Fridge / LISA

Entries on this page may have unmarked spoilers as they may assume prior knowledge of the reader, continue at your own risk

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Fridge Brilliance

• Brad doesn't remember any moves from his own family fighting style at the beginning of the Painful RPG. Why? Well, what has he been doing for the last ten plus years? Taking Joy and Drinking alcohol. No wonder his memory isn't too great. It might even explain why he doesn't recognize Rando or Buzzo.
• In the opening of the game, right before Brad finds Buddy as a baby, Brad hears the sound of a baby crying. His response? To take Joy. This is because he thinks he is hallucinating the crying. It isn't until after he takes the joy and continues to hear the cries that he realizes it is not a hallucination.
• The name of the Beehive. There's no "birds" (women) so all that's left are the "bees" (men), and in an actual beehive, there's only one female: the queen, whose main function is birthing more bees. And then there's the fact that the world itself has become a Wretched Hive of men with only one woman left in it. Suffice to say it's a grossly Meaningful Name that works on multiple levels.
• If Brad loses both his arms he can no longer equip arm bands. Makes sense, since you can't exactly wear "arm" bands without "arms".
• Unlike the name implies, the drug Joy doesn't actually make you feel happy at all, it just makes you feel nothing at all, both physically and mentally. To a person with immense emotional trauma and psychological problems or just plain depression, maybe feeling nothing at all is ecstasy.
• Ironically, for someone who's name is literally "Buddy", she's probably one of the most hostile and aggressive people in Olathe.
• After the second phase of the fight with the Rando army, the music changes from "Goodbye Baby" to "Soft Skin," the music that plays during Joy mutant fights. It's because at that point Brad is pretty much on the fast track to turning into a Joy mutant, and the music is reflecting that.
• Brad "Armstrong" can perform powerful moves with his "strong arms".
  • "Armstrong" turns into a cruel pun if you get one or both of Brad's arms cut off.
• A lot of the songs in LISA: The Painful RPG have parts where they play the tune to "The Sireen's Call," the title screen music and arguably Lisa's theme in general. No matter where Brad is or what he's doing, the thoughts of Lisa never go away, and that's why sometimes level theme's will just suddenly play "The Sireen's Call," out of nowhere.
  • Conversely, in LISA: The Joyful, only about two songs contain Lisa's theme. That's because Buddy doesn't know Lisa and she doesn't have thoughts about her. Instead, many of the songs in LISA: The Joyful contain a different song, "Buddy's Theme." Because this isn't really about Lisa anymore, it's about Buddy.
• Buzzo's name is a reference to when he mutilated Lisa with a buzzsaw. But it could also refer to the Buzz one gets when taking drugs.
• Since Satan is an expy of Mike Nnemonic, the theme that plays during the fight with him isn't "I Am Satan" but rather "Exploding Hearts." Because he isn't Satan, he's "just a man named Mike."
• Why does Terry only fall over when he attacks? Because he pulled his hamstring.
  • Also because he is a practitioner of Di Tang Quan according to his bio. Di Tang Quan is a style of martial arts that incorporates a lot of tumbling and other acrobatics.
• Shocklord is facing the wrong direction in every cutscene because his mask makes him practically blind.
• The most common foodstuffs Brad comes across are jerky and beer. Salting meat preserves it and negates the need for electronic refrigeration. Alcohol sterilizes bacteria, making it the safest beverage available in the absence of proper sanitation. This makes sense considering that there's a dearth of electricity and utilities in Olathe on account of it being a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
  • The only sources of water in Olathe, besides the Fishmen's swamp and the sea Shardy traverses, are sporadic hand pumps. These typically give you bottles of dirty water, making liquor the only real source of hydration that won't make you sick.
• Of all the party members to face Brad at the end of the game, Shocklord is the only one who refuses to fight you and will actively convince the others to cease the fight. He only has one special move. No regular attacks.
• It seems that the early party members are the ones that attack Brad the least. That's because they all had time to get to know Brad, to become genuine friends. Even Rage Ironhead, who made it clear that he wants sex with Buddy, will waste turns crying and standing there, not wanting to hurt his friend.
  • Rooster is the exception. You are holding Goldie hostage, after all.
• The description for Mad Dog's nipple patch reads, "Who loses a nipple?" Depending on one of Brad's decisions, it can later become a grim Brick Joke.
• A weird one for Lisa the First: The whole game can be seen as Lisa exploring options for escaping Marty and her own feelings, but no matter what she does, the only conclusion is that she will never escape him. But then you have the rope world, a single goal of moving upward that takes ridiculous patience to achieve.. and ends in a literal huge fuck you at the top. It may represent Lisa's thought process and decision to have her friend brutally mutilate her to spite her abuser.
• Austin Jorgensen practiced martial arts professionally, and it shows in the subtle jokes and details that goes into each character's fighting style.
  • Possibly to reflect the dismal state of Olathe, many of Brad's party members practice martial arts that are considered "less respectable" or outright jokes.
    • Terry, Rooster, and Birdie practice obscure forms of Shaolin kung fu that would most likely be laughed at in an actual fight.
    • Rooster practices Ya Quan, or Duck Style kung fu to reflect his chicken motif.
    • Birdie is a master of Zui Quan, the drunken fist style. That makes him a Drunken Master.
    • Dick practices Xtreme Martial Arts (XMA), which is often derided for being mostly about performance rather than self-defense. It makes sense, given that the founder of XMA used to do sentai roleplay. Kind of.
    • Clint's fighting style and surname are a pun on Olympic Taekwondo, namely schools of Taekwondo that train for sparring competitions rather than self-defense. Also, his moveset is a clone of Brad's because Taekwondo and Karate share more similarities than differences.
• Salvation Green's Spoof Aesop is "Don't pay for drugs, let your friends do that!". He's the only one of the Salvation Rangers, beside possibly Tan/Beige, who isn't a Joy addict. Yet he does nothing to stop them; he just lets them pay for their Joy.
• Nern's third story describes him seeing a child loiter around the doctor's office with "eyes of the devil". There are only three named child characters we know at the time: Lisa, Dusty, and Bernard. But Lisa is dead, and Dusty is too kind of a person to be like that, which leaves only Bernard. This implies that at this time, Bernard was already working with Dr. Yado to make Joy.
• Salvation Black's flashback shows him as a child in what clearly seems to be a post-Flash environment, implying that he is around a similar age or maybe a little older than Jack.
• One of Fardy’s post-battle quotes has him ask if anyone’s seen his contacts. Considering the Powerful, but Inaccurate nature of his Truck Slam attacks, it’s highly likely he’s Blind Without Them. You can rectify this by either feeding him Joy, a super-soldier drug, or a pair of accuracy boosting glasses, supporting this theory.

