Characters / Eminem

The three selves of Marshall Mathers

From left to right: Marshall Mathers; Eminem; and Slim Shady.

One of the signature elements of Eminem's work, starting from The Slim Shady EP, is his use of a trinity of personas. Marshall is the real him, a loving father with a difficult past; Eminem is a technically virtuosic battle-rapper who inspires his audience; and Slim Shady is Marshall's inner darkness without his inhibitions, and a satire of everything wrong with the America that made him. However, the line between them is blurry, with personas often switching within a song, blurring together or kept purposefully ambiguous.

Since the personas are all elements of the same person, they usually all share the name Marshall Mathers, the same relationships with his family, and so on - with the exception being a handful of songs in which Eminem raps as a specific character, usually taking on the Slim persona to do so.

Another way of thinking about the personas, one stated by Word of God, is this: The music and feelings come from the mind of Marshall Mathers; Eminem writes and performs the songs; and the stories Eminem tells are about Villain Protagonist Slim Shady. For the purposes of this page, it's Slim if it's about obviously ficitious events or Card Carrying Evil in tone; Eminem if it's about his career, art, and the positive aspects of his influence; and Marshall if if it's about his internal world or personal life.

Tropes applying to all the personas

Shady inside, hair every bit as dyed as it used to be when I first introduced y'all to my skittish side, and blamed it on him when they tried to criticize... ‘cause we are the same. Bitch.

• Bait-and-Switch: Eminem loves teasing the audience into thinking they're going to get one persona but instead getting another. A common joke is for him to dangle a glimpse of the real Marshall Mathers at the audience, only for it to turn out to be Slim Shady — The Marshall Mathers LP and its Title Track "Marshall Mathers" both run off this gag, forcing the audience to wonder if Slim is the real Marshall all along. (The Marshall Mathers LP 2, in the Album Closure, claims 'the answer's "yes"').
• Composite Character:
  • Marshall and Eminem, the personas representing the real life rapper directly rather than through metaphor, are often lumped into one in order to provide a single clear opposite number for Slim Shady.
  • Especially from The Eminem Show onwards, the personas are usually melted together to some extent. A typical variation would be a highly lyrical song about Eminem's comeup and career (Eminem), but expressed in violent and shocking verbal imagery and with a sarcastic, Villain Protagonist tone (Slim), and with flashes of insight about his love for his kids and the scared little kid he once was (Marshall).
  • Marshall and Slim, despite being the furthest apart of the personas, are merged for a few of Eminem's most deliberately uncomfortable songs — such as some of the Addiction Songs on Relapse and his iconic Murder Ballads about Kim.
• Decomposite Character:
  • They are all just the same person, but with different lenses applied - Marshall is the unfiltered feelings, Eminem the performative public persona worshipped by fans, and Slim an Indulgent Fantasy Segue.
  • Occasionally personas are split into even more fine-grained variations. One split that's shown up a couple of times is to split Slim Shady into a "normal" nasty person (who is somewhat sympathetic) and the Monster, an evil spirit who speaks in an Evil Sounds Deep voice and is a supernatural force of pure, untrammeled evil that possesses Slim in order to make him out-of-control.
  • There's also a fourth (or perhaps zeroth) persona that's shown up in a handful of songs - Rain Man, who represents what the man is underneath the personas, even the ones representing the 'real' him. He's an Idiot Savant with extreme emphasis on the 'idiot' part, a Talkative Loon, an Empty Shell with no real identity, and tends to be a depressing presence.
• invoked Dye Hard: Eminem bleached his hair blond at the beginning of his rise to fame in order to create the image of Slim Shady - though, for obvious reasons, this blondness was maintained regardless of what persona he is rapping as (aside from a couple of Real Life Writes the Hairstyle appearances around the time of 8 Mile or to give his scalp a break). He reverted to his natural hair colour after his overdose, though went through a period of bleaching it again in the mid-2010s to signal a Revisiting the Roots approach.
• Dysfunction Junction: None of Eminem's characters or personas are mentally healthy. Slim is Ax-Crazy, Eminem indulges in Heroic Self-Deprecation, and Marshall has OCD, drug addiction problems, brain damage and autism (and that's just the start).
• Evil Brunette Twin: Inverted. Marshall, while not a perfect person by any means, is associated with his natural dark hair, and Slim Shady, the evil Enemy Within, has hair bleached blond.
  • This appears in Eminem's imagery and lyrics, particularly in the video for "When I'm Gone", the lyric video for "Framed", and the lyrics of "Evil Twin" and "Campaign Speech", as well as various artistic representations of the characters.
  • As Slim is an Allegorical Character for Em's fame, the blond hair sometimes symbolises his imperial phase and relevance, as when Eminem states "the crowds are gone, it's time to wash out the blond" in "Walk On Water", or when Eminem reflects on "when I was a bleached blond" on his guest verse on GRIP's "Walkthrough".
  • This dichotomy isn't perfect (Slim only became blond around the time the music video for "My Name Is" came out, and "My Darling" from Relapse provides a kayfabe explanation for Slim's dark hair) but hair colour is often used by Eminem to signal whether Marshall or Slim is at the heart of the whole gestalt right now (such as when he went blond for The Marshall Mathers LP 2 and SHADYXV, and dark again for Revival). Generally (with the notable exceptions of the Early Instalment Weirdness Slim Shady EP and Reality Subtext on Relapse), periods in which he has blond hair tend to be Ruder and Cruder as a result, with his dark-hair albums being more radio friendly and having a little more socially redeeming content.
• Freudian Trio: Marshall is the Ego, the real self who contains the personas as a part of himself. Eminem is the Superego, the part of Marshall that cares about perfecting his art. Slim Shady is the Id, representing Marshall's gut feelings, emotional fantasies and need to express himself, even when doing so will get him into trouble.
• Kaleidoscope Eyes: Exploited to create the distinction between his characters. The rapper's eyes are a particular light, reflective shade of hazel that causes them to appear drastically different colours depending on lighting, hair and clothing. Since his eyes seem light blue when he has blond hair and light clothing, Slim is associated with bright, Innocent Blue Eyes. Marshall tends to dress in grey tones, so his eyes generally appear duller and more greenish; Eminem likes to shade his eyes with visors, hats and hoods, creating the impression of his eyes being dark blue. The Relapse Slim has distinctive dark grey/black eyes created by his dark hair, clothing and lighting, which give him a more psychotic look and get an Extreme Close-Up in the video for "We Made You".
  • Numerous rival emcees (such as Canibus, Az Izz and Aristotle) have written disses mocking his "creepy" colour-changing eyes, often to imply he's an entertainment industry phony or make insinuations about his race or possible Satanic possession.
• Kayfabe Music: Of a sort. You're not supposed to think that Eminem is Slim - the contrast between his sweet and goofy personality in TV appearances outside of his music and his filthy content is part of how he's able to get away with it - but Eminem's music makes a lot more sense once the listener understands how Eminem's alter-egos work.
• Nice Mean And In Between: Slim Shady is obviously the Mean, being a Villain Protagonist. Eminem is the in-between, being The Paragon but also a Knight in Sour Armor. And Marshall, a shy but well-meaning person whose main priority is to be a good father to his kids, is the Nice.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Eminem had altered his appearance numerous times at the start of his career and ran the gamut of Pretty Fly for a White Guy tropes in so doing. Before he was famous, he had closely-buzzed near-black hair worn in moisturised waves and wore hip-hop clothing. When he broke out, he wore a platinum blond crop to emphasize his light eyes and smooth hair texture, and a baggy t-shirt and jeans closer to what Nu Metal punks and skaters were wearing. Once he got famous, he started wearing more clearly hip-hop clothing, like do-rags, visors, basketball shirts and jewellery. In 2009 he marked his Career Resurrection by changing his hair to a dark edge-up buzzcut, at a time when he needed to remind people how much a part of hip-hop he was.
• Token White: Openly states that his success is due to being a white performer in a predominantly Black genre — though he also points out that being a superlatively talented rapper was also essential, or there'd be other white rappers as big as him.
• Universal-Adaptor Cast: Many songs written from non-Marshall perspectives still incorporate these personas. For example, Slim plays numerous working class young men's evil sides as a bad angel in "Guilty Conscience", a predatory white fratboy in "My Fault" and Stephen Paddock in "Darkness".
• Unreliable Narrator: To go with Kayfabe Music above - Eminem often deliberately blurs how autobiographical his songs are.
  • A good example of this is "Insane", a song describing Slim being raped by a stepfather — he has said the song was mostly fictional, but has never said to what extent.
  • Interestingly, one of Eminem's childhood bullies tried to sue him for defamation after the rapper targeted him, but the lawsuit was dismissed after the court found the song's content so transparently fictional that no sensible person would take it literally.
  • How much Eminem's lyrics reflect the genuine thoughts and opinions of Marshall is also somewhat ambiguous. In the early days of courting moral panic as a marketing strategy, Eminem would often state in interviews that 'about half' of what Shady says is the same as his views — keeping it carefully ambiguous as to whether that half included the homophobia, misogyny and violent threats. Not long after, he would figure out that this was not a good idea, and began to be more unambiguous that he was trying to satirise homophobia, misogyny and the toxic free speech debate of the 00s.

Slim Shady

The looniest, zaniest, spontaneous sporadic impulsive thinker, compulsive drinker, addict. Half animal, half man, dumpin' yo' dead body inside of a fuckin' trash can with more holes than an Afghan.

[Slim Shady]'s this character I created through music, just like an actor or actress would create a character when they're on the screen. So it does give me the excuse and freedom to then say a lot of fucked-up shit [laughs].

— Eminem, to The Metro Times, 2009

Slim is the most notorious of Eminem's alter egos: A vicious and insensitive sociopath who uses huge amounts of drugs and kills people — and kids all over the world want to be just like him. He first appeared in Slim Shady EP, in order to justify a drastic New Sound Album, but has become Eminem's signature despite various on-again-off-again retirements of the character.

Eminem became Slim after encountering his Enemy Within, the Monster, lurking in his mirror, and fusing with it. Starting from the The Slim Shady LP era, his signature is his bleached blond hair, which is occasionally referenced even when Eminem's own hair is its natural dark brown. He has two particular Iconic Outfits that represent Slim rather than any of the other personas - a white tshirt or wifebeater with a silver dog tag necklace and sagging jeans; or - starting from The Marshall Mathers LP - blue Dickies overalls worn over a bare chest, a Hockey Mask and Chainsaw.

Slim has an Era-Specific Personality. Characterization Marches On, and the autobiographical elements of Slim's character, causes his personality to shift between albums - he started out as a rather childish, self-destructive Stupid Evil troublemaker with some Justified Criminal and Freudian Excuse elements, picks up an obsession with sending bad messages to the youth of America, and from The Marshall Mathers LP brings in Serial Killer and Gothic Horror imagery, as well as an obsession with fame and his idol status. Eventually, Shady became an Allegorical Character for Eminem's own fame, and thus was Killed Off for Real in both "Encore" (as Lightmare Fuel) and "When I'm Gone" (Played for Drama) when Eminem stepped away from the limelight for the sake of his mental health. Slim returned in Relapse as a much Darker and Edgier character (different enough to the classic version to get his own section on this page). In his appearances on Recovery and The Marshall Mathers LP 2, he goes Lighter and Softer, reverting to variations of his original, playful portrayal (though with the Death Seeker element of his personality muted).

In general, Slim is very cartoony, associated with bold, exaggerated imagery, unrealistic sound effects (done as mouth adlibs early on), and hilarious trick rhymes emphasising witty enthusiasm rather than legitimate threat (Eminem was even nicknamed "the animated rapper" early in his career). Slim is an Anti-Role Model and always comes off looking stupid. Even in songs where he's portrayed more dramatically, there's always a tongue firmly in cheek.

According to Word of God, Slim Shady's Character Signature Song is "Just Don't Give A Fuck". Eminem's Breakout Hit "My Name Is" is his Establishing Character Moment. The trilogic album dedicated to him is The Slim Shady LP.

Tropes:

