Garren Mortimer
Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2018 8:19 pm
Name: Garren James Mortimer
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Grade: Senior
School: George Hunter High
Hobbies and Interests: Mens Rights Activism, shock humour, internet trolling, video games (MOBAs and FPSes), esports, anime
Appearance: Garren is an astoundingly average looking young man, standing at a height of 5’10” with a slim body and a weight of 145lbs, with little muscle or notable fat to speak of. He is Caucasian, and has fairly pale skin, which is thanks to one part genetics, and one part preferring to stay indoors. Garren’s jaw is slightly square, and his nose is a little larger than most, but that aside, his face is entirely unremarkable, with a pair of mossy green eyes and a mouth generally twisted into a smirk rounding things out. He occasionally gets bouts of acne on his nose and under his mouth; these are normally dealt with fairly quickly, but whenever Garren is too lazy or apathetic to do anything, they stay there for several weeks.
Garren’s hair is chocolate brown in colour, and is naturally straight. It reaches just to the nape of his neck at the back, and he keeps his fringe brushed to the right. It tends to get greasy fairly quickly, something that isn’t helped by his infrequent showering. Garren struggles to grow facial hair; the most he can manage is some peach fuzz along his jawline and a scraggly little moustache. He has, on occasion, attempted to cultivate this, but after a couple of weeks of no success, he inevitably shaves it off.
Garren’s wardrobe is almost entirely made up of t-shirts and jeans, with a couple of hoodies to balance things out. He has an affinity for hats, and has a good selection of baseball caps, snapbacks and beanies that he’ll wear, depending on the weather. When he was abducted, Garren wore a bright orange t-shirt with Umaru-Chan’s face in the centre and the words “Umaru-Chan” in white underneath, a pair of navy blue jeans, and a pair of black Converse. He also wore a black and white trucker cap, which had “#MENINIST” printed on the front in red.
Biography: Garren is the third child of Benjamin and Karen Mortimer. The family is pretty well off, as Benjamin works as a dentist and Karen as his assistant. Garren’s older sister, Stefanie, graduated from college last year, but is currently staying with the family while she finds work, and his older brother, Leo, is currently studying law at college. The family also owns a pet labrador, named Tucker.
Garren has not led a particularly noteworthy or exciting life; in fact, it could be said that everything interesting happens around him, rather than to him. His childhood was perfectly average, from kindergarten all the way through elementary school. He made a decent amount of friends, joined in with the games and activities his classmates played, and got decent grades in the majority of his classes, with some standout grades both good and bad along the way. He never really elevated himself above average when it came to his grades, though, and didn’t have any hobbies or interests that caused him to stand out amongst his peers. He was generally friendly and pleasant, although could become moody and argumentative when things didn’t go his way; in short, he was a very typical child who grew up to be a very typical young teenager.
One notable interest that Garren picked up during this period of his life was a love of anime. Every morning on the weekends, he would be the first member of his family to wake up, rushing downstairs to watch whatever cartoons were on TV. His favourite shows all turned out to be anime, such as Naruto, Inuyasha and the Pokemon anime. Garren liked the art style of these shows a lot more, and found the stories and adventures that occurred in them exciting and fascinating in comparison to Western cartoons. As Garren grew older, he began to seek out a much large amount of anime. He turned to the internet, as it was both a means, however legally dubious, of watching shows that hadn’t been shown on TV for years and for watching shows with subtitles rather than dubbed ones; he preferred subs to dubs as he believed they preserved the original feel and intention of both the writers and the voice actors.
It wasn’t until Garren’s first year of high school that issues began to crop up. He still did decently at school, getting solidly average grades, and he had a healthy amount of friends for someone his age. However, he began to feel as though there was nothing about him that particularly stood out compared to his peers, whether positive or negative. Although he worked hard at school, his grades never seemed to be able to rise, and he had no interest in working any harder on subjects he didn’t enjoy. He had no interest in sports, or any other hobbies or interests that might have caused him to stand out.
