#respose

This is the capital weird part of our lore AKA programs which we already mentioned in our Pup explanation, but yeah for recap: when shadows interact with a video game that meets the requirements of 1) being kinda broken and 2) having a lot of care put into it (whether it’s how it was created or how the person that had it cherished it or whatever) as in the saying of “putting your soul into it” the shadow gets the idea or asset or whatever of a character or a concept within that game and becomes conscious, that good old trope of "The game becomes self-aware". Normally they get a body and that’s it, they incorporate to normal human society normally and also have mandatory therapy because you cannot come out normal from that ToT 

The exceptions to this are Pup and the now titular little guy!! Red. Red’s name comes from rival red from Pokemon! Red itself comes from a Pokemon copy, a really broken and busted down copy of the most broken Pokemon game everrrr Pokemon fire red: A really buggy and glitchy mess held by tape and raw will power, a start of a beloved franchise with tons of love put into it and also just busted. And That sort of brought Red into existence 5 years ago.

Red did not take over a character or an idea or a concept of a character, Red took over the literal glitches, every unused asset and every game breaking bug, this made it so that whenever he TRIED telling someone of its existence, it just read as glitching and nonsense and what you would think of when someone tells you “haunted game”, everyone with self-preservation is not going to entertain that and will just shut the thing off and sell it or something, programs are expected to emerge in a somewhat normal 4th wall break or something not screaming and static and the game shutting off on its own. He took the name red because among the scrapped nonsense there was also a scrapped trainer Red sprite in there and it was the only semblance of a face amongst that entire mess, and you take any face you can get when you don’t have any, and you take any semblance of an identity you can get when you also don’t have any.

So Red gained consciousness a hot second ago, 5 years ago from current timeline, but was not taken anywhere to become a real person because no one could tell she was one. A guy had his cartridge and just let it rot under his desk for those years because that thing is unplayable and also probably haunted!! Eventually he decided to sell it and you would not guess who got it (Owynn and Loon.)

Loon bought it because he’s just game obsessed, and at this point he was already dating Owynn so they were just hanging out and Loon wanted to play the thing. Haunted game screeching and screaming ensures and Loon was about to do the normal person reaction that is turning the thing off, but since Owynn is a weirdo he didn’t really care? Owynn is curious, not easy to scare at all, and he HARDCORE doesn’t believe in ghosts, so he was determined to fucking around with the thing trying to figure out if it what was wrong with it.

So a lot of Red’s inherent craziness towards Owynn and Loon comes down to the fact that they were the ones who actually got him out of that hell, Owynn fucked around and treated her as some sort of ARG like a loser and figured out what she was trying to say and what she was. Thisss is also badd and this is the moment where we tell everyone that they should never look up to Owynn OR Loon.

Basically, they figured it out! (Mostly Owynn) woho!!! Now they will take her to get a body and be normal right? (no). Owynn is a curious bastard and also inherently just morally skewed, and Loon is sort of a pushover and also an absolute dickhead to strangers and rlly low empathy (doesn’t seem people he’s not close with as real), so owynn just basically kept her in there?? for a few months??? They tried to frankenstein him a bit, tried to figure out what he was and how he worked and all that stuff. And it was obviously dehumanizing as hell and messed up how they were just playing mad scientist with his life, but also 5 years of being completely alone kind of warps your brain a little (a lot), and being seen as something “precious” or cool or interesting got her crazy attached to them 2. 

Eventually they talked and Loon got over his “if i don’t know you you aren’t real” thing because he DID know them now, and they EVENTUALLY after a literal hot second got Red to get an actual body. Took them long enough jesus. 

First of all, they had no idea how to even do this?? Because you need to fill out forms and that and Owynn couldn't on the basis of bad homelife, and Loon technically could but he was also incredibly out of it because he was taken to a part of town he didn’t even know at all and that just panicked him way worse. So problem number one is that, problem number 2 is that Red wasn’t even normal by program standards and was still just inherently glitchy. It all worked out surprisingly, Neither of them had the money nor the want to take care of Red or whatever, and in theory he should’ve ended up in the foster system but the woman who worked on his body saw that even with a body she is just inherently unstable and decided that she could take that responsibility given that she was an expert on the stuff.

