Hey all! So now that the complete season is available to everyone, I figured I'd do what I did last year and review Zero in full after reassessing how I saw the show as it was airing.
This season had a lot to live up to, acting as a soft-reboot while also needing to make a good impression compared to the divisive story arc that preceded it. There've been some ups and downs, and time to process everything we've seen, so how did this ultimately fare?
This is long so it might be best to separate all this shit into categories. And I think it's only fair to start on a positive note.
The Music
I actually really like this soundtrack. It's not Trocadero or anything, but I totally understand the desire to associate Shatter Squad and their stories with a new style of music instead of sticking with the same stuff as before. We've had musical deviations in the past, so a new soundtrack helps sell Zero as having its own identity without abandoning the past at the same time.
And I think this energetic, aggressive rap music fits the more action-heavy pace of RvBZ while also emphasizing the more modern characters compared to the... frankly old-fashioned Reds and Blues. The Freelancers had Jeff Williams' rock music for the same reason; a different cast necessitates a different kind of sound to go with them.
If there's one thing I have absolutely nothing against in RvBZ, it's the soundtrack; in fact it really helped hype me up in the weeks leading up to its release. It was fresh, it was interesting, it was cool, and because music doesn't exactly need to make you think on the long-term, it doesn't leave you wanting anything else by the time you're done with it. I'd totally want to see Omega Sparx (and others) return for more Shatter Squad-centric stories in the future; this was a great addition to this new style of RvB.
The Action Sequences
By far RvBZ's greatest strength comes from its extravagant and creative fight choreography. It's the showrunner's bread and butter and likely the first reason he wanted to work on RvB and all. And while I don't think any of it will stand the same test of time as some iconic fights from say, S8 or S13, these bring their own brand of fun with some especially innovative combat gimmicks in characters like Diesel, West, pretty much every alien character, and both Phase and East individually. The rule of cool is in full effect here and when looked at in their own individual bubbles, they're a spectacle that clearly had a lot of passion put into them.
Thing is, they don't mean shit in terms of long-term effect without meaningful context to back it up.
As visually stunning as these fights are, they're based around pretty bad scriptwriting and equally confusing storytelling, so they don't carry a lot of emotional weight. Many of RvBZ's staff are mainly known for their work on Death Battle, where fights are self-contained, don't excessively focus on the characters' personalities, and don't require serious context to justify their existence; so everything leading up to and after each fight didn't need a lot of thought put into it.
But because RvBZ is a serialized project that needs to tell a complete arc with more immersive stories and characters, the fact that the writing hasn't improved past Death Battle's excuse plots and cheesy one-liners makes it hard to be consistently engaged in the fights, and subsequently for any of these fights to be as memorable as RvB's finest from past arcs.
The sheer quantity of them contrasted with the story not being engaging makes it hard to care the more we see the same kind of shit happen every episode. Because the fights start off excessively over-the-top and end with the exact same level of energy, and because nothing about the story suggests these characters truly learned anything behind their fights or changed up their tempo in any significant way; the actual progression behind each fight feels minimal. Nothing's really changed except the scenery and the odd new cliche that was artificially exposed to us.
By the time the season ends, I stopped caring. My brain's been completely turned off and what was once cool and badass becomes repetitive and dull. Almost every episode is more action than story and because the story didn't carry its own weight, the fights become less and less impressive over time.
These fights, in a word, are... bombastic. Beyond impressive at a surface level but lacking any real meaning beyond that.
That said, I wasn't offput by how the dialogue segments were animated. Different as it sometimes is, Unreal could totally work for RvB as a substitute for traditional machinima.
The Story
This story could have been phenomenal. I could write a SparkNotes version of the season's synopsis and it'd sound fantastic on paper.

Zero, the ex-leader of the UNSC spec-ops unit known as Shatter Squad, intends to reclaim his position of power by unlocking a suit of high-tech alien battle armor using an assortment of Great Keys that he and his crew have stolen from various planets across the galaxy. With Washington kidnapped and the other Reds and Blues separated, Carolina puts together a new Shatter Squad full of talented, albeit dysfunctional recruits both old and new, to keep Zero from getting the remaining keys (including Tucker's) and becoming powerful enough to single-handedly overthrow the UNSC's new Alliance of Defense.

It's not an especially deep story but for an eight-episode mini-season primarily meant to introduce a new cast and tone, it didn't need to be. At first glance this idea seems to take pretty good advantage of RvB lore without necessitating 17 years of baggage for newcomers to get the context, and the premise itself isn't one that would be alienating to series veterans like the last story arc was. This is a comfortable first step. That was always their intent and the ideas at play seem to align everything almost perfectly.
Too bad the season doesn't understand how stories are supposed to work.
Without getting into the characters yet, none of the writers seem to grasp even the most basic fundamentals of storytelling. I mentioned before that the script feels like a first-year student's rough draft that received no constructive feedback before passing it onto the animators and voice actors, and yeah, this still feels like it's the case.
The Death Battle crew is simply not suited for serialized, character-driven content, especially not from a series with such an extensive legacy that's so easy for amateurs to fuck up. If I were hypothetically offered a writers' spot in RvB, I'd be absolutely terrified because of how daunting it'd be to measure up to the peaks of the franchise's past, and to stay faithful to the franchise's soul; yet despite this, I'm confident that even I, a straight-B's animation graduate in his early 20's with no significant industry experience, could have done a better job at adapting Zero's story beats than what we got here. And I wanna say I'm normally a humble guy. This is the bare minimum; even some children's media has more thought put into their scripts, never mind a franchise that's catered to adults, or teenagers at the absolute worst.
They really should have hired a professional to execute Torrian's vision. Jason Weight did great work in salvaging S16's mess when writing for S17, he totally could have given these ideas the attention they deserved. Or some other freelancer that RT's done work with, or new blood that has good credentials. But these are rookie mistakes that no experienced writer would have ever done outside of fanfiction they wrote when they were 13 and angsty. I may sound harsh but I'm being completely sincere when I say the script and story development are just that lazy.
Almost every new revelation is revealed through stilted exposition, with visual storytelling taking a back seat when it comes to learning nearly anything about the characters' pasts. This lack of natural delivery or interesting imagery means that nothing is used to its fullest potential or told in a way that immerses the audience. The introduction to the Squad is narrated by Carolina as if she was reading a wiki article, East and West's past is a series of glorified audiobooks, Zero's motivations are never even addressed by Zero himself, and the Reds and Blues' statuses don't get any explanation or context, not even for those who are actually in the season. Because why would anyone want to learn about that when they could watch glowing Halo action figures clink against each other for the fourth time and counting?
So much about this story feels like it's a sequel to something we never got, like it expects the audience to immediately understand these new characters without first taking the time for us to really get to know them, then they're hurled into a new conflict that we're not prepared to care about yet. You can get away with this with a cast that's been established for 17 years, but not with a batch of newcomers. Every new major protagonist in RvB's past has been given some downtime for us to know what they're about before the plot is thrown at them, until Shatter Squad broke the mold and swept the cracked remains under the rug.
The dialogue is equal parts cliche and artificial, which makes the characters lack any novelty since they're only written as unoriginal tropes instead of as people. RvB prided itself in how organic the characters were, with its more tropey characters at least making up for their shallowness with hysterical jokes and not getting too involved in the plot for their own good. Here, every character is tropey, and only Raymond and Tiny try to be funny at all, leaving everyone else as cheesy non-humans who only act the way they do because the script said so, not because their decisions feel believable or because you feel the emotion behind what they're saying. Every attempt at drama is contrasted by the most corny, overplayed, stock one-liners imaginable, which put together with the rest of the bland script and lack of approachable characters, damages any potential individuality Zero could have had.
RvBZ seemingly goes out of its way to not only ignore anything from prior seasons that it could have used to flourish its ideas, but actually reverses or contradicts them with no payoff to compensate for those retcons, which in and of themselves are either poorly justified or not explained at all.
The pacing is ridiculously fast, meaning any new development doesn't get enough focus to feel earned or properly built up. Big triumphant moments are laughably ineffective on an emotional level because every single character arc is rushed to shit, often at the expense of what little personality they had to begin with. I understand the show's minimal budget but resources weren't applied to the right places to make this story work; way too much time was put into a gratuitous amount of fight scenes at the expense of RvB's bread-and-butter standing-around-and-talking schtick which is just the easiest way for audiences to get to know the cast. Alternatively, if additional dialogue-driven scenes weren't going to break the budget, we should have gotten more of them on top of the action. This imbalance didn't benefit RvBZ at all.
You don't learn anything about the characters when all they do is look cool, and at no point in RvB history, not even in the Freelancer arcs, was “cool” the number-one priority. Cool was supplementary to the characters, who we spent time learning and caring about via constant banter that helped sell their chemistry. Even then, the one episode of RvBZ that doesn't have a fight and is entirely devoted to the characters extensively talking to each other somehow still makes audiences learn nothing new about the characters or their story. It just regurgitates the same exposition as before because that's all they had to offer in the first place. Hell, it feels as though none of the characters learn anything meaningful from their losses because they never visually change up their strategies beyond the odd armor upgrade here and there. Despite the season's ridiculously short runtime, it's amazing how repetitive its structure is.
Nobody involved put enough time and effort into making these characters feel human or for the story to feel like a memorable trip, everything about RvBZ is a means to an end with the sole focus being on spectacle. Which again, doesn't do it any favors in making it memorable or worthy of a rewatch. The fights floor you the first time, sure, but once that adrenaline is gone, there's nothing else to go back to, nothing more to discuss, and nothing more to revere.
And a lot of that is because it's... just not funny. Like it has one or two good gags but for a series that even in its most serious seasons, made sure to complement its storytelling or action with character-driven comedy, this season doesn't find the time for us to learn more about the characters through jokes and banter, or heaven forbid, for a joke to influence the plot or otherwise be brought up later in a moment that would make the characters feel more real. Outside of the very last dialogue exchange, and the one interaction devoted solely to the three series veterans, none of the comedy feels authentic. There are no running gags, no callbacks, not even any room for quips, because of both the nonstop action and the need to take itself as seriously as possible, when even Joe Nicolosi's cliche-as-fuck storylines knew that they benefited from being ridiculed even if they still tried to play everything straight despite that.
So much about this derivative storytelling and ridiculous character motivations would at the very least have been helped by giving us jokes at their expense, and considering this season was literally designed to be cheesy according to Torrian himself, you'd think they'd use its cookie-cutter cliches as an outlet for humor instead of expecting everything to be taken seriously.
Nothing about this season's funniest moments feel intentionally funny because nothing about the story or the character arcs have a shred of irony in their execution. Every cliche is meant to be taken at face value, and when the storytelling doesn't go anywhere beyond first-draft cheese, it's uncomfortably cringey. It'd have been really easy for One or East's recklessness, West's stern attitude, or Zero's pretentious motivations to all be sources for comedy, because RvB generally takes the piss out of these kinds of ideas and at the bare minimum will point out how silly it all is when looked at through a certain lens at least once. For instance, Locus and Felix are serious characters but they aren't without their moments of vulnerability in terms of others making jokes at their expense, including each other. RvBZ doesn't want to be vulnerable, it doesn't want to be laughed at; and that keeps it from not only being identifiable, but also from carrying the same spirit that RvB has had in damn near all of its past incarnations.
But again, the ideas at work are good, which I think is the only thing keeping this season from being as bad as, say, S16 which had an awful story/tone and an awful premise despite still carrying some of that RvB soul. I didn't mind the new kinds of aliens they showed, I liked the new armor enhancements and weapons the characters used, I liked the backstories of characters like Axel/Zero and Phase/West... but only in theory. In execution, everything, and I do mean everything, falls flat in some capacity, because no one looked at any of these ideas and asked, “This is interesting, how far can we go with it?”.
And all without any consequences or significant changes by the end of the season beyond the bullshit loss of Tucker's sword that required nothing short of sodomizing the continuity to pull off.
The Characters
Rather than dumping one long essay on these guys, I'm gonna do my best to rank the named characters from my favorite to least favorite, and go over the pros and cons of each in list form.

1. Raymond is the only character that the series was comfortable in both ridiculing and consistently using for comedy, which makes him the most identifiable because he's allowed to be human. He's the new guy who hasn't been trained in the forbidden art of Ham and Cheese yet, so he's able to take in his surroundings the way a RvB character normally would; by being awkward, being confused about everything, stumbling into success or failure, and prioritizing the small dumb shit during moments that would otherwise be serious. The phone charger gag is probably the funniest thing in the whole season because it's synonymous with RvB's charm: the ability to juxtapose a gruesome military setting with mundane, trivial bullshit that everyone can relate to, and it even has a modern spin which is great for the audience RvBZ aimed to achieve. He's the one that's the most eager to learn about his fellow recruits, the first to want to lend a hand, and the most sincere in his actions because he doesn't have an agenda or an identity that he's desperate to maintain. The closest thing he has is wanting to fit in, and that once again fits in perfectly with the underdog vibe you need in at least one RvB character. He humble-brags about being the super-cool tech guy and yeah, he's good at his job which keeps him from being dead weight, but really, he's just kind of a goofball and he knows it. You need a guy like that in an RvB story. If the season really didn't want its main protagonist to be one of the three Shatter Squad members with buttloads of backstory baggage, then I think it would have actually been the most beneficial to give Raymond that role because his casual demeanor and his status as the new kid on the block make him the perfect audience surrogate. He's the one with the most immediate potential to offer for future stories because he's the only Shatter Squad member to not be arbitrarily held back by the wooden script of their first story. I like Raymond. He's cool because he's not trying to be cool. Be like Raymond, kids.
   
2. Who gives a fuck if she's not in Shatter Squad, I still adore Tiny. She already gets brownie points for her entire introduction being one giant punchline; I think almost every Shatter Squad member should have at least gotten that much; but her contagiously spunky personality combined with being the only other character who remembers how human beings are supposed to talk just makes her a joy to watch even when she's not doing anything in particular. Perhaps being a minor character meant she had less to live up to, so the writers weren't concerned about making her the best that she could be, but that aloof execution was to Tiny's benefit. She was memorable because she was allowed to exist without being hamfisted into the next source of bland drama. With a cast like this, being pleasant to watch regardless of context is an absolute blessing that I've learned more than ever not to take for granted.
   
3. Axel's okay considering what he had to deal with. I think he made the best first impression with the exposition dump team introductions because he, along with Raymond, are the only ones whose characters weren't defined by shit they've done in the past that we weren't allowed to see beforehand. Despite his beef with Zero, that's not what we learn about him first, which leaves room for... get this, his personality to speak for itself. Axel's the dad of the group, which lends itself to both serious moments and comedic moments that we don't often see from the regular Reds and Blues, who despite their familial bond, don't really have a parental figure outside of the stoic Freelancers. He's the first to reassure Carolina that they're here to help on principle, the one who knows the most about his squad, the one who'll watch out for them and keep them focused on their priorities... but he's also the kind to unironicically serenade a lawnmower as if it's a military-grade weapon of mass destruction, and that shit's just hilarious. And yet, Axel's not perfect. He'll encourage teamwork but when faced with difficult personal choices of his own, he's not above making honest mistakes that he believed would be best for everyone, mistakes that are hypocritical, and he's called out for them; but because his decisions have relatable context, they don't come across as bad writing. His backstory with Zero, as much as it could have used more focus and scenes outside of their falling out, provides just enough insight into both his flaws and his strengths as a character, so much so that... yeah, if there were no limits on who the main character could be, Axel should've been the season's protagonist. He had the closest ties to Zero which meant he had the most to lose by fighting him, and the most to gain by overcoming his losses to be the best man he can be, the best man he wants to be. But after his mid-season showdown with Zero, the story sidelines him and doesn't even give him much of a say in the final showdown. While I liked Axel when all we knew about him was that he was the parental figure, the fact that the season wanted to give us more to his past without committing to it really kept Axel from being my number-one favorite. You're gonna see this a lot; genuinely compelling ideas that are stained by a lack of commitment due to the season's ludicrous pacing holding it back.
   