Making matters worse was the fact that both of his older siblings were very popular around school, and both frequently singled out for praise by their teachers, with Stefanie a track and field star with the potential to go pro, and Leo getting excellent marks across the board and being the head of the debate team for his year. Garren began to feel as though he would always be in their shadow, a feeling that was unfortunately only exacerbated once Stefanie, and Leo a few years later, started preparing for their final years of high school and getting ready for college. Although Benjamin and Karen truly loved all their children equally, they understandably yet inadvertently focused more of their attention on Stefanie and Leo during this period, helping them prepare for college; something which caused Garren to feel even more like he was getting lost in the crowd than before.
Garren grew sullen and withdrawn. He would still hang out with his friends during lunch of after school, but his resentment towards his siblings began to spill into his friendship groups; he began to feel that he had less to offer in comparison to his friends, and he began to grow frustrated as he felt that they were isolating him because of it. He spent less time hanging out with his classmates, and would frequently head straight home from school and into his room In reality, his frustrations weren’t true, but Garren managed to cause his own self-fulfilling prophecy; his friends were concerned at first that he seemed distant and less inclined to hang out with them, but after he ignored several of their attempts to find out what was wrong, they began to drift further and further away from him.
Garren retreated away from social interaction with his peers, and instead started spending pretty much all of his free time on the internet, watching anime and videos on YouTube and Newgrounds. His main form of interaction came from talking with other anime fans on message boards and the like. Whilst he enjoyed this at first, he quickly felt like he was falling into the background on these sites as well, as his opinions and tastes in anime aligned with the majority of other peoples.
One day, Garren decided to create a thread on a general anime messageboard, posting how much he disliked the anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Almost immediately, it gained a number of replies arguing against him, quickly rising to the most active topic on the board. Fueled by the attention he was gathering, Garren began replying to as many comments as he could, further elaborating why he didn’t like the show. Most notably, he started making comments he didn’t actually agree with, so long as they went against what seemed to be the popular opinion. The thread continued to grow, getting more and more heated as Garren continued to post controversial opinions, until it was eventually locked by one of the board moderators.
The damage, however, had already been caused, and a kernel of an idea had been planted in Garren’s mind. He started creating more threads on similar topics, talking about how much he hated various anime series, even when he was only neutral towards them, and started arguments in other threads discussing those shows. After a couple of months of this, Garren’s account was banned, but he was more than happy nonetheless; he had made an impact, and he knew that people on the board would remember him for his actions.
Garren continued these actions on as many other anime websites, messageboards and communities as possible, posting controversial opinions and statements that went against the grain, intentionally trying to spark arguments and discord. As with the first messageboard, several of Garren’s accounts were banned because of this, but on a few of the websites that gave him the best reactions, he created multiple sockpuppet accounts to circumnavigate the ban. Currently, Garren’s most frequent haunt is Reddit, and he is rather infamous amongst a number of anime subreddits; he will drop in every so often and post intentionally inflammatory messages and memes before vanishing again, doing this infrequently enough that he doesn’t get banned for it.
Due to how frequently anime and video games intermingle, it didn’t take long for Garren to be introduced to a number of video games as he spent more and more time online. At first, he gravitated towards MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft and Runescape, although he soon lost interest in them, as he found them boring without friends to play them with. He instead became more interested in FPS games such as Team Fortress 2, Halo and Counter Strike, as he found them a lot more exciting and action packed, and also gave him a much easier opportunity to find people to play with. He also quickly found that he was pretty good at the games he enjoyed, finding himself at a significantly higher skill level than most of the people he ended up befriending online. Because of this, whenever he played with strangers, he would hold them to a very high standard; if they ended up playing below that standard, or making a mistake Garren saw as avoidable, he would start berating and insulting them, harassing them whenever they made further mistakes, and refusing to compliment them if they made an impressive play. He would also send messages to the enemy team, such as ‘easy’ or ‘not even close’ whenever he killed someone or won a match.
