One of the frequently occurring phenomenons these days that always makes me tingle with spiteful joy is when the internet shits its collective pants over some big movie/TV/book twist. Especially if it’s something I knew was coming and waited eagerly for countless minds to blow and tears to be shed. It combines my feeling of superiority with my need to feed off the sadness of others to stay alive. And there has never been a better instance of this wondrous thing than this past week when the most recent episode of Game of Thrones fucked everybody’s brain like a crossbow bolt through Robb Stark’s chest.

What? Too soon?

Twitter went apeshit. Tumblr (whatever the hell that is) wept. Buzzfeed ate its own face and then pooped it out and then the poop face started screaming obscenities. Memes a-plenty fired across the interweb tube system all lamenting the brutal deaths of numerous beloved fake people. One of whom has a great ass and is played by Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter.

The man’s been dead 24 years and he’s still making wonderful contributions to the entertainment world. Via her nudity.

And through it all I, upon my mighty pedestal made of the books the series is based on, laughed at all the silly plebeians below. Yeah, the Red Wedding was a bummer…when I read that chapter over a year ago during a field exercise! BOW BEFORE MY MIGHTY KINDLE AND THE PRECOGNITION THAT IT GRANTS ME, CRYING NERDS! I felt pretty much the same way once The Hunger Games came out (Peeta or Gale? Yeah, you wait and see how that turns out, bitches).

While powerful in its ability to see the future of TV shows and films, it does not hold up well when run over by a humvee. Believe me.

Yes, as children, when Bambi’s mom get’s gatted or Mufasa dies like a clumsy WalMart shopper on Black Friday it’s worthy of tears. But we’re grownups. These people got paid shitloads of money to be pretend murdered on camera and then went back to banging whatever extra still thinks you can trade dignity for fame without being related to Bruce Jenner. So, as such, I’ve been supping off the sweet cyber tears pouring forth from my laptop screen. I had planned on writing an update today mostly in this gloating vein and tie the recent TV tragedy to other fictional characters that nerds get all weepy over. Like when Joss Whedon shoved this heartbreaker/torso-slicer in the collective craw of his rabid fans:

P. D. Montgomery is now sobbing harder than if I’d run over his fiance if he’s reading this.

But shortly after I found that photo, a memory popped into my head and my heart dropped. My face fell. My erection softened. How could I  rake anyone across the coals when I, too, have known the sting of PBFCDDD (Post Beloved Fictional Character Death Depressive Disorder)? The realization that I was only lashing out to cover my own pain struck me like a gigantic metal spike fired out of a pneumatic canon from a Reaver spacecraft.

This was the worst thing that happened to me in 2005. The same year Hurricane Katrina killed 1,833 people.

The raging fires of my maniacal schadenfreude were now extinguished in a river of my own tears. And not just for dear Wash. Luckily for me, I could give a flying fuck for most of the other stuff Whedon’s done in his career, because that man has killed off more characters than the number of times he’s touched himself looking at footage of Summer Glau’s bare feet (I get it, The Avengers was good, but knock it off about Buffy and the rest of that crap. That show was ranked fourth on UPN during it’s final season. Know what else was on UPN in 2003? Exactly, nobody fucking does).

Behold, the man who unseated Quentin Tarantino as the most powerful foot fetishist in Hollywood.

But as much as Joss loves enraging the people that love him like a petulant teenage girl, he’s not the only one to twist the knife/gigantic metal spike. Earlier this year, Robert Jordan’s epic Wheel of Time saga ended after 14 books, 23 years, and the death of Jordan himself. While his writing was never as focused on the horrifying imagery that George R. R. Martin has an Eli Roth-esque boner for, the list of cherished dead in Jordan’s final book makes The Red Wedding look like a Hardy Boys story. It was brilliant, it was fitting, and it was utterly crushing.

Yet another weird looking dude with a beard who broke my heart.

Another long-running saga with it’s fair share of joy-shattering moments was BroCast favorite Battlestar Galactica. In the course of a mere four seasons and a kickoff miniseries, that show had a higher body count than most religious wars, and that’s not even including the countless off-screen deaths when everything that ever was ever forever exploded in the first ten minutes of the first episode. Every single death of a character on that show was so personal, so cutting, so real that I’m not convinced creator Ron Moore doesn’t literally feed off of sadness like I semi-jokingly claimed that I do.

“Oh, you think President Roslin’s cancer was cured? Well my oncologist, Dr Fuckyourhappiness, says otherwise.”

Again, all the deaths in that show from poor Billy eating a bullet sandwich at a cocktail lounge to Anders mumbling his way into the sun from inside a goopy bathtub were absolutely perfect in their context. But it makes them no less painful to sit through. So I must wipe a tear and tip my hat to these gents for knowing how to make even a cynical bastard like me give a shit about fake people on the TV box and the movin’ pictures. And I can’t judge those who were emotionally rocked by the latest horror show on HBO. Brought to us by yet another brilliant bearded weirdo.

Ugh, he looks like Harry Knowles ate the sea captain from Tintin.

You know, I’m seeing a pattern here. All these years, paranoid dickbags have been saying the Jews or homosexuals run Hollywood and are trying to use it to destroy society. But here, right in front of us, is evidence of what’s really going on. Who’s really using the media to get to us, weaken us, make us weep, destroy us from the inside. It’s the BEARDS! The fucking bearded have risen! Their terrible, furry visage is slowly rising up to blot of the light of all joy and happiness and blanket our collective consciousness with darkness and sorrow!

No…no, that’s…that’s crazy talk. Just coincidences, right? There’s no cabal of facial haired plotters working to take all my favorite books, movies, and TV shows and fill them with unrelenting sadness. Why, I can’t think of a single show I watch now that is controlled by…

Ah fuck.

Well, at least now we know what to expect if Community ever does a wedding episode.

“By the Gods, Roose Bolton got Britta!”