Knock knock. Who's there? Orange. Orange who? Orange you going to let me in? This is A Really Bad Joke.
It's also Maduin the Jester's blog following him as he battles the Slender Man as only he can: with pranks.
Maduin is a Trickster Mentor who has dared to get up close and personal to everyone's favorite Humanoid Abomination time and again for the expressed purpose of playing practical jokes on him, theorizing that humor can be a powerful weapon against him. Each update to the blog comes with twisted glee that readers can sense from it's author as he prepares a new method of pulling an Ashton Kutcher on Slendy.
Maduin is one of the individuals the title Sage was passed onto when Robert went into hiding, Jay perished, and Shaun was retitled Guide. Later Maduin took up the title Jester, instead, when Redlight came into the picture and attempted to discredit Robert, which caused the Role and Title System to fall from favor.
Maduin has sadly passed on, but you can read how here and here
Sopia's apparently taken over the blog in the time since, posting images on April Fools Day each year. 2015
◊, 2016
◊.
Tropes associated with A Really Bad Joke:
- Big Damn Heroes: Maduin getting ganged up on by proxies and Slendy?! Adrian to the rescue!
- Black-and-Gray Morality: From the very first post, Maduin makes it clear that he's going to do things that will get him some hate, and he does. In fact, he takes a play right out of Jay's playbook and deliberately introduces people to The Slender Man Mythos and then studies how they cope.
- The Blank: If you don't know by now, we're not telling.
- Maduin himself under his Cool Mask is now either this or Losing Your Head. The picture◊ is a little hard to tell by.
- Maduin himself under his Cool Mask is now either this or Losing Your Head. The picture
- Cool Mask / Coat, Hat, Mask: Maduin wears a rabbit mask while performing his "pranks", and in this post, he is seen wearing a giant trenchcoat. May overlap with Badass Longcoat.
- Emotion Eater: What Maduin theorizes the Slender Man to be: a being that thrives on negativity generated by humans. He doesn't think positivity hurts Him, but does limit him, which is why Maduin uses humor and good cheer as weaponry.
- In support of this, the person who he introduced to the Mythos via
Nightmare Retardant got over it easily, while both the others have seen Slendy and had stretches of Laser-Guided Amnesia.
- In support of this, the person who he introduced to the Mythos via
- Enemy Mine: Adrian, the same guy who called "What the Hell, Hero?" on Maduin, is now cooperating with him to end the nightmare. Crosses over with The Only One Allowed to Defeat You, because Adrian wants to keep Maduin alive to beat the crap out of him once Slender Man is defeated.
- Felony Misdemeanor: He loses the bunny mask at one point and this is treated a Level Red crisis. He gets better. He loses it a second time and reacts similarly, if not worse. He doesn't get better.
- Genre Blindness: Adrian. He's still under the delusion that he and Maduin can survive the war Slendy is waging on humanity.
- Hot-Blooded: Maduin's new sidekick, Adrian.
- Humanoid Abomination: See The Blank.
- Kick the Dog: like Jay before him, he's intentionally introduced people to Slender Man knowing what would happen. To his credit, he is no where near as cold about it as Jay was.
- The Nicknamer: Maduin uses lots of nicknames for our Eldritch Abomination friend, especially "TPF" ("Tall, Pale, and Faceless").
- Meaningful Name: 'Maduin' sounds an awful lot like both 'mad one' and 'mad win'.
- Noodle Implements: On recreating Prank #4, which he lost in a Proxy attack:Since the Christmas/Solstice season is over I'm gonna abandon the miniature Christmas tree in favour of a pineapple, also I'll require some thick wire (as in wire-fence thick wire, not ethernet thick wire) some colorful rags and maybe a few sparklers. Anybody who is going to ask what I intend to do with this, as Adrian has, doesn't understand that there's only so many things you can do with a pineapple and wire.
- Rule of Three: Both Invoked and Lampshaded here.
- Running Gag: He never quite gets a chance to use #4, as it keeps getting stolen or destroyed.
- Shout-Out: Credens iustitiam.
- As of April Fools Day 2016, the rabbit mask can be confirmed as an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland reference. As can his apparently missing head.
- Trickster Mentor: Maduin. All the way. While it is not the readers, the people he's guiding, that he's tricking (or if he is, it hasn't come out yet), but he is still doing a lot of tricking, nevertheless.
- Then he gets one of his own, by the name of Sopia.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Maduin, himself, acknowledges that not all of his deeds are of a clean and heroic nature by aptly referring to exposing people to the mythos creating more victims as Sinning.
- Adrian, one of the people Maduin exposed to Slendy also called him out upon reading the blog and finding out what the Trickster was up to.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: And Maduin is all about turning that on it's head with pranks!