As the years went by, and MOBAs like League of Legends and DOTA 2 grew in popularity, Garren started playing these games too; partially because he was interested in seeing what the big deal was, and partially because a lot of the people he played FPS games with were also playing LoL and DOTA. A similar pattern to Garren’s enjoyment of FPS games followed; he enjoyed the MOBAs he played because they were quick and easy to get into, and provided plenty of opportunities for exciting moments and individual moments of skill, and he was also able to play at a high skill level. In fact, he is even better at League of Legends than at TF2 and Counter Strike. He mainly plays Yasuo, Zed and LeBlanc, and hovers around a low Diamond/high Platinum rank, putting him at a significantly higher skill floor than the majority of players. Unfortunately, his poor attitude towards his teammates and opponents also carried over to LoL and DOTA. Garren has had several warnings, temporary suspensions and chat restrictions across all the games he plays, but he has managed to avoid being banned due to the fact that the actual language he uses isn’t as severely offensive as that of other players.
Garren also has a marked interest in esports, religiously following the livestreams for League of Legends and DOTA professional games. It started off as casual curiosity, as the streams were frequently linked on the ingame clients, and after a couple of particularly frustrating games, he decided to watch some of them, in order to get a better feel for how the professionals played. The sheer disparity between even someone as skilled at the game as him and the pro teams, however, kept him hooked, as each game was totally different to anything he usually played, and the entertaining commentary and analysis helped make the games a lot livelier than a lot of pro players’ streams. Garren also posts a lot in the Twitch chat whilst watching the games; rather than being lost in the crowd, he feels solidarity in the fact that his mindset is similar to that of the chat’s, making fun of players for messing up, and spamming memes and Twitch emotes whenever there’s a lull in the game. Although he has attempted to watch professional games of CS:GO and Overwatch, he finds the frequent switching of camera angles makes it much harder to watch; a fact he will frequently talk about on messageboards in order to get a rise out of other people.
Garren was getting much more attention online by being intentionally inflammatory and rude, and so the next logical step in his eyes was to bring that attitude to the real world. He started off small, bringing up controversial opinions or ones that were the opposite to the majority of his peers during class, or playing devil’s advocate during class discussion. At first, many of his teachers and classmates reacted positively to this, seeing it as him trying to drive discussion and look at different viewpoints. However, he soon started bringing this viewpoint outside of the classroom, looking to get a reaction out of people by commenting negatively on their interests or the way they looked. Whilst he initially avoided making these jibes towards people that he considered friends, a lot of these people quickly ended their friendships with him, turned away by the unpleasantness that had seemingly come from nowhere.
At the time, Garren didn’t really care about this; he was truly focused solely on gaining as much attention and standing out as much as possible, ramping up his efforts in doing so in the process. He started saying more and more outrageous statements, solely to get a reaction, making casually homophobic, racist and, most predominantly, sexist comments, his favourite being some variant of implying women should stay in the kitchen. He never used any outright slurs, and would always refrain from saying anything particularly inflammatory in the classroom to try and ensure that teachers would keep a positive opinion of him, but the number of his peers who began to dislike or outright hate Garren continued to grow.
Because Garren’s preferred type of offensive comments were sexist remarks, the majority of people in his class who disliked him were, and still are, the girls in his year. Inevitably, this resulted in plenty of them reporting his actions to teachers, and so despite his attempts to paint himself in a positive light in the classroom, a lot of the teaching staff now sees him as a troublemaker. Because of this Garren grew more and more annoyed at the girls in his year who did this. In addition, as he kept making them, his sexist jokes went from being things he saw on Reddit and spouted without thinking to things he actually started believing in.
On top of this, Garren had always had a conflicted relationship with his sister; the two got on very well together, and out of all his family members, Garren felt the closest to Stefanie. However, at the same time, he always felt like he was in her shadow thanks to her popularity and constant high achievements at school and in sport. He wanted to resent her, but got on too well with her to actually do so.
By talking about his experiences online and his growing belief that many sexist jokes had roots in fact, Garren was able to find his way to several subreddits and Discord servers focused around Men’s Rights Activism. What started as mere curiosity turned into, once again, something Garren was actually interested and believed in. He started seeing similar incidents to those people online talked about; girls getting given roles he believed should have been given to guys instead, getting unjustly rewarded, or getting preferential treatment, at least in his eyes. As far as he saw it, calling himself an MRA activist was also the perfect outlet for Garren to vent his frustrations at both living in his sister’s shadow, and at everyone attempting to get him intro trouble for harmless jokes. Garren has attempted to introduce other people at school to men’s rights and convince them to become an MRA activist, but most of them consider it, and him, nothing more than a joke. The main exception to this is Demetri Futscher, Garren’s closest friend, who has had similar poor experiences with women in the past. The two can often be seen together, discussing their beliefs and attempting to push it onto anyone in the vicinity, or alternatively making fun and pranking unwitting targets. Garren, naturally louder and more outgoing, takes on a sort of leadership role when it comes to his relationship with Demetri, egging him on to do various things. Garren is very happy with this setup, as he feels that, with Demetri as his right-hand man, he’s finally getting the attention and respect he’s been missing for most of his life.
