#roger robbe

OK i cant tell from this ask if youve read the book or not so im gonna work under the assumption that you (and whoever else is reading) hasnt. also just to get this out of the way.........i think Xerious is .bad . for the most part. its supposed to be a set-up for the wfrr universe and i think it fails spectacularly at that premise. roger rabbit from wfrr and roger rabbit from xerious are different animals to me. like, ""toons"" as described in wfrr and all the other books DO NOT match up with the toons in xerious business at AAALLLL. i might expand on this more later but considering this book is set in modern times (which was a terrible choice imo) i just. i cant relate them together at all. this is its own story. here we go.

Quick Synopsis (feel free to skip this one if you've read the book)

So. To really quickly run through the plot of Xerious Business for anyone who doesn't know. This book features Jessica Krupnik (before she becomes Jessica Rabbit) as our protagonist. She starts off the beginning as sort of a Cinderella type? Young adult with a deceased father, living with her neglectful stepmother and abusive/evil stepsiblings, working a dead end job that she hates. Her life is very sad and dull, that is before she's scouted by X.E.R.I.O.U.S., a spy agency, and is stolen away from her life for good. She becomes their top female agent in two years, and is very much the typical girlboss archetype. She's smart and fast and they spend a lot of time focusing on her physical attractiveness (which they make a point of saying how hot she's gotten since joining). This will be important for a reason I get to in a second. XERIOUS is in an eternal battle with a guild of billionaires and supervillains, and the biggest and baddest of all is a warring agency: Y.U.K., run by a supervillain calling himself The Klown. The Klown is allegedly developing some kind of drug, the effects of which are unclear to the agency at first. When Staid, the head of XERIOUS, learns that he'll be hosting a gala, he decides to send Jessica out to investigate. But he can't send her alone. So he sends her with their other best agent...Agent Robbe.

Now Robbe............fucking SUCKS. This guy is THE WORST!!!!!! I could not stand him my first read through and that is VERY MUCH the point. Robbe is an asshole. He is a sexist prick who fully, proudly admits that he only sees women as sex objects, and now has his eyes on Jessica. Being the other most attractive member of the agency, he's insistent that they belong together. He's very insistent that they'll be together, one day, even if she doesn't like him now. He sees Jessica as a prize to be won, and she sees him as The Worst Man Alive. As does every other women at the office. He seems to be well-liked by the men, though-- Staid is genuinely shocked to find his best agents not playing nice together. Robbe isn't the typical sleazy type. He's smug, and cocky, in a way that lets him easily get whatever women he wants, as long as it's not a woman that has to be around him for longer than a one-night stand. Jessica agrees to do this one mission with him, but that's it. Afterwards, she wants a new partner. She ends up not getting the chance to switch.

At the ball, the two of them meet The Klown in disguise (although, Robbe doesn't believe that it is actually him). And while they're there, he decides to debut the drug he's been developing. It turns out to be administered through this green gas, dubbed 'Looney Gas'. Once inhaled, and in your system, it starts wreaking havoc on literally every aspect of your body. Jessica manages to dodge it, but Robbe does not. He inhales every bit of it. Thus kickstarts his slow, horrible transformation :)

Effects of the Looney Gas

Holy shit man, I could talk about this all day.

