Before continuing, I’d like to thank:
The Homeless Beard for letting me play Ivan.
Namira and Professor Fether for helping me review these questions and make sure my epilogue-in-endgame was fine.
Espi, Cyn, Applesintimes, Yugikun & DerArknight for making this endgame really fun and enjoyable to be in (and really good too!) I think I’ve formed cool friendships with your guys that I didn’t think I would have made without this endgame so that was pretty sweet.
Pippi and Em for unwittingly being my pawn in a greater scheme that will pay off soon.
Liv for helping me move! If she didn’t do that, I would have been fuuuuuuuuucked. And it would have a really difficult endgame to properly do.
The Staff on Mini for making SOTF-TV happen through critiques, and other things staff do (I have no idea what staff does, please tell everyone what you do).
The Mandela Catalog for being genuinely one of the worst pieces of fiction to come out of the Analog Horror genre, and driving me to make art that is better than those shitty half-assed low production value videos. Update: ALWAYS PROVEN RIGHT (2024/03/14)
Toxie, Inhuman, Catche, Andi, and everyone else who has shown up during streams where I talked about TV3 Endgame and brainstormed ideas of what you were talking about without you guys knowing I was writing about you guys. So, uh, you get a writer’s credit. Put that on your resume.
And finally, and most importantly, me.
IVAN RODRIGUEZ'S POST-EPILOGUE: Discontinued Product or Self-Interview by the Handler
TV3 Epilogue: Ivan Rodriguez
WARNING: Don’t read this without having read Endgame if you don’t want to be spoiled! This is very important! Seriously!
Q1a: …where’s the epilogue?
If you’ve read the endgame (which you should!), you’ve already read the epilogue. So this is simply an informative piece to supplement it. If you have any questions, I will respond to them here.
Q1b: So you wrote the epilogue in the endgame?
Yup! That was my way to avoid writing an epilogue! I was simply tasked with writing the endgame. I mean, I wasn’t tasked, but you know. Responsibility arose, and I was like ‘aight, this is a job for Laura.’
Q2: Wait, responsibility arose? What happened to the original handler?
The original handler, NAFT, left the website for a series of reasons that I won’t go into. If you’re curious, you could always message them, but I think they want to be left alone for now. From the last time I spoke to them, they were quite happy!
Q3: This is the end of Ivan’s story?
Yup. If you’re curious about IC details, I recommend looking at Q5.
Q4: Did NAFT have any plans for the epilogue?
Yes! However, to respect their privacy, I will not share them. Consider it lost media, you know?
Q5a: Even if there is no more Ivan content, he is still a canon character. What happened to him post-game?
A series of things! This happens rather over a certain length of time. I don’t really have an exact time frame in my mind because I don’t really care about timelines, and here are the orders of big things that other people will be aware of for the next seasons. I believe all of this will have taken effect - or started - when TV4 starts. Here they are:
1. Tried to enter the public scene. This lasts for a couple of months until the next game where when it starts, he goes ‘alright, I can take a break now.’ And he never comes back.
2. From his break-turned-retirement, he moved to Canada, living in a Quebec town that is on the border. There, he enjoys a life of almost-anonymity in a small town of 5000-less habitants.
3. He meets a guy. They fall in luuuuuuv. Is he that girl from his profile? maybe. Make up your own opinion about that based on the clues I’ve given to you in the narrative
. The test is tomorrow.
4. Ivan still has some public appearances, but to things completely unrelated to SOTF-TV. Like once he showed up on a podcast about gambling addicts, opening up about his own struggles with it, or talking about dogs on a radio station. He mostly does the latter, talking about dogs and rescue dogs and other things like that. He raises funds for them and shows up at a charity event and goes ‘hello everybody’ and they get money and he leaves. It’s mostly remote though. It’s very rare that he is on the scene. He’s a lil reclusive.
5. Sued his father for the rights of his image. This created a precedent where parents (and legal people in charge) of SOFTers are unable to profit from their children’s image (as long as they are alive). This takes a while for this to actually happen. Here's something that Professor Fether said about it:
Normally, winners have the option to get legally emancipated following SOTF (with help from the show's scary legal team). However, this takes a little while to go into effect, and shenanigans can happen in that time.