At school, as has been the case for all of his life, Garren’s grades are average across the board, and show no signs of improving. The best that could be said for him is that there are no subjects he’s outright bad at, but a common statement from his teachers is that he’s reached a plateau of learning and has no interest in climbing any higher than that. Most of his homework is done the night before class, or over the weekend, in a couple of hours, with just a brief glance over to check for any incredibly obvious errors before handing it in. Whilst a handful of teachers appreciate his willingness to debate topics and look at points of view that other students are reluctant to, most notably in his History class, many others have either been informed of his inflammatory nature and tendency for shock humour, or have cast a sterner view on his pushy, argumentative nature in class, and are much less favourable towards him.
Garren’s family life is rather unstable as well. Historically, he’s always gotten on well with his family, aside from Leo, who spent most of his time out of the house when he was still living in Chattanooga. However, rifts between them have started to grow recently. Garren has kept his MRA leanings hidden from his parents due to the negative reception he’s gotten for it at school, and he refrains from his usual brand of shock and insult humour when at home. However, he cannot hide the reports home and occasional detentions from his parents, who are growing more and more concerned about them. Whenever they question him about them, he’ll claim that it was either a misunderstanding or that both parties were equally complicit, or that it was a one-off thing that won’t happen again. Benjamin and Karen are seriously doubting the validity of these claims, but as of yet, they have taken no further action, as they believe that the detentions themselves are punishment enough.
Garren’s relationship with Stefanie, however, has completely deteriorated. She discovered his ‘#MENINIST’ hat in his room when she was still at college but back at home for the winter break, and became very angry and upset with him; Garren’s attempts at explaining the movement and his protestations only making her more aggravated, feeling like she had been betrayed by her closest family member. She refuses to speak to Garren nowadays, and the only reason she hasn’t told their parents about it is because she’d rather devote her efforts to finding a job, no longer considering Garren worth her time or energy.
Currently, Garren is incredibly miserable. He has very few friends, and whilst for many years he was more than happy with the negative attention his jokes, insults and contrary ‘opinions’ were getting him, his lack of genuine relationships and connections has caused him to become very lonely over the last couple of years. On most days, he will come home from school and spend all evening in his room, playing video games or watching anime; he still enjoys both of these a lot, but he realises it’s a tedious cycle that he’s struggling to break out of. Worst of all, he no longer truly believes in any of the ideologies of being a MRA activist, realising it for what it was; a way to vent his frustrations at his lot in life. Despite all this, he still acts as though he’s a meninist, and continues to intentionally needle and make fun of his classmates; he doesn’t believe that they’d trust him if he attempted to change his ways, that he’s already burned too many bridges at George Hunter High, and that he’ll lose those few friends he currently has if he reveals he longer cares for being a MRA.
Garren is eagerly awaiting his chance to leave school and go to college. He has a couple in mind, more based on affordability and location, but is still undecided as to what subject he actually wants to pursue. Most of all, he’s looking forwards to getting to college so he can start over again and actually come away with some meaningful relationships.
Advantages: Garren has, admittedly, very few advantages over his classmates. He has a couple of close bonds, most notably with Demetri Futscher, who he could rely on as an ally if they ever met up. Garren is notably self-centered, putting himself as the priority in all situations, which could help save his life if snap decisions are needed to be made.
Disadvantages: Garren has very few friends aside from Demetri, however, and large number of his classmates outright despise him due to his attitude and offensive sense of humour. He will likely find no allies amongst the female members of his class due to him presenting himself as a MRA. Although he is of average health, Garren avoids physical activity wherever possible, meaning his strength and fitness are sorely lacking.
