I can't say that was always the goal with Those Left Behind, mainly because the plot changed so many times that I can't say there was ever a true mission statement behind the main theme: callbacks to our history. Both ZFRP and the Zoofights side of things. Pretty much as the knife was taken to it and things were reconfigured, it eventually boiled down to a plot that was really more about having fun than doing anything grandiose or overly emotional. Whether that succeeded will be up to the individual reader, but it was nice to not have a plot where I felt the pressure of every word I wrote having to convey things well. I just got to do fun goofy junk! It also made it much easier to make the plot about celebrating our history and those people we briefly met before Zoofights and ZFRP split off down their own paths (even if Zoofights itself went down the path of death).
We'll certainly dig deeper into the plot structure later on, but with a plot predicated on the idea of being packed to the brim with callbacks and references to our history, it's important to just point out what those call backs even are! So before we discuss anything about plot ideas or structure or any of that jazz... here's a giant reference list with explanations on each callback!
REFERENCE GUIDE!
HOT DRUGS STAND
From Zoofights itself and Season 1. To kick the plot itself off, I felt like the perfect teaser for it all would be setting things back to not only where everything began, but the place that was explicitly established for casual non-RPers. Hot Drugs Stand began as a joke in Zoofights itself, the more twisted version of a concession stand found at the animal death tournament. The bar was always pictured as the main place people talked and voted on the animals, but this little place existed in Zoofights lore. After the RP explosion of 2011, RPers basically crowded out the bar topics and made them all about our little enclave of roleplay, scaring away people who just wanted to talk about Zoofights as talking heads. The suggestion was to make a new all casual topic for them, and the Hot Drugs Stand was created for it. It never quite took off mainly because Zoofights itself was limping and the idea for the stand came too late in the season to salvage that, but it did have a bit of conversation and would be a callback people from back then could get. It's also been mentioned time and again that the old original bar had been shuttered and closed, although I probably would have chosen the stand anyway since it conveys the casual side of RP that most of the characters were from. The only other thing drawn from this old topic was the COCAINE TORNADO, a joke I had made in the thread about the fact that people wouldn't be ordering drinks so we had to think of interesting ways to order drugs. Faust made it into a drink though so that it could be integrated into the drinking challenge, but the original version really was just cocaine put in a blender.
GORON MERCHANT
Season 1 character, belonged to Kasuba. Literally the reason this plot happened in the first place! Let me explain. One day at work, I was thinking of fixing some of the more lackluster cards in the Zelda Munchkin card game I make to play with my sisters and friends, and Wandering Merchant was one of those cards. It is the Goron Merchant by it's "official" name, but as I thought about how to make him better, I thought also of the fact that the Goron Merchant just showed up in the bar for a brief period where Kasuba tried to enter RP and didn't really go anywhere with it. Kasuba is also notable for being the first person to RP WHEATLEY, who Spy sent along on the plot when he attended for an extra nice call back! Anyway, I started thinking of maybe reviving the character and RPing them, giving them a second life the way I did Jaws... and that line of thought quickly evolved. I started thinking about more and more old not-exactly-RP characters like Faust and soon, the idea for this plot was born. The reason Goron Merchant appeared in the teaser was because of his involvement in giving birth to the plot, even if he wasn't quite as recognizable to some as Faust/Suspicious Cook and Devil Ed. He was always destined to be a soft-hearted friendly type, to the point I didn't even expect to have him fight in the event he would be a part of. It took a bit to find out where exactly to stick him, but he ended up paired with the Deku King because of their Zelda roots.
TRAGEDY SHERBET
Season 1 character, belonged to Tragedy Sherbet. Holds a special place in my heart because when I tried to do a big bar picture to celebrate Season 1 of RP so many years ago, I didn't get very far... I drew Jaxx, Doktor Hanz in a painting, and Tragedy Sherbet. Literally just a talking bowl of orange sherbet, I wanted to include him quite a bit but the question of how was of course a big one. It couldn't really do anything, but as the plot idea developed into old bargoers being forced into the battles, hostages were of course the perfect means of coercion, and Tragedy Sherbet finally found his role. After all, the completely vulnerable food characters were perfect for being acknowledged but not overly relevant, and I did have a little fun with the scene where Avernus threatens to punish the old bargoers for going against Devil Ed... by holding a spoon to Sherbet. Like most season 1 users, Tragedy Sherbet mostly just voted on Zoofights and made ice cream jokes while doing so. He did enter the bar early on at least, characters who did interact with us in the bar thread were always favored over those who didn't.
FAUST/SUSPICIOUS COOK
Season 1 character, belonged to Suspicious Cook. Back in Season One, Suspicious Cook was a bit of a white whale. Near the end of the year I was getting users who had barely entered fites lining up to join, and for Big Bar Brawl 2 I would get some other users entering fites who weren't part of the core RP crew. One big event that got multiple regular non-RP users involved was the Ten-Way Tussle, a fite that had characters like Dragoshi, Mailman Cliff, Doom Baboon, BlueCollarBeaver, Burton Cummings, Major Failure, Crunk Wizard... and then Father Squid, Stag Beetle, and Brine's Mathias rounding it out to 10. You might notice we didn't really see much of those seven non-RPers during the plot, and that's partly why we didn't. It's also why we didn't see characters from Ogopogo, Owltomaton, Rosello, or other people who were only loosely attached to RP, but still attached in some way. Besides Devil Ed really, most the references were to guys who stayed pretty separate from us. Thing is, I wanted Suspicious Cook in a fite really badly! Faust seems like an interesting Guilty Gear character and even though I added him to this plot initially to tap into his moveset from that fighting game series, I think he ended up having a more interesting role in the Drinking myth and providing the first real connection to B'Yel'Tee. The user himself was one of the biggest voters-but-not-RPer types on the old forum, to the point he gets namechecked in the first Big Bar Brawl and even uses the enormous scalpel to fite off Sweet Brobeasts during it. Because of him being "the one that got away", I felt I had to include him on a personal level! Him running the Hot Drugs Stand came from trying to justify his username in universe while still calling him Faust.
ENFORCER WOLF
Season 1 character, belonged to Enforcer Wolf who later changed his name to JazzBanjo. Enforcer Wolf is a character with a lot of bad memories tied to him. Before any other real big drama bomb in ZFRP, there was the mod crackdown that came with Enforcer Wolf checking out our bar and being incredibly angry that we were "RPing wrong". He posted a meme image of Captain Picard that said "What the fuck is this shit?", a quote I made sure Enforcer Wolf said when he saw Zoofights 7 in RP. Back when this plot was to be a lot more fight focused, fighting back against the mod who condemned our RP seemed a natural fit. Since there had been an 80s theme back then, Enforcer Wolf didn't agree with us using video game characters or anything from after the 80s, and there was a long debate defending our choices. Setting debates have sadly been part of our blood since the start, but thankfully cooler heads prevailed in the end. It's surprising how much that moment stuck with some people, as his anger at us seems pretty present in people's minds even now. The extremely angry wolf avatar certainly didn't help his case. Despite the perhaps mutual animosity, I didn't try to make Enforcer Wolf a complete angry caricature of himself. When he chastises the idea behind Zoofights 7, he's making points that I do agree with in addition to some general rage and misunderstanding. I was surprised people just seemed okay with him dying to Spy and staying dead, although I guess it's better than having people have to line up and give their thoughts on a formative event that shook us all quite a bit. He was part of Motoko's crew since he was one of the more recognizable old faces I'd be bringing back, and in a post earlier in 2016 than the teaser, he has a brief chat with Motoko despite not being namedropped. He originally would have been fought with her and Avernus possibly, or then just fought alongside Avernus, and who knows how many other iterations before the Zoofights 7 idea was melded in and he was the perfect guy to kick things off by going against it as it has been and will always be one of our community's core rules: Don't host your own Zoofights. A mod character enforcing that? ENFORCING? Seems like he found his calling.
MOTOKO KUSANAGI
Season 5 character, belonged to Jumpropeman. There was an effort to put in references for newer users like Bree and Ven, and after Motoko Kusanagi managed the impressive feat of killing Ko and surviving the the Neo Kobber event, I knew there was something to be had there. It certainly wasn't planned too immediately after that, but I did put down a scene where Motoko considers her ties to people and all to begin the groundwork of doing more with her. Her distant nature and lack of sentimentality would be played up later, even though Motoko's limited appearances I feel didn't do much to really sell that she could have turned bad and on the flip side, I'm not sure the hints were big enough that she was a double agent, even when she lists them off near the end of the plot. She was never intended to be evil plain and simple, more of a character to keep you guessing during the event and help tie them together with a clear character who wasn't one of the higher-ups that people would feel cheated if they constantly got away. Going on to form NEO was a really late addition however, one born from how Effie had developed during the year and trying to find a satisfying end for her. I'm quite happy with Motoko's presence and where she ended up, and unless I got on some Ghost in the Shell kick, I wager she'll stick to being in charge of NEO on the sidelines of RP. What did go through a few changes was the pivotal scene where she'd talk to Effie. I had wondered a few times how to do it: One way that was considered was Motoko and Effie having a talk but then Justice Man interrupts and requires Motoko to prove her loyalty. From here, Motoko was most often considered to take a pound of flesh from Effie's face, the exact way how constantly changing, scarring her but sparing her. It probably would have nailed in how far Motoko would go to keep her cover, but perhaps it would ruin Motoko's chance at the surprisingly easy redemption and understanding she got at the end of the plot. Despite having a lot of cool skills, Motoko was only considered for fake fighting, which we saw a few times when she'd spray her gun on the ground to keep opponents back. There might have been a bigger fight but it never was developed anywhere beyond "this could happen". I told myself I'd watch a lot of Ghost in the Shell to catch up on how Motoko acts... but I didn't!
SMECK
Season 3 character, belonged to Jumpropeman. Smeck was randomly introduced in the aftermatch of the Dr. Satan/Satan fite, when the Kobbers plunged into the hell chasm to fight some bad guys and save Jumpropeman's soul from imprisonment as sort of a side objective. God, the Devil, and Bob had just started airing on Adult Swim and I was on an odd kick with it, so I randomly decided to put in the imp Smeck to this event, even though he basically just cowered and ran off when Dawn went to free JRM. Still, I had used and image and decided to put him in my profiles for a while, waiting for the day I could dig him up and use him... and where better than this plot? Devil Ed, since he was under the control of Meanpants AND was Devil Ed, was not the best mouth piece for the group despite being their fake-out leader. Smeck was put in to voice the group plans and concerns and all, the imp showing that he was on a different set of plans than the guy he was supposedly serving and laying the first hints Ed wasn't actually in charge. Smeck did reveal himself to still be snivelly and rather useless outside of keeping schedules in line and all, but he also was a good connection to something else I needed to explain. BBB3 had mentioned the revival method was a "Deal with the Devil Ed" where Ed would help the people leave hell afterwards to prevent revival woes. We still had a few revival plots regardless, but I tried! Still, I needed to explain why Ed was on Porphyrion at all, since his brainwashing took place after BBB2. So, why not connect one Devil to another? Dr. Satan was one in a line of characters tied to this plot who had their own goals of being big but played along for some reason or another. Dr. Satan got what he wanted and had little reason to assist, but even with what he could do to help Dylan's plans, B'Yel'Tee required more than just a portal to hell to summon. It needed sacrifices, so Dylan moved onto the path of setting out the best banquet he could manage while using Ed to make the portal required. Smeck just tagged along so he could do something and maybe be more important than the devil's lackey, but nothing was bound to ever come of that. Despite being a Season 3 reference, I didn't expect anyone to really recognize him, but if I was reaching for callbacks, I'd plumb the whole history for 'em! I even considered using a merchant I randomly got an image for who sold Edyth a dress while she was on a date with Leo, but there was nowhere with enough room to bend backwards enough to make THAT work, and it was more a "wouldn't that be funny" idea anyway!
LORD AVERNUS
Season 1 character, belonged to Lord Avernus. Even Gooper realized with Chronos Xarr that Warhammer space marines were once a big part of our DNA, and in Season 1, we briefly had one that didn't belong to Erebus! Lord Avernus appeared in the bar a bit and people said he should meet Erebus but that was about it. His signature on the forum is one of the few things we saw him say when he appeared in this plot: "Blood for the motherfucking blood god!" Although the Roll 21 part of the mythbusting event wasn't the best, it did at least capture how strong space marines are meant to be, and Lord Avernus was always going to have to fight the Kobbers even as a bunch of characters were retooled to do something else. It was just a matter of how, and there was almost an event that was basically fighting Avernus because he just really wanted to fight the Kobbers. One of the few characters planned to die since he wouldn't stop until he died, I found my Warhammer knowledge a bit wanting but the structure of the event he did end up with meant it didn't show. Shame Brine couldn't participate in the battle much, but hey, you take what you can get. Him threatening to eat Tragedy Sherbet is one of those things I knew I had to do in the plot teaser, but he really was such a simple Fight This Guy opponent that the plan never deviated and he never was considered to have much more to him!
