I'd be a lot more accepting of SpamTenna if people actually made an effort to acknowledge the canon elements, partically screaming at them that Spamton's and Tenna's "personal" relationship was at best immensely dysfunctional, abusive, and completely and utterly co-dependent.
(It feels like people are mindfully ignoring Tenna's immensely self-destructive and shameless narcissistic tendencies in all this as compared to Spamton's influence.
Like people just forget Toby Fox intentionally wrote these specific characters with layers and layers of personality and backstory. That own deeply immersive flaws, flaws that are very relatable and can be reflected upon. Those flaws are very interesting, and are worth learning about.
Their situationship, resulting temporary relationship and inevitable 'break up' is explicitly written as an increasingly complicated situation that cannot be any more obviously not one-sided at all.
I often see in SpamTenna that it's only all about what Spamton left behind, about what damage Spamton did. How oh-so close Tenna felt to him, how important Spamton was to him as a host and how oh-so deeply hurt he was when Spamton suddenly vanished into the night.
All this mischaracterization of Tenna honestly spites me into homing even more pity and empathy for Spamton. People letting all their self-gratifying assumptions about canon rule over the actual facts on what happened between two very cracked people all for the sake of fancy yaoi that rarely anyone does anything remotely original with.
It's hardly ever pondered what Spamton lost to the phone in order to built all this, who actually listened to Spamton's side in all this, are people afraid to learn that maybe Spamton deserved to be cut some slack?
Are people, like, afraid? Afraid that maybe it wouldn't hurt to impart some humane sympathy towards the puppet, left with little choice but to tolerate being under Tenna's thumb if he wanted to keep the spotlight?
Do you really blame him for being so resentful?
Tenna is unfortunately given the Papyrus treatment a lot of the time, like he was the perfectly innocent responsible one throughout the whole way and Spamton deserved the short end of the stick for what he put him through.
It feels almost a little misogynistic in how it's set up, like a knock-off holiday Hallmark movie; Tenna, the charming handsome masculine TV host with Kris's entire Dark World literally at his beck and call, the Lord of Screens and Spamton, the petite bitter ex, in denial about his feelings on the matter, running off tail between his legs leaving poor ol' Tenna heartbroken at the alter.
The all-powerful male role model and the tiny washed up co-host looking to find himself and make it big and free himself in the big city.
That is not what truly happened, folks.)
This game can definitely feel lighthearted and funny in a few moments, but it's isn't built like a Hallmark movie; it's appointed narrator, gerenal themes and the tone of its dialog willfully treats it's fully grown players interacting with it through a child's lenses like adults.
We know gerenally little about how it really went down between them except from what exactly Spamton and Tenna refected themselves, but there are far more then enough context clues from how Tenna acts himself and what is gathered directly from his exploited workers that there is even more evidence supporting Spamton's blunt interpretation of events that can be confidently assumed are true.
(I imagine Toby Fox kept it very vague since Spamton's and Tenna's respective Chapter outcomes and overall environments wouldn't really change if we knew about their past, plus the looming mystery is deeply alluring on an unrelated note.)
With that said, while both sides weren't perfect in the least and are ultimately unreliable narrators in their pitiful stories of yore for complex differentiations, Spamton was obviously a far more unfortunate victim than Tenna ever was.