VHSMEAT || 3/4 COMM SLOTS OPEN!!

putting effort in the dumbest things is one of my favorite activities. alt colors vvv

Honestly, bigotry is a big part of it. He's a homeless, visibly mentally ill and disfigured person, and people's biases against these demographics (partially influenced by media tropes about them) definitely play into it.

It's a common ableist trope in media (and also in real life, even among self-proclaimed "progressives") to associate ugliness/disfigurement with evil. The only disfigured character I can think of besides Spamton who is a major character and is depicted positively in popular media is Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Otherwise, it's common to either have an evil (or at best morally gray) character be ugly and associate that ugliness with their morality, and there's an insidious ableist trope of having a villain become visibly disabled/disfigured as a righteous "punishment" for their evils. People are used to seeing this association, and I think they're subconsciously assuming that the same happened to Spamton, when, ironically, Deltarune isn't doing the ableist trope. Spamton's disability is just that, a disability, and does not get tied to his morality. The thing he got "punished" for was trying to help a loved one in a way that his benefactor didn't approve of; he got punished for an (albeit reckless) act of kindness, rather than for selfishness, or greed, or whatever traits people assign to him. Vilifying mentally ill people is also common, both in real life and in media, so it's unsurprising that it happens to him.

Homeless people often get blamed for their own circumstances, with a non-insignificant number of people seemingly believing it's a choice or a lifestyle, rather than a systemic failure. So many people treat the homeless like pests to get rid of and that make them uncomfortable, rather than as human beings deserving of compassion and care. This gets worse when you consider that marginalized people are more likely to end up homeless; for example, trans people and disabled people, and Spamton is both of those. His disability, both literal and allegorical, is the reason why he's homeless; for reasons outside of his control, he's unable to succeed at his purpose, which comes naturally to other members of his species, which condemns him to being at rock bottom of society without outside help.

The "shallow evil greedy scammer" and other such misreadings of Spamton are a combination of bigotry and media illiteracy. People want to vilify him so bad, and they cherry pick and twist the narrative and ignore context to frame him as evil.

Oh, the multiply disabled homeless man wants money? And on account of said homelessness, he can only try to get it through scams? And he's willing to use questionable or even bad methods to achieve what he believes to be his only chance to escape the awful, traumatic circumstances he was forced to live in for years after everyone he thought he could trust left him to fend for himself, despite knowing he can't support himself independently? The guy who implied on several occasions that he has been physically assaulted during that time?

Wow, he's so evil for surviving and wanting a better life, clearly he should've just killed himself, maybe then he'd be a perfect enough victim for people to have even the tiniest bit of compassion for him. Sorry that the guy in desperate circumstances resorts to desperate measures to escape. You (the type of people who vilify him for it) would also resort to questionable actions if you were desperate enough, but perhaps you're too privileged to, even for a second, imagine yourself in his position and consider what you'd realistically do. Perhaps you're able to have a stable income, or have loved ones you can reliably depend on who won't leave you to die because your presence might make their business less profitable, which is what the Addisons did to Spamton (he was "bad for business").

Because they're prettier and their language is more sanitized, people trust them over him and just assume he must've wronged them in some way, when they don't even claim he did anything wrong, they openly admit they initially abandoned him out of jealousy; the way they talk about him also clearly shows that they see him as inferior and, at best, pity him, but don't respect him. The worst they actually imply about him is that he was kind of annoying when he kept talking about making it big one day.

Swatch calls Spamton a "crooked salesman", and yet he sells Spamton's old product, B.ShowBowtie, because it's good and he knows it, and he claims Spamton was once a "valued customer"; considering his willingness to talk negatively about present Spamton and about Rouxls, he's not being polite out of professionalism, he just genuinely has no complaints about Spamton pre-downfall. He says Spamton was trying to use NEO to fulfill his "twisted dreams", but what's so twisted about them? Oh, he doesn't want to be homeless and living in a dumpster and, ideally, wants to become a Lightner so he can have real autonomy and choose who he wants to be and how he wants to live? Wow, how evil and irredeemable of him; you see, a prettier, upper class character who talks more nicely says he's bad, so we'll just take it at face value.