DEVIL ED
Season 1 character, belonged to Devil Ed. An exception to most every rule made about the inclusion of every other character, Devil Ed had to get involved. Partly because he's so emblematic of early RP, his posts coming randomly and activity arriving in short bursts with strange grammar and spelling. I do believe he was around 13 back then or something like that, and at one point I did look him up online to see how he has come along, but since then I've lost track of anything he's active on save a website that seems to say he's a girl? Either way, Devil Ed the character was always a bit odd, something I wanted to capture in his dialogue and way of speaking. The no text color, weird capitalization and punctuation... but I did exaggerate it a bit. Part of the explanation ended up being that Meanpants was mimicking Devil Ed's mannerisms and after he was freed of Meanpants we did get a more coherent Devil Ed, but I did notice at some point I was accidentally copying Lysias instead of Devil Ed and went to do more reaserch on how he talked to get back in the groove. Since Those Left Behind was secretly a continuation of Devil Ed's old abandoned post office plot, the plot that made us averse to courtplots for years as it was the first instance of a completely failed plot thread, the court that had a jury that gave us Jaws and Ganondorf... it was such an important flop but I like to tie loose ends so things make sense, even if the pieces Devil Ed left behind didn't make much sense themselves. Still, making sure I handled Devil Ed himself well was importantly as he was perhaps the user represented here we had the biggest connection to. Devil Ed appeared in two Brawls even! Selling him as the villain was always a fakeout, Meanpants on his body the moment the plot got to the point of his inclusion. If you read the teaser, I think I even mention his pants specifically to draw attention to them! There were so many important reasons to include Devil Ed that leaving him out made no sense and since I couldn't get Ed back during my attempt at doing so in... 2013? 2014? Whenever it happened bore no fruit, it didn't feel like I was stealing a character so much as giving them an ending so they aren't in the weird perpetual limbo of everything the user dropped. I even dropped in a few cute references here and there to stuff he mentioned, like when we are about to fight Devil Ed he's on his computer playing Minecraft. Devil Ed the user was playing Minecraft on his computer instead of starting the courtplot one day! I made a few jokes about the Devil Ed fight about his reliance on his laser eye since that was almost what always came up save where the user did some random thing like flying off into the air and forgot about it when it came time to enter a fite later. Some things I didn't include were I want to call him Hyde... Devil Ed had someone taking over Hell back in the day who I think was Ed's brother that was defeated offscreen. Since he was defeated, why deal with it? Gooper threw me a curveball in bringing up Devil Ed's random son that was another dropped plot thread Ed started and had no intention to ever act on seemingly. I basically decided to give it a mundane wrap-up to not distract from other plot-threads, and really, I'm not about to explore Ed's sex life in RP! Nah, instead we got pretty much something akin to that as if it was a real life situation instead of a dramatic story beat. Ed helps with the kid because he's not sure its his, but he's not much of a dad because he was never tied to it. There was simply too much Devil Ed stuff to try and wrap it all up in a dramatic fashion. One thing I noticed some people forgot was Ed was half-demon half-angel, something I snagged on in some BBB pre-fite stuff involving, surpriginsly, Dudemanguy the sea slug! Same year that guy comes back Ed returns! Coincidence? ...yes. One weird thing though was working in the BBB3 revival method no one used of Devil Ed helping to revive people, but it wasn't TOO hard to justify, it just felt like something that added a pointless complication and a detour, even if it did allow Smeck his chance to join the plot. It also technically made things make more sense as a long-term affair and it threw in some Season 3 throwbacks the plot sorely needed, so it wasn't TOO bad. Devil Ed is basically adorable to look back on in retrospect, a lot of enthusiasm but no direction. I'm glad to have done some stuff with what he put down, and now we can say in RP Devil Ed has a happy ending and a happy life. Also, had to make sure the Devil Ed image used had the same watermark the version Ed used had. I usually shrank the image enough that it wasn't noticeable just like Ed did, but the fact it was there was too funny to leave out.
MUFFINS/ WANTED: BREAD OR ALIVE
Season 1 character, belonged to Muffins. One of the sentient-but-not-able-to-do-much characters who was perfect for the hostage situation that compels other bargoers to stay in line, Muffins was just a talking muffin who somehow owned a bakery. Back when the Betting Corner was tied to Zoofights and I was a big better, I managed to win "Half of Muffins's bakery" off a bet, which I decided to name "Wanted: Bread or Alive." I knew early on I wanted Muffins in the plot, but I didn't think of Wanted: Bread or Alive until pretty close to posing the teaser its mentioned in. Sure, burning down the bakery had no bearing on the plot as a whole, but it got the idea out there that they were targeting Kobber stuff, and it also allowed me to ditch a bakery that was burning a hole in one of my character's backstories! JRM probably just kept it going on the side, paying it little mind, and he probably didn't miss it much when it was destroyed. In the original draft of the plot, Tragedy Sherbet, Muffins, and Empty Sandwich were kept in a briefcase by Devil Ed, one he would have opened after we fought him to unleash the hostages. Instead, they ended up staying in Dylan's care til the end and didn't have much of an impact on the plot save being there.
Season 1 character, belonged to Empty Sandwich. It shames me that I never linked the picture of Empty Sandwich during the plot, because I'm sure people who didn't remember him probably imagined a literal empty sandwich despite the narration explaining he was a clay block. Empty Sandwich the user seemed to make a few clay blocks of varying things, his avatar being the green one with a swirl or a nine on it. Just like Muffins and Tragedy Sherbet, Empty Sandwich was big enough to be memorable but didn't have enough going for it to play a big role, so it became part of the hostage trio that eventually grew to add Stij, Honk on Honk Bag, and the Reject crew.
Evolution of the Zoofights concept. Initially pitched in the teaser as if it was a different plot, I think there was almost a time where I considered it on its own, but really, it was tied to this plot the moment it became a more serious idea instead of one entertained just for fun. There was an old idea that tied into a potential new character, a fish who walks on land with boxing gloves who was named... Daniopok. Daniopok ended up appearing in the plot as the Zoidbergbros' terrible invented Zoofighter, but even this reference goes back to a potential water starter Pokemon I made up as a kid based on the zebra danios in my fish tank at the time. Daniopok's story never evolved beyond being a hook for this Zoofights 7, and knowing the rules all too well, Zoofights 7 was always doomed to be pretty shitty rather than serious. Trying to carry on the Zoofights legacy feels wrong, its not really our place to do it and we've found a lot more success already with ideas of our own. Zoofights is fun, but we don't really need it... even if people seemed a tad excited at the idea of its return.DMG even was talking about potentially organizing a Zoofights revival that I had to talk him down a bit from, and I put all that language in the Zoofights 7 teaser to dissuade people from thinking it was going to be big and trying to assure people I wasn't trying to host my own Zoofights. Tying into the old bar characters felt like a Zoofights connection was a good idea though, and it was a perfect means to bring back some of the big unfinished business of that year, that being Sun Cat and Moon Cat. Maybe some day we'll have something with a tournament structure in ZFRP that doesn't get bogged down by delays, but I think Zoofights was good for its time and I loved it while it lasted, but even though we should revel in our past and celebrate it, we also have to move on.
ZOIDBERG BROTHERS/SUNWOOP
Season 5 character, belonged to Jumpropeman. Appearing as a joke to play into Gooper's Pokemon Fusion event during Neo Kobber stuff, these guys date back to one of the first big online communities I was a part of... if not the first! Lemmykoopa.com might predate it, but the Cheatplanet Forums had a Pokemon sprite fusion trend on it back in the day and I got involved in it. At first, most my mutations looked like Sunwoop, very slapdash stuff, but I gradually got better and better, winning some fusion contests even! I wish I could find them now, but the cheatplanet forums are gone, and the follow up PMF Inc. also had a purge so almost all my mutations are gone... save a select few. At one point, I made a big list of Pokemon Fusions and jumbled them, and amongst them was the idea of a Slowpoke/Omanyte fusion. I intended to make something better, but my brother walked in on me and suggested I just drag Omanyte's face over Slowpoke, and it looked funny enough that we called it Zoidbergpoke and the inevitable second fusion Zoidbergbro. From there, my brother and I decided to make a "webcomic" that was really just the Zoidberg Brothers appearing in The Whiteness (what we called their backgroundless domain that most webcomics take place in. The first time the Zoidberg Brothers were in RP was technically in a Season 1 post where Hella Jeff leaves The Whiteness once his stuff was wrapped up) and telling constant inside jokes between me and my brother. We posted them on Myspace and on PMF Inc., some people liking them perhaps for their dada humor or maybe a few jokes did slip through, but so many of them are poorly made, offensive, or crass, so I'm not really willing to share them now that I'm older. There are more innocent ones than naughty ones, but still! By way of this webcomic venture though, we managed to keep the Zoidberg Brothers despite the purge of other mutations, and a few others were saved thanks to appearing in the comic. Sunwoop was one of them, the Pokemon fusion's odd nature drawn extensively from these old comics. He seemed innocent enough in the first comic, but then he started trying to get people to smoke and ended up doing the things that make me hesitant to share the comics with people! So when he was brought into RP, that unassuming beginning and cute appearance belied the true nature of Sunwoop from the start, starting off as an unusual punching bag for the brothers before his true nature slowly leaked out. I forgot how little of it we saw in his first appearance, but I amped it up when the Zoofights 7 stuff started, turning him into a perfect rival for Jester Chao. A lot of little jokes exist that tie back into their history, it was really a balancing act of not including the ones that would make no sense in our context. For example, I didn't mention the brothers know Rex Kwon Do, nor the fact that their grandmother is that Napoleon Dynamite character of the same name. I did reference that they believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster though, and the fact they rarely ever move or want to move is again tying to their webcomic sprite nature. It's likely hard to tell, but the Zoidberg Brothers do have slightly different voices! My humor comes through in Zoidbergbro and my brother's in Zoidberpoke... well, not really, but I feel we leaned towards those two that way and so the character who did our jokes was often the one tied to us. Zoidbergpoke is the more sarcastic and mean one, Zoidbergbro softer but stupider. They're mostly about back-and-forth banter in ZFRP rather than spouting inside jokes though. As for why they popped up here in this plot, it was somewhere to make them finally put a proper mark on RP. I wanted to use them ever since their cameo in Season 1 but wasn't sure where, so since we needed a hook to ZF7, I put the brothers and Bubbles in it to make it work and sort of sell that it wasn't going to be a big flashy thing. Sunwoop's more absurd personality certainly stole the show from them, helped along by the fact Sunwoop helped instigate the Those Left Behind stuff that the plot needed, but the Zoidberg Brothers have something he doesn't: life! Sunwoop's dead now, so its on the two bros if they'll ever appear again. No plans exist now, but I've said that before!
SUN CAT AND MOON CAT
Zoofights character, created by banjojojo's 9 year old niece. Back in 2011, the user banjojojo shared pictures of these two cats, one based on the Sun and presumably the good guy and the other based on the moon and potentially the bad guy. Just like the postman plot that would go on to be the backbone of this plot, Sun Cat and Moon Cat was an often joked about part of our past because of one big thing: Major Failure agreed to host a special Zoofight where the two cats would fight, the winner determined by a vote and everything. Unfortunately, words are easier to say than they are to follow through on, and the cat battle never came to be. For a while, I considered reviving Sun Cat and Moon Cat as full on RP characters. Sun Cat and Moon Cat would have been a duo, Sun Cat and Moon Cat both feeling the pressure of their roles. Sun Cat would feel bad about doing things that weren't clearly good, and Moon Cat would be upset that it has to be bad to play into its role. I planned a heartfelt chat between the two about it, but nothing ever made them feel like I wanted to actually RP them as characters. Instead, when this plot came along, Zoofights 7 being a part of it, I knew it was time to finally determine who won in the battle that was six years in the making. I tallied the votes, rolled the tractor, and... Moon Cat won! Even though the good guy angle would make for Sun Cat winning in a dramatic end to that event. A more appropriate one too! But, as Fite Yer' Mates has taught me, particularly the end of this year's Fite Yer' Mates where we had quite a few surprise upsets where masters beat their students in battles meant to prove they've surpassed the master and all. But, it wasn't irredeemable of course. Sun Cat and Moon Cat didn't have many abilities listed because a nine year old invented them, so Moon Cat making the old bargoers evil for a bit worked, and Sun Cat providing interesting buffs worked, but making them fight was a bit harder. Apologetic Dog was roped in from the background of Sun Cat's picture based on a discussion Spy and others had during the little voting period, but cat corpse was left to be just a dead cat. Speaking of, I'm glad the cat battle didn't cause any of the usual cat battle troubles, and we actually got to go through with it to the end! I wanted to make sure there was enough body to the battle before the involvement of the Kobbers and others to make it feel like the wait paid off. Not sure if banjojojo's neice would have liked it in the end, but hopefully everyone else is pleased with the battle we finally got after half a decade of waiting.
Season 5 character, belonged to Jumpropeman. Originally a gift given to Shimmer for her 17th birthday, this guy would go on to be perhaps a critique of the very thing that birthed Reject's crew: gifting of living things. Shimmer had no way of handling such a creature, especially a big one like Bubbles, and it gave Shimmer a decent angle for her struggle with adulthood as a representation of responsibility. Still, after the farm plot failed, Bubbles still needed somewhere to go, and the budding Zoofights 7 part of this plot was a perfect place to stick him that fit with his need to burn off energy. He was a bit of an odd duck amongst the other animals we'd see in the Zoofights group, but he was that important hook to get people into this plot that otherwise had no direct connection until it advertised itself. During the fight with the feral animals, Bubbles and Jeffrey's Puma were the unusual ones for being not big callbacks. Jeffrey's Puma was originally just a joke, me highlighting how bad this Zoofights revival was because just a regular puma was standing as the most powerful creature in attendance. No giant cyborg animals here... hardly any altered ones either! This actual puma was not only the top dog of the competition but one of the few things they could advertise, and if we're being honest, since Bubbles is some OC creature, it didn't really fit the bill of what the original Zoofights was about. With Zoofights 7 a failure, Bubbles could almost have a crisis of where to go next, but the Zoidberg Brothers had a scene where they said they'd adopt him full-time anyway, treating it more like a pet than Shimmer ever did. As in, it doesn't define them much, it's just a part of their life that sometimes crops up. I am glad to finally have wrapped Bubbles up properly!
SQUCAT
Zoofights character, created by banjojojo's 9 year old niece. I wavered on whether or not to include Squcat. The original creature banjojojo's niece shared before she came up with Sun Cat and Moon Cat, Squcat has that whimsy of childhood design without any of the rules behind it. It's just a squid thing with a few cat features and its not even close to a logical body design! Zoofighters usually had some logic in their anatomy after the team got to the point they were drawing out and planning everything more than sticking clubs on gibbon arms, but Squcat was a fun callback that even less people were going to get than most the other callbacks. It required remembering the less remembered post of the Sun Cat and Moon Cat topic, but I suppose the image gave away its origins somewhat. Still, it was another animal for the event, and it shored up the ranks, so its presence was welcome certainly. I have no qualms with how it died either. It wasn't much of a character, perhaps the most animal of the characters fought, and it wasn't going to have a happily ever after really. If it had survived, it likely wouldn't have even received a mention of its future after this event.
SCHAZMANDER
Season 1 character, belonged to Schazmander. A bargoer, Schazmander was one of the first characters to come to mind for bringing back for this plot and was one of the first to come to mind for the Zoofight 7 portion as well. Sadly, a small bird with a squid on its back isn't exactly prime combat material, especially compared to its company on the plot event. That's partly why it went down more easily than most present, as it was just a bird with a squid on its back.