4. Phase or East; whatever, they're the same so I'm just gonna go with Phase because I like that half of her more. Phase made a phenomenal first impression in Episode 1 solely due to the rule of cool; her teleportation knife allowed for some innovative fight choreography and it was refreshing to see a female antagonist that held such a strong position of authority for a change. As for East... she was okay at first, she made for a solid straight man with her backstory complementing that behavior even if it became increasingly more annoying with how much the season insisted on not showing us any of it, and then... the twist happened. They're the same person, and suddenly she basically has to do a first impression all over again because East was a traitor all along so they have to show us that side of her too, and the opposite also applies to Phase. I always figured the two were related somehow but... a “Holo-Echo”? Really? If that kind of tech had been foreshadowed earlier in the season I might have given it a pass but that was just an ass pull that isn't tied to either RvB or Halo lore. This isn't the kind of twist that fans can be rewarded for because good twists require subtle clues that benefit best with hindsight. It's why Felix's turn worked so well, in addition to sticking to their guns with it and giving us an appropriate amount of time to learn about him both before and after his bad-guy reveal. Here, we don't know enough about her story with either Zero or Shatter Squad to make her betrayal to the latter and her loyalty to the former emotionally effective. So her final showdown with West was gonna be forced no matter what. With how little we knew about their past on a direct level, there were just always gonna be missing pieces to her motivations. Phase can't bring it upon herself to kill West because... reasons. Then she rejoins Shatter Squad because... reasons. There are so many whys here that the season can't be bothered to give answers to. Phase's personal stakes weren't pronounced enough to make her decisions believable, and at that point she really ought to have just killed West to at least try and bank on whatever emotion the story wanted to have, and go rogue because she's frankly got more potential without needing to be restrained by characters she just doesn't have good chemistry with. She has decent fight choreography with Zero and I like how their teamwork contrasted Shatter Squad at first, and I think Phase has the best vocal performance out of anyone in the cast both old and new. But she doesn't gel with anyone enough for me to look forward to her either staying loyal to Zero or finding forgiveness with West and the Squad. The fact that she stole Tucker's sword without killing him was already a disrespectful blow to his character, but the fact that Phase doesn't even use it outside of opening the temple door is legitimately infuriating, and one of the prime examples of RvBZ not using the franchise's legacy to improve the final product. She looked at the sword wistfully towards the end so... does she regret it? Does she want to keep it? Did she find something interesting about Tucker? Who cares, this script sure doesn't, and that unfortunately makes Phase more detestable than if they didn't surgically transfer Tucker's biggest novelty onto her for reasons that just weren't worth it in the end, despite that having nothing to do with her story or her personality. Another example of not going far enough with her for me to be engaged in her story, despite liking her character well enough at a surface level.
   
5. To Zero's benefit, Carolina was definitively the best veteran character they could have used with this particular kind of story, and all things considered, I don't think they really fucked it up. But I do wonder what they ultimately wanted to do with her, because they started off with her being the distant mentor only to have her be the honorary sixth member of Shatter Squad when it felt like the season was trying to build itself to the opposite of that. She should have had more reasons to be involved in the first batch of missions if they were just going to give her a spotlight in the final two fights anyway, and the fact that they arbitrarily gave her reasons not to be involved at first that don't make any sense beyond “Let the rookies take it”, which... shouldn't matter when Wash's life is on the line, is probably the only thing I seriously have against her portrayal here. Her attitude is appropriately plucky without being outright silly and her relationship with Wash is as strong as ever, but they don't do anything groundbreaking with her either despite being in the season as much as the actual Shatter Squad. She could have carried the season, but instead she's just there.
   
6. Zero could have been an amazing villain if they had just done one thing with him... make him funny. Because his motivation combined with his over-the-top delivery and delusional arrogance are all absolutely hysterical in how narmy they are. The guy rants on about wanting “Ultimate Power” like he's a teenage edgelord, and to make things more comical, he doesn't even know what that power even is until he sees it for himself. We find out that he wants it because he quit the super-awesome Shatter Squad after he felt his efforts were wasted when the war ended, when there was seemingly nothing stopping him from joining the present-day Shatter Squad and fulfilling his destiny that way. He goes out of his way to give his opponents opportunities to stop him again and again because he's that full of himself. He has this Shakespearean dialect that tries so hard to be intimidating but when it's used to project his shallow, childish aspirations, it all seems satirical. And if it was satirical, like if every character sarcastically remarked how vague, petty and immature Zero always is, and he lashed out at the characters for it, that might actually make for an interesting villain, especially if we actually got to learn about what he was like when he and Axel were partners in the original Squad. He wouldn't lose his edge as a threat because of how indisputably powerful he is, so unlike O'Malley who is just as ridiculous but can't act on his threats, Zero's the equivalent of an angsty teen if his strength was just as unhinged as his emotions; silly, but still absolutely dangerous. The plot exists because Zero got salty; that's a brilliant idea for the first big bad of a new RvB cast that mirrors its first villain while upping the ante. But no, like many things in this season, they try and take him 100% seriously. And it's all for the worse. Without any irony to his performance, what could have been charming is instead uncomfortably awkward and void of any sort of creativity. This isn't helped by the fact that Zero is such a powerful force for next to no reason beyond working well with his teammates (which might be effective if we knew why Phase and Diesel were so loyal to him), and the fact that Zero's defeat has entirely to do with his lack of self-esteem and not actually being overpowered by Shatter Squad. He's every bad cliche villain rolled into one, without the safety net Temple had of at least attempting to mask himself in a comedic layer to make the cringe slightly more bearable.
   
7. Wait, I thought West was the parental figure, not Axel. Yeah, the last two Squad members have this problem of sharing the same tropes as other, better Shatter Squad members, with very little about them actually being unique the more you stop to think about it. West works as the gruff commanding officer but falls flat on his ass once he gets all sentimental about East; in part because his voice actor has the emotional range of sandpaper, but also because it's hard to keep up with the path of logic behind every decision he's made when we're only able to follow his story through narrated exposition. He's a badass fighter, probably the most badass Shatter Squad member of the batch; I like his plated shielding in the finale, and I do admire how he was willing to let himself get killed by East herself to atone for failing her as a father, but everything leading up to that moment? Needed a second pass, like a lot of other stuff in this script. Nothing about West comes across as utterly wasted like Zero, but the more I think about it, the more it's hard to tell what made West's story anything special when he was playing double-dad duty with Axel, who had the same motivation and more.
   
8. Washington is not only pointless in the grand scheme of things, but his mere presence actively ruins his wonderful character arc from the last two seasons due to the baffling decision to reverse his brain damage off-screen. The most redeemable aspect of the time travel arc was nixed for... really no reason at all, because outside of a couple of decent hits in Episode 1, Wash contributes nothing to the story outside of being a motivation for Carolina. They could have had him keep his brain damage and just slowly learning to adapt to it in battle, and that alone would have boosted Washington's spot on the list substantially, but the fact that this season tried to bring him back to peak form only to just make him a victim with no individual contributions throughout the entire story honestly makes me feel uncomfortable. Why was this decision made; in fact, why were all of these decisions made in tandem with each other? Did no one take the time to ask what could be gained and lost from not going through on this choice, not just for the story they wanted to tell, but also in terms of trying to respect whatever fans salvaged from Joe Nicolosi's contributions to the franchise? The Zero crew tossed away what was unanimously the most beloved addition to his time on the show for basically no reason, and that just makes my skin crawl because I know, thanks to hindsight, that this wouldn't be the only time where Zero's writers didn't acknowledge or respect the show's legacy or what could have been done with it instead of actively fighting against it. Personality-wise Wash isn't much better; he's not bad but he's not memorable because he's not allowed to be. He's a plot device. And unfortunately that's something he has in common with another Blue Team member too.
   
9. Diesel was fun in his first fight but became increasingly more dull the more appearances he made without giving us any more reasons to like him beyond being the big guy who can tank bullets really well. He's practically Zero's poster child in that he's equally style over substance. You can tell based on whatever little dialogue he has that he might have been a decent character if they committed to giving him a character. But instead he's the angry guy; no context about why he's here, what he has to gain, and why he's as ridiculously tough as he is, with any potential charm losing itself fast because no one gave a fuck when writing for this guy. You can't convince me otherwise.
   
10. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. They had something going with Tucker in the last season; so much time was devoted to damage control for how he was handled in the years leading up to S17, and it finally looked like he was going to return to full form the next time we saw him, but this? This is insulting, because there's no explanation for the decisions the writers made for him besides either not giving a fuck about what came before Zero, or deliberately trolling those who watched what came before Zero for who knows what reason. Nothing about Tucker's execution feels like it was trying to respect his character. No context is given for Tucker's new position in the military, he acts just as arrogant and immature as he was in his worst seasons, he's not a capable fighter, they don't even get his “Bow Chicka Bow Wow” right. This is a caricature of Tucker designed solely to act as a plot device rather than because the staff believed there was something Tucker could contribute that only he could do for this story. And no, his sword doesn't count, because that would require either killing him or obnoxiously retconning one of the most important story elements of the franchise. Guess which one they go for? RvBZ strips Tucker of a huge part of his identity without having the balls to kill him or to even have him go out in a blaze of glory regardless of his survival; instead they inexplicably pass on his sword to Phase with no rational explanation that doesn't leave a stain on past stories in the process, all while leaving him with nothing, not even a badass final stand against the bad guys to show how he's matured since his poor decisions during the time travel arc. If they really wanted to get someone's energy sword as a plot device, they should have just gone with Locus; he's more expendable, fits better with Zero's serious tone and action-packed presentation, and already had foreshadowing of something bad happening to him due to his distress signal from S16 still being unexplained. It'd have been a hilarious yet tragic twist if Carolina thought Zero was going after Tucker, only for Zero to hunt down Locus instead and outnumber him three-to-one while Shatter Squad was distracted. But that would require wanting to use anything RvB's past seasons had in a clever way, and this season proved it didn't want to do that. Tucker's final scene where it was just him and the Freelancers was nice, probably one of the most authentic scenes of the season, but it doesn't excuse what they did to get to that point. I don't know how they can restore Tucker to his best self after this, but if this season has taught me anything, it's that you don't have to care about your predecessors to get what you want out of the story, so Zero needs to be prepared for everything it's done to not matter in an instant because its successors don't care enough about it. Fair's fair after all.
    
11. One is one of the most superfluous main protagonists I've ever seen in fiction. Not only does One carry practically no personal stakes in the season, not only are her legitimate contributions to the story practically nonexistent, and not only is her entire character arc is just a lesser version of an existing character in East... but her entire personality isn't even consistent with that character arc. One was described as being the loose cannon who could be a formidable leader if she could only work on a team and stop being arrogant/entitled. It's another cliche in a season full of them, but good execution can make me look past that. Unfortunately, the season often forgets that One is supposed to be selfish and reckless as much of her dialogue is devoted to looking out for her squad and calling people out for not acting as a team, and in return others call her out for acting like too much of a girl scout. Nothing about One's attitude (i.e. playful teasing) proves to be detrimental to Shatter Squad's progress, which not only makes her character arc ineffective as her various speeches don't reflect on her own experiences throughout the story, but further cements how redundant of an addition One is to the cast if she's not going to provide anything substantial to the characters around her or to herself. Sure she's the leader, but anyone can be that, as evidenced by Axel, Carolina, and West all taking charge when no one else was capable. This is again even more noticeable when you realize that East has much of the same personality as One, only they actually follow through on her actions by being more rude to her teammates and actually giving her a story that complements her indecisiveness towards working in a team. One gets none of that. She has no story, no history with Zero save for sharing the same rank, no motivation besides win fight, and no payoff to her decisions because Zero defeated himself and One's influence didn't radically change the way Shatter Squad worked together, seeing how their fighting style hadn't really evolved, and squad members still branched off and did their own thing regardless of the “teamwork” moral. She sorta has something with East, but their chemistry is so shallow that the payoff doesn't feel natural. And I'm sorry to Fiona Nova, because I know she's had it rough since starting at RT and I know how enthusiastic she was about headlining a new instalment of the company's longest-running franchise, but she really needs work as a voice actress. I don't think it's entirely her fault; the script was against her from the beginning; but every attempt at giving a serious monologue feels like she's conveying every possible emotion at once instead of really immersing herself into the context of the scene, and her sass is a little too tacky and overacted for me to call it charming in the same way I would the Reds and Blues' brand of sarcasm more identifiable than obnoxious. One should not have been the main protagonist of this season, and I'd even wager that she shouldn't have been in the season at all unless the writers were prepared to give her more relevance. Other characters needed focus and depth too, and it feels wasteful to devote so much time to a character that just doesn't bring anything unique to the table.
    

TL;DR, RvB: Zero is a visually stunning experience that loses its luster once paired with the context between its action sequences. Rather than adding onto the existing adrenaline, the story lessens the impact of the fights due to its shallow characters, cringey scriptwriting, frantic pacing, inability to commit to its ideas in stimulating ways, lack of awareness or irony in its absurdities, and general lack of respect for its source material, both in using past stories to its advantage, and in maintaining the spirit of why RvB was appealing to begin with, namely in Zero's significant lack of relatable banter and witty comedy.
The season has good concepts unlike the last major story arc, but the execution is lazy and uninspired, resulting in missed potential that doesn't leave a good first impression of its new cast and tone. Had different scriptwriters been tasked with bringing the showrunner's visions to life, in addition to potentially reevaluating how the show's budget and resources were allocated, this could have been a fantastic soft-reboot. As is, it's all style over substance, which makes it unmemorable compared to its more creative and iconic predecessors.

Pretty much what the title says. I enjoy crass humor if done right (South Park and Always Sunny are great shows), but I've very rarely played a video game that ~for me personally~ didn't miss the mark when it comes to crass jokes.
I don't have a lot of patience for cheeseball humor either. I found the tone of Borderlands, for instance, too annoying to really get into it.
To be clear, I am not passing a judgement on these games or this style of humor. I'm just trying to be clear what I like and what I don't.
I really like tactics games and RPGs (XCOM 2 and Fire Emblem Three Houses are two of my hands-down favorite games in recent years), but when I see things like yellow snowballs and cyborg chickens, I worry this game might just annoy the hell out of me. This RPS review excerpt in particular has me leaning "no" on a game I might otherwise be interested in:

As uninteresting and buggy as I found the combat, it is not what eventually made me lose patience with Wasteland 3, though. That would be the overall tone of its writing. Storywise, it is a recognisably pulp affair. No harm in that. But the game’s sense of humour is firmly puerile, in-jokey, and (crucially) unrelenting. There is a brothel featuring a goat you can shag for buffing effects. Snowballs you can pee on and throw to inflict enemies with a debuff called “the stink”. A parrot who swears colourfully at his owner until you recruit him to swear colourfully at you. Ha ha, swear words!
Besides that, it’s an endless stream of referential humour of the Ready Player One mold. Remember HAL 9000? Remember Missile Command? Remember Ghostbusters? Remember jokes? It feels dated in more ways than one. Even the upside-down turtle, one of the game’s funnier moments, is a winking Blade Runner gag surrounded by Futurama autobots. On top of that, I found its infrequent darker moments at odds with the prevailing wackiness of the world. Coming across a pit full of melted human corpses, adult and child alike, may have felt horrific, had I not myself, moments before, evaporated a foe called “the beastmaster” using a giant magnifying glass.
The moment-to-moment writing is defined by this overwhelming, try-hard comedy, with occasional and ultimately unconvincing stabs at satire. Saul “The Patriarch” Buchanan is the standout example, an all-American strongman who fancies himself the sole arbiter of justice and good governance in an otherwise lawless world. Having this despotic leader of Colorado sit atop a throne made of missiles and US flags is an eye-catching motif. But as a visual gag masquerading as allegorical critique, this is “Banksy running out of ideas” levels of political humour. In short, the game often makes me go: hm. But never: ha.

What do y'all think? Is this game loaded with enough corny jokes that I should avoid it, or is that going to be less of an issue than I'm worried about?