• Age-Stereotypical Food: He tends to eat childlike foods like McDonald's and Cap'n Crunch cereal.
• The Aggressive Drug Dealer: As part of his personality being a parody of Y2K-era moral panics, he constantly tries to recruit children into taking up drugs (They aren't generally that impressed).
  So everybody buy my shit or I'ma come and kill you.
• Alcohol-Induced Stupidity: Shady is pretty much permanently high and drunk at the same time, which is a big part of why he's always making terrible decisions.
• Aliens Are Bastards:
  • In "My Name Is," Slim refers to himself as "an extraterrestrial running over pedestrians in a spaceship".
  • In "Any Man", he tells us "I'm Slim, the "Shady" is really a fake alias, to save me with in case I get chased by space aliens".
• All American Boy: Portrayed as a septic version of one in his early music videos, which tended to have him hanging around Stepford Suburbia dealing with midcentury stereotypes of teachers, geeks, and light entertainment hosts.
• Alter-Ego Acting: Officially Type 3 (a "different" Eminem) but has been Type 1 (a separate person to Eminem) on occasion. In 1999, Slim handled most interviews due to Marshall's crippling shyness, which led to some disasterous incidents like him threatening to rape and murder an NME journalist in 2000. Due to being busy, Eminem also sent Slim to speak to DJ Whoo Kid before the 2022 Super Bowl Show, in which he expressed his desire to go on stage naked and that he didn't want to be rapping when he could be playing (and winning) the game.
• Always Introduces Themselves: Slim has numerous songs where he announces what his name is (often saying 'hi!' or making disc scratching sounds), like "Any Man", "My Name Is", "I'm Shady", "Just Don't Give A Fuck", "The Real Slim Shady", "I'm Back", "Rain Man", "Hello", and numerous others.
• Ambiguously Human: Slim is probably just a really gross human, but it's implied several times he's some kind of ghost or demon (sometimes possessing Marshall's undead corpse).
• Angry White Man: Most of Slim's bullies and tormenters are Black people, women and gay men, on whom he wreaks bloody revenge. He is consistently anti-racist, though, and even has some feminist and pro-LGBT+ views at times.
• AM/FM Characterization:
  • Starting from 2013, he's often playing songs from The Golden Age of Hip Hop, as a way of connecting him with the canon of GOATs. In "Rap God", he bumps Heavy D and the Boys while asleep at the wheel of a speeding car. In "Framed", the song opens with him lipsyncing to Too $hort's "Freaky Tales".
• Animated Shock Comedy: A major part of his aesthetic, with him using South Park-like voices on a lot of his early material.
• Antagonist in Mourning: In "Evil Twin", he's genuinely upset about the demise of the flash-in-the-pan boybands he once promised he had been sent to destroy. He considers starting something with Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, but decides it wouldn't be the same.
• Anti-Role Model: Slim's a crude and disgusting sociopath, a trashy loser with no future or present, and he wants every child in America to hear his music and become just like him.
  Follow me and do exactly what the song says
  Smoke weed, take pills, drop out of school, kill people
  And drink, jump behind the wheel like it was still legal
• Ass Shove: In "FACK", Slim discovers a fondness for being anally penetrated, all the while insisting that he's totally straight. Then he reveals that humans don't even have to enter the equation at all…
• Auto-Tune: Dabbles in it from the late 00s, only in order to make himself even more annoying. Most amusingly in "Tone Deaf", where the hook is him Ignoring by Singing - in Auto-Tune - all the haters, losers, people with valid criticisms of his behaviour and musical output, and people around him wanting to have their own lives without having to mop up his damage every five minutes.
• Ax-Crazy: He's violent because he was driven insane by abuse, as well as by physical brain damage.
• Been There, Shaped History:
  • Slim Shady has claimed responsibility for the murders that OJ Simpson definitely didn't do.
  • Slim Shady also claimed that he was indirectly responsible for 9/11. The Taliban had been trying to censor his music, and had been targeting Shady Records, which at that time was based out of a tower block only a few hundred yards away. Fortunately, the idiots hit the wrong building.
  • Slim claimed to have dealt the guns to the kids who shot up Columbine High - a boast so offensive that it was censored even from the Explicit Version of the record. He later repeats it on "Rap God", lamenting that his star has fallen enough that he can get away with it.
  • In "Rain Man", 'Rain Man' claims responsibility for the death of Christopher Reeve, by putting a sticker of him on the fridge next to Darth Vader, unwittingly hexing him.
• Being Evil Sucks: Despite his exhuberance and funniness, he's only as evil as he is because the world is awful enough to make him from Marshall, and early Shady songs describe him as being as suicidal as he is homicidal. Over time he begins to show more and more genuine guilt over the miserable world he's created for himself with his perpetual anger - "Evil Deeds" features Slim begging God to become good but not knowing what it looks like.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: To put it bluntly, "FACK" features Slim emulating Richard Gere in the most horrific way possible.
• Blade Enthusiast: Shady has a fondness for bladed weapons, and claims to be so proficient with them that even firearms can't stop him:
  I walked into a gunfight with a knife to kill you
  And cut you so fast, when your blood spilled, it was still blue
• Bondage Is Bad: In "Campaign Speech" he reveals his taste for rather well-organised sexual sadism:
  Endless source and reservoir of extension cords in dresser drawers
  and deadbolts on the bedroom doors and sexual torture kits kept in a separate storage bin.
  Excellent boyfriend.
• Bottom of the Barrel Joke: This persona's job is occasionally to chip in with vulgar things when Eminem can't think of anything clever or nice to say, or to cut through treacle a little (as in the violent end to "Mockingbird" and the misogynistic statement after the apology in "Yellow Brick Road").
• Bratty Half-Pint: Basically his persona on The Slim Shady LP was a mean kid with behavioural issues. While Eminem's fame and age pushed him out of being able to adopt that role, Slim often shows up in songs as a child, where he's usually like this (or a bullied stripling, not yet evil).
• Bright Is Not Good: Starting from the music video for "My Name Is", Slim is associated with vivid bright Subverted Kids' Show and televisual media-vomit imagery, which helps demonstrate the playfulness behind his psychotic evil.
• Bully Hunter: In "I'm Back", he arms kids with guns so they can shoot up "a whole school of bullies".
• Bullying the Disabled:
  • In "Greg":
    Met a retarded kid name Greg with a wooden leg
    Snatched it off and beat him over the fucking head with the peg
  • Slim's animosity towards Christopher Reeve is based around targeting a guy in a wheelchair to make his audience squirm.
• Bully Magnet: Basically everyone in Slim's life bullied him or allowed it to happen.
• Catchphrase:
  • "Hi! My name is..." (and scrambled variations).
  • Vocalised disc-scratching sound effects, often along with using a tinny, nasal voice to sound like a badly-recorded sample of himself.
  • Making chainsaw noises - vrinn, vrinn!
  • "Guess who's back".
• Character Aged with the Actor: The Slim on The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is supposed to be the Slim of the original The Marshall Mathers LP in middle-age, worn down by a life of anger and looking back on his legacy with somewhat mixed feelings.
• invokedCharacter Rerailment: After being a Slasher Movie villain on Relapse, Recovery returns Slim to what he used to be - a nasty white-trash jerk living in a trailer park with issues about women. Lampshaded on several songs around this time, particularly on "The Reunion", where Slim antagonises his punchbag of a girlfriend by playing Relapse in the car on repeat until she breaks the CD in half.
• Chubby Chaser: Slim's love of "fat sluts" is a bit of a theme (which would make sense - he's Lean and Mean, so it would be Fat and Skinny). He quickly seduces the fat bitch in "My Name Is", gets into a ridiculous fight with one he'd been trying to rape (who turns out to be more than he bargained for) in "As The World Turns", and states his ideal woman is a "fat slut who cleans and does dishes". The Skam artwork for The Slim Shady LP shows Slim trying to escape from two lustful fat women. In live stage performances of "Without Me" while touring The Eminem Show, the "trailer park girls" are two hot fat girls in tiny tops and daisy-dukes who Em and Proof dance with and grind on. In the music video for "We Made You", Relapse Slim also humps the leg of a fat Jessica Simpson, playing with her stomach fat and feeding her burgers. Relapse Slim's crush on Rosie O'Donnell probably has something to do with this, as well as his mindless erotomania for any woman he sees on TV.
• invoked Creator Breakdown : Marshall was in a bad place at the time he created the Slim Shady character, being burned out at a degrading minimum wage job and struggling to afford to feed his family, being stuck in a Destructive Romance with his wife, and his first album Infinite receiving no positive attention. He turned to nihilistic binge-drinking, drugs, and multiple suicide attempts, and created Slim Shady to allow him to process how much he hated himself. His anguish over the failure of Infinite is referenced in the first Slim Shady song Eminem wrote, "Just Don't Give A Fuck":
  So put my tape back on the rack, go run and tell your friends my shit is wack (I just don't give a fu-u-u-u-ck!!)
• Concussions Get You High: Deconstructed. In "Brain Damage", Slim mourns that his brain damage led to people around him assuming he was high on drugs all the time... but the actual outcome of his concussion wasn't enjoyable for him, just blurry vision and deafness.
• Controversy-Proof Image: Slim allows Eminem to argue that all his extreme lyrics are fiction, and not worth taking seriously, and is a significant part of how Eminem has been able to have a 20+ year active career as a mainstream pop star while rapping about, for example, raping his mother, eating a foetus to abort it, and slaughtering Lindsay Lohan. Later Slim songs, such as "Evil Twin", express some serious regret over this.
• Corruption of a Minor: Slim gets kids to try drugs, take up crime, kill people, defy authority, 'rape sluts', punch their stepfathers, and take his lyrics literally.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Slim can't stand the idea of his girlfriends having anyone else, but tends to date cheats. This does not tend to lead to good consequences for the girlfriends. Especially prominent on Recovery, where most of the Slim songs are about him bullying girls for going off with other rappers.
• Cute and Psycho: The classic image of Slim, with Eminem's boyish face, a cheery smile, a high-pitched voice with childish mannerisms, blond hair, baby-blue eyes and a white t-shirt, gives the impression of an all-American teenage boy, albeit a punkish interpolation with obviously dyed hair and tattoos. Self-declares himself as 'cute' multiple times, most notably on "White America" where he claims that being what white people consider cute is the only reason he sold as many copies as he did.
• Cute Is Evil: His adorable appearance and mannerisms satirise the depravity of the white American brat.
• Cuteness Equals Forgiveness: In "The Real Slim Shady", even his Straw Feminist haters can't get too wound up about his rudeness and crotch-grabbing because he's just so adorable.
• Death Seeker: A recurring theme in Shady's songs is that he's paradoxically both suicidal and (like Marshall) afraid of death, so he splits the difference by engaging in risky behavior without caring whether or not he survives. In "My Name Is", for example, he contemplates suicide but is too scared to do it, so instead drinks a dangerous amount of vodka and asks us to dare him to drive.
• Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!: Subverted. Early Slim material has him bragging about dealing drugs, but it's also clear he's a loser for doing it, mostly selling low-rent drugs like legal ephedrine supplements or aspirin passed off as something stronger.
• Depraved Dentist: Is portrayed as one a couple of times - first in "Big Weenie", where he harasses his jealous hater by examining and insulting his teeth, and second in "Shake That", where he pretends to be a dentist in order to get a woman to suck his dick.
• Domestic Abuse: Beats up his wife and his mother. Though given what Slim has said about the latter, it's more like he's trying to Pay Evil unto Evil, since she wasn't much better to him while he was growing up.
• Doppelgänger Dating: The woman in "Remind Me" - a vanishingly rare Silly Love Song from the Slim persona - is hot to Slim because she's just as trashy, psychotic, artificial and repulsive to normal people as his music is.
• Driven to Suicide: There's a reason why The Slim Shady LP opens with a parody disclaimer warning the audience that children should not be allowed to listen to the album "with laces in their shoes" - Slim's suicidal, and attempts to teach kids how to commit it.
• Dumbass No More: While he still insists on his stupidity in "Brainless", his characterisation on The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is notably much smarter and introspective than on any of his previous albums, with a philosophical and Olympian streak to his evil.
• Dumb Blond: Blond and braindead. In "Asshole", he gloats about his legacy - "they told me to slow down, I'd just zone out - good luck tryin' to convince a blonde!"
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The Slim Shady EP has a much less humorous take on Slim than The Slim Shady LP does, emphasising his nihilism and anguish more than his silliness. It also works a lot more with Gangsta Rap tropes than later Slim work, emphasising Slim's drug dealing and guns, where the LP turns him into a much more abstract Heroic Comedic Sociopath who tends to do the kind of violence stereotypically associated with white people, like school shootings, bashing members of marginalised groups, and serial killings.
• Elvis Impersonator: He has a particular kinship with Elvis Presley, as another great white artist innovating in a Black genre who inspired mass moral panic, and occasionally self-declares himself to be the second coming of him (or even greater than that). He also dresses as Elvis in his music videos a couple of times - in "We Made You" he recreates the dance routine from Jailhouse Rock.
• Enemy Within: On Slim Shady EP, Slim is this, first encountered on a skit staring Eminem down from a mirror.
• Enemy Without: In "Evil Twin", Marshall summons and faces down Slim, forcing him to come to terms with the fact that they were only ever the same person.
  Hi, faggot.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: His daughter, Hailie. Despite his abusive and sociopathic tendencies, he is very loving and protective towards her.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Amusingly portrayed on Devil's Night as D12's politest member, aghast at the antics of Bizarre. (This was a joke based on the fact that Eminem was, in fact, the most politically correct member of the group - as horrible as his lyrics were, he could only bring himself to say them if they had some kind of satirical, political or self-deprecating subtext, while the others had no such limitations).
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: Especially on The Marshall Mathers LP, where most of his jokes are incredibly sick comments about domestic abuse, gaybashing, and rape.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: Maybe not literally, but coldness is a common motif in his lyrics used to signify both his skill as a rapper and his sheer ruthlessness.
  I'm colder than snow season when it's 20 below freezing
• Evil Is Petty: Where to start? Slim will diss you for no reason ("Just Don't Give A Fuck"), or because he just doesn't like you ("Killshot"), or for giving him a compliment ("Asshole"), or for being his fan ("My Name Is", "I'm Shady"). He'll assault you for looking at him funny ("Forgot About Dre"), mock people for being disabled ("I'm Back"), speak ill of the dead for fun ("Medicine Ball"), use slurs gratuitously ("Criminal"), and generally be as much of a jerk as possible, all the time, for no reason other than that he can. "Overreaction is my only reaction," he claims.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: Slim Shady is a Pretty Boy, often gushed over by women for his cute face and blue eyes. He's also a surreal, Ax-Crazy, cartoonish imp, gangsta and Serial Killer.
• For the Evulz: "Rhyme or Reason" argues Slim wasn't pushing people's buttons to make any real point, just venting rage and hatred, causing chaos for no reason other than to make people unhappy.
• Fourth-Wall Observer: Shady knows he's a fictional character and enjoys it because it means he can get away with whatever he wants. He's even beyond race:
  How the fuck can I be white? I don't even exist.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Zigzagged. Slim's influence on real-world alienated freaks turns them into incarnations of him, but - as "Criminal" reveals - it's not likely they'll cause any actual harm, since it's not a literal transformation. It's just a sense of escapism from the crushing life of being an angry, unloved young person.
• Frankenstein's Monster: Another frequent theme with Slim.
  • "Brain Damage" opens with hospital staff struggling to revive Slim by shocking him, who then announces, "these are the results of a thousand electric volts - a neck with bolts".
  • In "Without Me", Marshall complains "I've created a monster - 'cause nobody wants to see Marshall no more, they want Shady". Slim soon takes back control, bragging about the "shock when I get shocked at the hospital by the doctor when I'm not cooperating - when I'm rocking the table while he's operating!".
• The Gadfly: Slim delights in pissing people off, especially censors.
  God sent me to piss the world off!
• Gag Nose: Describes himself as distinctive because "my nose is pointy" in "Criminal" and compares himself to Pinocchio in "Forever". He claims in "SHADYXV" that "the pointy nose is pointing right at you, mama", going on to explain that Rihanna loves it because "she loves the way I lie... she sits on my face and waits for my nose to grow".
• Gangsta Rap:
  • On Slim Shady EP and The Slim Shady LP, some of his songs come under this genre (as something of Early-Installment Weirdness). "Murder, Murder" is about Slim stealing a Nintendo 64 and some Beanie Babies and getting shot for his trouble; "Rock Bottom" is a more dramatic song about Slim being pushed to crime by crippling poverty; "I'm Shady" is about Slim as a drug dealer. Generally, though, he engages in Lower-Class Lout behaviour without gangsterism because he doesn't have a gang. (Or any friends).
  • In 2003-5, he also makes numerous songs in this subgenre, inspired by his affiliation with 50 Cent and beefs with Benzino and Ja Rule, with Shady cast as a thug singing Ironic Nursery Tunes as he blasts away at his enemies with guns.
• Genre Motif: Classical: Slim has a slight association with classical music and instrumentation, possibly in reference to another out-of-control, childlike murderer and rapist. In particular, the original version of "Just Don't Give A Fuck" was built around a sampled gavotte and "Brainless" is based on "Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor". "The Real Slim Shady" is based around a courtly harpischord run, and has been cited by some modern classical musicians for revitalising interest in the instrument.
• Going Postal: A Lower-Class Lout who reacts to the stress of poverty and abuse with acts of ridiculous, Crosses the Line Twice violence. "Rock Bottom", in particular, is about this.
• G-Rated Drug: Slim Shady gets high off many drugs that are legal or not traditionally thought of as recreational, including ephedrine supplements, antacids, over-the-counter sleep aids (referencing how these are a major addiction trigger for Eminem), laxatives, and hydrochloroquine. Early on he also tends to consume illegal drugs in impossible ways, like absorb entire sheets of acid tabs through his head, and inject himself with weed by putting the buds in an IV.
• Harmful to Minors: Slim is both the embodiment of the American moral panic, and a sort of Anthropomorphic Personification of pop cultural corruption of kids. Simply hearing Slim's music will make kids kill themselves and/or others. He even puts a public service announcement at the beginning of The Slim Shady LP warning that even though the opinions are "not necessarily the views of anyone", children should not be allowed to listen "with laces in their shoes".
  • Slim himself ended up the way he did due to exposure to horrific violence, drugs and sexuality while he was too young to handle it. The kids out there who relate to his music are victims of similar situations, or at least have been already corrupted by a pop culture as depraved as anything he does.
• Held Back in School: Unsurprisingly, Slim mentions in "My Name Is" that he was held back in school until he was 35 years old.
• Heteronormative Crusader: Slim has made no shortage of flagrantly homophobic statements, which certain people assume to be Marshall's true feelings even though the real person has always maintained that he supports the LGBT community. As detailed under Politically Correct Villain below, Slim has gone back and forth on whether or not his gaybashing is genuine (and to what extent if so), but even at his worst his lyrics so over-the-top that no sane person could really believe they reflected Marshall's true beliefs on the matter.
  [on "Criminal"] ''My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge
  That'll stab you in the head, whether you're a fag or lez
  Or a homosex, hermaph or a trans-a-vest
  Pants or dress, hate fags? The answer's yes
  Homophobic? Nah, you're just heterophobic
• He Who Fights Monsters: Slim is a bullying victim who became a bully, antagonising the entire world with his horrible behaviour and hurtful words. "Bad Guy" has the Monster point this out.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: His dad abandoned him, his stepfathers abused him, his drug-addled mother poisoned him, other kids at school bullied him, and his teachers joined in. While it draws from Eminem's real life, it's so over-the-top as to be funny.
• Hockey Mask and Chainsaw: Eminem performed shirtless, in dungarees, with a hockey mask and chainsaw while performing songs from The Marshall Mathers LP as Slim. Slim also claims that if he wasn't a rapper, he'd be "a fucking rapist in a Jason mask!"
• Homophobic Hate Crime: Gay people are a preferred target of his - Played for Laughs.
  • In "The Watcher" freestyle, he goes on an explicitly homophobic murder rampage:
    Gay-bashin' fags with tire irons and ratchets
    I seen 'em come, I've watched 'em go
    Versace, "Whoa, hey!", Liberace, "ho!"
    I might have bashed on somebody you probably know.
    Buncha' faggots in your clique screamin', "It's not me! No!"
    Drag 'em out the closet and across the floor
  • "Criminal" is ultimately a subversion, mocking Eminem's reputation for homophobia. It opens with a Rhyming List of slurs against LGBT people which Slim claims is why they call him a CRIMINAL!!... even though he's not actually doing anything in real life, or even in the song (which is just a braggadocious Metaphorgotten).
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: Despite his well-documented hatred towards his mother Debbie, Slim took no pleasure in watching his stepfather beat her on a regular basis — possibly because, for all her faults, she at least tried to be a good parent, which is more than can be said for the abusive piece of shit she married.
• Hostile Show Takeover: A constant theme of Slim's appearances in music videos is that he appears on TVs dressed up as various characters of the pop cultural moment, like Bill Clinton, Christina Aguilera or Osama Bin Laden.
• "I Am" Song: Many of Slim Shady's songs are just songs where Slim tells us his name, and then tells us about what kind of a horrible person he is. Of these, "My Name Is" is probably the most significant.
• I'll Kill You!: "Kill You" is a whole song dedicated to this.
• Improbable Use of a Weapon: A common gag in his early material.
  • In "What's The Difference", Slim threatens to "drop the sawed-off and beat you with the piece it was sawed off of".
  • In "Kill You": "Put your hands down, bitch — I ain't gon' shoot you. I'mma pull you to this bullet and put it through you."
  • In "Under The Influence" he'll "grab a knife at the blade and stab you with the fuckin' handle".
• Immune to Drugs: Played with. He does consume comically large quantities of pharmaceuticals that should kill a person, but they do bring him to the edge of death on occasion (and sometimes actually kill him, though it doesn't stick).
• Indulgent Fantasy Segue: The whole purpose of Slim is to be this for Marshall, who in real life is a troubled but ordinary person who does not go around running over pedestrians in a spaceship or microwaving pets. Slim has murdered Kim enough times that it's a cliché, but the real woman still lives. Frequently, songs end with Eminem pointing out that none of what he just described is real and it's just a bunch of stupid ideas he thought up.
• Intrepid Fictioneer: Once jumped into a cartoon and beat up Foghorn Leghorn.
• Insult Comic: Insulting people, usually celebrities, in amusing ways is one of his main jobs. "Ass Like That" in particular points out that he's basically just Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
• I Want My Mommy!: In "Stepdad," the young Slim is so distraught by his titular stepfather's abuse that he calls Debbie for help. Knowing what we know about Slim's relationship with his mother, that should speak volumes about how badly Stepdad's behavior affected him.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: His distinctive cleft chin is put to good use in his appearances as twisted superheroic characters in the music videos for "Without Me" and "Superman".
• Last Het Romance: In "Role Model", he's such a traumatically awful boyfriend that every girl he's ever been with has "gone lez".
• Laughably Evil: Slim Shady is hilarious, making goofy jokes about horrible topics, making asides on the reactions to people hearing his album, and reinforcing the humour with technically complex hip-hop lyric techniques like line-end multirhymes, internal rhymes and enjambments. Even in the darkest Slim Shady material, there's usually Bathos or at least Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking.
• Leitmotif: Several:
  • A specific disc-scratching sound, like "chkka-chkka", either an actual scratch or vocalised, is used to represent Shady, generally him making an entrance. First appears on "My Name Is", then turns up on "Forgot About Dre", "I'm Back", "Square Dance", "I'm Having A Relapse", "We Made You", "Old Times' Sake", "Rap God", "Homicide", serves as a Musical Spoiler to foreshadow the appearance of Slim in "My Darling", and many, many others.
  • A lot of Slim Shady songs tend to use a particular tonality in the hook, which is supposed to imitate the sound of a revving chainsaw. It's a 'melody' beginning with a one-syllable leap from a speaking pitch to the top of Eminem's vocal range, and then slowly wheedling downwards until the next one-syllable pitch leap up. This originated in the hook of "The Real Slim Shady" ("iiI'M Slim Shady, yes, I'm the real Shady..."), but can also be heard in the hooks of "Without Me" ("nnowTHIS looks like a job for me..."), "Business" ("llLET'S get down to business..."), "Just Lose It" ("nowwI'M gonna make you dance..."), and "3 a.m." ("it's thREE AM in the morning, ppPUT my key in the door...''").
  • Chainsaw noises in general, either Saying Sound Effects Out Loud ("vrinn-vrinn!!") or actual chainsaw effects. The beat in "My Darling" uses the sound of a rumbling, barely-starting chainsaw as a percussive element, building up to a constant whine as Slim wins and takes over Marshall.
  • Just saying "Hi!" in a squeaky, cheerful voice is usually sufficient to represent Slim. This originates in "My Name Is", makes a couple of appearances in The Marshall Mathers LP, then continues throughout his later catalogue (most notably to introduce Slim in "Evil Twin" on The Marshall Mathers LP 2).
  • "Guess who's back" (sometimes with disc scratching). Turns up first on "I'm Back". An expanded rhyme - "Guess who's back, back again/ Shady's back, tell a friend" - appears first on "Without Me", then turns up later on "Just Lose It". "I'm Having A Relapse" interpolates the "I'm Back" version, 'guess who?' is spoken in the intro to "We Made You", and it appears again in a very truncated form on "Marsh".
  • While not used as often as the rest of these, a sung melody of "get down, down-down..." shows up in both "Just Lose It" and "We Made You".
• Life Embellished: Most of Slim's life is rather similar to Marshall's life, but with insane and impossible fictional details added.
• Lighter and Softer: Due to Creator Recovery, on The Marshall Mathers LP 2, which shows us a (somewhat) mature Slim who's still angry and funny, but no longer wanting to lash out at others. "Berzerk" is announced at the beginning to be 'vintage Slim, BITCH!' (the scream of 'bitch' cheekily referencing Slim's vocal in the notorious, nightmarish "Kim"), but the worst Slim does in the song is dress up nice (well, nice for the late 80s East Coast boom-bap scene) while cruising for girls, drink a little too much lean and wake up next to "the ugly Kardashian".
• Lightmare Fuel: Slim's violence is disturbing, but the intricate multirhymes and ridiculous situations make it hilarious.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: Don't let his good looks fool you; sex with Slim is shown in explicit detail to be as nauseatingly unpleasant and unfulfilling as possible — even without taking his numerous venereal diseases into account.
• invokedMemetic Hair: During the production of The Slim Shady LP, Marshall bleached his hair blond while high on ecstasy. Regretting it as soon as he came to his senses, he would have got rid of it if Dr. Dre hadn't persuaded him that it was the perfect look for Slim. It spawned a fashion trend for boys and young men bleaching their hair which lasted for five years and is still thought of as "the Eminem hair". Multiple lyrics on The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show - and even some of Eminem's lyrics during the times he's wearing his hair its natural dark colour - mention Slim's blond hair as his signature, and the fad for young men imitating his look is mentioned in the lyrics for "The Real Slim Shady", "White America" and "Sing For The Moment", the video for "Stan", and several others. It's significant enough that for The Marshall Mathers LP 2, Eminem signalled Revisiting the Roots by dyeing his hair blond again, though a more natural-looking shade.
• Misanthrope Supreme: In "Rhyme or Reason", his "I Am" Song for The Marshall Mathers LP 2, he raps a Song Parody of the Summer of Love anthem "Time Of The Season", turning it into an announcement of the Season of Hate. He announces he hates "every fucking thing, yeah!" and "even this rhyme, bitch".
• Look Ma, I Am on TV!:
  • At the end of "I'm Back", which is about him being suddenly famous, he adlibs, "hi, Mom". (After an absolutely revolting joke about incestuous sex with Jennifer Lopez).
  • The Clean version of "Without Me", as performed at the VMAs, changes "fuck you, Debbie!" to "what's up, Debbie?!", while he and Proof mug for the camera.
• Meaningful Name:
  • He's Marshall's Shadow Archetype, so he's naturally "shady".
  • "Slim Shady" literally means Lean and Mean. At the time Eminem created the character, he was extremely skinny due to not being able to afford food, alluding to the poverty that led Shady to become so twisted. In kayfabe, Slim's skinny because he's constantly on drugs, and just abuses them instead of eating.
  • In "I'm Back", Slim Shady explains his name as alluding to a thin line of coke in the back of a dark limo. This hints at how Slim is also an Allegorical Character for Eminem's fame. (As a result of this, "Slim Shady" is occasionally used as a slang word for cocaine in Detroit's rap scene, as in the song "Where Is Marshall" by Lonnie Bands).
  • It's also a Line-of-Sight Name hinting to the Detroit connection - when driving to his miserable line cook job, Eminem liked to practice by thinking up rhymes for words he saw on street signage. One of the roads he passed to his workplace was Shady Lane (a photo of the sign can be seen in the CD booklet for The Marshall Mathers LP).
• Morality Pet: The only time Slim expresses genuine kindness is when looking after his daughter, Hailie... even if he's abusing and murdering her mother in the next few lines. In "When I'm Gone", a song that was intended to retire the Slim character, Slim expresses that he's not comfortable being Slim any more while he has a little girl to worry about.
• More Dakka: "Go To Sleep" is built around a ludicrous amount of gunshot sounds as Slim shrieks, "die, motherfucker, die!" in an almost playground-chant-like cadence. At the end of the song, he starts unloading progressively bigger guns, firing off rocket launchers.
• Multiple-Choice Past: How Slim became what he was is intentionally inconsistent. Was he a sweet kid who snapped at age 12? Or as a bullying victim in grade school? Or was he born Satanic?
• Mummy: Early on, Slim was sometimes depicted as one in album artwork and in stage shows. (At one show, the mummy on stage was played by Dustin Hoffman). The undeadness seems to suit Slim's suicidality, the bandages seem to be representative of Slim's constant self-injury and abuse of medical supplies, and mummies also don't have brains, which fits Slim's intelligence level.
• My Girl Is a Slut: His love of slutty women along with his insane jealousy ends up having seriously negative consequences for his relationships.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The name "Slim Shady" literally means Lean and Mean. In "I'm Back", he explains he gets his name from doing a line of cocaine in the back of a dark limo.
• Nerdy Nasalness: In his early appearances, he's played with a squeaky Midwest whine to emphasise his banal evil.
• Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: He explains in "Stepdad" that the abuse he suffered from the titular parent resulted in dark thoughts that he expressed as a child through creepy drawings:
  I'm startin' to think I'm psychotic with all the pictures that I draw
  Shit that I've already witnessed, this probably twisted my thoughts
• Nonconformist Dyed Hair: His obviously peroxided hair stood out a mile in a time when white rappers were rejected out of hand, while also giving him the aura of a punk. A lot of the imagery in his songs and videos (such as "The Real Slim Shady", "Stan" and "White America") plays off the way that this became an iconic '90s Hair look imitated all over by his fans, to signal their membership of an alienated, angry working-class youth culture who looked to Slim as an Escapist Character.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: Usually when describing something that is extremely made up.
• Other Me Annoys Me:
  • In a 2010 interview, Slim Shady was not particularly impressed by the confessional and inspirational lyrics and poppy production on Recovery, telling Eminem, "what the fuck? You've gone soft". This has yet to go addressed in a song, however, where Slim is quite happy doing "pop shit" if it means he can continue to have his malign influence on America.
  • Slim has also claimed in interviews that Eminem is "fucking stupid", largely for having any dreams or wanting anything.
  • A handful of songs involve mentions of him bullying or killing Marshall. (In other songs - ones portraying him as The Monster - he loves him).
• Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous: Despite his homophobia and transphobia, Slim also plays around with and transcends gender roles to reinforce how beyond humanity he is. He's constantly shown as female characters in music videos, and is a Creepy Crossdresser from time to time as well. The Relapse incarnation takes this to a whole other level.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: The first verse of "Bad Meets Evil" has Slim as a ghost hassling Royce by possessing him through vibrations, helping signal Royce's turn towards Horrorcore for this song.
• Pædo Hunt: Especially on his appearances on Encore, where he starts preying on barely legal celebrities. (This aspect gets carried on in Relapse Shady's love of jacking off to Kid Com shows).
• Pedophile Priest: Portrayed as one in the music video for "Role Model", lusting after pretty girls in the confession booth and inviting little boys to his bedroom.
• Political Correctness Is Evil: In the 2000s, his bigoted humour is to annoy people, but also to "fight for the right of your kids to say something you might not like". It's worth pointing out that this was not just to spite the gay activists who picketed him in the streets: At the time Eminem wrote his early 2000s albums, there was a governmental Moral Guardian push to censor music based on empty and racist grounds. A radio station in Colorado was even fined $7000 for playing a Clean version of "The Real Slim Shady" in 2001, sending the industry into panic, forcing a cross-industry pressure group to get the ruling overturned (setting a legal precedent for what constitutes "offense" in broadcasting).
• Politically Correct Villain / Politically Incorrect Villain: A significant part of the joke of Slim Shady is that he says outrageously bigoted things about gay people and women, but is actually pretty progressive about them. On "Just Don't Give A Fuck", he supports abortion, and on "The Real Slim Shady" he voices a sincere argument that in a culture where Tom Green can have sex with animals on TV, why is anyone offended by the idea of two men who love each other running away to marry? (And underscores it with an 'ew' sound, of course.)
  • He has fun with the absurdity of this on Revival, where Shady drives around with the body of Ivanka Trump in the back of his car and rapes Ann Coulter with a Long List of rhyming junk.
  • On "Rainy Days", Eminem threatens to abandon his own progressive views and return to Shady's offensive jokes:
    Fuck it, I thought this might be a good time to put woke me to rockabye
    I got the bottle of NyQuil right here
    You want the sleep me to wake, you want Slim Shady EP
    That’s on the CD cover, sockin' my mirror
• Post-Rape Taunt: Some of his vilest lyrics involve this. In "Medicine Man", he says "I even make the bitches I rape come".
• The Power of Apathy: A major theme. He does not give a fuck, and the power he wakes up in the fans who emulate him is also the power to not give a fuck, allowing them to resist any amount of crushing abuse or poverty with a raised middle finger and a personal freedom. When asked in a 2018 interview about why Slim champions 'not giving a fuck' while also being astonishingly petty and sensitive, Eminem observed that "not giving a fuck" can mean two different things - literally not caring about anything, and not caring about the outcome of doing what you care about. The former is neutral, but the latter is liberatory.
• President Evil: A couple of times.
  • The marketing campaign for Encore involved the Shady National Convention event, where Slim Shady was running for President in the 2004 election - despite his Ax-Crazy personality and vapid speechmaking, his campaign staffers/posse assured him he could get away with saying or doing anything "because you're white". The Shady campaign also had a ringing endorsement from Donald Trump, much to Eminem's later embarrassment.
  • "Campaign Speech", a promotional freestyle single for Revival, is about his goal for what he would do if he was president, which mostly seems to involve doing drugs and having violent sex with female celebrities whose names rhyme with funny things.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Shady has an extremely puerile personality. His signature on the front of The Slim Shady LP is in crayons. In "Square Dance", he apparently writes in crayon.
• The Quincy Punk: Describes himself as a "punk rocker" in numerous songs, which is a bit of a stretch for his music, but suits his appearance, attitude and hyperviolence.
• Rage Against the Reflection: Slim's first appearance on the New Sound Album The Slim Shady EP is a skit where he calls Eminem's name from behind the mirror, and Eminem reacts in horror, thinking he'd killed him. When Eminem punches the mirror, the two personas fuse.
• Rape as Backstory: While Slim's past is intentionally inconsistent, a common feature of it is that he's been molested as a child. He got this from his babysitter ("Low Down, Dirty", "Insane"), his preschool teacher ("I'm Shady"), his stepdad ("Insane"), and himself (and got convicted for it) ("Low Down, Dirty").
• Rap Is Crap:
  • Occasionally whines about and mocks trends in hip-hop he dislikes, particularly in his 2006-2008 appearances and on Kamikaze.
  • In "Get You Mad", he tells us he doesn't even like rap and is just trying to get his porno career started.
  • In a rare in-character interview prior to the 2022 Super Bowl Half Time Show, Slim's annoyed that people are expecting him to go up at half time and rap, since it's more likely he was called there to play for the Rams.
• Rated G for Gangsta: On the guest verse in "Forever", Eminem mentions he's rapping as Shady, but the content has no controversial elements (significantly less than the other rappers on the song, even) and is about Eminem-persona content like being a famous rapper. It's probably only attributed to Slim because of how bafflingly fast the verse is, implying he has to be insane just to do it.
• Red Baron: As part of Bad Meets Evil, he's known as "Evil". He's also called himself "Dr. Evil", "the King of Controversy", and "White America's Mirror".
• Screw the Rules, I'm Famous!: A constant theme is that his fame lets him get away with all the horrible things he says and does. On the opening track of The Marshall Mathers LP, Slim rapes his own mother while an appalled Moral Guardian character whines that this guy is on the cover of Rolling Stone. Slim responds, "you're goddamn right bitch, and now it's too late - I'm triple platinum and tragedies happened in two states".
• Self-Harm: Constantly self-mutilating and trying to commit suicide in stupid ways. It doesn't stick, though.
• Self-Proclaimed Liar:
  • He claims in "Just Don't Give a Fuck" to be a "pathological liar blowing things out of proportion".
  • In "SHADYXV", Rihanna loves the way he lies. Because she sits on his face and waits for his nose to grow. But that also was a lie - "pathological liar, oh, why am I such an asshole that my disguise is pants, but they on fire!"
• Sexual Karma: Any sex he's having is violent, masochistic, non-consensual, perverted, immature or with someone he had to pay. He has horrible taste in women and has caught various diseases from them.
• Sick and Wrong: In his 2015 Sway In The Morning freestyle, Slim raps "In a four seater Taurus but tell them my face is the best seat in the house — I’ll let them bleed in my mouth while I’m eating them out", to which the DJs can be heard in the background groaning and trying to hold back their puke.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: His mouth is the filthiest of all of the personas, to the extent that several songs use a Precision F-Strike (often a less acceptable 'f-' word than the one you're probably thinking of) to signal a shift in persona to Shady.
• Smug Super: An element to Slim's persona starting from The Eminem Show (and particularly prominent there). He's often associated with superhero imagery, and portrays himself as a defender of free speech and patron of fuckup children.
• Split-Personality Takeover: Used in The Slim Shady EP as justification for a New Sound Album after his first album, with a sincere and positive image, ended up tanking.
• Spree Killer: The theming to a lot of Slim's violence, especially on Kamikaze where he compares himself to James Holmes and claims he uses a bump stock. He also shoots up playgrounds on occasion.
• STD Immunity: Averted. Numerous songs describe how his penis burns when he pees, his genital warts, rashes, and his possibly having AIDS.
• Stopped Caring: Slim's as nihilistic as he is because he grew up so poor and bullied that he "just [doesn't] give a fuck" any more.
• Stuffed into a Locker: In "Brain Damage", this was just one of the humiliations he used to get from 'brawny bullies'.
• Stupid Evil: If Slim has one character trait, it's this. He spends most of his time in a cycle of pointless, self-destructive troublemaking that is just as likely to end up with him on the wrong end of it as anyone else. He antagonises his doctor while he's getting surgery, randomly mutilates himself with a chainsaw, ties a rope to his nuts and jumps out of a tree, spends his record release party saying he sucks and announcing he's quitting rap, tells a woman he's planning on robbing and raping that he's going to do those things to her and getting punched out...
• Subverted Kids' Show: Variously throughout The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP, Slim's associated with music that resembles children's music, sounds cheerful and friendly, and directly addresses children. He's a vicious, self-destructive killer!... and swears a lot.
• Subverted Sitcom: The music video for "My Name Is" shows a TV show called The Slim Shady Show - starring Marshall Mathers, in which Slim Shady is introduced as a bullied, dark-haired geek in a Stepford Suburbia, but quickly becomes a peroxide-blond Psychopathic Manchild doing horrible things like driving drunk, stealing his friend's girlfriend and getting dragged out of a strip club for streaking (an allegory for how Eminem found his evil alter-ego through a Creator Breakdown). There's also a pastiche of the opening of The Brady Bunch, with Slim Shady heads appearing in a grid around a logo reading "The Shady Bunch".
• Take That, Critics!: Slim was created in response to negative reviews of Eminem's debut album Infinite. Right from the beginning, Slim would threaten to murder, and occasionally murder in the songs, people who think his music sucks, critics who gave him mean reviews, other rappers who think they're better than him, opinion columnists who call him a bad influence, politicians who think he's destroying America, or basically anyone who said some shit about him one time (sometimes even if it's complimentary). By The Marshall Mathers LP 2, Slim expresses some serious regrets over adopting this lifestyle. By Kamikaze, he embraces it fully, Eminem telling his fans that you wanted Slim Shady back, so you got him.
• Taught by Television: A dark version. In "Criminal", he taunts his teachers, parents and preachers about not being able to teach him anything, because he learned his foul homophobic and misogynistic views from watching "TV and Comcast cable".
• Team Dad: Both "My Fault" and "Jimmy, Brian and Mike" show Slim being the responsible one at a couple of very bad parties, trying to look after his friends and keep them from getting into trouble by screaming at and threatening them, though he's out of his depth. As both are songs written very early in Eminem's career, this has some Early-Installment Weirdness to it.
• Teenage Death Songs: Slim has claimed responsibility for teen suicides, and the Columbine massacre.
• Teen Idol: Becomes one after The Slim Shady LP, and immediately starts using it to bait kids into committing suicide.
• Teens Are Monsters: To satirise the Moral Guardians' reaction to his violent lyrics, teenagers in Slim Shady songs are often portrayed as belligerent idiots who hate everyone around them and themselves, and copy whatever they hear on records. In "White America", the kids are in on the joke, hugging him on TRL... but loving him because they are everything America fears teens are.
• Teeny Weenie: He claims in "The Kids" that his penis is the size of a peanut, which is why you ain't seen it.
• That Man Is Dead: Slim claims in "My Name Is" that he killed Marshall:

  Well, since age 12, I've felt like I'm someone else
  'Cause I hung my original self from the top bunk with a belt