BADWOLFWHO
Season 1 character, belonged to Badwolfwho. Appearing in the profiles topic but never really posting elsewhere, Badwolfwho had a bit of backstory attached to it but not much else. The user themselves came from a Doctor Who background, but they thought up something different for their character despite keeping the Who name tie. The Who background is why it used a knockoff sonic screwdriver, as I wanted to reference that tie and it almost became their main trait before I read their profile again close to the event and retooled its behavior a bit. It started to do the whole fighting with politeness thing I've done a few times. Without that, it would have just been fighting another wolf, and we already had Enforcer Wolf there for that!
ARACHNOFIGHTYA
Season 1 character, belonged to banjojojo. Posted by banjojojo in the character profiles topic but going nowhere just like badwolfwho, I do believe it was meant to enter a fite or something at some point but banjojojo never entered one. Notably though, its genre-savvyness immediately made me draw parallels with Widow Maker, a genre-savvy giant mantis. So, when I took Arachnofightya for this plot, I decided to take the similarity and turn it into straight up emulation. Arachnofightya admired Widow Maker and wanted to be just like her, so I was very happy she attended the plot and I could explore that angle properly! Originally, Enforcer Wolf going unconscious would teach us about the comas characters go into after a while away from Devil Ed, but since Enforcer Wolf was killed, I latched onto Arachnofightya as the new means for that, since he both survived and Widow Maker wanted to be nice to him. Arachnofightya also lead to me reviving some jokes I haven't really told since Widow Maker's old days in FYM where she'd rely on tropes and such to succeed. Sure, Springtrap in fites allows me to be meta, but Arachnofightya and Widow Maker are a different kind of meta. Also, Arachnofightya was perhaps the most perfect character for the Zoofights 7 battle, since he was essentially Widow Maker, who was a Zoofighter!
THE TAPOGRES
Zoofights characters. Back in Season 1, spambots on the forums were affectionately nicknamed Tapogres after the rather awful self-defeating tapir ogres who appeared back in Zoofights 3. This was helped by the fact that the ban image for a user was a Tapogre stabbing itself in the head, and in season 1 of Fite Yer' Mates, I rounded up a bunch of Tapogres for a fite that took the spambot users and pitted them against each other with Tapogres themed around whatever they had been peddling. For example, the doghouse selling Tapogre was made into a dog tapogre in a doghouse. One Tapogre gave the trojan virus, so he got some trojan theming, and so on. The desire to bring Tapogres back was always there, to do the same fun thing with whatever spambots we happened to see along the way, but the new forum was much less prone to them and sometimes it was hard to tell apart random chatzy people from spammers entering the chat. Still, there was a small batch, so I decided it was time to see them again. Back during the big final battle of Season 1, back when I was hardly involved in RP, I involved all my characters doing their own side battles, one of them involving Xrumer, the winner of the Tapogre fite and sole survivor, causing mischief. I noted that Major Failure had something called the Tapogre Cage where he presumably put these spammers, and so, I had the ingredients needed to bring them back. Xrumer was still alive and could lead them, and the Tapogre Cage was the perfect explanation of how they all got released at once. Plus, it was just left as something that existed, so wrapping it up in a way was a good idea as well. I considered bringing back Tapogrepogo for this plot, perhaps as a good guy who would help the Kobbers by battling the other Tapogres, but Ogopogo is still a user I feel could make at least a small return some day, so I felt like I didn't want to touch Tapogrepogo for something so small. Besides, the Custard Kittens supposedly still worship it, so its probably off living it up like a god. No need to interrupt that!
AzoTGwFg, BITCOIN TAPOGRE
Based on a spambot from the old forum. The moment I came up with a Tapogre battle event, I knew the perfect hook. A tapogre in disguise would enter the bar and order something but would try and pay for it with bitcoins. A few other elements made this even more perfect, like the Bir being present on the Drink menu still, but it seems we've strayed away from going TAPOGRE DIE on sight so I had to have Keahi have the overreaction to get the plot moving. Keahi finally got to use the pressure hose I gave him for potential combat scenarios! Anyway, the joke of Tapogres being bitcoin peddlers goes back to the Tapogre named here, AzoTGwFg, a tapogre who came to the forum peddling bitcoins. Of course, there were other Tapogres trying to sell bitcoins as well, but at one point it was agreed on that bitcoins were the official currency of tapogres and thus the bar would never accept that currency, a joke that crops up a few times even when we left the old forum. It's the one currency we won't take, and I was hoping that hint was enough to make it clear what was coming. Of course, being a bitcoin seller doesn't make for the most combat focused Tapogre, so his role was mostly as the catalyst to start things rather than giving an interesting challenge. It did let me whip out one necessary line from old Tapogres. I had to write most of their spam talk off the cuff since most spammers had their stuff deleted, but Gooper preserved a few of them, and "15 EPIC SECONDS ON THE TOILET" was too good not to use. I wish I knew which Tapogre had said it so I could have made a full Tapogre out of them, but giving the bitcoin Tapogre a bit more interesting to him didn't hurt either.
SUSANLEEE, Old Lady Tapogre
Based on a spambot from the forum. It saddened me when Bree deleted her profile so close to the fact I was going to use her for my plot. I had a few notes set aside of course, but I couldn't pull from everything about her false profile with it gone. She was our forum's first tapogre (save maybe xaphod the mystery user, but he had no actual spam stuff in his profile while susanleee did!) and yes, she had three "e"s in her name, it's just easy to forget they're there since lee is a real name and leee is not. Her profile did list her having a bunch of old lady interests like knitting and such, her profile actually trying to sell some website about such things I believe. Really shouldn't have been complacent and just copied the info sooner, but most the references didn't work as well anyway since you couldn't look back at susanleee's profile and laugh. Still, she did her thing and was one of the only tapogres shown mercy because she was an old lady. She was one of the few musts of Tapogres, with Edwardsb and sakhea being the others.
EDWARDSB, NEW AGE BUSINESS TAPOGRE
Based on a spambot from the forum. When Edwardsb posted his spam topic on the forum, I made sure to move it to the trash instead of deleting it so that I could go back and reference it any time. Just like susanleee and sakhea, he was one of the new forum tapogres and thus always guaranteed a spot in this plot, but he was a bit harder to come up with an angle for. His spam post was about database software and the future of business, so I decided to go all in on that, making him a new age businessman and googling stereotypical examples of that to make his design. Nitori being present for the plot is what allowed him to be more than just a face to punch, as the two could have a businessbattle of sorts. Shittalking Nitori online as an attack is still one of my favorite attacks of the plot.
SAKHEA, BOLLYWOOD TAPOGRE
Based on a spambot from the forum. The third of the tapogres from the current Zetaboards forum and thus an automatic inclusion, I feel Sakhea had the strongest set of stuff to draw on. First of all, the Bollywood ties made for a distinctive appearance, one I actually based on a character from a Bollywood movie I've seen through my Telugu classes back in college. After that, came the fact she was peddling illegal copies of them like sakhea was on our forum, but the most important part and the one that made her more interesting in combat was the fact her links were recursive. Since you'd get trapped in a loop that lead nowhere, sakhea was given a looping power to restart a battle and undo the damages. Browny eventually conquered it, but it was a little challenge of sorts that made her more than just a dancing tapogre. sakhea still is a bit strange for joining our forum many days in advance to posting their spam, suggesting either a new breed of spambot that is more careful and intelligent or perhaps a person being in charge of the spamming even though it was so poorly done. You never can tell with tapogres!
TERRY BOGARD, BLOG COMMENT TAPOGRE
Based on a spambot from Steel Komodo's blog. The tapogre cast was pretty small thanks to most of the tapogres of old appearing in the tapogre fite and very few new ones had come along and left an impression. However, SK had seen a tapogre on his blog about SNK games, one who called itself Terry Bogard. While I don't know much about Terry Bogard or the games he is from... I doubt the tapogre knew much either! Being based on a fighting game character made him an easy combatant to cook up though, just copy the character's attacks! Plus, a blog comment is still tied closely to our community, so its not too much of a stretch to use this tapogre. Of course, this isn't the actual Terry Bogard, just in case people still want to use him, but this Tapogre sure tried to ape him hard. It was harder to research Terry than expected because of the youtube videos not explaining his attacks too much, but I got enough to make him last for the event's duration.
JADE, TAYLOR SWIFT CHAT TAPOGRE
Based on a chatzy spammer who tried to advertise a Taylor Swift chatroom. Perhaps the most fun of the tapogres to use, this one was based on a strange lady named Jade who popped into our chatroom to advertise a Taylor Swift chat, where someone who was clearly not Taylor Swift was pretending to be her to talk with people. So, this Tapogre's gimmick was to be that she was pretending to be Taylor Swift, and while I knew a few of her songs off the top of my head, rest assured, most of those references that would be her attacks were researched rather than pulled from some impressive knowledge of her catalogue. It certainly is a fun gimmick to try and tie all your attacks to a song title, and I feel like I could make a really fun character out of that to use more often, but here, it was just a fun gimmick that made Jade stand out as one of the more interesting and fun tapogres of the bunch. Extra props to Bree for taking it even further and making it absolutely amazing.
CENAROMANVS, CAR AND WRESTLING TAPOGRE
Based on a spambot Spy told the chat about. Spy brought up this tapogre in chat, and while it had never appeared on anything related to us, the fact he specifically requested it for a future Tapogre fite made me include it despite it being a bit of a stretch. It helps that the community knows a lot about John Cena and Roman Reigns through Cornwind and other wrestling inclined users, and I played with the memes I did know for these Tapogres to have a bit of fun. Spy showed he could have done a better job just with his part in fighting them being so reference heavy, but I suppose call backs to wrestling in general are also pretty appropriate for our community. You can find the transcript of cenaromanvs and their strange car-shilling in chatzy review mode, hence the fact the two tapogres were driving a car when they were fought!
NAKED JULIA, PORN TAPOGRE
Based on a spambot from the VGCW Twitch streams. There's always got to be a porn tapogre. This was true of the tapogre fite even, where one crashed the affair and we still had the one tapogre who was literally just XXX with an Anna Nicole Smith Tapogre head on top. This porn tapogre, though, since I couldn't find a really good example in more recent memory without combing through so much of chatzy, instead references the brief period of time back in 2013 or so where VGCW was so big that everyone in chat but me was talking about it. Naked Julia was their porn tapogre, their inside joke over at that twitch stream, so I thought it would be neat to call back to that faded part of the group history with a tapogre that fit the current event but also had a tie to something some people would recognize on a different level than most of the callbacks. I couldn't find much history on Naked Julia in my research since it's an inside joke from the ephemeral medium of twitch chat, but people recognized it, so the goal was achieved regardless. You'll also noticed she basically reimagined what the XXX tapogre did. Instead of literal red Xs for a body, Naked Julia had actual physical black bars as part of her body! Just some absurdity for the grossest tapogre, and I had a lot of fun with Harpy thanks to her playing along with Etrohus.
XRUMER
Season 1 character, based on a spambot. Back during the Tapogre Fite in Season 1, I made a special voting method for that fite where a user could RP as the Tapogre to give them a bit of an edge when it came time for vote talling. Spy was the only one to take me up on this, writing a story portrating Xrumer as a horrifying puppetmaster of sorts, and those points no doubt earned Xrumer his spot as the winner of Tapogre Fite, beating out even Foreman Tramadol, the tapogre saberwulf adopted as an actual character before the Tapogre Fite was even conceived and seemed a shoo-in winner with his tapogre rights angle. But nope, the evil one beat the good one, and since Xrumer was not just a tapogre forum user but also the name of the system that makes so many tapogres, it was not only incredibly appropriate, but made him the perfect leader of the tapogres for this plot. We did see Xrumer one more time in Season 1 during the big end of the year battle where he got put in the Tapogre cage after fighting the Custard Kittens and Yahoo Bot, but Xrumer was still alive, and that needed to be fixed. I even recall seeing somewhere someone making a ZFRP game where Xrumer was one of the potential enemies to fight along with other surviving villains of early RP. I have to guess Gooper made it for making a reference like that, and you used to be able to find it on pastebin, but I can't find it anymore. Either way, Xrumer was a perfect villain for the tapogre plot even though he wasn't technically the one in charge of them all as he took orders from the Deku King still. Another loose end wrapped up, this time in death!
DEKU KING
Season 4 character, belonged to Jumpropeman. Having only callbacks to Season 1 would make a cohesive plot, but at the same time, it would mean there were people who just wouldn't get the references at all. I keep my fite club characters in the back of my mind, always waiting for a chance to use them for something else, and the Deku King was both one of the first and one securely in my head for later use. With Goron Merchant in the plot and Deku King's crown having stuck around a little after the character's brief appearance, I thought he'd be a good inclusion for a callback people like Ven and Bree might recognize. Finding a spot for him was hard, originally he almost was responsible for bringing Reject into the plot, but then he was put on the Tapogre cage since that needed some ties to the bigger plot and these two guys had nowhere to go. Deku King's skills were hard to come up with even in the fite club, done more as a reference to Zelda Munchkin for Ven's sake than as a real battle opponent, but I just basically copied some tricks from Deku Link to make Deku King last the needed amount of time. Chao said he was a bit surprised I killed the King off, but there really wasn't much more to him. He was mad his crown was stolen and squandered instead of treated with reverence, and the King hardly could rule without a sign of his power! I've still got other fite club opponents who haven't worked through their potential, but this one has finally been put to bed after waiting to shine for so long.
ICE COLD WATER MAN
Season 1 character, belonged to Jumpropeman. Another classic JRM joke character, this guy was a meme around the time of Season 1 so when I saw the tractor usage going ridiculous in its infancy, where people would roll multiple tractors in the span of a post for a single piece of combat or roll tractors for simple things like the eventual joke of Rolling for Hot Dog Holding. When the tractors were young and all over the place though, I decided to lampoon them with Ice Cold Water Man, whose very presence involved constant meaningless rolls as every piece of him delivering the drink had to be rolled for. He popped up once again at some point after the tractors calmed down because of a more egregious case of constant rolling in combat, but from there, his joke angle was retired in favor of him just popping up to give water after big battles on occasion, making his last appearance before this plot I believe in Season 4 after the Uruk-hai stuff. Maybe it was elsewhere, and people did mention ice cold water in general without bringing the character into it, but I was in constant fear someone would rope him in after I came up with the angle for Ice Cold Water Man for this plot. Originally, Ice Cold Water Man was a simple street vendor, pitching ice cold water for only one dollar. However, I wanted crazed bond villain to corrupt him, turn him into a generic business focused fella who lost the heart of selling ice cold water, best encapsulated by the fact he was selling room temperature water for higher prices. Of course, that was crazed bond villain's doing, so once he was defeated, Ice Cold Water Man is back to selling ice cold water for only one dollar! His corruption was the emotional hook for that plot, albeit a small silly one of course, and I always knew I wanted him to regain his old self and just needed to find the spot where he could do it. I guess he might work for Kuwahawi Springs in a way still, but after reviving his old tractor gimmick for taking down crazed bond villain, I doubt I'll ever need to use it again... although sometimes chatzy does go down that route of using tractors constantly for things of little substance, but you can't exactly get Ice Cold Water Man levels of posts in chatzy itself without being incredibly annoying. Don't worry about having him around to pass out Ice Cold Water now, he's been given back to the people to keep dishing out delicious drinks!