Possible spoilers ahead for Shine by Jessica Jung. No real warnings beyond I guess vague insinuations of bullying. I would’ve put this off until the book came out but this is like ten pages already. Plus, somehow this subreddit has never had a writeup about 930 which is what the bulk of this wound up being.

Backstory:

In 2007, SM Entertainment debuted a new girl group. SM is one of the “big three” idol agencies in Korea, and had been incredibly successful in the first generation of idol groups with acts such as H.O.T., Shinhwa, and S.E.S. and their 2005 boy group Super Junior eventually became recognized as one of the major acts to usher in the second generation of kpop. This new girl group, SNSD (short for Sonyeo Sidae or Girls Generation in English), drew a lot of attention even before their debut.
The group’s nine members was a large jump from most first generation girl groups, which tended to max out at around five members. Although this was still fewer than Super Junior’s debut lineup of twelve members, boy groups tend to gain a large base of dedicated fans while girl groups mostly rely on support from casual fans and the general public. Having such a large number of girls in a group seemed unnecessary. On top of SNSD already being an unconventional group, Super Junior had already managed to become insanely popular by the time SNSD debuted, and SNSD was expected to be the female counterpart to Super Junior. The group was under massive amounts of pressure from the very start.
SNSD initially dealt with a lot of hate from fans of competing girl groups KARA and Wonder Girls, as well as due to the SNSD members being good friends with their labelmates TVXQ and Super Junior. Boy group fans were jealous that the SNSD girls were friends with their beloved boys. Girl group fans were mad that this new girl group had shaped up to be decent competition to their groups of choice. None of these were enough to stop the group’s rising popularity, and in 2009 they released mega-hit Gee. Post-Gee SNSD became insanely popular; they were known as “the nation’s girl group” and their faces were everywhere. To be SNSD during their peak was to be an international superstar the likes of which Korean Girl groups hadn’t really achieved before, especially within Korea, Japan, and China.

Everyone versus Jessica?:

Around probably 2010/2011, a lot of fans noticed that members Jessica and Taeyeon did not seem as close as they used to. Whether this was true or just fan perception is anyone’s guess, but there was a storm of rumors and accusations surrounding Jessica well before shit truly hit the fan. People claimed (and still do) that Jessica was supposed to be the third member of SNSD subgroup TTS instead of Seohyun, but that Taeyeon refused to let Jessica be part of the subgroup because the two didn’t get along. The merit to this argument is that Jessica and Taeyeon were SNSD’s two main vocalists, and that TTS was a pretty vocal-heavy group. TTS debuted in 2012, after rumors of the Jessica-Taeyeon rivalry were well entrenched, so this remains a popular theory despite Jessica having an acting gig that overlapped with TTS promotions. And the fact that TTS’s whole existence was because those three members were the only ones who didn’t have other work at the time.
Many fans shipped Jessica and Taeyeon in the first few years of their career, so every interaction between them was scrutinized, giving additional “sources” to the rumors that they hated each other. To a lesser degree, people argued that she didn’t get along with the rest of the group as a whole.
Besides her perceived drama with Taeyeon, Jessica had accusations of being “lazy” in her dancing compared to other members. Her TV acting was mediocre at best. In 2014, rumors of her dating Tyler Kwon came to a head when gossip articles claimed that the two would marry that year (for the record, idols marrying is still controversial even when they’re a former member of an unpopular group. A member of the top girl group getting married at the height of the group’s fame would be a shitstorm the likes of which no one has ever seen). In general, Jessica had a reputation for seeming cold or unfeeling.
None of this is to imply that she was anything short of massively popular, but her fame came with a fair share of scrutiny and accusations of cattiness. One major downside of having a group with nine girls was that it gave fans more freedom to pick and choose their favorites; plenty of die-hard fans of the group would only actually like some of the girls and outright hated some of the others. As with all kpop groups, fans of one member would complain about others having too many lines while their favorite didn’t have enough, or about music videos or choreography giving too much attention to their least favorites. Jessica tended to fall to the “least favorite member” end of the spectrum more often than some of the other girls, but this was balanced out by fans who preferred Jessica above all other members.

Jessica’s dramatic departure:

On September 30, 2014, Jessica posted a message on social media. I’m just going to quote it below, to give you the full context.

I was excited about our upcoming fan events only to shockingly be informed by my company and 8 others that as of today, I’m no longer a member. I’m devastated – my priority and love is to serve as a member of GG, but for no justifiable reason, I am being forced out.

Some people thought it was a hoax, or that she had been hacked. When this message was posted, Jessica was supposed to be travelling from the U.S. to Shenzhen, China to attend a fan event with the other members of SNSD. The Shenzhen event was bizarre, to put it lightly. There’s footage here and you can find lots of pictures and commentary about how several of the girls cried and how, rather than making any attempt to cover for Jessica’s absence, they instead left gaping holes in the choreography and were silent during her parts of the music.
After Jessica’s initial panicked statement, both she and SM Entertainment released more detailed statements. SM said that Jessica had been planning to leave SNSD after their next album anyway, “due to her personal situation”, and that she had been removed early because she was focusing on her fashion brand which she founded the month before. Jessica claimed she had no plans to leave and that SM had given her permission to start her brand, but that the other group members took issue with it.

Everybody on the internet argues, as the internet tends to do:

While there’s a lot of theories about how and why Jessica exited the group, the most unified one that took hold was that Taeyeon--who was the leader and allegedly no longer got along with Jessica after 2011ish--had kicked her out. Points against this theory include the fact that she literally would not have the authority to do that (because the “leader” position in a kpop group is something more akin to The Official Mom Friend than anyone’s actual boss), the fact that Jessica specified both the company and all of the other members had been the ones to force her out, etc...you get the point. Points for this theory are that Taeyeon was not among the members photographed crying in Shenzhen, and that if any member would’ve had the clout with the company to force a lineup change, it probably would’ve been her. That plus the aforementioned perception that Taeyeon and Jessica did not get along anymore was enough to cement this as probably the single most prevalent theory amongst both people who hated Taeyeon and people who liked Jessica the most, which made up a pretty significant portion of the fanbase.
The other largest group was those who thought Jessica deserved to be kicked out anyway, or that she was leaving on purpose and was only upset because she had been forced to leave earlier than anticipated. This group pointed to dozens of “Jessica lazy moments” compilations on youtube, to her focusing on her brand, and basically to absolutely anything that they could find that it was all Jessica’s fault she was no longer a member, and that she was evil for dragging SNSD through the mud by claiming they kicked her out.
No matter your theory of choice, there’s still questions. If Taeyeon and Jessica really did hate each other and Jessica was really kicked out over that..why? What happened--presumably in 2011--that led them to go from being friendly to eventually hating each other enough that one had to leave the group? Hell, even if you think all eight other girls voted her out, why? And if they wanted her out that badly, why did they seem so upset about it? Or if you think Jessica had been planning to leave anyway, why would SM Entertainment tell her she was out much sooner than planned? Why lose a popular member who you could’ve gotten another full album cycle out of, while simultaneously destroying a lot of your goodwill with the fanbase by going about it so poorly? Back in the immediate aftermath the catch-all explanation for many theories was that she was going to marry Tyler Kwon, which had already been going through the rumor mill beforehand. Obviously now we’re six years on with no wedding, so an elopement wasn’t the answer. So what the hell happened? SM and Jessica agreed on two things: that she was no longer a member of SNSD as of September 30th, and that her departure from SNSD had been unexpected and abrupt. Everything else remains a mystery to this day.

SNSD in the aftermath:

Following her departure, Jessica hasn’t done a whole ton of music-related stuff and has mostly focused on fashion. Part of this is because SM Entertainment is blocking her from going on music shows. Part of it also just seems to be that her own goals lie more in the fashion world at this point. SNSD continued to be fairly active for a few years, but by now most members have moved on to other ventures. Several members left SM Entertainment in 2017 shortly following their 10th anniversary. A subunit with the members still signed to SM called Oh!GG released music in 2018 and that’s the last we’ve heard of them as a group. SM and the members have all maintained that the 8-member lineup of SNSD is still intact and will reunite in the future, but that’s something we’ve also heard from plenty of groups who have never released music again.
In the immediate aftermath of the events of September 30, 2014, everyone pretty quickly split into pro-Jessica, anti-Jessica, and pro-stop-fighting-jesus-christ. Since then, the fanbase seemed to have mellowed out a bit. Rather than vicious fighting at the mere mention of Jessica’s departure like there was a few years ago, the bulk of the fandom has drifted into the camp of “whatever I think happened, I love and support all nine of these girls like I always have”. There’s also frequent rumors and “evidence” that the former SNSD members are secretly in contact with Jessica, who they have never publicly interacted with her since she left the group. There’s some pretty wholesome takes in all this, but that shaky peace has recently gotten thrown out the window by more angry fans than I’ve seen since 2014.

Jessica Jung: Future NYT Bestselling Author?:

So the true reasons for Jessica’s departure have remained as one of kpop’s greatest mysteries alongside such classics as “why was Jay Park really kicked out of 2PM”, “why did Hyuna leave Wonder Girls for ‘medical reasons’ only to re-debut in 4Minute”, and “why do Jimin from BTS and Jeongyeon from Twice seem to hate each other” (we as a community have very specific priorities). Like I said, the vast majority of people have resigned themselves to the fact that we are probably never going to have answers for what went down with any of this shit. Unless any of the idols involved decide to write a tell-all book, of course. Something that’s been a recurring half-joke, half-wish in every thread about kpop mysteries since the beginning of time. Something no one particularly thought would actually happen. Most people “spilling tea” about the industry have been those whose careers within it never really took off in the first place, because those are the people with basically nothing to lose (sorry Kyla. Sorry Grace. Sorry everyone else). No one seriously anticipated any well-known idols to ever tell us all of the dirty details of their career.
...And then in 2019 we found out that Jessica wrote a book, and everyone lost their shit. You’d think the fact that it turned out to be a Young Adult fiction novel would have done something to stem the excitement over getting a juicy tell-all, but you’d be wrong. Frankly, Jessica seems to be encouraging the people expecting a memoir masked in fiction.

“With Shine, I wanted to tell a big, fun, escapist story that also examines in-depth, behind- the-scenes aspects of the K-pop world,” Jung said in a statement. “My goal was to tell a transparent, candid story — in a way that sometimes fiction does best.”

Fans interpreted this statement in a few different ways.
The first interpretation was, “that absolute snake is writing her tell-all under the guise of fiction so that she can avoid getting sued and include as many lies as she wants to make herself look good”.
The second interpretation was, “good on Jessica for finally outing Snakeyeon and the rest of SNSD as the heartless bitches they are, I’m excited to finally see her speak the truth”.
The third interpretation, mostly expressed by people who have actually managed to calm down about something that happened six years ago to people they’ve never met, was “this is clearly based at least partially on her real life, considering the main character, her sister, and her group all seem like clear analogues to Jessica’s actual life. But this is all probably a big marketing stunt because how many people would be buying it if it was just some generic corny novel as opposed to the long-anticipated big reveal for Jessica’s relationship with SNSD? She’ll probably never go into any detail about which parts of the book are supposed to be real and which are supposed to be fake because the mystery will keep people talking while also keeping her from getting sued to hell and back. It’s genius.”
(If you can’t tell...I lean heavily towards #3).
The book comes out on September 29, 2020, which means two things. First, that’s exactly the sixth anniversary of her departure from SNSD, which is fuelling both the “tea” theories and the “clever marketing” theories. Second, that’s still a month out, and there’s supposed to be a sequel coming in 2021, so it’ll be awhile before anyone can be fully satisfied with whether or not Jessica actually had anything to say about her former group members.
Some people have gotten advance copies (ARCs) but from the goodreads reviews most either don’t know much about kpop or say somewhat vague things about “wow this showcases how brutal the industry is”. There are a few interesting reviews I found on the goodreads page for the book, but for the record there’s no way of telling who has actually gotten an advance copy when looking at goodreads reviews. You’re just taking the reviewer’s word for it, so take these all with a grain of salt (and note the sheer number of 5 star reviews by Jessica’s fans who haven’t gotten to read the book yet).
Part of a 2 star review by someone who says they got an ARC says this:

What really disheartened me about the book was how catty all of the girls were towards each other. I have no doubt that this cattiness is based in reality, but it left me feeling really negative after I put down the book. I wasn't sure what sort of message I was supposed to get. Mina is Rachel's main adversary in the book, as they are in a trio with Jason Lee for their new song. They are constantly pit against one another, and just when I thought that their friendship was moving forward and they were developing an understanding of each other, Mina would do something catty and we would be back to square one. Rachel was always painted as the victim. I also hated how she ended things with her friend Akari, who she just let fall to the wayside. After I finished the book, the only thing I got out of it is that Rachel will do whatever it takes to get ahead and I feel like her character barely developed.

Along with the closing line of the same review:

To me this just felt like jabs at the other members of Girl's Generation and petty vengeance. *Sigh*

Interesting take.
A non-review by an excited fan put into words what every gossip hungry person buying the book is assuming:

Although Shine is a work of fiction, Jessica will be drawing from her real-life experiences. Writing fiction will allow her to be more candid and discuss things in an ambiguous way. So I predict the tea will be overflowing and anyone who has ever wronged Sica should be running scared muwahahaha >:D

(Also included was this hyper-specific gif).
Someone who also said they got an advance copy of the book had this to say in their 5-star review:

Shine was actually way better than I expected it to be. I did judge the book a little but thinking it was going to be something fluffy about the K-Pop world written by a K-Pop star but the book was way more than that. It didn’t show everything as bright and full of rainbows and happiness. Things are mean in that world and it just makes you wonder if this was what the author went through before she left her group and decided to do her own thing.

Another ARC review, this one three stars:

I thought a book about a girl group would be about friendship but what I got was a lot of snarky dialogue, mean pranks and bullying. All the characters felt as if they had the same voice, none of them really stood out. Rachel being the MV did not have me rooting for her as she came across as any girl with talent. And Mina was just the Korean version of mean girls, even then get insults were repetitive.

These are obviously reviews handpicked by me for interesting commentary, but the main points seem to be that it’s a portrayal of how ruthless the industry is, and there’s a lot of people--those who say they know kpop and those who say they don’t--commenting that the villain isn’t well written:

There was nothing special or villainous about Mina other than her penchant for wanting to see Rachel fail. Here is where I need to get sidetracked to talk about what a failure Mina is as the "bad" character. She started off as a hilarious antagonist who is obviously and understandably shoved into the story to create the girl vs girl conflict, but she ended up being more of a yappy Pomeranian than a clever antagonist who has the ability to spin a web of lies to catch "perfect Princess Rachel." How are we as readers supposed to fear for Rachel and worry about her failing if everything Mina does is thwarted by Rachel's aptitude with excelling in comebacks and remaining nonchalant? I was rooting for Mina to change towards the end, and despite there being several chances for her to do so, she reverted back to the original version of herself from the beginning of the story.

But all the ARC reviews in the world won’t give as much clarity as the book itself. So now we sit and we wait until the book drops and see if the kpop world burns to the ground at the end of next month. In the meantime, SNSD fans have resumed tearing each other apart with a fervor that has not been seen in half a decade.

