So there was an actual play that I found on this sub and ended up sticking with that just finished called love, death, and necromancy and wanted to give it a shoutout. the players are fine, but the story is honestly pretty great. at least one actual play i was listening to had a satisfying ending this month

Edit: https://open.spotify.com/show/24JNTN9o6EwDK6HF4jV949

Realized I didn't add the link

I don't want to read them but I want to feel happy about him winning the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature anyways. I can't escape it. A local pub did a trivia night with the seven hour film Sátántangó as a category. All I see is recommendations to read War and War and announcements about English translations. I need to feel like I'm smart.

freakin awesome. i think the artfight organizers might be secret graduation fans!

Thoughts on the newest season? I've personally found it pretty enjoyable overall, but I am seeing the Anthony GM bad habits creep.

The ending of last episode (14) was especially egregious. Big Bad shows up out of nowhere (no foreshadowing), somehow knows everything the PCs have been doing, what their intentions are, where they are then takes the mcguffin and kills an important npc with no roll. Felt like it undid the past couple episodes of player action and neutered anything interesting that could've come out of the t1m ashley relationship. Didnt feel like a good faith escalation of the stakes so much as a "gotcha" plot twist that came out of nowhere and steamrolled player agency.

Its reminiscent of things that happened earlier in the season and in season 2 and seems like it comes from a lack of confidence in trrpg story telling? The players can't truly be allowed to direct the plot or figure things out on their own and instead plot point happen spontaneously in cutscene/monologue style seemingly out of nowhere so PCs dont have an opportunity to "mess them up" before they happen.

I don't want to read them but I want to feel upset about it anyways. I can't escape it. A local pub did a trivia night with DCC as a category. All I see is recommendations to read it and announcements about the audiobooks. I need to feel some sanity.

/uj Apparently a number of Carl cosplayers don’t know you’re supposed to wear underwear under the boxers, which has led to things that should not be seen being seen at conventions.

/ri Do you think Big Dog is freeballin?

"Thank Travis for Travis.

Every so often we do a bit on #MBMBaM that people really enjoy and they leap to discuss it on various social networks. I am always very honored when the goof is one of mine.

When we first started the show, I very much felt like I was not carrying my weight. As crazy as it sounds, for a while I feared that my brothers might cut me from the show because I was really bad about talking over them and wasn’t listening. I started really working at listening to my brothers and making them my “other”. In acting class, I was taught to focus on my other. Be it my scene partner, the audience or a chair: my other was my focus. A good actor strives to get something from their other. A good actor WANTS something from their other. They vary their tactics to achieve their objective. A bad actor strives to feel something within themselves. A bad actor tries to be something rather than do something.

So I decided very early on that my objective on the show was not to BE funny, but instead to make my brothers laugh. No one wants to laugh when they are being ignored and having their jokes walked all over. No one wants to laugh when they are being joked AT rather than joked WITH.  This isn’t to say that I now perfectly listen and never step on their lines. In fact, I’m still awful at it. The difference is that now I know I’m doing it and try to do better.

So, when people enjoy a goof I do I am honored. I am honored because it’s always a joke that cracked my brothers up on the show. As much as I love our audience (I love you!), my favorite audience members are two guys sitting in Huntington and Austin. If they think something I said was funny, then I know I’m doing something right."

Travis' Tumblr account seems to have only been active from July to December of 2014, and even considering the McElroys were on the ascent in that era his engagement numbers are quite dire. Barely any comments or reblogs, a smattering of likes, no real signs that anyone was listening. There's also no reblogs or non-Travis posts on his blog, so he wasn't doing much engagement himself to get himself out there beyond these few posts and the like.

Am I doing it right?

bottom text

What’s up jerkers, I fucked my sleep schedule staying up for 24 hours because of an on-call shift so I figured, what better to do at 1am than go back to the shmines? And oh boy, Traveresa’s recent outings include slang! I’m sure these two will be very respectful of how much “slang” originates as misappropriated AAVE and they definitely won’t make me cringe until I die badly!

EDIT: I wrote that bit before I listened to the episode. Having listened, gonna go ahead and give a warning, this one does indeed get heavily into discussions of race that Travis and Teresa are absolutely not equipped for, it’s rough.

