Trivia / Ben Drowned

• Approval of God: Jibbs with king kong.wmv.
  @AlexanderDHall: I think I'm legitimately the only white guy that @therealjibbs actually follows on Twitter. Whatever, I'll take it. #swag
• Defictionalization: A rare collaborative and (mostly) non-deliberate example. After reading thetruth.rtf, hordes of people started inputting BEN-related questions and answers into Cleverbot, effectively training it to play the role of BEN when prompted.
• Development Hell: For starters, the real trailer to the game was supposed to come out on May 10, 2014.
• Missing Episode:
  • Some of the videos, such as "huntyoudown.wmv" have been taken down from Jadusable's account. Has been reuploaded here. Also in-universe. Turns out BEN withheld some of what happened, only revealing it during the Awakening arc. And if the changes in title during the upload were an indicator, he didn't reveal it willingly.
  • What was the be part 1 of the Grand Finale - The Fourth Day.wmv - was completed to the point of being uploaded to Youtube and given a premiere date. Due to the Schedule Slip (as detailed below), the video was pulled, and the final episode was re-edited into a single part and released later, removing a number of elements Alex Hall felt unsuitable. Due to Alex wanting to rework the scrapped elements of the story into future work separate to the BEN story, it's unlikely the scrapped episode will be shown any time soon, if at all.
• Schedule Slip:
  • The ARG was apparently supposed to conclude (or have something important happen) on 4/23...in 2011. Due to Jadusable's coding buddy being busy with work, it (and the rest of the third arc) got delayed. The ARG has also been delayed due to Alex's own busy schedule, especially with him attempting to make his passion film project. The story wasn't picked up again until 2020, with the playable game completely scrapped, the ARG elements becoming more tied to Alex Hall's Patreon, and the out-of-game narrative altered to incorporate elements of his passion project Methods of Revolution.
  • Deliberately invoked during the Awakening arc; with Alex ultimately deciding to leave off Jadus' plotline after reality started to hew a bit too close to it with the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the COVID-19 Pandemic.
    • And again with the final entry, The End.wmv. Originally written as two separate videos - the first one (titled The Fourth Day.wmv) completed to the point of being uploaded to Youtube with a premiere date on October 4th 2020 - the video was suddenly pulled a day before the scheduled release. Alex mentioned on his Patreon that apparently the Methods of Revolution elements in the video - once again - eerily and unintentionally paralleled events in real life, noting in particular U.S. President Donald Trump being diagnosed with COVID-19. Rather than delaying the episode further, he decided to scrap the entirety of the Methods of Revolution elements of the video and put them on the backburner to finish at a later date. Rather than seeing this as a bad thing, Alex saw it as a chance to polish off the BEN/Sarah story to be the best it could. He spent an entire month reworking the video and finally released it on Halloween that year.
• Word of God:
  • Jadusable did a long blog post (found here) about the plot, and revealed a few things with this. First of all, the whole ARG is parallel to the plot of Majora's Mask. A creature trapped inside a (cartridge/mask) uses someone else to help it escape into the (world/internet), and a bold hero from another dimension (Link/Alex) must save us. Oh wait, Alex is dead.
  • Someone on 4chan also theorized that Jadusable's the moon, though it makes much more sense to say that he is, in fact, the Skull Kid, as he's suckered into something that could destroy everything by accident. Also, Alex is back.
  • Jadusable held a Q&A on Feb. 16th answering some burning questions such as what mhftt stands for. Matt Hubris Four Two Three. Most questions were met with noncommittal responses or a Shrug of God, though. Transcribed here.

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