recruiting" vulnerable people.) At bare minimum, it made the allegory as Holbrook had initially presented it feel cheapened.
- Done Again with Edward in 2025, who used a rabbit disguise for years, even marrying and impregnating a rabbit, without telling her his real identity, falling into the stereotype of transitioners actively deceiving people for personal gain.
Fan Nickname: Fans tend to capitalize Vin's name to differentiate them from Vin Vulpen.
Friendly Fandoms: It's not uncommon for K&K fans to also discuss and share TwoKinds and Doc Rat within the strip's discussion threads. The latter is not so surprising since they've had a prominent sponsorship on the Kevin and Kell homepage for years.
Genius Bonus:
- In this comic, Coney is losing marks for not sharing her meals by regurgitating them. Most people would find this funny due to the idea of the rabbit being greedy, but the thing is, rabbits are physically unable to vomit, meaning that she literally cannot share her meals by regurgitating them.
- Also the mole scientist named Avagadro: in chemistry, Avagadro's Number is the number of molecules in a mole.
Hilarious in Hindsight: A football-themed strip on New Year's Day 2006 showed even the players at a bowl game had corporate branding. Fast forward 15 years, and college football players can now benefit personally from their name, image, and likeness (NIL). This was further invoked in 2022 when Rudy was again able to sell his produce after the gardening season harvest.
It Was His Sled:
- The Great Bird Conspiracy, that they ran the world until they gave it up.
- Getting to this trope is that Lindesfarne and Danielle are former humans.
Periphery Demographic: Believe it or not, furries. Kevin and Kell was started out because Bill Holbrook thought the idea of the clashing of a modern, technological world otherwise ruled by the laws of nature and populated by Funny Animal characters was hilarious. Understandably, since he distributed it entirely on the internet in the mid-1990s, it was immediately embraced by the young but rapidly growing Furry Fandom that was pretty content starved in its early days. While Holbrook was never aware of this demographic when he created the strip (furries were incredibly obscure in 1995), he has embraced it as they helped spread the series and frequently are the ones who spend the money needed to keep the comic running. Even with their loyalty though, the strip's greatest readership was still when it was syndicated by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Holbrook pointed out this was still his larger readership compared to the views he was getting online, hence why he never fully catered to furries and kept the material more understandable to people outside that subculture. A comic about "Manthrocon", in which the attendees dress up as their own human OCs, was a gentle nod to his furry fanbase and one of the furry conventions he still attends regularly to promote Kevin and Kell.
The Scrappy:
- Francis to some. He was interesting as a speciesless furry infant, but when he turned human, he became insufferable. Every strip since he's become a toddler he appears in has to emphasize how unique and clever he is, when most of the time he's acting like a brat causing trouble. This culminated during the storyline where he went to summer camp. He maliciously caused trouble all the way up to the point where Carl was so badly injured he needed CPR and had to go to the hospital. Many fans vocally posted in the comments they were perfectly fine never having him in another storyline again. This even extends to in-universe: the summer camp staff had such a bellyful of him they asked him never to come back. Holbrook seems to have taken the hint and limited his appearance to a handful of strips after the summer camp storyline concluded.
  - Holbrook took deliberate steps to remedy the situation with Francis by giving him more of a presence at the summer camp storyline of 2021, showing that he'd matured a little, and ending with him saving his friends from a vicious leopard by putting his own life in danger. Lampshaded by the title of the strip being "Francis redeemed" and Lindesfarne mentioning it on her blog as well.
- Fiona has attracted some of this over the years, given her often jealous tendencies (she once threatened to end their relationship over the sheep character he drew in his webcomic and had a fit when he proved to be a better hunting captain than her). Granted, Rudy did cheat on her at one point, and not being the hunting team's focus would have been hard given the time she spent literally fixing the world's problems before Y2K. But though Rudy has developed over the years, there have been times where fans have been off-put by Fiona's treatment of him. Particularly during the drama around their scholarships going into Beige.
- Desdemona Fuscus became this especially during the lead-up to Lindesfarne and Fenton's wedding; see below in They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot. This ended up completely tanking her debut as the new hot character and she eventually got demoted to occasional background appearances, with all mentions of the "vampire bat prejudice" that had been invented specifically to present her as a marginalized character disappearing with her.
Strangled by the Red String: Rhonda dumps Edgar, a character she had been dating exclusively for much of her history in the strip, for Quinn, a character the readers have just met, has had no build-up at all, and it's supposed to be "true love". She would then be Put on a Bus for several years before returning to join Kell's business.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Lindesfarne and Fenton's wedding, which was the culmination of roughly a decade of the strip's history, should have been an occasion to show off the entire diverse cast over the years and highlight the much-anticipated union of two characters who had been dating since the strip's earliest years. Instead, the entire thing was derailed to introduce and glorify Fenton's mother, Desdemona, a character than until this arc had literally never been seen outside of a silhouette. The entire plot about the wedding was hijacked to focus on the bigotry she faced as a vampire bat, with very little of the storyline having anything to with the actual main characters unless they were somehow critical to pushing Desdemona onto the readership. On top of that, the idea of vampire bats facing bigotry was also brand new to the strip, which is even more contrived given that by this point the series had run for ten years and nobody had so much as breathed about having problems with different bat species. Not only were main characters sidelined, Lindesfarne suddenly had a significant portion of her wedding guests apparently abandon the wedding just because the mother of the groom was revealed to be a vampire bat... something that you'd think would be horrifying to learn about *on the eve of your own wedding*, but Lindesfarne shrugs it off because showing any emotion from her would distract from how wonderful Desdemona is and how mean the world is to her. And then in the aftermath, Lindesfarne and Fenton spent a lot of time off camera in favor of... guess who? Yet after all that, Desdemona rapidly faded into the background as it was obvious fans didn't gel with her, she offered nothing interesting to the strip with her presence, and now she's lucky to show up a few times a year.
- This is building off of a general issue in Holbrook's comic strips, where he inevitably gets bored with his current cast. Rather than naturally phase out characters he's lost interest in, he just starts inventing new characters that he then devotes all of the strip to glorifying and expects the readers will carry about the new hotness as much as he does.
- While the comic eventually did include LGBT characters, the interracial allegory leans more into Broken Aesop territory with how whitebread it is with the lack of cities, art, foreign countries, etc. that often comes off more like a Monochrome Casting sitcom from decades ago.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Edward lost a lot of support after he got Donna pregnant and still refused to tell her he's actually a coyote, instead choosing to put himself in intentional harm so that he could get needed surgery to become a rabbit physically. He's clearly supposed to come across as being in the right in these situations and as a poor sympathetic woobie caught between a rock and a hard place desperately wanting to fit into the place he calls home. But many people pointed out that with the "trans-species = trans individuals in the real world" metaphor, this comes across as a rather shitty and downright dangerous thing to do. In the real world, trans people have been put in harm's way and even murdered when being deceitful about being trans to their sexual partners. Lying to Donna about something as important as his species and which might affect the health of her baby, plus leaving her to go through her pregnancy on his own while he recovers from surgery, comes across more as a self-centered, selfish, and cowardly attitude than anything noble or to do with true love.

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