Ivan's father, being SOTF-savvy, likely cashed in as hard as humanly possible in the days immediately following the version, while Ivan was in the hospital and before he managed to get the emancipation paperwork through. Ivan in turn likely sued to nullify/claim any rewards of contracts signed during that period, with the result being that now nobody will touch contracts with survivors until it becomes clear whether they will or will not take the emancipation deal.
Possibly has some fun repercussions for older winners too—the lawsuits could take years to work out!
Q5b: IVAN GAY?????
*bisexual
Q6: Why did you make the choice of (not) portraying Ivan like this in the endgame?
Long story short, when I talked to NAFT, they were like ‘the story of Ivan is already done. He’s got what he wanted. After all this, it’s overtime mode like Dead Rising when the main character is infected and he staves off the infection by eating food.’ Well, they didn’t say that, but that’s the paraphrase. So I decided to write it as an anthology about how LGBTQ+ people reacted to Ivan.
Most importantly though I was uncomfortable with writing Ivan as a character that was mine, I made a stylistic choice to incorporate elements that I was comfortable with. I recommend doing this with any adoptions. You should always seek to make characters yours, even if it’s simply for a single thread.
Or in this case, a lot of threads.
Q7: Why the LGBTQ+ theme for Ivan?
I came out as gay when I was 14, I came out as trans when I was 15, and I came out as a lesbian when I was 18, and then I came out as bi when I was 22, and then I guess I’m a lesbian again????. I’ve done all the letters of the alphabet mafia, so I felt like I needed to find a way to honor that root in a work that would be seen by a lot of people. Ivan tied back to it because people wouldn’t necessarily think of him as part of the community because of his lack of obvious ties to it, but he still is. He’s not any less bisexual because it wasn’t visible in the story. It’s also not something I invented out of nowhere - I discussed it with NAFT and we were like ‘yeah he’s tolly bi’
Q8: Will Ivan show up in other epilogues?
As the handler of Ivan, I give full permission for other epiloguers to do whatever they want with him, as long as they respect Q5 and Q17’s timeline and events. I won’t write anything though – because I am done writing Ivan.
In a roundabout, and ironic way, Ivan’s fate is once again into the hands of other people.
Q9: Some names in the epilogue-endgame are familiar, why’s that?
I asked people on call if I could use their likeness in the epilogue. Well, they didn’t know it was the epilogue, but you know.
Q10: Was Ivan picked as the winner before or after you adopted him?
Wouldn’t you like to know, weatherboy? I mean, the former: I adopted him knowing that he would win. If I didn’t adopt, this would have messed with a bunch of plans for a lot of people. And I’m like a nice person who likes things going nicely and smoothly, so I did that.
Q11: What’s Ivan’s kit in Champions?
Ranged Support Tank
Passive: Autoattack steals defense and resistance, shoots twice before reloading
Q: Slams into a target, and drags them along for the remainder of the dash.
W: Summons a shield. After 3 sec, it explodes, damaging creeps and people.
E: Tosses the tenga out as a boomerang doing more damage as it comes back. If hits an allied Olivia, she gains a surge in attack speed.
R: clones for ~1/2/3 seconds based on rank, and if they kill the clone in that time he gets a massive heal/buff and comes out of stealth a few seconds later in big damage mode.
Skins: Cute Girl Ivan (Ivan wearing a school girl fit inspired by season 22), Pride Flag Ivan (Bisexual flag recolor)
Q12: Is it true you almost included a sex scene in endgame?
Someone has to do it at some point. #lettheendgamersfuck
Q13: Can I make merchandise for Ivan that my character can mess with in pregame and during the game?
Yeah, but keep in mind that Ivan merchandise is like second-class: there are other winners this version that are more active - or I presume will be. Getting something based on Ivan is like getting a shirt of an Iron Man villain: it absolutely exists, but he’s less marketed.
The SOTF-TV corporation also got kinda scared by Ivan’s lawsuit with a variety of people that used his images. So they really don’t make new things based on him. There’s the usual posters, shirts, promotional images - but not like ‘Here Is The Cereals With Ivan and the Respects Face as Marshmallows’.