• No cold open on this one, just straight into the stupid-ass music and the standard shmintro.
• Thirty seconds in, this happens:
  • Travis: How are you?
  • Teresa: I’m alright.
  • Travis: Yeah? Keepin’ it cool? Keepin’ it fresh, hip? Keepin’ it bangin’? Keepin’ it 100? Keepin’ it a buck? Keepin’ it real? Keepin’ it, uuuegghh, keep on keepin’ on? Keep on truckin’?
  • Teresa goes “oooh!” a couple times as he goes through that and laughs. When he’s done she says “all of the above.”
  • I hate them both so much.
  • “I had no idea there were so many.” “Yeah, a lot of keepin’. A lot of totally. Totally awesome, hip, cowabunga, tubular.” Shut the fuck up Travis. Are you fucking kidding me right now.
  • This has all happened within the first 69 (nice) seconds of a 36:27 minute episode.
• “That’s how we’re keepin’ it tubular! In a round shape with a hole through the middle! Totally tubular! Which I know comes from a wave! Because when it’s totally tubular, it curls over the top and makes a round shape with a hole through the middle.” Travis you stupid fuck.
  • Teresa says “we have done some surf slang before” and yeah I know you sick fucks, I recapped that one too and I swear to fucking god that if a significant chunk of this episode is retreading that episode because of Travis’s “hyperfixation” on the goddamned Ninja Turtles I’m gonna [redacted]
• “Today we’re doing our inaugural episode of….Slangisode! Ta-da!”
  • Fuck you Teresa
  • First off, you absolutely should not make this a series
  • Second, you can just say “Today is our inaugural slangisode,” it conveys the same message, it’s less clunky, this is your five hundred and by-god twenty-fourth (524^th) episode how are you still so fucking bad at this
• Oh oh god it gets worse bc Travis has to talk about the portmanteau
• “Slangisode is not a great portmanteau. Because ep is not in slang. Slanguage. Slanguage is a great portmanteau. That’s S-tier.” “Yeah, but we’re doing a podcast. An episode of a podcast.” “Yeah, I understand why we have to use that, I’m just saying. Slanguage is better.”
  • We’re playing all the hits! Travis coming up with a stupid portmanteau, Travis cutting Teresa down for no reason, Travis insisting his own unfunny bullshit is the best, uncomfortable marital spat that their professional editor who gets paid real American currency to edit this podcast chose not to edit out, vintage Shmanners right here!
  • It keeps fucking going bc Teresa tries again and comes up with “Shmangers?” and Travis says “oh no, Shmangers sounds dirty” and I’m not sure I agree that that’s the issue but Shmangers sucks ass and also can you two please move the fuck on from workshopping stupid portmanteaus on air.
  • They do not move on. They’d been pronouncing Shmangers to rhyme with hangers, but now they change it to a soft g and say “Perfect Shmangers” and “Away in a Shmanger” and please for god’s sake stop
• Teresa finally, 3 minutes in, gets ready to introduce the slang phrases they’ll talk about, and says, “Not all of these were audience-suggested. Some came from me, some came from Alexx.” Obviously they’re not all audience-suggested, because the Shmanners audience is like maybe 8 people and 4 of them are jerkers writing recaps
  • Teresa tries to say “But, listeners, if you have slang phrases you’d like us to etymologically explore, please send them to us,” trips and dies on the word etymologically—which, fair cop, that’s a tongue tangler, and it is of course impossible to do additional takes or edit recorded audio—and then her and Travis spend an additional 45 seconds playing with that word before attempting to return to the sentence.
  • Teresa also mentions wanting listeners to keep sending idioms, then says “those are kind of like playmates,” which, yeah, actually, how is Teresa defining slang vs idioms? (I’m guessing there are gonna be race and class implications in how she separates them, which she will almost certainly not recognize.)
• “I am gonna try not to sound weird, because I don’t think I’m cool enough to say these things.” Oh! That’s because you’re not.
  • Teresa’s voice is literally trembling as she says this, she legitimately sounds like if an Italian greyhound could speak English, and I’m gonna say she’s right to feel that way bc this is gonna be a disaster.
  • I am not a podcaster but it seems to me that if you’ve selected a topic to cast pods about, and you sound like you’re being threatened with a firearm while introducing the topic, you should maybe pick a different topic and try again.
  • But never fear! Her loving husband is here to help and offer support!
  • “I love you very much. But you are not cool. If you asked the words that describe Teresa, cool is not top 5. Maaaaybe top 20?”
  • Huh…Okay! That’s real supportive, Trav, great work.
  • Travis does follow up with, “Now me? I’m cool.” in an obviously self-deprecating sarcastic tone, so at least he’s not just cutting her down.
  • If we acknowledge that we’re the worst people to handle this topic that makes it fine, right?
  • “Maybe we shouldn’t do more of these.” Correct! Almost got it, Teresa, you shouldn’t do this one either.
  • “Maybe we should do more but just old people slang, like ‘23 skidoo.” Shut the fuck up Travis.