• Then Let Me Be Evil: The young Marshall was rejected for being a weird freak who was probably on drugs, and then an evil white interloper trying to steal hip-hop - and then a monster trying to corrupt kids with his music. Slim Shady represents everything that was said about him, being a diabolically evil, drugged-up loon who compares himself to Elvis and brags about influencing kids into shooting up their schools.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: His violent boasts usually involve totally unnecessary violence, like filling your coffin with flammable gas so he can make you explode after he's killed you.
• The Unapologetic: Usually as Album Closure. In "Still Don't Give A Fuck", he tells anyone offended by his lyrics to kiss his ass. In "Criminal", he screams that "if I ever gave a fuck, I'd shave my nuts, tuck my dick between my legs and cluck!". In "My Dad's Gone Crazy", he informs us he'd yank his teeth out before he'd ever bite his tongue.
• The Virus: Since he influences children to become just like him, he's able to duplicate himself infinitely so long as there are angry teens who relate to his music.
  • Results in some rather negative consequences for Eminem later in "So Far...", where he realises all that's happened is he's made kids think it's funny to spit in his onion rings and leave the head of a dead cat in his mailbox.
  • This also results in negative consequences for him on Kamikaze, in which he realises his imitators have grown up to replace him — "never be as good! Never be as good! Wife beaters, white tshirts, what? But I'm the greatest". He again gloats about his clones at the end of "Venom", which has a music video designed to play this up.
• They Killed Kenny Again: Slim gets shot in "Murder, Murder", kills himself in "My Name Is" twice, spends "Role Model" drowning himself (and dies from an overdose in the lyrics, and digs himself out of his grave). Eminem admits in "Cum On Everybody" that he channels his suicidality into writing 'songs where I die at the end'.
• Too Dumb to Live: A core character trait. In "Marshall Mathers", he intervenes in the East Coast-West Coast beef by driving around in a broken car, waving a gun, wearing both Bloods and Crips colours:
  Leanin' out a window with a cocked shotgun
  drivin' up the block in the car that they shot Pac in
  looking for Big's killers. Dressin' ridiculous,
  blue and red? Like, I don't see what the big deal is.
• Toon: On The Slim Shady LP, with its Subverted Kids' Show aesthetic, Slim's cartoonish Creepy High-Pitched Voice, and the physically impossible, violent situations (complete with sound effects and silly voices from appalled bystanders). In later albums, these elements are toned down, Slim's voice drops in pitch, and the character starts taking more influence from Horror Tropes, but cartoony elements never go away entirely. (Think of the verse in Relapse's "Insane" where Slim eats his chainsaw, shoots himself in the face with a slingshot, pops his eyeball out, plays ping-pong with it...)
• Toxic, Inc.:
  • In "Role Model":
  I'm not a player, just a ill rhyme sayer
  that'll spray a aerosol can up at the ozone layer
  • In "Scary Movies", Slim puts air in a bag and charges people to breathe.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Has an affinity with McDonald's - especially prominent in work made after Eminem recovered from obesity. In "3 am", Relapse Slim murders a bunch of people in a McDonald's. "Won't Back Down" and "Hello Good Morning" both contain a similar joke about how Slim's such an irresponsible boyfriend, he won't even buy his girlfriend McDonald's from the drive-thru.
• Troll: He pretty much lives on saying shocking and offensive shit he probably doesn't even believe just to piss people off. "Criminal" is a prime example, written as a Take That! towards people who don't realize that Slim Shady is just a character and accuse Marshall of condoning the violent acts he raps about.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: "When I was five, I was already fuckin', and playin' X-Rated casettes with Teddy Ruxpin".
• Undiscriminating Addict: Binges on everything from crack and smack to glue and decongestant tablets.
  I'm doin' acid, crack, smack, coke, and smokin' dope then
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Many songs present him as having been corrupted by his Hilariously Abusive Childhood, with "Kill You" and "I'm Back" both presenting him as a former Mommy's-boy who went evil.
• Vague Age: Goes up and down in age, either to represent different scenarios or for a punchline.
  • Slim tends to act like a teenager, making juvenile line-crossing jokes, fighting with childhood authority figures like teachers, school bullies and his parents, and if he's got a job (other than being a famous rapper) it's usually a stereotypical working-class teen job like burger flipping or dealing small amounts of drugs. He also has a ruthless libido for teenage sources of masturbatory amusement like PG movies or Kid Com shows. At the same time, his persona is blended enough with the life of the real Marshall that he also is frequently portrayed as having adult life responsibilities, like marriage and raising a family. Also, while he socialises with children, it's usually in an authoritative persona like a father, a Depraved Kids' Show Host or a teacher trying to educate them into a life of crime and debauchery (if he's not trying to rape them).
  • In a few songs his age is changed for specific scenarios:
    • In "My Name Is", he gives his age as 34 due to being Held Back in School so much, but in "The Real Slim Shady" (released the following year) he's well under 30 (because he'll need to be in a nursing home by the time he is).
    • He seems to be a student in "My Fault", because he's worried about how long Spring Break will last for.
    • He's a prepubescent ten year old in "Brain Damage", but already horny for 'naked nurses'.
    • In "Guilty Conscience" he's an ageless shoulder imp.
    • Throughout the Relapse album he's imagined as an older, weirdly accented Gothic Horror-themed serial killer who lives in a nice house with candles and wooden panelling and mostly preys on younger women and men.
    • On his Nicki Minaj collaboration "Roman's Revenge" in which he rampages with Nicki's Expy of Slim, Roman Zolanski, the song ends with Roman's mother Martha interrupting the two of them as if they're a pair of naughty children. In "Moment 4 Life", Martha informs us that she's dispatched Roman and Slim off to a boarding school in Russia.
• Villain Protagonist: His default characterisation - though sometimes he's more of a Karmic Trickster (and even more occasionally, just The Fool).
• Villains Love Entertainment: Slim's relentless consumption of trashy media - comic books, violent rap music, violent cartoons, mindless video games, reality TV, football, boxing, South Park, and garbage celebrity gossip tabloid news - inspires his awful behaviour and attitudes.
• Vocal Evolution: On The Slim Shady LP, Slim is portrayed with a cheerful, high-pitched, nasal voice with a more general Midwest accent, caricaturing a stereotypical 'white guy voice' ("Hi kids! Do you like violence?"). Starting with The Marshall Mathers LP, he's more often voiced with Eminem's natural voice pitch and accent, to facilitate both the Darker and Edgier material on the album, and to allow Slim, Eminem and Marshall to blend more evenly with each other. (And because Eminem decided the squeaky voice sounded stupid). Throughout Relapse, a Horrorcore concept album, Slim talks in a low-pitched voice with a goofy, difficult to identify accent, suggesting he's different to the typical Slim persona. The Marshall Mathers LP 2, a Revisiting the Roots album, returns to Slim's classic voice for some sections.
• Wasted Beauty: Despite his cute appearance, he's so loathsome —between his outrageous violence, bigotry, suicidality, trashiness and just being really annoying — that the only women he can get to be with him are as crazy, desperate or disloyal as he is.
• Weird West: "Bad Meets Evil" and "Bad Guys Always Die" feature Slim in a supernatural Wild West setting filled with ghosts and cyborgs.
• White Hair, Black Heart: Via Hair Color Dissonance. Eminem's initial intent had been for Slim's hair to be white, and he describes it as such in a few of his early interviews and statements. However, Eminem's limited knowledge of hair dye chemistry led to it coming out more of a blond colour, which he decided to run with, describing Slim as a 'blonde' thereafter.
• Who Even Needs a Brain?: Slim's brain is presented as absent or vestigial. In "Low Down, Dirty", his brain is the size of a bread crumb. "Brain Damage", his entire brain falls out of his skull, so he picks it up, stitches it back into his head, and puts a couple of bolts in his neck. In "Brainless" his head is so empty that he uses the inside of it as a storage bin.
• Youthful Freckles: Is described as having them (Em has them in real life, but they're not usually visible under the stage makeup he uses). In addition to reinforcing his childlike cuteness, it also reminds us that he is white. In "Brain Damage", he has "taped-up spectacles with a freckled nose". In his 2015 Sway and Tech freestyle, he mentions being "white with freckles, but I silence hecklers". "Remind Me" combines this cleverly with some Joke of the Butt imagery as Slim describes himself walking into a party — "asshole, freckled cheeks and a butt-chin".

Eminem

I wanna make sure somewhere, in this chicken scratch, I scribble and doodle enough rhymes to maybe try to help get some people through tough times.

The Eminem persona is the showman, a punchline-heavy battle-rapper who became a hip-hop legend. He's performing, is proud of his talent, and enjoys showing off his technical skill, but is ambivalent about his fame and often brooding and anguished.

Eminem represents the rapper's better nature, as opposed to Slim (representing his worst). In a 2000 NME interview, Eminem described Eminem as "a real Nice Guy" — while this isn't exactly true, Eminem's bad behaviour tends to be for righteous or honourable reasons, and he's apologetic when it's not. He represents the qualities of Eminem's spotlight that allow him to inspire others — his inner strength, the perfection of his poetry, and his compassion and insight for himself and for his audience.

Eminem was the first persona Eminem adopted in his studio albums, with his debut album Infinite being dedicated entirely to him — Slim Shady wouldn't appear on an album until Slim Shady EP. For this reason, he is also sometimes used to invoke nostalgia for Eminem's time as a young emcee and a return to basics, such as on Recovery, an album dedicated almost entirely to him. According to Word of God, Eminem's Character Signature Song is "Lose Yourself". His Establishing Character Moment is "The Way I Am" - Em's first major single under the persona. The trilogic album dedicated to him is The Eminem Show.

Tropes:

• Age Insecurity:
  • Wrote several songs around the time he turned 30 about how much he was dreading it (considering killing himself at 30 in "When To Stand Up", calling himself too old in "Square Dance", fearing his career demise in "Lose Yourself", and claiming the fire inside him will die at 30 in "Soldier").
  • In "Bad Guy" he expresses horror about him still being on stage in his 40s, and in "Tone Deaf" he expresses amusement at having turned 48 considering his original reputation for bratty violence.
• All-Loving Hero: While there was always a subtext of compassion even to Eminem's meanest work (with even his bullies and enemies being portrayed as misguided or as fucked-up by the world as he is), he begins to show elements of this in songs like "Sing For The Moment" and "Like Toy Soldiers", fully embracing it by "Beautiful" and "Not Afraid".
• Author Phobia: He often uses his music to needle himself about his own anxieties, and stuff that winds him up.
  • Subverted (now averted) with pop music, as he’s incorporated more pop elements in his music in the 2010s (and stepping away more from the limelight), and even boastfully categorised his music as pop (fused with rock and shock-rap) in "Rap God".
  • Eminem's hatred towards his more annoying fans is also well documented in his songs. He often satirically brags about his role as a corruptor of children and celebrates his ability to free kids from their shitty lives, but he's also worried about his own influence on them. "Stan" is a Loony Fan Gothic Horror about how messed up his true believers are, and was inspired by letters Eminem was getting from "fans" who thought he was like them. "The Way I Am" is a rant for his fans to leave him alone. "Elevator" is a fantasy about murdering the annoying fans who knock on the door of his mansion all day, and "So Far..." is a more friendly storytelling song about his annoying fans hassling him well into his middle age. Even in the Mid-Vid Skit in "Phenomenal", Eminem is shown irritatedly brushing off attention from fans in the middle of an action scene.
  • "Bad Guy" combines Eminem's fear of his negative influence and fear of his fans with his fear of his own declining relevance, bringing Stan's little brother back to get revenge on Eminem, who, in death, is taunted by the Monster about how his time is almost up.
• Battle Rapping: The most famous battle-rapper of all time, which unfortunately prevents him from participating in the sport any more - though he still follows the scene and tries to support it (even bowing out of judging a tournament after rappers became concerned his presence would make the league too commercial). His movie 8 Mile has been credited with reinvigorating the scene, and his style has been highly influential on modern battle-rap (with many even getting into the sport in order to emulate their idol). Urban legends circulate that any rapper signed to Shady Records has to battle him first, though this isn't true.
• Beard of Sorrow: Turned up with one prior to Revival, with a lead single airing out his insecurities.
• Blank Stare: While promoting The Marshall Mathers LP 2, Eminem was doing a persona where he'd spend his TV appearances gawking vacantly at the camera with his eyes blinking slightly out of sync - a sort of parody of Ad-Rock, whose music inspired a lot of the content on the album. Most viewers just reacted with concern for his mental health.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: A recurring theme in Eminem songs is that he wanted to be the biggest rapper ever, and it absolutely sucked, ruined his life, ruined his family's life, got him addicted to drugs, and got his best friend killed.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Eminem has a comedic, gimmicky style that persists even in his more serious songs, which sometimes gives the impression that he's just having fun making silly noises. He was initially regarded by many as a novelty artist and his primarily child fanbase and Subverted Kids' Show aesthetic did little to help people take him seriously. Until "Renegade", where he stole the show so comprehensivelyinvoked from Jay-Z on his own album that "renegading" became hip-hop slang for — to paraphrase Nas in "Ether" — a a guest rapper murdering someone on their own shit. He has since developed a reputation of being able to commit severe reputational damage with his diss tracks, contributing to Benzino getting deposed from The Source, Ja Rule going from a major star to a punchline, and Machine Gun Kelly having to revamp his entire image on being the inauthentic irritant that Eminem painted him as. A quick scan of the Find tool for "Eminem" on the page for Condemned By History: Music and Overshadowed By Controversy: Music will show he tends to turn up as the executioner of careers (and even genres) surprisingly often for one artist.
• Boastful Rap: Eminem is the persona who handles these, though whenever he does he will always insert a line undercutting his ego by pointing out how worthless a person he is apart from his rapping.
• Celebrity Is Overrated: While Eminem is proud of his ability to connect to troubled kids through his music, he dislikes the harassment, judgement, responsibilities, and overall negative consequences that come with his own fame.
• Copycat Mockery: His ability to imitate other rappers's voices and flows inevitably makes appearances in his diss tracks, right from the very start of his career through to now.
• Crucified Hero Shot: The cover of "Rap God" shows him facing away from the camera, striking this pose.
• Determinator: He was broke and without hope, nearly died a whole bunch of times, and still became the biggest rapper on Earth (and one of the best). He has stated that one of the lessons he wants his fans to take from is music is to be inspired to do what they set their minds to.
• Drama King: Describes himself (accurately) as one in "I'm Gone" and has nicknamed himself "the Drama Setter". He swears off drama from now on in "Not Afraid", which mostly sticks, but rediscovers his craving for drama on Kamikaze.
• Drugs Are Bad: Discussed. Numerous songs on Kamikaze needle the idea that Eminem got too nice once he got off the drugs by promising that you'll forget he isn't on drugs any more ("Fall")... or by dramatising a massive crisis of confidence as he panics over the idea that they're right and he should be on drugs again in an elaborate speedrap ("Lucky You").
• Feet of Clay: "Walk On Water" is a song in which he admits his fear that he is an incompetent, only capable of being great when everything lines up right for him. He was rewarded for this with widespread validation of this fear, and mockery. His following album would show him and Shady being understandably mad about it.
• Foreign Cuss Word: As Em was not able to do his signature raised middle finger on most of his TV appearances, he liked to substitute it with the British obscene V-Sign - not considered obscene in America, but just as rude as the middle finger in the Commonwealth. On his Commonwealth TV appearances, where he couldn't do either, he would substitute it sometimes with the metal horns or a peace sign.
• Framing Device: The hook of "Stay Wide Awake" frames the song as a horror story being told by Eminem, and the hook of "Medicine Ball" acknowledges that he's just trying to write a song to piss off as many people as possible.
• Greek Chorus: One of Eminem's main jobs is to provide a somewhat neutral perspective on the other personas, and comment on Shady's antics if he's getting too crazy. It's very noticeable on some songs, like "Lose Yourself" (where he simply tells a story) and "Elevator" (where Eminem sings the hook, and Shady takes over in the verses).
• Hair-Trigger Temper: His outrageous temper caused him many problems in the early 2000s and led to a few live TV crack-ups and embarrassing beefs. On "The Way I Am", he warns his fans that he can be a jerk if people upset him when his guard's down. Throughout The Eminem Show, he's portrayed as a trigger-happy maniac ready to blast people away for the slightest threat.
• Hard Work Fallacy: "You can do anything you set your mind to, man."
• Hurricane of Puns: Starting from Recovery, this becomes a fixture of his rapping style.
• Idiot Savant: Frequently self-describes as one, because he's great at rapping but useless at everything else - he sometimes calls himself "the Rain Man of rap".
• Innocent Prodigy: His persona on Infinite is a naive yet Wise Beyond His Years rapping prodigy defined by his sweet, easy-going optimism despite his circumstances. Em's producers, the Bass Brothers, had been struck by his childlikeness and high intelligence and helped curate it into a persona, resulting in poor reviews. On Eminem's next appearance, he would be sobbing as the Monster transforms him into Slim Shady, allowing him to explore a different kind of childishness.
• Jive Turkey: In his 2009 appearance on Tim Westwood's radio show, he invented the gangster-adjacent drivel phrase "swag juice" and said it back and forth with Denaun over and over, in the apparent hope Westwood would think it was a real term and start using it. The last freestyle he and Denaun did on the show was called "Swag Juice".
• Knight in Sour Armor: Songs like "Sing For The Moment" and "Stimulate" cast Eminem as this, using his influence to inspire his audience to hold themselves together and fight back against their bullies and oppressors, but also acknowledging that his fans might take a worse message from his work than he intended or have to become things society fears to protect themselves from a horrible world. He holds that anyone taking these messages from his music need them; whether their parents would prefer them to change in the ways he inspires them to change is not his problem.
• Lampshaded Double Entendre: In later songs, he often adlibs 'get it?' after delivering a howler homophone.
• A Lesson Learned Too Well: Comes to realise on Kamikaze that the lesson he learned about dealing with his rage, finding compassion for his enemies and avoiding drama shouldn't apply if people are going to view it as weakness and shittalk him forever.
• Mad Artist: Writes hugely offensive and hurtful songs, not caring about the bloodbath it made his personal life into, because he can't control his awful thoughts, and has a compulsion to be the best rapper. "An artist, tortured, trapped in his own drawings, tap into thoughts blacker and darker than anything imaginable..."
• Madden Into Misanthropy: The previously mild-mannered rapper had a mental breakdown and a few suicide attempts, and adopted the persona of Slim Shady, a furious and raging critic and satirist of everything depraved about his society. A few of Eminem's songs describe this transformation, like "Castle" and "Guts Over Fear".
• Man of a Thousand Voices: While not quite to voice actor standards, he's a natural impressionist and has a knack for silly voices, which tend to appear in his raps.
• Mental Health Recovery Arc: Relapse, Recovery and The Marshall Mathers LP 2 document the improvements in his mental health - and technical ability - after kicking his drug addiction. To a lesser extent, the story through The Marshall Mathers LP through to Encore shows him abandoning violence and purposeless rage in favour of a more empathic sadness and honesty.
• Meaningful Name:
  • It's a play on his Alliterative Name - Marshall Mathers, or MM.
  • It's an Outside/Inside Slur - M&Ms have a white label stamped on them but are brown on the inside. (While kind of tasteless now, at the time, many popular white rappers had names signalling their whiteness).
  • M&Ms are also sugary, addictive junk, brightly-coloured, marketed to children, and bad for their health, alluding to Eminem's Subverted Kids' Show, Corruption of a Minor and Anti-Role Model aesthetic.
  • It's also an Artifact Name stemming from his time in the early-90s white rap group Soul Intent, where every member of the group had a candy-themed alias.
• Messiah Creep: Slowly emerged from his Slim Shady persona to become, first, a Karmic Trickster superhero leading his army of freaks and fucked-up kids against the world; then a Trickster Mentor who might be a failure himself but who ignites the spark in other people to make them great. Then he got clean and released the single "Not Afraid", turning him into a Recovered Addict paragon in a crucifix pendant who came back from his 'death' through the love his fans had for him and asks them to use his strength to save themselves, and started making singles titled things like "Rap God" and "Walk On Water". Complicated somewhat by the fact that becoming messianic didn't make his sense of humour any less childish, mean or disgusting (a surprising amount of "Not Afraid" is poop puns). Increasing backlash against this persona led to him to tone it down, with his 2018 single "Fall" telling the audience to forget he made "Not Afraid", before unleashing his Shady side for vile and petty attacks on people he dislikes — just like the old days.
• Mondegreen Gag: From the mid-2010s, his love of wordplay gets to the extent that he can write parallel sentences with entire hidden meanings through deliberate mondegreen. A great example is in the second verse of "Fine Line", which uses mondegreen to reflect both Eminem's state of mind, and him doing his stage makeup in front of his mirror in the dark -
  a martyr is how I paint myself, and through these harrowing ordeals, I'm so vain^note "a mirror is how I paint my face and do my hair — oh, in ordeals, I'm so vain
  [...] 'Cause this vanity, surrounded by all these lights — yeah, it's like a nightmare. I said, this vanity surrounded by these lights is a night mirror
• Multiple Reference Pun: A frequent lyrical trope in his later work.
• Neologism: Inventing the word "stan" is one of his proudest achievements.
• The Not-Love Interest: Dr. Dre, especially in "I Need A Doctor" - a straight-up love song to him.
• Not Screened for Critics: Kamikaze, being a surprise drop full of bile against music critics, was this. Eminem notes he's not doing this for good reviews, only for the kids out there lipsyncing this in the mirror.
• Only Sane Man: Maybe sane is a reach, but he's the least insane out of all the personas and the one who is able to maintain a detached perspective and self-awareness. He's the persona who is responsible for the inspiring, encouraging songs, while the others dwell more on their negative feelings (Marshall) or actions and influence (Slim).
• The Paragon: Starting from Recovery, he has multiple songs where he asks his audience to reach out to him because knowing they're feeling his pain inspires him, and will lead his fans through their own darkness. In "Believe", he claims, "I'm the light at the end of the tunnel, so people are always lookin' to me as they're goin' through it".
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Due to his controversy-magnet status being a major part of his persona, it's not uncommon (especially in later songs) for Eminem to describe himself as being a scary menace to society, despite the fact that almost nobody aside from complete jokes have been scared of him since about 2003, he's vanquished his demons, and all he does is rap really well while promoting positive values. Some find this corny, others consider it to be similar to how other rappers who haven't sold crack for decades still use a Gangsta Rap persona.
• The Prankster: He's a lover of prank calls, put the repulsive song "FACK" as the first track on his Greatest Hits album, and in his beefs tended to do things like send D12 into Moby's dressing room to wait for him and - when he was freaking out thinking he would get assaulted - having Proof hand him a cartoon Eminem drew of Slim Shady stabbing him. Occasionally his sense of humour reached the point of Muse Abuse, such as getting his baby daughter to provide backing vocals on a song about murdering his wife, which he thought was extremely funny, and which she did not.
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Eminem's initial claim to fame was the idea that he was the one white rapper who could really do it, being both a marvellous technician at his art as well as integrated into the culture. While he has not been able to completely avoid questions about appropriation (he dedicates a significant passage of his Invasion freestyles into debating if he has the right to use Black slang), he's avoided serious criticism of his fashion and occasional use of 'blaccent's for stylistic effect that has derailed the careers of other white rappers.
• Reclusive Artist: He was always shy; after getting clean from drugs, he prefers to stay in Detroit with his family rather than interacting with fans. He gave up doing album promo after the poor quality of Revival's marketing led to the fan backlash, and only does mini-tours (long tours are an addiction trigger).
• Red Baron: The Drama Setter, the Rap God.
• Room Full of Crazy: A frequent theme is his obsessive, hyperlexic lyric writing which he does on loose-leaf paper, often in ways incomprehensible to normal people (and to him) like writing in spirals from the middle of the page heading outwards to the edges. The lyric sheets are famously beautiful and he's often photographed with them.
• Satire and Switch:
  • Eminem also dropped his satire near-entirely for Recovery, which ended up creating enough of an image that he'd gone all serious that much of his audience was actually confused when the satire returned on The Marshall Mathers LP 2, and especially on SHADYXV and Revival. Sia claimed on Twitter that she agreed to collaborate with Em on MMLP2 because she thought "Slim Shady had been put to bed", and had not realised Eminem would do songs on the album using a particular word for homosexual men which is associated with Slim Shady (and that should not be considered to be Eminem's actual thoughts on the minority).
• Scandalgate: The negative reaction to "Walk On Water" is punningly described by him as "Walk On Water-gate".
• Self-Deprecation: Where Slim channels Marshall's self-loathing into absurd Anti-Role Model comedy, Eminem states his negative feelings about himself without irony. In particular, he loves to use this to undercut braggadocio cuts.
• Self-Made Man: The "gay-lookin' boy" passage in "Rap God" is an attack on other rappers who were manufactured by their labels, as opposed to Eminem, who "worked for everything I had, never asked nobody for shit"... although (even in that same passage) he still acknowledges that he needed a "hell yeah" from Dre, as a spot of light Hypocritical Humor.
• Signature Laugh: A distinctive, wry "ha-ha", usually after Shady says something annoying. In "Jimmy Crack Corn" he luxuriates in it being an Annoying Laugh while 50 Cent joins in with it.
• The Smart Guy: According to Word of God, Eminem is easily the smartest of his personas. His songs also tend to focus more on dazzling lyricism and technique, where Shady focuses on humour/shock and Marshall on emotion /sincerity.
• Smug Straight Edge:
  • Eminem claimed in 2002 that he'd given up drugs, and so many of his diss tracks in 2003-5 involve smarmily raised middle fingers at his enemies for being worthless junkies for smoking weed, snorting coke or taking ecstasy (which just a couple of years prior had been Eminem's signature favourite substance and brazenly gobbled up by him in public and on stage). Considering Em's personality, the irony here is likely intentional. However, Eminem had not stopped using sleeping pills and painkillers and was in fact a far worse addict of them than he'd ever been to illegal drugs — so it may have just been his addiction-denial talking.
  • Averted after Eminem did get clean, after which his music shows obvious compassion and empathy towards drug addicts and users — even, amazingly, extending that compassion towards his mother.
  • He gets back to talking shit about drug users on Kamikaze and Music To Be Murdered By, with much of his irritation with the current generation of rappers revolving around them sitting around drinking lean and giving themselves brain damage. (To be fair, Em knows first-hand how much worse opioid addiction can make you at rapping).
• Spark of the Rebellion: In "Mosh", Eminem asks the audience to let his song be the thing that gets them to rise up against the Government:
  Come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness, as I provide just enough spark that we need
  to proceed, carry on — give me hope, give me strength, come with me and I won't steer you wrong
  Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog to the light at the end of the tunnel, we gon' fight,
  we gon' charge, we gon' stomp, we gon' march through the swamp
  we gon' mosh through the marsh, take us right through the doors, come on!
• Spirited Competitor: Em's compulsion to prove himself the greatest rapper alive leads him to constantly try and push himself, especially in terms of outrapping anyone else he jumps on a track with. He views this as "the sport of hip-hop" and has compared it to athletics, particularly in "Higher".
• Stealth Insult: Was responsible for one of the most controversial subliminals in hip-hop — whether or not Em dissed Lil Wayne and Kanye West in "No Love". If he did it, it would be remarkable for two reasons: First, that Eminem claimed on another track earlier on the album that dissing Wayne and Kanye would be pathetic; secondly, because Lil Wayne was the featured artist on "No Love".
• The Stoner: In early work, Eminem would often voice his taste for softer/social drugs like beer, weed and light psychedelics (in contrast to Slim, who is addicted to the entire medicine cabinet and police evidence locker). After Marshall's recovery from a downer/opioid addiction that almost killed him, he becomes clean even from these.
• The Storyteller: Eminem is the persona who writes, raps and performs.
• Tabloid Melodrama: Especially on The Eminem Show, a Concept Album about Eminem's status as a famous celebrity trainwreck, with him portraying himself as a suicidal, trigger-happy psycho, airing all the uncomfortable details of his crumbling mental health, ugly, public divorce and the harassment and abuse from his mother.
• Tasty Tears: According to the skit at the beginning of the video for Slaughterhouse's "My Life", Eminem holds onto his "boyish good looks" by bathing in the tears of other rappers, as if baptising himself with holy water in a gothic cathedral.
• Teen Idol: Especially on The Eminem Show, Eminem makes use of his position as an idol to liberate and inspire the world's neglected, angry children in the same way the rappers he idolised growing up helped him survive his childhood. (By contrast, Slim gloats about being a teen idol because it means he can tell kids to commit crimes and kill themselves).
• To Be a Master: Eminem wants to be the G.O.A.T. and continually pushes himself into even more complex lyrical constructions.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Gets consistently more empathetic and compassionate on every album following The Marshall Mathers LP, through to Recovery, albeit with a few wobbles here and there. By Kamikaze he's back to his old habits, though.
• The Trickster: A significant part of the Eminem persona is that there is nobody more skilled than him at doing what he does, and yet he uses his powers primarily to wind people up for fun.
• True Art Is Angstyinvoked: Discussed:
  • In an interview with MTV in 1999, Eminem joked that if his personal life got less horrible, that'd be when he'd start writing love ballads. Fortunately(?), his own fame and Lost in Character issues destroyed his mental health, marriage and ability to live a normal life... though after his Creator Recovery he did start making a lot more love songs. (Though they are usually anguished songs about toxic, emotionally dysfunctional relationships).
  • In "Guts Over Fear", he discusses how he got big talking about his horrible life, and then expresses insecurity about his artistic direction now that he's experienced Creator Recovery:
    But what am I gonna do when the rage is gone
    And the lights go out in that trailer park? Oh
    And the window is closing and there's nowhere else that I can go with flows and I'm frozen
    ‘Cause there's no more emotion for me to pull from
    Just a bunch of playful songs that I make for fun
    So, to the break of dawn, here I go recycling the same old song
    But I'd rather make “Not Afraid 2”^note "Not Afraid" from 2010's Recovery was an uplifting and inspirational song about overcoming addiction that has helped a lot of struggling people, but that a significant portion of his fans found to be Glurge than make another motherfucking “We Made You” ^note a satirical Black Sheep Hit Misogyny Song from 2009's Relapse about Slim Shady lusting after female celebrities, which was criticised for being outdated.
• The Tyson Zone: While not so much any more, he entered into this several times - first during his full-on moral-panic-bait years when the tabloids had no interest in differentiating his Slim Shady character from his real personality, and later during his hiatus when deranged stories about him began to be circulated by rumour (some started by his mother and ex-wife). Mocked in a few songs, particularly "Marshall Mathers", which begins with him describing what he might get papped doing:
  Yo, you might see me joggin'.
  You might see me walkin'.
  You might see me walkin' a dead Rottweiler dog with its head chopped off in the park with a spiked collar, hollerin' at him 'cause the son of a bitch won't quit barkin'!!
• Unusual Dysphemism: Most of his violent, graphic, disgusting lyrics are just extremely elaborate dysphemisms for the concept of 'being really good at rapping'.
• Victory Is Boring:
  • After destroying his enemies in the beefs he was stuck in in 2003, he admits this in the "Fubba U Cubba Cubba" freestyle, finding himself so bored of rap now that he's won everything that he has to invent a new language just to stay interested.
  • In "Believe", he expounds on the difficulty of keeping going when he's won everything he ever wanted.
• Vindicated by History:
  • "Sing For The Moment" is a ballad in which he hopes they'll forget the controversy and remember his greatness when he's gone. (This ended up happening sooner than he expected).
  • "Careful What You Wish For" has Eminem hyperbolically musing that Encore will be considered a classic after enough time has passed. (It has been regarded more positively over time, but 1) largely by people who reject Recovery onward as overworked and overly serious, and 2) we're still waiting for it to be considered as good as Illmatic).
• We Want Our Jerk Back!: Notes on numerous songs on Kamikaze that this is what his fans want.
• What Beautiful Eyes!: Has striking, pretty, innocent eyes which he brags about - especially because they let him get away with the content of his music.
• A Wild Rapper Appears!: Fitting his competitive spirit, he's usually the persona recruited for guest verses, especially when Shady's subject matter would unbalance a song too horribly.
• The Worf Effect: Subverted in "Love Game", where Eminem comes in with a Patter Song verse that serves as an intro to let Kendrick Lamar show off how good he is by outrapping him. Then Eminem comes back for the third verse, rapping this time, in a third-verse-of-all-third-verses that spirals into insanity.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: One of Eminem's primary messages in his inspirational songs — often paralleled with Slim's blunter, meaner message of Be Yourself Even If What You Are Is A Miserable Freak Of Nature Who Wants To Die And Is Rightly Hated And Feared By All Their Authority Figures.
• You Are the New Trend: While never a fashionable person, Em accidentally started a fashion trend for young white men to crop their hair and bleach it (something he did spontaneously while high on drugs), and wear white tees and carpenter jeans (which was just the comfy clothes he liked wearing at the time). He references this on numerous later songs and music videos, such as Stan in "Stan" being shown bleaching his hair to resemble his idol, his "million others just like me, who dress like me, who walk, talk and act like me..." in "The Real Slim Shady", and in "White America" - "who would have thought, standin' in this mirror, bleachin' my hair with some peroxide, reachin' for a t-shirt to wear, that I would catapult to the forefront of rap like this? How could I predict my words would have impact like this?" This even ended up causing him some real-life trouble when, during the incident where he pistol-whipped a man for kissing his wife, a young lookalike on the scene insisted to the cops that he was the real Slim Shady and slung boisterous insults at them until the cops arrested both.