CRAZED BOND VILLAIN
Season 1 character, belonged to crazed bond villain. One of the first characters considered for the plot since he was a perfect fit in that he was already a villain, he was also always considered to be in a villain role, never once deviating into the role of being a coerced bargoer like most the others. Crazed bond villain's entire inclusion in the plot and the spin Mr. Fish's character got all came from a joke the user told back in season 1, where crazed bond villain made jokes about his company Evilan Bottled Water tainting the water supply. I thought the joke was just the fact he was in the business of bottled water and almost played that up, but research time meant I was able to see there was a bit more to it. Crazed bond villain was also noted to be responsible for turning Crunk Wizard into Darth Wizard, something I considered toying with but never found a use for since Crunk himself was being left out of the plot and was Darth Wizard for all of a day basically. I've already noted that I thought the username was crazedbondvillain but it actually had spaces in it, a thing Chao pointed out and immediately allowed the idea that Mr. Fish took the name in stride have a funnier second dimension to it besides Mr. Fish just learning not to dismiss seemingly obvious evil characters from the Kobbers. Originally, crazed bond villain and his guys was just another fight, this time in his office, but as my plot started to be more about interesting battle types, I decided to give the old obstacle-course a go again, especially since it worked well enough with the end of Spectrum plot. However, to keep it interesting, I made sure there were opponents to fight while avoiding the traps, but boy howdy did I research those traps. So many videos on the creation of water bottles, on water purification, and on ice watched so I could make more interesting traps and somewhat accurate ones. Sure, some things were conflated, others were added between various methods to make it last longer, but you can learn quite a bit about bottling, water purification, and ice harvesting from this plot! Crazed bond villain also carried over the Bond villain stereotypes, mmyes and the pinky finger technically being more Dr. Evil but Dr. Evil IS the stereotype, so whatever. It also let me have some fun with the fact James Bond is canonically permadead in RP due to my RPing of him back in Season 1. Although things changed around crazed bond villain, I feel he was the most set in stone throughout, always in charge of the water bottling plant because of that simple joke made back in season 1. Shame I couldn't find a better image than the really tiny one.
A CAT WITH ONE LEG
Zoofights character. This guy had a very simple reason for appearing. I wanted crazed bond villain to be stroking a cat like a classic bond villain, but I couldn't think of any RP cats that weren't spoken for like the old pets like Nago or were like Sun Cat and Moon Cat and already used elsewhere. So, I pulled from the one available spot, a Zoofighter of sorts, the cat with one leg. It was just there to be pet and complete the stereotype, so I was surprised when Bree decided to do more with it, giving it a happy ending. Maybe I should have used Madarfoxfire's honey badger character here... although that's an after the fact idea and one I doubt I would have done since Doktor Hanz gave the honey badger new life anyway besides a talking head. SK even used that honey badger later! But Cat with One Leg? This was his only use since Zoofights, and since it was a throwaway joke, it left more of an impression than expected.
JUSTICE MAN
Season 1 character, belonged to Justice Man. More than any other character, Justice Man struggled to find a spot in this plot. He had a super hero as his avatar and thus was the perfect inclusion for a foe to fight, but where to put him was the question. I even considered having both Justice Man and the guy kicking him in the crotch in the picture as two separate characters at one point, but that never went anywhere. One idea was for Mythbustazz he'd test the myth that Kobbers can come back from death, a myth I felt had no legs and necessitated death for something easily disproven. Another idea involved him hassling Motoko for talking to Effie, either fighting them and getting defeated or forcing Motoko to hurt Effie to prove her loyalty. Random battles with Justice Man and others in the street and all came and went, but ultimately, I tied him to crazed bond villain partially to finally put him somewhere, but it also played into the RP kickstarting riots. Justice Man didn't do much in the bar, but he was there for the riots, and this supposed superhero was all too eager to be killing innocents for some reason. Crazed bond villain was also present for the riots and did his own thing, but it at least connected these two somewhat and allowed me to make Justice Man a villain despite his super hero appearance. I felt a bit bad that Bree wanted redemption for Justice Man as I had no real plans for him after defeat, and he was almost always set to be a troublesome guy to match the aggressive personality of his user, but Justice Man was a superpowered guy to beat, latched onto the bottling battle since he seemed best for keeping characters stuck in their giant plastic prisons. Of course, I was just waiting for someone to give him the old crotch kick, and it was good it happened. Originally I also remember Justice Man just being a straight up bodyguard for bond villain instead of helping with the traps. It really was strangely difficult to find a spot for this guy!
DIAMONDS DROOG
Season 1 character, belonged to Kasuba. Kasuba and Rosello both almost did a Homestuck RP back in Season 1, Rosello managing to introduce Nepeta and get her involved in some fites and RP bits but Kasuba faded to the background... but not before introducing two characters who I knew I wanted to bring back. In fact, the idea of using these guys was partly why I decided to read all of Homestuck at work, and while I did transfer over some in-jokes from Homestuck such as the narration style and their use of the card-decks-come-weapon-containers, Diamonds and Clubs both erred on the side of being understandable rather than far-out absurd. Diamonds was set up as the meaner of the two, appropriately so since he was introduced in RP above the beaten body of a guy he just clobbered (and who I briefly thought "What if he was in the plot?" for all of two seconds before moving on). The monitors Diamonds used to watch Clubs and other RP characters through ended up being a perfect way to keep the bargoers on a short leash. Just having the threat of hostages didn't seem enough, so perfect surveillance seemed another great way of keeping them in line in a believable manner. Diamonds was always set up to be a dick, and he delivered on that right until the end of the trap section. Still wish I had done more with his Homestuck tricks like the Brawloseum, but I had fun with what I did allow myself to use. He was a natural fit for the Ice traps on account of his icy nature.
CLUBS DEUCE
Season 1 character, belonged to Kasuba. In Homestuck and in Kasuba's brief use of him in RP as a failed spy on the Kobbers, Clubs Deuce was always a sillier and nicer member of the group. He could cause some trouble yeah and he had a few good tools, but he was a comedy character first and when I started getting terrible rolls for him, it was like fate had gifted me the means to make him silly here as well. Saddled with the Water traps since I thought they'd be the least lethal and could use something to make them more interesting, Clubs's failures endeared him enough to be spared in the end, and it seemed like a good way of rewarding people by having him disable bond villain's lasers instead of forcing people to fight them or something. I enjoyed writing Clubs fail so much I considered evolving him into a regular joke character, but I doubt that will ever happen. What did happen was me not using his stuff to their maximum potential even moreso than Diamonds because of all his failures, all the gizmos and stuff spilling out by accident. I left out the Bull Penis Cane from Homestuck on purpose though, for obvious reasons.
MYTHBUSTAZZ
Season 1 character, belonged to Mythbustazz. If there's someone to blame for the interesting twists battles were given, its these guys. Taken from there brief appearance in the Open Bar topic, the idea of doing a mythbusting plot was so obvious that I couldn't just have them do a regular battle. Coming up with myths was the difficult part, and I wanted to ask around for them but didn't want to spoil the surprise, hence why they were open for more during the plot in case I missed some (and Chao bringing up the votes influencing fites was a good one). Other than that, I wanted to bring in 21s as one of the forums longest unique aspects, I thought the drink tolerance was a good one as something absurd in reality but sort of accepted in RP, and the joke characters myth from the early days made a return despite disappearing in more recent times as the evidence against it added up. I tried to see if anyone mentioned other myths in chatzy, but when you have people like Ven who are so into mythology talking about it a bunch, it was too much content to search through. I didn't plan for these guys to be fought even with their guns, or I considered them just shooting people like they did at the end to get arrested, but the battle between them as a myth was a was a fun way to dispense with them and still have them be more than hosts. These guys are probably why the plot as a whole was tooled more towards fun in general, as their impression on me and the fact they got the creativity flowing encouraged me to do more with the other aspects of this plot than just have a bunch of fights. It was also fun just making Mythbusters references and exploring the joke of the original user of them being from the more extreme Zoofightsverse version of it.
TAEKE
Season 1 character, belonged to Taeke. A LEGO man from the early bar, a replacement character for Theodore Logan after the user got tired of him and let the teenager get cooked and eaten, an act that later inspired my Season 2 villain of Chuck de Nomolos! Anyway, Taeke himself and his ability to make LEGO creations as a mad scientist was a wellspring of potential, but I didn't know where to use that potential for quite a while. I wasn't sure what he could make or how to rope Taeke into anything, but he was such an obvious and interesting inclusion that I had to do it. It was never on Justice Man levels of confusion and brainstorming, as soon he was the perfect fit for Mythbustazz. Being able to make old characters out of LEGO and get around some of the plot's rules on who should show made for a really fun angle even without the joke character myth being tested. If anything, the joke character myth was more an excuse to add these characters, with me worrying I should use someone besides jazzbanjo as the joke since the moderator wasn't much of a joke even if his avatar of a dinosaur mascot was. Lhegho appearing was perfect and I wanted it the moment I realized the character could interact: the original LEGO character meeting the newer one! And yes, I always capitalize LEGO and pluralize it as LEGO. It's the brand identity!
MAJOR FAILURE
Season 1 character, belonged to Major Failure. One of the more obvious picks for a Taeke creation, the guy who created Zoofights and birthed our forum and RP as a result deserved at least a cameo in this plot, and rather than having to get the big man involved physically, we instead got him and the rest of the moderation team to make appearances by way of LEGO duplicates. I wish I had found a better "turn image into LEGO" generator, but this one did the job well enough and kept the character recognizable. If anything, they were too recognizable, and that was the issue! It didn't feel LEGO enough! I also wish I could have removed the background being made of LEGO, but I got the hippo-headed dictator in, and while I could have had him just swinging hammers like he did in the fites he entered, I decided the Zoofighter angle as more interesting, and it would allow me to get in another old character who almost had to get a pass for this plot!
GRAVITAS SHORTFALL
Season 1 character, belonged to Gravitas Shortfall. Major Failure's right hand man, Gravitas first had an avatar of an arcade machine, hence why at the center of the pyramid we found one controlling the rest of it. The giant pyramid form with the eye came from a forum conversation where Gravitas wanted a video linked as his avatar and would give a Gorillion Dollars to whichever user made it, and after making a bunch of versions, I finally made one he was happy with and it became his avatar. I got the Gorillion Dollars, used it to vote on the Zoofights Finale for Vighneshvara, and... he lost. So. so much for that! But, the pyramid itself was used as another foe here to represent the moderation team, even if it was kind of hard to come up with a battle style for a stationary pyramid powered by a stationary arcade machine. Surprisingly, he ended up lasting the longest though! Even when the point of fighting it was gone! I couldn't find the old arcade machine image to LEGO-fy sadly, or else we would have seen that as well when it made its appearance.
AKUMU
Season 1 character, belonged to Akumu. Part of the forum staff but not having moderation abilities as far as I could tell, Akumu was like a little assistant to the main force and had this little guy as his avatar... or girl... it was really hard to tell! It's so small and all I could tell was it was a little demon thing, and the puyo puyo connection was never made on the forum or in the moments it was mentioned by Zoofights itself. That made for a good joke during the plot, and I had Akumu fight more as a little demon, having Taeke make the mistakes in reading the character that I did to have it work more in the current situation. Despite the jokes, Akumu was not the puyo puyo character according to what little we did know about it. Admittedly, the weakest of the staff turned LEGO opponents, but fun nonetheless.
JAZZBANJO
Season 1 character, belonged to Jazzbanjo. The supposed joke character to confirm or bust the myth of joke characters always winning, Jazzbanjo was actually a retooled version of Enforcer Wolf. As Jazzbanjo he never got quite as angry or pushed his moderation so strongly, but we did see the bouncing dinosaur mascot from Scott Pilgrim poke his head around on the forum as part of the staff, and since his avatar was so silly, I decided he was joke character enough despite being tied to Enforcer Wolf. Being a joke character also made his lack of abilities more acceptable, and he was killed off pretty quickly, which is sort of the fate of a lot of joke characters in big battles these days. The days of Barkles, WALL!!s, and other such characters taking the multiways over serious ones have faded, where its now the exception more than the trope.
MOST GLORIOUS FROG
Season 1 character, belonged to Most Glorious Frog. Most Glorious Frog was a big face in Zoofights 6 voting. He stuck around about as long as the rest of us after he appeared, but there was one issue with including this recognizable face in this plot... his avatar was of the actual Zoofigther Croaka Cola. Involving Cat with One Leg is one thing, that guy was more of a cameo in both ZFRP and in Zoofights itself, but taking a whole Zoofighter and turning it into an RP character after it had died and transformed so many times in Zoofights, even for a moment, felt wrong... but having a LEGO version of that character appear didn't! It also let us fight a Zoofighter, something I think could be more fun if done carefully and with the proper reverence, but I held back a bit since everything the LEGO creations had to be limited by what they were made of. No actual soda spraying from this frog! It also made Major Failure a bit more properly interesting to fight. Despite being in charge of Zoofights, the hippo-headed commisar was fairly simple power wise. He liked to use hammers and drink beer. Having his mount be a giant space frog with a Coca-Cola theme to it made the battle much more appropriate for the guy who invented the wild world of Zoofights. Most Glorious Frog's inclusion this way is one of my favorite ways of making the callbacks work for this plot.