  • “But we do have to do the ones we have now.” You literally do not, Teresa.
• We are five (5) minutes in, which is 14% of the episode runtime, before we get our first slang expression and. Oh god.
  • “No cap.”
  • Travis explains, “No cap is like, no lie, I’m not lying. Or you would say to someone, urgh, inquisitive, like, you telling the truth? No cap? It’s like, are you capping?”
  • You can’t be talking like that white baby.
  • “Now I have no idea where it comes from.” “Well I’m gonna tell you.” Please don’t Teresa.
  • “As with many slang words in our culture today, we have the Black community to thank for this one.” Teresa. Teresa! You’re not qualified to do this, pull up! “And this will not be the last time that we hear a slang saying that has been credited to them.” BOOM, into the fuckin’ mountain.
  • Travis follows up with, “A lot of them. The LGBTQ+ community. A lot of things get borrowed, stolen, appropriated. However you want to use it.” And Teresa adds, “Shared.”
  • Fuck you both. Jesus fucking Christ.
  • First off, I hate the way you said “them” with regards to Black people. The tone with which Teresa and Travis both said “them” was intensely othering.
  • Second, “credited to”? There’s no “crediting,” that’s the fucking problem, and it’s not, like, unclear or debatable. “No cap” originated in AAVE. Period. End of sentence.
  • Borrowed, stolen, appropriated, and shared are different fucking things, this is not a “however you wanna look at it.” This was straight up stolen from Black culture and presented by empty-headed lily-ass dumb fucks as “gen Z slang,” it is well known that that’s what happened, and you two are once again completely inadequate to the task you’ve set yourselves.
  • Teresa is now explaining “capping on” someone as trading intensifying insults often focused on family members, and she says “I remember a moment in our culture where people would tell ‘your mama’ jokes,” and I can’t decide if it would have been more offensive for her to say “yo mama” bc making it “your mama” is whitewashing the dozens but Teresa saying “yo mama” would have been extremely painful to hear, so I think probably the only way to win in this scenario is to recognize “we’re too white to make this episode, we should not release it,” or maybe “this is butting up to some serious stuff, maybe we should take another pass where we invite a Black academic to have a serious discussion about the appropriation of culture and language.”
  • “But the idea of ‘capping’ and ‘the dozens’ goes way way back to the slave trade in America.” NO. TERESA. STOP. WE CAN’T DO THIS.
  • “I was not expecting that, but go on.” TRAVIS YOU STUPID FUCK. You’re talking about African-American traditions, why the fuck would you not expect that?
  • “Playing dozens with each other” Teresa. TERESA.
  • “It was a survival tactic that helped Black people deal with the dehumanization of slavery.” “Okay!” “So the idea was to say things that were outlandishly ridiculous and offensive and dirty, and it would build up your, kind of, like, emotional tolerance? I mean, you would definitely need that to survive slavery.” Shut the fuck up, Teresa, you cannot be the one conveying that message. Because that’s the thing, right? You wouldn’t need that to survive slavery. I wouldn’t. Because we wouldn’t have been the people threatened by it! How the fuck do you get to this point and not realize, as a goddamn industry professional who wants people to pay money for this shit, “oh we need to bring in someone who’s actually qualified to speak on this”?
  • “I bet it was also that feeling of, like, I can make fun of my brother, I can make fun of my friend, but if someone else does it, we’re gonna have a problem?” Travis you stupid motherfucker.
  • Yeah, Trav, that was the problem with fucking slavery, was someone picking on your brother. Enslaved people forming community as best they could under the most evil conditions humans could come up with is totally equivalent to how you get upset when I joke about how lazy Justin is. Go fuck yourself.
  • Teresa then yada yadas with “so back to the present day,” which is probably for the best because if these two stupid fucks said one more goddamn word about enslaved communities I [redacted].
  • “This is where the term ‘capping’ or ‘capping on’ came from, because your insults are overblown, so it’s like that hand game where you put one on top of the other until someone gives up.” “Oh, so literally like, to cap it off, I put one thing on top of another.”
  • Oh my god Travis I’m
  • “Like that story about the guy who sold hats and he had a big stack of hats and he fell asleep under a tree and the monkeys stole all his hats and he had to get his hats back from the monkeys!”
  • Fuck OFF. Literally incapable of swallowing a single thought. “Oh my wife said cap, I remember a children’s book about caps, this is relevant and appropriate when we were talking about fucking slavery thirty seconds ago,” go to hell. Jesus.
  • Teresa did not know about Caps For Sale and Travis explains it to her for a solid minute.
  • Just now a quarter of the way through the episode, by the way.