The impact:

So, there’s two parts of this story.
Jessica’s departure and the subsequent fan outrage sent shockwaves through the industry. One of, if not the strongest girl group fandoms of all time was suddenly torn asunder. Pre-2011, TaengSic (Taeyeon/Jessica) shippers had made up an impressive chunk of the fandom. They had already taken a blow after the girls seemed to stop getting along, but most remained in the fandom. Some had given up on their ship, some still held out hope, and some used the drama to write angsty stories, but post-departure they were thrown into chaos again. Although TaengSic shippers were the most volatile subset of the fandom, fighting was prevalent in all sorts of kpop communities. This went on nonstop for years, and although it still tends to pop up at any mention of Jessica or SNSD’s lineup changes, there has emerged a pretty strong subgroup of people who support all 9 girls and accept that they have parted ways for good. But there’s also those desperate for a 9-member reunion. Seriously. Every thread about SNSD potentially being active again has at least one comment about Jessica showing up. Especially their 10th anniversary in 2017. These conspiracy theories are often accompanied by the same “proof” I mentioned earlier about Jessica and SNSD members still being in contact (ICYMI, it’s mostly instagram posts of them possibly being in the same places at the same times, or nosy fans pushing the question and interpreting everything as a “yes”).
Even non-fans weighed in on her leaving. Those who hated SNSD revelled in the fighting and were excited to see what they considered to be the group’s downfall. Outside of kpop, casual followers briefly took notice of the drama. SNSD, afterall, was “the nation’s girl group”, so what happened to them was more noteworthy than your average idol group. But pretty quickly, only those invested in SNSD, Jessica, or the kpop scene in general seemed to care. Jessica is still very much “Jessica from SNSD”--a draft of the 2019 korean film Parasite mentions her as “the one who started the jewelry brand” from Girl’s Generation.
As for the book? We’re still waiting to see just how bad it gets. Right now, fans are at each other's throats again. Many fans who sided with Jessica (especially those who hate Taeyeon and blame her) are going around and spreading the word about her book, telling everyone that she’s going to reveal the truth. Those who sided against Jessica (especially Taeyeon fans) are worried that she is going to harm the careers of the rest of the group by slandering them. Everyone who fell in the middle is once again being expected to take a side. Most book-related drama seems to be happening in English-speaking fan communities, since the book itself is in English. I can’t speak for the Korean fandom, but since a majority of kpop fandom outside of Korea, Japan, and China takes place in English...there’s a lot of fighting going on. The goodreads page for the book has been flooded with 5-star reviews from fans who openly say they haven’t read the book. A few random reviews also reference there having been an onslaught of 1-star reviews immediately upon the book’s announcement, but those are no longer visible so I can’t say if they ever existed at all.
SNSD was a group with a global fanbase and they cemented their legacy as pretty much the most iconic group of the second generation. Although they haven’t been active as a group in years, they still have an insanely large fanbase across the world. And now that fanbase is once again fighting about things that we know basically nothing about. Fun!

Welcome, one and all. I’ve been a lurker on this sub for a while, and I’ve decided it was time I contribute. This is my first shot with a story post on the snoo snoo site, so go easy on me. A warning for Undertale spoilers. Also, this write-up will make mention of pedophilia, incest, needles, tongue injuries, and food that has been tampered with. Yeah, the fandom gets kind of fucked up at points, but if that didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be writing this, now would I?
Unless you make your residence under a rock, you’re aware of the 2015 indie game Undertale, developed by Toby Fox and Temmie Chang. You also probably know about its 2018 sort-of-sequel, Deltarune. But we’re not talking about Deltarune here. In a shellnut, the plot of Undertale is about a human child who falls into an underground world full of monsters. The monsters have been trapped there for centuries by magic, and the child’s soul is the key to their escape. The gimmick of Undertale is that the player can do a full “pacifist” run of the game in which they don’t kill a single NPC or random encounter creature. Doing this unlocks the Golden Ending. The player can also go out of their way to slaughter every NPC and creature in the Underground, in what’s called the “Genocide” or “No Mercy” run. The game will be sure to punish you for your pointless virtual cruelty if you do that (more on that later.)
Undertale exploded in popularity because it is indeed a very well-made game. It’s been greatly praised for its themes, storytelling, music, humor, and atmosphere. Special mention goes to the characters; all the main characters and even some minor encounters are extremely well-developed and complex. Of these, fans are most obsessed with Sans the Skeleton. He’s a lazy but good-natured skeleton monster who loves cracking puns, drinking ketchup, and his brother Papyrus. In a pacifist run, he’s a fun jokester type and promises to look after you, but there are hints that he knows more about you and the game’s mechanics than he lets on. In a genocide run, all bets are off, since you killed his brother and everyone else. He subjects you to a ridiculously hard boss battle (you don’t fight him in a pacifist run at all) at the end of the run. Said boss battle is set to “Megalovania,” which Toby Fox composed for earlier games of his and then adapted for Undertale. Sans is a cool character. His boss battle is kickass. “Megalovania” is a banger. You can see where this is going.
I don’t know why people are thirsty for Sans, though. Being obsessed with him for being cool, I understand. But the thirst, I don’t. He’s not hot and he wasn’t supposed to be, either. He’s short, implied to be chubby, always sports a shit-eating grin, and walks around in a hoodie, shorts, and silly bedroom slippers*. If you ask me, he’s more huggable than hot. But fans will be fans, I guess. It wasn’t long before there were scores of thirsty fans (mostly female, for usual reasons) all over this goofy skeleton. I don’t think I need to link fanart to prove it. Use your imagination. Insert pun about wanting to bone him. Sans would approve. What he wouldn’t approve, though, were some of their choices of who to ship him with. There are three Sans ships that are most popular in the fandom, and only one of them isn’t flagrantly creepy. Enter the stinkies, Frans and Fontcest, and the maybe-not-creepy Soriel.
*There was a debate whether he wore slippers or sneakers. Undertale has simple pixel graphics and all battle sprites are in black and white, so it’s hard to tell going off the game alone. But the official merch shows him wearing slippers, so that’s what I’m going with.
Frans refers to Frisk x Sans. If you didn’t know, Frisk is the canon name for the playable character in Undertale. Normally shipping the player character with an NPC would be fine, if not a bit wish fulfilly, since the PC is usually a stand in for you, the geek at the controls. Problem is, Frisk is a child, unambiguously so. They’re repeatedly called “kid,” “my child,” “kiddo,” etc. Based on the in-game sprite and official artwork, Frisk doesn’t look any older than 10. Sans, on the other hand, is clearly an adult. Cue the accusations of it being pedoriffic, and I can’t say as if I disagree.
You most likely know the issue with Fontcest just by looking at the name. Yeah, it’s shipping Sans with Papyrus. His brother. Yuck. What is with fans and shipping incest? Anyway, Fontcest was also virulently hated in the fandom. Maybe even more so than Frans, since you can age up Frisk to make it less creepy, whereas explaining away Sans and Papyrus’s relationship is more difficult. Some people ship Fontcest shamelessly, while others try to find a workaround. Usually, they’ll bring in a Sans or Papyrus from one of the copious alternate universes in the fandom. (Most of which are just Sans and Papy in various hats.) Is it incest if they’re from different universes? I dunno, you make that judgment call. I’m just the reporter guy.
That leaves us with Soriel – Sans shipped with Toriel, a character who is, thankfully, neither underage nor related to him. Toriel is an early-game NPC who rescues you from a flower trying to murder you (it makes sense in context) and escorts you through the tutorial level. (Toriel? Tu-torial? Get it? Yeah, I thought it was a little cheesy, too.) She’s a goat woman who loves humankind, despite what they’ve done to her race, and adores being a mom. She’s obsessively protective of you, to the point where she literally fights you when you try to leave her home. Her connection to Sans is that she befriended him through corny jokes and asked him to look after you. According to Sans, she’s the reason you aren’t “D E A D W H E R E Y O U S T A N D.” Okay, so Toriel isn’t underage, isn’t related to Sans, and has a meaningful connection to him, to boot.
So where’s the problem? Why do fans get pissy over Soriel shipping? Well, to be honest...I have no idea. Sure, Toby Fox confirmed that Sans is too lazy for a relationship, but if you’re going to take that as gospel, then you shouldn’t ship him with anyone. And since when has the fandom listened to creators’ requests to not do the hippy dippy super shippy? Some people pulled out the “pedo” argument since Toriel is noticeably older than Sans (he even calls her “old lady” at one point), but an older woman and a younger man is different than an adult and a literal child if you ask me. Consenting adults and all that. Maybe the goat woman is a cougar, but I’d rather have that than skeletons being pedos and/or incest partakers.
Of course, there’s always the tried-and-true “I’ll ship them with my OC.” Okay, fair enough, I guess. You do you. But you know how fandoms are, and naturally a lot of the Sans fangirls got slapped with “Sans is MINE!!1!” jokes. And who’s likely to root for Sans hooking up with some random chick instead of a well-known character, especially if said random chick stinks of Mary Sueishness and self-insert. I won’t cheer for Mary Sue x Sans, but it is better than those god-awful stories of him banging his sibling or creeping on a kid.
So this probably just seems like normal fandom dumbfuckery, right? Well, I’m sorry to say that it goes beyond that. Our investigation into drama over who Sans should date leads us to the big incident that forms the real drama. Someone almost got killed because of Undertale shipping drama. Here’s the sordid story. This is where the part about the needles and tampered food comes in, so if that’s a trigger for you, this is your last chance to turn back.
Apparently someone missed the core theme of the game – all that hoopla about mercy and love. A popular Undertale fan artist, Avimedes, attended a convention in Taiwan in 2017. While at the convention, a person, who has not yet been identified, approached Avimedes and offered her a box of homemade cookies. The artist, thinking it was a gesture of goodwill, accepted the treat and tried a cookie. Except this wasn’t a random act of kindness from a fan of her artwork; it was an attempt to get her hospitalized or worse. The cookies had needles in them – large sewing needles, to be exact. As Avimedes wasn’t aware of the adulteration before trying one, she ended up piercing her tongue on the needle and needed medical attention. Shortly thereafter, she posted a picture of the blood and needle on her Plurk (a Taiwanese social media site) with a morose comment about how she now has an extra piercing and can’t track down the person who did this to her.
Despite the inability to catch the miscreant, fans suspect a particular motivation for the crime. Avimedes is a Frans shipper and often does artwork of it. Frisk is aged up in her artwork to avoid the whole deal seeming creepy. Despite the aging up, her behavior supposedly pissed off an “anti,” -- that is, a person who is opposed to shipping incest, pedo-ish stuff, and so on. The anti then concocted the tainted cookies and gave them to Avimedes with the hopes of injuring or even killing her. Fans have since been holding up the incident as an example of toxic anti culture (see the last two links in the references section), where moral ideology gets so fevered that it turns murderous. If that was indeed the cookie criminal’s intent, then those people have a point. As you’re probably well aware if you’ve spent five minutes in a fandom on Tumblr dot hell, shit really hits the fan when the antis and proshippers clash. But we don’t know the con criminal’s motives, and we never really will.
Just don’t accept food from strangers at a con. And maybe don’t ship adults with children.
References
WARNING: Some links contain images of needles, blood, and chewed up food. DO NOT click on a link if those are a trigger for you.

• Search the tags “undertale discourse,” “anti fontcest,” “anti frans,” and “anti soriel” on Tumblr to get a feel for what kind of fighting goes down in the fandom.
• Toby Fox’s thoughts on Sans shipping: https://sweetdreemurrs.tumblr.com/post/164617843256/more-like-where-does-it-say-sans-is-aro-ace-since
• Sources on the tainted cookies story – a news article from Medium and a Tumblr post. Some links may lead to the photograph of the blood and needles; click links with caution if those are triggers for you.
• https://medium.com/@trekfaerie/antis-will-have-a-body-count-89390b491716
• https://eclaire-de-lune.tumblr.com/post/160699469137/how-about-we-dont-hurt-real-people-over-fictional

