Literature / Threadbare: Stuff and Nonsense

Golem Animus!

Once upon a time, there was a teddy bear.

An old man, bent with tragedy but still daring to dream, made him into a thing that could think and feel.

And if the teddy bear could have said "Status", he would have seen the following words...

Stuff and Nonsense is the inaugural book in a LitRPG series whose narrative protagonist is a teddy bear brought to life by a spell inside a magical world where people get jobs and classes and skill levels.

Initially quite the idiot, as well as a Heroic Mime, Threadbare is adopted by his creator's daughter^note asterisk and taught to be a proper teddy bear, as well as a hero. Then things go horribly wrong.

Threadbare at birth

• Name: ????
• Age: 1 minute
• Jobs:
  Greater Toy Golem Level 1
• Attributes:
  • Strength: 4
  • Intelligence: 2
  • Dexterity: 6
  • Charisma: 2
  • Perception: 5
  • Constitution: 16
  • Wisdom: 11
  • Agility: 3
  • Willpower: 10
  • Luck: 5
• Pools:
  • Hit Points: 50
  • Sanity: 14
  • Stamina: 19
  • Moxie: 12
  • Fortune: 10
• Defenses
  • Armor: 10
  • Mental Fortitude: 0
  • Endurance: 20
  • Cool: 20
  • Fate: 1

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Do You Wish to Accept These Tropes? Y/N

