#Also I want Bad and Baghera's concerns to be justified

[qsmprambling]

Anarchy and conflict is fun, but I would actually fully support Bad doing the hermit anarchist lifestyle of just not getting involved with any of the government nonsense anymore and doing his own thing (while still leaving him room for conflict by just refusing to follow the system).

[phocidine]

I feel like there’s a disconnect between what fans frustrated with Bad’s character want for consquences and what Bad’s fans consider consquences.

(Explanation below)

Bad was self-harming via modded minecraft bird and having concerning lapses of memory and getting hit in the kneecaps every 2 seconds by purgatory and mourning over his children. And now he’s lost his memory and is either dying from a nuke blast or recovering from dying.

So he’s a character that does some shitty stuff, but he’s also kind of rotting away where he stands, so it balances out right? Why do other fans want him to hurt more? How could he even possibly hurt more than he’s already hurting?

This is what a lot of protective Bad fans believe, but it’s not at all what other fans are talking about.

When I say consequences, I don’t mean the consequences of letting himself be vulture food or the consequences of just…existing in purgatory. These are painful but they have nothing to do with his actions towards others, which are the actions that myself and I suspect a lot of other BBH fatigued fans care about. Does everyone remember that whole ordeal where Bad got interrogated by Tubbo about Ron? Bad would be eaten by soul vultures whether he tortured Ron or not, but Tubbo beefing with him only happened because of what he did to Ron. THAT is a consequence.

And yeah, I do think Bad deserves consequences. Not for stupid shit like furniture stealing, and not for anything that happened in purgatory because I couldn’t watch most of purgatory and I would rather slam my head into a wall than talk about purgatory discourse again, but for the cold and calculating way he treated all of his friends for his big scheme after the Acceptance stream onwards.

I’m going to guess from the fact that this behavior started at the same time as Bad’s rapid mental health decline that we as an audience are not supposed to consider Bad treating everyone around him like ends to the means of his mysterious plan as a good thing, or a neutral character trait.

It might be easy to brush off Bad’s behavior as just angst not really worth remembering, but…I was invested in Baghera’s backstory and how it intertwined with the Ron storyline. I was invested in her and Bad’s friendship. I don’t want to just brush off the fact that Baghera drug herself through the mud to protect Bad and he ignored her in return. Situations like this have happened several times. Bad acts like an asshole to people he cares about because he has a one track mind to save the eggs, and then anyone who would like to see the pain or indignity he caused those other characters have some kind of follow up just don’t get it.

I’ve heard some confusion over why people want consequences from Bad when other characters have done way worse, but the thing is those characters DO get consequences.

Cellbit can’t embrace his cannibal persona and be friends with Pac at the same time. He’s messing up his relationship with his sister. He’s pitting Fit and Bagi against him because they care about the two people he has hurt. The Feds are looking for the worker killer right now and who knows what they plan to do to him. Cellbit does shitty things, and whether not you think he’s justified in any of it, he is suffering as a DIRECT consequence.

Slimecicle didn’t go on a murder spree against the eggs and then everyone just moved on and forgot about it. He was crying and screaming about Flippa throughout the entire thing, and at the end of the stream he has a very sincere “what am I doing?” moment and admits to himself that she’s gone and he needs to accept it. He showed regret, and then he went down and apologized to everyone and said it wouldn’t happen again (although admittedly he did treat the apology part like a bit). This example is kind of shaky because killing eggs was still less of a huge deal back then, but I still wanted to bring it up because consequences don’t always have to be punishments, they can be moments of humility and regret, too. Bad is in despair because of the missing eggs, but it would be nice to see him have some despair over how disconnected he might feel to his loved ones specifically because of the effects of his downward spiral. Or to have him show some regret for how he acted, whether he ends up apologizing or not. I doubt this will happen, it doesn’t really seem like ccBad’s style, but it is an option.

The eggs are back now so Bad will probably go back to being a slightly obnoxious babysitter with trust issues and the frustration of him being able to throw people under the bus for his own needs and getting away with it constantly will hopefully fade away. I do like Bad’s character after all, I just also like the characters that interact with him and feel like they deserve better in the narrative.