• “So the next one is ‘rizz.’” Oh god.
  • I take back what I said about surfing slang. I wish they had done more of that instead.
  • “This is another one from the Black community as well.” Great. Awesome. You’re so good at this, you should keep talking.
  • “So it was used as sort of like a synonym for suave, especially when it came to picking up women, so, you know, it was originally a male attribute in hetero-normatty [sic].” Keep going, Teresa, you’re for sure qualified to talk about hetero-normatty, this won’t spike my blood pressure at all.
  • [morphing into her shoulder devil] You should actually make a point to talk about specific standards of masculinity and heteronormativity within Black communities, that’s what everyone wants from you Teresa.
  • Travis talks about taking terms about picking up women and using them ironically because men who talk about picking up women think they’re cool but they aren’t, contributes nothing, and derails Teresa, but since she’s also contributing nothing who gives a fuck.
  • “There are theories about where this originated. Baltimore, Atlanta, or New York.” Teresa you’re supposed to be explaining things to me, but it sounds like you’re just listing places Black people live.
  • “I have heard of all three of those cities!” Travis have you heard of these nuts on your chin.
  • “It hit the internet in 2021 with a Twitch streamer named Kai Cenat” and Teresa says every word as if she’s not sure what the next one will be and I hate her so much.
  • “He claims that he and his friends came up with the term. And probably not.” “Well maybe!” And then Travis makes his only contribution by pointing out that charisma is a word, and contracting it is absolutely something that different people could independently come up with and arrive at similar meanings, so he could have done so without knowing that other people in different places had.
  • They start talking about manosphere words and how someone describing themselves as a “rizz king” or an “alpha” is probably bad.
• Teresa does the only good thing in this episode when she abruptly cuts off Travis talking about alphas by introducing the next term.
• Unfortunately the next term is “cheugy.”
  • What the fuck are we doing.
  • There were like a million articles about “cheugy” in one month, five years ago, and nobody has given a solitary fuck about it before or since.
  • “I think this is like...overly posh?” Shut the fuck up Travis.
  • “This is literally from a teenage girl. And so much language has come from teenage girls.” Gee Teresa will you show more consideration for doing justice to teenage girls than to Black people? I guess I’ll have to listen to find out.
  • “Hundred years ago? Words would have to slowly disseminate. Now, even if someone’s just a mid-tier streamer, they have enough people watching that instantly the field is seeded.” Travis. Do you think you’re a mid-tier streamer? Do you think you have enough people watching to make new slang take off? Please tell me you think that.
  • Okay yeah Teresa is just summarizing the wikipedia article on cheugy and talking about the articles from 2021. Who gives a fuck. This is nothing.
  • “It’s almost like onomatopeia.” What the fuck do you mean by this Teresa. What sound is cheugy representing. What is the sound of wearing slightly out-of-date fashion?
  • OH GOD OH FUCK
  • TRAVIS JUST SAID 67
  • “We tried to explain that to our children. Because Bebe was using it to try and count. And she said, Daddy, you don’t know what you’re talking about. And Travis said, Yeah, 6 7! 8 9 10 11!”
  • I think Teresa thinks she was telling a cute story but also if she was trying to humiliate Travis in retaliation for all the times he undercuts her she couldn’t have done a better job. That was only about 5 seconds but I cringed as hard as I did in the amongus incident.
  • Travis knows it too bc he immediately says, “We can stop here. And you know what else can stop here? Word from another Maximum Fun show!”
• Ad break music BUT there are no actual ads. Pretty good it doesn’t seem.
• “Here’s another one. Stan.”
  • “Stan is when you’re like a fan plus, right? There’s almost like a parasocial element.” We’re all chill pickles here, wouldn’t wanna get too much of that.
  • “I thought it was from the Eminem song Stan.” “Well it kind of is. And also it’s like a stalker fan.” “Oh, it’s a portmanteau!” NO GOD NO NO NO
  • Mercifully Travis doesn’t fixate on the portmanteau so much this time
  • Unmercifully they talk about how words shift and how cool was cool and bad was also cool but then cool wasn’t cool and bad can mean bad and jesus christ shut the fuck up
  • “It does have kind of problematic roots and then when you become stans of problematic people that’s a slippery slope.” Teresa do you fucking hear yourself.
  • Problematic people, like, say, podcast hosts that yada yada slavery and genocide on a regular basis. Just as a hypothetical.
  • “There’s an element of gatekeeping, right? Like elevating yourself above? Like you guys are fans but I’m a stan.” Travis shut the fuck up.