Looney Gas is a FASCINATING fictional drug. The effects are different for every person. But generally, its characterized by the same few things. First, it stops your heart. People who inhale the gas tend to choke, gag, and then pass out. If you check their pulse, you'll get no feedback. However, after a few seconds, they'll pop right back up, and start acting completely different. How "different" they act and what exactly they do depends on the person (I'll go more into why later in this section), but generally, they start acting....silly??? Hence the name for the gas. Dancing, singing, playing childish games or otherwise just having no spatial and social awareness. It's not a total, immediate loss of personhood, and the effects can be nullified/mitigated temporarily. It doesn't seem to worsen overtime, unless more gas is ingested, but it does cause the infected to develop "triggers" that start spells of this erratic behavior. Higher concentrations of the gas cause physical changes, not just mental ones. Robbe is the best possible case to analyze, as over the course of the book, he slowly ends up ingesting more and more, in increasingly large doses. His descent is slow and agonizing, not just for him, but for everyone in his personal life. As Robbe slowly looses touch with the sane, rational part of his brain, you can almost see his internal battle to hold on. His mouth says one thing, but his face, and his body language says something else. It's like there's two voices trying to talk at once. I'm gonna slap in a few excerpts occasionally to further my points; here's a few from the party! Robbe danced across the floor, his body loose, arms flailing, legs rubbery. Jessica chased after him, tried to catch him. No easy task. Robbe was moving at almost inhuman speed. Finally, Jessica caught him by the arm. "Stop that!" Jessica commanded him. "Everybody's looking at you." "I can't stop!" Robbe answered with grave concern. "I can't control myself." (pg 93) She snagged Robbe's arm, halting his chicken chase. "Come on," she told him. "We gotta get outta here. Now." "Aw," said Robbe, "you always spoil my fun." In the dark recesses of his gas-addled brain, Robbe knew full well she wasn't spoiling his fun. She was saving his life. (pg 94) Jessica grabbed the gun off Robbe's claw. "What's wrong with you? What was in that gas?" "Who cares," said Robbe. "I'd like some more, please. I feel GREAT!" (pg 97) When he's gassed at the party, the effects start off fairly strong at first. For a while, Jessica assumes some sort of hallucinogen or deliriant. Or, less seriously, that he's just experiencing similar effects to being drunk. When the effects don't subside after a day, or even a few days, she's alerted to the idea that it must be more serious than that. I said above that, when he has these fits, it's almost like there's two halves of his brain fighting for control. The interesting fact here is that the effects of this drug don't add this "other" being to your brain. It's not a parasite, it just functions like one. There's nothing possessing Robbe; everything he's doing is still him. What I mean is, this drug doesn't just make you act silly for no reason; if that was the case, it should effect everyone the same way, but it doesn't. What Looney Gas does, specifically, is it essentially turns your brain inside out. It amplifies everything that you'd been trying to repress. Every childish desire you don't act on to be a functioning adult in society? Suddenly, you can't keep yourself from acting on it anyway. Every emotion you know is irrational/unfounded? You're feeling it anyway, ten times as strongly. Repressed fears, trauma's-- things you overcame and worked past? Suddenly, all your progress has been reversed, and you're even more afraid than you were at the beginning. That also means that the traits you consider good, or useful-- like Robbe's intellect, bravery, and quick-thinking skills-- are pushed to the back. This is all but told to us. A few instances are coming to mind. The first being a moment from before he got gassed:

"I've never done anything I enjoyed more than performing in that musical," said Robbe wistfully. "For a long while after that, I wanted nothing more than to be an actor." His face fell. His wistfulness vanished. "Then things changed." He didn't say what. Jessica didn't care enough to ask. (pg 72)

Here, we see Robbe admit that his greatest dream in childhood was to be an actor, though he gave up on it for some (currently) unspecified reason. Interestingly, when he is gassed, virtually the first thing he does is put on a show! He does a silly little performance with the only other person who was gassed at the party. And he keeps this up through the whole book! His looney fits mostly consist of singing, dancing, and otherwise performing in front of an audience of as many people as he can find. He's not good at it, but it is funny, which makes perfect sense if you know anything about Roger Rabbit. Another, more negative example I can think of off the top of my head, is how Robbe starts reacting to small, tight spaces. When he trailed off in the above excerpt, it's presumably because of something he admits to Jessica later, after being gassed. He never had a mother, and was actually abandoned on a doorstep as a baby. He was passed around in foster homes for years, abused and neglected in all of them. This lead him to developing certain fears, that he had grown out of, until this brought it all back. Here's the excerpt (this ones pretty long): Crawling through thee air duct had been, for Jessica, a nostalgic, almost enjoyable remembrance of her warehouse tryout for XERIOUS. She negotiated the small, cramped space, the twists, the turns with an enthusiasm bordering on pleasure. She loved this kind of challenge. Robbe had a different, much more negative reaction. Robbe whimpered softly during the entire crawl. At times he grew paralyzed, unable to continue the journey. Jessica had to softly coax him into moving forward. Jessica knew Robbe was a brave man. Snaking through an air vent wouldn't spook him. He had certainly done far more dangerous things then this in his XERIOUS career. She chalked up his whimpering to one more aftereffect of his gassing. Her theory was partially true. Robbe had crawled through many dark, narrow spaces in his XERIOUS career, always without incident. The gassing had unleashed one of Robbe's long buried and dreadfully disturbing childhood memories. The dark, narrow airlock gave Robbe a horrifying flashback to his seven-year-old youth. His brutal foster father, in a drunken attempt to 'make a man out of the little woosy' had tied to toughen Robbe up by locking him inside a small, lightless broom closet and keeping him there, sometimes for days. That buried memory hadn't surfaced in years. Not since Robbe joined XERIOUS. Where Staid had done what his foster father couldn't, admirably succeeded in making a man out of him. (pg 132 - 133)