Marshall Mathers

And if that mockingbird don't sing and that ring don't shine, I'ma break that birdie's neck. I'll go back to the jeweler who sold it to ya and make him eat every carat. Don't fuck with Dad.

Marshall Mathers is a persona based on the 'real' Eminem - a normal person who went from a troubled childhood to the loving father of his children, and then to a drug addict. He can be differentiated from Eminem in that he tends to be internal, discussing his family members and personal life in frank terms without the same hyperawareness of the spotlight on him. For this reason, Marshall is associated both with Eminem's most sentimental and most gutwrenching songs.

According to Word of God, the Character Signature Song of the Marshall persona is "Mockingbird". The trilogic album dedicated to him is The Marshall Mathers LP... though he doesn't make many appearences on it.

Tropes:

• 420, Blaze It: 4/20 is the date on which Marshall got clean from drugs, which he acknowledges makes it impossible to forget.
• Alter-Ego Acting: In "Bad Guy", the Monster points out that Marshall Mathers is just as much a fictional character as Slim Shady is. It can be observed that Eminem often conflates Marshall with Jimmy Smith Jr./B. Rabbit in terms of visual imagery and fashion associated with the personas, fictionalising himself through his own semi-autobiographical movie.
• Beard of Sorrow: Described as having one in "Deja Vu" after giving up on personal maintenance as a result of his depression.
• Class Clown: Was apparently one in school as a way of compensating for his shyness; in adulthood, he retains the personality.
• Classical Anti-Hero: Marshall's quiet, geeky, and somewhat disturbed by his horrible upbringing, mentally ill, and can't do any of the outrageous things that Slim can do. But he is trying to be a good father.
• Comfort Food: "Deja Vu" contains graphic descriptions of Marshall's binging on fast food as the result of his depression and Vicodin addiction, to the point of making himself obese and sickly.
• Descent into Addiction: His sink into his drug addiction is discussed frankly in numerous songs, particularly "Deja Vu" and "Castle".
• Friend to All Children: Marshall's troubled childhood results in him relating to children and being interested in their perspective on the world. (Slim tends to channel this into outrageous statements about arming ostracised children so they can shoot up their school bullies).
• Godlike Gamer: Collects arcade cabinets and is great at them - in the top 20 Donkey Kong players in the world. Several of his songs and music videos reference his love of retro games, like "3 a.m." (which opens with a sample of the Donkey Kong theme), "So Far..." (he complains about modern games being too complicated when he just wants to run and jump), and the promo for "Killshot" (in which Eminem was seen playing Pac-Man to a ludicrously high score).
• I Am Not Pretty: Marshall is insecure about his appearance, in part due to his mother bullying him about his looks, which comes up in numerous songs - such as begging Kim to admit she thinks he's ugly in "Kim". The fact that his pouting, shirtless posters were on the walls of every other teenage girl's bedroom in 2002 did little to help with this, as — in his view — nobody thought he was cute until he got famous.
• Mean Character, Nice Actor: While definitely a flawed person, Marshall's nowhere near as evil as Slim and does not endorse any of the things Slim says. However, he acknowledges that Slim comes from his own insecurities and prejudices. Much of his later work expresses his discomfort with the fact that he had the need to come up with a character like Slim at all.
• Nerd Glasses: When appearing as Marshall at the end of the "Stan" music video, he wears glasses to emphasise the idea of it being him 'out of character'. (Eminem and Slim wear contact lenses... although Slim went through a phase of wearing glasses during the Encore era). "Mockingbird", the Signature Song for Marshall, also has a music video in which Marshall wears glasses and has dark hair with bleached tips and highlights, a (painfully 2000s) colour he never wore before or after.
• Nice Guy: Not a pushover and not especially friendly, but he's much more concerned with the lives of ordinary people than the other personas, and tries to be decent to his fans. (In contrast, Eminem tends to find his fans an annoyance, and Slim writes them abusive letters for fun).
• The Not-Love Interest: His children, but especially Hailie. Many of Marshall's appearances are sincere songs about how much he loves his daughter(s).
• Recovered Addict: Starting from "When I'm Gone", but becomes a major feature of his persona starting from Relapse.
• Sad Clown: Self-describes as such in "Beautiful".
• Sincerity Mode: Basically what Marshall represents. The character is a stylized but basically true-to-life version of the man behind the mask, who wraps about things going on in Marshall's life at the time. These topics include such things as how much he's letting his daughter down in "When I'm Gone" and a deeper look into things between him and Hailie's mother in "Mockingbird".
• Therapy Is for the Weak: Subverted in "Stan". Stan, who thinks Slim is what Eminem is like in real life, connects to his work because it helps him feel cool about his instability and murderous-suicidal actions. Not knowing Stan will never read the letter, Marshall writes back a letter containing unexpectedly good mental health advice, recommending Stan should try getting counselling instead of glorifying his self-harm, and make an effort to listen more to his girlfriend.

Sub-personas and non-persona characters

Relapse Slim Shady

And I get these panic attacks, pop a Xanax, relax. Trying to stick my fucking dick inside a mannequin's ass. Then I get manic-depressed, see the orthodontist, get gassed. Man, it's kick-ass, the first thing I put on is the mask.

2009's Horrorcore Concept Album Relapse features a version of Slim who is different from the conventional portrayal. Like the traditional Slim, he is a drug abuser, serial killer and serves as a vehicle for button-pushing comedy, but he's played with an accent and has a much darker personality. Drugged by his mother, raped for years by his stepfather, provoked into relapsing by an uncaring establishment that doesn't provide him with any support (with some help from his Enemy Within), this tortured and brittle Slim miserably binges on hospital-grade branded pharmaceuticals while slaughtering and stalking female celebrities.

Relapse Slim was swiftly abandoned after his creation due to Eminem cringing about the accents, but he occasionally makes cameos elsewhere in Eminem's discography. Some earlier work features prototypical versions of the character: "Amityville" on The Marshall Mathers LP features a Creepy Crossdresser serial killer Slim, "Ass Like That" (from Encore) has an accented erotomaniac Slim with the same "ohh!" adlib, and various 2007 songs like "Step Right Up (Freestyle)", "Ballin' Uncontrollably" and "Peep Show" show Eminem beginning to experiment with accents and extreme grossout imagery. His post-Relapse influence can be found in the occasional accent passage or celebrity-murdering freestyle during Eminem's Recovery era (Recovery was originally Relapse 2), and "Framed" from Revival (2017) and "Discombobulated" from Music To Be Murdered By (2020) both revisit the persona in more light-hearted ways. He also appears on "Things Get Worse", a B.o.B (Rapper) collab which appeared on B.o.B.'s 2011 album E.P.I.C, and in 2022 Em wrote and recorded new verses as the character for the Curtain Call 2 track "Is This Love".

His album was promoted with a few tie-in pieces of media that are now no longer available and provided extra backstory for the character and what happened during his stint in rehab - an Alternate Reality Game, an Adventure Game called The Relapse (which won an FWA award), and an iPhone game.

Due to being introduced after the autobiography The Way I Am was released, Relapse Slim wasn't assigned a Character Signature Song in that book, but Eminem has repeatedly referenced "Bagpipes from Bagdhad" as being the archetypal Relapse Slim song ("The Reunion", "Psychopath Killer"). The incarnation was introduced to the world in the freestyle "I'm Having A Relapse". Relapse's lead song, "3 a.m.", and the first music video single released for Relapse, "We Made You", are both written to serve as an Establishing Character Moment. The album dedicated to him is (obviously) Relapse.

Tropes:

• invokedAccent Depundent: Exploited. Constantly dips into a variety of accents to force rhymes that wouldn't make sense otherwise:
  Causin' illusions again, braaain contusions again
  Cutting and bruising the skin, raaazors, scissors, and pins
  Jaaaysus, when does it end? Phaaases that I go through
  Daaazed and I'm so confused
  Daaays that I don't know who gaaave these molecules to
  meyyyy, what am I gon' do?
• Accent Relapse: And in a "Relapse accent", no less: Shady raps in something closer to his typical Midwest accent in "3 a.m." before changing the POV to reveal he's the killer following you, before switching into the accent he uses for the rest of the song.
• Accent Slip-Up:
  • "Deja Vu" is a Marshall song, but with sudden passages where he spirals into the accent as his drug addiction makes him do awful things, reflecting his Shady side.
  • "Cold Wind Blows" on Recovery uses a slight accent throughout, which stops after God zaps Slim a couple of times and gets him to agree to behave himself.
• Adaptational Sexuality: It's Slim, so him murdering gay men isn't a surprise. What's a bigger surprise is that he now likes to seduce and fuck them too. Lampshaded when he announces this in "Medicine Ball" - "come again? Rewin', selecta!"
• Addiction-Powered: The intro video to his (few) live performances of Relapse material states that while staying at the Popsomp Hills drug rehabilitation clinic, Marshall Mathers consumed a quantity of drugs that should have killed him, but instead it pushed him into a state of 'psychotic rage' that led to him slaughtering 13 staff members at the rehab facility.
• Addiction Song: "My Mom" is about how Slim developed his drug addiction due to his mother spiking his food with drugs to make him sick. In "Hello", he's trashing the house trying to find a lost pill of Valium which was supposed to be breakfast, then cruising for girls to try and get them to give him pills.
• Addled Addict: Takes pills instead of eating, steals drugs from people, has unprotected sex with women while on drugs, murders everyone in a McDonald's on drugs, self-harms on drugs, sits around masturbating to Kid Com shows on drugs, and cries about how he should really stop taking drugs while on drugs.
• Allegorical Character: For a lot. Here's a few.
  • Eminem's drug addiction, and the toll it took on his body, the people around him, his mental health and his career.
  • More specifically, an allegory for the end of Eminem's phase as an unquestioned critical darling via a semi-conscious career suicide album invoked, taking elements of Encore but playing it for horror. Also reinforced by how an Encore CD is shown lying amongst addiction paraphernalia in the CD booklet.
  • The way celebrity culture leads to famous people killing themselves in public with drugs, for the same fans who love them so much they eagerly consume them.
  • A healthcare system that is more interested in profiting off branded drugs and expensive rehabs than in actually helping addicts.
  • Eminem's fame, as was normal by that point.
    Genius Lyrics Description: As a metaphor, ["Same Song and Dance"] illustrates the weight and pressure that fame can bring to an artist. When artists experience an extreme level of fame, it often becomes a destructive force in their lives. This applies to not only the two women included in the song, Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan, but to Mathers himself. It’s not difficult to see how Eminem relates to Britney Spears' and Lindsay Lohan’s situations. Keeping this metaphor in mind, he personifies the destructive powers of the celebrity status through the Slim Shady character. Shady becomes one with the tabloid culture. He traps them with intentions of rape and murder. Eminem is known to speak about fame in this way. His celebrity status traps him inside his house, hotel, etc. He’s no longer free to do as he wishes. The screaming, overzealous fans leave him feeling violated. These feelings of isolation breed suicidal thoughts as he alludes to in multiple songs.
  • The core of what Eminem was always about, deep down: Rapping extremely gross things to annoy people. The Boastful Rap cuts on the album make a lot out of this.
• All Just a Dream: Possibly. The album intro skit is explicitly a Dream Intro Catapult Nightmare, ending with Mr. Mathers apparently waking up as his alarm clock beeps. After the "Mr Mathers" skit, which dramatises Mr Mathers being recuscitated from an overdose, the serial killer storyline softens, with two Sincerity Mode songs followed by some comparatively normal Ode to Intoxication, Glam Rap, and Boastful Rap lyrical-showcase songs (still using the grisly serial killer imagery, but as Hardcore Hip-Hop metaphor for more typical hip-hop subject matter). Was the whole thing a bunch of nightmares within nightmares while Marshall was ODing? "My Darling", a Cut Song showing Shady's return that follows straight after the skit, is also a dream, but seems to get gruellingly real.
• Anachronic Order: The third verse of "Stay Wide Awake" is backwards, starting from Slim dumping his victim's dead body beside a lake, and ending with him watching her as she realises he's there and calls 911.
• Ambiguous Innocence: In contrast to the Card-Carrying Villain personality of the regular Slim, the Relapse Slim is portrayed as genuinely not knowing or understanding what he's doing. In "Insane", when a bystander asks him (after threatening to rape and then kick a puppy) what he's saying, he screams "I don't know, help me!" and flashes back to his traumatic childhood rape. In "Same Song And Dance", he murders a couple of starlets (and another woman, Tonya) while delighting in their screaming and struggling, viewing it as them singing and dancing just like they do on stage. In the Revival song "Framed!", Slim has no idea why these real life murders seem to be the same as the ones he's described in his songs, and seems to really have no understanding why he's covered in blood or has Ivanka Trump in the trunk of his car. A lot of this is to allegorise the Missing Time that can be caused by abuse of Ambien and Valium.
• Author Vocabulary Calendar: Relapse Slim has weird use of language compared to the earlier version of the character due to Eminem getting his love of words back. The experimentation with dialect also allowed him to use slang words he normally wouldn't reach for
  • Apparently the extreme amount of celebrity namedropping on Relapse is because, during the writing of the album, Em bingewatched TMZ and used any names he thought rhymed with something funny.
  • Eminem also fell in love with the names of branded pharmaceuticals while in rehab, so Relapse Slim abuses anything with a catchy name, whether or not it's actually recreational.
  • "We Made You" has some particularly bizarre language - "back by popular demand, now pop a little Zantac for antacid if you can...", "damn, girl, I'm beginnin' to sprout an alfalfa", "give me my Ventolin inhaler, and two Xenadrin, and I'll invite Sarah Palin out to dinner, than...", and of course "Wowzers, I just made a mess in my trousers!"
  • Relapse Slim is obsessed with lesbians — a word Eminem had only used before on a banned version of "My Name Is" — because it rhymes with so much. This doesn't tend to result in good consequences for the lesbians.
  • Relapse Slim talks about an 'elephant tusk' twice - once as something Shady thinks he can impress Britney Spears by mailing her footage of him impaling himself on, and the other in the Glam Rap "Crack A Bottle" in which Eminem bafflingly raps, "back with Andre the Giant, Mr. Elephant Tusk, fix your musk, you'll be just another one bit the dust..." Whether the latter line is a brag about Slim's Gag Penis or a reference to his tusk impalement habit is anyone's guess. Eminem has never rapped about elephant tusks before Relapse or since.
  • Slim also uses the Arabic phrase "hamdulillah" ('praise be to God') as a generic space-filler word on "Bagpipes from Baghdad".
  • "Drop The Bomb On 'Em" contains the West Indian obscenity "bomboclaat" and is also based around him using the word "bwoy" as a rhythmic device. He uses the word "bwoy" 37 times in the song. (35 if you don't count the two "bwoy" puns - "Chef Bwoyardee" and "cowbwoys".
• Bestiality Is Depraved: His 2010 Tim Westwood freestyle using the character (to promote Recovery) tells the story of Slim fucking the pet of a rival in a past life — Bubbles the Chimp.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: The concept of the video for "We Made You" is that Slim's various personas are the protagonists of an awful-looking MTV celebrity dating show.
• Brand Names Are Better: Fitting his Medical Horror theme, he's fussy about the brand names for the drugs he uses, and now even abuses drugs that aren't even recreational, like Zantac (ranitidine) and Seroquel (quetiapine). About the only drug he mentions being a user of to which isn't branded is 'paint thinner'.
• Black Comedy Rape: Experiences several in "Insane", and commits several more throughout the rest of the album.
• Blood Bath: Shown in one in the video for "3 a.m.".
• Bloodier and Gorier: Slim was always violent, but mostly just a violent little jerk. Relapse Slim is a horror movie monster. Virtually all songs in the persona are nauseating, graphic bloodbaths.
• Boastful Rap: The Album Closure "Underground" is an intense song in which Slim boasts about his strength in coming back from the dead and how the other Slasher Movie villains are afraid of him.
• Brownface: Kinda; prior to Relapse, Slim (being a parody of white people) was always portrayed with bleached blond hair, baby-blue eyes, light skin and a nasal voice. For Relapse, Slim has dark hair and a tanned skin tone, which along with his tendency to use Hindi, Arabic and West Indian accents gives the impression of more racial ambiguity.
• Came Back Wrong: "Underground" tells the story of Slim digging himself up out of his grave (after Marshall murdered him in "When I'm Gone"). This goes some way to explaining Slim's change in personality and mannerisms.
• Camp: From the silly accents, to the 80s Exploitation Film-style strings in the background of the skits, to the ludicrous and Bloody Hilarious lyrical content, to the constant homoeroticism and crossdressing, to his obsessive idolisation of gay icon celebrity women like Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Madonna and Ellen DeGeneres, to rapping in 5/8 over a musical-theatre-style choir, to doing a Solo Duet with his Enemy Without about how much Slim Shady loves Marshall, this is the campiest Slim Shady has been or will ever get. It's a big part of his appeal to Relapse's cult-classic fandom.
• Catchphrase: Uses a distinctive, plaintive 'ohh!' adlib throughout his songs. The first use of the adlib was on "Ass Like That" on Encore, the first song where Shady begins to show prototypical versions of his Relapse traits. It also pops up on Recovery's "W.T.P.", a song written for the scrapped Relapse 2 as Eminem was beginning to transition out of the persona into a more realistic Lower-Class Lout version of Shady.
• Celebrity Breakup Song: "Bagpipes from Baghdad" has Slim in a fit of drunken jealousy about Mariah Carey marrying Nick Cannon.
• Celebrity Crush:
  • On Britney Spears. Turns out he dissed her in his songs because he doesn't know how to tell her he likes her. Maybe he should cut off one of his ears and mail it to her? Or send her footage of him impaling himself on an elephant tusk?
  • One of his core character traits is his violent lust for any woman who gets on TMZ, regardless of type or sexuality. Angelina Jolie. Dakota Fanning. Amy Winehouse. Rihanna. Madonna. Lindsay Lohan. Ellen DeGeneres. Sarah Palin.
• Chainsaw Good: His obsession with chainsaws remains throughout the album. Amusingly represented with the beat of "My Darling" being based around a loop of a rattling chainsaw motor (that picks up into a steady rumble as the Split-Personality Takeover takes hold).
• Cheap Heat: His 2009 Tim Westwood freestyle involves several references to obscure British ephemera, like a joke about Rosie & Jim and a scandal about Nurofen Plus^note  Nurofen Plus is a British ibuprofen/codeine tablet that was notorious for being abused; each drug was contained in each half of the tablet, so abusers could eat only the codeine halves to get high without risking the side effects of ibuprofen overdose..
• Circumcision Angst: Inverted - in "Old Times' Sake", he's excited to show off to girls that he's regrown his foreskin.
• Circus Synths: A lot of his beats give the impression of a macabre circus, with enormous, bombastic horn sections that Eminem's earlier and later music didn't use, and his typical childish melodies. Some good examples are "Crack A Bottle", "We Made You" (which adds in a rodeo vibe with slide guitars) and "My Mom".
• Club Kid: In "Medicine Ball", he describes his habit of hanging around in New York's Greenwich Village to fuck gay men on ecstasy (And steal their drugs. And kill them).
• invokedCreator Backlash: Eminem seriously regretted this character later, saying he 'ran it into the ground', so most of Relapse Slim's post-Relapse: Refill appearances are done to make fun of himself for having made, well, a campy Horrorcore album where he performed the whole thing in a bunch of silly accents. "Framed", in particular, uses a similar conceit and structure to "Ass Like That", another song satirically apologising for an embarrassing career moment, and a song that formed a prototypical version of the Relapse Slim.
• Comfort Food: A few lines also relate this character to Eminem's depressive fast-food binges and recovered-from obesity. In "3 a.m.", a dissociated Slim murders the staff of a McDonald's while having no memory of doing it, and despairingly remarks "not again!".
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:invoked In-universe: In a passage in "Underground", Slim beats up a whole string of slasher movie villains to prove he's tougher than all of them combined, as well as Edward Scissorhands, who is not a slasher and is in fact a sweet-natured, artistic teenager. Slim winning that particular fight is not really surprising.
• Creepy Crossdresser:
  • In "Insane", he wears a training bra as an adult while chasing people off with his chainsaw.
  • In "Same Song And Dance" he's wearing stilettos when he visits Britney Spears, then kills her and turns her into a skin suit.
  • In "Bagpipes from Baghdad" he says he can't resist putting on lipstick if a tube is around.
  • In "Stay Wide Awake" he wears red lingerie.
  • On "Music Box", he wears his mother's makeup and a blouse.
• Creepy Shadowed Undereyes: In the video for "3 a.m.", playing on the insomnia implied in the song.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: "Underground" has him effortlessly defeating all of the other slasher villains and movie serial killers in combat - Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers, Hannibal Lecter, and finally... Edward Scissorhands, who doesn't really deserve it.
• Darker and Edgier: The violence of the traditional Slim is arbitrary and pointless and isn't intended to really scare the listener — just their parents. Relapse Slim, while still hilariously funny, aims to genuinely disturb and horrify the listener.
• Deconstructive Parody: Relapse runs off the joke that anyone as violent as Slim would not be a funny cartoon who's too childlike and cute to be scary, but a horrific serial killer. The Battle Rapping-style violence on The Slim Shady LP is obsessively focused on Slim's crazy actions rather than the targets of them; on Relapse, Shady's self-absorption is suggested to be because he's not fully capable of understanding the consequences of his actions.
• Demonic Possession: In "My Darling", the Evil Sounds Deep voice that brings Shady back to his drug-abusing and murdering ways describes itself as 'a spirit'.
• Depraved Bisexual: This version of Slim expresses enthusiastic attraction to men as well as women, a huge contrast from the no-homo gay-murder of the typical portrayal. (Not that Relapse Slim doesn't also murder the gays... he's just attracted to them first).
• Discontinuity Nod: Even after Eminem ditched the persona, Relapse Shady makes occasional appearances in Eminem's later discography, usually with some embarrassment.
  • Eminem teasingly flickers back into his Relapse Shady accent and mannerisms in "Not Afraid" - "I ran those accents into the gruu-ouund".
  • In "The Reunion", the regular Slim bullies his girlfriend by making her listen to Relapse while he's driving until she takes the CD out and breaks it in half, causing him to fly into a rage and deliberately crash the car.
  • Eminem's verse on "Speedom" uses the Toon hyperviolence characterisation from 1999, but at one point he gets pinned to the side of a car driven by a friend of Brenda, who, as he points out, is the girl who got raped with an umbrella in "Stay Wide Awake" - it's all still Slim.
  • "Psychopath Killer" is an interesting case study. Em's verse starts off with the typical Slim making violent threats and causing chaos with his lyrics, then switches to Eminem cursed by his need to write, then switches to the Relapse Slim character within Eminem's section to make a point about the grossness inside his own mind:
    I snapped back to my old antics and shenanigans,
    dammit, the Pope's mad again,
    probably shouldn't've ran up in the Vatican with that mannequin
    singin' "Bagpipes from Baghdad" again
    in my dad's drag, draggin' a faggot in a GLAAD bag —
    won't be the last time I make a dramatic entrance like that again.
    You thought I was lyin' when I said I think that I'm crossin' the line again.
    I've lost my mind, caution — oh God, I think I just thought of another fucking line!
• Dissonant Serenity: One of the major points of deviation from the original Slim, who is often blithely happy or snarling with anger - Relapse Slim is numb and relaxed about the misery he causes. In "Same Song And Dance", he reacts dispassionately to the women screaming and struggling as he kills them. In "Stay Wide Awake", his rape of Brenda is described in a light, almost childlike sing-song.
• Doesn't Like Guns: Unlike the classic Slim, he won't use guns because he prefers chopping his enemies up with blades. (Eminem turned against guns in 2006, after his best friend, Proof, died in a shooting).
• Domestic Abuse: Appallingly brags "of course I side with Chris Brown" over his battering of Rihanna in an unreleased solo version of "Things Get Worse"... which leaked, giving Eminem - who in the 2010s would make hit singles with Rihanna, tour with her, and brag unconvincingly about having had sex with her - yet another reason to regret having ever created this version of Slim. He apologised to Rihanna in several public statements, saying he got 'way too into' playing a serial killer, as well as in his song "Zeus".
• Drugs Are Bad: The purpose of the character was to allow Eminem to prove he could still rap like he was on drugs, and that not being on them didn't make him soft - in fact, they made him worse. Several songs point this out, particularly "Must Be The Ganja" and "Bagpipes from Baghdad", which both contain a scene of absolutely sickening Shady depravity with the punchline that he's actually not on drugs.
• Duck Season, Rabbit Season: In the hook he sings on "Discombobulated", he uses this to trick a reluctant lady into taking off her clothes.
• Elevator Failure: In "Elevator", he gathers all his annoying fans up in the elevator in his house, rides it to the top, then cuts the elevator cable. Then goes and makes a snack while he waits for them to hit the bottom.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Apparently, he's irresistible to the gay men he likes to murder.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: The dark hair signals the change in Slim's persona from an Obviously Evil freakish and disgusting psycho running on Screw the Rules, I'm Famous! and Refuge in Audacity, to a more introverted and subtle Slim who, despite being even worse than the older incarnation, just seems like a regular person. Eminem claimed he was particularly inspired by the idea of how serial killers seem like ordinary people, so the garish blond hair didn't fit. (This itself was an allegory for how Eminem wasn't getting recognised any more due to his drug addiction mangling his appearance). Eminem later said that the dark hair served to signal him having gone clean - he was frightened of returning to the typical blond image due to thinking it would serve as an addiction trigger for him. (He later did so again in 2013, when he was more comfortable with his sobriety, and admitted even then that his blond reflection kind of freaked him out).
• Fake Nationality:invoked Eminem jokingly referred to Shady's rapping style as being done with "Auto-Alien" (as opposed to Auto-Tune).
• 15 Minutes of Fame: A lot of songs on Relapse use Slim as a metaphor for how fame and the public eye causes celebrities to turn to drugs and kill themselves.
• Food Songs Are Funny: The first verse of "Music Box" is about Slim stalking a girl while daydreaming about all the food items he's lusting after that she reminds him of. Considering the subject matter, this song was probably written during Eminem's period of weight loss.
• Freak Lab Accident: In The Relapse ARG, Balzac's experiments on Marshall led to him becoming what he is.
• Freudian Excuse: He's a drug-addicted serial killer because his mother fed him drugs to make him sick, while being raped by his stepfather in his mother's full knowledge.
• Ghost Story: The hooks on "Stay Wide Awake" frame the story as a horror story being told to children before bedtime.
• Glam Rap: "Elevator" is a rather homicidal take on a wealth-boasting song, in which Shady's house is so terrifyingly big that it appears to have Alien Geometries.
• G-Rated Drug: He abuses drugs that are traditionally not abusable, like Ventolin (an asthma inhaler), Seroquel (an antipsychotic), Zantac (used to treat IBS), and, most horrifying of all, NyQuil. The last one is because NyQuil turned out to be a serious addiction trigger for Eminem in real life. He also uses a bunch of mildly obscure but abusable sleeping pills like Klonopin and Lunesta.
• Handsome Lech: He's gorgeous, talented, and impossibly rich, and is often successful at seducing his victims, but his favourite targets (famous women) rightly all find him repulsive and horrible. Despite this, he still makes delusional declarations that they're all in love with him.
• Hannibal Lecture: Amusingly, on Hannibal Lecter himself, who gets sat down in the produce section for a lecture in "Underground".
• Hidden Depths: Relapse Slim is notably a deeper and more conflicted character than the original Slim, who was only ever intended as a Flat Character to allow Eminem to say offensive things. He tells us about a backstory of horrifying abuse and misery that is intended to paint him as at least somewhat sympathetic, and a lot of stuff that would have been played as cartoon slapstick in earlier Slim appearances is instead played for horror and anguish, with the consequences of his actions taken more seriously and having more complicated internal thoughts about why he's doing what he does.
• Homage: To various serial killers, both real and fictional. Like The Silence of the Lambs's Buffalo Bill, he kills women and makes clothes out of their skin after softening it with cocoa butter; like Norman Bates from Psycho he loves to dress in his mother's clothing and appears sweet and harmless to put women at ease before slaughtering them. He uses a chainsaw, like Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, he targets gay men and has a male mannequin he uses for sexual gratification.
• Horrible Hollywood: Slim can be seen as a personification of the ubiquity of drug problems in the entertainment industry.
• Horrifying the Horror: In "Underground", Slim's so twisted all the horror movie icons are terrified of him.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: Parodied in "Underground", where it's Friday 19th, which means it's just a normal day and this is the stuff he thinks of regularly.
• I Have No Idea What I'm Doing: The first lines of "Swag Juice" are him singing this phrase repeatedly, before spitting a bunch of freestyled verses that are just obscene nonsense.
• I'm a Humanitarian: In "Medicine Ball" he eats a foetus to abort it. In "Buffalo Bill", he cuts up a woman and barbecues her on skewers. He implicitly eats his victim on "Music Box", though he might just be daydreaming about food as he kills her.
• Important Haircut: "My Darling" provides a fictionalised explanation for his new haircut and colour - when preparing for his Split-Personality Takeover, Slim was able to persuade Marshall to buzz his hair as short as it had been at the beginning of his career, but not to bleach it.
• Immune to Drugs: In The Relapse, Slim's initial overdose in Pompsomp Hills should have killed him, but instead caused him to gain superhuman strength, senses and rage. Why this happened to him is suggested to be the result of medical experimentation from Dr. Balzac.
• Incompatible Orientation: Lusts after lesbians and cannot understand that they don't like him.
• Jail Bake: In "We Made You," he expresses a desire to break out of prison with a saw blade hidden in his birthday cake.
• Junkie Parent: The Monster in "My Darling" baits him into becoming Slim again by reminding him that because of the addiction, he's not even sure if his kids like him. In the otherwise Marshall song "Deja Vu", Eminem slips, disturbingly, into Slim's accent in passages when he's betraying his family for drugs.
• Kensington Gore: In the few live Relapse stage shows, Eminem would appear on stage in a tshirt soaked in fake blood to portray Slim for "3 a.m.". (Referenced in "Framed" - when Eminem insists he didn't do any of the murders in his songs and it's all to entertain, the cops ask him why his shirt is so bloody).
• Lean and Mean: The slimmest Slim Shady, due to Eminem losing a lot of weight to portray the character (and being eager to show it off). In one song, he states that he's so skinny because he just takes drugs instead of eating. (This is an inversion of what happened in reality, which is that the abuse Eminem's pill addiction took on his stomach lead to him eating excessively and becoming obese).
• Life of the Party: A subtler personality trait of the Relapse Slim is that he's a hard partier (playing off some of the Glam Rap elements to his persona that he inherited from 50 Cent). While he uses parties as an excuse to indulge in reckless drug abuse and sex, he doesn't kill people at the parties and is even popular with the women who attend them.
• List of Transgressions: "Crack A Bottle" opens with Eminem in-character as a sort of boxing announcer - "In this corner, weighing 175 pounds, with a record of 17 rapes, 400 assaults, and 4 murders — the undisputed, most diabolical villain in the world — Slim Shady!" ^note Slim has obviously performed more than 4 murders in his time. The 'rapes' are the number of beefs Eminem won, the 400 assaults is an approximation of the number of songs and features Eminem has done, and the murders are the number of platinum albums Eminem has had.
• Loony Fan: Stalks and murders female celebrities, but it's out of a sincere belief that he has a relationship with them. The implication is that Eminem relates to these women who have been screwed up by fame.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: Separates a pair of conjoined twins and joins them up again in a sexual position.
• Medical Horror: The basic concept of the character is that he's relapsed on both drugs and serial killing due to a medical/recovery establishment that doesn't care about him.
• Missing Time: In "3 a.m.", Slim can't remember any of his killings, but there's all these dead bodies lying around. Truth in Television, since Valium and Ambien cause memory loss.
• Monster Misogyny: Slim Shady was already a misogynist - Relapse Slim might be slightly less misogynistic since he also rapes and kills men, but the vast majority of his victims are female.
• Murderer P.O.V.: The first passage in "3 a.m." describes the actions of Slim's victim in second person to create this sort of effect.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Upon hearing his haunted music box come to life in his attic, Slim delightedly remarks "I love my house".
• Non-Specifically Foreign: Subverted. His accent is a weird mix of Egyptian, Hindi, Jamaican, and Romanian, with a few other accents showing up from time to time, like English, Iraqi and Scottish. It seems at first Shady's accent is there to mark him as a sort of "evil generic foreigner" character, but his cultural references and the locations he describes in the songs indicate he's still supposed to be a white-trash guy from Detroit.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent:
  • Some of the later appearances of Relapse Slim, while Eminem was transitioning out of the character, use similar subject matter but with Eminem's normal accent - like Eminem's 2009 Tim Westwood freestyles (apart from "Swag Juice") and a handful of Recovery-era freestyles which still use the character (such as the absolutely nauseating verse about Bubbles the Chimp from his 2010 Tim Westwood freestyle).
  • 2015's "Psychopath Killer" and 2017's "Framed" both use the character, but are rapped without an accent.
  • Slim also raps in Eminem's typical accent on Relapse's posse cuts, like "Crack A Bottle" and "Forever".
  • "3 a.m." is the only song from Relapse that has stayed in Eminem's live sets, and he doesn't do the accents on it any more.
• Not Himself: Slim's uncharacteristic behaviour and mannerisms here is an allegory for the misery and dissociation of drug addiction, which he points out in "3 a.m.". It's notable that Em normally refers to Slim Shady as a 'persona', acknowledging that he's a Life Embellished version of the real him, but calls the Relapse Slim a 'character', describing it as almost like an acting part he had to get into the head of.
• Ode to Intoxication: Considering his drug addiction theme, nearly every song on the album from his perspective is about him being high. He's not having much fun with it, though.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: A repeated lyrical theme, befitting a 'relapse' and Slim's Bathos. "3 a.m." has "oh no! oh, oh, oh, oh no!" as an intro adlib, and finishes the first verse with "not again!" after Shady realises he's just murdered everyone in a fast food restaurant. "Oh No" opens with the lyrics "oh no, what's HA-ppen-ing to my brain? I can't believe this is happening agai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ain..."
• Old Flame Fizzle: "Bagpipes From Baghdad" starts with a scenario of a drunken, locked-up Slim stating his undying lust for Mariah Carey and desire to murder her husband Nick Cannon to get her back, then realising in the second verse he doesn't want her any more and wishing Nick 'luck with the fucking whore'. Then he has sex with 'two braindead lesbian vegetables', which is a hell of a rebound hookup.
• Ominous Music Box Tune: The entirety of "Music Box" is dedicated to him rapping over one of these, which is diagetically supposed to be a music box that mysteriously came to life in his attic.
• Our Slashers Are Different: While it's not fair to expect a rap album to have the same continuity as a movie franchise, let's do this:
  • Powers: Extraordinary strength and elevated senses, stated in Loose Canon to stem from his rage. Also has incredible drug tolerance, and an implacable physical resilience probably connected to his heavy consumption of painkillers.
  • Powers acquired from: Drugs, Demonic Possession by his temporarily vanquished Enemy Within, and (in Loose Canon) scientific experimentation inflicted on him during his stay in rehab.
  • Killing methods: Blades, strangulation, power tools (particularly chainsaws), razors (never guns). Often seduces his victims with his seemingly mundane demeanour — despite his fame and wealth he seems just like any normal guy.
  • Targets: Young women, gay men, little boys, trans women, anyone blocking his access to drugs (or occasionally, junk food), and the (usually female) celebrities he gets obsessed with (or their love interests, who he views as inferior rivals to him). Many of his targets abuse drugs themselves.
  • Habits: Verbally witty. Binging on fast food, drugs, and alcohol, often killing people to steal their supplies. Rape, crossdressing (as his mother or his female victims), self-harm, skins women to make clothes out of them. Lusts over media punchline starlets, sometimes eats his victims, drinks their blood, or chops them up to hide their bodies around his mansion. Has a male mannequin he uses for sexual gratification, and masturbates to children's TV and slasher movies. Indulges in risky sex at parties, even if he's not always killing the victims.
  • Backstory: Mom got him into drugs by feeding them to him as a child; Stepdad raped him in her full knowledge. Became a famous rapper, had sex with famous women, got bored with success, and relapsed on drugs in order to regain the fame he had once. Claims his first murder was dismembering his own cousin at a Christmas party.
  • Psychology: Serious Oedipus Complex issues with his mother, and his identification with her appears to fuel his crossdressing. Simultaneously resents his fame, and lives for the power and prestige it gives him. Seems unsure about his actions due to the Missing Time caused by his extensive drug abuse; his Dissonant Serenity and childishness makes it unclear if he knows what he is doing. Hears voices in his head, which he shifts between with strange voices and accents. Claims he's just like Mom, hence the crossdressing, and also feels deep identificationinvoked with his celebrity victims, killing them apparently out of not knowing how to deal with how much he relates to and wants them.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Weirdly describes himself in very vampiric terms (perhaps playing on the vampire fad of the late 2000s), though whether he's the real deal or a Vampire Vannabe is unclear. In multiple songs he mentions biting women's necks to drain the blood out of them, he tells Nick Cannon to prepare for "Dracula acupuncture", and also drinks his cousin's blood in "3 a.m." (in the music video he's shot in a Twilight-like manner and seen in a Blood Bath). He refers to himself as "Dracula" in "Music Box". "Stay Wide Awake" even has him operating at night and suggesting his victims "pray for the light of day right away", but "Same Song & Dance" implies him to be a Daywalking Vampire who just prefers to hunt at night.
• Post-Rape Taunt: Often claims his female rape victims loved it, but it's not clear if this is just his erotomanic delusions. In the 2009 BET Cypher, he rapped:
  My dick is so big, if I add another inch to it
  You would swear when I raped you that you was actually into it
• Practically Joker: Perhaps owing to Eminem's love of comic books, this version of Slim has something of a kinship with The Joker, particularly Heath Ledger's famous portrayal of the character in The Dark Knight. The extreme sadism and sick sense of humor are still prevalent, the Circus Synths heard throughout Relapse give a clownish vibe to the murder and mayhem depicted in the lyrics, one piece of album artwork depicts Slim dressed as that version of the Joker, and some of the lyrics directly compare Eminem to Heath Ledger as another "actor" who got Lost in Character and overdosed on prescription drugs as a result of that. In addition, the intro to "Same Song and Dance" has Slim briefly quote the Tim Burton version of the Joker as well ("In the pale moonlight…")
• Present-Day Past: In "Insane", a prepubescent Slim mentions playing with Teddy Ruxpin, a toy that debuted in 1985. If he's the same age as the real Marshall Mathers (implied elsewhere on the album), the toy would have been way too young for him. In the same song he also mentions having "a Heath Ledger bobblehead". Probably Teddy Ruxpin is there for the rhyme scheme - "(can't we play with Teddy) Ruxpin instead"/"(I want my dick) sucked in the shed" - and Heath Ledger is there to reinforce the album's concept of celebrity pill addiction death (and probably homoerotic overtones).
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Of a different type than the suburban-wannabe-gangsta that the old Slim was; this Slim frequently slips into a Jamaican accent, playing off the stereotype of the Jamaican love of getting stoned. A few of the beats on Relapse incorporate Dubstep and dancehall influences, and he uses patois on a handful of songs (particularly "Must Be The Ganja" and "Drop The Bomb On Them").
• Prophet Eyes: Murders the people in Pompsomp Hills Rehabilitation Center with blank eyes in the music video for "3 a.m.".
• Psychopathic Manchild: A much more horrifying example than his prior depictions: The Slim from "Same Song & Dance" describes his gruesome behavior in an unnaturally serene, almost boyish manner, and it barely seems to occur to him that what he's doing is wrong ("A couple rape charges, people think you're a monster," he says incredulously). He talks about the female celebrities he... has his way with like a schoolboy with a crush on the popular girl, and at one point he offers to swap his prescription pills with those of his latest victim like they were school lunches.
• Questionable Consent: "Is This Love" shows Slim having sex with a girl who begins to freak out while she's sucking his dick, to which Shady speculates that alcohol and pills must make women emotional. He isn't any less inebriated — he wakes up the next morning with no memory of what had happened.
• Rape and Switch:
  • A meta-version. Slim had previously been homophobic, but with increasing moments of homoerotic gags and Gay Bravado. In Relapse, Slim is openly into men, identifying himself as bisexual in "Medicine Ball", shown as being attracted to them and raping them in multiple songs, and with a Dahmer-like fetish for male mannequins. The song "Insane" establishes that this happened because he was raped by his stepfather as a child.
  • In "Bagpipes From Baghdad", he attempts to convert "two lesbian vegetables" by raping them.
  • In "Underground", Slim cuts off the legs of a lesbian so he can rape her, getting her pregnant - and making her fall in love with him.
• Rape as Backstory: On "Insane", Slim describes being repeatedly raped by his stepdad (and allowed to do so by his mother). In one moment of the song, he has a flashback to an assault, signalled by him altering his voice to sound like a little boy's as he relives the trauma of it.
• Rape as Drama: "Stay Wide Awake", a song about Slim seducing, hunting down, raping and killing a young woman named Brenda, is chilling rather than funny - Eminem maintains the same rhyme scheme, meter and vocal inflection for fourteen entire lines to give a feeling of the claustrophobia of the woman trapped by him lying on top of her, reinforced by a guitar chugging away repetitively on the same chord. Slim's Dissonant Serenity drives the whole thing home.
• Rape Leads to Insanity: The plot of "Insane" is about Slim's history being raped by his stepfather (and eventually his babysitter), leading to him growing up into being an insane, self-mutilating, unstoppable monster and Serial Rapist himself. Amusingly, despite him begging his victims to understand his pain, they're are just in awe of his over-the-top antics and think he's "so gangsta".
• Recovered Addict: Some songs have a recovered-addict Shady looking back on his time while using - in order to show that the nastiness isn't the drugs. "Bagpipes from Baghdad" has a particularly grossout verse in which Slim has sex with two braindead, lesbian conjoined twins, interrupted by him bragging about getting his one-year sobriety coin chip. The third verse of "Hello" is him looking back on his drug use with nostalgia, and "Old Time's Sake" contains lyrics about his nervousness about being near a weed-smoking Dre. "My Darling", set before the album, is about the now sober Shady being coaxed into a relapse by a demonic voice.
• Red Baron: He refers to himself as "The Coroner" in "3 a.m." In "Medicine Ball", he calls himself "The Homosexual Dissector". In "Music Box", he's "The Mortician of Love". In "Taking My Ball", he's "The Fruit Loop From Jupiter". And of course, in "Buffalo Bill", he's... "Buffalo Bill".
• Reminiscing About Your Victims: In "Same Song And Dance", the first verse describes his capture of a victim, Tonya, and the other two verses are him talking to her about his previous victims while she struggles and cries in the back of the car.
• Retraux Flashback: "Discombobulated" starts with a promise to go back in time, which is represented with a Relapse-style beat and accent.
• Revisiting the Roots: Eminem launches a new and more optimistic phase of his career by releasing a comedy-horror Concept Album about Slim Shady, who is played with an altered voice pitch and accent to reinforce that he's a character, rapping about the most horrible things you can imagine over spooky Dre beats. There's only three features - a couple of appearances from Dr. Dre, one from a female session singer, and one from a close friend he's worked with. Eminem spends almost all the album in-character as Shady instead of merging the personas together. The album is an attempt to express Eminem's feelings about his narrowly-avoided death from an overdose. Is this a description of Relapse or The Slim Shady LP?
• Same Character, But Different: Slim came back after a half-decade hiatus with a drastic change in appearance and personality, presented as a heightened horror movie character rather than a surreal cartoon of an evil loser. The reason his characterisation is so weird is because of Eminem's annihilated confidence - having to relearn how to rap while not on drugs, he used the obviously fictitious Horrorcore content and altered voice to mask himself with until he got back in touch with his real self. Em later said Recovery was an album that better reflected his current state of mind, but that he'd never have been able to make it without Relapse letting him get back in touch with Slim.
• Screw Yourself: In "My Darling", the Monster/Slim tries to seduce Eminem into taking him back - even saying 'you and I were meant to be together', in a Continuity Nod to "Stan".
• Shifting Voice of Madness: His peculiar, shifting accent seems to be the result of him hearing voices - he raps as some of the voices in his head in "Elevator" and "Buffalo Bill" (bizarrely, one of the voices appears to be Yoda).
• Slasher Movie: The basic concept. As typical for slasher movies, most of his victims participate in a sin - here, it's drug abuse.
• Slashers Prefer Blondes: As an overlap with his love of tabloidish all-American women - murders Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, a cheerleader with long blond hair, and Ivanka Trump.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: In contrast to the traditional Slim, who up until that point was usually screaming, growling, shrieking or squeaking. Relapse Slim has a softer, deeper tone to his voice which sounds almost tender, especially on "Same Song And Dance". What he's describing is, almost always, murder.
• Split-Personality Takeover: The story of the album is that Marshall exits rehab, but immediately relapses, reverting to Slim and embarking on a campaign of serial manslaughter. This is also dramatised in "My Darling", in which an Enemy Within Slim claiming to be an evil spirit attempts to persuade Marshall to give into him and revert to the version of himself that people liked.
• Stalker with a Crush: Slim in "Same Song & Dance" describes his routine of falling in love with, stalking, kidnapping, raping, and murdering female celebrities.
• Subverted Catchphrase: The traditional Shady introduced himself with a cheery "Hi! My name is (chkka-chkka) Slim Shady!". On Relapse's "Hello", he introduces himself with formal language to differentiate himself from the older incarnation:
  Hello. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is (chka-chk-chk) Shaaa-dy. It's so nice to meet you. It's been a long time. Sorry I've been away so long. My name is (chka-chk-chk) Shaaa-dy. It's so nice to meet you.
• Tabloid Melodrama: He's in some ways the allegorical incarnation of this, targeting and murdering the starlets and media hate figures of the day. (Due to the time most Relapse Slim material was made, these are mostly controversial figures of the mid-to-late 2000s, but in 2017's "Framed", he slaughters Ivanka Trump).
• The Insomniac: Heavily implied. As "Deja Vu" spells out, Marshall was unable to sleep without medication during his addiction, and as a result was exhausted all the time. Shady is wandering around in a dissociated state finding bodies at 3 in the morning; in "Stay Wide Awake" he warns his victims not to sleep because he's wide awake (and murderous).
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Several songs mention he's successful at befriending his future victims because he seems just like a regular guy, despite being a famous rapper... and an impossibly prolific serial killer. (This is perhaps an allegory for how, at the height of Eminem's drug addiction, he had been rendered unrecognisable by sickliness, severe weight gain and lack of ability to upkeep his bleached hair/shave his beard/care for his skin). Eminem cited his fascination with this trope as a major inspiration for the album:
  "You listen to these people talk, or you see them, they look so regular. What does a serial killer look like? He don't look like anything. He looks like you. You could be living next door to one. If I lived next door to you, you could be".
• Temporarily Exaggerated Trait: Slim Shady was always a drug addict and would occasionally describe himself as a serial killer, but they were just details to a character that was mostly a playful irritant. Relapse makes his serial killing and addiction his core traits.
• Trans Equals Gay: In the second verse of "Taking My Ball", Slim declares to his gay haters that he's "fruitier" than them while tucking his penis, putting on eyeshadow, and anally penetrating a man with a vacuum cleaner.
• Transplanted Character Fic: Slim Shady as the villain of an Exploitation Film!
• Vampire Vords: Whatever the accent is appears to be a variation on this. "I must have keeled um! Keeled um!"
• Vertigo Effect: Amazingly manages to do this in a song in "Music Box": After dismembering Tabitha, he raps "Zoom in with the lens, then pan back the camera".
• Victim of the Week: Tears his way through plenty of fictional people with faintly weird names: Tonya, Rebecca, Brenda, Tabitha, Dakota, Bridget, Hector, Lester...
• Villainous Cheekbones: Eminem's naturally high, delicate cheekbones are especially prominent here due to the amount of weight Eminem lost to portray the character.
• Villains Love Entertainment: The Relapse Shady is obsessed with celebrity gossip in a way that makes even the original Slim look cultured. In "3 a.m." he watches kids' TV and masturbates, and he reads a tabloid newspaper out loud to a prostitute he's battering in "Things Get Worse (Solo Version)" to justify his mistreatment of her. And then there's his love of Star Wars, to the extent that Yoda is one of the voices in his brain. Probably this has something to do with creating the image of a reclusive, depressed drug addict stuck at home binging on comforting childhood movies and trash Tabloid Melodrama TV.
• Villains Out Shopping: In "3 a.m.", he spends the first verse murdering people in a rehab facility and a McDonald's. Then we hang out with him at home as he masturbates in front of the TV.
• Vindicated by History: invoked During Eminem's 2019 Rapture Tour, a major feature was Denaun leading a call and response for who loved Relapse, which would always get a huge cheer. Denaun would then say, "see? They love that shit now!" to Eminem, squirming.
• Weakened by the Light: Subverted; "Stay Wide Awake" establishes Slim as operating primarily at night and telling his victims to pray for daylight to come soon, implying him to be vampiric. But "Same Song & Dance" has him kidnap a victim in broad daylight, implying that he attacks at night out of personal preference and not necessity. Likely an allegory for the fact that nighttime is when Eminem was going to be taking huge doses of sleeping medication.
• Weight Loss Horror: A not insignificant subtext to the character considering that Eminem wrote the album while recovering from obesity. Slim goes on murder sprees in McDonald's, which Eminem was binging on at the time. The first verse of "Music Box" has him fantasising about calorific food while torturing a woman, and in the second verse he's been binging on so much cocaine his weight is under 100lbs.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Has an impossible-to-place accent that orbits mainly around the Middle East, South Asia, the Caribbean and the Carpathian Mountains. When asked in an interview what the accent was, Eminem said it isn't supposed to be one that really exists, and gave the nationality as "Alien".
• Word Salad Lyrics: Relapse Slim is often criticised for being a less meaningful character than the original, due to a lot of lyrics by the persona being rambling grossout stream-of-consciousness. While the fact it's possible to write a Character section about him on TV Tropes proves the character has a significant amount of depth and metaphor to him, it's also hard to argue there's a deep meaning to lyrics like "Here's a smidgen, a midget to git your digits, Bridget, don't try to fidget wid' it, rurrrr-ribbit, ribbit..."
• Would Hurt a Child: In contrast to the standard Slim, who has a soft spot for children, Relapse Slim lures children in to be raped with cookies and jams a Tonka truck up a kid's anus.
• Yandere: This version of Slim describes a series of celebrity crushes, but he doesn't seem to know how to deal with these emotions in a way that doesn't involve being a Serial Killer.