“GET DOWN! GET THE FUCK DOWN!!!”
Stitch’s voice sounded far less threatening while being distorted by his mask.
I always thought that was a corny nickname. Stitch.
But we all had one, for security reasons. The less my “colleagues” knew about me the better. I went by “Grey”. I don’t think I’ll divulge my real name here, though.
It was a six person crew. There was Stitch – the muscle. Wick – sharpshooter. Wire – safe-cracking expert. Casanova – the intel guy, Eagle – sniper support/lookout, and me – the de facto leadegetaway driver.
The place we were robbing was a weight training equipment store that served as a front for a smuggling ring. What they did smuggle? Literally everything under the sun. Casanova had gotten in with the ring a few months prior, working undercover as they carried out their operations. He knew the general layout of the place, how many guards were going to be present at any given time, and most importantly, where the goods were.
Even with the intel he was able to provide, the operation was still going to be quite dangerous. If we were to be caught, the consequences weren’t going to be as simple as prison. It was going to be… much worse. In any case, I was just gonna off myself if things went south. So was everybody else.
So why choose such a risky place to rob? Well first of all, it would attract less police attention, as opposed to robbing a bank or currency exchange. Simple criminal vs. criminal action. No need to go and track down any stolen money. Second of all, we could kill with impunity. No civilians. Just the most rotten pieces of shit on the planet. As strange as it was, we definitely had the moral high ground here. Third of all, they were apparently hoarding millions in cash, diamonds, and other valuables.
In short, the operation was high-risk, high-reward, high-catharsis. Killing these bastards was certainly gonna feel good. Casanova had once told me about something he’d seen while in one of their storage closets. Frozen torsos. Human torsos that definitely weren’t big enough to have belonged to an adult.
“ARE YOU FUCKING DUMB? GET DOWN!!!!” Stitch continued to scream. The “employees” at the front counter hardly budged. In fact, they hardly reacted at all. They just stared at us with disturbingly blank expressions. I knew we should’ve expected more resistance than usual, but this kind of behavior was still pretty bizarre.
“Fuck!” Stitch spat. “They aren’t fucking listening. Can I just waste these freaks!”
I looked over at Casanova. “You recognize them? How involved are they?”
Casanova clicked his tongue. “I think they’re new hires. Only seen them sneaking around in the basement since last week. But they’re aware of the operations for sure.”
I sighed. “Alright. Waste ‘em then.”
Stitch and Wick put two bullets in both of the employee’s heads. I was kind of relieved when they dropped. They were starting to freak me the hell out.
“And you’re sure nobody heard that?” Wick asked. Even with silencers, they’d still made a hell of a lot of noise.
Casanova shook his head. “Nah. Right now, there should only be people in the basement. And you can’t hear shit from down there.”
“And nobody’s watching security right now?”
“I’m 95% sure nobody is.”
Wick shot him a concerned glare.
“Stop being greedy, those are good odds.”
“Alright then,” I said. “Let’s go.”
The plan was fairly simple. Once we got down to the basement, we’d waste anybody and everybody there, grab as much shit as we could, and then get the hell out of there before reinforcements showed up.
However, the only reason we’d be able to do this at all was because of Casanova’s intel. We really owed him this one. Usually, there were dozens of guards stationed here at any given moment. There was only a small frame of time each week where there’d only be four. According to him, five of the eight main traffickers would also be present, in addition to the guards.
We were about to do society a favor.
I gestured towards him. “Lead the way, Cas.”
“Hey aren’t you worried they’ll find out it was you?” Wire asked him.
“Nah,” Cas responded. “I’ll be fucking outta here. Getting sick of this country. Already got property down in Jamaica. Smooth sailing from here on boys.”
I had plans on retiring from heists after this one as well. It really wasn’t a terribly sustainable occupation. I nearly had enough cash as well. I just needed a little more and I was golden.
We entered through one of the back doors, before locating the entrance to the basement.
“Fuck, boys. Here we go,” Stitch looked at us, before tapping his chest twice. “Godspeed.”
“Godspeed.” We all whispered in unison. It was sort of a tradition for us to do at this point.
“So are we just gonna ignore the elephant in the room?” Wire said. “What the fuck is that?”
He pointed to the ground, where some kind of symbol was painted right in front of the basement doorway. It looked like a circle with triangles lining the circumference, all pointing inwards. In the center of the circle was what I could’ve only described as an eye.
“Oh,” Cas responded. “I dunno. These people are probably in a cult or something. I mean, they sell kids. But they must’ve put it there recently. First time I’m seeing it.”
Not exactly something I wanted to hear or see. Nevertheless, we proceeded with the job. We rushed down the stairs and began tossing stun grenades. That just about did it. The ensuing firefight was a near-flawless victory on our part. Stitch was the only guy injured on our side, with a bullet grazing his shoulder. It wasn’t a problem, though. We’d taken out all the guards and the traffickers.
“Man, you fucked it up,” Wire said. “All that mass makes you an easy target.”
“Fuck off!” Stitch spat. “Let’s just get the shit and get out of here!”
“Where to now, Cas? Cas? Hello?”
I turned around to see Cas just standing there, his expression seemingly bewildered.
He shook his head. “I’ve… I’ve never these guys in my life.”
“So?” Wire responded. “What does it matter?”
“I’ve been undercover for months. Never met any new faces after day 1. But now they’re getting new employees? And now these people? Something’s going on.”
“Maybe they didn’t trust you as much as you think they did,” Wick said. “I doubt you know everything that goes on in this place.”
“Fuck that,” Cas said. “Something’s fucked up here.”
He walked over to the corpses of one of the “traffickers”. He kneeled down, observing a tattoo on one of their arms.
“Jesus, what the hell.” He held up the guy’s arm. His tattoo was an exact replica of the symbol that we’d seen on the ground earlier.
As it turned out… all of the traffickers had the same tattoo. Even the guards did.
“You sure you don’t recognize that symbol?” Wire asked. “Like, you’ve never seen it?”
“You think I’m fucking blind or something? I said I haven’t.” Cas responded. “Fellas, I don’t like this at all.”
“We’re wasting time,” I told him. “Where’s the shit we came here for?”
Cas shook his head and sighed. “Fine. Fine. God, I didn’t sign up for this demon shit.”
He led us to a locked, password-protected door near the back of the room.
“What’s the code, Cas?”
“Fuck if I know. Wire, you’re up.”
Wire took out his toolkit and began going to work. Only a minute later, the door was open.
“Shoulda never dropped out of MIT,” he said. “My talents are wasted here.”
“Yeah, yeah, cry about in the Bahamas,” Stitch said, walking in. We all followed suit.
Cas’s intel didn’t disappoint. We’d hit the fucking jackpot. Stacks of cash, gems, watches, you name it. There were also boxes of USB’s. I set on those on fire. Cas still appeared to be on edge as we shoved the loot into garbage bags.
“Relax man,” I said. “We found it. We’re golden. You’ll never step foot in this hellhole ever again.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess.”
“You have any idea what’s in there?” Wire asked.
I looked at the direction he was pointing towards. It was a small, grey safe in the corner.
“What could be so valuable that it needs double protection?”
Cas shook his head. “Like I said, I dunno. It’s like everything’s changed the last time I was here.”
“Well, it must be something good.” Wire said, getting up and walking towards it.
“We don’t have the time, man!” I called out to him.
He simply held out his hand. “Won’t take long.”
I did have a habit of underestimating him. He managed to crack the safe in under 30 seconds.
“Well, what the hell’s in there?” Stitch asked.
“Um… it’s a… necklace.”
“Alright, well toss it into a bag. We’ll figure out its value later.”
“Come take a look at it first.”
As it turns out, the necklace was… alive. It appeared to be made of sharp teeth, with an abnormally large eye as the centerpiece. An eye that was still blinking.
We must’ve stared at the thing for a minute straight without saying a word. I heard Wick silently utter a payer.
“What the hell are these people?” Stitch asked. “Let’s get the fuck outta here. Cas, you aren’t possessed or something, right?
Describing how I felt as “unsettled” would’ve been an understatement.
“Alright, pack it up. We’re outta here.” I said, heading towards the stairs. I couldn’t wait to leave. But before I could even make it out of the room, I got a call on my radio. It was from Eagle, who’d been hiding out on the 7th floor of an adjacent building. He was only supposed to call if he’d spotted any suspicious activity outside the store.
Obviously, this was gonna be bad news.
I picked up the call.
”Hello?”
”Grey? Find a fucking place to hide!” His tone was frenetic.
”What? What the hell-“
”Go, Go! Don’t ask questions, just hide. A fleet of cars just pulled up outside. Over a dozen people got out. Maybe even twenty. They’re getting out and walking in as we fucking speak.”
”Are they armed?”
”I’m not sure, but… they’re walking weird. It’s screwing with my head. Fuck! I think one of them saw me, I gotta go. Just hide!”
“Eagle? Hello? Shit!”
“Well,” Wick said. “That didn’t sound good.”
“It wasn’t,” I responded. “We gotta hide.”
“Is that joke? If somebody’s coming down, let’s just waste ‘em.” Stitch objected.
“Too many. Won’t work. Cas, I thought you said nobody was coming back ‘till midnight.”
“That’s the way it’s been for months, it is my fault that they suddenly changed the goddamn schedule? And EVERYTHING else?”
“Jesus,” I took a deep breath, trying to compose myself. “Fuck it, just find a place to hide.”
As soon as we stepped back out onto the main basement floor, another issue presented itself. All the bodies were gone.
“What the hell?” Wick said, dumbfounded.
We hardly had time to digest the news, as heavy footsteps began descending down the stairs. Eagle was right. Their footsteps did sound weird. They were too… uniform. As if they were all marching in unison or something. And there were a lot of them.
I was starting to panic, looking around the basement for somewhere to hide.
“Cas, where the hell do we go?”
“There’s no goddamn place to hide! Shit!”
“Check it out!” Wire said.
I looked over, seeing him holding open a door in the opposite corner of the room.
“No. No way,” Cas said. “That door was never there before.”
“You sure, Cas?” Stitch said. “Your memory seems pretty foggy these days.”
There was hardly any time to argue. The footsteps were getting dangerously loud. We all rushed into the mystery room, with Cas being the last one to enter. I did have to admit. I was beyond unnerved. I knew Cas the best out of anybody in my crew. He didn’t do any drugs. No record of mental health issues. I believed him 100% when he said that this door was never there before.
Once we were all in, we shut the door behind us, plunging ourselves into sheer darkness. We all grabbed our flashlights and pulled them out. I could only describe what we saw in front of us as a cruel joke.
We were in a short corridor, leading to a small room at the end. In that room was the entrance to another staircase, leading down. And on the floor? The symbol. That same, hellish symbol.
Obviously, none of us wanted to go down. We are all perfectly content with waiting until we got an all-clear from Eagle.
Wait. Eagle. He told me that he’d been spotted. I didn’t call his radio, in case he was hiding. I texted him instead. No response.
“What the hell is going on?” I heard somebody whisper.
“Just keep quiet,” I said. “We’ll wait here until I get a response from Eagle.”
That option was quickly wiped off the table when we heard the doorknob begin rattling.
You’ve gotta be kidding me, I thought to myself.
Nobody needed to say anything. We started moving towards the stairs, as much as we all dreaded the prospect.
The stairs themselves took around a full minute to descend fully. A full fucking minute. Where the hell did this thing lead? At the very least… it didn’t sound like anybody had followed us down.
In retrospect, that fact should’ve been more concerning than anything. These people obviously knew there’d been a break-in. They obviously heard us running towards the stairs. Why the hell had they not chased us down?
“Shit. Alright, let’s get our bearings straight,” Wick said. “Cas, you have any idea what this place is?”
Cas shook his head. “Not in the slightest.”
“Fantastic,” Wick mumbled in response. “Well, I’m not gonna be a sitting duck. There’s gotta be another way up. But make sure we know the way back. Just in case.”
We started walking. The place was… weird, to say the least. It didn’t look haphazard at all. The floors looked like they should’ve belonged in a well-maintained hospital. On top of that, the place itself had a hospital-style layout. Well, with hints of a prison. A prison-hospital hybrid, if you will.
It was also big. We’d walk down the corridor, passing dozens and dozens of closed metal doors, but there’d be no end in sight.
“What the hell’s behind these doors?” Wire whispered.
Honestly, I really didn’t want to know.
“This is pointless. We’ve been walking in a straight line for like twenty minutes. How big is this place? I’m starting to freak the fuck out.” Stitch said. “Let’s just go back and-“
“Hang on.” I cut him off.
Somebody had stopped walking with the group. They were standing about 20 feet back, absolutely still, with their flashlight pointed at the ground.
“You find something?” I called out to them. “Hello-“
I felt somebody grab my arm.
“Stop.” Wire said.
“What? What do you mean?”
“Everybody’s here.”
I was confused. I shined my light down at everybody’s shoes. Six pairs, including myself. That meant…
I looked back up at the mystery person, petrified at the prospect of directing my flashlight towards whatever was lurking there in the darkness. A few seconds of tense silence passed, before they turned their own flashlight off.
And then they started walking towards us.
“Stay the fuck back!” Stitch shouted. I heard him raise his rifle. I followed suit, attaching my flashlight to the mount underneath the barrel and pointing it towards the mystery person.
God, I could’ve gone my entire life without seeing the thing that was illuminated before me.
It was… a woman. About eight feet tall. Wide, dead eyes and a wide, static grin. Too many teeth in her mouth. Almost looked like a damn doll. We all opened fire at once. Thankfully, she went down. However, she ate at least six bullets, two of them headshots, before she did.
“Yup,” Wick said. “Our past has caught up to us. We’ve died and gone to literal hell.”
I can’t say it was a terrible theory. I didn’t know how else to explain what the hell was happening.
Before any of us could decide on our next course of action, we heard doors beginning to open up, one-by-one, all around us.
I heard Wire sigh. “Is it too late to repent?”
We all started running. Unfortunately, our senses of directions seemed to have gotten a bit jumbled. We inadvertently split up. Wire, Wick and I ran in one direction, while Cas and Stitch ran the opposite way. I aimed my light up, only to see… things beginning to stumble out into the hallway. Some resembled humans. Others, not so much.
Thankfully, Wick was with us. He hadn’t earned that nickname for nothing. He began shooting the creatures down in front of us, clearing a path. Most of them looked similar. Just zombified humans, for lack of a better term. But some were freakier than others. I saw a six-armed humanoid wearing a steel mask, a slug-like being with a gaping mouth, a hulking man with rusty saws for hands, amongst many other monstrosities.
At a point, an oily, elongated arm reached out from one of the rooms and pulled Wick in. I’ll never be able to forget the sound of his slimy, muffled screams. It was the worst possible outcome. Compared to Wick, Wire and I couldn’t shoot for shit, and it showed.
Soon enough, we were effectively trapped. Creatures had started piling up in both directions, and we were running out of ammunition. With nowhere else to go, we just ducked into one of the empty rooms and shut the door behind us.
Not moments later, they began viscously pounding on the metal. I could see no way out of it. I started wondering if Cas and Stitch had made it. Whether or not Eagle was alright. The decisions that led my life to such a shitty conclusion. I’d always told myself to put the past in the past. Not to dwell on my regrets.
However, it was all that I could do right there. I pulled out my pistol. I’d made a promise to myself. I was going to die on my own conditions.
“Well… I guess that’s that.” I muttered. I could hear Wire fishing out his own pistol next to me.
But before we could do anything drastic, the pounding suddenly stopped. A few seconds passed before the door opened. My flashlight was on the ground, so it partially illuminated the two figures that stepped in. They seemed to be humans, more or less. But I didn’t get my hopes up.
“Well, isn’t this quite the surprise.” A voice said.
The next thing I knew, somebody had kicked me in the face. My body went limp, with my consciousness slowly fading into nothing as I was laid out on the floor. The last thing I saw before everything went black was Wire falling down next to me.
Everything was going wrong. I’d even fucked up my own contingency plan.
When I woke up, I was tied to a chair, back in the basement. The first basement. Wire and Cas were next to me, in similar conditions. Stitch was nowhere to be seen, though. Wasn’t a mystery what had happened to him.
“I’m not quite sure what you were thinking there.” A voice called out from behind.
I suddenly heard a cacophony of footsteps, and before I knew it… there were about 3 dozen people, both men and women, standing in front of us. They were all wearing black suits and gloves, with one sleeve rolled up to reveal a tattoo. You can probably guess what it was.
What was even stranger… I saw the men that we’d definitely killed earlier standing amongst them. Hell, even the employees in the main store were there.
“I believe you took something from us.” The man at the front – a blonde man in his twenties, said.
“It’s all in the bags,” I said. “If you’re gonna kill us, I only ask that you do it quickly.”
“No. We’ve recovered those. But we’re still missing one thing. The most important thing.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.
“It’s in my jacket pocket.” Wire spoke up.
The blonde man walked over and reached into Wire’s front pocket, pulling out a small container. He opened it up, revealing the weird eye-necklace inside.
I could hardly believe it. “Wire, what the FUCK!” I screamed. “Why the hell would you take that thing?”
“I dunno,” he said. “I thought it might be worth something. That some creeps would be willing to pay big bucks for it.”
He sighed, shaking his head. “I’m sorry guys. I fucked us all over.”
Obviously, I was furious. But at the same time… he couldn’t have known something like this was going to happen. My anger was useless anyway. Our fates appeared just about sealed.
The blonde man looked at the necklace and smiled. “Well, I’m glad that’s resolved.”
“So what now?” I asked.
“Well… that’s up to the discretion of our leader. The new Messiah. With your skills and some conditioning, you just may earn a spot amongst his loyal followers. Like us. But… you’ve certainly caused us some trouble. That likely won’t go unpunished. You may just end up back down where we found you… until we need you again, of course.”
Ah fuck. I didn’t like the sound of that.
“In the meantime… just wait here. The Messiah should be here soon.”
I was really wishing that I’d just pulled the trigger when I had the chance.
“But don’t worry… know that whatever happens… you’ll be a pivotal piece to the formation of the new world. A world shaped by the ideals of the Messiah. There is no greater pleasure we can execute in this worthless state known as human consciousness.”
“Hey freaks!”
Another voice called out from behind. But this time, it was familiar.
The blonde man’s expression changed. “Oh. What do we have he-“
A bullet was drilled through his brain before he could finish the sentence. I flinched at the sound of automatic machine-gun fire coming just a few feet away from me. I watched as each and every one of the people in suits were mowed down right in front of me.
I could hear the person who’d done it walking towards us from behind. I had a hunch about who it was, but still remained cautious.
I breathed a sigh of relief when he walked into view. It was Eagle, limping on one foot, covered in blood and dirt, his eyes wider than I’d ever seen them before. He’d definitely snorted a few lines. Couldn’t blame him, though.
“Eagle?” I said, recognizing his mask. “What the hell happened up there?”
He just looked me dead in the eye and shook his head. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
After he untied us, we all booked it up into the main store and out the door. There were about ten bullet-ridden bodies on the ground in the parking lot. All wearing black suits, of course. I can’t be sure, but I think I saw some of them moving on the ground as we ran. In any case, we got into our van and floored it the hell out of there. We were starting to hear sirens in the distance as well.
Eagle was shaking as he drove.
“You sure you’re alright to drive?” I asked.
With his mask off, he looked like he’d seen the devil himself. Although with everything that’d happened… I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case.
“I’ll be fine.” He said.
“Well… what happened?” Cas asked.
Eagle just shook his head vigorously. “Don’t want to talk about it. Listen, we need to get out of the city. Out of the country, even.”
“Well, that was the plan, wasn’t it? Thanks for coming back and saving our asses.” Cas said.
Eagle just nodded once in response, his expression still borderline catatonic.
In the end, we’d only managed to make it out with two of the five bags we’d filled. But I wasn’t going to complain. At least we’d made it out at all. I uttered a silent prayer myself for Stitch and Wick. It's not like I believed in that stuff but... it felt like I needed to do something.
We sat in silence from then on. At some point, Cas fell asleep. His sleeve was rolled up slightly, revealing some kind mark on his forearm.
Out of curiosity, I rolled it up the rest of the way, just to check if he’d been injured or something.
What I found was worse than any kind of injury.
As far as I knew, Cas never had any tattoos. Especially not that one.
Oh boy.

