Made this recently as a vent piece but it ended up being too funny to keep to myself. Viva La Bam was a big part of my teenage life, though looking back on it as an adult I realise that Bam Margera maybe wasn't the best role model for a British youth who watched way too much late night MTV. It did show me a thing or two about how to write a loveable asshole though.

After some recent discourse in a comment section about how Spice's vain personality had ruffled a commenter's fur I found myself remembering Viva La Bam's opening line: "What'll he do next?" "Whatever the fuck I want!" I couldn't help picturing this over the top reaction from Spice, rebelling against the idea that he has to be 'good' just because he's a protagonist. I laughed, I doodled it... and then I kind of kept going until it was a finished piece.

So this can be taken as a tribute to an MTV show I haven't seen in over a decade... but if you want to know what the venting was about, I've written up an explanation.

Warning, kind of a rant beyond this point:

There's been some discussion about how Spice fits when it comes to the protagonist role. In Sore Losers he is an outright antagonist, but in chapter 1 of Spice of Life he becomes a villain protagonist (Initially inspired by the Tumblr blog 'Ask King Sombra', if you can believe it!) His goal was to get back to the Contest Hall and exact revenge and reclaim his former throne as Beauty Contest Champion of Sinnoh, but to do so he had to help Cyn since he doubted he'd survive for long in the wild by himself.

It's after arriving in Clearspring he started to move into a more 'anti-hero role', or 'loveable asshole' as I mentioned earlier. He's selfish, he's uppity, he spends all his Rescue Team's money on himself. It takes time for him to learn to put others ahead of him on a regular basis, to actually become the hero he claims to be from the start.

Admittedly there's a lot of confusion with Spice's character because I often get art or write stories about him in his pre-Clearspring days where he's still essentially a villain protagonist, this can come across as if Spice's default is "Hypnotise and eat the competition so I always win", as opposed to this being a snapshot of him in the past which is fun to return to because of the many plots and stories you can get out of such a character. I've started to refer to this particular Spice as 'Contest!Spice'. Contest!Spice also appears in anything where the events of Sore Losers didn't happen, or happened in a way where Spice was able to continue to be a Contest Pokemon afterwards.

Clearspring!Spice, on the other hand, is Spice as he appears in the Clearspring canon, at the end of the events of Spice of Life. He cares about other Pokemon and wants to do his part as a Rescue Team member, not just for the fame but also for the sake of helping those who need a Rescue Team, as well as Clearspring as a whole. He looks back at Contest!Spice and feels regret about how he used to act. If you have the stomach for fatal vore I'd recommend my story 'No Substitute for Show Business' ( https://www.furaffinity.net/view/29765320/ ) which features Spice essentially confronting his past self through his Substitute Spyce. I think it really shows just how different Clearspring and Contest Spice are.

Anyway, just wanted to clarify the difference between the Contest Universe Spice where he's still a Contest Pokemon and a villain protagonist, and Clearspring Spice where he's more of a standard protagonist. Although if being an anti-hero is as simple 'not being a typical hero', I suppose you could call Clearspring Spice an anti-hero too!

Apologies for the long description, I might have to do a journal digging deeper into Spice's character at a later date, but for now please enjoy this picture of Spice holding a skateboard with a clever pun.