The Monster

An extremely deep voiced "spirit" that appears in a handful of songs and skits. He appeared from Eminem's mirror at the beginning of Slim Shady EP, resulting in the Split-Personality Takeover that transformed the previously mild-mannered rapper into the diabolical Slim Shady. Officially named 'the Monster' in "SHADYXV", it is unclear what exactly he is - he could be the voice of Marshall's dark thoughts, a sub-persona of Slim (in his true form outside of Marshall), or something much worse. Indications of all three readings can be found in the songs and visuals.

He appears in "Slim Shady (Intro)", "Dr. West (skit)", "My Darling", "Bad Guy", "The Monster", "SHADYXV", and the Investigative Forensics: The Revenge of a Bad Guy short film.

Tropes applying to the Monster:

• Argument of Contradictions: His argument with Slim in "My Darling" derails into this.
  The Monster: I can bring your career back!
  Slim: But I don't want it back!
  The Monster: Yes, you do.
  Slim: No, I don't!
  The Monster: Yes, you do! You're gonna regret it later.
  Slim: No, I won't!
• Demonic Possession: In "My Darling", he claims to be "a spirit", which is why he's impossible to ever truly kill, despite Eminem's best efforts prior to Slim Shady EP and in "When I'm Gone".
• Devil in Disguise: In "Dr. West (skit)", he turns up as a rehab councillor in Marshall's dream, to try and tempt him into relapsing.
• Dream Weaver: He's shown gatecrashing Eminem's dreams in "My Darling" and in "Dr. West (skit)".
• Enemy Within: Lives in Shady's mind as a dark side that was always already there.
• Good Needs Evil: The Monster often reminds Eminem that without him, he would be nothing. Eminem seems to agree.
• Loony Fan: In a way. In "My Darling", he's analogised somewhat to Stan, declaring his love for Slim, drawing Slim's attention to his posters, and insisting that they should be together.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Whether he's just the voice of Marshall's personality flaws or a hellish cosmic force is purposefully unclear.
• Mental Monster: He first appeared at the time Eminem was suicidally depressed and in the first stages of drug addiction, and shows up again to allegorise Eminem's second major depression and addiction relapse.
• Moral Myopia: He seems to care about Slim getting everything he wants, and wants him to be happy and successful, and to protect him from learning things about who he is that he shouldn't know. The effect this has on Slim's victims and family he doesn't care about, only bringing up when he's trying to convince Slim he doesn't have a choice but to embrace him.
• More than Mind Control: Regardless of his protestations and sobbing, Slim appears to want the Monster deep down - the Monster is able to bait him into becoming Slim again by reminding him that he needs him to have the Career Resurrection he wants.
• Not Quite Dead: The unkillable Monster is how Slim survives his death in "When I'm Gone" - in "My Darling", he claims he was 'playing possum' while Em could watch his children grow up.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: How the Monster's presence tends to be shown in videos. In "The Monster", he appears as a distorting ripple over the video; in Investigative Forensics: The Revenge of a Bad Guy, he appears as the film darkening and warping.
• Rage Against the Reflection: He is what is being raged against. Eminem shatters his mirror in "Intro (Slim Shady)" on Slim Shady EP, an incident depicted on the cover art that causes him to fuse with the Monster and become Slim Shady; in the music video for "When I'm Gone", Marshall's destruction of his blond reflection serves to bookend this, serving as the death of the character. In "My Darling", Slim screams "fuck this mirror!" and shatters it again, but it does nothing, as the Monster is already inside him.
• Remember the New Guy?: In Slim Shady EP, Eminem is already familiar with the Monster and claims to have killed him before. Neither he nor Slim Shady turned up on his prior album Infinite, though Slim has a few appearances on a D12 album that came out before Slim Shady EP.
• Satan: It's possible he is Satan or a representative, with his declarations of love for Slim, his baiting of him with material wealth and earthly power, and his reminder that Slim's soul is his.
• Screw Yourself: Sort of. He claims to love Eminem, even telling him "we were meant to be together" in a Continuity Nod to "Stan".
• Split-Personality Team: Due to Eminem's Mental Health Recovery Arc, Eminem and the Monster appear to find a comfortable balance by The Marshall Mathers LP 2. As the hook of "The Monster" reminds us, the two of them get along.
• The Heartless: Possibly a monster that emerged from Marshall's rage and negative emotions.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: When Slim/Eminem in "The Monster" wonders where his dark thoughts come from, the Monster wryly advises him not to think too hard about it.
• The Mirror Shows Your True Self: The Monster tends to lurk in Eminem's mirrors. In "Intro (Slim Shady)", the Monster forces a sobbing Eminem to "look in the motherfuckin' mirror!"; in "My Darling", Eminem narrates that "the mirror grows lips" to speak to him as the Monster.
• Toxic Friend Influence: The Monster's love of Eminem and belief he's nothing without him appears to be sincere and, especially in "My Darling", he speaks to Slim with obvious affection. It's just that his advice involves going back on the drugs and boosting his already outrageous success, whatever the consequences to the people around him or himself.
• Voice of the Legion: In both "My Darling" and "Bad Guy", his voice is layered under Eminem's voice to indicate fusion between the two of them.

Jimmy Smith Jr./ B. Rabbit

You've signed me up to battle?! I'm a grown man, dammit!

The protagonist of 8 Mile, an Author Avatar for Marshall Mathers - a Detroit auto plant worker and battle-rapper with mental health issues who is trying to scrape together enough money for a demo and survive the grind of his life. While not a true persona, he still makes occasional appearances in Eminem's music, most prominently "Lose Yourself" and "Rabbit Run".

Tropes applying to Rabbit in Eminem's music:

• Decon-Recon Switch: "Lose Yourself" deconstructs the idea of a Rags to Riches inspirational anthem by comparing Rabbit's anxiety problems to the horrible, pointless life Rabbit would get if he was actually successful, but then finishes off with a verse in which either Eminem or Rabbit admits that anything is better than the poverty he came from.
• Hard Work Fallacy: In "8 Mile" and "Rabbit Run", Rabbit really believes that if he just works hard he can achieve his dream of becoming a famous rapper. In the movie he isn't shown achieving this; he might achieve it in "Lose Yourself" but it's up for interpretation who the narrator is.
• Inspired by…: "Lose Yourself" opens with Eminem narrating Rabbit's story. In the second verse, he switches to narrating about the story of a hugely successful and famous rapper whose moment in the limelight has slipped and left him with nothing except the psychic damage and alienation of fame. He then explains that this is no movie - this is his life - and ends with a verse in first person in which he describes poverty in a way deliberately ambiguous as to whether it is Rabbit's life, or his own pre-fame life.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Rabbit makes a brief appearance in the middle eight of the song "Just Lose It", complaining about Eminem signing him up to battle - "I'm a grown man!" - and exiting the song early, leaving Eminem having to fill space with gibberish.
• Stress Vomit: The single most famous example in music history.
  His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
  There's vomit on his sweater already, Mom's spaghetti

Ken Kaniff

Ooh, don't bite it, don't be violent with it, ow. Just suck it, nice and slow. Yeah... uhh...

Voiced by: Aristotle (The Slim Shady LP), Eminem (all other appearances)

A creepy, predatory gay man. Introduced on a skit on The Slim Shady LP where he (played by the underground rapper Aristotle) prank calls Eminem with a bunch of gross gay sex ideas, Ken turns up later, voiced by Eminem, in skits and adlibs - as well as a couple of live appearances.

Tropes applying to Ken Kaniff:

• Abhorrent Admirer: He wants to have sex with Slim. Unusually for this trope, Slim doesn't seem too bothered by it and tends to just enjoy his gross interjections.
• All Gays Are Pedophiles: In "I'm Back", his idea of fun is hunting around on internet chatrooms trying to lure children into bed with him. This element is dropped from his later appearances.
• All Gays are Promiscuous: Constantly having sex with multiple men.
• Depraved Homosexual: A gay character defined by being a gross pervert.
• Diss Track: His appearance on The Marshall Mathers LP is as a diss against Insane Clown Posse.
• The Grunting Orgasm: Makes unbelievably awful grunting noises when he's turned on.
• Harassing Phone Call: Calls up Eminem to breathe heavily and offer him sex.
• Pædo Hunt: On "I'm Back", Shady argues he isn't the bad guy:
  With Ken Kaniff, who just finds the men edible
  It's... Ken Kaniff on the... Internet
  Tryin' to... lure your kids with him... into bed
  It's a sick world we live in these days
  "Slim, for Pete's sakes, put down Christopher Reeve's legs!"
• Performance Artist: Ken gets on stage at the end of The Eminem Show. In Relapse, he tap-dances!
• Plot Parallel: Ken's later storylines reflect the album theme in miniature:
  • In The Eminem Show, he comes out from between the curtains at the end, performing his heart out to an empty auditorium.
  • In Relapse, expected to say sensible words at his addiction recovery meeting, he instead confuses everyone with a grossout comedy singsong - a pretty good allegory for the content of Relapse.
  • In The Marshall Mathers LP 2, Eminem is rushing for a piss and realises Ken is in the stall next to him - reflecting the album's concept of Eminem's 2000s karma catching up to him.
• Prank Call: Ken's initial appearance is as a character used by Aristotle to prank-call Eminem on The Slim Shady LP. Later on the album, Eminem claims he makes prank calls as Ken himself on "Cum On Everybody".
• Queer People Are Funny: Hopefully you find homosexuality inherently funny, or you'll probably be skipping these skits.
• Song Parody: Ken's appearances on The Eminem Show, Relapse and The Marshall Mathers LP 2 include him singing parodies of "Without Me", "We Made You"/"My Mom" and "Berzerk" with the lyrics changed to be about gay sex.
  I'm gonna rock this blouse and put a cock in my mouth
  And get my balls blew out, and get gay into the A.M
  And lay with eighteen guys naked
  And let myself show, let myself show
• STD Immunity: Averted; it's mentioned in "The Kids" that he has AIDS.
• Trans Equals Gay: In his appearance in The Marshall Mathers LP 2, Eminem, sitting on a toilet in a stall, thinks at first that a woman has just entered the bathroom because he hears "her" high heels. He's mortified to discover it's Ken.

Stan Mitchell & Matthew Mitchell

My girlfriend's jealous 'cause I talk about you 24/7. But she don't know you like I know you, Slim, no one does - she don't know what it was like for people like us growin' up. You gotta call me, man, I'll be the biggest fan you'll ever lose. Sincerely yours, Stan. P.S. We should be together too.

Portrayed by: Devon Sawa (music video, dialogue)

Voiced by (rapping): Eminem

Stan, introduced in the song "Stan", is a rather invested fan of Slim Shady who has been writing fanmail to him after meeting Eminem in Denver. The lack of a reply causes his letters to become increasingly unhinged, eventually resulting in the murder of his pregnant girlfriend. Matthew is his little brother, who likes Slim even more than Stan does.

As "Stan" is one of Eminem's most celebrated songs, Stan occasionally shows up for cameos in later songs. Stan's name became a term used in hip-hop to describe an obsessed fan, but ended up generalising into a term for fandom in general.

The Mitchell brothers appear as characters in "Stan" and "Bad Guy", and the Investigative Forensics: The Revenge of a Bad Guy short film (which also features their mother). Stan also makes a What Could Have Been appearance in the skit "Stan (The Lost Verses)". Stan gets referenced on numerous other songs, including "Off The Wall", "Without Me" (Clean version only), "Can-I-Bitch", "A Kiss", "Calm Down", and "Killshot". There's also a character called Stan in "Guilty Conscience" but it's not the same Stan, unless you personally believe he is.

Stan has also made numerous deuterocanonical appearances in songs by other rappers, with the most significant being Nas referencing him in "Ether", which popularised the term as a general insult for a fanboy. Canibus's C! True Hollywood Stories, a fanfiction about the character in the form of a Concept Album, is also notable because it inspired several of Eminem's disses towards Canibus. Matthew makes a noncanonical appearance in "The Black Slim Shady" by The Game.

Tropes applying to Stan:

• '90s Hair: The music video depicts Stan bleaching his hair to replicate Eminem's blond look - a major fashion trend of the era.
• Actor/Role Confusion: He constantly addresses Eminem as "Slim", not realising that Slim is just a fictional character that doesn't represent Marshall's real personality.
• Allegorical Character: At the end of "Bad Guy", Matthew's voice merges with that of the Monster to scream at the drowning Eminem what he represents — the fans who stopped liking him, the imperial phase that's long over, his advancing age, the wear and tear on his body of a life of rapping, the negative karma he put into the world with his vile lyrics, and the gay people who were hurt by his comedic homophobia.
• All There in the Manual: Investigative Forensics: The Revenge of a Bad Guy adds in some details to the story of the brothers, in particular giving a date for Stan's death (2002 - Eminem's career peak), explaining that the tape to Eminem (which Marshall hadn't heard in "Stan") was widely publicised by the press, and going into detail about the events of "Bad Guy" from an external perspective (Matthew's dead body was found by police; forensic scientists believe Mathers was able to extracate himself from the sinking car, but he went missing after the incident and had not appeared as of 2014).
• Brick Joke: Matthew turns up 13 years later on the song "Bad Guy".
• Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality: He compulsively addresses his favorite rapper as "Slim" and at one point praises him with "Everything you say is real and I respect you 'cause you tell it" — meaning he wholeheartedly believes that the cartoonishly fictional escapades of the Anti-Role Model Villain Protagonist really happened, and he's dumb enough to emulate that behavior in real life.
• Cheap Heat:
  • In-Universe: Marshall sends Matthew an autograph on a Starter cap, which in "Bad Guy" is revealed to be merchandise for the Denver Broncos (the Mitchell's local team). It doesn't work — after chloroforming Eminem, Mitchell returns the hat. "And here's your Bronco hat, you can have that shit back ‘cause they suck!".
  • In live performances, Em changes the city where the Mitchells met him to wherever the show is.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Stan's father used to cheat on his mother and beat her; his friend killed himself over a woman rejecting him; and he doesn't have anything to live for in his own life. (He doesn't care about his girlfriend and kid as much as he cares about Slim).
• Depraved Bisexual: It's up for interpretation if Stan is bisexual, or if he is just so invested in Slim Shady that he doesn't know how else to express his love for him outside of wanting to have sex with him. The song itself seems to imply the latter, but the protests against the song on the grounds that it was homophobic have cemented it as a Ho Yay anthem - something Eminem himself exploits in later songs, using Stan as a shorthand for other men being in love with him.
  • In "Bad Guy", it's heavily implied Stan was bisexual, as Matthew is particularly disgusted by the homophobia in Eminem's lyrics.
• Didn't Think This Through: Stan realises just before driving his car off the bridge that he's got no way of sending his tape to Slim.
• Documentary Episode: Investigative Forensics: The Revenge of a Bad Guy is done as a documentary about the events of "Bad Guy", with talking heads sequences from the investigators of the case, and the mother of the Mitchell brothers.
• Entertainment Above Their Age: In "Stan", Matthew is six years old and loves Eminem more than Stan does - not really appropriate, considering the content of Eminem's music.
• Evil Is Petty: Both brothers are Ax-Crazy obsessives because they're obsessed with a rapper to an extent where they are willing to ignore conventional morality. In particular, Matthew makes a point of returning the signed hat Eminem gave him because the team on it "sucks".
• Fan Dumbinvoked: Stan is a parody of a certain irritating section of Eminem's fandom that he described as "Nazis and Satanists".
• Gay Bravado: Eminem brings up Stan to represent Even the Guys Want Him homoeroticism.
  • In his VMAs performance of "Without Me", he uses Stan's name to replace a homophobic slur; "Moby, you can get stomped by Obie. You thirty-six year old bald-headed Stan, blow me."
  • On his Canibus diss track "Can I Bitch", written in response to a Canibus concept album in which he raps in character as Stan after surviving the Murder-Suicide, he jokes about Canibus sending him a load of obsessive, increasingly unhinged letters like Stan in the song, then realises "that's not an 'e', that's an 'a' - this dude wants to give me a massage, he's gay!" Later in the song he calls him "Stanibus".
  • On "Marsh", Eminem puns, "I stan Redman, X-Clan and I'm a Treach fan, but I look up to myself like a fuckin' headstand" - pronouncing headstand to sound like 'head-Stan', as in "Stan giving him head". He accompanies this with the cartoon sound effects of this meaning.
  • On "Killshot", Eminem calls Machine Gun Kelly "Stan" as part of the song's ongoing metaphor that Kells is so in love with him that he wants to suck his cock.
• Groupie: Stan isn't quite one, but he wants to be. In "A Kiss", Slim says he wants a one-night stand with "a female fan — one like Stan".
• If I Can't Have You…: In "Off The Wall", Stan stakes out Eminem's house with a gun, in a car with tinted windows.
• I Just Want to Be You: The video for "Stan" shows Stan seeing himself in the mirror and literally imagining himself as Slim. His murder of his girlfriend is also done in a Slimmish method, imitating him even as he feels cast out by him.
• Ironic Echo:
  • In "My Name Is", Eminem's extremely funny Breakout Hit, Slim raps "I just drank a fifth of vodka — dare me to drive?". Stan repeats this to him, bitterly, while driving drunk with his girlfriend screaming in the trunk of the car.
  • In "Bad Guy", Matthew paraphrases an old Slim Shady lyric from the D12 obscurity "Desperados" followed by a lyric from "Stan" - "Chauvinist pig drove in this big Lincoln Town Car ^note Chauvinist pig, drove in this big Lincoln, till it went over the bridge" - well, gotta go, I'm almost at the bridge now".
• In-Universe Factoid Failure: Stan, not in sound mind, brings up the Phil Collins song "In The Air Of The Night" and says it's about Phil seeing a guy not save another man from drowning, who later turned up at a concert.
• Loony Fan: Liking and relating to Eminem's music is one thing; obsessing over Eminem to the point where you commit Murder-Suicide with your pregnant girlfriend just because he was late responding to the numerous fan letters you wrote him from the dimly-lit basement you had wallpapered with his posters and magazine cutouts is quite another.
• Mirror Character: Matthew is one for both Stan and for Slim. Most of "Bad Guy" sounds at first like it's a song about Slim going around murdering a woman, but after the reveal that it's Matthew, the fact he's enough like Slim Shady that you can mistake him for Slim is still striking. Matthew also repeats actions done by his older brother, despite his initial plan being quite different to his brother's murder-suicide.
• Misaimed Fandom:invoked Discussed. Stan relates to the misogynistic murder fantasies expressed by Slim Shady, despite the fact that they're not to be taken literally and nothing like the real Marshall.
• Murder-Suicide: Both Stan and Matthew end up committing this - Stan kills himself and his girlfriend, and Matthew kills himself and Eminem.
• No Yay:invoked Stan's a pretty sympathetic character, so it's not uncommon for listeners to suggest that maybe Stan and Marshall should have got together. Eminem has occasionally supported this reading.
• One-Steve Limit: Stan is the second character with that name to appear in an Eminem song, the first being a Frat Bro/potential rapist in "Guilty Conscience". When asked about this in an interview, Eminem said that didn't even occur to him at the time of writing, and while he didn't intend to suggest that the two songs share any connection, it's not impossible that the two Stans are one and the same.
• Psycho Supporter: Stan agrees with Slim's disgusting views because he's nuts.
• Punk in the Trunk: Stan's girlfriend ends up tied up in the trunk in an imitation of "'97 Bonnie and Clyde''" - but, worse, she's left alive so her death will be more painful. Later, in "Bad Guy", it's Eminem's turn to end up in Matthew's trunk.
• Room Full of Crazy: Stan has a whole room full of Eminem's posters and pictures, which is shown in the music video as a gloomy basement mancave from where he scribbles his fanmail.
• Significant Name Overlap: Matthew gloats to his former idol that they even have the same initials - M (and) M. He doesn't mention it, but Matthew's name in reverse ("Mitchell, Matthew") has an extremely similar cadence to Eminem's real name (Marshall Mathers).
• Significant Anagram: Stan tries to Invoke this: In the music video for "Stan", Stan is shown with a piece of paper on which he has written "EM" and then reversed it to say "ME". But outside of Stan's mind, it doesn't actually mean anything.
• Single-Target Sexuality: Stan did get his girlfriend pregnant, but all he cares about is Slim.
• Stalker Shrine: Stan's basement is a room full of Eminem's posters and pictures, staring down at him from every surface.
• Stalker with a Crush: Stan loves Slim and wants to 'be together' with him.
• Straw Fan: The Straw Fan of all Straw Fans, to the point where his name is now a common slang word to describe a stereotypical mindless fan-idiot.
  • Stan represents the kind of fans who take Eminem's songs and the Slim persona literally - miserable young men in much the same circumstances as Eminem was, but without any outlet of their own.
  • Matthew represents an entire litany of Eminem's sins, as the "Lesson of the Day" Speech at the end of the song explains, but also the former fans who turned on Eminem for the rotten social politics in his early work.
• Uncertain Doom: At the end of the music video for "Stan", it's ambiguous if Stan's face at Eminem's tour bus window is just his realisation of what has happened traumatising him, or if he's back to get revenge. Eminem supported the idea that Stan might have survived the incident in a couple of statements from this era (and a song, "Off The Wall"), but after Canibus wrote a concept album about Stan's survival, Eminem changed to declaring that Stan was officially dead and was never coming back, to emphasise that Bis's interpretation was not canon.
• Word of Danteinvoked: Eminem's rival Canibus wrote a Concept Album, C! True Hollywood Stories, in character as Stan being saved from the wreckage, getting therapy and medication, and choosing to become a rapper. (And according to Canibus, Stan was not gay - he wanted to be in a rap group with his idol). This wound up Eminem enough that in "Can-I-Bitch" he dismissively referred to it as "'Stan Lives!' shit" and then started comparing Canibus to Stan - e.g. Canibus must also be gay and wanting to have sex with Eminem.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Fitting the theme of "Bad Guy" of Eminem's karma catching up with him, Matthew ends up unintentionally re-enacting the death of his brother. He gives up on his initial plan to bury Eminem alive next to Stan due to getting nervous about the police attention and Eminem regaining consciousness, and instead decides to drown him in the river, but his awful driving ends up getting him chased and forces him to drive off the bridge, just like his brother did a decade ago.

Elvis Presley

Though I'm not the first king of controversy, I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley to do Black music, so selfishly, and use it to get myself wealthy — huh-heyyy!

Elvis Presley was a singer, actor and Teen Idol, who garnered controversy in the 1950s over being a white innovator in the Black musical genre of rock 'n' roll. Facing criticism from Moral Guardians for his sexual imagery and occasionally violent lyrics from racist whites (who viewed him as a hillbilly race traitor who was probably gay), and from Blacks who viewed him as a thief of Black culture, Elvis became an international icon. His move to a poppier and softer style (under the auspices of his manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker) turned him into a mainstream success at the cost of his vitality, especially after the rise of hippie culture and the British Invasion made novelty entertainers a thing of the past. While he made a comeback by returning to recording harder material, he ended up divorced, addicted to pills, surrounded by yes-men and reduced to a parody of himself, locked in the gilded cage of a Las Vegas hotel residency, until his gain in weight and death from a heart attack — in urban legend (and in Eminem's telling), while on the toilet.

Eminem — a singer, actor and Teen Idol who garnered controversy in the 2000s over being a white innovator in the Black musical genre of hip-hop, was compared constantly to Elvis by Moral Guardians. Facing criticism for his vulgar imagery and exceedingly violent lyrics from racist whites (who viewed him as a white trash race traitor who was probably gay) and racist Blacks (who wrote off his abilities, influence and right to play the music he grew up with), he responded with a running joke of mocking the parallels between himself and Elvis.

What is initially a playful parallel between Eminem and Elvis takes on a bittersweet tone after 2006, when Eminem also found himself locked in a gilded cage of his fame, surrounded by yes-men, reduced to a parody of himself, becoming a fat, depressed pill addict and having a near-death experience while using the toilet. Unlike the 20th Century version, the 21st Century Elvis Presley lived.

Elvis Presley appears in "Without Me", "Invasion (The Conspiracy Freestyle)", "Ricky Ticky Toc", "We Made You", "Deja Vu", "All I Think About", "Fall" and "The King & I" (which samples "Jailhouse Rock"). Slim Shady is shown dressed as Elvis in the music videos for "Without Me" and "We Made You".