This would be the first time I tried this with the character, they’ve been talking to the other one a lot and have grown quite fond. She agreed to do the movie activity with him, but he is unsure if she meant it as a friend or the first mission in the questline.
She also mentioned that she was “asexual” in passing. My character only has minimal knowledge of the LGBT+ character traits, and does not know wether this means she is opposed to relationships entirely, or just sexual relationships (which both characters are too low level to do).
She has also sent some mixed signals, she told my character “not to feel special” when they where discussing details of a highly personal writing project of hers, but also talks about how much they have in common, make corny jokes, and even compliments his looks, hat accessories, and eyes, which due to my character having the extreme emotional sensitivity trait, provides a substantial boost to the self esteem stat for a long time.
Also due to this trait, he is deathly afraid of the consequences of rejection, as he fears it may lower his self esteem stat to such an extent where it slows his progress in or even removes progress from his social skill tree (which Is a crucial part of the character build, especially at this teen/young adult part of the game)
This is my first (and what I’ve heard from the mechanics, only) character I’ve made. And even if the results in either direction would be a relatively low debuff for a relatively short time, it is still extremely important to me and my character
Thank you for reading this long post. Any advice and help would be appreciated

This is an updated list of all of Nick and Mitch's guest appearances on other podcasts. I figured some folks might like some extra Doughboys content right about now.
If you notice any errors, or have a link to contribute, please comment so I can add or edit it.
Happy Listenin'!
Achievement Oriented - The Holiday Deluge, 'Stardew' on Switch, and the AI of 'Echo' (w/ Nick Wiger)
Action Boyz - Demoltion Man (1993) w/ The Doughboys
Affirmation Nation With Bob Ducca - 213 - Mindfulness: Living in the Moment (w/ Nick Wiger)
A Funny Feeling - 25 - New and Old England Ghosts w/Mike Mitchell
Alison Rosen is Your New Best Friend - Mike Mitchell
Almost Better Then Silence - 216 - Nick Wiger Interview
Analyze Phish - 9 - Hollywood Bowl (w/ Mike Mitchell)
The Beef and Dairy Network Podcast - 53 - Lesley Clocks (w/ Heather Anne Campbell and Nick Wiger)
The Beef and Dairy Network Podcast - 56 - The End Of The World (w/ Nick Wiger)
Before You Were Funny - Scott Gairdner, Nick Wiger
Before You Were Funny - Matthew Brian Cohen, Mike Mitchell, Alice Wetterlund
Best of Friends - 86 - The One With The Doughboy (w/ Nick Wiger)
Bigfoot Collectors Club - BCC 132 – “The Cecil Hotel” w/ Nick Wiger!
Bigfoot Collectors Club - BCC 134 – “Borley Rectory” w/ Mike Mitchell!
Blank Check - Who Framed Roger Rabbit with Mike Mitchell & Nick Wiger
Blocked Party - 66: Doughboys v. Hoarse Whisperer
The Bread Cast - Episode 4 - The Bread Cast Holiday Special w/ the Doughboys
Bubble - 1 - Huntrs (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Bubble - 2 - Three Stars (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Bubble - 3 - The Dark District (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Bubble - 4 - Home Brew (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Bubble - 5 - Nothing Trivial (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Bubble - 6 - Into the Brush (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Bubble - 7 - Shareables (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Bubble - 8 - Die Hard (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Buckets with Amir Blumenfeld - 11 - Lake Show Deep Dive (w/Nick Wiger!)
Can I Pet Your Dog? - 108 - Doughboys and the Mysterious Mongolian Ridgeback w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell
Cassock Club - Episode 18: Wait - You Have a Guest?
Checking In with Mary Lynn - Checking In with Mike Mitchell!
Cool Playlist - 36 - Hanging Out On The Couch With Cats with Mike Mitchell
Cool Playlist - 46 - Gotta Go Fast! with Nick Wiger
Comedians of Wrestling - Shawn Michaels: Hairless in Seattle w/ Mike Mitchell
Comedians of Wrestling - AEW ALL OUT & PWG Talk w/ Nick Wiger
Comedy Bang Bang - 054 - The Wacky Ding Dongs (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Comedy Bang Bang - 077 - Crappy Howl-o-ween! (w/ Nick Wiger)
Comedy Bang Bang - 104 - Shut Up Dracula! (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Comedy Bang Bang - 249 - Ice Cold STaB (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Comedy Bang Bang - 252 - The Creeeeeeepy Halloween Special (w/ Nick Wiger)
Comedy Bang Bang - 353 - Goodbye Reggie! (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Comedy Bang Bang - 383 - Return to Suicide House Part Boo (w/ Nick Wiger)
Comedy Bang Bang - 454 - Return to Suicide House Part Tricks-or-Treats (w/ Nick Wiger)
Comedy Bang Bang - 515 - Return to Suicide House Part 666 (w/ Nick Wiger)
Comedy Bang Bang - 579 - 2018 Holiday Spectacular (w/ Nick Wiger)
Comedy Bang Bang - Best of 2019 Pt.4 (w/ Nick Wiger)
Comedy Bang Bang - 666 - You Get It? (w/Nick Wiger)
Comedy Bang Bang: Special Edition - Live From Boston 2013, Part 1 (w/ Mike Mitchell)
The Cracked Podcast - 271 - 12 Great Ideas America Should Steal From Other Countries w/ Adam Tod Brown and Nick Wiger
The Cracked Podcast - 290 - 10 Insane Real-Life Crimes Committed Through Video Games
Culture Kings - The Kings and Doughboys Are In The Building
The Dark Weeb - Uzumaki with Nick Wiger
[the deep end] - 12 - John K Hanna Barbera Shorts w/ Nick Wiger
Definitely Dying - Nick Wiger
Deli Boys - Patreon Report #2 w/ Mike Mitchell
Deli Boys - Brent's Deli with Mike Mitchell
Deli Boys - Deli Counter #9: Deli Leaks with Nick Wiger
Deli Boys - Brent's Deli (Part 2) with Nick Wiger
Directionally Challenged - “Double Dating” with the Doughboys
Doing Great with Vicky Vox - Sexy Santa (w/ Nick Wiger & Mike Mitchell aka The Doughboys)
Doodie Calls with Doug Mand - Mike Mitchell
The Dumbbells - 12 - Flexibility and Fat-loss for a Doughboy (w/ Nick Wiger)
The Dumbbells - 14 - Surviving this Fast Food World (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Dunktown - 11 - Nick Wiger + Bulls vs Wizards
Dunktown - 28 - Mike Mitchell + Celtics vs Pacers (Round 1, Game 4)
Dunktown - S2 E12 - Nick Wiger + Lakers vs Trail Blazers
Dunktown - S2 E41 - Mike Mitchell & Nick Wiger + Celtics vs Lakers (1984 NBA Finals, Game 4)
Eating Pie - 10 - Coconut Cream Pie w/ Nick Wiger
The Education of Tim Chang - 12 - Slaughterhouse-Five w/ Nick Wiger
Everything's Coming Up Simpsons - 05 - Treehouse of Horror V (w/ Nick Wiger)
Everything's Coming Up Simpsons - 26 - Lemon Of Troy (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Everything's Coming Up Simpsons - 90 - The Town (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Fake The Nation - 145 - How Do We Solve a Problem Like Twitter? with Dave Holmes and Nick Wiger
The Flagrant Ones - The All-Corny and All-Handsome Teams with Nick Wiger
The Flagrant Ones - Listening to Fan Submissions with Ben Rodgers and Mike Mitchell
Food Republic Today - Nick Wiger & Mike Mitchell (The Doughboys)
Get Up On This - 24 - Nick Wiger
Get Up On This - 310 - Mike Mitchell
The Gino Lombardo Show - From Heathcliff To Mungo (with Mike Mitchell, Edgar Momplaisir, Alison Rich, Mary Holland, and Ben Rodgers)
Girls Like Us - "The Clique: Diss and Make Up" with Nick Wiger
Godzilla vs Podcast Zero - 10 - The Son of Godzilla with Mike Mitchell
Godzilla vs Podcast Zero - 27 - Godzilla vs Mothra (1992) w/ Nick Wiger
Good Morning, Good Morning - Ep. 1 Love and Relationships
Groomzillas - 43 - How To Marry a Concertmaster w/ Nick Wiger
Halloween Unmasked - Michael vs. Freddy vs. Jason (feat. Paul Rust, Nick Wiger and Amy Nicholson)
Hard Nation - 20 - Bill Clinton Winks Mischievously (w/ Mike Mitchell, Anthony Atamanuik)
Hard Nation - 32 - Sarah Palin Has A Plate In Her Brain (w/ Mary Holland, Craig Rowin, Mike Mitchell)
Harmontown - 196 - Problematizing (w/ Nick Wiger & Mike Mitchell)
Hello From the Magic Tavern - Season 3, Ep 61 – Brothers (w/ Mike Mitchell and Nick Wiger from Doughboys)
Hey Teens! - 19 - Jeff Dutton & Mike Mitchell!
High and Mighty - 26 - Being Fat (w/ Nick Mundy & Mike 'Mitch' Mitchell)
High and Mighty - 62 - Star Wars w/ Nick Wiger & Erin Mallory Long
High and Mighty - 78 - 2nd Annual High and Mighty Thanksgiving Eve Power Hour (w/ Adam Pally, Mike Mitchell, Mary Sasson & Neil Casey)
High and Mighty - 130 - Thanksgiving Power Hour LIVE (w/ Nicole Byer, Nick Wiger, Billy Scafuri and Mano Agapion)
High and Mighty - 136 - Being Fat w/ Mike Mitchell
High and Mighty - 165 - Fat Follow-Up (w/ Mike Mitchell)
High and Mighty - 182 - 4th Annual Thanksgiving Eve Power Hour (w/ Nick Wiger, Nicole Byer, Betsy Sodaro & Mano Agapion)
High and Mighty - 212 - Chicago Power Hour (w/ Nick Wiger, Mike Mitchell and Nicole Byer)
High and Mighty - 235 - The 5th Annual Thanksgiving Eve Power Hour (w/ Nick Wiger, Betsy Sodaro and Nicole Byer)
High and Mighty - 269 - Talk-O-Bell (w/ Nick Wiger, Mike Mitchell, Betsy Sodaro and Mano Agapion)
High and Mighty - 292 - Being Fat (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Hollywood Handbook - 44 - Nick Wiger, Our Close Friend
Hollywood Handbook - 173 - Mike Mitchell, Our Close Friend
Hollywood Handbook - 198 - Nick Wiger, Our Segment Advisor
Hollywood Handbook - 224 - Nick Wiger, Our Corny Friend
Hollywood Handbook - 250 - The Doughboys, Our Shrimp-off Friends
Hollywood Handbook - 275 - Tom and The Doughboys, Our Close Friends
Hollywood Handbook - Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell, Our Patreon Partners
The Hooray Show - Vas The Deferens? w/ Mike Mitchell and Mike Hanford
The Hooray Show - Welcome to Weirdville w/ Mike Mitchell and Mike Hanford
Horny 4 Horror - 27 - Talkin' With Mike Mitchell
How Did This Get Made? - 73 - Congo (with Nick Wiger)
How Did This Get Made? - 175 - Ultraviolet: LIVE! (w/ Nick Wiger, Mike Mitchell)
Huckerpunch - 15 - Nick Wiger
If I Were You - 324 - Sexy Flashlight w/Doughboys Nick Wiger + Mike Mitchell!
If You're Listening - 169 - Metallica "Ride the Lightning" with Nick Wiger
Inside Video Games - Episode 21 - Final Fantasy VII Remake Trailer (w/ Nick Wiger)
Inside Voices with Kevin T. Porter - Nick Wiger Has a Monotone Voice
Improv4Humans - 027 - Mustard Girl (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 049 - App Talk (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 049.5 - Bonus Cut: Big Red Boat (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 056 - Best of improv4humans Vol. 2 (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 112 - Christmas With The Birthday Boys (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 112.5 - Bonus Cut: The Holiday Mope Report (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 202 - No Joke Thieves Allowed (@FatJew) (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 218 - Dawes in You've Been Invited to an Invite (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 244 - Corked-up Porcupine (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 258 - Gallant and Gallant (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 270 - An Armen Brown Christmas (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 318 - The Science of Comedy (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 353 - My Hamburger's 15th Birthday (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 368 - The Best of i4h Vol. 9 (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Improv4Humans - 381 - The Best of Meta Vol. 1 (w/ Mike Mitchell)
It's All Been Done: A Barenaked Ladies Podcast - 10: Life, In A Nutshell with Mike Mitchell
I Will Write Your Book - Donkey Kong 64 The Book w/ Nick Wiger
James Bonding - 22 - Best And Worst Of Bond Live (w/ Nick Wiger)
Jordan, Jesse, Go! - 348 - Yucky Alvin w/ Tim Kalpakis and Mike Mitchell
Jordan, Jesse, Go! - 390 - Headache in a Bottle w/ Nick Wiger and Vanessa Ramos
Jordan, Jesse, Go! - 418 - The Naughtiest Nurse w/ Mike Mitchell
Jordan, Jesse, Go! - 455 - Live at Now Hear This Festival w/ the Doughboys
Jordan, Jesse, Go! - 518 - Duvet Snatcher w/ Nick Wiger
Jordan, Jesse, Go! - 564 - Candy Please w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell
Jordan, Jesse, Go! - 617 - Live from Los Angeles w/ Nick Wiger, Mike Mitchell, and Allie Goertz
Jordan, Jesse, Go! - 649: From Mouse to Man with Mike Mitchell
Jordan, Jesse, Go! - Ep. 654: The Ole Pull and Pull with Nick Wiger
Junk Food Cinema - Dead Alive with Special Guest Nick Wiger
Keep it 2000 - 20 - "Extra Butter” with Nick Wiger
Lady to Lady - Poppers with Dracula ft. Nick Wiger
Mall Talk - Dave & Buster’s w/ Nick Wiger
The MEAT Improv - 19 - "Cocaine & College" with Mike Mitchell & Mookie Blaiklock
Mike Delivers - 29: Mike Mitchell, Peeing In A Bottle, Cat Love, Robbing A Bank
The Most Wonderful Pod of the Year - Merry Kissmas with Mike Mitchell
movies.edu.gov - The Tenant with Mike Mitchell
My First Band - 63 - Nick Wiger
Newcomers: Star Wars, with Lauren Lapkus & Nicole Byer - Star Wars Ep. I - The Phantom Menace (w/ Nick Wiger)
Newcomers: Star Wars, with Lauren Lapkus & Nicole Byer - Star Wars Ep. II - Attack of the Clones (w/ Mike Mitchell)
No Cartridge - Episode 134 - The Signature Wall with Heather Campbell and Nick Wiger!
Off Book: The Improvised Musical - 32 - Picket Line Pals (w/ The Doughboys: Mike Mitchell & Nick Wiger)
Off Book: The Improvised Musical - 104 - The Cat 5 & The Bad Boys: The Musical (w/ Heather Anne Campbell and Nick Wiger)
Off Book: The Improvised Musical - Live from Vancouver with Mike Mitchell and Nick Wiger of The Doughboys
On Comedy Writing - 22 - Nick Wiger
One Photo Reviews Movie Podcast - 47- Plunker: John Ross Bowie and Nick Wiger
The Oscar Should Have Gone To - 1990 w/ Mike Mitchell
Peecast Blast - Doughboys: Wetzel's Pretzels with Sean Clements and Hayes Davenport (LIVE) from Peecast Blast
Please Be My Girlfriend - 8 - Mike Mitchell

