This Post is Not About Fritz the Cat

 There will be spoilers for Fritz the Cat.

 

Regarding the previous spoiler tag: No, this post is not really about the movie, but I will talk about it anyways. Because I need to justify putting this post on the blog. This is a blog for archival of essays and reviews, and if I want to talk about anything, I need to make it into an essay or review. The movie is the veichile for the rest of the post, and for that reason, I dont consider it essential that you watch it in full before reading this post. If you do want to watch it, please go ahead, because it is genuinely a good time. 

Anyways, nothing in this post is edited. As usual, if you see any typo, please point it out to me. 

 

Today is 10 of July of 2026. My twitter account has been restricted. The given motive was "Inauthentic Behavior". My goal with the account was always simple: Create as much engagement as possible, participate in as many discussions and leave as much of a presence as I can. Because, as an artist, as a critic, as a person, the only way someone like me could leave a mark in the world and build a following would be to become someone known for their personality. I never really kept track of my follower amount, because at the end of the day, the only thing I cared about was that it would be higher with each passing day.

It is the most selfish admission I could probably give. I will not lie and say that I was not acting mostly out of self interest. Because that is precisely the truth. My one goal has always been to build an audience and reach, because that is how you get your voice to be heard. And did it work? Well, I had some retweets, I got some so-called "twitter bangers". But I have friends who could score way more than I ever could, and who did that by just tweeting naturally and building a following without any pressure. People who really didn't want to be on social media, yet somehow attracted the most attention, while all that I got were my once-in-six-months 100 like posts. Something that I feel a lot of my friends don't even get. Well, whatever I had, its now lost. My contacts with authors and creatives I enjoyed will need to be restablished, and anyone else whom I only knew from that site will have to be found through some other illusive method. My account might still exist, but for all intents and purposes, its been all zeroed out.

And, alongside that, was my media thread. With over 60 entries by that point.

This post is not really about Fritz the Cat. I just want to talk about my personal grievances (as you can very clearly tell) and I will use this movie as my outlet.

If I were to review this movie in there as I normally would, ir would probably be something like this: The title of the movie first, then the year in which it was released (I had a genious punchline in mind with reading the entire Epic of Gilgamesh and putting it in there as dated 2100 BCE. I'm never doing that, I guess), then it would follow with the line: "I'm slowly being convinced that the 70s may have been the best decade for moviemaking, or at least my favorite. The era just has an energy that nothing else really captures to me". You know, something that is as nondescriptive of my actual thoughts as my usual media thread posts were. A blurb that tells you something just vague enough that it relates to the movie, and gets people to agree, but to the point that it is hard to parse the writer's actual intentions. Something designed to spark interest without actually being of use. And at the end, of course, there would be my score: 8/10. A 5/10 is a neutral opinion on me, and any piece of art I engage with can go higher or lower depending on how much I enjoy it, usually by virtue of what it makes me experience rather than any objective metric of quality.

 

And I enjoyed Fritz the Cat a lot. Its a very stylish animated movie that weaves all of its short vignetes in a way that is narratively satisfying as the journey of this character. Its the perfect representation of a guy whose life has been stuck in a rut in college and, as a result, ends up going from place to place trying to make a name for himself or enjoy life. Its a fantastic movie in how it builds up to the escalation of the violence caused by Fritz and the ways in which he denies accountability for his actions, leading into an ending that makes it clear that someone like him will never change as long as he continues to never believe in anything to live a comfortable life.

Now, notice how none of this could ever fit in a twitter media thread? Yeah, exactly. Thats the issue. Catering your thoughts on anything into short-form content is bound to force you to simplify any discussion you want to have about the subject matter into its most easily spreadable, memetic form. When it comes to media threads, designed to follow a formulaic structure, you are guaranteed to never see anything actually insightful in these. Thats why people just make them be funny. Because this format is better suited for punchlines, so all your opinions gotta be dressed as if they were some disposable zinger you'd see in amateur screenplays. Thats what I was doing for the longest time. Until I got sick of it and decided to try and work within the format, which led me to writing reviews that meant absolutely nothing. It was nice to be reminded of everything I did that year, but frankly, I wonder how forgettable a lot of these entries truly were if I needed a physical log of them all.

Anyways, as you can imagine, media threads were a trend, and it was a trend I tried to hop on so that my tweets would go viral, like I had seen other media threads go. It never occurred, most of the time people didn't even react to them, and the few who did were friends whom I usually had sent my thoughts on anyways. Having all these images ready was good for making tier lists at the end of the year, but I was incredibly sloppy in handling these, too. In fact, I never got around to do my 2025 one, and I suppose I never will now. 