Anything fanmade sometimes gets Ivan to like it on twitter or whatever, but only if it paints him in a positive light. Anything else, and you get blocked. Like most famously, he retweeted someone’s drawing him, and then went on their account, saw that they had drawn him as their problematic blorbo while killing Giselle, and then he called them a ‘fucking loser’ and blocked them.
Q14: Wait, Ivan blocks people on twitter?
He blocked Jewel Evans and fellow winners in general. He blocked some survivors if they were present in the SOTF-TV scene. He thinks like 60% of them are annoying and losers, 30% of them are fake, and the 10% left can be genuinely enjoyable to be around but they’re severely mentally ill. He does have some winners/survivors’ phone numbers and he sometimes talks to them, but it’s about like "hey do you want to come to my place and watch football?” and if they start talking about TV, he blocked their number.
Q15: So… why did he hallucinate things? Does he still hallucinate things?
Ivan has CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. In layman's term, brain’s function affected from repeated injuries.
It’s a disorder you cannot properly diagnose in life, but in death, it’s pretty obvious. Ivan has this entire situation compounded between his football experiences — high impact sports — and SOTF-TV — self explanatory. It’s a degenerative illness that leads to memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, anxiety, suicidality, parkinsonism, and, eventually, progressive dementia. Some of these you might already have clocked from his CTE during his time in SOTF-TV. His symptoms were based on the real life experiences of people with CTE.
Additionally, the seizures you’ve seen are caused due to the TBI — traumatic brain injuries. Since it’s repeated, and conjoined with CTE, he has developed epilepsy and other shenanigans.
Q16: He got shot in the spine, and he’s seen walking in the epilogue. What’s up with that?
You can recover from spinal cord injuries! Well, not always. Depends on the injury and where it is. For the case of Ivan, he was largely immobile for a while, but started physical therapy and locomotor therapy as an effort to walk again. He now utilizes crutches and other mobility-tools to ambulate and get around. He has a wheelchair with spikes so people are not allowed to touch it.
And to be quite honest, I didn’t think that far </3. Stop thinking about it!
Q17: What’s his opinion of his fellow season winners?
Olivia: Ivan thought he could find kinship with her, but realized they had nothing in common. Feelings started to rot. He started blaming her for what happened in the endgame leading to his spinal cord injury, and started to feel like Olivia had only survived because of him, and she never properly thanked him or appreciated him. Even if Olivia were to be like ‘thank you for everything you’ve done to me’, Ivan would simply go ‘I still hate you.’ Sometimes, he’d try to reach out, but he’d stop himself: he has dug himself into this hole, and he is not getting out of it because that would admit he’s wrong. But then again, he doesn’t think he’s wrong because Olivia didn’t kill Verity when she had the chance. So you know! There is a possible future where Ivan and Olivia make up, but it would probably involve a third party getting into it, maybe Luanne or Seo-yun invited the two of them without the other knowing. A lil silly scenario!
Seo-yun: While she didn’t kill anybody that he particularly cared about, Ivan still feels like it’s wrong to be around her. It’s like admitting that he is okay with it - and even if deep down he is - Ivan doesn’t want to show that part of himself to the world. Ivan randomly sends messages to Seo-yun, asking how she’s doing and all. He wants to keep her at a distance, but he struggles with it, because at the end of the day, Ivan seeks kinship with those who have experienced the same thing as him. Killing, surviving, being grievously injured: if any other winner is like this in his version, it’s Seo-yun. So he talks to her intermittently. He wants more than just being penpals. He wants to talk to her, ask her questions, and interact with her outside of SOTF-TV. If Seo-yun wanted, Ivan would get her a dog to help with whatever trauma she’s going through.
Luanne: She’s a bit of a wildcard for Ivan. He didn’t know she existed until he learned that there was another survivor. He doesn’t feel like he can talk to her about anything, because, well, she doesn’t seem real. You’re telling Ivan that this girl who’s maybe 100 pounds soaking wet escaped the version without killing anybody? Ivan doesn’t believe it. He digs into it, and things start to make less and less sense. At first, he refuses to talk to her: she freaks him out. And then, maybe when he quits the scene all-together from his temporary-turned-permanent vacation, he sends her a message that’s like ‘I want to buy a NFT, should I?’ and Luanne is like ‘oh my god, no’. And they strike up an uneasy friendship. In the end, it’s a net positive that Ivan doesn’t become a NFT shill, and Luanne gets to talk about the art that Ivan buys.