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Grade: Senior
School: George Hunter High
Hobbies and Interests: Mens Rights Activism, shock humour, internet trolling, video games (MOBAs and FPSes), esports, anime
Appearance: Garren is an astoundingly average looking young man, standing at a height of 5’10” with a slim body and a weight of 145lbs, with little muscle or notable fat to speak of. He is Caucasian, and has fairly pale skin, which is thanks to one part genetics, and one part preferring to stay indoors. Garren’s jaw is slightly square, and his nose is a little larger than most, but that aside, his face is entirely unremarkable, with a pair of mossy green eyes and a mouth generally twisted into a smirk rounding things out. He occasionally gets bouts of acne on his nose and under his mouth; these are normally dealt with fairly quickly, but whenever Garren is too lazy or apathetic to do anything, they stay there for several weeks.
Garren’s hair is chocolate brown in colour, and is naturally straight. It reaches just to the nape of his neck at the back, and he keeps his fringe brushed to the right. It tends to get greasy fairly quickly, something that isn’t helped by his infrequent showering. Garren struggles to grow facial hair; the most he can manage is some peach fuzz along his jawline and a scraggly little moustache. He has, on occasion, attempted to cultivate this, but after a couple of weeks of no success, he inevitably shaves it off.
Garren’s wardrobe is almost entirely made up of t-shirts and jeans, with a couple of hoodies to balance things out. He has an affinity for hats, and has a good selection of baseball caps, snapbacks and beanies that he’ll wear, depending on the weather. When he was abducted, Garren wore a bright orange t-shirt with Umaru-Chan’s face in the centre and the words “Umaru-Chan” in white underneath, a pair of navy blue jeans, and a pair of black Converse. He also wore a black and white trucker cap, which had “#MENINIST” printed on the front in red.
Biography: Garren is the third child of Benjamin and Karen Mortimer. The family is pretty well off, as Benjamin works as a dentist and Karen as his assistant. Garren’s older sister, Stefanie, graduated from college last year, but is currently staying with the family while she finds work, and his older brother, Leo, is currently studying law at college. The family also owns a pet labrador, named Tucker.
Garren has not led a particularly noteworthy or exciting life; in fact, it could be said that everything interesting happens around him, rather than to him. His childhood was perfectly average, from kindergarten all the way through elementary school. He made a decent amount of friends, joined in with the games and activities his classmates played, and got decent grades in the majority of his classes, with some standout grades both good and bad along the way. He never really elevated himself above average when it came to his grades, though, and didn’t have any hobbies or interests that caused him to stand out amongst his peers. He was generally friendly and pleasant, although could become moody and argumentative when things didn’t go his way; in short, he was a very typical child who grew up to be a very typical young teenager.
One notable interest that Garren picked up during this period of his life was a love of anime. Every morning on the weekends, he would be the first member of his family to wake up, rushing downstairs to watch whatever cartoons were on TV. His favourite shows all turned out to be anime, such as Naruto, Inuyasha and the Pokemon anime. Garren liked the art style of these shows a lot more, and found the stories and adventures that occurred in them exciting and fascinating in comparison to Western cartoons. As Garren grew older, he began to seek out a much large amount of anime. He turned to the internet, as it was both a means, however legally dubious, of watching shows that hadn’t been shown on TV for years and for watching shows with subtitles rather than dubbed ones; he preferred subs to dubs as he believed they preserved the original feel and intention of both the writers and the voice actors.
It wasn’t until Garren’s first year of high school that issues began to crop up. He still did decently at school, getting solidly average grades, and he had a healthy amount of friends for someone his age. However, he began to feel as though there was nothing about him that particularly stood out compared to his peers, whether positive or negative. Although he worked hard at school, his grades never seemed to be able to rise, and he had no interest in working any harder on subjects he didn’t enjoy. He had no interest in sports, or any other hobbies or interests that might have caused him to stand out.