The other reason to have them would be as a pure ego boost. The same way it feels nice to have a million twitter likes or followers, it felt nice to have an absurdly large ammount of media consumed in one year. But really, there is something unique about knowing that you have a way larger knowledge on art compared to all your friends, specially when all of them are either artists or generally focus their lives on appreciating this kind of art.

Yeah, well that vice ruined my life.

 

June 25th was the deadline for the delivery on all college work on two different disciplines in my college course (game development). I had forgotten at the time that, one day prior to it, June 24th, Deltarune Chapter 5 would have come out. Had I been smart, I would have had everything else sorted out by that day. But to make long story short: I have no discipline, barely any self restraint, and can only work in either sponatenous fits of mania, strict deadlines, or under constant stress from the people around me. So obviously, the easiest way for me to focus was to leave all my work to just a few days before it was due, a plan which had to be changed because, as anyone can confirm, I had spent the last half of a decade doing theorizing and engagement-baiting with the Deltarune community in particular. One of the largest fanbases in gaming, one that highly rewarded the kind of pseudo-intellectual theorycrafting I engaged in, and one that I made sure to be active on whenever new content came out.

Well, Chapter 5 came out and I didn't like it. I still don't. I wasted the whole day playing 7 hours that I did not once find enjoyable, instead of actually doing my college work. As a result, only one of these disciplines got its work finished, and the other had been flunked.

You might think this story is unique, but no. It had been the third semester in a row where something like this happened. I joined college in 2022, I should have finished it in 3 years, and now I'm on my fourth year there because I can't bring myself to finish anything on time, or work on anything unless I'm pressured to. The deadline before I'm flunked out of this college for real is 5 years, by the way.

 

As you can tell by my use of images from this clip in particular, there is one scene in Fritz the Cat which strung a particularly high note with me given my personal experience. The scene where Fritz, this college slacker who does nothing but party with women (something I never did) and wax poetic of his own life (something I always do) goes on a huge monologue, accompanied by very good use of budget-saving abstract visuals, about the disillusionment he has had with the college life that he had chosen to go into. It is never clarified what his major is in the movie, though given the context of the scene it is likely to be an academic pursuit like philosophy or literature, but to him, the desire to study on this subject that he had initial interest in, and is probably still engaging in, has long since died by his own repulsion towards the idea of comitting to anything. Of reaching any conclusion by fully following with a path in his own life. Because he realizes that there is way more to his life, that he could be engaging in so much more adventure than devoting himself to the poetics that he loved his whole life. Living in endless adventure that leads to no result.

So, in a fit of mania, he decides to set fire to all of his college papers, books and materials. Burning the whole building down in the process.

 

In the voiceover, the only thing he can do is nonchalantly remark on the subject as if it was simply an awkward mistake he happened to commit. He talks about how his parents will be pissed at him as if it were costume. As if burning down everything he has, and everything everyone else has for the matter, was a natural action for him that would lead to mild repercussion.
Basically, it is the most honest portrayal I have seen of what I do every last semester. And the reason why I am certain that, even if people don't admit it, they are sick and tired of my unchanging routine.

And I mean, so am I, its why I stopped going to my therapist since I was tired of going there every session and saying that nothing changed, feeling like nothing in my life ever moved. Something which got worse in my third semester, after it became impossible to continue to supply me with money to keep living on my own in the town where my college was located, making me move back in with my parents and do all my college course online. Actually, have I mentioned how much I hate online courses? They are the one thing that I can never follow to the end out of complete lack of enthusiasm. Not even college courses, just basically any online course I have. Because I feel there is a lot more that I could do to learn something online rather than just sit and watch someone explain something, hence why I need to be physically present in a class if I feel like I want to absorb anything from there. Its probably not a coincidence that this is when I stopped putting any real effort in college, or that I'm unmedicated as of the time writing this, or that anyone whom I describe my situation to seems to think that I might be suffering from longform depression.

I will be going back to a therapist soon. But yeah, the moral of the story is that Deltarune should never be your priority in life, I guess. And specially not any trend-chasing. You see this with Fritz the Cat. He spends the whole movie jumping from ideology to ideology. From being a hippie, to being a staunch revolutionary, to partnering up with literal nazis (whom he is longtime friends with) because they are all living lives way more interesting than he is. And they all get in way more trouble than he does.

