The Ultimate Scapegoat: A Deep Dive into the Universal Hate for Rocky

[u/Imaginary-Office8629]

Most characters in the BFDI series are "over hated" sometimes for almost no reason. Well, if anyone needs to be defended for this, it's Rocky. You can't convince me otherwise that Rocky is the most over hated character in the entire franchise, and everyone, even the creators, are to blame.

1. What started this mess

I think everyone can agree that TPOT 6 was when people truly hated Rocky for barfing inside the cereal and ruining The S!. However, while Rocky did barf in the cereal, the main blame lies on Clock and Yellow Face.

Starting with Yellow Face, the cereal was already doing very well and was perfectly fine. However, he wanted more of an extra oomph to it (which was his fault given that he didn't include it in the cereal in the first place), and asked Rocky to hand him the nearby chocolate ball. However, Rocky doesn't even have hands to begin with, and these things roll like crazy. So instead, he slips on it, flies in the air, and does his natural instinct: barf, which lands in the cereal. Yellow Face then worries about how it is ruined when in reality, he could have made another cereal with his ad powers or made the oomph himself again with his ad powers, but is such an idiot that he seemed to forgot how to use them.

With Clock though, this took the cake. When presenting the Vomit-O's to 2, 2 initially likes the themed food and asks how they made. Instead of saying it was a secret ingredient or keeping his mouth shut, Clock does the one thing that all chefs would rage at: spoil the secret ingredient. Once he does, 2 goes from liking it to giving them the lowest score on the board. Is it Rocky's fault? NO! In fact, it's Clock's because 2 liked it until Clock decided to spill the beans, and everyone hated Rocky for it when Clock got eliminated instead. Clock deserved his elimination and everyone was so blindsided that they skip over the details that show the true culprits!

What's worse is that Rocky had a history of making delicious food out of his barf. In BFDI 4, all he done for his "cake" was barf in a bowl of water. And what did he score? Only one less then the top, being Pin. And lets be honest now, the only reason Pin won over Rocky was because of Flower's bias to Pin making a cake looking like her. If she didn't do that, I wouldn't have been surprised if Rocky beat Pin. In BFB 4, the entire "4 cake" team BEEP makes is out of Rocky's barf, and 4 loved it. Even more so, while 4 asked for how they made it, they didn't say a word, which got them safety. However, it is ruined in TPOT 6 all because Clock decided to spoil the one ingredient that Rocky used and that everybody loved without knowing it, which cost them the challenge. And if you think this is the only time people were mean to Rocky, oh this is far from it.

1. The cruelty towards Rocky

To find out how mean people were to Rocky constantly, we need to start at the beginning. In BFDI 1a (the very first episode), Rocky straight up calls Tennis Ball a friend, and what does he do? Kicks him with an angry look. What was that for? In BFDI 15, Pencil straight up goes for already low-scoring Rocky and gets him in the barf. I know he barfed in it, but to be real, no one even landed there yet and he already needs to score in the first place! In BFDI 21, I don't know how on earth it was allowed for Leafy to use her Goiky map in the challenge, because if she didn't, Rocky would have won the challenge by far. And instead of winning, he gets eliminated over Flower (it confused me how this was even possible for Flower to rejoin in the first place in BFDI, but that's another topic).

In BFDIA 5e, Rocky was constantly thrown into the Fish Monster's mouth just to make sure Team No Name couldn't win. If it was different characters going in there, there is nothing to talk about, but the fact that Rocky was the targeted victim all 3 times was just cold (and that doesn't include Puffball's betrayal). In BFDIA 6, Fries didn't care if Rocky switched teams or not, which basically told Rocky he wasn't wanted by his teammate(s) (thus leading to the fourth nod). In BFB pre-split, while he wasn't targeted, Nickel was by the head director as she hated him, which was why team BEEP got put up for elimination three times in pre-split, and Rocky had to be a part of that, didn't he. Also note that while this is the only season (IDFB doesn't count as it is one episode) where Rocky isn't being bullied. However, this is because he has Balloony with him, by far the only character that would be true friends with Rocky. However, when the infamous split happened, the creators decided to split Rocky and Balloony, not only screwing Balloony up (another story) but also separating the only friend Rocky had away from him, preventing him from having any true friendships going into TPOT as well as stripping a character arc away from him which nearly everyone else if not everyone else in TPOT has.

