Some trolls experience buyer’s remorse, Margera says, chuckling. He says a man from Texas recently emailed the morning after spending $5,000 sending variations of the message, “Wake up, pussy!” He pleaded his case: He was drinking and blacked out. Margera wasn’t sympathetic. “Eat a dick!” he said. “That’s what you get.”
The team welcomes me into the control room, where several other producers are diligently clicking away behind custom multi-monitor displays. The fish mill about on their screens, flitting from feed to feed. I can hear their footsteps overhead.
The control room evokes an insurgency’s bunker, or the lair of a trashy supervillain—it’s all screens and crumbs, guitars and whiteboards, cables and empty cans and canisters of pepper spray. At least eight producers scurry around the largely windowless space or spin in their chairs. Neptune gives me the tour: One configuration of monitors displays the inside of the house, another the outside (to provide advance notice of the cops, when the fans call them as a joke); one desk controls sound effects and ads, another the paid fan messages. Much of this, I’m told, was coded using AI. I ask where the team sleeps. Neptune points to couches and the floor underneath his own desk.
“Luckily the carpet is nice and soft this season,” Ottman says.
“I like sleeping on the floor,” says Taylor, who wears a knit cap, an untucked dress shirt and Japanese-seeming slippers. He has a full beard and dark, tired eyes.
“It’s nice and debasing,” Neptune agrees.
“It’s punishing,” says Taylor. “I don’t want to sleep on a bed anymore.”
“I don’t deserve it,” says Neptune
“I don’t fucking deserve it,” Taylor echoes. “When we’re filming, I feel so masochistic. It’s like, fuck it.
“Fuck my stupid life,” Neptune says. “I’m just an idiot who sleeps on the ground.”
They both laugh, then fall silent. Just then, a printer beeps in the corner, and fresh pages jolt out. With an assist from ChatGPT, they’ve written a love song for one of the fish named Landon to sing. Landon, in his early twenties, is a janitor from Wisconsin who, I know from watching the show, is the team’s favorite cast member to torment. A few days earlier, Taylor had challenged a drunken Landon to a boxing match and viciously beaten him to the ground.
The previous night, Landon had gotten drunk again and spent many hours begging another cast member, Vimp, to kiss him. Today he’s experiencing a lot of regret, and the producers want to make sure he doesn’t give up on the storyline.
“Do we want this to end with Landon getting his kiss?” Taylor asks the room.
“I want it to end with it getting worse and worse and him never getting his kiss,” Neptune says. Everyone agrees. They decide to tell Landon, who is naturally trusting, that Vimp is simply playing hard to get. Lyrics in hand, Neptune and Taylor ascend the staircase and appear moments later, in miniature, on the monitors. Vimp is off camera, in the bathroom. They pound on the door, shout, “CHOP CHOP!” and then find Landon, who is curled up on a couch, hungover and sad. All day the viewers have been taunting him, but now a few are trying to comfort him.
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