Play it by Year - Episode 09: 2008 (featuring Mike Mitchell of Doughboys)
The P.O.D. Kast - B.O.N.U.S. Kast #3: Who Then Now? w/ Nick Wiger
The Podcast Preview - 7 - Doughboys (Nick Wiger, Mike Mitchell)
Podcast: The Ride - Walt Disney World vs Disneyland w/ Mike Mitchell
Podcast: The Ride - Mickey and Friends Parking Structure w/ Nick Wiger
Podcast: The Ride - The CityWalk Saga - Sector 19 w/ Nick Wiger
Podcast: The Ride - Woodfield Mall LIVE w/ Nick Wiger
Podcast: the Ride - Downtown Disney Ordeal 4-3 with Mike Mitchell
Podcast: The Ride - Downtown Disney Ordeal 5-3 with Nick Wiger
Podcast: The Ride - Churros with Mike Mitchell
Public Domain Theater - "Love Story" by Irving E. Cox Jr. (w/ Nick Wiger)
Public Domain Theater - LIVE "The Guilty Secret" by Paul de Kock (w/ Mary Holland & Nick Wiger)
Public Domain Theater - "Adolescents Only" by Irving Cox Jr. (w/ Nick Wiger)
Questions For Lennon - Lennon and Larry - Live Show At UCB (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Questions For Lennon - Kong Together (w/Mike Mitchell)
Questions For Lennon - Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Dough w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell
Raised By TV - 9 - Mt. Crushmore (Live at UCB w/ Nick Wiger, Betsy Sodaro, Christine Lakin)
Raised By TV - 50 - Time To Make The Donuts (w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell)
Seaside Chats - Nick Wiger talks Long Beach, NBA, and why he stopped watching NFL because of CTE
Self Esteem Party - Mike Mitchell
Sidekick with Matt Mira - Kumail Nanjiani and Nick Wiger
Smart Mouth - Pizza w/ Mike Mitchell
Snakes, Rats and Goats: A Survivor Podcast - Survivor Season 34, Ep. 1 w/ Nick Wiger
Social Discasting - 89 - Mike Mitchell in Massachusetts
Social Discasting - 100 - Nick Wiger in California
Social Distancing w/ Jonah Ray - Mike Mitchell
The Soft Spot - Cereal Killer Nick Wiger
Star Wars Minute - Jedi Minute 97 - Two Levels of Fake Surprise (w/ Nick Wiger)
Star Wars Minute - RotS 96 - Good Guys Never Scurry w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell
Star Wars Minute - RotS 97 - Pizza-Based Solutions w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell
Star Wars Minute - RotS 99 - A Nice-Looking Balcony w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell
Star Wars Minute - RotS 98 - Do I Kneel Every Time I See You? w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell
Star Wars Minute - RotS 100 - The Town Fool w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell
Street Fight Radio - The Politics Of Food w/ Nick Wiger
Struggle Session - 10 - The Last Women Protectors w/ Nick Wiger
Struggle Session - 61 - Struggle Boys w/ Mike Mitchell
Struggle Session - 100 - Final Fantasy w/ Nick Wiger
Struggle Session - 144 - The Thing w/ Mike Mitchell
Struggle Session - 244 - Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell
Survivor's Guide with Nazeem Hussain - Mike Mitchell's Guide to the USA: The Fast Food of Comedy
Talking Simpsons - You Dish Upon a Star (w/ Nick Wiger, Heather Anne Campbell, and Matt Apodaca)
Teen Creeps - Jay's Journal by Anonymous (w/ Nick Wiger)
Teen Creeps - Joe Boyle's Brog the Stoop (w/ Nick Wiger)
The Steele & Nazz Podcast - Episode 12: Wollywood (feat. Actor Michael Mitchell)
This Feels Terrible - 2016 TOUR Los Angeles with Mike Mitchell, Erin Whitehead and Wayne Federman
This Podcast is Self Care - Episode 2 - A Nice Sunday Dinner with Mike Mitchell
This Podcast is Self Care - Episode 6 - Best of Patreon Volume One (feat. Mike Mitchell)
This Podcast is Self Care - Episode 30 - Mani Pedis with Nick Wiger
This is Rad - Pink Floyd (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Too Stupid To Live - Slamdunked by Love w/ Nick Wiger
Trends With Benefits - Yoinks Indeed with Mike Mitchell
Trends With Benefits - Gigantic Bug with Nick Wiger
Two Old Queens - Mission Impossible: Fallout with Nick Wiger
Watching Watchmen - S1E5 w/ Nick Wiger
We Have To Stop Talkin' TMNT On CBB - Turtles Forever (2009) w/ Heather Anne Campbell, Nick Wiger, & Matt Apodaca
Weird Adults with Little Esther - Doughboys
Weird Adults with Little Esther - Nick Wiger LIVE
Well This Sucks - Doughboys! with Mike Mitchell & Nick Wiger
What A Time To Be Alive - Bonus Ep #102: Fancy Fatass (w/ Nick Wiger)
What's Your Deal with Ariana Lenarsky - The Doughboys
Who Charted - 338 - Doughboy Special w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell
Why Do You Know That? - Dave Matthews Band's Before These Crowded Streets with Mike Mitchell
Why Do You Know That? - Jazz Saxophone with Nick Wiger
Why Won't You Date Me? - 14 - Dating Fans (w/ Mike Mitchell)
Why Won't You Date Me? - 31 - Love, Marriage, and Taxes (w/ Nick Wiger)
Why Won't You Date Me? - Top or Bottom? (LIVE w/ Jon Gabrus, Nick Wiger, and Mike Mitchell)
Wild Horses: The Perspective - Gru is a Good Man (w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell)
With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus - 89 - Mike Mitchell, Nick Wiger: The Force Awakens Minute
Yelling About Pâté - 30- Steamed Hamming it Up w/ Nick Wiger
Your First Time - Mike Mitchells First Time Masturbating and Skiing (Not at the Same Time)
Your Kickstarter Sucks - 83 - Wiger Fever w/ Nick Wiger
Your Kickstarter Sucks - 119 - Doughboys Scared Straight w/ Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell
Your Kickstarter Sucks - 156 - Return of the Doughboys