That's what's so sinister about the gas, to me. It makes you feel like you're being possessed, but you're just being possessed by YOURSELF. The parts of yourself that you HATE. The parts you have ACTIVELY WORKED NOT TO LET ANYONE SEE. It's humiliating, it's terrifying!!! But it's not necessarily bad! Because you're becoming, like or not, the most authentic version of yourself. Another example we see of people changing due to the gas, is two men who confess their feelings to each other the second they're both infected. The gas didn't just make them do that because it'd be funny. It made them do that because those were real feelings they had, real feelings they hadn't let themselves act on. It's fascinating!!

Robbe really got the short end of the stick, here. Because of the very small dose that he injected from the start, he was much more aware of these things happening to him than any of the other victims seem to. And his reaction is, mostly, absolute terror. And you can't really blame him! It's a scary thing to have happen to you! He's not just losing control of his body half the time, he's losing control of his mind. He can't easily separate which thoughts he'd be having anyway, and which thoughts are completely and totally irrational. It's like having a delusional episode, and being completely unable to distinguish reality from what you're feeling. Music tends to calm him down temporarily, and can prevent full-on fits, but it isn't a cure. He can tell his own condition is getting worse, and it truly frightens him. The scene that really put this into perspective for me is a scene where he and Jessica are on a long flight. this'll be another long few excerpts but i really need you to see just how fucked up this is for this guy The movie was nearly over when Daniel Craig went out of focus. Robbe tapped the screen, assuming a technical problem. That didn't help. The problem wasn't the screen. The problem was Robbe. His vision had blurred. He rubbed his eyes. No help. His vision remained blurry. Robbe's face twitched. The twitch spread to his shoulders, his arms, his hands, his legs, his feet. Try as he might, he couldn't stop twitching. Robbe leaned across the center console separating his seat from Jessica's. He shook Jessica awake. "Help me," he said to her, in a panic-stricken whisper. "My problem. My problem came back." "What?" Jessica asked. She sat up, sleep-dazed, not completely awake. Robbe's eyes rolled around crazily. His nose twitched like a rabbit approaching a lettuce patch. (pg 118) Inside the toilet, Jessica tried to calm Robbe down. She sat on the toilet, grabbed Robbe, and sat him on her lap. She wrapped her arms around him and cooed to him, rocking him like a baby. She stroked him the way she would soothe a frightened puppy. "There, there," she said comfortingly. "Everything will be okay. Take a breath." He did. "That's right. Good," she said. "Now another." Robbe breathed in deeply again. Then once more. She remembered how music had soothed him before. She punched up her Mellow playlist on her iPhone. A current pop melody started to play. She gave the wireless earphones to Robbe. The music had the desired effect. Robbe calmed down. Slowly, surely, he regained his normal composure. Robbe stood up, smoothed out his badly wrinkled tux. "How do I make this stop?" He asked Jessica, truly frightened. Jessica shook her head. She had no answer. (pg 119)

The absolute panic in his voice speaks for itself. The shame of having to be consoled like this. The pure, uncontrollable dread, knowing what you'll do if you let it take over.....And it's not even like he'll go on a murder spree!!! But honestly, that sounds less terrifying!!! At least if that was all, he'd have the comfort of knowing that these fits have nothing to do with himself. But here, he's having an internal battle with HIS OWN PSYCHE. And he knows he's going to LOSE.

All of this is taken to a new extreme when we learn that The Klown spent HIS childhood in a mental hospital, after being deemed 'insane'. The depiction of this facility is very cartoonish and arguably offensive, which is a shame, because the implications here are so fascinating. The Klown's motive, by gassing people with this, is to bring about a Utopia. A Utopia he plans to rule. He thinks it will be a Utopia in the first place, because this gas is meant to bring out the most true part of a person's being. Everyone is honest, everyone's having fun. Most people who are gassed have no desire to turn back! And everyone who knows them usually don't want the 'old' version back either! This is especially true with Robbe, which leads me to my next point.