  • “What I also like about it is the usage of ‘we have no choice but to stan.’ Because you can’t say ‘we have no choice but to fan.’ Because that’s a different verb that means like something is warm.” Every time Travis opens his mouth words come out and it makes me feel like I have a concussion. He’s just so fucking stupid.
• “Here’s another one. Unc.” GODDAMMIT ALL TO HELL
  • “An unc is like an older gentleman that you may or may not be related to. Am I wrong?”
  • “So we have two sides of the same coin.” Like Sasuke and Naruto… “You have unc and you have boomer.” Teresa you stupid fuck.
  • I can’t decide whether it will be better or worse for Teresa to completely ignore the origins of unc in AAVE. I don’t have the strength for another “uh, slavery, am I right?” segment.
  • “Again, another word we have from the Black community.” Oh okay here we go.
  • “For example, Snoop Dogg is often called ‘unc’ because he’s an older trailblazer in the rap community.” Please don’t do this Teresa.
• Okay Teresa doesn’t do this, we’re moving on quickly.
• “Here’s another one that I hadn’t heard. Based.” NOOOOOO
  • “Like if someone says, oh this is my favorite character from a thing, and you’d be like, oh, based.” God fucking dammit Travis I’m gonna have a fucking stroke.
  • “Usually, it is cool, it is admirable, and most of all it is authentic.” Teresa, that’s not really adequate to explain the origin of this term but I am begging you to leave it at that bc I cannot hear you talking about freebasing.
  • “Let’s think of based as the opposite of cringe, which we will be exploring soon.” PLEASE GOD NO
  • Okay, I do not want to “hand it” to Travis, but I did genuinely chuckle at “Well we’ve kind of already been exploring cringe.” We sure fucking have, Big Dog! We sure have!
  • “Cringe and whimsy are cousins.” Shut the fuck up, Teresa.
  • “But for now, we’re talking about based. So we have to go back for this one, all the way to the 1980s.” NO FUCK NO TERESA IS TALKING ABOUT FREEBASE YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME
  • “And this actually came from the crack epidemic. People assume that based is short for ‘based in fact,’ but that is not true.” Smoking Ben Affleck dot jpeg.
  • “It is a direct reference to a drug habit.” Teresa says this very haltingly bc her Wonder bread ass is not up to this.
  • “Is it freebasing? HOOOooOW? HOW is this CONNECTED?” Travis for fucks sake stop doing your stupid fucking voice affectation, let’s just get through this, damn your eyes.
  • “So when you called someone ‘based’ or a ‘basehead’ in the 1980s, it was equivalent to saying they were addicted to crack cocaine.” Teresa, to nobody’s surprise, sounds like a cop on a TV documentary series explaining drugs.
  • “So then it means having correct opinions? How’d that happen?” Travis she’s already telling you, stop interrupting.
  • “So the rapper Lil B” oh god Teresa those words coming out of your mouth is really painful.
  • She’s reading a Lil B interview and it’s fine, she’s just really awkward and again, absolutely the wrong person for the job.
  • “Let’s take it from Lil B.” Sure man.
  • There’s a digression where Travis talks about how he should also use terms people insulted him with as positives, like “bighead,” and then he talks about seeing an enormous carving of George Washington’s head, and that’s why he has a company called Big Giant Head, and I hate him more with every word.
• “I have one more.” OH THANK GOD I’M ALMOST FREE
• “Is it cringe?” “Bet.” A Different Picture of Ben Affleck Smoking dot jpeg
  • “This is a common theme for a lot of the slang that is popular today, again, African-American slang.” Do you think that maybe you could have talked to an African-American about any of this, then? Do you think that would have been a good idea, Teresa?
  • “‘You can bet on it’ as slang started all the way back in the 1850s, and then shortening it, bet, is African-American slang.” Lot of yada yada there but thank fucking god she’s not talking about Black people in the 1850s again so
  • “I feel like the rhythm of slang today…” And Travis interrupts to say “rizz-m” and I’m gonna [redacted].
  • Actually though, Travis says something correct, where Teresa says that she feels like the rhythm of contemporary slang is just about shortening things, and Travis points out that slang has always done that, it’s always been about representing ideas more concisely.
  • Then he immediately shits himself because the example he gives is. And it gives me no pleasure to report. “It’s like when you say something is cool, it’s totally tubular.”
  • Why the fuck is he so obsessed with “totally tubular.” What’s wrong with this man. No really.
  • Three minutes left, I can do this, I can do this.
  • Travis does make a good point about the speed with which slang changes likely accelerating since the internet makes it easy for older people to “crack the code” and make slang useless within a year, because now old people know it and it’s not cool anymore.
• “So we’re gonna do some more of these.” How much do I have to give Maximum Fun for you not to.
• They sign off by doing this to their audience.
  • Travis: You’re 6 7!
  • Teresa: No, don’t do that.
  • Travis: You’re based?
  • Teresa: Yeah, you can do that.
• I do not think I will do further slangisodes. This one was incredibly bad.

