The Rise and Fall of PBP Chapter 3: The Bottom of the Barrel

Arthur, Seanathan, and I refer to Arthur’s 2014-2015 school year as “the dark ages”, and we had a good reason for it.

Arthur was bullied constantly that year. Thus, he was constantly miserable and angry, and his imagination developed a darker streak. For PBP, this meant a dramatic change in the winds.

Arthur had begun to watch the TV show “The X-Files” in Summer 2014, which was where he got the idea for Aperture Sleuths, A.K.A: The stupidest idea ever. As an X-Files fan, he wanted PBP to be more like it. However, the X-Files generally takes itself very seriously, while PBP at the time was a lighthearted, quirky comedy.

At one point while we were acting out an episode, Arthur told me to pump out all the jokes I could. When I asked him why, he responded “Because PBP is going to become more serious, and we need to get rid of all the jokes now.” When I asked why we were eliminating humor from PBP, he replied simply “Because I like serious things now.”

In Aperture Sleuths, we ripped off the X-Files, among other things, quite a bit. That was nothing compared to what we did in Episode 26, the first episode of PBP Season 5. We outright stole the Black Oil parasite from the X-Files. Just read this episode description he wrote: 26.Black Oil: The Oracle, Seanathan, completes his duty as Oracle for a mysterious alien parasite. Meanwhile, Arthur is having parent issues when he finally meets his parents.

The subplot of the episode, where Arthur meets his parents (apparently, he was stolen by the evil orphanage), brings us into the second change in PBP. In addition to the LARP becoming more serious, the series became much less fun to produce. Arthur was constantly criticizing everything we were doing, and yelling at us. I got into the habit of dreading going to his house. Once, during PBP: The Movie 3 (more on it later), I was bored of being serious and was skipping around. Here’s the exchange between Arthur and I.

Arthur: [Astatinius], STOP SKIPPING!

Me: Why?
Arthur: It’s costing us trillions of dollars in CGI!

I think that the reason Arthur bossed us around so much is, because he was bullied so much, he just wanted a sense of power. In any case, production became a nightmare.

After the episode Black Oil, Arthur decided that the new villain of PBP would be demons. Because why not? I should also point out: at this point, the series had nothing to do with Portal. Aperture was gone, and the only link besides the name was the addition of GLaDOS, and a few cameos.

Then, came PBP: The Movie 3. In my opinion, this was easily the stupidest of the PBP movie trilogy. An evil villain named the Pi Killer is on the loose. Why is he called the Pi Killer? He kills people by burning 𝛑s into their dwellings. There was also an army of demons in there somewhere, and everybody in Michigania joined together with Arthur to fight the demons. It was supposed to be the series finale, but Arthur had no mercy in his heart.

There was a plot twist, where due to a neurotoxin leak, everybody had passed out, and had collectively dreamed everything except the first season. M. Night Shyamalan, eat your heart out! This was Arthur’s lame attempt to satisfy my want for the series to return to Aperture.

Thus began the sixth season, which was even more unoriginal than the last. Arthur was now simply lifting ideas from conspiracy and legend websites, and pasting the “characters” into them. I put ‘characters’ in quotes because nobody had any personality. GLaDOS was the flattest character ever, Chell was a generic tomboy, my character was a generic inventor, and Arthur was a jerk with a huge ego.

The first episode of Season 6 involved a ghost only visible by thermal imaging haunting Arthur. It was a kind of creative idea, and I think it was the only episode in that series with an original premise. Then, we investigated UFOs in Stonehenge, the Nazca Lights, and the Australian Black Mountain. It was as stupid as it sounds.
Seasons 7 and 8 were similar. Out of episodes 34 to 41, only four episodes were original.

Though there were more original ideas in Season 9, they were pretty stupid. For example, in Episode 45, Wheatley’s evil clone, Oatley, takes over Aperture. Then, there was Episode 44: Rats.
If you’ve played the Portal games, you probably know about Doug Rattmann, a schizophrenic Aperture scientist who tried to help Chell escape Aperture. There’s a comic about him called Lab Rat, that’s clever, funny, and actually sort of emotional.

Well, according to PBP, Rattmann was actually a deranged robot.

In Season 10, we went back to ripping off, with the Illuminati invasion of Michigania. It was probably the best of our rip-offs. In it, the Illuminati take control of the minds of the Michigania city council, and order the construction of a massive pyramid. Then, the pyramid is revealed to be a power source that mind-controls every Michiganian except Arthur, Seanathan, and I, because, plot convenience. I actually had a lot of fun with Season 10. It was the first time in awhile that I was having fun with PBP.

Around this time, Arthur started his blog, and began chronicling PBP in a short story format. Meanwhile, the LARP was coming to an end.