So, Red has a really warped vision of those two because how do you not after that??? He sees them as sort of gods? which sounds crazy but then again how do you not after that. When Red is taken out of DS hell, two things are evident. 1) Her file was an English copy, so their “mother” language is English, most of the spanish he knows was acquired directly from hearing the real people out in the real world talk with each other over those 5 years, and even if that sounds like a long time to learn his cartridge was stuck and stored in a desk so what he could hear was limited and also muffled. So their Spanish is kinda bad, they tend to default to English but even then words are pronounced wrong because he never had the need to say most or any of them out-loud. 2) they have no animal. This is due to the scrapped Rival Red sprite having no animal traits. So he has to chose what type of animal person he will be, they knew they wanted to be an arthropod. Loon and Owynn are both arthropods, and she wanted to resemble her saviors, her gods. She chooses a cicada, a true bug! Actual bug! It’s a bit of a play on words on our part, since Red is an accumulation of all of Fire Reds bugs. Cicadas also represent rebirth, and new beginnings, and he was pretty much reborn into a new life by being taken out of DS hell. Another thing you may notice about their design is their eyes, one is a bar that you cannot see the end of, and her other small dot eye, this is also something he chose to have. Its the same eye disorder Owynn has! Xe also styles xir bangs like Owynn, wears stud earrings like Loon, and is in the insect subsection of arthropods with Loon. Generally tries to emulate them both. So, for the parts of themself that Red could choose in, he decided to look like the people he admires/worships.

Little visual help go!! :

Due to forming within an accumulation of glitches, and not a normal sprite like most programs, her physical form still glitches out. Things like chromatic aberration and actual spikes of distortion, which are all visual glitches but still hurt. This facet of how she exists is a lot of electricity, and messes with electronics, and with other programs, since their bodies, although made to be as realistic and human as possible, are still built things. machines and electronics, and therefore tamperable. Due to his glitchy nature, this means that he can bypass a lot of rules set inside of Programs that were made in fear of “machine uprising” nonsense.  Every program is able to re-enter electronics, they can go into the computer and chill there while their body is just sleeping/knocked out. They can do anything you normally can, but have a built in chip that prevents them from easily prating things, easily stealing people's information to make purchases, getting peoples ips, and in general messing with things for their benefit. These are all bypassable by Red due to her “inherently broken” nature. 

Speaking of being compatible with computers, programs have little items on them that their consciousness can retreat into if their physical body is too damaged, this item is sort of like a hard drive of their entire being? It holds them, and can be used to transfer their memories onto exterior hardware like a laptop, phone, or computer. Think of it as back ups to keep themself extra safe! Red is, again, glitchy, and have a terrible memory that gets erased and corrupted as they exist, and the longer they go without uploading their memory the more likely he is to have it become corrupted and forgotten. THey are reminded to upload it, and sometimes do, but even still the memory held within its own mind will corrupt eventually. They are left with watchable memories, thoughts and experiences that they don't remember doing or having. Undeniable proof (memory upload on exterior device) vs I Dont Remeber THat. 

Due to the fact that they clinged so hard to the image of the only useable face they had, and being baseline modeled after it, she has a bit of a thing with hats, since one of the key features of trainer red has always been having that iconic red cap and all of that it’s both a comfort and also something she hates. He doesn’t want to be trainer red or code or something that isn’t alive, but it’s also something that makes him feel less afraid and lost and stressed out because it's familiar, and she has very few things she can even classify as familiar at all. Which is why in some art she has it and in some she doesn’t. 

Xe also needs glasses given that xe willingly screwed his eyes up, but they tend to forget them a lot and having stuff on their face is just generally a foreign and weird feeling she hasn’t gotten used to, so she also may pop up with glasses or without glasses.

She has yet to really crack how to act like a normal person, has a hard time understanding social norms and the concept of lying in general. She’s blunt and sorta rude, she’s not used to moderating the volume of her voice so it tends to be either too loud or too quiet, and he’s horribly bad at lying and borderline cannot do it. They are very easily startled and scared, but she translates that fear into an immediate fight response, so they read as very easy to piss off and also very easy to hit things or hit people. 

Programs are sorta normal by now, and there’s other students who are programs, Red absolutely loathes all of them. It’s mostly just crazy strong jealousy at the people who claim to be “like him” to live so much better than him. Aside from the glitching, Red’s origin has made her have bad memory, be sort of physically numb to a lot of sensations aside from pain (can’t feel cold all that well, can’t feel light touches and stuff), and have an awful time with a lot of motor skills. And none of the other programs have to deal with any of that and it drives him crazy. Other programs also have memories from inside their world, since they are usually “character gains sentience” types, but Red has none of that, They are not a character, not even the MC, they are the glitches. Super jealous, sad, but overall mad. So he just messes with a lot of them, due to being glitchy when he touches other programs he makes THEM glitch and therefore hurt, and he tends to not get into a lot of trouble for it given that Owynn is vice president and plays devil's advocate. He tends to stick to just touching them to mess them up that way but he does have one guy he specially hates who he straight up gets into fist fights with, and it’s the guy who used to have his cartridge. Who is also a program!! how unfair!! he got to live those 5 years completely normal while Red was stuck! Xe wants to absolutely kill that guy.

