Bob Belcher (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sesameseedpuns) wrote2016-10-02 12:28 am
sesameseedpuns) wrote2016-10-02 12:28 am
Entry tags:
application | entranceway
Name: Dani
DW username:comatoseroses
E-Mail: t.fantasyfan@gmail.com
IM: tfantasyfan17 @ aim
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comatoseroses
Other Characters: N/A at present!
Character Name: Bob Belcher
Series: Bob's Burgers
Timeline: post-S05E21 ("The Oeder Games")
Canon Resource Link: series wiki article | bob wikia page
Character History:
There hasn't been a ton of specificity in canon about Bob's pre-canon history, but what's mentioned and shown has been relatively consistent. While nothing's really been said about his mother or where she is, it's mentioned that Bob was primarily raised by his father (Bob Sr., aka Big Bob). He was brought up in his dad's burger restaurant, an environment which was super "all work and no play": he didn't really have toys as a kid.
Big Bob was a very no-nonsense man overall. He wasn't much for smiling or laughing, or emotional talks, or compromises, or for deviating from the norm in any significant way. In contrast to his father, Bob was always a very creative person, and this is something that he demonstrates not only in flashbacks, but through the entire show. He didn't have toys, so he used a spatula as a toy fighter pilot and turned a weird piece of soap into his adopted pet dog. Cooking, and burgers specifically, were a life calling for him from early on, something he grew to be passionate about. As he grew older and grew more interested in putting his creativity to work with his passion for cooking, he met a great deal of resistance from his dad. It came to a head when Big Bob tried to make Bob his business partner: Bob said no, and then basically blew up at him for all the shot-down ideas and resistance to change over the years. Annnd that was about the last time they were in a room together for more than 15 minutes for the next 15 years, give or take.
Bob didn't let the sudden lack of restaurant in his life stop him, though. He went out, grew a mustache, and presumably started a restaurant on his own while he was still young and single. He met his future wife Linda at some point, a hopeless romantic free-spirit type who broke her engagement to a future health inspector for Bob, got married to Linda in time (and failed to go on a honeymoon because they couldn't afford not to work), and then proceeded to have 3 children with her. Tina, Gene, and finally Louise. He seems to have been a pretty actively involved dad, not afraid to have fun with his own kids, and was even the one who potty-trained all of them. Fast-forward by about nine years from Louise's birth, give or take, and... then you have canon.
Welcome to Bob's Burgers: a small restaurant that's usually just barely scraping by, if at all. Bob makes an excellent burger, something that's noted multiple times in canon, and having his own restaurant allows him to be as creative as he wants. He has a burger of the day special every day, and it's always got a pun for a name (ex: Thank God It's Fried Egg Burger, She's A Super Leek Burger, Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Zucchini Burger). Bob greatly enjoys what he does, for all that he's not a huge success and struggles to compete with the popular pizza place across the street. His rivalry with Jimmy Pesto, the owner of said pizza place, is as ridiculous as it is childish, and things tend to escalate any time they cross paths. Tina wanted Jimmy's son to be at her birthday party early in the show: Jimmy said he'd let him, but only if Bob shaved off his mustache and let Jimmy pin it to his trophy wall. Just one example of many. It helps establish early on that there's a lot Bob is willing to do for his family.
To define Bob's children in simple terms, consider Tina a boy-crazy, horse-crazy, mostly comfortable in her understanding of herself Lawful Good, Gene a really weird, musical, oddly comfortable being nude in public Chaotic Neutral, and Louise a smart, cunning, tsundere about her family and ambivalent about the wellbeing of pretty much anyone else Chaotic Evil. The three of them are very different and more than a little weird: not to mention all lacking standard social graces in their own unique ways. Linda's more of a Chaotic Good: fun-loving, romantic at heart, and head in the clouds a lot.
