I can't stop thinking about Battat/green pippins/whatever you wanna call him lately. I was never all that interested in him before, I thought he was a cute little nod to the theorist side of the fanbase and that was about it, but that winter newsletter really opened my eyes to how fucked up he is when it comes to Tenna and I am fascinated lmAO
especially since like. all the newsletter did was expand upon their fucked up relationship and make things a little clearer, like I've been going back and combing over all his dialogue in chapter 4 and Battat's been a horrible little control freak about Tenna since the moment he started having dialogue.
first of all, there's the fact that he's doing this Mike shit at all lmAO of his own volition! Tenna's not paying or even asking for some random pippins, zapper, and shadowguy to play pretend with him, Battat just started impersonating Tenna's friend because for some reason he thought that was the best way to keep everything running smoothly after the real Mike disappeared and then enlisted the other two once the workload got to be too much for him. Like it'd be one thing if he had just secretly done the jobs in his place and had the other two help with that but the fuckin costumes, my guy??? you HAVE to pretend to be another person and interact with Tenna as that person????? you couldn't just Phantom of the Opera that shit????????
and he complains about it! like, brother, YOU decided to do this!!! no one asked any of this of you, you completely took it upon yourself to commit identity theft and do extra work for Tenna, and you roped two other people into helping. And you had an out!!! After Kris and maybe the gang find out the truth and the fake Mike trio decides to dip, they literally come right back!
and decide to compete over who gets to be the one true Mike via the high scores of their minigames??? because that's how that works I guess?????
very cool, very normal to want and possible to achieve. so much for it being sooo hard doing what Tenna wanted on your own lmAO
his reaction to winning is also very normal
and he gets SO MAD when Pluey or Jongler's games get the high score, thus making either of them "the real Mike," he even straight up threatens Jongler
like yeah I get it, friend inside (me), he said the thing, but damn dude calm down lmAO like I know I said that "they (plural)" are competing to be the real Mike, but someone clearly cares way more about the competition's results than the others
so he wants the be the one and only Mike and gets possessive of his little tasks he does for Tenna and doesn't want the other two to do them. But he still enlisted them for help because it was all too much for him to handle by himself. [dog with ball.png] No do task, only help.
but despite how desperately he needs to be Mike, he still ditches Tenna near the end of chapter 3.
what a fuckin thing for him to say after the fact lmfAO christ
and he fucking threatens to do it again!!!!!
he gets mad that Tenna likes Pluey more than him and uses Mike's face to try to punish him! of course, it backfires since yknow. Tenna thinks he's talking to the actual Mike and has no clue about Battat or his freak-ass obsession with being Mike Supreme, and Battat has a tiny moment of clarity where he realizes the guy whose face he's wearing is like. an actual guy that Tenna used to know. but he's still gonna wear it. and still gonna use it to get himself a vacation.
like, perhaps before the winter newsletter you might have been able to convince me that Battat's just obsessed with Mike/becoming Mike and the fuck shit he's doing to Tenna is just kind of an unfortunate byproduct of that, but. using the Mike persona for petty revenge and then deciding to squeeze a little extra vacation time out of Tenna in response to him making it pretty clear he is gaslighting the man proper, purposefully or not, is just. there's kinda no excuse for that one buddy lmAO that's not Mike behavior, he is officially being unacceptably weird about his boss and that does retroactively make all his dialogue about Tenna and the things he does for him way creepier lmAO
he thinks himself a victim of Tenna's poor management when he is literally overworking himself voluntarily and tricking Tenna into believing he's his missing friend. Tenna does not know that the green pippins is Mike, he thinks they are two separate people so why he fuck would he expect anything less than a normal workload from the "both" of them? And Battat gets so sick of being overworked he lashes out at Tenna, leaves him when he's at his lowest, and threatens to leave him again in response to something Tenna does not know is related to his anger. Because Battat is actively lying to him. And he had the chance to escape, to no longer be so overworked, but he chose not to, like it was a compulsion, like he couldn't stand to let it go. But it's still all Tenna's fault and he "treats the people who work with him like expendable trash." like. I am putting this little green bitch under a microscope what the FUCK is his problem lmfAO