VARKARRUS
Season 1 character, borrowed by Devil Ed. Among the listed jurists for Devil Ed's trial, there was always an incredibly strange one: Varkarrus. Noted as (a friend of mine), that was all we were ever told about this mysterious character, and before I did any research, I basically imagined this character as a second Devil Ed. When I went to google and typed the name in though... I found a user who put so much love and care into a character I almost felt bad for borrowing them for this callback and joke. Apparently, Varkarrus is some guy who invented a demonette character and has been building her up for years, his art style evolving around her and her antics with other characters. There are tons of art of this character, her name being Amvira, but if you simply google image search Varkarrus Amvira you'll find a lot of it. You might also notice a lot of it is not exactly the highest quality... like I said, their art style evolved with this character and a lot of friends have drawn this character, so its no surprise the quality is all over the place. Some of the good quality art is ruined by "the detail problem" too, which is what happens when an artist puts way too many blemishes and such on an image to be more "realistic" and instead makes the character look even more fake. Amvira's blemishes take the form of weird spots that make her look worse and worse like splotchy pimples instead of freckles, but I found the images I used were a good balance of her visual characteristics and were in a decent art style. The care given to Amvira made me want to do right by her when she appeared in RP as Varkarrus. Varkarrus himself says he wishes he was Amvira, so maybe he got his wish this way? Anyway, that art of her made her look fun so I gave her a fun personality, and although I wanted to have her turn into a giant demon and go "Ed says I gotta fight you" in the doorway, the video game idea was a way of making the battle more interesting and allowing her and the other two be more fun characters instead of things to fight. If Varkarrus wasn't so tied to this plot and another person online, her personality was fun enough that I feel I could get a character out of it... and I'll call that character Tomiko V: Yeah, she's not too different from other spunky ladies my roster has, so it's not a huge loss. The Amvira stuff made me a bit hesitant about making her in a relationship with Devil Ed, but I decided hinting at it didn't hurt and I couldn't resist the idea of her wrapping those extra arms around him from behind. The giant demon form did have to get shunted to the MOBA though instead of manifesting in RP proper, but it's no big loss.
LINUS SHINE
Season 1 character, belonged to Devil Ed. A Devil Ed character I forgot existed for a long time. Linus Shine sort of appeared in RP randomly one day. There was a fight, Linus appeared, seemingly teleported but was just super fast, jumped out of a building, mentioned either the Order or the Council, and that was all she wrote. Linus never did much of anything in RP besides say stuff that might as well be coming from Ed or his other interchangeable twenty-something year old men with superpowers. It was on me to give Linus some personality, and an image too, since he was only described as a guy in a suit. I googled the name Linus and tried to find a fashionable guy in a suit, eventually settling on this male model named Linus as the reference pic. Linus's super speed also made him a good fit for the racing game I was working into the plot, a nice bit of happenstance that I couldn't have planned on purpose. He's probably the least interesting of Ed's crew though, partly because I decided to make him reserved and almost "too cool for you".
NAOISE BRAN
Season 1 character, belonged to Devil Ed. Naoise is the more famous of Devil Ed's random guys who appeared briefly and weren't too different from Ed himself. Naoise was a guy interviewed about the trial but didn't really say much interesting. He was shot, presumably to dispose of him to keep him from revealing anything, but Naoise survived the shot. I wanted to integrate his bulletproof nature in the battle, but it didn't really come up. Still, Naoise didn't really give evidence despite Ed not actually killing him off, but Ed decided to make him drop by the bar and do his one big moment in RP. Jonesy was about to get the Nemesis weapon, an incredibly heavy halberd that no one could lift in the bar, not even the strongest characters, because the weapon by design is meant to be lifted only through the help of psionic powers, which Jonesy had briefly back then. Naoise, though, Devil Ed had him just approach and lif it no sweat. Devil Ed had a few moments in RP where he just did things without thinking of the difficulty or if he should be allowed to do it, but Naoise's stood out as the urr example for making little sense. Of course, this strength manifested as Naoise's power in the event here, and before others like Roomba or Linus were considered to return, I wanted us to face off with this inexplicably powerful individual. Of course, we fought him in a fighting game, but the fighting game version of him was made absurdly strong to mimic that, even using the Nemesis weapon for an attack and hurling Gezora to continue the joke. He threw the arcade cabinet in the end too to play with that strength. Naoise had the same personality as all Devil Ed characters before I got to him, and I decided he'd be the one getting upset with the games, ragequitting and all to give Naoise some personality. Much like Linus's image source, his image came from googling the name Naoise. The rather plain and unassuming look of some political guy named Naoise worked perfectly, and so I picked that one for his involvement in the plot.
RACE YER' MATES: KING OF BEASTS GRAND PRIX
Forum concept created by Steel Komodo. Admittedly the least explored of the video game concepts the forum has dabbled in from time to time, it was a perfect fit for the burgeoning idea that we would fight Varkarrus and the others not with fists, but controllers. At the same time, the fact there were so few characters meant the selection was small, but the point was less about the selection and just the fact you'd play as someone besides your current character anyway, adding more callbacks to the plot to characters people would all recognize quite well. Still, it was incredibly tempting to try and inflate the ranks of Race Yer' Mates the game during the buildup to this plot, but I couldn't help but think people would find it suspicious that I'd suddenly add a bunch to it. Maybe now I should add some guys to it, even though we'll likely never see this Mario Kart like game again in any capacity. It did add a race to the plot, one that was admittedly meant to be tipped in the favor of our players and I wasn't sure what I would have done if Linus won since it was more tractor tied than the others... still, the race, the fighting game, and the MOBA all brought in different places from ZFRP history to add more callbacks! The fighting game took place in the old bar in Manhattan for 2011-2012 callback, racing took place on Porphyrion to make the 2013-2014 call back, and the MOBA was sort of smooshed into a Vegas inspired arena to call back to 2015-2016 despite the MOBA originally containing no elements of anything beyond 2014 saved Del's late contributions. This was basically reference heaven here as well. We got the Sintendo Flii Yu named checked from the old Pre-Brawl fite in season 1, we had Linus use the Top Spin as a power-up which was a running joke for Zephyrus in Season 1,we had cameos from Sheryl, TYP-E, Stormtroopers, and a few other characters popping up here and there... not to mention that, on the plot as a whole, Cornwind was on point with his Sine call backs. Not that I recall any happening here, but they started coming in full force after I recall when we fought Ed and did other stuff. Not to say anyone else wasn't doing it well. We had some fun references in these games from participating users and throughout the plot as well as people brought in old characters or mentioned them. This reference list is already beefier than intended, so don't expect all those pointed out sadly.
SUPER FITE YER' MATES II: BLACK LEGEND XL DELUXE EDITION
Forum concept, dates back to Season 2 I believe. The arcade fighting game cropped up in the bar as a time waster back when ZFRP sometimes just had random stuff appear more as forum games than plot or character moments. I remember one instance where people would post pictures and others would give their thoughts on them, which was strange to say the least. This, though, was a classic fighting game, and while we don't have the original roster on hand without me digging for it, the more interesting aspect of including this and the other video games was to take the topic from the AU forum and give it a point in-universe. Now, people were made to play as the characters we had created back then, and while this would be a fun idea to revisit, I'm not sure it can work well a second time, at least in a manner where it mattered rather than being idle fun. This was of course the simplest to make a decent contest of the three video games, as fighting games are just battles, although I did have to justify how Naoise was in the game and why multiple characters were fighting him.
ZF MOBA
Blog concept made by Jumpropeman. Smite got me interested in MOBAs where games like DOTA and League of Legends never did, so for a brief period back a little into Season 4, I tried to imagine what a ZFRP MOBA would be like. It required too many details to flesh out in the scope I was imagining, but I got down quite a lot of the details and eventually caved in an showed everyone what I had made. I doubt I'll ever go back and add to it now, although I almost did for this plot just to give people more options, but ultimately, it was more interesting for limiting the characters people could pick, adding a few more callbacks to the plot by way of the characters selected. I simplified MOBA rules massively to make it work as a fun battle instead of something drawn out like a MOBA can be, and I did base it more on Smite's Arena mode than the typical MOBA battles. It was mostly a struggle of deciding which details to conserve for the fight and it was always going to be more of something else than a true tribute to MOBAs, but it was the only other video game type we've dabbled in enough to be referenced here, although I was tempted to try and work in my two ZFRP based card games somewhow, an idea it was best I never followed through on. Those would be harder to make short and dynamic!
FLAMEDOG
Season 1 character, belonged to Devil Ed. While I could justify most of Devil Ed's supporting cast turning bad or being misguided, Flamedog always seemed too pure a soul to corrupt. One day, Devil Ed just introduced a random fire-breathing dog into his RP, one he named Flamedog and entered into the second Big Bar Brawl, where I decided to make it look like the dog Heartless from Kingdom Hearts 2. Flamedog did amazingly well, getting sixth place with a skillset that consisted solely of Flame and Dog. If no one had suspected Devil Ed by this point in the plot, Flamedog was always meant to be the means to get the suspicion flowing during the fight, Ed's rudeness to his beloved pet seen as out of character. I almost even considered having Ed kick it, and while he did hit the dog in the end, that was after the Meanpants reveal where it was no longer ambiguous what was going on. Maybe he smacked it a little too beforehand, but not so rough? It's been a while since the plot, the minutiae is fading from my mind. Anyway, Flamedog's presence in the plot was always to be that last bit of hint before the reveal, even before I decided Varkarrus and the gang would tell the Kobbers Ed has been strange these days. Just like the rest of the Devil Ed domicile though, now Flamedog is happy as a pig in the mud, no longer on a chain leash, no longer admonished by Smeck, and now free to just be a dog in Devil Ed's household.
ROOMBA
Season 1 character, belonged to Devil Ed. One of Devil Ed's first characters was, strangely, a Roomba. It hung around the bar, killed the first Snapper the bar ever met in the lead-up to the Big Bar Brawl, and even got in a fite, helping James the Squirtle fite the much more powerful team of Saberwulf and Eddie Riggs. Roomba lost, but it put up a fite, and it has a little turret from Portal on top of its head that, since I knew little about Portal, decided to give the ability to walk. Back then of course, fites were so loosey-goosey skillwise I could have done it even if I had remembered that Portal turrets couldn't walk, but it made it more interesting in the end when saberwulf fought the turret inside the Roomba. Roomba's other main trait was having a bunch of muderous implements able to pop out, and although the world mostly forgot about Roomba after that fite, I thought it a perfect assistant for Devil Ed during his fite, and one that could very well participate without being evil because it was just doing what Ed said was right. The Roomba wasn't much of a foe, making it perfect for facing off with Kennedy and Cirral since they weren't big combatants. Everyone else could fight the demons and all, they could fight the robotic vacuum! I probably wavered on whether or not to include the Roomba more than I should've, but it was partly the perceived ineffectiveness of it potentially and because it entered a fite and thus sort of broke the rules that kept out certain characters... but Ed himself was breaking those so I decided his whole supporting cast should be exempt for the sake of fun.
ALOCER
Season 1 character, "belonged" to Jumpropeman. Devil Ed was fiting Ogopogo in an inexplicable naval battle back in season 1, so to make Devil Ed's ship make more sense, I filled its crew with demons who could more conceivably have a reason for being on a boat or owning one. Alocer was the first sign of my interest in demons, one that came to a head with Furfur and Edyth's stuff and faded away quickly when demons became 10% of RP, but Alocer (also spelled Allocer) was one of the demons who helped Ed on the boat and one of the two to survive the fite. Thinking of ways to make Devil Ed's battle more interesting, Alocer and Beelzebub were added, a reference I feel more obscure than most since it requires remembering a specific fite that was part of that year's sort of fite rush. Alocer's art from the Ars Goetia was lifted and used as his means of attack for this plot, but he didn't have much more to him so I had no issue putting him down quickly.
BEELZEBUB
Season 1 character, belonged to a lot of people! For some reason, Beelzebub has changed hands between so many users. At first, I think it was just other people forgetting that other people had used him, but Del, Gooper Blooper, and M Sheep all used him, and I had put him in a fite in Season 1 as a demon assistant to Devil Ed as one of the earlier appearances. Also part of the naval battle between Devil Ed and Ogopogo, Beelzebub was one of the few survivors of it and so I decided to bring him back along with Alocer when that callback came to mind... but I made sure to grab a different piece of art of Beelzebub than has ever been used in RP before. Another thing about Beelzebub's many appearances is he never looked the same and rarely even sounded the same, but for this go round, I decided to have Beelzebub talk like M Sheep's take on the character, where he had super long buzzing noises whenever he talks, but I reigned it in a bit to be on only certain letters because M Sheep did it to the hilarious extreme with everything he said. Cirral being present made for one of the most fun take downs in the whole plot, as Beelzebub was just happy to have a fangirl. I wager they still talk about bugs every now and then when she can get some time away to drop a line to Hell. It's only a matter of time before Lysias introduces his version of Beelzebub, continuing the long tradition. Also, I've mentioned before, but one year, to get a more even Big Bar Brawl number, I considered having Beelzebub enter as a People's Entrant, representing everybody since so many people had RP'd as him. Never got any further than a silly idea though.
MEANPANTS
Season 1 character, belonged to Jumpropeman. Besides Dylan, the other Season 1 joke villain I made was a character I called Meanpants, who was a pair of pants that was mean. It was one of those "this concept is bad and there lies the humor" kind of jokes, and at least the jokes were stronger I feel than the Dylan ones. Meanpants just wanted to get on people's butts so he could drive them to kill, and Meanpants had the honor of evolving out of a joke before Dylan did, appearing near the end of the year during the final battle of Season 1. I was whipping out every character I had, but since Rose and Sophia had returned to Miami at this point, I needed a reason to mention them, so I had it that Meanpants was trying to get them to wear it... only for Stealth Fat Guy to buy him instead and make Meanpants suffer since Stealth Fat Guy was neither sanitary nor susceptible to Meanpants's influence. The fact he was on Stealth Fat Guy's butt last was mentioned in the plot even! Meanpants also came to mind pretty quickly when I needed a way to turn old bargoers against us without making them inexplicably evil, Meanpants taking over Ed's mind making it believable that Devil Ed would turn against his friends and it excused some of the more jokey ways I wrote Devil Ed's dialog. Yeah, Devil Ed had grammar and spelling issues, but they weren't as rampant as the parody that Meanpants turned him into. Meanpants's reveal was also one of the first things planned of the plot, that being Ed throwing open his robe to reveal the pants. Meanpants's reveal was shifted around in the plot structure a bit along with Devil Ed himself and the reveal of that, but it was always gonna culminate in that flash to reveal an angry set of pants. It probably came out of left field for most people who didn't remember an old joke of mine, but really, in universe, so many things probably make little sense to Kobbers who just attach themselves to random battles and adventures. The users got to feel like their characters for once! I toyed with the idea of Meanpants trying to take over another host, but that event was already so long in its final planned form, although earlier versions of the Devil Ed confrontation could have allowed it. Originally, Devil Ed was in an office building for some reason, Hobo McGee, Naoise, and Varkarrus would fight us first, and then we'd fight Devil Ed with Flamedog on the side barking up a storm. Devil Ed being alone is one reason why Meanpants could have done more to keep the fight interesting, but Devil Ed got more back-up and the entire plot event changed to the simpler version where we just showed up at Ed's house.