• "Angry Black Man" Stereotype: All half-orcs get tagged with this. Garon gets it really hard because he, unlike his brothers, got the orcish racial buff "Twisted Rage", which sends him into a powerful rage but also saps his hit points and means he always, always has to control his temper.
• Absurdly Low Level Cap: It doesn't take very long to hit level 25 in a job, especially if you take to adventuring. And when you're surrounded by monsters and dungeons, you're kind of forced to take up adventuring.
• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • Threadbare literally knows nothing about anything. All of his jobs are chosen just to get the annoying words out of his vision. Fortunately, they add up to a pretty awesome collection with surprising synergies with his race(s) as a Greater Toy Golem and Bear.
  • Likewise, Caradon didn't know what a Greater Golem actually was. He had no idea what he was unleashing on the world. Fortunately, what he set loose was a teddy bear who loved his little girl.
• All-Loving Hero: Threadbare doesn't have a mean bone in his body. He doesn't have any bones in his body. The first thing he does when he comes to life is try to free a fellow golem that he sees is suffering. From there, he goes on to save the world. A bit. A couple times.
• Badass Adorable: Threadbare slowly develops into one over the course of the book. One of his skills is literally just his ability to be "Adorable - Level 1".
• Badass Boast: Zuula opens her final fight with the King's men with "Come then! Come and die!". She follows that up a little while later.
  Zuula: Foolish boys...
  Unclever girls...
  You come to kill an orc? you come to kill an orc in the night?
• Bears Are Bad News: One of the only reasons Threadbare survives is that his race is automatically classed as a bear, giving him a high constitution. This lets him survive a Greater Golem's ridiculously low luck score at creation.
• Brave Scot: Beryl has a strong scots accent as indicated by the text, and she's one aggressive cleric.
• Born Unlucky: The reason Threadbare barely survives his earliest days is because all the worst things just happen to happen to him. That's because luck is a stat and his low luck means all the worst things will happen to him in the most contrived ways.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Grindluck is a card game for little kids that helps improve their luck stat. It's just Go Fish.
• Cats Are Mean: Percival is kind of a stinker. If you're family, he'll love you forever. If you're not, he'll try to murder you. He has his own opinions on who counts as family. And if you straight up murder a mother fucker? Watch out.
• Circling Saw: The King sends his five Animus Blades to cut through the ceiling and drop Celia down into the room with him at the end of the book.
• Determinator: Threadbare spends five years pinned to the collapsed roof of the attic slowly working his way free of the sword holding him there. He will save his little girl.
• Downer Ending: Caradon is dead, murdered in a cultist ritual. Mordecai is captive. Zuula's been killed by her own daughter. Celia has been taken by the king, who is her real father. Missus Fluffbear has been kidnapped by monsters. Threadbare has spent five years pinned to the ceiling with a sword through his gut.
• Due to the Dead: Though they leave Caradon (a traitor in their eyes) in the remains of his fallen home, Melos's soldiers bury their dead and leave markers saying "Fell in the line of duty".
• Exact Words: Melos promises Celia he won't hurt Caradon, but he'll make the man answer for his crimes. He gives Caradon a numbing potion before he starts in with a ritual that requires a dagger, and off-screen carving.
• Fantastic Racism: Humans are basically white people and other races are other races dealing with their shit. Some, like Celia, are Innocently Insensitive, others, like the King's Guard, are openly hostile.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Pulsivar and Threadbare start out as enemies thanks to Pulsivar being freaked the hell out watching Threadbare, in his newborn ignorance, accidentally murdering a fellow Greater Golem. However, their second fight turns into a Mêlée à Trois and they go into Back-to-Back Badasses and Pulsivar, smelling the family soap on the bear, realizes he's family.
• Foreshadowing:
  • From page 1.
  But alas, the little teddy bear who was now a golem could not speak or even read or write. Not at the beginning. The old man thought that made him a failure. And so the old man made a mistake that would cost him and his loved ones dearly...
  • And late in the book, One of the king's guard, a former cultist, starts describing just why human-shaped demons are so dangerous, right before we see Anise show off her power. Later, we get even stronger hints that Meros is just barely in control of her.
• Embarrassing but Empowering Outfit: Threadbare needs pockets to carry stuff and he needs the dragon toy so Celia can talk to him. He ends up wearing the dragon as a ridiculous hat and a pair of Celia's panties, with pockets sewn on, as a tunic.
• Heroic Mime: Threadbare says not one word through the entirety of the book, because he's a stuffed toy with no mouth, lungs, or vocal chords. He uses his new tailor job to change this at the very end of the book and finally accesses the full panoply of information and abilities available to the people of Cylvania.
• Hope Spot: All is not lost. The strongest characters have been killed or captured, but the kids and Threadbare are free, and now he can speak.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Back in the past, after the change to the new jobs and leveling system, people found out fairly quickly that level 25 was the max, but monsters didn't have that limit. However, the real threat came from fellow humans after they found a way around the level cap.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: As a high level Archer, Mordecai can pull of some tricks, like planting an arrow between your fingers or spelling out the word YES rapid fire.