Bob actively tends to try to be there for his family, or to find ways to bond with them and have fun with them. He gets his legs waxed with Tina when she's too afraid to get it done alone. When it turns out he and Gene are interested in an old spaghetti Western film series, Bob buys an entire box set to watch with him (bonding with Gene can be hard for Bob. They don't have a lot in common). When Louise worries that she and Bob will grow apart as she grows up, just like their favorite father-daughter acting duo did, he reassures her that that will never happen. Linda brings a lot of genuine fun and excitement to Bob's life, for better or worse. Sometimes a mix of both. Like when she named the raccoon who eats from their dumpster Little King Trashmouth, and later brought him inside when another raccoon showed up and started to fight with him. Bob spends a Valentine's Day running all around the city desperately searching for a cheesy love-meter machine that he thought they once used on a date together (he was very mistaken). A lot of... just a lot of stuff going on with these guys. The Belcher family is at the heart of the show, and Bob tends to be at the heart of the Belcher family. To keep with the alignment metaphor, Bob is kind of a Chaotic Neutral hiding in the guise of a True Neutral/Neutral Good.
On the surface, his role in canon is to play the practical straight man to his family's frankly weird notions and actions, and further to the weird notions and actions of the other more minor characters around them. And a lot of the time, that's true to what he's trying to do, even though he has about as much social grace and dignity as his kids do at the end of the day. The crazy situations that he and his family wind up in are ridiculously diverse and numerous. They get kidnapped onto a cruise ship by a captain who wants Bob to be his guest chef (after Bob said no very clearly). They earn a favor from a notorious biker gang for serving them beer and burgers after a funeral, and then the gang leader's wife gives birth in their restaurant. Linda's health inspector ex-fiance, Hugo, is frequently on their back looking for any excuse he can find to shut them down. At one point, he retires to spend his days on a nude beach, and Bob tries to best him in a nude decathlon to get him to come back, because Hugo's replacement is trying to blackmail them. Bob doesn't even win the decathlon. There's an episode where Bob and Linda go to the hospital to get Bob's finger stitched up (tomato-cutting accident), and they return to find out that not only did their kids start an illegal casino in the basement, but they're $1000 in debt to the landlord over rock-paper-scissors. The landlord's brother straight-up tries to murder Bob and the landlord when Bob convinces him not to sell the local amusement park on the pier.
Events of this caliber are interspersed with a lot of everyday problems, like the family not having money to fix the car yet, or Linda getting a job somewhere and the restaurant being both less fun and having its bills a lot less smoothly juggled, or Bob desperately trying to find a way to get a plot in the local community garden, because he's very passionate about gardening on the down-low. As a family, they all often pursue their passions, whatever they may be and however off-color they are. And much like in real life, it's never a case of huge success or recognition: instead they find their paths lead to a lot of weirdness, compromises, and little victories. Just as an example, when TV station corruption keeps them from proving that they were cheated out of a game show victory by Jimmy Pesto and the host, there's no sudden turn of the tides in their favor. They don't win or prove their case to the TV court. They lose and they leave. But on the way home, they see that Pesto's got a flat tire and has no idea how to even change a tire. And of course, Bob ends up helping him with it anyway.
Bob actively tries to be supportive of his kids and his wife and his friends, and more often than not he sides with the morally right course of action no matter what insane thing has been happening. That might mean refusing to sell his friend Teddy burgers after hearing that his cholesterol is way too high, or shaving off his mustache so that he can try to give his daughter her dream birthday party. It's easy for family, friends, and acquaintances to wheedle him into doing a lot of things: the landlord bribes Bob's whole family into pretending to be his for a Thanksgiving. If someone calls him with a crazy request and ends with "I'm desperate, I have nowhere else to turn," Bob will probably feel obligated to do it for them. When Hugo the health inspector has just shut them down (somewhat unnecessarily) and needs help getting out of his parking spot without hitting anyone, not only does Bob do the right thing and try to help direct him: he literally ends up in the driver's seat doing it for Hugo.
Because he's always trying to be a sane and rational voice, he ends up stepping up as a leader and making a lot of dramatic speeches, which doesn't often work out. When he tries to rally his neighbors to protest the rent hike, it somehow ends with everyone turning on him, and him turning on them, only for things to flip back around after another passionate speech. Bob is a passionate person about almost everything at heart, even when it isn't always well-delivered.