 

Everyone who guides Fritz into a path in life either receives a major repercussion for their action, or are flat out killed. Duke the crow being the easiest example as the crow (as in, Jim Crow, since he is explicitly just a black guy who is portrayed as a crow to the audience given the context of the time) who guides Fritz down the streets of Harlam, where he attempts to organize a class revolution after being inspired by his actions. Which leads to the cops coming, which leads to Fritz naming them as the enforcers of the oppressive order in the world, which leads to the crows of Harlam enacting a revolt against the police, and the police responding by slaughtering them all in a massacre that seems to destroy the entire neighborhood. Something that Fritz gets no punishment for. His friend and guide, Duke? He gets shot in the heart and has one of the movie's most breathtaking sequences dedicated to the last remaining thoughts that pass him by before he collapses. No matter what someone as privileged as Fritz can do, the social gap between him and everyone else who doesn't have that blanket will always mean that he can screw up as many times as he wants, while everyone else is bound to get killed in the process.

Sometimes I wonder how many people I screwed up by just never growing into my own, but thinking about that is pointless since, if I'm certain of anything, its that the people whom I wronged just won't want to be near me to begin with. Oh well, nothing I can do about that.

Actually, want to know what my least favorite video essay of all time is?

 

I hate this video and everything it stands for. It is by far not the worst video essay I have watched. There were plenty that I thought were just extremely poorly produced or researched. But I have yet to see a video that is as venomous in its content and as cowardly in its approach as this one. It deliberately goes out of its way to go over every relevant aspect of James Rolfe's career, all his failings, all his successes, everything he has ever done, all with one purpose: To tear down on this guy that has half his talent and quadruple his success and influence. Something he admits himself, to an extent. But that would not be enough for a video, so instead, it opts for a unique approach: He becomes James Rolfe.

 

He starts dressing up as him, recreating his cinematic techniques, rebuilding his cumbersome, borderline unusable custom camera rigs. He overimposes the image of James Rolfe over himself utilizing a projector. He makes it as clear as possible that he feels like, despite all his talent and ambition, he is the same as this loser who keeps making videos only enjoyable by 14 year olds. And it is all played off as his attempt at understanding and respecting the man. A lolcow-style video at least tries to present "the other" as a creepy and repulsive entity you should never want to be and be ashamed of being similar to. This video has a unique approach: It creates a morally-free lolcow video by directing all insults towards yourself while making it implicit that you are also talking about someone else. It is the complete denial of the responsibility any critic has of making the day of the artist exponentially worse. And it is the most repulsive thing I have seen anyone do.
Because no, no matter how much you try to pretend you are, you are nowhere near the same level of clumsiness in filmmaking at his guy. You show it off yourself with how intentionally pretentious and artsy every decision you make in this video is, in the manner that it becomes clear to anyone watching that while James Rolfe might be a complete buffoon, you are a real artist who is playing the role of a buffoon. And yes, thats exactly what you are. A real artist. A real critic. Someone with an unimaginable amount of talent who chose to spend months of your time making a video about your envy of someone else. And not having the gull to admit that's what you did.

Because the least, the very least, thats expected of any critic is sincerity. Its the way in which you express your true feelings that will define your writing, true, but if you are writing something without being honest on your true feelings, all you will be doing is writing fiction. You don't need to believe in everything you write, you can easily formulate an argument you don't personally believe in and present it just as you would anything that you hold close to your heart. But you need to hold your face up and be ready to discuss everything you say with courage, and let your true thoughts on the matter shine, because otherwise you are no better than a preacher who scams old grandmas into a cult.

And you know what? I have done the exact same thing. I have been just as much of a coward when, after saying all of that about Umineko in my infamous backloggd review, I went on to say that "I suppose I have love". No I fucking didn't, if I actually had any love for any part of that game, I would have praised it within the review instead of trying to brush off all my criticism through the veil of neutrality.
I did the same thing Dan Olson did, I pretended to have empathy because claiming that you understand others is the easiest way to tear them down. Its what stops people from seeing you as a bully, and instead as someone who just wants to help and understand the person whom you are making a mockery of.

So you know what? Screw that, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm tired of masking everything I say, I'm tired of pretending I'm being kind when all I'm doing is taking advantage of others. Thats how I feel in real life, and I don't need to feel this in the virtual world too.

So, for the final line in this post, I will state the core thesis of this post:
This post is not about Fritz the Cat. Its about me. And Fritz the Cat is just a reason for people to read it.