Tropes associated with Elvis:

• Fat Slob: Elvis's portrayal in "Without Me" is as a grotesque overweight guy eating disgusting food while shitting. He sure can breakdance, though.
• Insult Backfire: Eminem's Black critics compared him to Elvis to make the implication that Eminem was an appropriator and thief. Eminem happily agrees with this, and also likes that people compare him to the greatest musical legend of all time. In "All I Think About", he acknowledges he loves the Elvis comparisons "because he died shitting".
• Not So Similar: In "The King & I", Eminem slyly concludes that he and Elvis aren't really that similar — Eminem got out of his drug addiction, lived longer, and is now happy and healthy, getting to enjoy his money and long influence while still making music he has creative control over and can be proud of (even if the critics doubt it). Even the little parallels between them are inverted — Eminem is naturally dark but dyed his hair blond, while Elvis was naturally blond but dyed his hair dark; Elvis stayed with the Colonel to support his father, while Eminem's father walked out on him.
• Other Common Music Video Concepts: Eminem recreates the "Jailhouse Rock" music video in the music video for "We Made You". (Eminem claimed learning the dance routine was one of the hardest things he'd ever done for a video).
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy: In Eminem's telling, Elvis is a thief who stole Black music, just like he is.
• Shock Rock: In "Without Me", Eminem mocks the fact that the parents who listened to Elvis Presley as kids are so appalled by him doing pretty much the exact same thing — doing Black music and getting rich off it.
• Supermodel Strut: In "Fall", Eminem is an Elvis clone, walking while "thrust[ing] my pelvic bone".
• Toilet Horror: Mixed with Lightmare Fuel — Elvis's alleged death on the toilet is used to both mock him and contemplate the morbid fate Eminem himself nearly experienced (as detailed in "Hello"). "The King & I" uses bathroom-death imagery throughout the first verse to create the metaphor of this kind of setting.
• Toilet Humor: In "Fly Away", Eminem quotes a couple of lines from "Blue Suede Shoes", then (symbolically of how he survived his own fatness and drug issues) takes a shit, wipes his ass and rolls the paper back on the roll.
• Whole Costume Reference: In "We Made You", Eminem keeps dressing like Elvis. In "The King & I" Eminem's dressed in blue suede shoes, though one is missing a shoelace (a reference to Eminem's past suicidality and the use of shoelaces to hang yourself).

Dr. Balzac and the Popsomp Hills Staff

Success is earned. It will become your only focus, your only purpose. It will become all you have to live for.

The Medical Horror aspect of Relapse is reflected in Popsomp Hills. Founded by Dr. Timothy Balzac, this rehab clinic represents the uncaring, incompetent medical establishment and how it only exacerbates addiction problems.

Popsomp Hills is only indirectly mentioned in the music itself; most information comes from the Alternate Reality Game The Relapse and other promotional material created for Relapse's release. Their website can be found here. The web game The Relapse can be played here, but requires Flash, which is now obsolete. The music video for "3 a.m." is set in Popsomp Hills.

Tropes Applying To Them

• All There in the Manual: Some of the storyline for Relapse Shady was explained via a small Alternate Reality Game website for the Popsomp Hills drug rehabilitation clinic, which — as all these other tropes can attest — didn't appear to be a very helpful institution.
• Asshole Victim: Considering how obviously exploitative and incompetent they are, you're unlikely to feel sympathy towards the 13 staff members who Slim Shady slaughtered.
• Bedlam House: They're the last clinic anyone should expect help from. The 'Learn More' page on the Popsomp Hills' website redirected users to the Wikipedia page for "Hell".
• Big Brother Is Watching: Doctor-patient confidentiality is not their top priority. Their advertised privacy policy makes no attempt to hide this:
  •Nothing is private in this world. Let's not kid each other here.
  •We don’t trust you. We don’t even trust ourselves.
  •We tell our staff all of your secrets. All confidential information provided to us during the course of your treatment will ultimately be used against you.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Subverted mostly; most of their website puts up a convincing enough veneer of benevolence and professionalism, but their Terms & Conditions drop all pretence:
  •Thank you for caring. Unfortunately, it will never be enough to save you.
  •We are not fair people. We make mistakes under the influence just like you did in order to get you here.
  •Pain is not only tolerated- in fact it's encouraged.
• Dr. Jerk: Dr. Balzac is the last doctor anyone should seek help from, as indicated by his belief that patients need to "earn" his help.
  "Humanity is not kind. Impassionate is the new passion. Give people a reason to live by giving them only one thing to live for".
• Evil Brit: Balzac has an English accent, as does Marshall's rehab counsellor Dr. West on the Relapse album. (Eminem's own rehab counsellor was British).
• Faux Affably Evil: Their website paints them as well-intentioned and passionately dedicated to helping those suffering from addiction, but it's clear that their "help" is ineffectual at best and the patients don't have much choice in the matter.
  At Popsomp Hills we give each abuser a choice: go into rehab or risk losing everything.
• The Ghost: Neither Dr. Balzac nor any Popsomp staff appear in-person in any of the songs.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Relapse version of Slim Shady would likely not be what he is if not for the incompetence and apathy of the Popsomp Hills staff.
• Loose Canon: Insofar as it's possible for a hip-hop album and its EP to have a canon, Popsomp Hills is sort of canonical... maybe. It's explained as lore in the intro video for Eminem's Relapse-era stage shows, but the music occasionally contradicts it, such as having Mr. Mathers's rehab counsellor be Dr. West rather than Dr. Balzac, and "Stay Wide Awake" and the unused track "Oh No" both referencing Shady's rehab as being "Brighton" (the actual rehab Eminem went to). The video for "3 a.m." shows Shady on a killing spree in Popsomp Hills, but the song itself doesn't mention a rehab facility, only referencing a "horrorcorridor", McDonald's, Slim's house and a bathroom in a Christmas house party. Popsomp Hills is perhaps only one way of interpreting the story of Relapse.
• Mad Scientist Laboratory: In cutscenes in The Relapse, Dr Balzac is presented in a Gothic Horror-style parlour with torture implements, mysterious midcentury Cow Tools and a test subject chained up beside him.
• Manufacturing Victims: They encourage their patients to keep up their addictions so the Popsomp Hills staff can keep making money "treating" them.
  Life is too short, party harder than ever. We can help.
• Punny Name: Popsomp Hills - "pop some pills" - and its founder, Dr Timothy Balzac.
• Tropaholics Anonymous: In The Relapse, Dr. Balzac is proud of his ludicrous 'four-prong programme':
  1. Address the hurt, then the attitude.
  2. Confront the facts.
  3. Build the faith.
  4. Commit to submission.
• Unfortunate Names: The clinic's founder is named "Balzac" Tee hee.
• We Care: The Popsomp Hills website is full to the brim with schmaltzy platitudes and feel-good anecdotes to make them seem more reputable and professional than they really are.
• Word Salad Philosophy: If you can make sense of their incomprehensible feel-good metaphors, you're probably on something yourself.
  There is no magic to breathing underwater, but the journey to recovery will provide you with a sense of success that puts you on cloud nine and makes you feel like a fish.
• Worthless Foreign Degree: Dr. Balzac got his degree from Switzerland, and his treatments aren't what one would call effective.

Family members (as they appear in Eminem's music)

Tropes applying to the whole family or multiple family members

Tropes applying to the Mathers family:

• Adoption Angst: The Mathers family is full of adoptions, generally when someone in the family becomes too dysfunctional to look after their own kids, leading to the arrangements themselves being unhappy. Marshall was adopted by his great aunt Edna, because (at least in how he saw it) his own mother didn't want him. Debbie adopted Kim after she fled an abusive household where her stepfather was raping her. Marshall adopted his little brother, Nathan, to get him away from Debbie, who had been poisoning him with drugs; Eminem also adopted Kim's sister's daughter Alaina when her parents died of a drug overdose, as well as Stevie, a child Kim had with another man while married to him, when Kim went on the run to avoid getting imprisoned for cocaine offenses - forcing him to grow past some of his jealousy issues so that Hailie could see her sibling.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Mathers family is gothically awful, a graveyard of child abuse, crushing poverty, mental illness, drug addiction, poisonings, pet murder and suicide. Eminem reflects on this on "The Apple", where he points out that considering how messed up everyone around him is, he really didn't stand a chance.
• Department of Child Disservices: Children in the Mathers dynasty are often getting taken away by the state, with Kim, Nathan, Alaina and Stevie all ending up either in children's homes or threatened with this due to various circumstances. In "Headlights", Eminem mentions that Nathan getting taken away was his realisation that his mother was abusive and had been drugging her sons due to severe mental illness that would not get better.
• The Three Faces of Eve: In the first phase of Eminem's career, the three women closest to Marshall slot into twisted, blackly comedic versions of these three archetypes.
  • His mother, Debbie, is a dark version of the Wife, portrayed as overly enmeshed with her son, poisoning him due to her Münchausen Syndrome and harassing him with lawsuits to try and get him back into her clutches.
  • His girlfriend/enemy/babymama/imaginary-murder-victim/wife/ex-wife/wife/ex-wife Kim is a dark version of the Seductress, defined in his songs by her serial cheating, disloyalty, love of drugs, sluttiness, physical abuse towards Marshall, and the intense physical reactions (lust, puking, violence) she incites in Marshall in response.
  • His daughter, Hailie, is a slightly twisted version of the Child. She is innocent, and wonderful, and the only truly good character in the whole Slim Shady mythology, but like most children in Eminem's music she likes violence, sometimes accompanying her dad on diss tracks and chainsaw sprees. Her Ambiguous Innocence also gives her something of a dark edge.
  • In Eminem's work after his overdose, the three women tend to get more empathetic portrayals that take them outside of these archetypes, forming a document of Eminem growing up in terms of his attitude to women.
• Troubled Abuser: Kim and Marshall both experienced horrific past abuse, which led to them forming a Destructive Romance as neither knew how to be in a normal, loving relationship. Debbie, who poisoned her children for years, was made pregnant with Marshall while underage, by a man who abused her, then abandoned her to parent her son on her own.

Mom / Debbie

Here, want a snack? You hungry, you fuckin' brat? Look at that, it's a Xanax, take it and take a nap! Eat it!

Debbie Mathers-Briggs is a frequent character in Eminem's music. At first, a fictionalised version of her appeared as Slim Shady's mother, usually as an over-the-top abuser and white-trash slut. Over time (especially after she attempted to sue her own son for $10m for describing her as a drug user in "My Name Is") she began to turn up more frequently as a version of her real self, in some of Eminem's most inflammatory and brutal lyrics.

Mom is addicted to Valium and has Münchausen Syndrome, making her son believe he was sick by feeding him drugs. This started her son down the path of his own drug addiction, as well as starting his fascination with Medical Horror and with the idea of himself as diseased... or, rather, ill. Despite this abuse, Eminem claims he still loves her and has even thanked her for raising him the way she did, because it gave him such good material. A recording of her, screaming at her son to get out of the house in one of many occasions where she rendered him homeless as a teenager, can be heard in the outro to 2004's "Yellow Brick Road". In the 2013 song "Headlights", Marshall extends a desire to make peace with her.

Tropes applying to Mom:

• A-Cup Angst: In "My Name Is", she starved little Slim as a baby because she doesn't have tits. This line apparently upset the real Debbie Mathers, as it was a reference to how she hadn't been able to breastfeed her son as a child due to a health problem.
• Addled Addict: Addicted to Valium.
• The Atoner: In "Headlights", Marshall discusses how despite Debbie's abuse of him and his brother, she did nevertheless raise him as best as she was able to considering her drug issues, and at least loved him. Marshall even alludes to the fact she also had it rough, considering the fact that - as Marshall expresses it, with typical class - "Dad fucked us both!". While it doesn't wash away her mistakes, she and Em do decide to mend the bridge.
• Bullying a Dragon: In the middle of a rant about his mother in "Marshall Mathers", 'Marshall' (Slim?) gives the real name of his mother's lawyer (who was actively suing him at the time), then calls him a homophobic slur and claims he's "just aggravated I won't ejaculate in his ass". This was censored even on the dirty version of the album, because it would definitely not have helped him win his lawsuit.
• Everyone Has Standards: As toxic as her relationship with her son had been, she's still shown rushing to Slim's defense when he's being abused by the titular character of "Stepdad".
• Evil Matriarch: As Slim's mother, she's a comedic version. As Marshall's mother, she is not.
• Forgiveness: He forgives her in "Headlights", due to her cancer, his own growth past his own addiction, and drugs having erased most of her abusive personality. Em also points out that for how much Debbie was a very flawed person, she did care for him as much as she did, compared to her father who ditched them both.
• Frivolous Lawsuit: Her litigiousness is a frequent target of Eminem's songwriting (not least the fact that she tried to sue her own son). In "My Mom", Slim implies she gets most of her money this way ("a rack fell and hit me in K-Mart and they witnessed it").
• Gaslighting: Eminem's gaslighting at the hands of his mother and her Münchausen Syndrome is mentioned in numerous songs, such as in "Kill You" (where she tried to turn him against his absent father until Slim realises she was the crazy one) and "Cleanin' Out My Closet", in which Marshall says that his whole life he was made to believe he was sick when he wasn't. "The Apple" contains a gruelling anecdote about his mother attempting to convince the young Marshall that he had a sister who died, even showing him a picture of one of his relatives to try and force him to doubt his own memory.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: In Slim's songs about his Mom, she's described as both committing and enabling truly absurd child abuse against him, including beating his entire brain out of his skull.
• Junkie Parent: Slim claims that Debbie does more drugs than he does. In "Cleanin' Out My Closet," Eminem recalls seeing his mother popping pills in the kitchen.
• Lady Drunk: In Slim songs she's essentially presented as a trashy cartoon slut, constantly drunk and on Valium.
• Like Mother, Like Son: Slim, Eminem and Marshall all admit that their hatred of her is because they're just like her - severely mentally ill, sexually dysfunctional, abusive, and addicted to drugs.
• Rape as Comedy: Slim Shady has her 'bend over and take it like a slut' in "Kill You" - prompting a voice switch into the character of a tutting Moral Guardian aghast that the guy who writes lyrics like this is on the cover of Rolling Stone.
• Resentful Guardian: While she's amazed by Marshall's giftedness, she resents him for outgrowing her and constantly tried to make him homeless growing up.
• Münchausen Syndrome: In "Cleaning Out My Closet" (a Marshall song), "My Mom" (a Slim Shady song) and "Gnat" (an Eminem song), she's described as feeding the young Marshall drugs in his food to make him sick.
• Muse Abuse: While their relationship was already in crisis, Eminem's accusations of a fictionalised version of her abusing him led to her suing him. In return, he wrote a song in which he claimed he was dead to her and wouldn't even let her see her granddaughter at her funeral.
• My Beloved Smother: Despite constantly abandoning Marshall, she continued to orbit him in an attempt to control him well into his fame, which "Cleanin' Out My Closet" was largely written as a response to. Her Munchausen's-by-proxy appears to have emerged so she could have the feelings of neededness she got from looking after her children when they were sick.
• My New Gift Is Lame: When Slim turned 16, she gave him a truck that, when he turned it on, screamed, "please fix me!" (A similar scene to this turns up in 8 Mile. Eminem confirmed in an interview with Funkmaster Flex that it had actually happened).
• Parents as People: Eventually, in "Headlights", where Marshall wrestles with the abuse she committed while acknowledging that she was, in reality, a severely mentally ill woman who loved him but wasn't capable of looking after him properly.
• Turning Into Your Parent: Whenever Slim uses Valium, he'll mention how much like Mom he is:
  • In "Purple Pills" - "cool, calm, just like my Mom!"
  • In "My Mom" - "My mom loved Valium and lots of drugs. That's why I'm on what I'm on - 'cause I'm my mom!"
  • In "Bagpipes from Baghdad":
  This beautiful pill dust in my palm, my
  Cuticles get residue just from touchin' the bottle
  Never knew I could remind me so much of my momma

Dad

Marshall Bruce Mathers II is less focused-on than Eminem's other family members, but for good reason — he walked out on the family during his son's infancy and never saw nor spoke to them again. His abandonment of his family deeply affected young Marshall, who swore to be a better parent than Marshall II ever was.

Tropes applying to Marshall II:

• Anti-Role Model: Eminem has stated at least once that he was motivated to be a loving parent to spite his absentee father.
• Archnemesis Dad: Rather understandably, Eminem has never forgiven his father for walking out on the family. Even after the rapper extended an olive branch to Debbie, he hated his father until the very end — no love lost, no love found.
• Death Equals Redemption: NOPE! Eminem explained in "Leaving Heaven" that, even after hearing of his father's death, he still hasn't forgiven him.
• Disappeared Dad: Walked out on the family when Marshall III was only a few months old.
  I was a baby, maybe I was just a couple of months
  My faggot father must've had his panties up in a bunch
  'Cause he split; I wonder if he even kissed me goodbye
  No I don't, on second thought; I just fucking wished he would die!
• Domestic Abuse: While it's unknown for certain if this happened, Marshall II is shown violently shoving Debbie to the ground in the video for "Cleanin' Out My Closet".
• Fat Bastard: The "Cleanin' Out My Closet" video depicts him as an overweight wife-beater. In "Leaving Heaven", Eminem mocks him for his weight - "Only guts you had was from your stomach fat".
• The Generation Gap: Hinted at in "Rhyme or Reason" - Em's parents were hippies in a rock band at the time he was conceived (she was underage at the time). "Rhyme or Reason", the song going after Dad, samples The Zombies' "Time Of The Season", a song about a man seducing a young hippie girl during the Summer of Love. Eminem's version is about the Summer of Hate and Slim's desire to torture everyone pointlessly, and how this struck a nerve with an entire generation of Gen-X and Millennials who felt the same nihilistic anger, unlike the false and shallow ideals of his Boomer Dad.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Slowly emerges as this over the course of Eminem's music, especially in opposition to Mom. In "Kill You", Slim feels his mother lied about Dad being evil to cover up her own issues; in "Cleanin' Out My Closet" he wonders about him and then declares he wishes he was dead; in "Evil Deeds" he begs for his father to forgive him (in a way deliberately ambiguous as to whether it's God, or Dad - viewing him as a potential Big Good). After getting clean, we get songs like "Rhyme or Reason", in which Slim expresses his belief Dad screwed him up and assaults him. In "Headlights", he forgives Mom, but points out that Dad didn't do anything to find him, especially compared to what he'd do for his own children. In "Leaving Heaven" he openly gloats about his Dad being dead and insults him prodigiously.
• Lower-Class Lout: Portrayed as a white trash stereotype.
• Parent Never Came Back from the Store: Once again, walked out on the family and never looked back.
• Parting-Words Regret: Inverted; in "Leaving Heaven," Eminem expresses disappointment that he wasn't harsh enough with his father before the latter died, wishing the two could've met just so Em could tell him in person how much he hates him.
• Poverty for Comedy: In "Rhyme or Reason", Marshall and Shady both laugh when the sample asks, "Who's your daddy? ...Is he rich, like me?"

Kim

Let go of my hair! Please don't do this, baby! Please! I love you! Look, we can just take Hailie and leave!

Kim Scott, who Eminem married, divorced, married and divorced again, may be the most infamous target of Eminem's Muse Abuse in his music. The love of Marshall's life since his early teens, she entered a mutually abusive, Destructive Romance with him, gave birth to his biological daughter Hailie, and experienced drug problems and legal trouble every bit as outrageous as her husband's.

While cheating on her himself, Eminem vented his feelings of jealousy, fear and frustration with her cheating, and their frequent on-again-off-again breakups, by writing songs in which he beat and murdered her. The most infamous of these is "Kim" - generally agreed to be Eminem's most horrifying song, and one of the most devastating Horrorcore songs in the genre.

Tropes applying to Kim:

• Addled Addict: She struggled with a cocaine addiction which led to her making some poor, hurtful decisions. Eminem did little to help matters by openly mocking her for her coke habit in "Puke", and insulting her use of it - and marijuana - in "50 Ways", which Eminem wrote at a time when he was struggling with a drug addiction himself (and denying it).
• Anti-Love Song: Eminem has always held that "Kim" is a love song and it's about how much she means to him.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: A few times. Particularly on "Girls", where Eminem states that he would fight anybody for Kim, implying that she's always had his back as well.
• Break-Up Song: Many, ranging all the way from bittersweet empowerment ballads ("Stronger Than I Was") to grossout comedy ("Puke") to utter, utter horror ("Kim").
• Cement Shoes: "'97 Bonnie and Clyde" includes a deviation to weigh down Kim's corpse so she can be disposed of in the lake.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: After Eminem's Creator Recovery made him reevaluate his habit of using his art to hurt people, Kim fades out of his songs. Her typical role is replaced with many fictitious Suspiciously Similar Substitute bitches who are often Allegorical Characters for drugs/rap/the fans, and who don't cross any Muse Abuse lines when Slim batters them. Her main late-career appearance is in "Bad Husband", an apology to her.
• Crossdressing Voices: Kim's voice in songs is provided by Eminem, and is surprisingly convincing.
• Disposing of a Body: Her corpse usually ends up at the bottom of bodies of water.
• Domestic Abuse: In real life, Kim and Marshall were in a mutually physically and emotionally abusive relationship; the songs detail this.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Eminem's debut album, the Conscious Hip Hop album Infinite, contains "Searchin'", a genuine love song to her, as well as numerous lyrics about how excited he was to be a good husband to her. On his next album he would be rapping about disposing of her murdered body in the sea.
• Embarrassing Tattoo: The subject of two - her gravestone on Eminem's navel, and a 'Marshall + Kim' heart on his arm. "Puke" expresses misery over this. In "Bad Husband", they both laugh at the navel tat, but Eminem realises it was never that funny.
• "I Hate" Song: "Puke" is entirely dedicated to loathing her.
• Masochism Tango: Kuniva's verse in D12's "That's How" describes the Shady and Kim relationship:
  Chokin' your wife all in front of your peeps (Bitch!)
  She toss a brick through the window of your Jeep
  Get back together by the end of the week, that's so sweet
  Slim and Kim argue too much
• Misogyny Song: Virtually every song that features her.
• Murder Ballad: "Kim" and "'97 Bonnie and Clyde" detail her murder, and the aftermath as Marshall/Slim attempts to dispose of the body. "50 Ways" implies this, with Slim suggesting in the verses that she'll end up in the back of a trunk if she crosses him, and the sound of her screaming over the hook. Parodied in "What's The Difference", where Dr. Dre offers to kill her for Slim, who assures him that he appreciates the offer but that he can take care of it.
• Muse Abuse: The real Kim Scott attempted suicide after Eminem broke his promise to never perform "Kim" live, instead slaughtering a blow-up doll of her onstage and getting the crowd to chant, "bleed, bitch, bleed!!"
• Of Corpse She's Alive: In "What's The Difference", Slim explains that if he ever did murder Kim, he'd put her dead body in the car next to him with sunglasses on and have her wave at pedestrians ("hi!") before dumping her body in front of a police station.
• One-Woman Song: "Kim".
• On the Rebound: In "Superman", Slim bangs numerous groupies he clearly loathes while claiming he doesn't even remember the name of 'what's-her-face', who he just divorced. It comes off as the pathetic Cringe Comedy it's intended as.
• Prim and Proper Bun: In "Searchin'", she's so hot that even wearing this hairstyle Eminem thinks she's the sexiest, trashiest girl ever.
• Relationship Revolving Door: Kim's frequent breakups with Marshall and hooking up with him again soon later, derived from their equally chaotic real relationship, is almost a Running Gag.
• Screaming Woman: Considering the subject matter, the majority of her vocal appearances on songs consists of terrified screaming.
• Sex with the Ex: A few songs indicate Kim and Marshall were still having sex even when they weren't officially together. In "Lady", Slim's wary because although they're not officially a thing, they are still sleeping together from time to time, so he has to play it careful. (In reality, just before they officially got back together, Kim left Em after he used Hailie in a diss track against Ja Rule, considering it irresponsible to involve their child in a potentially violent beef). In "50 Ways", even though they're divorced again and Slim absolutely loathes her, he's still always up for sex with her.
• Taking the Kids: "'97 Bonnie and Clyde" is set after Marshall has murdered her, in order to get his daughter after she'd taken out a restraining order against him and settled down with a new family.
• Troubled Abuser: Both she and Marshall had chaotic lives and were abused severely as children, which enables him to feel sympathy towards her, especially in his later songs.

Hailie Jade

It's too late, Dad, you made the choice. Now go up there and show 'em that you love 'em more than us.

Hailie Jade is Eminem's biological daughter and the emotional heart of his music. Usually, she appears in songs written from the Marshall persona, but is Slim-as-Marshall's baby accomplice in murder in the iconic "'97 Bonnie and Clyde", the voice of reason holding back her illing father in "My Dad's Gone Crazy", and the daughter of the revolution in "Mosh".

Tropes applying to Hailie:

• Age-Inappropriate Art: Whether babbling as Slim murders her mother, joining in with her dad's chainsaw rampages, or saying she doesn't want to grow up "like one of Ja's nasty-ass kids", Eminem would put her on his nastiest songs to get people to freak out. This did result in Kim walking out on him at one point. In his book The Way I Am, a then middle-aged Eminem shared a photograph of some lyrics he wrote for an unrecorded song where he'd wanted to have Hailie yell "kiss my ass!" at her dad's haters, and commented, "this was a bad idea".
• Age-Progression Song: "Castle" is a string of letters written to her by her father starting from before her birth and ending just before her twelfth birthday.
• Ambiguous Innocence: Her distressed reactions in "'97 Bonnie and Clyde" imply she has some awareness of what's actually happened to her mother is wrong and awful, but she still enjoys the murdered-girlfriend-body-disposal "games" her Daddy plays with her.
• Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: Repeatedly, Marshall's songs about her revolve around the motif that he wants to give her what he never got as a child.
• Children Are Innocent: A thoughtful take. She is the one thing in her father's life that is perfect and pure... but it's because she's as funny, mean and brilliant as Dad is. She occasionally joins in with his murderous antics on songs.
• A Child Shall Lead Them: In "Mosh", she calls for the government to hear her and her friends, implying they will be the ones to change the world.
• Cuteness Proximity: Often reduces her father into helpless, babbling adoration even when he's doing something terrible. A passage in "'97 Bonnie and Clyde" is rapped in baby talk, as is the opening of "Kim"; the first verse of "Castle" derails into him describing cutesy food items and kisses. Even in "Killshot", he pauses the insults briefly to "give [Hailie] Jade a kiss".
• Daddy's Girl: It's obvious that she is the apple of Marshall's eye and seems to be close to her father as well.
• Did I Mention It's Christmas?: Hailie was born on December 25th, so Christmastime and festive imagery is associated with her in songs and some videos. Themes of her father not being able to afford Christmas gifts for her come up quite often when he's describing his poverty before blowing up, including a whole verse of "Mockingbird". Marshall also missed out on his daughter's birthday in 2007 due to his drug overdose, which is dramatised in "Castle".
• Dreaming the Truth: In "When I'm Gone", she appears to her father in a dream and tells him that he's abandoned her for the sake of his career, telling him that he's made his choice. Slim then kills himself.
• Evil Parents Want Good Kids: Even Slim, the corruptor of children, really doesn't want Hailie to end up the way he did.
• The Family That Slays Together:
  • A deeply Black Comedy case in "'97 Bonnie and Clyde", as little Hai-hai unwittingly helps her father dispose of the corpses after he murdered her Mommy, her Mommy's new husband, and her four-year-old half-brother.
  • She helps her Dad with his chainsaw in "My Dad's Gone Crazy", providing the sound effect.
  • On "Doe, Rae, Me (Hailie's Revenge)", Hailie enthusiastically teams up with her father to shove Daddy's Oscar "up Ja Rule's ass".
• Morality Pet: Especially in songs where the personas are blended, her dad's devotion to her is often used to take the edge off some really horrific songs. A good example is "Any Man", in which Slim Shady performs a whole string of depraved actions, but ends the song by not being able to read his lyrics because his daughter scribbled over them.
• The Not-Love Interest: She's everything to Marshall, the reason Eminem became a rapper, and the only thing Slim Shady cares about. In "When I'm Gone", Marshall-as-Slim chooses to die in order to be a better father to her.
• Outlaw Couple: She and Slim are compared to Bonnie and Clyde.
• Relative Button: Attacking Hailie is a favourite strategy in hip-hop to force a response from her father. The adult Hailie has made jokes about the unfairness of this on TikTok, rolling her eyes at the dreary fact that whenever anyone tries to attract beef from Em for attention, it means she's caught in the crossfire, having to hear idiots making horrible comments about her. The joke was made in response to some nasty lyrics allegedly written by The Game in which he claimed he was fucking her. (Game later denied the lyrics were real).
• Wacky Parent, Serious Child: "My Dad's Gone Crazy" starts with her bursting in to find her father vacuuming up a line of coke, and escalates into her rampaging in amazement at his antics, chiding him for his foul language, and reminding him that he's not normal.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: In "When I'm Gone", she piles boxes and junk in front of the door to keep her father from leaving to go on tour again. When he does, he has a vision of her in the crowd, realising he has chosen his fame over her and saying goodbye.