It's no surprise that the flat "oh my god"s and valiant attempts to reign in the chaos he's plunged face-first into are only a part of what he brings to the table in the show. Bob's creativity, again, is something that runs throughout the show, even if only in relatively low-key ways like his burger of the day specials. He's got a habit of puppeting entire conversations between himself and inanimate objects when he's bored, especially if he's drunk: Bob spends most of an early episode talking to a miniature figurine of Keanu Reeves a la the movie 'Speed'. He pretends to be stuck in the Inhibition-era crawlspaces of his walls for days to avoid dealing with his in-laws-- and then really does get stuck, and loses his mind in a mini-sendup to The Shining. In the episode 'Dawn of the Peck,' he has a drunk conversation with a turkey baster (a judgmental one) as a result of his own pent-up disappointment with not cooking Thanksgiving dinner. When Bob gets invested in something or takes up arms about it, he can get super intense. He spends an episode going to increasingly desperate lengths to knock Jimmy Pesto's high score on a burger-based video game (cleverly named BOB SUX) off of the leader board. Not only does it end with Bob getting carpal tunnel and hallucinating on his pain medication, it also gets the entire family banned from the local Yacht Club because Bob is crouched beneath a pool table fighting security guards with an oar. His day-to-day interactions can be stiff and awkward, but when it comes to it, he's as wacky and emotive as everybody else in the series. He'll get drunk and jam out to Donna Summer while unaware that the streets outside are rampant with vicious, bloodthirsty poultry, then decide that he does want to cook Thanksgiving dinner and walk to the store. When a critic goes to the restaurant on an off day, Bob yells at people in the streets for ignoring his restaurant over a bad review: he then attempts to go to the critic's home for a do-over, and the situation escalates into holding a food critic hostage in his own home. He does the right thing in the end, but it doesn't negate the huge lengths he goes to when he's irrational and over-the-top.
People might see his general honesty and good work and respect it- because Bob is certainly a pretty honest man and good at what he does- but they might also see him putting up his sister-in-law's paintings of animal butts just to spite two uppity old people who run an art store in town, and then yelling at them about it.
Someone never knows where Bob's burgers will take them. Which is just as well, because Bob and his family also have no idea where it will take them.
Abilities/Special Powers: No special powers to speak of! Bob is very much an average human man with average human capabilities.
Third-Person Sample:
The adjustment period for the Wonderland thing is... rough for Bob. He manages three days or so at an even keel, all bets placed on either having been drugged or on just having a weirdly lucid and detailed dream. But the thing about time is, it passes. He stubs his toe here and there, dozes off in the armchair in the room he holed up in.
God.
It occurs to him, as he hovers unshaven and tired over the supplies he pulled out of the closet, that he probably really has just gone crazy. The only other option he can come up with is that this is actually happening. That he's gone from wrangling a victory out of the mess that the rent strike turned into to living in a single room like some kind of sweaty, mustachioed goblin. Lin and the kids can hold the fort down well enough without him, he guesses, but that does nothing to help him figure out what he's doing in a creepy magical mansion in the first place.
When a man spends his life working to build a restaurant with mediocre service, almost no regular customers, and a limited menu, that man should be allowed to spend the rest of his life struggling to get by in his restaurant. Uninterrupted.
"Oh my god. What am I doing?" Bob scratches his chin, contemplating the condensed soup he's warming up on a crappy hotplate. It's not much. And he's stirring it with a plastic fork. Even when a creepy mansion could give him whatever he asks for, he can't say with honesty that he suddenly wants a lot of nice stuff. It's just too nice. Silk shirts are flimsy and people end up having to polish real silver. Bob picks up his discarded soup can. "I'm not even cooking burgers. It's like there's nothing in the universe I can count on."
"You can count on me, Bob," he answers himself in a higher-pitched, indefinably accented voice, shaking the soup can so that it looks like the top is a flapping mouth. "I'll always be there to support you."
"Yeah, I know, soup can. Even if it's a little-- no, never mind." Bob shakes his head. "That means a lot to me, soup can. Thanks."
"Never mind what?"
"Well, I mean. I don't wanna offend you. It's not important."
"Bob, look at me. Look at me." Bob looks at the soup can. For all intents and purposes, the soup can looks back at him. "I'm your friend."