Fridge Horror

• Joy causes the user to lose control and act out their deepest desires. Buzzo stalks and tortures Brad incessantly, despite saying himself that it does nothing to help his pain over Lisa's death. He even admits in LISA: The Joyful that he knew nothing would ever make up for Lisa's death and that Brad had never deserved the pain he had caused him. This means that Buzzo's greatest desire wasn't to avenge Lisa, but rather to shift all the guilt and regret he felt onto someone else, someone he could demonize and accuse of all the same evils that Buzzo himself is guilty of, Brad. Buzzo is quite literally hating himself through Brad.
  • Which is why he turns into a Joy Mutant at the end of Joyful: without Brad, he has no choice but to realize that he hates himself, and act on that desire.
  • Likewise, Brad's greatest desire is to protect Lisa / Buddy, and Buddy's is to be free of any authority (and thus why she murders all the warlords).
  • With that in mind, when Brad confronts Marty (his dad), his greatest desire is over-ridden by his next greatest of all desires: revenge on his dad. That is why he readily attacks Buddy (despite claiming that he's out to protect her), even when she desperately shields Marty from Brad, Brad has to forcibly beat her up (by any means necessary) in order to continue to enact on his "desire". This is also why he is beyond reason, as even if you choose to spare him, Brad will carry out the deed anyway.
  • Compare this to other Joy Mutants, however. Rex Thunderstorm placed a high value on his motorcycle, yet when he turns into a mutant he's mindlessly bashing his gang members to death with it like a club. It can be presumed that his deepest desire (something related to the motorcycle) was twisted and mingled with violent, primal thoughts, similar to the ones Salvation Blue felt in the cave before his own transformation.
• The credits sequence gets deranged pretty quickly, including messages such as "Burn in Hell, Kickstarter" and "Kill Her Brad Armstrong." A good possibility is that it is Dr. Yado issuing his orders via trumpet.
  • This is also why no such thing occurs in the credits for the Joyful. Buddy is the one holding the trumpet.
  • Perhaps this is stretching it thin, but this could also explain why there are no credits sequence at all in Lisa: The First. Lisa's pain is on-going, and it never truly ends until her eventual suicide.
• Without any women there's no hope for humanity. With that being evident, perhaps the people of Olathe's crazy antics are actually a way of coping with imminent extinction. Things like the EWC and the Salvation Rangers roleplays suddenly make more sense when put into the context that the world is going to end anyways and nothing matters.
  • According to Word of God, many people (such as Terry Hintz) changed their names after the Flash to better reflect their personalities as a coping mechanism.
• If you listen closely to the Hum heard whenever Brad hallucinates or loses control, you might notice that it sounds similar to the scream attack that joy mutants use.
• From what little we've seen of Ms. Armstrong, Lisa seems to resemble her somewhat. According to a tweet by Austin Jorgensen, Marty wasn't always abusive. In fact, he might've been a normal well adjusted individual. Something happened to Ms. Armstrong however. What happened is a mystery, but the fact is she simply vanished awhile ago. This is most likely what caused Marty to change so dramatically. In some sick way, because of immense grief over the loss of his wife, Marty may actually be using Lisa as a substitute for his wife.
• In scenes with Buzzo, look at his gang. You might have noticed that some of them are missing one or both arms. Buzzo has a limb cutting fetish, and most likely gets strong urges to cut off limbs. He tells a member of his crew to let him cut one of their arms off, and if they don't he'll just kill them. Just imagine working for this maniac, who at anytime may chop one of your arms off because it turns him on.