Making matters worse was the fact that both of his older siblings were very popular around school, and both frequently singled out for praise by their teachers, with Stefanie a track and field star with the potential to go pro, and Leo getting excellent marks across the board and being the head of the debate team for his year. Garren began to feel as though he would always be in their shadow, a feeling that was unfortunately only exacerbated once Stefanie, and Leo a few years later, started preparing for their final years of high school and getting ready for college. Although Benjamin and Karen truly loved all their children equally, they understandably yet inadvertently focused more of their attention on Stefanie and Leo during this period, helping them prepare for college; something which caused Garren to feel even more like he was getting lost in the crowd than before.
Garren grew sullen and withdrawn. He would still hang out with his friends during lunch of after school, but his resentment towards his siblings began to spill into his friendship groups; he began to feel that he had less to offer in comparison to his friends, and he began to grow frustrated as he felt that they were isolating him because of it. He spent less time hanging out with his classmates, and would frequently head straight home from school and into his room In reality, his frustrations weren’t true, but Garren managed to cause his own self-fulfilling prophecy; his friends were concerned at first that he seemed distant and less inclined to hang out with them, but after he ignored several of their attempts to find out what was wrong, they began to drift further and further away from him.
Garren retreated away from social interaction with his peers, and instead started spending pretty much all of his free time on the internet, watching anime and videos on YouTube and Newgrounds. His main form of interaction came from talking with other anime fans on message boards and the like. Whilst he enjoyed this at first, he quickly felt like he was falling into the background on these sites as well, as his opinions and tastes in anime aligned with the majority of other peoples.
One day, Garren decided to create a thread on a general anime messageboard, posting how much he disliked the anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Almost immediately, it gained a number of replies arguing against him, quickly rising to the most active topic on the board. Fueled by the attention he was gathering, Garren began replying to as many comments as he could, further elaborating why he didn’t like the show. Most notably, he started making comments he didn’t actually agree with, so long as they went against what seemed to be the popular opinion. The thread continued to grow, getting more and more heated as Garren continued to post controversial opinions, until it was eventually locked by one of the board moderators.
The damage, however, had already been caused, and a kernel of an idea had been planted in Garren’s mind. He started creating more threads on similar topics, talking about how much he hated various anime series, even when he was only neutral towards them, and started arguments in other threads discussing those shows. After a couple of months of this, Garren’s account was banned, but he was more than happy nonetheless; he had made an impact, and he knew that people on the board would remember him for his actions.
Garren continued these actions on as many other anime websites, messageboards and communities as possible, posting controversial opinions and statements that went against the grain, intentionally trying to spark arguments and discord. As with the first messageboard, several of Garren’s accounts were banned because of this, but on a few of the websites that gave him the best reactions, he created multiple sockpuppet accounts to circumnavigate the ban. Currently, Garren’s most frequent haunt is Reddit, and he is rather infamous amongst a number of anime subreddits; he will drop in every so often and post intentionally inflammatory messages and memes before vanishing again, doing this infrequently enough that he doesn’t get banned for it.
Due to how frequently anime and video games intermingle, it didn’t take long for Garren to be introduced to a number of video games as he spent more and more time online. At first, he gravitated towards MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft and Runescape, although he soon lost interest in them, as he found them boring without friends to play them with. He instead became more interested in FPS games such as Team Fortress 2, Halo and Counter Strike, as he found them a lot more exciting and action packed, and also gave him a much easier opportunity to find people to play with. He also quickly found that he was pretty good at the games he enjoyed, finding himself at a significantly higher skill level than most of the people he ended up befriending online. Because of this, whenever he played with strangers, he would hold them to a very high standard; if they ended up playing below that standard, or making a mistake Garren saw as avoidable, he would start berating and insulting them, harassing them whenever they made further mistakes, and refusing to compliment them if they made an impressive play. He would also send messages to the enemy team, such as ‘easy’ or ‘not even close’ whenever he killed someone or won a match.