Q18: What about Emmy?
Ivan doesn’t really interact with Emmy post-SOTF-TV. Ivan doesn’t have the emotional range to understand her very complex (and traumatizing) situation. He feels jealous at her position, actually. He feels like it should have been him. He would have done a better job than her. He would have been actually helpful. It’s a tad strange, really, because Emmy wasn’t mean to him or like anything negative for that matter! And yet, the only feelings Ivan can conjure about Emmy is that it should have been him.
It culminates in a very public fight which ultimately leads to Ivan entirely leaving the scene. It’s too unfair, he thinks. Emmy is lucky and he would have killed to be in her place, and she doesn’t realize that. She’s wasting everyone’s time by being depressed, when her life is now set for the rest of it - simply because she was the lucky spared one. It’s unfair, he thinks, but he can’t seem to shake off the feeling that he might be wrong.
But again, like Olivia, too proud to admit he’s wrong, and in the end, makes up his mind that he’s not wrong.
Again, there’s a chance for them to make up. Here, it would most likely involve something happening to Emmy. We’re talking about something bad. Suicide attempt, self-harm, her being hurt, car accident. Something that makes Ivan go ‘she is also someone who almost died because of the SOTF-TV.’
If that happened, it might have clicked for him that the game is never really over, and that seeking solidarity with those around him might be his best outcome from this whole ordeal.
Q19: You wanted to kill Ivan, why’s that?
I thought it would be funny
Q20: No seriously, why?
Well, I’m an artist and I like to push the boundaries of what is and isn’t appropriate within a medium. It’s very important to remember that the medium that we have made through SOTF has many constraints that are only, really, present in your mind. We can do so many things! Everybody can! We write a character who is only seen through cameras, we can write a character that only speaks in poems, we can write a character who does, I don’t know, something else? There are so many ways to explore the world of SOTF through the medium, and I like to mess with that.
I guess that would have been my artist statement about it, and I would have posted it if people were mad at me:
I have a knack for stories that end in death, you know with SOTF and all. I think killing Ivan, for me, was a way to end the toxicity that he had created through actions, to show that the World of SOTF-TV doesn’t let healing or growth occur. As long as they are traumatized and victimized by the world, they can be (ab)used by the corporation that robbed them of their childhood. They can be made into merchandise, into prizes at cons, into real life characters by a corporation whose only goal is to use them until they die.
And that’s what happened to Ivan. He was used and abused until he died, grinded down into a soft dust of pennies. Even in death, he’s still a product. There is no respect for the winner – even if by the SOTF-TV standards, there should be. I guess in a roundabout way, the legacy of Ivan as a character is less about him winning SOTF-TV, but showing to the world that the game never ends.
Technically, all of this I have described above has happened in Lore Seasons, but having it through a character that was played was important to me. Due to the nature of the adoption, I was given free reign and I decided to make this a statement, I guess.
Q21: What changed your mind?
A couple of things, not in order:
1. My girlfriend prefers hopeful endings
2. I realized that it would be more interesting to have a bittersweet ending where recovery is possible, but at far reach and necessitating work on the person.
3. I didn’t want to do a bury your gays trope, especially with a character who won.
4. I think that would have made the people’s opinion who I care about (other endgamers) change their mind about an Ivan win. This is like the biggest part of the shenanigan.
Q22: Has Ivan learned his lesson?
Not in any ways that matters for the public opinion, but on a personal basis, I would lean toward a solid maybe. I think there’s hope for him to get better, and be less a complete asshole. I think, in his case, with the establishment of his support systems plus the existence of three other winners within his season plus Emmy plus other winners from previous versions all together means he has the opportunity for a relationship that is based on an equal power balance.