• Terry was standing by the edge of a cliff for some unexplained reason at the beginning of LISA: The Painful RPG. With information from the Land of Hints in LISA: The Joyful it suddenly makes sense. Terry was so lonely that he was trying to kill himself, and had it not been for the dog attacking him, he probably would've gone through with it.
• The Special Thanks to Martin Armstrong in the credits of The Painful RPG is this. Usually special thanks is for someone who made something possible or who without, something wouldn't be possible. The LISA series wouldn't have been possible without Marty.
• Sweetheart, Dr. Yado's pet Joy mutant, is implied to be female. Sweetheart is also the most powerful mutant, which implies it's been around for a long time. And why does it obey Yado so readily? It attacks the man molesting Buddy very brutally. Dr. Yado is revealed to be Buddy's father (maybe. Buzzo states that he's simply crazy)... and he deliberately used Buddy as part of his plans.
• In the very beginning of The Painful, you can investigate the inside of Brad's house after you find Cheeks dead. On top of a dresser is a dead man with a rusty knife buried in his chest. After watching the opening of The Joyful and seeing how Brad "trained" Buddy to survive in Olathe, it's safe to assume Buddy wasn't kidnapped without a fight.
• In the Joyless ending, Buzzo states that only a few doses are needed to trigger the onset of Joy mutations. This means that the implied fate of all your Joy-addicted party members (assuming they don't die by Brad's hands) is that they will eventually become Joy mutants.
• The item descriptions for Squirrel Jerky, Horse Jerky, and Mystery Jerky state that the meat is from their respective animals. (Mystery Jerky is from "common Olathian animals".) However, the item description for Domestic Jerky simply reads that it recovers 1000 HP, implying that it might be more domestic than one would think.
  • Geese Thompson’s campfire scene in the remake implies that at least some of the jerky you come across was made from people, as he comes back with a bloody beak and a sack of jerky.
• If you happen to lose party members to Marty during the nightmare sequence in the Definitive Edition's new secret route, you'll find that they are still gone even after waking up. Two things can be interpreted from this:
  • On one hand, you could assume that Brad's nightmare and trauma is so visceral and severe that whatever he dreamt about made it happen for real after waking up.
  • On the other hand (and this may be even worse to consider), it could also be interpreted that entire nightmare sequence was one violent hallucination Brad was experiencing and any party members that died during the super boss, in reality, died by Brad's hands trying to defend themselves after he went on some trauma-induced rampage.
• The two different endings in Joyful have slight variations on each other, where Buddy is seen with a child. You don’t see this child if you kill Bolo, and you do if Sweetheart does the job for you. In what’s either a case of The Bad Guy Wins or extreme Black Comedy, it’s entirely possible Bolo… did the deed in literal seconds since Sweetheart comes in a couple seconds after he unzips.

Fridge Logic

• It's stated that Jack, the youngest party member Brad can recruit, was born about the same time as the flash. Seeing as Jack is clearly an adult, this raises a question about where the children Brad encounters at the orphanage and Wally's village came from. They're clearly younger than Jack, so were they born after the flash happened? How can that be if there aren't any women?
  • Jack's bio merely states that he "grew up" after the Flash, not necessarily that he was born after it. He could very well not be an adult. The kids in the orphanage all look to be about Buddy's age, which would make sense, as Buddy was indeed born after, or sometime very close before the Flash. The orphanage kids (and the ones in the Wally village, as well) could've been already-born babies when the Flash happened.
• In the beginning of Lisa: The Joyful, it is a flashback scenario where Brad has to drag a body. It is completely possible to kill yourself in the flashback.

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