As the years went by, and MOBAs like League of Legends and DOTA 2 grew in popularity, Garren started playing these games too; partially because he was interested in seeing what the big deal was, and partially because a lot of the people he played FPS games with were also playing LoL and DOTA. A similar pattern to Garren’s enjoyment of FPS games followed; he enjoyed the MOBAs he played because they were quick and easy to get into, and provided plenty of opportunities for exciting moments and individual moments of skill, and he was also able to play at a high skill level. In fact, he is even better at League of Legends than at TF2 and Counter Strike. He mainly plays Yasuo, Zed and LeBlanc, and hovers around a low Diamond/high Platinum rank, putting him at a significantly higher skill floor than the majority of players. Unfortunately, his poor attitude towards his teammates and opponents also carried over to LoL and DOTA. Garren has had several warnings, temporary suspensions and chat restrictions across all the games he plays, but he has managed to avoid being banned due to the fact that the actual language he uses isn’t as severely offensive as that of other players.
Garren also has a marked interest in esports, religiously following the livestreams for League of Legends and DOTA professional games. It started off as casual curiosity, as the streams were frequently linked on the ingame clients, and after a couple of particularly frustrating games, he decided to watch some of them, in order to get a better feel for how the professionals played. The sheer disparity between even someone as skilled at the game as him and the pro teams, however, kept him hooked, as each game was totally different to anything he usually played, and the entertaining commentary and analysis helped make the games a lot livelier than a lot of pro players’ streams. Garren also posts a lot in the Twitch chat whilst watching the games; rather than being lost in the crowd, he feels solidarity in the fact that his mindset is similar to that of the chat’s, making fun of players for messing up, and spamming memes and Twitch emotes whenever there’s a lull in the game. Although he has attempted to watch professional games of CS:GO and Overwatch, he finds the frequent switching of camera angles makes it much harder to watch; a fact he will frequently talk about on messageboards in order to get a rise out of other people.
Garren was getting much more attention online by being intentionally inflammatory and rude, and so the next logical step in his eyes was to bring that attitude to the real world. He started off small, bringing up controversial opinions or ones that were the opposite to the majority of his peers during class, or playing devil’s advocate during class discussion. At first, many of his teachers and classmates reacted positively to this, seeing it as him trying to drive discussion and look at different viewpoints. However, he soon started bringing this viewpoint outside of the classroom, looking to get a reaction out of people by commenting negatively on their interests or the way they looked. Whilst he initially avoided making these jibes towards people that he considered friends, a lot of these people quickly ended their friendships with him, turned away by the unpleasantness that had seemingly come from nowhere.
At the time, Garren didn’t really care about this; he was truly focused solely on gaining as much attention and standing out as much as possible, ramping up his efforts in doing so in the process. He started saying more and more outrageous statements, solely to get a reaction, making casually homophobic, racist and, most predominantly, sexist comments, his favourite being some variant of implying women should stay in the kitchen. He never used any outright slurs, and would always refrain from saying anything particularly inflammatory in the classroom to try and ensure that teachers would keep a positive opinion of him, but the number of his peers who began to dislike or outright hate Garren continued to grow.
Because Garren’s preferred type of offensive comments were sexist remarks, the majority of people in his class who disliked him were, and still are, the girls in his year. Inevitably, this resulted in plenty of them reporting his actions to teachers, and so despite his attempts to paint himself in a positive light in the classroom, a lot of the teaching staff now sees him as a troublemaker. Because of this Garren grew more and more annoyed at the girls in his year who did this. In addition, as he kept making them, his sexist jokes went from being things he saw on Reddit and spouted without thinking to things he actually started believing in.
On top of this, Garren had always had a conflicted relationship with his sister; the two got on very well together, and out of all his family members, Garren felt the closest to Stefanie. However, at the same time, he always felt like he was in her shadow thanks to her popularity and constant high achievements at school and in sport. He wanted to resent her, but got on too well with her to actually do so.
By talking about his experiences online and his growing belief that many sexist jokes had roots in fact, Garren was able to find his way to several subreddits and Discord servers focused around Men’s Rights Activism. What started as mere curiosity turned into, once again, something Garren was actually interested and believed in. He started seeing similar incidents to those people online talked about; girls getting given roles he believed should have been given to guys instead, getting unjustly rewarded, or getting preferential treatment, at least in his eyes. As far as he saw it, calling himself an MRA activist was also the perfect outlet for Garren to vent his frustrations at both living in his sister’s shadow, and at everyone attempting to get him intro trouble for harmless jokes. Garren has attempted to introduce other people at school to men’s rights and convince them to become an MRA activist, but most of them consider it, and him, nothing more than a joke. The main exception to this is Demetri Futscher, Garren’s closest friend, who has had similar poor experiences with women in the past. The two can often be seen together, discussing their beliefs and attempting to push it onto anyone in the vicinity, or alternatively making fun and pranking unwitting targets. Garren, naturally louder and more outgoing, takes on a sort of leadership role when it comes to his relationship with Demetri, egging him on to do various things. Garren is very happy with this setup, as he feels that, with Demetri as his right-hand man, he’s finally getting the attention and respect he’s been missing for most of his life.