"Yeah, that's kind of what I mean, though. I've only known you for, like. Four minutes. It's like, are we friends yet? I thought it was more like an acquaintance thing. Maybe you're just. You come on a little strong. Intense." The soup can remains un-puppeteered in his grip. "And you're offended. Sorry. I'm sorry."
"It's fine." It's clearly not fine.
"Okay, but your tone doesn't match up with that, so... how can we fix this?"
The can doesn't answer, obviously, but Bob likes to imagine that if it were a real person, it would've shrugged noncommittally. He sighs. Soup can is turning out to be a real drama queen. Maybe he should have picked up a plastic fork.
"How can I fix this?"
The soup in the pot is starting to burn.
First-Person Sample:
[ There is a monumental amount of fumbling going on on the other side of the device, even when it's been set up and appropriately turned on to record. It takes Bob a second to figure out exactly what he's doing, but he picks up on it sooner or later. Technologically adept, here he comes. ]
Oh god, it's on. Wait. [ Probably not a great first impression choice. ] Hi. I guess I'm looking for whoever owns this phone. I wasn't... stealing it. I mean, this might look pretty bad since I have it. Buuut it's really nice, so there's no way I could get a plan for it. And I couldn't afford to replace it if my kids tried to put it in the deep fryer, so. It's better if I just give it back before they ever know I had it.
[ None of those things are jokes. They're very matter-of-factly put. As far as he figures today, he probably came out of a weird side of Mr. Fischoeder's hedge maze and someone will try to tell him he owes a life debt for scratching their favorite phone.
Bob sounds Tired. ]
God, am I just making a memo? This idea was bad. It's not good. No one would even be able to hear this if they lost it. I'm just gonna leave it here by these nice... topiaries, and pretend this isn't happening, because I've lost my mind.
[ For a long moment it seems like Bob's going to leave it at that. Naturally, he pops back on, already sounding like he's losing the lid on the cool he was pretending to have. ]
And I just wanna remind everyone that kidnapping is illegal! It doesn't matter how rich you are or how-- how "cool" you think your Alice in Wonderland theme park is gonna be, which it's not!
DW username:
comatoserosesE-Mail: t.fantasyfan@gmail.com
IM: tfantasyfan17 @ aim
Plurk:
Other Characters: N/A at present!
Character Name: Bob Belcher
Series: Bob's Burgers
Timeline: post-S05E21 ("The Oeder Games")
Canon Resource Link: series wiki article | bob wikia page
Character History:
There hasn't been a ton of specificity in canon about Bob's pre-canon history, but what's mentioned and shown has been relatively consistent. While nothing's really been said about his mother or where she is, it's mentioned that Bob was primarily raised by his father (Bob Sr., aka Big Bob). He was brought up in his dad's burger restaurant, an environment which was super "all work and no play": he didn't really have toys as a kid.
Big Bob was a very no-nonsense man overall. He wasn't much for smiling or laughing, or emotional talks, or compromises, or for deviating from the norm in any significant way. In contrast to his father, Bob was always a very creative person, and this is something that he demonstrates not only in flashbacks, but through the entire show. He didn't have toys, so he used a spatula as a toy fighter pilot and turned a weird piece of soap into his adopted pet dog. Cooking, and burgers specifically, were a life calling for him from early on, something he grew to be passionate about. As he grew older and grew more interested in putting his creativity to work with his passion for cooking, he met a great deal of resistance from his dad. It came to a head when Big Bob tried to make Bob his business partner: Bob said no, and then basically blew up at him for all the shot-down ideas and resistance to change over the years. Annnd that was about the last time they were in a room together for more than 15 minutes for the next 15 years, give or take.
Bob didn't let the sudden lack of restaurant in his life stop him, though. He went out, grew a mustache, and presumably started a restaurant on his own while he was still young and single. He met his future wife Linda at some point, a hopeless romantic free-spirit type who broke her engagement to a future health inspector for Bob, got married to Linda in time (and failed to go on a honeymoon because they couldn't afford not to work), and then proceeded to have 3 children with her. Tina, Gene, and finally Louise. He seems to have been a pretty actively involved dad, not afraid to have fun with his own kids, and was even the one who potty-trained all of them. Fast-forward by about nine years from Louise's birth, give or take, and... then you have canon.