It's incredible to watch how some people will see examples of other characters in the game being bigoted against Spamton, but because they themselves hold the same biases (and are media illiterate), they will take that at face value and also believe Spamton is horrible or worth less than others and deserves to suffer. They'll even completely make stuff up to get mad at him for, because it couldn't be that the cute funny ad guys or the handsome butler are the ones in the wrong, it has to be the Gross Evil Homeless Guy. There's definitely a good reason he's all alone, there can't possibly be an injustice happening here. Marginalized people never end up isolated because of societal bigotry, what are you talking about? (/sarcasm)

(And Tenna's anger towards Spamton is just grief expressed through anger and denial, but many people don't recognize it as such, in large part because Spamton isn't actually dead (unless Chapter 2's Weird Route was completed), and it doesn't occur to some people that Tenna doesn't have all the same information that we as the audience do, and from his perspective, Spamton went missing.)

It's also peak media illiteracy to take a character whose entire storyline revolves around a lack of autonomy, with him even being a literal puppet, and claim how, actually, everything bad that ever happened to him is his own fault. And to take a character whose entire storyline is about breaking free from what he's "supposed" to be and then act like, actually, his intended purpose perfectly represents who he is as a person. (I'll link this recent analysis I wrote about Spamton's canon characterization.)

There's also an annoying thing people like to do where they present the Weird Route version of him as his "true self", when the whole point of the Weird Route is how it warps various characters. Noelle would never cause a serious injury to Berdly under normal circumstances, she generally doesn't like hurting people and Berdly is also her friend, but if the player abuses her and breaks her down enough, she can be coerced into putting him in a coma. The player is ultimately the one with power, and they're the one who has to go out of their way to take a number of counterintuitive steps (like going in the "wrong" direction, as Noelle points out) in order to achieve the Weird Route.

Yes, Spamton is flawed. He's not a perfect victim, because no victim is perfect, and if you limit your sympathy only to perfect victims, you'll never sympathize with any victim. However, the stated and implied info we have points to him being a decent person before his downfall, and his more questionable behavior in present day being a direct result of his desperate circumstances, so he's as close to innocent as he can get, which makes him a great litmus test for people's biases, and whether they really mean it when they say they want more realistic depictions of traumatized characters, whose trauma shows up in "unpalatable" ways and not just them quietly crying in a corner somewhere.

As for the idea of Spamton getting "woobified", I have only been in the fandom since Chapters 3&4 came out, and my engagement with others' stuff is limited, so take this with a grain of salt, but I have not actually seen people doing that, and frankly, I think the term is getting misused. Like, if someone believes Spamton to be Evil, of course they're going to think that depicting him as anything other than a flat cartoon villain, and specifically depicting him sympathetically, with emotional depth and (completely in-character!) softness and love, is going to read as "woobification" to them. I'm aware that there are some people who used Spamton's eviction to hate on Queen, but that's not his fault, that's the fault of people being misogynistic and wanting an excuse to hate on a woman; he's not even hating on her in the game, he's angry at Swatch.

Claiming that Spamtenna is unimportant and "not that deep" is hilarious when their relationship and forced separation also ties into Deltarune's theme of autonomy and the idea of "nobody gets to choose who they are in this world" (they tried to choose and got punished), Tenna is still talking about Spamton in Chapter 5 (and it's given emotional weight), and hints at their relationship are written into the specifics of the music (which is made by Toby himself). They have a shared leitmotif, the track "Pushing Buddies" is called "tvromance" in the game files, is 19 seconds long, in 97 BPM and in G Major, and the track "And Now For Today's Sponsors...!" (Spamton used to do commercials on TV Time, so that's referencing him) is called "baci_perugina" in the game files, in reference to Baci chocolates that are wrapped in love notes (their name literally translates to "kisses", and they're sold by the Italian company Perugina). I don't think Toby would be including such details only dedicated fans would find if this relationship between two major characters wasn't important.

As for people saying Spamton can't be trans, I can understand how someone may not notice his trans coding, but I don't understand how someone can definitively claim that he can't be a trans character, and I don't even want to know why they'd think that. I sure do appreciate the insistence that one of the rare bits of positive transmasc representation in a world that usually completely erases transmascs is also being erased, how lovely (/sarcasm).