HOBO MCGEE
Season 1 character, belonged to Devil Ed. One of the jurists on Devil Ed's trial and perhaps the most random, while other jurists were either ZFRP characters or 80s references or at least a person Ed knew, Hobo McGee was just a joke jurist with no history or indication of who they are. We never even saw Hobo during the trial, and while Jaws got his character angle from the fact he called someone "honey" and I twisted that off wildly from there, we had nothing on who Hobo was. Chao googled the name once and found a profile that gave us the image I used for Hobo, but from there, I had full freedom on how to use him. Hobo ended up being a spy of sort, watching the battle with Devil Ed and avoiding detection like most Order members by looking just like a regular guy, although in this case, he was a hobo as well. Strangely, he evolved into being the character who actually believed in the stated goal of the Order and the Council rather than doing it for selfish ends, which I guess gave people a satisfying face to the whole affair to rub it in when it all came tumbling down. He was never a fighter of course, hence why his event was him being present with some Order member to watch and stall while Reject and the Gremlins carried the true combat of the event. He reminded me a bit of Bum Rush from Venture Bros who I used back in Season 3 and had I not used that character already, that could have been another image candidate for Hobo McGee. Making him a Council member mainly came about because I realized his role made him strangely important as he would be organizing the Reject kidnapping and all, so despite being a nobody from the jury, he ended up almost one of the more important characters in a plot with a lot of one-time faces.
THE ORDER/THE COUNCIL
Season 1 concept, belonged to Devil Ed. I've mentioned it a few times without going in depth about it, but this plot picked up the pieces of Devil Ed's failed plot which I call the Postmen Conspiracy. In it, Devil Ed was being targeted by postmen of all things, putting him on trial for a crime he didn't commit maybe. It was hard to figure out much of anything about the plot or why it was happening. Someone wanted Devil Ed arrested apparently, and so he was on trial, but Devil Ed the user really had no idea how to do a trial. Even though Miles Edgeworth was the prosecutor, it wasn't an Ace Attorney styled one, the ones that are interesting enough to work in RP, and it also wasn't a realistic trial since Cornwind and I could pick apart stuff that didn't work with our armchair interest in law, so instead it was just a mess. We had no evidence and were the jury instead of the defense, meaning that the jury was predisposed to say he was innocent and the trial was pointless already, but then Devil Ed gave us no evidence, and when evidence was presented, he would then ask "where's your evidence" to completely ignore it. It was a plot more ambition than substance, with contradictory details where details were given and just a lot of vagueness elsewhere. I did consider having Judge Keanu Reeves appear somewhere in the plot, but it had no spot, just like the jurists I passed over, and Miles Edgeworth was left alone in case people with an interest in Ace Attorney want to do something with him more than just paying homage to the trial plot. However, this plot aimed to pick up the pieces of this failed plot, and while I did my best to find out what Ed was going for, there were so many disparate pieces that I had to tape together what I could. The Order and The Council (not of thirteen, although I did laugh when I found it during my research) may or may not have been involved initially, as they were only mentioned rather than given any details to explain who they are or what they were doing. It would be some street thug saying "The Order sent us" and giving no further details, or Linus going "Have you guys heard of The Council, they're bad" without any other details. Maybe I'm mixing them up, but that's how little they mattered but Ed was making villain groups with no real idea of what they could do. Ultimately, I decided The Order would be the name of the Postmen Conspiracy, the grunts who do the work and since they were postmen and thugs seemingly, I decided they'd be mostly plainclothes and unassuming. Regular people with basic goals, the kid who don't draw eyes or deserve pictures. It is mentioned in the teaser that the people with Devil Ed are wearing blue uniforms, which was the hint those were the postal workers, and Dylan being equally unassuming made him a perfect fit for the Order. The Council I decided would be the leaders, admittedly a ragtag bunch but the plot was basically ragtag when Ed ran it. None of them were competent and all of them had conflicting goals, so it kept that sort of slapdash nature as part of its DNA just to carry on the joke of the plot being more ideas than execution..
REJECT AND ITS CREW
Season 3 character, belonged to Jumpropeman. It may surprise you, but Reject was one of the earliest callbacks planned for the plot! As soon as B'Yel'Tee became the villain, I knew I wanted to work in Moomba's history. Back in Season 2, one of Celestia's magic dolls went rogue, became The Doll, and attacked her. It was hinted something had corrupted the doll, a present left for The Sheep despite it being dead that actually came from the Consumer. That darkness is what animates The Doll, and even though it had moved on and found happiness with the crew of Reject, it was still ripe for plucking to make for a small betrayal. Reject itself is basically the perfect inclusion for this plot. Reject itself was a character built on callbacks to Season 1 and 2, me rounding up a bunch of failed pet and minor characters and giving them new life through a fun gimmick with the team-controlled mech. Bakemon references a very specific moment where Phantomon calls on Bakemons to defend him during the Bulgrave battles, Calabat was a gift to Sarah for her birthday I believe, The Doll I've explained, Gizmo was one of many pets given to Antoinette before she fell out of RP along with Erebus, The Attorcroppes followed the bargoers back from Scotland (a rather ill-advised plot I did and almost referenced in this plot to make it more interesting, but really it was just that Harpy had Garnet keep saying she wasn't given jobs by Jumpropeman when I had tried to imply again and again her work was offscreen), and Evinrude came from the really weird thing I did where Q as an owl went through an altered version of the movie The Rescuers for... some reason. Niggles, of course, came in 2014 from Harpy's gem witch plot, and for a bit Niggles being around made it harder for me to justify Reject getting taken down by The Order's forces. Moomba turning on his friends and the forgiveness after was easy to imagine, but the giant electric worm was hard for anyone to defeat! It was even hard to figure out when I wanted Reject to drop by. The Deku King of all people almost brought him into the plot, heading all the way to Porphyrion to do it! It was really hard to think of why Reject would drop by Earth... but Bree gave me an out. The Pet Show was the perfect excuse to bring a mech full of pets back, and while they stuck around longer than they reasonably should for the sake of making a plot appearance, I was mostly just glad to have something less contrived to bring them to Earth to be taken over by The Order. Reject's inclusion was also a must as an evolution of two failed things I always wanted to do: one was have the Kobbers fight Reject (which almost happened at the end of Deckplot but Reject had no reason to be there and we instead briefly tangled with Everett, Jokerton, and Shimmer in his place) and the other was to have a proper Gremlins battle. Gizmo being there made things ripe for some Gremlins goodness, and its a fun movie series with a killer theme that made me break my usual lethargy when it comes to linking music in a plot. The battle with the Gremlins was always a feint since Motoko's false betrayal is about as old as the Gremlins stuff in regards to this plot, so it would imply that they were stalling the Kobbers to allow the ritual to go off without a hitch. The Gremlins I used of course grabbed from Gremlins 2: The New Batch to make them more interesting when we did fight them, although the Vegetable Gremlin was gladly tossed away quickly since I just wasn't feeling it. Bat Gremlin became a bit of fun mostly because I made fun of the movie's poor special effects for it by constantly teasing it construction. Spider Gremlin was basically just that. Brain Gremlin was of course the voice and the big reveal of what happened to Reject, the smooth talker showing his intelligence but also his ego in that he sells out the trick to at least appear in charge before he loses. Lightning Gremlin was the surprisingly helpful member of the bunch, letting me add in a few more callbacks as well as making him the more dangerous of the foes since he couldn't be killed easily. I was so freaking happy people figured him out though, sometimes it takes a bit for people to figure out hints I'm throwing down, so when it goes swimmingly and at the perfect pace, it's marvelous. Moomba being corrupted was of course the final member of the evil Reject crew, but for a bit I had an image of Greta the girl Gremlin saved as a potential pilot. One reason I left her out is almost every picture of her has her scantily clad, which is gross and I like to link pictures of my character. A girl Gremlin baring her cleavage is not something I want to see on the forum, so she was scrapped before Vegetable Gremlin could have been considered for it. Although the battle with the Reject mech was short, I'm still happy to have got both things into one event well enough, a bit more unfinished business taken care of so Reject can retire peacefully... save if I ever do decide to be less stingy with myself and let him Brawl some day.
BASSETKING
Season 1 character, belonged to Bassetking. Despite being a jukebox here, his name makes a lot more sense on SomethingAwful where he is literally a basset hound king. His main imprint as far as I recall is making a Zoofights irc that I never checked out, but I remembered the jukebox well enough to decide to include him. For a long time, more than most any other character I wager, he sat in the Future folder with no assigned role. He was just a jukebox, how can he do stuff? Besides play music, which I'm sure I considered a quick and dirty cameo of him to link a song, but I don't link songs much in general so that would require a specific situation that never arose. Instead, when it came time to fight Gremlins in the Kobber Museum, the idea of the Lightning Gremlin taking over animatronics of old bargoers finally gave Bassetking a chance to appear right before he almost lost the opportunity. He still couldn't fight all too much since he is just a jukebox, but he was more like a single attack and thus not a problem for his oddity.
ANTI-SPIRAL
Season 1 character, belonged to Anti-Spiral. One of the first characters who came to mind when I decided I wanted to do an old bargoers plot, Anti-Spiral was a well-known face in the early days of 2011 and dropped off basically when everyone else did, but he was present enough to leave a lasting impression that didn't violate any of my exclusion rules... although Chao seemed to think he did. He said something happened in Season 5 of Zoofights to make it feel weird, and I wager there might be something I'm just straight up forgetting or something from SomethingAwful that I never read. Chao sent me a list of characters when he was getting hyped for the plot of characters he thought we could see and who I should probably exclude, but even without that knowledge of the Season 5 strangeness, Anti-Spiral's source material was what really turned me off. I still have not watched Tengan Toppen Gurran Lagen and I probably spelled that wrong, but as I read about Anti-Spiral on its wiki I realized this guy was a much bigger deal than he appeared in the bar. Rather than making for an interesting foe, he would be a straight up plot in himself if I wanted to give him due credit, and while there were certainly characters reduced in scope by joining the plot, Anti-Spiral I decided to just give a pass... but I still got in a quick reference thanks to the Kobber Museum! Of course, my need to be logical meant that the robot had no real skills and it was more a cameo for the sake of it than a true foe to fight, but it was fun to slip in references like that where I could, especially when it doesn't tarnish a legacy one bit to make a reference in that manner.
GEZORA
Season 1 character, belonged to Gezora. The original bartender with a history that dates back beyond RP and back into Zoofights proper, the giant cuttlefish was Fite Yer' Mates's first referee and a wonderfully fun bartender even after the user who controlled it basically left. It pretty much became a joke vehicle for other users and is the actual best example of a bartender as utility. The giant mollusk chomped down people and served drinks quickly and easily, all while talking in the first person! Including Gezora itself (never specified as male save by accident or others!) in the plot would have been inappropriate... partly because Gezora is still canonically dead! Not that people would have snubbed their noses at a revival, but it added a layer of inaccessibility and I didn't want to revive Gezora for little reason. The museum battle was the perfect place to give our first bartender a means of participating without hurting the character or their history. Of course Mr. Fish will have an animatronic of the first bartender, and while the robotic version didn't have as many fun tricks as the real one, it was still nice to have the Lightning Gremlin take it over as its most powerful vessel during the battle. On the old forum there was even a cthulhu smiley emoji we'd use to indicate Gezora was talking, I miss that little thing. Hopefully this was an homage most people enjoyed!
MAILMAN CLIFF
Season 1 character, belonged to Mailman Cliff. When I was setting out to make this plot, I excluded a lot of the Season 1 characters who had a decent bit of intersection with us even if it wasn't that big. This mostly meant that if the character had dropped by to join us in a fite or two, they already made a mark on RP that keeps us with them in a way. This is the main reason we didn't see characters like Bluecollarbeaver, Dragoshi, Ironichide, Iamyourking's cast, Doom Baboon (I did briefly consider having a character ride the baboon as a mount but nothing developed beyond the glimmer of an idea), but Mailman Cliff was an odd exception to this. He appeared in the Ten-Way Tussle and was actually the guy who sparked the idea of it... by accident, but he still got the ball rolling! Anyway, he was just as likely to be left out if not for the fact the plot finale taking place at a post office. I had thought originally just to have characters go from the museum straight to post office with no pick-up, but that's hardly fair or fun, so Mailman Cliff was recruited to drop on by and make a small yet appropriate cameo. Mailman Cliff was mostly known for his size comparison charts between Zoofighters, and in perhaps the most forced reference of the plot I had him mention size comparison charts at the end of things just to get that in there. Some things you just gotta do, even if they don't work!
PATMAN POST
Season 4 character, belonged to Gooper Blooper. When it came time to hook characters for the final event of the plot, I realized I had an opportunity sitting there to grab more than just Mailman Cliff. As part of the continued effort to rope in at least a few fresher references and characters into the plot, I asked Gooper for permission to bring in Patman Post to drive the characters to where they needed to be. It was a tiny cameo sure and more of one of the "just for funsies" types, but it was still fun to put him in there. I'm not too versed on which Patman Post memes are the hottest in town, but I made sure to include the big one I knew: "Terrible!" Other than that, just a thank you again to Gooper for adding another callback to a plot filled with them, and one to Season 4 technically, a barely represented season in the plot otherwise!