Welcome to Bob's Burgers: a small restaurant that's usually just barely scraping by, if at all. Bob makes an excellent burger, something that's noted multiple times in canon, and having his own restaurant allows him to be as creative as he wants. He has a burger of the day special every day, and it's always got a pun for a name (ex: Thank God It's Fried Egg Burger, She's A Super Leek Burger, Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Zucchini Burger). Bob greatly enjoys what he does, for all that he's not a huge success and struggles to compete with the popular pizza place across the street. His rivalry with Jimmy Pesto, the owner of said pizza place, is as ridiculous as it is childish, and things tend to escalate any time they cross paths. Tina wanted Jimmy's son to be at her birthday party early in the show: Jimmy said he'd let him, but only if Bob shaved off his mustache and let Jimmy pin it to his trophy wall. Just one example of many. It helps establish early on that there's a lot Bob is willing to do for his family.
To define Bob's children in simple terms, consider Tina a boy-crazy, horse-crazy, mostly comfortable in her understanding of herself Lawful Good, Gene a really weird, musical, oddly comfortable being nude in public Chaotic Neutral, and Louise a smart, cunning, tsundere about her family and ambivalent about the wellbeing of pretty much anyone else Chaotic Evil. The three of them are very different and more than a little weird: not to mention all lacking standard social graces in their own unique ways. Linda's more of a Chaotic Good: fun-loving, romantic at heart, and head in the clouds a lot.
Bob actively tends to try to be there for his family, or to find ways to bond with them and have fun with them. He gets his legs waxed with Tina when she's too afraid to get it done alone. When it turns out he and Gene are interested in an old spaghetti Western film series, Bob buys an entire box set to watch with him (bonding with Gene can be hard for Bob. They don't have a lot in common). When Louise worries that she and Bob will grow apart as she grows up, just like their favorite father-daughter acting duo did, he reassures her that that will never happen. Linda brings a lot of genuine fun and excitement to Bob's life, for better or worse. Sometimes a mix of both. Like when she named the raccoon who eats from their dumpster Little King Trashmouth, and later brought him inside when another raccoon showed up and started to fight with him. Bob spends a Valentine's Day running all around the city desperately searching for a cheesy love-meter machine that he thought they once used on a date together (he was very mistaken). A lot of... just a lot of stuff going on with these guys. The Belcher family is at the heart of the show, and Bob tends to be at the heart of the Belcher family. To keep with the alignment metaphor, Bob is kind of a Chaotic Neutral hiding in the guise of a True Neutral/Neutral Good.
On the surface, his role in canon is to play the practical straight man to his family's frankly weird notions and actions, and further to the weird notions and actions of the other more minor characters around them. And a lot of the time, that's true to what he's trying to do, even though he has about as much social grace and dignity as his kids do at the end of the day. The crazy situations that he and his family wind up in are ridiculously diverse and numerous. They get kidnapped onto a cruise ship by a captain who wants Bob to be his guest chef (after Bob said no very clearly). They earn a favor from a notorious biker gang for serving them beer and burgers after a funeral, and then the gang leader's wife gives birth in their restaurant. Linda's health inspector ex-fiance, Hugo, is frequently on their back looking for any excuse he can find to shut them down. At one point, he retires to spend his days on a nude beach, and Bob tries to best him in a nude decathlon to get him to come back, because Hugo's replacement is trying to blackmail them. Bob doesn't even win the decathlon. There's an episode where Bob and Linda go to the hospital to get Bob's finger stitched up (tomato-cutting accident), and they return to find out that not only did their kids start an illegal casino in the basement, but they're $1000 in debt to the landlord over rock-paper-scissors. The landlord's brother straight-up tries to murder Bob and the landlord when Bob convinces him not to sell the local amusement park on the pier.