Stepdad

Slim Shady's stepfather, whose physical, sexual and psychological abuse of his stepson is significantly responsible for Slim becoming the homicidal maniac he would grow up to be.

Stepdad has the distinction of being the most fictional character in Shady's family. While Eminem has been ambiguous about how much of reality there is in Stepdad, evidence points to him having a positive relationship with his actual childhood stepfather. He's usually understood as a Composite Character of Marshall's biological father, several of Eminem's mother's boyfriends, some other Mathers patriarchs, and Kim's stepfather, who raped her.

Stepdad first appears in "Insane" on Relapse, in which his repeated rapes of that particular Slimcarnation led to him becoming an insane Serial Killer and rapist himself. He appears later on "Stepdad" on Music To Be Murdered By, which makes no mention of his sexual abuse, instead portraying him as a worthless, violent brute deserving of euthanasia. Despite the autobiographical tone of the verse, he is briefly mentioned in "Parables (Remix)".

Tropes Applying to Shady's Stepdad

• Abusive Parents: He has mentally, physically, and sexually abused his stepson.
• All Gays Are Pedophiles: Slim Shady's rampant homophobia may have been latently inspired by what his stepfather did to him.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: He stomped his family's pet chihuahua to death just for peeing on the carpet.
• Cigarette Burns: When Slim's in a catatonic state after being raped, he gets Debbie to snap him out of it by putting out her cigarette on his neck.
• Depraved Bisexual: Stepdad may have married and fucked Debbie, but the clearly underage Slim Shady was the primary target of his carnal longings, whether he wanted to be or not.
• Disproportionate Retribution: His family lives in fear of him because he takes punishments way too far; no matter how minor the crime, Stepdad's answer is always a vicious beating.
• Domestic Abuse: He beat Debbie and young Marshall/Slim on a regular basis.
• The Dreaded: Even in the present day, Relapse-Slim is completely broken by what his stepfather did to him and has a flashback to his childhood abuse at the mere thought of him.
• Easily Forgiven: In "Stepdad", Slim can't believe how quick Debbie was to forgive his stepfather for abusing them.
• Everyone Has Standards: Eminem claims "Insane" originally started with "my own father said that I sucked in the bed", but that he thought it went too far, hence creating the Stepdad character. Considering the content of the song was to try and go as gross as he possibly could to see if he could make the listener puke, it's interesting that that was where he drew the line.
• Evil Is Petty: From killing the family dog for piddling on the carpet to ruining Slim's new Christmas present as a prank, Stepdad is quite the petty bastard.
• Gaslighting:
  • "Stepdad" opens with a near-literal example. The stepfather wakes up his young son and beats the shit out of him for leaving the lights on in the kitchen, profusely swearing at him and ignoring the child's protests that he didn't do it. The stepfather knows this, and in fact, he himself left the lights on just so he could have an excuse to blame his abuse victim.
    Last night, he said I left the kitchen light on
    But he walked in there this morning and purposely flipped it, I saw him
  • In "Insane", Stepdad keeps bursting into the bathroom when Slim was using it, claiming Slim needs his help to pee properly, despite being a big boy now. This left the young Slim confused about his own developmental age — which probably has something to do with the Psychopathic Manchild personality he ends up with in adulthood.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor:
  • In "Insane," his total lack of imagination is played up with the fact that the best idea for a parody porn title he can think of is "Ass Rape".
  • In "Stepdad," his idea of a funny prank is to kick young Slim's arm to mess up his new coloring book and humiliate him in front of his friends.
• Hate Sink: As all the other tropes in this folder can clearly attest, the listener is not expected to like this man. Stepdad is presented as the most horrifically cruel character in Eminem's repertoire — a rage-bound lunatic and a shameless pedophile with nothing cool, funny, or sympathetic about him at all. His first song was written with the intention of making listeners want to puke, and his second appearance is an "I Hate" Song turned Revenge Ballad that ends with him being beaten to death by his abused stepson.
• Horrifying the Horror: Put it this way: anyone who can make Slim Goddamn Shady go mad with terror must be one sick bastard.
• "I Hate" Song: "Stepdad", dedicated to him, is probably the most on-the-nose example in Eminem's discography:
  I, I, HATE, MY, MY, STEPDAD!!
• Karma Houdini: Unlike with Slim's other childhood tormentors, Shady's stepdad isn't shown paying for his crimes (at first); "Insane" just ends during a flashback to Slim's CSA at his father's hands.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: He finally gets his due in "Stepdad" when Slim decides he's had enough of his stepfather's shit and beats the guy to death.
• Karmic Death: "Stepdad" ends with Slim Shady beating his stepfather to death after Stepdad spent the whole rest of the song beating the shit out of Shady, Debbie, and their dog.
• Lack of Empathy: He has a rather blasé reaction to his stepson's suicide attempts, showing that he only sees the young Slim as a blowup doll.
• Like Father, Like Son: They may not be related by blood, but Relapse-Slim Shady grew up to be a sadistic sexual predator just like his stepdad.
• Literal Metaphor: As Slim points out, Stepdad was a motherfucker both literally and figuratively.
• No Dead Body Poops: A strange aversion occurs in "Stepdad"; after Slim beats him to death, Stepdad's corpse releases two full liters of piss.
• Offscreen Inertia: "Insane" ends in the middle of Slim's PTSD flashback of his stepfather raping him, where presumably he's stuck reliving it forever.
• One-Hit KO: In "Stepdad," he technically goes down for the count after Shady hits him once in the head with a baseball bat; Slim then pummels his unconscious stepfather with his bare hands presumably to make sure the bastard stays down.
• Pædo Hunt: Slim recounts his stepdad's molestation of him in nauseating detail.
• Paper Tiger: As much of a violent piece of shit as he is, it's important to bear in mind that he's only shown going after victims who couldn't hope to fight back; once Slim plucks up the courage to take his revenge, it takes him very little effort to kill Stepdad. Slim even concludes that "The Big Bad Wolf ain't so bad" after he's successfully killed the guy.
• Parallel Porn Titles: Subverted. Slim says his rapist babysitter watched a A Nightmare on Elm Street porn parody with the amusing title Pubic Hair on Chelsea. Stepdad witlessly responds that his "movie" would just be called Ass Rape.
• Pick on Someone Your Own Size: What makes Stepdad such a loathsome figure is whom he targets for abuse: he repeatedly beats and rapes his stepson and kills a small dog for a petty reason, making him vile and utterly pathetic in equal measure — this is made especially evident when Stepdad pushes his luck and provokes Slim into killing him, since it took very little effort to bring Stepdad down even though Slim couldn't have been older than 11 years at the time.
• Prison Rape: Before dragging Slim off to rape him again, he "jokes" that they'll be "shooting the jail scene" of a hypothetical porn movie.
• Rape as Drama: While the song itself is told with humourous rhyme schemes, Bathos, silly voices, Lightmare Fuel and even a parody porn title gag, the rape itself on "Insane" is not funny, followed as it is with medically authentic depictions of the childhood Slim's Angst Coma, and his adulthood PTSD flashbacks and dissociation. It's the most sickening song on the album, in at least the top five most horrific songs Eminem ever wrote, and probably the only time you'll feel sorry for the Relapse version of Slim Shady.
• Revenge Ballad: Subverted in "Insane", where it's set up like a child-abuse-revenge song a la "Brain Damage", but the only people Slim takes it out on are some harmless bystanders (who don't even seem that bothered by it). Played straight in "Stepdad", in which he finally gets some consequences for his actions.
• Sick and Wrong: Eminem claims to have written "Insane" with the intention of making listeners want to puke. Notably, despite all the bloodshed on the rest of Relapse, it was the stepfather's "gay, incest rape thing" that made Paul Rosenberg Rage Quit the album.
• Threw My Bike on the Roof: In "Stepdad," after the young Slim receives color books and crayons for Christmas, Stepdad "accidentally" kicks Slim's arm and messes up his coloring job just to be a dick, even laughing at him after a sarcastic "oops". This is the point where Slim decides he's had enough and kills the bastard.
• Undignified Death: It's only fitting that someone as repulsive as Stepdad would get such an unflattering demise, being beaten to death by his abused fifth-grader stepson, suffering post-mortem Potty Failure, and then being buried in the backyard next to the dog he stomped to death.
• Unnamed Parent: His name is never spoken at any point.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: When "Insane" came out, fans and the press tried to figure out if Marshall Mathers had been molested as a child, and Eminem's only answer is that the song is "almost entirely fiction". Whether the rape itself was one of the fictional details, he has refused to discuss. ^note Troublingly, an early 2000s diss track by Evidence, "Search for Bobby Fischer" (written based on him going to Detroit and gossiping with people who knew Eminem) suggests "daddy stuck it to ya - that's why you hate your mother, 'cause she never tried to stop it".

Interscope

Dr. Dre

Slim Shady, you a basehead. (Nuh-uh!) Then why's your face red?... Man, you wasted.

Dr. Dre, Mr. N.W.A, Mr. AK, Mr. Comin'-Straight-Outta-Compton-Y'all-Better-Make-Way, real name Andre Young, is an iconic Hip-Hop record producer and rapper from Compton. In the 90s, he listened to Eminem's demo tape while cleaning out his garage and was blown away, signing the rapper to his label Aftermath and mentoring him as his Executive Producer.

Dre's many appearances in Eminem's discography go beyond the usual guest verses to feature him as another of Eminem's cast of characters, similarly often turning up in Eminem's music videos. With raps ghostwritten by Eminem on their appearances together, he's generally cast as a loving soulmate to Em, a cool but beleaguered adult having to put up with Shady's never-ending torrent of shit.

Tropes applying to Dre in Eminem's music:

• Actually Pretty Funny: Eminem somehow managed to make Dre laugh until he fell out of his chair by bringing up Dre's assault of Dee Barnes in "Guilty Conscience", which at the time he had not issued a formal apology for.
• Anti-Role Model: In "Forgot About Dre", Slim claims his ludicrous violence is the result of using Dre's music as his personal, completely literal moral compass.
• Artistic Stimulation: In "My Darling", Dre uses this as justification to persuade Shady to take up drugs again, complaining that when he got clean he 'became a lot softer'.
• Badass Longcoat: Dre wears one in the video for "Without Me" (as Dre flat-out refused to dress as Batman).
• Brief Accent Imitation: As Dre records his performance based on Eminem's guide vocal, Dre gamely tries rapping fast in one of Eminem's Relapse accents on "Hell Breaks Lose".
• Catchphrase: "Hell, yeah!".
• The Conscience: Plays one literally in "Guilty Conscience", as a sort of reference to his role as a moral guide for Eminem himself - as late as 2018 he nixed a song from an Eminem album for "going too far".
• Cowboy Episode: "Bad Guys Always Die" is a Western in which Dre meets Slim, who helps him fight a villain in order to find 2001.
• Criminal Found Family: In numerous songs, Dre and Slim celebrate their bond by doing crimes together, like taking drugs, shooting enemies, burning down the house of a woman who screamed at Slim for crashing his car while trying to park it in her garage while drunk, and discussing methods of disposing of Kim's body.
• The Ditherer: After spending far too long working on Detox due to his chronic (no pun intended) perfectionism, he finally embraces it on "I Need A Doctor" - "you can kiss my indecisive ass crack, maggots - and the cracker's ass".
• Even the Guys Want Him: In "Just Lose It", Slim hits on Dre, then backpedals by blaming it on Beer Goggles.
• Faux Yay: In "My Dad's Gone Crazy", Slim announces that this whole time, he and Dre have been "fucking with hats off". An irritated Dre comments "suck it, Marshall!".
• Fake Shemp: His voice is provided by Eminem on a few songs, most notably on "Can-I-Bitch" and at the end of Eminem's "The Watcher" freestyle. (A demo version of "Crack A Bottle" featuring Em's guide vocals also exists). Em also voices the Adam West-like "Andre" character in the intro to "Business" (who isn't supposed to sound like the real Dre, anyway).
• Gleeful and Grumpy Pairing: Slim's exuberant stupidity tends to bring out shreds of Dre's playful side, though it takes him a while to get there.
• Ham and Deadpan Duo: Dre's not totally deadpan but his need to appear cool doesn't let him emote as much as the Ax-Crazy Slim Shady.
• Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: In "Rain Man", Slim considers Dre an expert on what behaviour is considered gay and is in awe of his answers, which are just him mindlessly saying "yeah" to everything he's asked (a badly chopped sample from "Bitch Please II"). Things Dre considers gay includes playing golf with a friend.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Eminem's personas have a much better relationship with Dre than they have with the women in their lives. In "Guns Blazing", the two men commiserate over their various bad relationships with women and reaffirm that they have each other.
• "Hell, Yes!" Moment: In "Business", he contributes a "hell, yeah!!" adlib after Slim announces he's going to heroically save hip-hop.
• Hero vs. Villain Duet: "Guilty Conscience" is a concept song in which Dre plays the conscience of various characters as Slim Shady attempts to convince them to rob, rape and kill people.
• Homoerotic Subtext: At times, sometimes as Gay Bravado (mocking the baseless and racist rumours that Eminem slept with Dre to get his success), and sometimes to reinforce the depth of love the two men have for each other.
  • The pair of them are compared to Ho Yay invokedicons Batman and Robin, Kirk and Spock, and even Marshall and Kim.
  • In "I Need A Doctor", Eminem says "you picked me up, breathed new life in me" - a Kiss of Life.
• The Idol's Blessing: Gives this to Eminem early in his career, which is mentioned in numerous songs.
• Leitmotif: He's associated with the G-Funk whistle. In "Rain Man", little G-Funk whistles appear in the background once 'Rain Man' starts quizzing Dre. He's also accompanied by one in "My Darling" after the Monster gets him on the phone.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: In the music video for "Godzilla", Dre and Slim Shady operate on Eminem - using booze as anaesthetic - to detach his mouth from his body, where it flops around erratically on the floor speed-rapping.
• Musicalis Interruptus: Falls asleep in the middle of "Rain Man", causing the beat to disappear for a while until Slim rouses him.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: Often gets cast as Slim's shrink or Dr. Feelgood in songs and music videos, but as he doesn't have any actual doctorate qualifications he's rarely very helpful.
  Slim Shady: Dr. Dre? Don’t just stand there! Operate!
• Not So Stoic: In the music video for "Without Me", Slim chair-dances in the Batmobile while Dre continues glowering ahead coolly. At the end of the video, Dre joins in with the goofy dancing.
• Not Wearing Tights: Allegedly, Dr. Dre refused to dress up as Batman to play off Slim-as-Robin in the "Without Me" video. So he wore an outfit similar to Blade instead.
• Older and Wiser: Several songs Em wrote for him centre around the idea of him being the comic-book hero of the N.W.A beef melodrama that Eminem eagerly consumed in his youth, now grown up and supporting a new generation of "little gangsters".
• Only Sane Man: Along with Paul, he's one of only two characters in the Slim Shady mythos who's not completely fucked in the head (the ending of "Guilty Conscience" not withstanding), often playing the eye-rolling straight man to Shady's bizarre antics.
• Platonic Declaration of Love:
  • Slim's verse in "What's The Difference" opens with him announcing that he loves Dre and will kill anyone he needs taking care of. Dre returns the sentiment, offering to help him dispose of Kim's body if he ever decides to actually kill her. It's cuter than it sounds, especially coming off the back of Dre's verse in which he expresses regret about the awful and sad mess of beefs that N.W.A turned into, his love of his fellow group members, and his intention to be a bigger man than that in the future.
  • Both men declare their love for each other in "I Need A Doctor", with Eminem saying "you breathed new life in me", and Dre remarking that nobody else stood by him other than Slim - "all I need is him".
• Promoted Fanboy: invokedThe fanboy promoter. N.W.A were a formative group on Eminem growing up, and under Eminem's pen, Dre takes on the role of a stalwart guiding hip-hop into his image by mentoring those who grew up on his music.
• Psychedelic Comedy Bromance: "Can-I-Bitch" is an extremely silly story about Slim and Dre getting a bomb threat at the building from a Loony Fan, then going off to beat him up by driving to Canada in the Batmobile, getting into a scrap on the way with an unkillable Jermaine Dupris.
• Reformed Criminal: Under Em's pen, a feature of his persona is that as domesticated as he might seem, you don't want him to turn back to the gun-toting militant of his N.W.A days. In "Guilty Conscience", he protests that Grady shouldn't get violent because "he don't need to go the same route that I went"... before immediately agreeing that Grady should shoot his wife.
• Running Gag: Many of Dre's productions end with an adlib from Eminem saying "Dr. Dre," before giving a year. At first the year was "2001", in reference to Dre's album 2001, for a song that came out in 2000. Gradually, Dr. Dre's year extends further and further into the future, to the extent that the 2020 song "Discombobulated" ends with "Dr Dre, 2050".
• Slipping a Mickey: In the second verse of the Eminem/Dr. Dre song "Guilty Conscience," Em, as the Bad Angel, has slipped something into a 15-year-old girl's drink and is pressuring the guy to take advantage of her. Dre, being the Good Angel, vehemently objects to this.
• Soprano and Gravel: A variation, where the higher pitched voice is the harsher. Dre's voice is deep and powerful, but it has a more traditionally pleasant tone than Em's, reflecting his more mature personality. Eminem - while his voice changes dramatically between albums - has a high-pitched and boyish voice, but it's also nasal and displays obvious influence from Punk Rock vocal technique. (Appropriately, it was Dre who first taught Eminem how to Metal Scream, and encouraged him to incorporate more of a rock sound to his rap delivery).
• The Stoner: Several of his appearances are about him and Slim smoking up, and occasionally popping X in the booth.
• Take That, Critics!: Dre's verses in "Forgot About Dre" are a furious rant about people who think he 'fell off' (penned by Eminem, a man who has made three albums dedicated to insulting his critics).
• Ten Paces and Turn: Subverted in Dre's and Eminem's "Bad Guys Always Die".
  Dre: He was shady; I could tell by the look on his face
  He said "Take ten paces"; shit, I took eight
• Too Upset to Create: In "I Need A Doctor", Dre attempts to get over the grief and failure of confidence that held him back from finishing Detox. ^note He never finished Detox... but he did make Compton.
• Unexpectedly Dark Episode: All of Em and Dre's collaborations are defiant and lighthearted until "I Need A Doctor", an overwrought Emo-pop banger addressing the death of Dre's son, Dre tortured by nearly a decade of writer's block, Slim screaming at Dre to remember who he is and crying over how much he loves him, and Dre regretting how everyone he loves gave up on him except Slim.
• Unexplained Recovery: In "The Real Slim Shady," Slim claims to have kidnapped and murdered Dre, whose face appears on a milk carton in the video. (This is probably the aftermath of the incident in "Criminal", in which we hear Slim shooting a Bound and Gagged Dre in the face with an assault rife). Yet the good doctor has returned alive and well since.
• While You Were in Diapers: "Forgot About Dre" ends on this image:
  But all you savage cats know that I was strapped with gats
  While you were cuddlin' a Cabbage Patch
• Whole-Plot Reference: "Bad Guys Always Die" dramatises Dre and Slim meeting, in a lyrical pastiche of Beastie Boys' "Paul Revere".

Paul Rosenburg

Anyway, somebody told me that, um... they heard a rumor that you got a new gun. Um, I know it's probably not true, but I just need to talk to you about that, so, um, gimme a call.

Paul "Bunyan" Rosenburg is Eminem's long-time manager, lawyer, fellow hip-hop fan and a capable rapper himself. Both Eminem and Paul - and even outside observers - have analogised their relationship to that of a child and an adult, with Paul's job being to keep Eminem out of trouble, provide moral guidance, reign in his legendary Hair-Trigger Temper, and keep him from getting his hands on firearms or sharp objects.

As a character, Paul tends to appear on skits on Eminem's albums, with a few mentions in his music.

Tropes applying to Paul in Eminem's music:

• Beleaguered Assistant: In "Ass Like That", he's helpless to protect Slim from getting hauled off for his rampant sexual perversion because he's too busy mopping up Eminem's previous mess from when he started beef with Michael Jackson.
• Benevolent Boss: Unlike Steve, whose interactions with Eminem are always abusive, Paul shows some genuine affection for Eminem and is more disappointed by his behaviour than condemnatory of it.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Paul's appearances on Eminem's albums take the form of phone calls in which he's trying to talk Eminem out of doing something dangerous or absurd, such as getting a gun when he's banned from having them, or driving over to the houses of people who made fun of him on the internet.
• Dude, Not Funny!: He's usually at least tolerant of Eminem's antics, but finds the lyrical content on Relapse so indefensible that he quits.
• Failure Is the Only Option: It's rare that he gets Eminem to behave himself for very long.
• Never Speak Ill of the Dead: Is pushed into abandoning Em on Relapse after hearing him make jokes mocking the already off-limits Christopher Reeve after his death.
• Only Sane Man: Paul is without a doubt the sanest character in the Slim Shady mythology, which also makes him the designated killjoy.
• Parental Substitute: Eminem describes Paul's role as being 'the Dad'.
• Pulled from Your Day Off: In "Tone Deaf", a song in which Slim tries to wind up his internet haters, Paul asks for Christmas off (implying he doesn't want Slim to ruin his holidays by dropping another song he'll have to do damage control over). Slim tells him 'no', before singing a song to him about how he can't hear or understand a word he says.
• Shoo Out the Clowns:
  • On The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show, Paul's appearances come after runs of especially nasty horror/comedy songs (SSLP: "My Name Is", "Guilty Conscience" and "Brain Damage"; MMLP: "Kill You" and "Stan"; TES: "Drips" and "Without Me"), and remind Em to tone it down a little. They serve to introduce a more mature and reflective track about Eminem's life and public influence (SSLP: "If I Had..."; MMLP: "Who Knew"; TES: "Sing For The Moment").
  • Subverted on Encore. After "Puke" and "My 1st Single", Paul worries that Eminem might be having some problems keeping it together and that he's heard he's planning something stupid and dangerous. What follows is two even sillier and more depressiveinvoked songs ("Rain Man" and "Big Weenie"), an insane response from an audibly shitting Eminem insisting he's OK - through an electrolarynx, in Michael-Jackson-themed word salad - and a final one-two idiocy punch of "Just Lose It" and "Ass Like That".
  • Subverted on Relapse, where Paul calls after the foul and button-pushing "Medicine Ball"... only he never even bothers to ask Eminem to tone it down, instead just announcing "I don't even have your back on this one, I'm done". The track that follows is "Stay Wide Awake", a horrific Slasher Movie fantasy containing several graphic rape scenes.
  • Paul goes back to his traditional role on Kamikaze, calling to remind Em that a whole album of Take That, Critics! Diss Tracks would get him trapped in a loop recording albums to insult people who hated the last album about him insulting people who hated the last album. His intervention leads into an Anti-Love Song and friendship breakup ballad portion of the album.
• The Stoic: In contrast to Eminem, he never shows so much a flicker of anger, getting at worst exasperated with him.

Steve Berman

Tower Records told me to shove this record up my ass! Do you know what it feels like to be told to have a record shoved up your ass?

Steve Berman is the President of Sales and Marketing at Interscope Records, Eminem's label.

On Eminem's albums, he makes appearances to mock the Executive Meddling Eminem faced to make more commercial, socially acceptable music (an incident of which, during the making of The Marshall Mathers LP, nearly got him fired).

Tropes applying to Steve Berman in Eminem's music:

• Amusing Injuries: Parodically subverted. In The Eminem Show, Eminem shoots him - just as he was about to praise his latest album - in a scene of total slapstick. Cut to Relapse, in which Steve reveals that after Eminem shot him, he required years of intensive rehabilitation just to retain the use of his limb.
• Boss's Unfavorite Employee: He's a good boss, just not to Eminem.
• Disproportionate Retribution: On his appearance on The Eminem Show, Eminem shoots him just before he tells him his (Kinder and Cleaner) new album is the best thing he's ever heard.
• Executive Meddlinginvoked: Makes his first appearance on The Marshall Mathers LP, representing the pressure Eminem faced to make a funny pop single in the same tone as "My Name Is". It introduces "The Way I Am", which explicitly calls this out... which is then followed by "The Real Slim Shady", the funny pop single Steve asked for.
• Glam Rap: Wishes Eminem would just make some saleable hip-hop about "big screen TVs, blunts, 40s, and bitches".
• Mean Boss: Openly insults and disparages Eminem and his music. In the music video for "The Way I Am", his attempts to get Eminem to rap about something more market-friendly than "homosexuals and Vicodin" are shown leading Eminem to attempt suicide.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: He's not actually that bad a guy - on The Marshall Mathers LP, the intensity of his reaction is because he's already had the CD he's trying to promote rejected by major retailers due to its content, and he thinks Eminem will cost him his job. On Relapse, while he's rude to Eminem about his drug problem, he's insulting him in the name of the people who lost their jobs due to his breakdown... and also, Eminem had shot him seven years previously.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: He's usually facing Eminem when he's in a contrite and reasonable mood, to give his foul language and demeanour room to fly.

Beefs

DeAngelo Bailey, Benzino, Canibus, Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon, Machine Gun Kelly, Moby, Christopher "Reeves", Triumph the Insult Comic Dog

Due to length, these have been moved to a dedicated page.