Speaking of her body and the issues that come with it, They have a hard time doing a lot of stuff and are inherently clumsy due to not being used to any of this. They've had a body for about 6 months? So everything is still insanely overwhelming, scary and stressful; and such emotions of instability heighten her glitches which hurt and make her more stressed and it’s just a mad man’s cycle.

She also just has a really hard time even seeing her body at all, he has dysphoria because he’s nonbinary and her body was made to be male so they look masculine, they have a broad back and a square-ish face and a deep voice and it makes her feel gross. And he also has body dysmorphia, so he just looks fundamentally wrong and it cannot click in her head that the body in the reflection is actually hers at all, it doesn’t feel real in the slightest and it tends to make her derealization and her feelings of not being a real human worse.

They tend to have a really hard time feeling real, mostly when they’re alone because it just plops them right back into that crushing loneliness of being completely on her own for 5 years. When it’s on its own a way they ground themselves often tends to include biting, biting his fingers or a pen or chewing hard candy, likes the pressure in her teeth and likes exerting any force at all and it having a clear effect, this also means that her jaw tends to be super tense and that they grit their teeth a lot, also just bites her nails off and tends to pick off the loose skin around the nails with her teeth which just ends up in messed up fingers.

He has a fixation or proving his own realness, by experiencing as much as he can. Doing is living. Theyll try anything once except they will actually do it, unprompted, anything. Impulsive thought to eat something that by all means no one should consider eating? It's already in her mouth, sorry. Uh she learns about her cicada biology through Owynn (freak) and learns that she can process liquids a lot better than anything else. Soooo her best friend is the blender in her kitchen. They will blend up bread, insects, and meat. Think of that funny scene where Town explains his juices except 100 percent serious that is what she is drinking. It will also drink blood, in some hope that it will make it more of a living person. “how would drinking her own blood make him more of a person if he's having a hard time thinking of himself as one?” Who said it was their own blood? checkmate.

They are mostly not good at school, which makes sense given her background, but she’s freakishly good at math. This isn’t a robot thing, it’s not because she’s has a calculator built in or anything. It’s  because in those 5 years she spent completely alone there wasn’t really anything else to do other than thinking, because doing much else broke the game and therefore threatened to break them. But after a bit she just ran out of things to think about, and then she just started counting to entertain herself, counting up and down, making up operations and then solving them, and doing anything at all to keep himself (somewhat) sane. Numbers click into place and make sense, numbers tend to be constant and expected, a multiplication between two numbers no matter how big will never vary, counting is a way to keep herself entertained. Fun fact, Owynn also counts when he feels trapped, smiley. 

He outright despises the idea of trainer red, the literal character, because a part of his brain tells him that he’s not really a person, nor is he that beloved character, they are a scrapped version of it, a literal error that just happened to present itself with that well known face. And yet he clings to it, because if he doesn’t have that face and that name then he has nothing at all, and she has changed her body enough to resemble other people so it shouldn’t matter, and sometimes she wants to look like the character to feel as if he was a normal program at all. Just don’t bring up that character in front of her, lights a fire in her head.

Despite how Red may feel about their “game counterpart”, they don't harbor any resentment toward the overall Pokemon franchise. This is mostly because Loon really does like Pokemon, I mean, he was interested in the Fire Red cartridge for  a reason. Red has this mental system about how they feel about things, naturally you'd assume they hate Pokemon bc resentment for their source material, but since Loon is someone they consider above them, it “overrides” that. Her emotions toward people she would otherwise be indifferent to is easily and sharply shifted by the people she considers herself to be “on the side of”. extra thing we didnt know how to transition to: 

While Loon is unable to see strangers as real living people, Red has a tendency to see strangers as just inherently more alive than her, more deserving of being called living beings and all of that, everyone who isn’t a program is an actual breathing person, while programs are a cruel mockery and none of them are alive, including her.

AND THATS ALL THANKS FOR READINGGGG

Never ask us anything ever again we WILL send the bible every single time without fail /J