• Innocently Insensitive: Celia asks what it's like to be a half-orc. Zuula declines to answer and leaves it to the kids. They explain, among other things, that only humans ask things like that.
• Kick the Dog: Literally. The King's Guard punted Backy's pet bloodhound off the mountain outside Catamountain Dungeon because "they said it was too weak to survive the dungeon".
• Level-Up Fill-Up: One of the things that keeps Threadbare alive early on is the fact that he's level one in everything and keeps getting new classes. Every time he levels up, it refills his pools, most importantly his HP.
• LitRPG: Unapologetically a homage to D&D and its spin-offs, it's quite the franchise.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: "Hello, Cecilia, I'm your father," said King Melos Ragandor the First.
• Magnetic Hero: Despite his naivete, Threadbare's unceasing kindness and optimism (and overwhelming cuteness) nets him a lot of friends right from the jump.
• Naughty Tentacles: People believe this about the Gropevines, but the narration assures us that all they want to do is kill and eat you and aren't weird about it.
• Obviously Evil: With her pale skin, black hair, blood red nails, and seductive aura, you'd be a fool (or a child) to think Anise Layd'I was anything other than a demon.
• Oh, Crap!: You go adventuring you're going to find yourself in unexpected dangerous situations. It gets worse when the shit hits you at home. Celia and Threadbare face a lot of trouble and come through it, after a struggle. Then Mordecai and Caradon face an army at Caradon's house... and they don't.
  • Zuula is well prepared, using her Home Field Advantage to take out a small army, with her mask full of emotions giving her enormous buffs to defend her family... Except the leader of the troops is her estranged daughter, Mastoya.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: Threadbare rapidly gains strength far out of proportion to... being a teddy bear. Even so, he still only has the mass of a teddy bear, so when he goes fishing he gets pulled into the water by a trout that's much heavier than he is.
• Poor Communication Kills: Caradon never trusted his son in law, so the disaster that came with the sealing of the Oblivion led him to believe that Melos was responsible. Melos never got the chance to explain, and, of course, his demonic servants were a little unreliable. Also, there were other unstoppable disasters he had to try and stop.
• Pragmatic Hero/Pragmatic Villain: Though Caradon views him as a villain, Melos sees himself as the hero who only did what was necessary to prevent disaster.
• Revive Kills Zombie: Threadbare discovers that his hugs kill the undead quite by accident.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Pulsivar quite wisely nopes out of the final fight. Unfortunately, this means he has to learn the horrible truth the following morning: his cream is going to be late.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: Zuula's an orc and they express things quite physically. When Mordecai comes home late without having sent word, she lets him know she's upset with a club to the face. Then they get romantic. Mordecai reassures Celia beforehand that he likes it. The kids go fishing so they don't have to hear it.
• Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom: The Obviously Evil woman Celia and Threadbare meet in the woods is named "Anise Layd'I". No. No she is not A Nice Lady.
• Sweet Home Alabama: Mordecai and his kids have strong southern accents. That's kind of weird, because Mordecai, as a Scout, would've spent a lot more time away from home than their mother, Zuula, who has a thick Caribbean accent, albeit without the patois.
• Took a Level in Badass: Threadbare survived his infancy. As we'll see, that's quite an achievement for an unprepared Greater Golem. But then that little teddy bear just kept on marching into danger with his little girl...
• Trash the Set: Mordecai returns to Caradon's house to find the place half in ruins thanks to a night of fighting random disasters caused by Missus Fluffbear's terrible luck. It only gets worse when the King arrives.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Because he doesn't understand about good and evil, Threadbare accepts Anise's quest and takes her Caradon's scrolls.
• Wham Line:
  • The last spoken line of the text comes from Threadbare. "Status."
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Maddy the vampire has some kind of broad accent that makes her say "nice" as "nahse". Given her later characterization, she's probably intended to be a Jersey girl.
  • The audiobook possibly clarifies this by making it a drawling nasal Vampire Vords accent.
• World of Pun: It's downplayed in the broader world, which is more pastiche than pun, but the dungeons crank the pun dial all the way up. They get themes and run with them.
• Worthy Opponent: Mordecai taught all of the Royal Scouts personally, so when they finally take him down, his prime student, Jericho, lets his son Bak-Shaz go, knowing he has nothing to do with the rebellion and is no threat to the King's plans.

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Once upon a time there was a teddy bear who made himself a mouth and a voice of strings and things, and said "Status." And this is what he saw.

Threadbare at the end of Stuff and Nonsense

• Name: Threadbare
• Age: 5
• Jobs:
  Greater Toy Golem Level 9
  Bear Level 8
  Ruler Level 4
  Scout Level 3
  Tailor Level 8
  Model Level 2
  Necromancer Level 1
  Duelist Level 1
  Animator Level 1
  Enchanter Level 2
  Golemist Level 1
  Smith Level 1
• Attributes:
  • Strength: 79
  • Intelligence: 58
  • Dexterity: 41
  • Charisma: 56
  • Perception: 57
  • Constitution: 83
  • Wisdom: 89
  • Agility: 51
  • Willpower: 47
  • Luck: 53
• Pools:
  • Hit Points: 216 (236)
  • Sanity: 147 (167)
  • Stamina: 102 (122)
  • Moxie: 103 (123)
  • Fortune: 110 (130)
• Defenses
  • Armor: 34
  • Mental Fortitude: 24
  • Endurance: 44
  • Cool: 20
  • Fate: 9