Every previous relationship he’s had in other spheres of his life weren’t equal: his parents, particularly his father, his ex-girlfriend, people within the school, online. He essentially lived the life of a child star without the money, until he survived SOTF-TV. Now, he only has the money.
So did he change for the better? He changed for something else. Sometimes, it’s good, sometimes not.
It’s perspective.
Q23: Do you think this will make people mad? Like the format for this ‘epilogue’?
I hope not, but I don’t know. Maybe? Honestly, this entire self-interview is mostly just to have a thread to link on the final thread on Ivan’s wiki page and giving something like ‘hey! go read the endgame!’ before reading said epilogue. Isn’t that scary?
All of this might have just been a waste of time?
Q24: Hey, I have some unanswered questions!
Ask them in Discord, and if I give a shit, I’ll add them here. But I’ll answer everything truthfully!!!
Q25: Do you love Garcia from Criminal Minds?
Yes, ma’am!
If you’ve read the endgame (which you should!), you’ve already read the epilogue. So this is simply an informative piece to supplement it. If you have any questions, I will respond to them here.
Q1b: So you wrote the epilogue in the endgame?
Yup! That was my way to avoid writing an epilogue! I was simply tasked with writing the endgame. I mean, I wasn’t tasked, but you know. Responsibility arose, and I was like ‘aight, this is a job for Laura.’
Q2: Wait, responsibility arose? What happened to the original handler?
The original handler, NAFT, left the website for a series of reasons that I won’t go into. If you’re curious, you could always message them, but I think they want to be left alone for now. From the last time I spoke to them, they were quite happy!
Q3: This is the end of Ivan’s story?
Yup. If you’re curious about IC details, I recommend looking at Q5.
Q4: Did NAFT have any plans for the epilogue?
Yes! However, to respect their privacy, I will not share them. Consider it lost media, you know?
Q5a: Even if there is no more Ivan content, he is still a canon character. What happened to him post-game?
A series of things! This happens rather over a certain length of time. I don’t really have an exact time frame in my mind because I don’t really care about timelines, and here are the orders of big things that other people will be aware of for the next seasons. I believe all of this will have taken effect - or started - when TV4 starts. Here they are:
1. Tried to enter the public scene. This lasts for a couple of months until the next game where when it starts, he goes ‘alright, I can take a break now.’ And he never comes back.
2. From his break-turned-retirement, he moved to Canada, living in a Quebec town that is on the border. There, he enjoys a life of almost-anonymity in a small town of 5000-less habitants.
3. He meets a guy. They fall in luuuuuuv. Is he that girl from his profile? maybe. Make up your own opinion about that based on the clues I’ve given to you in the narrative
. The test is tomorrow.4. Ivan still has some public appearances, but to things completely unrelated to SOTF-TV. Like once he showed up on a podcast about gambling addicts, opening up about his own struggles with it, or talking about dogs on a radio station. He mostly does the latter, talking about dogs and rescue dogs and other things like that. He raises funds for them and shows up at a charity event and goes ‘hello everybody’ and they get money and he leaves. It’s mostly remote though. It’s very rare that he is on the scene. He’s a lil reclusive.
5. Sued his father for the rights of his image. This created a precedent where parents (and legal people in charge) of SOFTers are unable to profit from their children’s image (as long as they are alive). This takes a while for this to actually happen. Here's something that Professor Fether said about it:
Normally, winners have the option to get legally emancipated following SOTF (with help from the show's scary legal team). However, this takes a little while to go into effect, and shenanigans can happen in that time.
Ivan's father, being SOTF-savvy, likely cashed in as hard as humanly possible in the days immediately following the version, while Ivan was in the hospital and before he managed to get the emancipation paperwork through. Ivan in turn likely sued to nullify/claim any rewards of contracts signed during that period, with the result being that now nobody will touch contracts with survivors until it becomes clear whether they will or will not take the emancipation deal.
Possibly has some fun repercussions for older winners too—the lawsuits could take years to work out!
Q5b: IVAN GAY?????
*bisexual
Q6: Why did you make the choice of (not) portraying Ivan like this in the endgame?