DYLAN
Season 1 joke by Jumpropeman, turned into a character. Back when I was a simpler man, I made OOC joke posts about "The Lord's Brother, Dylan." Out of respect for Cornwind I never made him into a real character (something like this happened with Uncle Greg years later!), but whenever I had an idea for petty villainy, this supposed character would be joked about... in thread. Man, thank goodness for chatzy! So many in-thread jokes and observations back in the old forum days! There was never much more to Dylan then besides being a really bad villain who wanted to be as evil as his brother, and he would go on to appear in The Silver Age blog and a blog about him reviving the Scullions, but he went fallow for years... until Goron Merchant inspired a plot about the old forum. I knew Devil Ed couldn't be the main villain even if he was going to be portrayed at it, and then Meanpants came into the mix, but from there, we needed a true big villain... and the Consumer came in there! But as the ideas mixed and matched together, I came up with a deviously funny idea, one I was afraid to spoil early. I almost saved Dylan himself and all his plans until the final battle just before B'Yel'Tee appeared, but I think I made the right choice in having Smeck spill all, and luckily Gooper and Chao remembered him! Naturally, the nature of Dylan's relationship with the Lord was never explored to keep that respect for Cornwind going, but he still had his hang-up about wanting to be better than the Lord. It seems that even now we can't stop referencing that guy even though it bothers some people when it happens, I tried to at least make it too much of a joke to bring back that pang of pain from that period where it dominated RP, but with Dylan dead now, I've pretty much no reason to mention the Lord ever again save if I'm made to by other people. Dylan being a postmaster was to make his role in the plot make sense, as the post office was always the big force in Ed's old plot and never explored enough for their motives or plans to ever be... well, mentioned. At all. So, slipping in Dylan's goal and his front of memory erasure to help others made a nice fit. Of course, we'd never fight the guy himself, he was just a guy, unexceptional and as much the guy capable of the petty villainy the old jokes said he was up to. I did struggle to think up a reason why Motoko and Effie were at a stalemate killing him when they had just massacred all the other members of the Order, but the "no matter what you do, he gets what he wants" sacrifice angle seemed to work and at least made the fact the Gremlins stalled for time not completely pointless in retrospect. I was worried about the parallels with summoning Spindlelegs, but usually if I notice similarities after the fact, no one else ever indicates it as a problem. So long as I'm not ripping stuff of consciously, I'm fine, right? ...Sorry Goops. Either way, "my first joke villain" finally got his chance to not only be real, but to do some proper villainy! ...And like a proper joke, he was defeated easily. The pig he summoned though? Not so much...
B'YEL'TEE, THE CONSUMER
Season 1 character, belonged to Jumpropeman. I wanted to make a Halloween post back in 2011, so I decided to take that gif floating around the internet of a pig with teeth laughing and spin a yarn out of it, this mysterious Consumer sitting at a table in the bar and feeding on the flesh/ectoplasm/pieces of famous bargoers. Those bargoers being: EREBUS, SARAH, ZEPHYRUS, SINE, DAVID, KIRBY, JONESY, RAIN, and JUMPROPEMAN. In the original version of the B'Yel'Tee fight, these names were important. Instead of summoning old goons and gangs of RP past, I considered at first him using the powers of those he had eaten all those years ago, adding STELLA too since he ate her in their fite. Chao did something like that with the Council though, so that idea was discarded and I moved onto the idea of B'Yel'Tee summoning duplicates of these characters to fight for him... a gimmick Draco noted I did with old bargoers in general with Joyce Jr. back in 2015. I struggled for a while what I was going to do with him in battle, but that wasn't the only thing that made reviving this old character hard. Back in 2011, The Consumer teamed up with the Sheep to fite Stella and Rain in a Halloween fite that I think had a turn over of one day... crazy how them season 1 days were. The Consumer was "killed"... notably though, it mentions the Consumer disappears into smoke and disappears when he is dealt the fatal blow. Smoke that would end up being the pink smoke that makes memories disappear like Josephine's did and the one that was used to empty the minds of the old bargoers if they didn't get a constant dose of it to keep the memories "in" instead of flowing out to feed B'Yel'Tee. The Consumer being the big villain was part of my idea of reviving old Season 1-2 ideas and giving them the attention they deserved now that I write with care and quality, but making it work required explaining a few things. One big thing was that Gooper had Gust and Blackbird watch the movie the pig's appearance was from as a cute joke, but that got gears turning in my head, and I decided the appearance of the pig was based on a memory he had seized when he had been brought into existence in his avatar form. The avatar too weak to do what Dylan wanted it to do back then. As Dylan worked harder and harder to pull the real B'Yel'Tee out through various different means, I wavered on if the pig appearance should stay. The name was staying though, the BLT joke was intentional the whole time and is my little fun with Cthluhu-esque apostrophe-laden fantasy names. Maybe JRM's old D&D character from season one, the living apostrophe, may appear in RP again some day... Anyway, I decided to keep the pig appearance and initially tried to find a fearsome version of a pig from like a horror movie, but nothing matched my imagination. So, I ended up leaning into the jokes again, keeping the gentleman accessories even if they didn't make much sense in its "true form" and adding Melvin Underbelly characteristics. The Consumer was the perfect villain for the plot, making a big easy target to gang up on that no one had compunctions against killing like they would Devil Ed while also having that peculiar quality of eating meat with stories in Season 1. Why did he want those pieces of those characters specifically? Because they were powerful individuals with powerful memories, and the Consumer craves those most of all. After all, he can make memories take form, like we saw with Dylan's memories of the Scullions and others! I was careful with the memory attacks, I think its fun to have mind attacks so long as you do them right and I made sure to assure people nothing would be permanent or even required to play into, and we got some nice stuff because of it!
THE SCULLIONS
Season 1 characters, belonged to Owltomaton. I was wavering for a while on what B'Yel'Tee should summon as an extension of his memory powers and to avoid the battle from being just pounding on a giant pig the whole time. Things that were considered included reviving old villains of mine like Chuck de Nomolos, the Alice from Scotland plot, The Closet Monster, and a few other Season 1 and 2 characters to give them a better showing now that I write better in general. Ultimately though, I felt it had to be characters Dylan would both know about to contribute the memories to B'Yel'Tee and ones that weren't so big he'd be overshadowed by them in his goal to be the best villain the Kobbers ever had. This does undermine his assertion that Lord of the Night was the Kobbers' First so they remember him best (virginity metaphor!!!) but at the same time, of course he'd know about the weaker first showings! The Scullions themselves are pretty much our first villains ever despite Gooper skipping them on the Grand Villain List to get at Techmagos Vridrizen who was the first villain of "RP Proper", but the Scullions cemented their position and lead to the others being included because of one of Dylan's few moments of memorable activity. Sure, Dylan did some stuff in joke posts, but the joke blog I wrote long ago had him reviving the Scullions to fight the Kobbers as part of an evil plan. The blog itself doesn't really hold up these days, I can't believe I was so corny... but callbacks can be made to even the corny stuff! The Scullions were really simple, the riots were happening in a pre-Brawl Season 1 RP era where basically every character was killing wantonly. This was back when we were basically talking heads so everyone had no compunctions against mass murder, or eating Theodore Logan which had happened earlier in the year. The Scullions were brought in by Owltomaton, referring to them as those kooky goons from Police Academy. They were defeated easily and that was it! But being first meant I had to reference them!
THE FOREARMS GANG
Season 1 characters, belonged to Saguaro PI. Famous for being the impetus that created the Mammals are Lazy Patrol, a group of non-mammals who joined together to save Daniel and Morris from the multiple grips of these goons. I decided pretty randomly to make MALP into a thing in season 1 after JRM died in his fite with Meat Boy, and Draco went on to take the concept I did mostly for fun and evolve it into a fantastic callback plot of his own in 2016. By the time I decided to put the Scullions in for sure, from there I decided it would be the tiny villain groups that would be backing up B'Yel'Tee, and the importance of the Forearms gang in setting up MALP and the other big callback plot made them an undeniably good choice for this plot as well. The art is of course of an X-Men character rather than how they're meant to look since they're street thugs with four arm, but hey, a man makes do. Incidentally, Devil Ed also had some random street punks that were tied to the Council/Order probably in a way that was never followed up on, and had they been more interesting or their fates ever really sealed, maybe they would have joined these other guys in the B'Yel'Tee fight! Another group considered to potentially replace the Forearms gang was Clear Sleeves and her gang. I made an all female gang back in 2011 with a few characters solely so that Pool Robot could get beat up, and when the Lord changed her into Rend, she went back to get revenge on them in a particularly gruesome manner, spinning it as "art" since that was Pool Robot's big thing in trying to appeal to Optimus Prime. They didn't feel appropriate to put here nor as meaningful or memorable, but they considered! The big surprise though is apparently these guys belonged to Saguaro PI somehow?
ROLLER DISCO DEVILS
Season 1 characters, belonged to Jumpropeman. Sure, Dylan was "the original joke villain", Melvin is "the best joke villain", but if we're talking joke villains that were proper villains, my decision to rope in the Roller Disco Devils into Season 1 RP was pretty indicative of my RP path as a whole... save the random meaningless nature of it. Taken from some old comic book Hostess Fruit Pie ads, these guys played into our 80s setting and the fact we had a Roller Disco in the bar for a while by attacking the Kobbers and showing that the "devil" part of the name was more literal than expected. They would crop up later in a Draco post and were a go-to joke villain reference for a long time, and I really did want to include them in this plot as I roped in all my old joke villains together into one extravaganza, so the Scullions idea evolving was the perfect spot for them... although I did make you guys wait a bit to see them. Can't spoil the lead! Chronology of villain appearances was what really sold it though, since going backwards to Scullions and Forearms didn't feel right. Another goon group I considered to join these three gangs were the golems Cornwind dropped on us around the time he introduced Blade (not that one). Being nameless meant they didn't get a showing, although that does remind me... sort of how Keahi was pulled from the arena fites to be the bartender and how Nathan Cardinal from a different one made Reject, I almost pulled the Wielickza salt golem from WALL!! vs. Gamera into this plot. He's still got an image reference in my future folder, despite the fact I'll probably never use him now, but I had no place for him, certainly not among his golem kin. Even though I'm going to list characters who were more seriously considered and skipped later, rest assured, I was looking around to pull pretty much anyone I could for a time, just so many of them had no hook or angle worth pursuing or it was one that wasn't congruent with the plot.
STIJ
Season 1 character, belonged to Stij. Stij was a somewhat regular forum member who never touched the bar but did vote on Zoofights, enough for me to remember him. In fact, you can see him in this picture between ROB and Doktor Hanz. Perhaps I should have used that image not that I think on it, because one thing about Stij is he was clearly some sort of wrestler, so he would have been perfect for a battle. In the end, there weren't a whole lot of one-on-one battles he could have fit in really, but because I couldn't find the original image of him, I decided to relegate him to a more simple reference, being one of the two who ended up going into the coma so that other old bargoers would stay in line.
HONK ON HONK BAG
Season 1 character, belonged to Honk on Honk Bag. Unlike Stij, I never even once thought of using Honk on Honk Bag for a fighting-type thing, and his inclusion in the plot was more as a supplement to Stij being in the coma state so it wasn't just one character who tried to escape and then everyone was in line. You need more than one example to get things set in people's head! Looking again at that image linked under Stij's part, right there between Sine and Bluecollarbeaver on the right is Honk on Honk Bag. Not the Honk on Honk Bag who would become Burton Cummings, the original version where his avatar was some guy sticking his head through a television set. There was a better image of Honk on Honk Bag on the forum where Major Failure was beating him up for some comment, but besides just showing you the character like I could have with Stij, it wasn't too important since Honk on Honk Bag was never much of a role in the plot at all. Just another hostage basically. I left out Burton Cummings who was Honk's bigger character because of Burton's participation in the Ten-Way Tussle. As you already have learned, he's certainly not the only one in that situation, but being able to include a character from one of the guys who did brave the Hot Drugs Stand to talk Zoofights was nice in its own way.
EFFIE
Season 5 character, belonged to Jumpropeman. After making a bit of a splash during the big Make-Your-Own-Neo-Kobber events in Gooper's Neo Kobber plot, there was always an urge to bring Effie back. I decided to give it a go this year, deciding to spin her behavior in the Neo Kobber event and the difference between it and her portrayal in Fire Emblem Fates as the core basis of her character. I pondered on what would make a braggart proud of her own strength become an unassuming shy woman, and that's where the whole Hero Kid angle came up. Her bragging drew the attention of a foe who she wouldn't fight because beating up a kid is bad news, but Hero Kid was desperate to prove his strength and tried to bait her into battling her, turning up his attempts to draw her attention until her friends were hurt and some of them even died. We only explored this backstory in glimpses, but it was what had turned Effie into a person who had no idea who she was and kept trying to pretend to be something she wasn't to protect others. It would take Motoko to pop her out of this funk, and early on in the season was pretty okay in regards to find her way on her own... and then the Garon stuff happened and I completely lost interest in the character. I wanted to kill her off or otherwise dispose of her because of the constant passive-aggressive sniping at her any time I tried to enjoy using her, but I instead just tossed her in the background until she had to have her moment tied to the plot. At least NEO seems like it will be an okay send-off for her where she can be herself, but she definitely did not pan out as intended. If something like this ever happens again, even though its baked into the rules now that you can't just play fast and loose with other people's worldbuilding, I'll probably just kill the character off more quickly to avoid the emotional turmoil. I mean, I've got Tomiko and Cirno from Touhou stuff, but that's things abiding to rules others established, which I can handle. Taking the rules of things I've established and flipping them for a bar jokepost that is thrown in my face every time I try to do something is something I'd rather not see again. I will say, Ven has seemingly stopped or at least slowed down the random morning new character but actually just a deviantart link post, which I'm very happy to see! For some reason the guy most averse to us playing fast and loose with dimensions and all is the person who technically does it the most with those morning random character posts, which is equally perplexing since he claims to be the most focused on worldbuilding but introduces the most disruptive elements to that goal with so many random unexplained things, but it at least means we can instead potentially get meaningful things from Ven's posts and less troublesome stuff like Garon or other things I'll avoid mentioning to avoid them reappearing. My biggest shame though was Effie's cats fell to the wayside! I named them after the Catscratch characters and intended them to show up a bit more often, but there was no reason for her to bring them to the bar when she's got a room, so... I also wanted her to fight with her shield more than she maybe did. Originally the plan for this year was to have characters fight in more interesting ways, with Effie focusing on defensive combat. Harth and Ethopoiea were both part of that initiative but I abandoned it because it didn't look like a promising route. Gysel's approach to combat was influenced by this old idea as well! Still, I guess I did SOMETHING with Effie in the end, even though the Neo Kobber stuff of the plot was a bit thrown off. It was cool to see other people contribute their Neo Kobbers here to link into her potential betrayal, and when I saw people sending them I didn't want to discourage it, but at the same time I didn't plan for Effie and Motoko to hide they were good guys the whole time when the Kobbers showed up. It added a few more references to an already reference heavy plot though, and they seemed happy, so we were all winners! I guess another regret was her Neo Kobber past wasn't as explored as I would have liked, but I think I'm ready to just wrap her up and send her off save NEO cameos. A good reason why I don't RP many video game characters presented right here! Ignore that Knack shaped silhouette on the horizon...