Colleagues Response

We can't talk about Robbe's mental changes without talking about the biggest one: the same day he gets gassed is the last day he utters anything misogynistic. At the beginning, I characterized him as a sexist, awful man with no desire to respect women...At all. He doesn't see them as people, and was proud of it. But this changes the absolute moment this gets into his bloodstream, and is actually the first thing that makes Jessica realize that something is deeply wrong with his brain. (this is another long excerpt, sorry)

Jessica grabbed Robbe by the shoulders and shook him hard. "Get a grip on yourself," she said. Robbe rolled his head. He looked at Jessica cross-eyed. He licked his lips and smirked. "I'd rather get a grip on you," he said, reverting to type. He was talking the talk, the way he always did, always had, but his suggestive retort seemed involuntary. A reflex action. What he was expected to say rather than what he meant. 'Umphrey [their taxi-- later known as Benny] had a Frank Sinatra song playing on the radio. Robbe's head bobbed in time to the song. The music seemed to effect his mood, make him rational, calm him down. Robbe's expression changed suddenly from utter lust to abject horror. He grabbed Jessica's hands firmly in his and held on tight, as though she were a life preserver, and he was bobbing in the water after having just abandoned the Titanic. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," Robbe said apologetically. "That remark was totally uncalled for. Especially after what you did for me." His breath came in short, quick, hard bursts, like he was running the race of his life, running a race for his life. A race he was terrified he was going to lose. "Throughout our whole relationship I've been a complete sexist boor. I shouldn't be hitting on you all the time. I shouldn't be harassing you the way I do. I shouldn't be verbally assaulting you with my gross innuendoes." He paused to catch his breath, as though he might run out of wind before he ran out of contrition. "Tonight, you protected me, kept me from harm. Instead of making lewd remarks, I should be down on my knees saying thank you, thank you, thank you. Believe me. I'm eternally grateful to you for what you did." He clasped his hands together in silent prayer to both their better natures. "I beg you. Forgive me for the way I've treated you in the past. Please. I'll never, ever treat you or any other woman than way again." Robbe lowered his head. "I'll really try to be a better man. I will. I honestly will." Robbe's contriteness and supplication worried Jessica as much as his lunacy, maybe more. This was definitely not the Robbe she had grown to know and hate. This was Robbe 2.0., radically improved form buggy version 1.0. No question, she much preferred this version. There was only one problem. This version wasn't normal. Not even close. Robbe 1.0. was sickening. Robbe 2.0 was just plain sick. (pg 99 - 100)

This proclamation is the only one he doesn't seem to be ashamed or afraid of. It's also one he doesn't walk back on, even once. I believe this is sort of our first hint that the Looney Gas does more than just make you act a little silly. I believe that Robbe genuinely did feel some level of remorse for the way he was treating Jessica, it's just that 'remorse' wasn't an emotion he allowed himself to feel before that night. If he ever felt bad when she'd call him out, he didn't dwell on it. He stuck to his guns 100%, because he believed being persistent was a part of who he was. When, really, it wasn't just hurting Jessica, it was hurting himself, too. This ties into what I view as one of the most tragic parts of this novel, and that being that, in a way, this complete loss of self was for the better. And, in a way, that means that the Klown won. People at the XERIOUS office, particularly women, are glad that Robbe has changed so suddenly and drastically. He's nicer to service workers, and more polite to women who try and get his attention. Like, objectively, when he's not being ""looney"", he's still a considerably better person than he was before. Jessica frequently laments about what a shame it would be if he goes back to "normal" after this, and slips right back into his old bad habits. Of course, she wants him to be his best self, but this really does feel like an improvement. And if you think about it, it's not like he's "losing" himself. He's just losing the façade that he put on. Good habits could, theoretically, he relearned. But would he want to, after being fully changed? The new version of him doesn't have a desire to save the world, or be a spy. He's clumsy, and cowardly, not to mention the fact that he sticks out terribly once the physically changes commence. And I haven't even talked about the physical changes yet!!! When the Klown said that he wouldn't have any interest in turning back, he was right. At the end of the novel, he's even offered the antidote, on the condition that the Klown gets to go free, and he refuses. There's just still something bittersweet about the fact that, if he wasn't too far gone at this point, he would've jumped for it. The old Robbe, the one who was shaking in terror on the plane, or pleading on his knees in front of Jessica, would've selfishly taken that deal in a heartbeat. So who really wins? Robbe will never be himself again, and he's happier, proving the Klown right. Or, the Klown goes free, so he wins, and Robbe is rightfully back to his old self. Would he have been scared straight? What parts of his new self would he have kept? We'll never know. It's hard to see it as a happy ending, with so many unanswered questions.

End Result

Okay I'm gonna go over the physical results really quickly because honestly the implications are never explained and they kinda bug me.