Events of this caliber are interspersed with a lot of everyday problems, like the family not having money to fix the car yet, or Linda getting a job somewhere and the restaurant being both less fun and having its bills a lot less smoothly juggled, or Bob desperately trying to find a way to get a plot in the local community garden, because he's very passionate about gardening on the down-low. As a family, they all often pursue their passions, whatever they may be and however off-color they are. And much like in real life, it's never a case of huge success or recognition: instead they find their paths lead to a lot of weirdness, compromises, and little victories. Just as an example, when TV station corruption keeps them from proving that they were cheated out of a game show victory by Jimmy Pesto and the host, there's no sudden turn of the tides in their favor. They don't win or prove their case to the TV court. They lose and they leave. But on the way home, they see that Pesto's got a flat tire and has no idea how to even change a tire. And of course, Bob ends up helping him with it anyway.
Bob actively tries to be supportive of his kids and his wife and his friends, and more often than not he sides with the morally right course of action no matter what insane thing has been happening. That might mean refusing to sell his friend Teddy burgers after hearing that his cholesterol is way too high, or shaving off his mustache so that he can try to give his daughter her dream birthday party. It's easy for family, friends, and acquaintances to wheedle him into doing a lot of things: the landlord bribes Bob's whole family into pretending to be his for a Thanksgiving. If someone calls him with a crazy request and ends with "I'm desperate, I have nowhere else to turn," Bob will probably feel obligated to do it for them. When Hugo the health inspector has just shut them down (somewhat unnecessarily) and needs help getting out of his parking spot without hitting anyone, not only does Bob do the right thing and try to help direct him: he literally ends up in the driver's seat doing it for Hugo.
Because he's always trying to be a sane and rational voice, he ends up stepping up as a leader and making a lot of dramatic speeches, which doesn't often work out. When he tries to rally his neighbors to protest the rent hike, it somehow ends with everyone turning on him, and him turning on them, only for things to flip back around after another passionate speech. Bob is a passionate person about almost everything at heart, even when it isn't always well-delivered.
It's no surprise that the flat "oh my god"s and valiant attempts to reign in the chaos he's plunged face-first into are only a part of what he brings to the table in the show. Bob's creativity, again, is something that runs throughout the show, even if only in relatively low-key ways like his burger of the day specials. He's got a habit of puppeting entire conversations between himself and inanimate objects when he's bored, especially if he's drunk: Bob spends most of an early episode talking to a miniature figurine of Keanu Reeves a la the movie 'Speed'. He pretends to be stuck in the Inhibition-era crawlspaces of his walls for days to avoid dealing with his in-laws-- and then really does get stuck, and loses his mind in a mini-sendup to The Shining. In the episode 'Dawn of the Peck,' he has a drunk conversation with a turkey baster (a judgmental one) as a result of his own pent-up disappointment with not cooking Thanksgiving dinner. When Bob gets invested in something or takes up arms about it, he can get super intense. He spends an episode going to increasingly desperate lengths to knock Jimmy Pesto's high score on a burger-based video game (cleverly named BOB SUX) off of the leader board. Not only does it end with Bob getting carpal tunnel and hallucinating on his pain medication, it also gets the entire family banned from the local Yacht Club because Bob is crouched beneath a pool table fighting security guards with an oar. His day-to-day interactions can be stiff and awkward, but when it comes to it, he's as wacky and emotive as everybody else in the series. He'll get drunk and jam out to Donna Summer while unaware that the streets outside are rampant with vicious, bloodthirsty poultry, then decide that he does want to cook Thanksgiving dinner and walk to the store. When a critic goes to the restaurant on an off day, Bob yells at people in the streets for ignoring his restaurant over a bad review: he then attempts to go to the critic's home for a do-over, and the situation escalates into holding a food critic hostage in his own home. He does the right thing in the end, but it doesn't negate the huge lengths he goes to when he's irrational and over-the-top.
People might see his general honesty and good work and respect it- because Bob is certainly a pretty honest man and good at what he does- but they might also see him putting up his sister-in-law's paintings of animal butts just to spite two uppity old people who run an art store in town, and then yelling at them about it.
Someone never knows where Bob's burgers will take them. Which is just as well, because Bob and his family also have no idea where it will take them.
Abilities/Special Powers: No special powers to speak of! Bob is very much an average human man with average human capabilities.