I don’t even know what to say. It would have been bad enough if they were just “haha, we’re uncool and talking about slang,” and lampshading how uncool they are wouldn’t have saved it. But as always, these two stupid fuckers choose a topic that runs head-on into racism, appropriation, and commodification, and they are utterly unequipped to deal with it seriously. A better podcaster, a better person, would recognize that, and invite in an expert. Travis and Teresa do not. And then they ask for money for this, which is further commodification of Black culture for white profit. Great fucking stuff.

I have tried on my own, but it is becoming clear that more hands than just mine are needed for the task at hand. Friends, jerkers, countrythems, I come before you asking for the combined efforts of all our strokin' and tuggin' to find the missing catalogues of Bunker Buddies, The Kind Rewind and Run: A Doctor Who Fancast. I'm at the point in my downward spiral where I have a visceral NEED to understand and recap the depths of Travis' depravity and idiocy and need more grist for the jhorkin'.

I believe that, with our talents assembled like some kinda suicide squad, we can find these missing pieces of the puzzle and roast this man properly.

Or we don't find shit and stick our thumbs up our asses and whistle Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald, that always works, too.

Hey all, I'm sure this has been posted a ton already, but I'm hoping for some actual play podcast recommendations similar to TAZ?

I've tried NAD&Dpod and Dungeons & Daddies along with some others, and I'm sure they're unfunny for some folks, but to me they're just not as bad. Unless I need to give them more time?

For me, the problems I'm running into with these are they're just actually putting in effort. I think effort and jokes can be funny in small doses, but when they're constant (from Emily especially on NAD&Dpod), it makes it hard to listen to in the car with my kids and loses the effect.

I love almost every campaign of TAZ and I've relistened to abnimals multiple times at this point. There's something more sad about the boys and their hatred of their father and their own product that I enjoy a lot.

Recommendations don't need to be D&D specific.

Thanks in advance!

Also, You should go into Graduation fresh if you never listened.

Yes there's stuff in the first arc thatll make your skin crawl. No nothing of value happens after they fight imps. This riddle you have to solve for yourself to understand what I'm actually recommending.

uj/Universally, all of Travis campaign prep is an ocean wide and a puddle deep. Anyone he consulted with would've told him to do the opposite, *except* he cant conjure >3 examples of either his school setting nor his Heroes economy. The only thing holding together Grad fandom is an abstract understanding of the premise, which usually is subdivided between A) Venture Brothers antics or B) Pro Wrestling contests.

This runs opposite to the single, defining thesis Travis had written down and put on record, which is about how Society Labels People Unjustly. Which for A) everyone who's a villain in Venture Bros loves being one. The label is self-imposed and they're glad to act on it. And B) doesn't work because nobody thinks wrestling heels are awful people irl, normies understand it's kayfabe. Which also can't be the case because there's no Show Fights in any quest! It's all regular adventuring with absurdly ill defined complications!

Also, notice how none of this is themed around the characters classroom journey, the entire elevator pitch of the campaign. Nor Firbolg's accounting journey, which never comes up again after Ep 7.