Robbe's physical changes start out small, almost unnoticeable. He becomes much more flexible, first. So much, that he occasionally gets tangled up in his own limbs. Then, he gains the ability to somewhat flatten himself, by releasing all the air in his lungs and diaphragm, allowing him to snake into small spaces, like between metal bars. Then he grows suckers on his palms, allowing him to scale walls. Then he gets shorter, grows longer ears, longer feet, etc etc until he eventually turns into a rabbit. The most interesting part of all of this is the way that he reacts to it. I'll put in a few snippets of his little breakdowns.

"I've always been a brave, fearless superhuman," said Robbe. "Now you're simply a normal human," Jessica replied gently. "Except I'm not!" Robbe's eyes started to water. He was going to cry. "I'm a...a...I don't know what I am. Slipping through those bars like I did. That's not human." Robbe pointed down towards the ground. "You know how I got up here?" She didn't have a clue. She shook her head. Robbe held up his hands, palms out. "Little suckers sprouted on my fingertips," said Robbe. "I climbed up that stalk like Spiderman. That's not human. That's downright freakish." (pg 165)

He put the cord into his mouth and bit the cord in half. The cord arced and sparked. Amazingly, for a harrowing split-second, Jessica, watching from the edge of the dance floor, could see Robbe's skeleton visible through his tuxedo. (pg 180)

There are far more instances than this but honestly I can't really justify these changes. As much as I love that he turned into a rabbit-man, one thing that really irks me about this novel is that, because it's set in modern times, these toon tropes already exist. In the rest of the WFRR series, the toons have always existed and they're just...like that?? But in this book, it doesn't make sense to me to have a man turn into a cartoon. In fact, he's notably not turning into a toon. Theyre not made of ink, and paint, these are just...horribly deformed people. In fact, when we see a group of looney's later in the book, they take the form of already-existing toons (like Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and Shrek are all name-dropped specifically, as well as several others I don't care to pull right now). So unless Roger Rabbit is a character that exists in this universe (which I doubt) it either 1) doesn't make sense for those other people to turn into pre-existing IP or 2) it doesnt make sense for robbe to turn into something unique??? I like to pretend that everyone who gets gassed gets their own transformation into something unique and special to them but that's just not true.

The novel ends with the Klown being brought to justice. There were several victims to the gas in the process, including virtually all of XERIOUS (save for Staid and Jessica). At all the locations they hunted him down at, at least one other person was infected. Because of this, the government decides to designate a spot for all of the infected to live, as the Klown has destroyed the only antidote, and there's currently no hope for their return to normalcy. They name the spot "Loontown" (temporarily), and Jessica moves in with Robbe (now going by his first name, Roger), and they're married. His last name, Robbe, translates roughly to Rabbit, hence the new, full names. Roger and Jessica Rabbit.

Symbolism

I won't dwell on this very long, I just have to point out my absolute favorite detail.

The party in which Robbe is gassed happens to be a costume party. Robbe attends dressed as a wolf. Specifically Tex Avery's cartoon wolf! A character famous for lusting over attractive red-heads, which is no accident. This is how Robbe sees himself as the beginning. He calls that wolf his spirit animal. Which is why I absolutely love that the animal he turns into isn't a wolf, but a bunny. It perfectly incapsulates the kind of man he was on the inside. Small, weak, cowardly, clumsy, sweet. It's so perfectly juxtaposes the wolf he was pretending to be- literally a bunny in wolves clothing. Like a fable, the RABBIT outsmarts the WOLF in the end and that makes me CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!!!! thats why i always use a bunny to represent this part of him thats taking over or clawing his way out, and use a sick/dying wolf to represent robbe. i just think its so fascinating. it killed him with kindness. how are people not going batshit insane over this book i dont get it

Final Thoughts

The worst part about this novel is that I'm sure a lot of this symbolism and imagery wasn't intentional. Because if it was, it should be marketed as like. A psychological horror, and not a "jessica and roger backstory", which is the one place where I think this story fails. At the end of the day, this premise is KIND OF ruined IN MY OPINION by trying to expand the WFRR-verse. But at the same time, I understand that was probably more of a marketing thing, because this author's WFRR books are the most popular. They're his characters! This is the same man who wrote the novel who inspired the movie! But it's a very odd choice that I think detriments the otherwise very compelling story here. I totally recommend people read this book, but I would set realistic expectations. I HAAATTTEEDDD this book on a first read because it advertises itself as a "History of toontown" and "backstory" for the wfrr verse when really the only thing they have in common is their names. Like, Jessica doesn't even become a toon/"looney"???

None of the novels are particularly consistent but I enjoy this one entirely separate from the main characters. These are just humans/ex-humans who happen to share the same names/physical features.