At school, as has been the case for all of his life, Garren’s grades are average across the board, and show no signs of improving. The best that could be said for him is that there are no subjects he’s outright bad at, but a common statement from his teachers is that he’s reached a plateau of learning and has no interest in climbing any higher than that. Most of his homework is done the night before class, or over the weekend, in a couple of hours, with just a brief glance over to check for any incredibly obvious errors before handing it in. Whilst a handful of teachers appreciate his willingness to debate topics and look at points of view that other students are reluctant to, most notably in his History class, many others have either been informed of his inflammatory nature and tendency for shock humour, or have cast a sterner view on his pushy, argumentative nature in class, and are much less favourable towards him.
Garren’s family life is rather unstable as well. Historically, he’s always gotten on well with his family, aside from Leo, who spent most of his time out of the house when he was still living in Chattanooga. However, rifts between them have started to grow recently. Garren has kept his MRA leanings hidden from his parents due to the negative reception he’s gotten for it at school, and he refrains from his usual brand of shock and insult humour when at home. However, he cannot hide the reports home and occasional detentions from his parents, who are growing more and more concerned about them. Whenever they question him about them, he’ll claim that it was either a misunderstanding or that both parties were equally complicit, or that it was a one-off thing that won’t happen again. Benjamin and Karen are seriously doubting the validity of these claims, but as of yet, they have taken no further action, as they believe that the detentions themselves are punishment enough.
Garren’s relationship with Stefanie, however, has completely deteriorated. She discovered his ‘#MENINIST’ hat in his room when she was still at college but back at home for the winter break, and became very angry and upset with him; Garren’s attempts at explaining the movement and his protestations only making her more aggravated, feeling like she had been betrayed by her closest family member. She refuses to speak to Garren nowadays, and the only reason she hasn’t told their parents about it is because she’d rather devote her efforts to finding a job, no longer considering Garren worth her time or energy.
Currently, Garren is incredibly miserable. He has very few friends, and whilst for many years he was more than happy with the negative attention his jokes, insults and contrary ‘opinions’ were getting him, his lack of genuine relationships and connections has caused him to become very lonely over the last couple of years. On most days, he will come home from school and spend all evening in his room, playing video games or watching anime; he still enjoys both of these a lot, but he realises it’s a tedious cycle that he’s struggling to break out of. Worst of all, he no longer truly believes in any of the ideologies of being a MRA activist, realising it for what it was; a way to vent his frustrations at his lot in life. Despite all this, he still acts as though he’s a meninist, and continues to intentionally needle and make fun of his classmates; he doesn’t believe that they’d trust him if he attempted to change his ways, that he’s already burned too many bridges at George Hunter High, and that he’ll lose those few friends he currently has if he reveals he longer cares for being a MRA.
Garren is eagerly awaiting his chance to leave school and go to college. He has a couple in mind, more based on affordability and location, but is still undecided as to what subject he actually wants to pursue. Most of all, he’s looking forwards to getting to college so he can start over again and actually come away with some meaningful relationships.
Advantages: Garren has, admittedly, very few advantages over his classmates. He has a couple of close bonds, most notably with Demetri Futscher, who he could rely on as an ally if they ever met up. Garren is notably self-centered, putting himself as the priority in all situations, which could help save his life if snap decisions are needed to be made.
Disadvantages: Garren has very few friends aside from Demetri, however, and large number of his classmates outright despise him due to his attitude and offensive sense of humour. He will likely find no allies amongst the female members of his class due to him presenting himself as a MRA. Although he is of average health, Garren avoids physical activity wherever possible, meaning his strength and fitness are sorely lacking.