Long story short, when I talked to NAFT, they were like ‘the story of Ivan is already done. He’s got what he wanted. After all this, it’s overtime mode like Dead Rising when the main character is infected and he staves off the infection by eating food.’ Well, they didn’t say that, but that’s the paraphrase. So I decided to write it as an anthology about how LGBTQ+ people reacted to Ivan.
Most importantly though I was uncomfortable with writing Ivan as a character that was mine, I made a stylistic choice to incorporate elements that I was comfortable with. I recommend doing this with any adoptions. You should always seek to make characters yours, even if it’s simply for a single thread.
Or in this case, a lot of threads.
Q7: Why the LGBTQ+ theme for Ivan?
I came out as gay when I was 14, I came out as trans when I was 15, and I came out as a lesbian when I was 18, and then I came out as bi when I was 22, and then I guess I’m a lesbian again????. I’ve done all the letters of the alphabet mafia, so I felt like I needed to find a way to honor that root in a work that would be seen by a lot of people. Ivan tied back to it because people wouldn’t necessarily think of him as part of the community because of his lack of obvious ties to it, but he still is. He’s not any less bisexual because it wasn’t visible in the story. It’s also not something I invented out of nowhere - I discussed it with NAFT and we were like ‘yeah he’s tolly bi’
Q8: Will Ivan show up in other epilogues?
As the handler of Ivan, I give full permission for other epiloguers to do whatever they want with him, as long as they respect Q5 and Q17’s timeline and events. I won’t write anything though – because I am done writing Ivan.
In a roundabout, and ironic way, Ivan’s fate is once again into the hands of other people.
Q9: Some names in the epilogue-endgame are familiar, why’s that?
I asked people on call if I could use their likeness in the epilogue. Well, they didn’t know it was the epilogue, but you know.
Q10: Was Ivan picked as the winner before or after you adopted him?
Wouldn’t you like to know, weatherboy? I mean, the former: I adopted him knowing that he would win. If I didn’t adopt, this would have messed with a bunch of plans for a lot of people. And I’m like a nice person who likes things going nicely and smoothly, so I did that.
Q11: What’s Ivan’s kit in Champions?
Ranged Support Tank
Passive: Autoattack steals defense and resistance, shoots twice before reloading
Q: Slams into a target, and drags them along for the remainder of the dash.
W: Summons a shield. After 3 sec, it explodes, damaging creeps and people.
E: Tosses the tenga out as a boomerang doing more damage as it comes back. If hits an allied Olivia, she gains a surge in attack speed.
R: clones for ~1/2/3 seconds based on rank, and if they kill the clone in that time he gets a massive heal/buff and comes out of stealth a few seconds later in big damage mode.
Skins: Cute Girl Ivan (Ivan wearing a school girl fit inspired by season 22), Pride Flag Ivan (Bisexual flag recolor)
Q12: Is it true you almost included a sex scene in endgame?
Someone has to do it at some point. #lettheendgamersfuck
Q13: Can I make merchandise for Ivan that my character can mess with in pregame and during the game?
Yeah, but keep in mind that Ivan merchandise is like second-class: there are other winners this version that are more active - or I presume will be. Getting something based on Ivan is like getting a shirt of an Iron Man villain: it absolutely exists, but he’s less marketed.
The SOTF-TV corporation also got kinda scared by Ivan’s lawsuit with a variety of people that used his images. So they really don’t make new things based on him. There’s the usual posters, shirts, promotional images - but not like ‘Here Is The Cereals With Ivan and the Respects Face as Marshmallows’.
Anything fanmade sometimes gets Ivan to like it on twitter or whatever, but only if it paints him in a positive light. Anything else, and you get blocked. Like most famously, he retweeted someone’s drawing him, and then went on their account, saw that they had drawn him as their problematic blorbo while killing Giselle, and then he called them a ‘fucking loser’ and blocked them.
Q14: Wait, Ivan blocks people on twitter?
He blocked Jewel Evans and fellow winners in general. He blocked some survivors if they were present in the SOTF-TV scene. He thinks like 60% of them are annoying and losers, 30% of them are fake, and the 10% left can be genuinely enjoyable to be around but they’re severely mentally ill. He does have some winners/survivors’ phone numbers and he sometimes talks to them, but it’s about like "hey do you want to come to my place and watch football?” and if they start talking about TV, he blocked their number.