Third-Person Sample:
The adjustment period for the Wonderland thing is... rough for Bob. He manages three days or so at an even keel, all bets placed on either having been drugged or on just having a weirdly lucid and detailed dream. But the thing about time is, it passes. He stubs his toe here and there, dozes off in the armchair in the room he holed up in.
God.
It occurs to him, as he hovers unshaven and tired over the supplies he pulled out of the closet, that he probably really has just gone crazy. The only other option he can come up with is that this is actually happening. That he's gone from wrangling a victory out of the mess that the rent strike turned into to living in a single room like some kind of sweaty, mustachioed goblin. Lin and the kids can hold the fort down well enough without him, he guesses, but that does nothing to help him figure out what he's doing in a creepy magical mansion in the first place.
When a man spends his life working to build a restaurant with mediocre service, almost no regular customers, and a limited menu, that man should be allowed to spend the rest of his life struggling to get by in his restaurant. Uninterrupted.
"Oh my god. What am I doing?" Bob scratches his chin, contemplating the condensed soup he's warming up on a crappy hotplate. It's not much. And he's stirring it with a plastic fork. Even when a creepy mansion could give him whatever he asks for, he can't say with honesty that he suddenly wants a lot of nice stuff. It's just too nice. Silk shirts are flimsy and people end up having to polish real silver. Bob picks up his discarded soup can. "I'm not even cooking burgers. It's like there's nothing in the universe I can count on."
"You can count on me, Bob," he answers himself in a higher-pitched, indefinably accented voice, shaking the soup can so that it looks like the top is a flapping mouth. "I'll always be there to support you."
"Yeah, I know, soup can. Even if it's a little-- no, never mind." Bob shakes his head. "That means a lot to me, soup can. Thanks."
"Never mind what?"
"Well, I mean. I don't wanna offend you. It's not important."
"Bob, look at me. Look at me." Bob looks at the soup can. For all intents and purposes, the soup can looks back at him. "I'm your friend."
"Yeah, that's kind of what I mean, though. I've only known you for, like. Four minutes. It's like, are we friends yet? I thought it was more like an acquaintance thing. Maybe you're just. You come on a little strong. Intense." The soup can remains un-puppeteered in his grip. "And you're offended. Sorry. I'm sorry."
"It's fine." It's clearly not fine.
"Okay, but your tone doesn't match up with that, so... how can we fix this?"
The can doesn't answer, obviously, but Bob likes to imagine that if it were a real person, it would've shrugged noncommittally. He sighs. Soup can is turning out to be a real drama queen. Maybe he should have picked up a plastic fork.
"How can I fix this?"
The soup in the pot is starting to burn.
First-Person Sample:
[ There is a monumental amount of fumbling going on on the other side of the device, even when it's been set up and appropriately turned on to record. It takes Bob a second to figure out exactly what he's doing, but he picks up on it sooner or later. Technologically adept, here he comes. ]
Oh god, it's on. Wait. [ Probably not a great first impression choice. ] Hi. I guess I'm looking for whoever owns this phone. I wasn't... stealing it. I mean, this might look pretty bad since I have it. Buuut it's really nice, so there's no way I could get a plan for it. And I couldn't afford to replace it if my kids tried to put it in the deep fryer, so. It's better if I just give it back before they ever know I had it.
[ None of those things are jokes. They're very matter-of-factly put. As far as he figures today, he probably came out of a weird side of Mr. Fischoeder's hedge maze and someone will try to tell him he owes a life debt for scratching their favorite phone.
Bob sounds Tired. ]
God, am I just making a memo? This idea was bad. It's not good. No one would even be able to hear this if they lost it. I'm just gonna leave it here by these nice... topiaries, and pretend this isn't happening, because I've lost my mind.
[ For a long moment it seems like Bob's going to leave it at that. Naturally, he pops back on, already sounding like he's losing the lid on the cool he was pretending to have. ]
And I just wanna remind everyone that kidnapping is illegal! It doesn't matter how rich you are or how-- how "cool" you think your Alice in Wonderland theme park is gonna be, which it's not!
Quick question!
I ask the important questions XD He's such a pop culture nerd, I need to know how I can have him react :P
Re: Quick question!