MELVIN UNDERBELLY
Season 3 character, belonged to Jumpropeman. I've already said why Melvin dropped by for this plot, but I'll say it again: Dylan was basically the original JRM joke villain, but Melvin was probably the most effective. This fat halfling was made when Draco snagged on a bit of dialogue and I decided to make a little dayplot for Draco back in Season 3, the dragon ousting the fat halfling from Mellow Hills without killing him. When you don't kill a JRM character though, you're always at risk of them making an appearance some day, and Melvin would poke his nose in a few more times, such as being part of Cleft's OSI training. His big years surprisingly felt like the Vegas when the jokes were are their strongest and most frequent, the halfling full on playing into trying to be the top villain without having much of a reason to be it besides him asserting that he was big, therefore the best. I considered killing him off in a Big Bar Brawl for awhile, and when Cornwind held Twisted Metal, I decided I had to enter Melvin to play off the joke that Cornwind couldn't kill him despite him originally asserting he had done so somewhere without my participation or permission. If Twisted Metal had gone on schedule, maybe that would have been Melvin's end... even though I told Cornwind not to kill him and there was no indication that Twisted Metal was to be lethal at all originally. I had to work in a way to justify why Hector and Vector would kill when they suddenly did it and revealed that yeah, Twisted Metal is apparently lethal. Melvin making a tear in Twisted Metal was fun to watch and I had a joy drawing the art of it, but by then Melvin had been sworn to a few things like meeting Zargeesh and what would be his crowning achievement in this plot, so the disclaimer that Cornwind can't kill him became an even bigger one. I did plan for Melvin to appear a bit before he showed up for his big moment in the finale, but 2017 saw a lot of my old joke characters fading away. The Vegas guys had done their time and it was better to let them fade rather than trot them out a few times like I did with Hurley before I finally retired him as well. Melvin didn't make any unnecessary appearances, allowing me to joke that he had just arrived on the island finally when the event was starting! Tying together the fates of my original joke villain and my biggest felt just so appropriate and allowed me to turn B'Yel'Tee from what was originally intended to be a fearsome looking pig monster into something more appropriate for the plot's general tone. A bit of a shame to finally say goodbye to the fat halfling, who I included in RP on a whim because I happened to have played the first bit of Overlord and remembered him when Draco asked the right questions. Oh RP, the weird way you work is wonderful to me~
Before we move on, here's a list of characters who considered for the plot but were rejected for one reason or another: REDENGIE (Season 1 character who appeared in the bar briefly, the Red Engineer from TF2 and rejected since the character it tied to Spy stuff), MISTAYA (Season 1 character who was a nice looking lady with a bow, I believe Del knows her and we talked to her once I believe post-old forum so since she's not potentially gone forever, no inclusion), POD (Season 1 character who was a hologram of Queen Elizabeth, no real place to put her), THE GOVERNATOR (Season 1 character who was Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, no real place to put him that more deserving characters didn't already fill the slot for), BALBOACONSTRICTOR (Season 1 character who was in the same spot as the Governator, save this was Rocky Balboa/Sylvester Stallone instead), THEL VADAM (Season 1 character who was the Arbiter from Halo, rejected because Draco does some Halo stuff and people seemed to have fond memories of this guy despite me not seeing much of him), WHEAT (just a laughing smile guy from Season 1, no role was imagined for him), BANJOJOJO (despite his niece's art getting in and Arachnofightya as well, Mojojojo with a banjo didn't have any place in the plot that felt right for this Season 1 character), RAVENKANA (Season 1 user, can't remember an avatar and the images are borked so no character was considered), MISTER LYNCH (just some Season 1 guy, never considered for much but was in my mind just in case), THE SUPPORTER (was actually once considered for the plot! In season one, these Gangsta Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street guys earned a lot of ire from the userbase and I would have had them as the original instigators at the Zoofights 7 battle, but they had already come back and died in Gooper's big Final Boss BBBBP extravaganza so they were scrapped), other jurists from Devil Ed's court trial (THE GRINCH was considered most strongly but left out ultimately so that someone else could better use him. Some Samhain related thing or someone willing to give him a go elsewhere would have been better than squeezing him in somewhere he didn't belong. THE DOCTOR though was left out because A: I don't want Doctor Who stuff in RP if I can avoid it and I still pray for the day the TARDIS disappears forever, and B: I'd definitely not want to RP the Doctor himself and have to admit I would not do the character the justice they deserve. The series probably has a lot of good stuff and even though I think it taints our RPverse by its presence at least in regards to its bigger aspects, I still wouldn't want to disrespect it with some halfass inclusion here), and AZULA (Brine's Secret Fiter from BBB5 that I wanted to include as a newer callback. She would have appeared in the Kobber Museum battle back when I felt Reject and the Gremlins weren't enough, but she was scrapped even after I got permission from Brine to use her).
One thing that was left out in a big way was an entirely abandoned piece of the plot involving some unfinished Season 2 business. Besides Devil Ed's stuff, the biggest dropped thing in ZFRP feels like it might have been Cornwind's reploid plot in 2012 with tralphium and all that. I had hoped to weave the pieces of it into this plot as well, having Cornwind's villain of that plot (Lumen I think was the name?) be trying to get his stuff going again after it petered out a few years back. Tralphium was considered to be some sort of device he was developing, or a giant moon robot, and a few other things like that to justify the hint clue making no sense and it was to be joked about no doubt. Speaking of tralphium, Spy's Ophelia Chill plot was a perfect companion to this stuff, making some jokes and references to really make this year the year of the callback. Anyway, I was getting ready to ask Cornwind about integrating it and even noting that I'd have to be in control for it to go off properly (CW had another year this year where his attendance was seemingly random, so you can't pull of a joint plot with momentum that way) but then Harpy beat me to the punch, having a Planeswarden post sweep it up suddenly and blindsiding me a bit. In the end, it was for the best, I think it would have been a fun addition here but it would be a bit out of place and I'm not sure Cornwind would have approved of it being a bit player in the plot with one event around it rather than something bigger. Lumen? would have made appearances as a member of The Council though!
The biggest changed part of the plot has to be a pair of characters, one who didn't get in and one who changed a lot...
MR. FISH AND MR. WALRUS
Mr. Fish the Businessman and Mr. Walrus both come from a tale I've told before about my time on the Star Fox Assault GameFAQS message board and how I had my first encounter not only with RP, but an RP bar... a bar that I got closed one day when I had a bad headache and reported it for off-topic posting. Mr. Walrus was just my username then, but that was the name I became infamous for, the old people who liked the bar topic migrating to THE STAR FOX ULTRA MEGA BOARD or something like that and briefly doing stuff there before leaving. They had a Mr. Walrus hate subforum they were that mad, but it died down after they lost interest in their board in general. Still, that was the first time I saw forum RP in the wild, but to say I had a character in it wouldn't be accurate. I did do this weird thing though that might qualify Mr. Fish as my first RP character. Mr. Fish the Businessman and a cast of characters I've forgotten would pop up in Star Fox Assault threads about pretty much anything and "review the thread". I mostly remember Mr. Fish because I sort of imagined him as the fish in a suit from Spongebob that he saw in Rock Bottom, although by now, Mr. Fish's image has been completely cemented as Businessfish, a character from a set of Facebook messenger stickers that was just too perfect for representing the character.
Mr. Fish and Mr. Walrus didn't start as characters for this plot, even though I realized quickly they were perfect for a callback plot as they called back to my earliest ever taste of RP. Instead, they were initially envisioned as a pair of wacky villains to serve under a rather serious one in the first of my many rejected island plots.I do believe Those Left Behind was imagined before that plot was cooked up, but from there, Mr. fish and Mr. Walrus left because they didn't match the very serious tone of that dropped plot about a virus that was meant to lower the Earth's population. So, from there, they were considered for a plot instead about sea creatures attacking the island, a plot I dropped when Snowmads basically did it this year and thus I didn't want to repeat it again next year, but Mr. Fish and Mr. Walrus were more to be hooks from Those Left Behind into that plot at this point. They would connect that plot to this one, but Mr. Fish's role and Mr. Walrus's were already cooked up. Before I started writing Mr. Fish, he was a villain through and through. The businessman made the Kobber Museum to feed B'Yel'Tee, drumming up old memories that were more tasty for the pig god and to help the old bargoers prove to be more recognizable. This was scrapped, but crazed bond villain and Devil Ed still funded it in RP as part of that same goal, while Mr. Fish's intentions were purely motivated by his interest in the Kobbers. The Punfisher connection was made to sort of connect him to the scrapped undersea life rising up plot, but Punfisher also made for a fun moment where Mr. Fish almost appeared to have a dark side while talking to Chuckster... but I thought it was funnier to play on the idea that Mr. Fish has so much family he would know what happened to Punfisher but he had no fondness for him. I've already implied that Gefilte, Jaws's manager, is also tied to this strange family, and they're just as likely to have only loose bonds. Anyway, by the time I wrote the blog introducing the Kobber Museum, Mr. Fish was still set to potentially be a bad guy, but the fun gimmick of constant hydration and just a development of his character made me like him and make him almost too goofy for such a turn. I can't say when it was scrapped completely, but I feel it was before the Sarahkin dropped by the museum, as that was the absolute point I decided he couldn't go evil no matter what. His original reason for being a bad guy was his desire to take over the King of Beasts, seeing it as the biggest acquisition a businessman could make. This manifested a little in RP for when he took over as momentary manager, and in RP, he still does believe the same thing, he just won't do evil things to get it. If it wasn't such a breach of etiquette, I would try and make him the major owner of the Zoofights side of the business so we'd always have a face to this thus far faceless side of our RP! But for now, he sticks with the bottled water (a role he was given solely to play into crazed bond villain's part in the plot) and the Kobber Museum. Mr. Fish was meant to be taken care of during the water bottling plant event, meaning the Kobber Museum was the next target because we learned of Mr. Fish's nature rather than getting baited there as part of a distraction and some revenge on Mr. Fish for his part in foiling the water bottling plan.
Mr. Walrus though, was very different. He was, originally, the true villain behind the entire plot. While everyone else was fighting for their own goals, Mr. Walrus was manipulating all of them behind the scenes, even Motoko, knowing full well about her secret mission and using it to his advantage. Mr. Walrus was a true mastermind, and we wouldn't even get to kill him in the plot. He was intended to get away in the end, Motoko potentially tracking him to kill him if people were incredibly upset with that ending, but I almost considered having Mr. Walrus be the villain the Kobbers could never kill, always getting away and being a step ahead. His goal was pretty simple: he just loved to destroy bars. The fact he destroyed the Star Fox bar was to be part of his backstory, and the thrill of destroying social connections like that sent him out across the galaxy to do it more. It was going to be implied that Mr. Walrus was responsible for shuttering the old Manhattan bar and for the scuttling of the ZFS King of Beasts as part of his goal of destroying the biggest bar ever known, the biggest target, his white whale: The King of Beasts. Thing is, before the Kobber Museum battle, he'd realize the plan was doomed and during the event at the museum, there would be monitors playing Mr. Walrus talking to the Kobbers, revealing his nature, his plans, what he did, and how he was already gone, but no one could follow him because B'Yel'Tee was currently being summoned as they spoke. The distraction was much more important then since it allowed Mr. Walrus to get away. Mr. Walrus was still considered for the plot even after the season started, but between the Snowmads having a walrus as their leader and Ven having his sea people introduce Hugh Man the walrus in people clothes that looked so much like Mr. Walrus I almost asked Ven to remove it so I could do Mr. Walrus still, I felt this angle was just gonna be another walrus and thus not as fun. Well... he also wasn't too fun of a concept at all I think, and once the plot became less about grand tales and dramatic moments and more about fun, Mr. Walrus was completely excised, and unlike Mr. Fish he wasn't given a joke character role to redeem him. I'm still thinking some day we may see Mr. Walrus, but not as something so serious. Maybe as a joke character. Originally too, Mr. Fish admired Mr. Walrus's business acumen, and when Mr. Walrus told him they were going to "destroy the King of Beasts", Mr. Fish interpreted that as destroy them financially so they could acquire it, not literally dissolve the bar by causing strife between old and new members and accentuating the fleeting nature of its members and how the bar effects so many characters poorly in the long run. After what the plot had become, this would have been a jarring reversal of tone I admit, so I don't regret scrapping it. Brain Gremlin carried on most of the good parts of Mr. Walrus's behavior during the museum event without any of the stuff that could have ruined the plot as a whole.
As for the plot structure, there were a lot more Just Fight These Guys events until the Mythbustazz got me thinking more creatively about all of them. We did still get quite a few, but we had the myth event, the video games, the traps during the water bottle plant... I tried to make each one more interesting than just a themeless battle with old characters, and sometimes I tried a little too hard. I considered having a Kobber History Quiz during the Museum battle for some reason, but quizes in RP are unfairly tipped towards those of us who remember it too well and it was just happening for the sake of it. Having varied and unique event structures is great, but I didn't want it to be forced. One thing I will note is that in the original notes for the plot, the water bottling plant happened after the Devil Ed showdown, which didn't make too much sense even then. The idea was that we'd learn about the water bottling plant from Devil Ed as he revealed he wasn't evil but knew about Mr. Fish and all being bad guys, but that didn't work well timewise. Why weren't we fighting them tomorrow then? Not to mention that the Kobber Museum would then be basically right after to make sense as well. It ended up being that I put down the hints for Kuwahawi Springs being tied to things so I followed up on that instead of letting it sit for too long, ultimately making the plot structure a bit better. Other than that, most events had so many versions its not even worth trying to figure out what they used to be. It was more like almost every character was tied to some generic battle plot until I started whittling the cast down, found spots that worked for them, and finally formulated something that could evolve into a plot that wasn't just a hundred battles all devoted to old guys.
While not my most meaningful or well-written plot, this one certainly played into my interests a lot, mainly, the joint history of our group. RP is just about fun sometimes, something I forget as I try to tell compelling stories or make satisfying character arcs, and this plot was mostly just about having a bit of fun with our history. I hope you all enjoyed it, and I don't regret the way it turned out! If anything, I wish I could have done even more, but I'm glad it didn't drag on either. It got in a ton of fun references, wrapped up tons of old loose ends, and let me clean up a lot of unfinished business, both mine and other people's. Thank you all for attending it and for reading this, and while I don't think I'll ever make a plot that indulges in callbacks so flagrantly again, I'm sure I'll keep coming up with wonderful ways to bring our past back to be celebrated.
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