Q15: So… why did he hallucinate things? Does he still hallucinate things?
Ivan has CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. In layman's term, brain’s function affected from repeated injuries.
It’s a disorder you cannot properly diagnose in life, but in death, it’s pretty obvious. Ivan has this entire situation compounded between his football experiences — high impact sports — and SOTF-TV — self explanatory. It’s a degenerative illness that leads to memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, anxiety, suicidality, parkinsonism, and, eventually, progressive dementia. Some of these you might already have clocked from his CTE during his time in SOTF-TV. His symptoms were based on the real life experiences of people with CTE.
Additionally, the seizures you’ve seen are caused due to the TBI — traumatic brain injuries. Since it’s repeated, and conjoined with CTE, he has developed epilepsy and other shenanigans.
Q16: He got shot in the spine, and he’s seen walking in the epilogue. What’s up with that?
You can recover from spinal cord injuries! Well, not always. Depends on the injury and where it is. For the case of Ivan, he was largely immobile for a while, but started physical therapy and locomotor therapy as an effort to walk again. He now utilizes crutches and other mobility-tools to ambulate and get around. He has a wheelchair with spikes so people are not allowed to touch it.
And to be quite honest, I didn’t think that far </3. Stop thinking about it!
Q17: What’s his opinion of his fellow season winners?
Olivia: Ivan thought he could find kinship with her, but realized they had nothing in common. Feelings started to rot. He started blaming her for what happened in the endgame leading to his spinal cord injury, and started to feel like Olivia had only survived because of him, and she never properly thanked him or appreciated him. Even if Olivia were to be like ‘thank you for everything you’ve done to me’, Ivan would simply go ‘I still hate you.’ Sometimes, he’d try to reach out, but he’d stop himself: he has dug himself into this hole, and he is not getting out of it because that would admit he’s wrong. But then again, he doesn’t think he’s wrong because Olivia didn’t kill Verity when she had the chance. So you know! There is a possible future where Ivan and Olivia make up, but it would probably involve a third party getting into it, maybe Luanne or Seo-yun invited the two of them without the other knowing. A lil silly scenario!
Seo-yun: While she didn’t kill anybody that he particularly cared about, Ivan still feels like it’s wrong to be around her. It’s like admitting that he is okay with it - and even if deep down he is - Ivan doesn’t want to show that part of himself to the world. Ivan randomly sends messages to Seo-yun, asking how she’s doing and all. He wants to keep her at a distance, but he struggles with it, because at the end of the day, Ivan seeks kinship with those who have experienced the same thing as him. Killing, surviving, being grievously injured: if any other winner is like this in his version, it’s Seo-yun. So he talks to her intermittently. He wants more than just being penpals. He wants to talk to her, ask her questions, and interact with her outside of SOTF-TV. If Seo-yun wanted, Ivan would get her a dog to help with whatever trauma she’s going through.
Luanne: She’s a bit of a wildcard for Ivan. He didn’t know she existed until he learned that there was another survivor. He doesn’t feel like he can talk to her about anything, because, well, she doesn’t seem real. You’re telling Ivan that this girl who’s maybe 100 pounds soaking wet escaped the version without killing anybody? Ivan doesn’t believe it. He digs into it, and things start to make less and less sense. At first, he refuses to talk to her: she freaks him out. And then, maybe when he quits the scene all-together from his temporary-turned-permanent vacation, he sends her a message that’s like ‘I want to buy a NFT, should I?’ and Luanne is like ‘oh my god, no’. And they strike up an uneasy friendship. In the end, it’s a net positive that Ivan doesn’t become a NFT shill, and Luanne gets to talk about the art that Ivan buys.
Q18: What about Emmy?
Ivan doesn’t really interact with Emmy post-SOTF-TV. Ivan doesn’t have the emotional range to understand her very complex (and traumatizing) situation. He feels jealous at her position, actually. He feels like it should have been him. He would have done a better job than her. He would have been actually helpful. It’s a tad strange, really, because Emmy wasn’t mean to him or like anything negative for that matter! And yet, the only feelings Ivan can conjure about Emmy is that it should have been him.