I'm sorry in advance for the length of this post. It's going to be a doozy.
Once upon a time, a woman got pregnant. She told the father of the baby that he would have to choose between his drug and alcohol habits and being involved in his child's life. He chose his habits.
That's where I come in.
My mother raised me as a single parent. I was an only child, so it was just the two of us for as long as I can remember. She was sick a lot when I was growing up. She was diagnosed with lupus when I was five and had a few serious flares over the years. The worst was the year I was fifteen, we spent 6 weeks in the hospital before the doctors basically sent her home to die. Spoiler: she didn't.
As a result of this and a few other health conditions, she was unable to work, and we got by on her disability check. This is important later.
Growing up, there were some basic principles drilled in my head. The obvious - be a good person, try your best at everything you do. And some that were less.. Common. Not only was sex a thing to be saved for marriage, but it was also a vile thing, and men only want women so they have something to have sex with. (Paraphrasing, but that's the basic idea). Gay people should have rights, but it would break her heart if I ever told her I was. All races are equal, but certain ones are to be feared. Just to name a few inconsistencies.
Like most kids, I had a part-time job in high school. Graduated with a 3.87 GPA, got a full ride to college. Raaa! When I started working, I'd started contributing to the household bills, so we decided I'd continue staying at home and she'd take me to school (I didn't have my own car at the time, and couldn't drive the stick shift she had.) It worked, it was convenient. I maintained my part-time job, even picked up some more hours since classes didn't take as much time as high school had.
My boyfriend at the time was a year behind me in school, so still in his senior year when I entered college. He had plans to go into software design and joked that he'd be making so much money, I wouldn't have to work if I didn't want to. I made the mistake of telling my mother about this little joke. She. Flipped. Out. She said I shouldn't even joke about wasting the opportunity I had with the scholarship. I told her I knew, it was just a joke. Kind of ironic, considering what happened next.
A couple of months into my first semester, she tells me that things are getting more expensive, and she needs me to either pick up a second job or go to work full time. There was no way I could do either of these and continue focusing on school. And just like that, my goal of being a doctor, or at the very least obtaining a degree, went out the window.
So begins the call center life. The new job paid more, so my household contribution went up to around $300 a month. I didn't mind, not having a car payment, or any real bills other than my cell phone and a credit card or two at the time. Everything's still normal at this point and remained that way for the next few years.
I was completely naive when it came to my credit for the longest time. I had a couple of little cards that I paid on and thought I was doing good. I'd get my report every year when I filed my taxes, like clockwork. Open it up, give it a look. But stupid me, I never read it that closely. 'Oh... Open accounts. Cool cool, revolving balance. Gee that's a low score, I don't know why, I don't have THAT much debt...'
In 2019, I noticed a few names showing up that I didn't recognize. Strange brand names from stores that I wouldn't shop at, all opened in 2016. I asked her about them, and she said they were hers. That they wouldn't give her an account, so she opened them in my name. But it shouldn't matter to me, because she was making the payments, so just leave it at that. It struck me as odd... But, the naive thing that I was, I let it go. The payments WERE being made, and it was just easier to not rock the boat, I'd learned over the years.
See, for as amazing as my mother is... She also has reactions that resemble a tornado. It was common when I was a kid to get slapped across the face if she thought I was 'backtalking' or even looking at her the wrong way. Books were ripped from shelves and thrown. The really big screwups would end up with her using a belt on me until she was exhausted. (You've not lived until a belt hits just right and breaks the skin. It's like a paper cut with personality.) But she grew up in a household that spanked, and she'd always said "The day I can't spank my own child is the day CPS can have her." It wasn't until I was an adult and thought back that I realized there's a difference between spanking, and what happened in my house.
The years passed, and I went from call center to call center. A few years in the rearview, I was encouraged to file bankruptcy because my credit situation and revolving balances were getting out of control. I realize now that was NOT the correct choice to make, and things should have been handled differently. But I trusted my mother and her opinion that it was my only option. For as big of a hit as my credit took, I did get a clean slate and was able to start rebuilding and paying on some small accounts.
One thing about bankruptcy, though.. Banks don't want to give you a checking account, at least not without paying a pretty hefty monthly fee. I didn't want to do that, so she suggested we get a joint checking account. We could both have access, and my name would be on the account, but it was sort of like cosigning on a car. The logic seemed sound, so I went with it.
The company I work for now is, or was, pretty okay. It's gone downhill drastically over the last couple of years. I was quickly promoted to a management position and made significantly more money. Even with my change in income level, my household contributions were never mentioned. I assumed everything was the same. She was a very.. Receipt-oriented person and I was one who'd rather just pay the bill and check on the account that it went through. So since she would be impacted by any shortcomings on the checking account too, I let her basically have control of the money. She'd make the payments and tell me how much was left, keeping everything all neatly filed away. It never occurred to me that things just didn't add up. Well, not at the time.
A detail I failed to mention is how... anti-social life was. She didn't have any friends to speak of, to go out and do things with, regardless of living in the same town her entire life. Anytime I wanted or needed, to go to a work function that she couldn't attend.. They came with a side order of guilt trips. As time went on, I stopped going as much as possible, because it just wasn't worth it. I'm an introvert, yes, but I also recognize the value of building business relationships. Maybe if I had gone to more things, I'd have a better bond with my coworkers.
A year so ago, I got a husky from a coworker. She was going through a divorce and couldn't keep the pup in her new place. I named her Lady Rose and she was the sweetest thing on four legs. Sadly, too big to stay in the house, but she was happy digging up holes in the yard. Huskies in general have a tendency to roam, and she was no different. Multiple times we got calls from neighbors she'd gone to say hi to on her adventures, and we'd go pick her up.
One day, she went for one of her runs, and I was working some overtime, so I couldn't go with my mother to pick her up as I normally did. She returns and tells me that she decided to let the neighbors keep her, because they could keep her inside.
My dog. She gave away MY DOG, without even asking me. That's not normal... Right? Needless to say, I was devastated. I still miss her and her puppy hugs. (She'd stand up on her back legs and hold onto your shoulders)
Then... I met Mando. Name changed to protect the amazing. (I can't even type that without smiling). Being a hermit like I was, the only exposure to people I had was online. I don't know the rules about naming specific gaming platforms, so we'll just say it's one that allows you to have a Dual Existence, concurrent with your first. Those who know it, will get it, lol. We were both involved in a roleplay community and became fast friends. Things snowballed, simply put. Before I knew it, months had passed and we were planning to meet in person for Christmas. As soon as things started getting serious, back in June of 2019, I started talking about him nonstop. This was greeted with 'that's nice, dear' or the equivalent.
So December rolls around, and all of a sudden it's a shock that I'm meeting an Internet Person. (Because according to her, all Internet People are psychopaths, kidnappers, and murderers. Though I never got an answer to the question of... If all internet people are those things, what does that make me? Because I'm one too lol) That hailed a week of intense arguments. Namecalling insults... I won't bore y'all with the details. But the primary implication was that the only reason he was coming was to get laid, to put it very politely.
Let me be frank here. He's in the armed forces and looks damn good in a uniform. I'm pretty sure if all he wanted was to get laid, he could have done that on his own and without driving 9 hours to visit.
This is when things started going downhill in a most dramatic way. The week he was in town was both the best and worst of my life. The best because, as corny as it sounds, just being in the same room with him, finally, after so much time, was like being home. The worst because, the hours away from him were intense, and not in a good way.
"Poison pen letters" were always my mother's specialty. Usually, this was dealing with a complaint she had with a company or someone else on a personal level. However, in the last few years, I'd received a few myself. Daily, I would wake up to a fresh email, paragraphs, and paragraphs long about how I was a disappointment, a whore (because I met Mando in person, and that could only be for sex), among other things. These emails would leave me in tears, and I would reply, trying to explain. Each rebuttal was met with more namecalling, more insulting. Eventually, I learned to stop replying, because it didn't help.
The ironic thing is that at one point, she told me to tell him that she approved and liked him very much. I'm a bit biased, but she should! He brought her Christmas gifts, and we made every effort to include her in what we did, all of which she refused, then sulked because I was gone so much.
He returned home, and life returned to its old miserable state. A 'miserable' I hadn't realized WAS miserable until then. Around this same time, my mother had a consultation with a surgeon. For years, she'd had a condition with her feet that made it very painful to walk and would need surgery to correct. I was working on the day of the appointment, so we were on the phone until the doctor came in. She put the phone down, but the call didn't disconnect all the way. Sure, I should have hung up. But I wanted to know what was said, and I was rarely given details when I didn't go to the appointments. The doctor starts explaining the procedure and asks if she would have someone to help because she couldn't be on her feet at all for eight weeks. No pressure of any kind could be put on her left foot, she'd have to use one of those knee scooter things to get around while the bones mended. She thought for a minute and then sighed. She then told the doctor she didn't know. She had three dogs, and a bundle of cats to take care of. And her "daughter lives there, but she's fat and lazy, and I have to do everything for her, so I don't think she'd be any help."
I. Was. Stunned. At this point, we'd already discussed the surgery and what it would likely entail, and I'd told her that I was willing to do anything I could to help her feel better. I'd already talked to my boss about possibly working from home full time for two months, so I could be there to help. This was the only reason she went on the consultation in the first place. Anyway, the doctor tells her to think it over and call if she wants to schedule it. I disconnect the call at this time, still thoroughly in shock.
She calls me back not even five minutes later and doesn't understand why I'm upset. I explain what I'd heard and ask her to explain. Is that truly what she thinks of me? Instead of apologizing, she gets defensive and says it's my own fault for listening to a private conversation. And she hadn't said anything she didn't feel was true in the first place.
There's an uncomfortable thing about living in a small house, with only two people. Sooner rather than later, the silence tends to become deafening, and you move on from things whether you want to or not. The surgery happened, and for the next eight weeks, I worked full time and took care of the animals and my mother.
What's the big deal about taking care of the animals? I know it sounds like a pretty basic thing. But here's another sub-story. I'll try to be as descriptive as I can. The pet food was kept in a shed in the lower part of the yard, a walk down a pretty good slope from the front door. So you had to exit the house, unlock the shed, and bring the food in shifts because some animals were inside, and some were outside. The cats were expected to be fed at around 8 am. To feed the outside cats, you had to go around a slippery slope and up a set of stairs that was not in the best condition. (If you put your foot in the wrong place, it might go through the wood). Climb over a few things on the porch, then repeat to get back down. The dogs were inside and ate at approximately 5 am, and again at 4-5 pm. If one was smart, they brought enough dog food inside for two feedings when they went out for cat food in the mornings.
Two of the dogs were kept in crates 24/7. We had Baxter since he was a puppy, and got his mother Fiona at the same time. Baxter was easy to house train, he was a good boy. Fiona had slip-ups. As a result, she decided they weren't allowed out of their crates because she didn't want to clean up messes. We'd had dogs for as long as I could remember, and this didn't set well with me. She'd never done that to any of the others. It was cruel. Dogs should not exist in a 2x3 foot box their entire lives. But, it was "my house, my rules" and I couldn't do anything about it, short of calling animal control and reporting it as abuse. Which it really wasn't. They had shelter, food, and water. What would anyone have said? Still cruel.
My old dog, Jasper, was allowed to roam, as he always had. He passed away in March, and it's still raw. He just ate when he was hungry, as any creature should be allowed.
The porch described above is a small indicator of the rest of the house. Some families have a junk drawer. Some have a junk room, where random things are stored. We had both of those, and then some. From the kitchen to the hallway leading to her bedroom, there is just pile after pile of STUFF. Things that were bought online, left in their boxes, never used. There's so much, that her bedroom is completely inaccessible. It is literally stacked wall to wall, corner to corner with... I don't even know what. But she uses none of it. All sorts of kitchenware, which would be really nice things to cook with. None of them were ever taken out of the box. (Some of which I'll mention later) Even the closet in my room was half-filled with her things, along the floor and on the shelf above. There was a narrow path to walk leading down the hallway, and in the kitchen. Everything else was just.. stuff. It was suffocating.
So, a snapshot of the day. I would wake up at 4 am and take the dogs out. Then, to feed them, they had to be done one at a time, and handfed. The process took about half an hour between them. (The dogs didn't demand this, but this was the 'right' way to do it.) After they were fed, I would make her coffee, and go back to bed to try to snag another couple of hours of sleep. My work typically started at 8 am, and I'd work a normal 8 hour day while doing whatever was needed around the house. Cooking, laundry, taking the dogs out, etc. Doggo dinnertime was at 5 pm. They then had to be taken out at 9 pm, and then again at midnight. After their midnight trip, I was able to go to bed. Sleep rapidly became a myth, but I didn't mind. It was temporary and needed.
However, I don't know if y'all have ever tried to play a nurse to an independent person. It's not easy. Getting into the house was the first hurdle. For the surgery, she was given a nerve block, which made her leg literally dead weight. She couldn't feel anything from the knee down, even hours later. So we get home, and it becomes rapidly apparent that the driveway was not going to be an easy trip. She had the knee scooter but refused to use it because she couldn't feel where her foot was and didn't want to mess things up. Understandable, I suppose. We tried a few options - an old office chair, which got caught in the mud repeatedly. (Yes, it had been raining for two days beforehand, so the yard was nice and sloshy. This was also January, so it was cold AF.) I asked, no, pleaded several times to call 911 and have them send a police car, or EMT to help us get inside and she vehemently refused. We were outside for over an hour and a half, trying to find some way to get her inside. Every time I made a suggestion, she shot it down. Eventually, I ended up getting some old blankets and spreading them over the ground. She dragged herself along, kind of like a reverse crab walk.
Going to the bathroom was also a struggle. The way the house is set up, her chair was only about 6-7 feet from the restroom. However, there's a little 'bump' of a ledge going from one room to the other. For the first day or so, she wouldn't use the scooter, nor would she let me help her get into the room or do anything. She did more reverse-crabbing, awkward as can be. That bathroom is TINY, and there's a litterbox right in front of the sink that takes up a lot of space. Once she started using the scooter, that much got easier at least.
For the first week or so, things went normally. Then she started sneaking into the kitchen to make her own coffee. Which included going down a sharper drop (the living room to the bathroom was around a half step. Living room to kitchen was a full step down). At 3 am. Because she didn't want to wait until 4 am when I got up to start the day. Sometime between going back to bed and getting up again, I'd hear her in the bathroom. She couldn't take a shower for the first two weeks, so she took a sink bath. (Overshare, maybe. But it's relevant later)
Now let's talk cooking. When I was younger, homecooked meals were a regular thing. All the good, down-home country goodness that every family wants. Little by little as I got older, they became less and less frequent. At first, it was said it was because I was working odd shifts and wasn't home at night. Then they just... Stopped altogether. If it couldn't be put into the oven and cooked quickly (chicken tenders and fries, for instance) or microwaved, it didn't get cooked. At least not by her.
So when she had the surgery, I saw this as a chance to spread my culinary wings and cook! I did small meals for myself regularly, but this would be cooking for both of us and I was looking forward to it. However, anything I cooked she 'wasn't in the mood for'. I asked her what she wanted, and she would always say just a sandwich. She literally ate a bowl of cereal and a turkey sandwich every single day, no matter how many times I asked what she wanted.
This eight week period was also the first time that I was able to check the mail. We had a PO box, and prior to this, she would go early in the morning to get the mail, usually before I was even awake (the lobby was open early). Anything that was mine (that she wanted me to see, anyway) was waiting for me when I got up. (This is also relevant later)
Afterward, everything went back to normal, given relative values of normal, with COVID and all. At this point, my office was closed, and we were all full-time work from home anyway. There were random blowups, but things were mostly quiet. Most of the blowups happened when I asked for access to the checking account log-in or something similar.
In March, the accounts she'd opened in my name, at least four out of five of them, went into arrears. I got notified that I had a delinquent status on one or more accounts. When I asked her about this, she said she just had to wait until payday, but she'd get them caught up. She didn't.
This was also the month Jasper got sick. It seemed to happen overnight. As usual, I had no money, and didn't know what to do. Mando said he'd take care of it, so we hurried to the local vet. He was in kidney failure. They could slow it but not stop it, and he would just suffer more and more. That day, I held my sweet boy while he crossed the rainbow bridge. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. When I got home, I told her he was gone, then went to bed. I slept/cried my way through the afternoon. I woke up to a message saying I was heartless because I didn't consult/tell/give her an option as to whether he was put down or not. That she lost him too and I should just get over it.
June rolls around, and it's been a long six months since I saw Mando. We decide this time I'm going to make the drive to see him. This sparks one of the largest fights of all time. More emails, more namecalling.
The night before, a fight launches from out of nowhere. As has become normal, she calls me a liar (then can't come up with examples of anything I've lied about). More names, more accusations, none of which with any ground at all. This time for added flavor, she screams about how she was forced to sit in her own filth after her surgery, because I 'refused' to help her take a bath. She claimed she had bed sores from not being able to clean herself for over a month. None of this is true, of course. Like I mentioned before, I heard her almost every day, doing her daily cleaning ritual until she could use the shower chair and sit in the shower while keeping her foot dry. Many times I offered to help and she always said no.
The day I'm set to go, it's 6 am and I'm finishing loading up my car. She comes outside and looks at me. Now, if your loved one was embarking on their first solo trip, you might say something like "I love you, be safe. Call me when you get there" regardless of your personal feelings of the situation. Instead, she says, "I don't even know you since you met him. I hate you." She then stalks back into the house. I make it to his place nine hours later, and text her to let her know, so she wouldn't worry.
Around 4:30 pm, we're upstairs cooking dinner, and I'd left my phone in the basement. She calls twice in a five-minute span and leaves a voicemail on the second call. "Well, I guess I'll just have to call the police since you're not answering me. They'll be by to make sure you're not dead."
It wasn't as though she hadn't seen my text. She responded with an "Ok." So I quickly text her back and a small encounter follows, one I just stop replying to.
The next morning, I wake up tagged in a Facebook post saying how inconsiderate it is to do things like go on trips while COVID is happening. She makes several pointed comments and essentially calls Mando and I selfish people for putting her at risk. (It should be stated that during the drive, I stopped only for gas and wore a mask and gloves, and our plans for the two weeks included lots of working at home and very little else. The risk of any exposure was minimal.) I call her out on the public post in DMs, and she denies that it was what she meant. The post soon disappears, though.
That same day, she removes me on Facebook and a few mobile games.
Over the next two weeks, there are varying levels of blowups. She always knew exactly how to play my emotions to upset me in the most direct way possible. If one tactic didn't work or get a response, she'd try another. An angry outburst would lead to a sad/depressive one. If those didn't work, she tried chipper, normal conversation. All of these things just to get any sort of reaction from me. It was a revolving door that never stopped. I never knew which person I'd be hearing from that day.
Eventually, I packed up to leave Mando's place. And I swear to Merlin, I cried more during that 9 hour drive than was probably safe. It didn't feel like I was going home. It felt like I was leaving home and returning to where I lived. Sappy, huh?
I arrived around 10 pm. I walked in the door, dragged my suitcase in, and she ignored me. It was late, so I decided to just go to bed. Upon going into my room, I found everything of mine had been collected from the rest of the house and shoved in there. Decor, gifts I had given her, everything. I ask her why and she still ignores me. This goes on for the next two days. Then the emails started again.
I asked over the course of this, exactly how much was I 'contributing' a month at this point. She finally says $650. Here's the logic behind it:
Rent: $250 (while she paid $50 herself, due to being on rental assistance)
DirecTV: $90 (I was never allowed to touch the remote or decide what was watched.
Netflix: $7.50 (Same situation, though I could watch what I wanted in my bedroom)
Net: $30 (The net was absolute SHITE, but she wouldn't allow us to switch to a more reliable provider, that wasn't that much more expensive)
Amazon Prime: $5.00 (Okay, I got my money's worth and then some here.)
Hulu: $7.50 (Never had the log-in, so I couldn't benefit from this in private, sadly)
Food: $150 (I bought my own food. I never ate any of what she brought into the house, and hadn't for years, because we really didn't have the same taste)
Landline/security system: $45
All of that together only comes to around $550, so it doesn't quite add up. Her only response was "You couldn't live anywhere else for that price!" And at the time, I couldn't rock the boat and risk getting actually thrown out. I was helpless and we both knew it, having no access to the checking account, short of my debit card, and nowhere in town really to go.
The next three weeks were nothing short of volatile. I started demanding access to my accounts as well as the checking information, of which I received none. On one day in particular, I'm sitting in the living room, and a verbal argument begins. Things escalated, and she picks up a large three-wick tumbler candle from my desk and tries to throw it at me. I go into my room and lock the door. I'm on the phone with Mando, telling him I'm afraid, that I don't feel safe.
She busts my door down. My locked bedroom door. She says we need to 'finish this'. Reluctantly, I hang up the phone. She comes a step or two short of saying she wanted me out of her house, trying to twist the situation in such a way that I was choosing to not live there anymore. I tell her I'd never said that, but things I'd said started getting thrown back at me in reverse order. Everything was twisted, it was misinterpreted.
At this point, she leans in the doorway of my bedroom and extends her arm. She always bruised like a peach, and had bruises from playing with the dogs, etc. She points at one bruise and says... "I wonder what the police would say about you grabbing my arm and bruising me like that?" I look confused, because I hadn't touched her. "Or that time a month ago when you broke the mirror and came after me with some broken glass and tried to kill me." Remember, I hadn't even been in the state a month ago. She just smiled. "Elder abuse is taken seriously, remember that." She threatened to contact Mando's boss and file a complaint against him. All sorts of completely made-up things. It was then I knew that I couldn't stay there. I would end up thrown in jail or worse.
The same day, she apologized. A halfhearted apology of, "I said some things I didn't mean." When I asked her to clarify, she just blew up. She said that I said mean things too (I hadn't) and I wouldn't even apologize. I told her I just wanted to know what parts she didn't mean. She never would clarify.
A few days after that, Mando asks me to come back. The next day, I'm packed up and ready to go. Fun fact, I'd never even unpacked my suitcase from the first trip, so it was easy.
This time around, more of the same happens. Guilt trips, lengthy emails. Threats to turn my phone off. Salty then sweet. Saying she missed me, she loved me. When it didn't work, the attempts would grow more and more desperate.
She had a really bad habit of making assumptions. A couple of years ago, she started saying she knew I hated her and didn't know why. I have no idea why she'd even say or think that, as we said I love you frequently. Kind of a good policy to have, to say I love you before you go to sleep and whenever you leave the house, I've always thought. The last time I said those words to her was six months ago, and I was called a liar. I didn't try it again.
One day while I was working, she sent me a Facebook friend request. She then deleted it a couple of hours later, and apologized for 'intruding'. I told her I hadn't checked Facebook before she removed it, which she ignored.
At this moment, I'm really not sure the moment that I knew I'd given up completely. I had no desire to be around her. During her 'sweet' moments, I would tell her that I just needed space. I needed time. I needed to move past all the nasty things that had been said. She kept pushing and pushing until I was just... Done. The cycle just kept reverting in a way that showed that things would never change. And having seen what life could be like... I wasn't willing to go back.
So Mando helped me come up with a plan. He helped me get my own, personal checking account at the same bank he uses, which was far easier than I expected. (She'd told me that I'd never be able to get one on my own) Systematically, I contacted my creditors and had my information updated to my own, to a new email address that she didn't know. It was a tedious process, since every form of communication, even some of the security questions, were tied to her.
All the while, she's sending me nasty messages. Finally, I tell her that I've decided to stay here, and we're coming in a couple of weeks to get my things. "I'll be out of town" was the first line. Which fooled nobody, because she never went anywhere if it wasn't with me. "I've changed the locks, you won't get in my house." Also untrue, and I knew it was a bluff.
Eventually, she said she wished I would wait to come get my things until she could "reach the same level of coldness and cruelty toward me that I felt toward her". (Remember those assumptions?) In any event, Mando and I helped ourselves to a weekend road trip. We got a 5x8 U-Haul trailer and headed for the house.
The entire time we were there, she barely acknowledged our presence, unless she was making a snide comment. She had put 'all my things' in the living room (toiletries, kitchen things, etc).
Now, this is where it gets interesting. There were some large kitchen appliances, still in the box, in the pile of 'my' stuff. She said I could take them if I wanted them. This didn't make sense at the moment, however...
Remember those credit cards that were 6 months unpaid? Half of them were home goods stores. If I accepted items that I knew (or 'knew') were from these stores, she could easily implicate me in the knowledge and/or use of the accounts. Needless to say, we left those things behind.
When we walked to the door with the last box, she walked up behind us. She didn't say a word, just closed the door. No goodbye, no anything.
Two days later, we arrive home and yes, you guessed it. More messages. She went on and on about how I meticulously carved her out of my life and pushed her away, leaving her when she's getting older, her body's failing, and she needs me the most.
I carved her out, but she's the one that pushed me away. She removed me on Facebook. She is the one who demanded access to my entire life, and yet kept her own under tight lock and key.
I mentioned before the house is small, right? From where I sat on my PC, she could see my screens. She would read my messages, right over my shoulder. She would critique my interactions with other people. And on occasions where we would fight, she would absolutely blow up if I were to reach out to my friends for support. Because I had 'no right to make them think of her negatively while I made myself out to be an angel.'
I've never claimed to be perfect. And I'll admit, in this story, I might be a bit biased. But I don't believe that anything I did made me deserve the way she treated me. I'd always describe what had happened, even things that I had done that were less than nice, and more often than not, the Internet People would take my side.
I recently made the difficult decision to pursue an identity theft claim against her. The idea that she would be sent to jail terrifies me, because I honestly don't know if she could survive that or not. But I don't think I was left with any other option. Even paying the accounts at this point would leave negative marks on my credit that will take years to disappear, as heavily delinquent as they are.
Not to mention, this is nearly $10k worth of credit card debt that I didn't agree to, yet am responsible for on paper. She has more credit in my name than I do (car notwithstanding).
In the past two weeks, I've severed all contact with her. I no longer see her emails and frankly, it's a relief. I miss her, but I miss the 'her' I used to know. Not the version that's been inhabiting her body for the decade or so.
I really miss my dogs, and my cat. None of this is their fault, and they won't understand why I'm gone. It breaks my heart that they'll think I just... Left them. But she never would have let any of them go, so I didn't even try. Maybe I should have.
Mando and I are doing great. We're settling in and enjoying having a life together. Transitioning from online to living together is almost intoxicating. Those little bursts of happiness we got from visits never seem to stop. And he's cute when he wakes up with bed head in the morning.
If you've made it this far, congratulations.
If you've gone through something similar yourself, please feel free to share your story. I hear this sort of thing happens far more commonly than it should.
Thank you for reading, for letting me get everything out. It really does help.