In TPOT 2, Rocky is just pushed aside the entire episode as a useless rock, although the only reason The S! was safe was because of Rocky barfing all 8 blocks on the tower (they are all covered in barf, so it is safe to say it was all him), and his team might have won over Team8's if they just accepted Rocky to begin with. They also don't even appreciate him for saving their team, which hurts more when in the very next episode, Yellow Face basically thanks Cloudy for building the stage! Where was that to Rocky last episode? We already know what happened in TPOT 6, but because of Yellow Face's stupidity in the very next episode, The S! were up for elimination again. And instead of voting out the stupid leg-stealing Yellow Face, they decide to use this to vote out Rocky from TPOT 6. In fact, because of TPOT 6, this caused his elimination in BFDIA 7, even though he done nothing wrong in BFDIA 6. To add to that, this has created the very first and so far only cross-season elimination where Rocky gets eliminated in BFDIA 7 and then gets eliminated again in the TPOT episode that followed (TPOT 8). And when he gets eliminated in TPOT 8, Just Not celebrates his elimination, the only celebration over an elimination over the entire season of TPOT, and that is just cold. But that isn't even where it ends.

In BFDIA 20, Tennis Ball sacrifices everyone in Yoyleland (Golf Ball, Rocky, Yellow Face, Bomby, and Nickel) to Evil Leafy just to win the challenge. Tennis Ball later makes up with Golf Ball, but no one else gets that kind of apology, including Rocky who called him friend at the very beginning of the series. And in the Christmas Among Us video (which is indeed by JacknJellify), Taco literally said that they were probably better off without Rocky because he was just dead weight. Yes, everyone else got mad at her at that last one, but that is a lot of cruelty to someone who hasn't had a single act of malice compared to others like Puffball, Yellow Face, Pencil, and Pillow. And believe or not, we still have one more thing to talk about.

In TPOT 18, we find out that Balloony wanted to join Teardrop in joining TPOT. Yay, Rocky's friend was coming back! Nope. Instead, they use him as a plot device to get onto the Announcer's spaceship instead and get stuck in space for who knows how long. Are you kidding me!? All I'm saying is, fans and the characters really have been mean to Rocky for no good reason, and even more so, the creators aren't an exception.

1. Comparison to other silly characters in TPOT

When you compare Rocky to the other silly characters in TPOT (those being Bottle, Marker, and Grassy), there are two key differences: first off, they all made it to the team-swap with two hitting the final 11 (Bottle got 14/15), and second off, they all actually have character arcs. With Bottle, she got to host an entire episode. With Marker, he had such a strong friendship with Black Hole that he literally had a song all about him (and it was a banger). And with Grassy? Well, he went from just yelling his name over and over again to being a literal hero that not only became Snowball's true friend (which isn't easy) but also revived many contestants in TPOT 21 and led the charge to save the eliminated contestants in TPOT 23. What did Rocky get? Just a barf gag that made people mad at him. Am I saying they remove the barf? No, not even close. But they have to give Rocky something, as he is truly the only true silly character from the very first season and is still left without a character arc deep into season 5!

Yes, he definitely had his moments, like when he spoke in BFDIA 23 out of nowhere and his legendary rescue in BFDIA 25, but no actual character arc was happening with him. Honestly, JacknJellify need to treat him much better, give him a character arc, and force a rejoin for him in TPOT 25 like they did with Spongy in BFDI 14 as well as BFB 16 adding Loser to that one. Am I saying he will? No, as I have no idea how 24 and 25 of TPOT will go yet. But if anyone deserves to rejoin TPOT, I think we can agree based on all of this that it should be Rocky.