It culminates in a very public fight which ultimately leads to Ivan entirely leaving the scene. It’s too unfair, he thinks. Emmy is lucky and he would have killed to be in her place, and she doesn’t realize that. She’s wasting everyone’s time by being depressed, when her life is now set for the rest of it - simply because she was the lucky spared one. It’s unfair, he thinks, but he can’t seem to shake off the feeling that he might be wrong.
But again, like Olivia, too proud to admit he’s wrong, and in the end, makes up his mind that he’s not wrong.
Again, there’s a chance for them to make up. Here, it would most likely involve something happening to Emmy. We’re talking about something bad. Suicide attempt, self-harm, her being hurt, car accident. Something that makes Ivan go ‘she is also someone who almost died because of the SOTF-TV.’
If that happened, it might have clicked for him that the game is never really over, and that seeking solidarity with those around him might be his best outcome from this whole ordeal.
Q19: You wanted to kill Ivan, why’s that?
I thought it would be funny
Q20: No seriously, why?
Well, I’m an artist and I like to push the boundaries of what is and isn’t appropriate within a medium. It’s very important to remember that the medium that we have made through SOTF has many constraints that are only, really, present in your mind. We can do so many things! Everybody can! We write a character who is only seen through cameras, we can write a character that only speaks in poems, we can write a character who does, I don’t know, something else? There are so many ways to explore the world of SOTF through the medium, and I like to mess with that.
I guess that would have been my artist statement about it, and I would have posted it if people were mad at me:
I have a knack for stories that end in death, you know with SOTF and all. I think killing Ivan, for me, was a way to end the toxicity that he had created through actions, to show that the World of SOTF-TV doesn’t let healing or growth occur. As long as they are traumatized and victimized by the world, they can be (ab)used by the corporation that robbed them of their childhood. They can be made into merchandise, into prizes at cons, into real life characters by a corporation whose only goal is to use them until they die.
And that’s what happened to Ivan. He was used and abused until he died, grinded down into a soft dust of pennies. Even in death, he’s still a product. There is no respect for the winner – even if by the SOTF-TV standards, there should be. I guess in a roundabout way, the legacy of Ivan as a character is less about him winning SOTF-TV, but showing to the world that the game never ends.
Technically, all of this I have described above has happened in Lore Seasons, but having it through a character that was played was important to me. Due to the nature of the adoption, I was given free reign and I decided to make this a statement, I guess.
Q21: What changed your mind?
A couple of things, not in order:
1. My girlfriend prefers hopeful endings
2. I realized that it would be more interesting to have a bittersweet ending where recovery is possible, but at far reach and necessitating work on the person.
3. I didn’t want to do a bury your gays trope, especially with a character who won.
4. I think that would have made the people’s opinion who I care about (other endgamers) change their mind about an Ivan win. This is like the biggest part of the shenanigan.
Q22: Has Ivan learned his lesson?
Not in any ways that matters for the public opinion, but on a personal basis, I would lean toward a solid maybe. I think there’s hope for him to get better, and be less a complete asshole. I think, in his case, with the establishment of his support systems plus the existence of three other winners within his season plus Emmy plus other winners from previous versions all together means he has the opportunity for a relationship that is based on an equal power balance.
Every previous relationship he’s had in other spheres of his life weren’t equal: his parents, particularly his father, his ex-girlfriend, people within the school, online. He essentially lived the life of a child star without the money, until he survived SOTF-TV. Now, he only has the money.
So did he change for the better? He changed for something else. Sometimes, it’s good, sometimes not.
It’s perspective.
Q23: Do you think this will make people mad? Like the format for this ‘epilogue’?
I hope not, but I don’t know. Maybe? Honestly, this entire self-interview is mostly just to have a thread to link on the final thread on Ivan’s wiki page and giving something like ‘hey! go read the endgame!’ before reading said epilogue. Isn’t that scary?
All of this might have just been a waste of time?
Q24: Hey, I have some unanswered questions!
Ask them in Discord, and if I give a shit, I’ll add them here. But I’ll answer everything truthfully!!!
Q25: Do you love Garcia from Criminal Minds?
Yes, ma’am!