Bugbears
Bugbears belong to a group of boggles known as botherants - the kind that love irritating people. As their name might suggest, bugbears have a knack for identifying a person's pet peeves. Once identified, they'll mercilessly play upon them until they slowly lose THEIR MINDS!
If your biggest annoyance is running taps, a bugbear will sneak into your house and loosen your plumbing. If it's people who say 'literally' when they mean 'figuratively', a bugbear will encourage your friends to say it all the time. If it's crooked politicians who cosy up to big business because corruption is essentially legal now, a bugbear will... well - it won't do anything. Politicians have got that covered.
Bugbears came to the forefront of the public consciousness thanks to a mirrorquest called Celebrity Big Bugbear. This show marked the boom of so-called 'reality quests' - the productions which were to reality what bacon is to a low fat diet. Celebrity Big Bugbear marked a low point for the emerging genre. Interestingly, it only got lower from there.
While people had always watched live adventurers, such 'mirrorquests' had always focussed on the questing bit. Reality quests focussed on everything else - i.e. the tensions that arose around the camp site. Eventually, quest producers realised they could cut out the quest entirely and lock a bunch of adventurers in a dungeon together. With little to do beyond occasional tasks and challenges, the real adventure became not strangling one another.
Fearing that people wouldn't be sufficiently irritating, one quest producer had the genius idea of introducing a bugbear. This sent aggravation levels through the roof, which in turn sent ratings skyrocketing. The more agitated and obnoxious people behaved, the more watchable they became.
People especially liked to watch celebrities being subjected to this voluntary psychological torture. The rich and famous give off an air of being above other people, but Celebrity Big Bugbear made it obvious they were just as prone to losing their temper and tossing an axe at someone's head as the next person.
Celebrity Big Bugbear eventually got taken off the air after it became clear that bigoted celebrities lacked the brains to stop being bigoted even when recorded 24 hours a day. This led to many complaints. A lot of them came from the celebrity adventurers themselves who felt like the show that was famous for making their ilk look like dim-witted egomaniacs had treated them unfairly.
Creation Notes
In terms of legend, 'bugbears' belong to a group of similar beings that include 'bogeymen', 'hobgoblins', 'bogles' etc - all of which are obnoxious or murderous in some fashion. The word 'bugbear' has primarily lived on through the fact that it's another way of saying 'pet peeve'. I decided to combine the beastie with the word and create a boggle which lives to identify a person's annoyances.
Bugbears originally got a mention in the upcoming book The Fame Eaters, although the brief footnote in which they appeared has since been removed (I commissioned the artwork before making that edit!).
See Also
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| Bugbear by Zuza Gruzlewska |
If your biggest annoyance is running taps, a bugbear will sneak into your house and loosen your plumbing. If it's people who say 'literally' when they mean 'figuratively', a bugbear will encourage your friends to say it all the time. If it's crooked politicians who cosy up to big business because corruption is essentially legal now, a bugbear will... well - it won't do anything. Politicians have got that covered.
Bugbears came to the forefront of the public consciousness thanks to a mirrorquest called Celebrity Big Bugbear. This show marked the boom of so-called 'reality quests' - the productions which were to reality what bacon is to a low fat diet. Celebrity Big Bugbear marked a low point for the emerging genre. Interestingly, it only got lower from there.
While people had always watched live adventurers, such 'mirrorquests' had always focussed on the questing bit. Reality quests focussed on everything else - i.e. the tensions that arose around the camp site. Eventually, quest producers realised they could cut out the quest entirely and lock a bunch of adventurers in a dungeon together. With little to do beyond occasional tasks and challenges, the real adventure became not strangling one another.
Fearing that people wouldn't be sufficiently irritating, one quest producer had the genius idea of introducing a bugbear. This sent aggravation levels through the roof, which in turn sent ratings skyrocketing. The more agitated and obnoxious people behaved, the more watchable they became.
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Celebrity Big Bugbear eventually got taken off the air after it became clear that bigoted celebrities lacked the brains to stop being bigoted even when recorded 24 hours a day. This led to many complaints. A lot of them came from the celebrity adventurers themselves who felt like the show that was famous for making their ilk look like dim-witted egomaniacs had treated them unfairly.
Creation Notes
In terms of legend, 'bugbears' belong to a group of similar beings that include 'bogeymen', 'hobgoblins', 'bogles' etc - all of which are obnoxious or murderous in some fashion. The word 'bugbear' has primarily lived on through the fact that it's another way of saying 'pet peeve'. I decided to combine the beastie with the word and create a boggle which lives to identify a person's annoyances.
Bugbears originally got a mention in the upcoming book The Fame Eaters, although the brief footnote in which they appeared has since been removed (I commissioned the artwork before making that edit!).
See Also
Sign up to my mailing list below
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