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Kid Bitter is possibly the most bizarre thing on my current webseries radar. The channel centers around a bit of a psychopathic manchild with a passion for brag rap just doing whatever he wants to. That is the plot. It’s truly something great if you like off-beat humor and/or stories and characters that aren’t really supposed to be good or likable.

After enjoying these antics for a good few months, I decided to reach out to the creator, and he agreed to do a small interview.

If the series sounds up your alley and you haven’t seen it yet, I highly suggest watching it before reading the interview. You can find the series here. But if you’re good, we’re good.

Q: Can you, in your own words, describe what Kid Bitter is about from the perspective of the creator?

A: kid bitter started as a tool to allow myself to be someone unlike myself when I wrote raps. I was originally inspired to write raps after listening to Childish Gambino’s EP. I noticed that he used a setup/punchline style and, having dabbled in stand-up comedy, I thought I might be able to grasp rapping more than I expected. So, I wrote a rap over the Freaks & Geeks instrumental. It sucked.

I wrote another one over the Be Alone instrumental. It was a rap about the struggles I had with bonding with my father and how it affected my entire demeanor. There was a line in there. It was truly awful. “Kid bitter, think himself as critter.” I hated that line the more I thought about it, but I liked the sound of kid bitter. So, I kept it.

I would write in my own personality, but turned up to ten. I’m antisocial, so kid is a sociopath. I have trust issues, so kid has become someone who can’t be trusted himself. I am immature, so kid is…well, a kid. The more I wrote raps, the more I tried to embody the name itself. Someone childish and someone angry. I used the name as my handle on social media and gaming platforms, but I started to notice that constantly trying to write that way was harmful to my psyche. So, I changed my name on most platforms to KidBetter, but grabbed the name on a few different social media platforms just in case I thought to go back to use it.

Three years went by. I kept writing raps, but just to keep myself entertained. Then, I moved away to college to study film and theatre. I stopped writing. I became more lonely and more depressed than I had ever been before. I had lived at home for all these years before then and, now that I had freedom, I was still just the same lonely lump I always was. I wasn’t even using the alone time to hone a craft. I was just drinking, jerking off and playing video games.

At some point, I stopped paying attention in class and started writing raps again instead. They were very angry and filled with self-loathing. Instead of being cartoony representations of my frustration with the world, they were dark diatribes about why I wasn’t worth a life. Looking back, they were practically suicide notes.

Still, I always told myself that it would be a step backwards in my life if I moved back home. Then, my mom told me she was going to have to get heart surgery. I moved home to help her recover and found that I felt more purpose in that than I had any of the work I was doing at school.

So, I moved back home permanently. I felt good about it, believe it or not, but I still felt bad about something. All these years, I had told myself that it would be bad if I moved back home, but it was the best thing to happen to me since I moved out. I felt like a brat for thinking like I had. I thought about the raps I had written recently. While my mom was in the hospital (actually, for a car crash unrelated to her heart issues), I wrote a rap about all the pent-up feelings I had; My desire for happiness, my unwillingness to change, and my penchant for doing dumb shit that hurt the people around me in hopes that it made me look tougher than I actually am. You can hear it on the mixtape. It’s called No One Need.

When I was done, I felt better than I had in years. I realized that I needed to keep writing. It was my outlet to get all the bad in me out. So, that’s what kid bitter became: all of my badness. Everything wrong that I do, think, and feel. There are also parts of the character that are meant to satirize brag rap and internet culture, but these elements are still filtered through the perspective of a unrepentant manchild and that perspective remains central as I start to branch out into other topics.

Q: You’ve remained pretty under the radar. Is there anything out there related to the series that to your knowledge, nobody has noticed yet?

A: It seems like my biggest issue in making this series has been getting followers of one medium to the others. I only have 77 subscribers on YouTube, but that’s still a hell of a lot more than the 5 followers I have on Twitter, the twentysomething likes I have on Facebook, or the 11 listeners I have on SoundCloud.

Still, there isn’t a ton of content on those outlets. I was hoping more people would try to interact with kid on Twitter or that more people would actually give a shit about my music. Oh well. I guess it’s all been noticed, but it hasn’t exactly spread like I expected it to.

Q: Would you rather fight a hundred rabbit-sized eldritch gods or one eldritch god-sized rabbit?

A: I mean, an Eldritch god wouldn’t be restrained to any sort of size, right? I’m pretty much fucked either way. To be clear, let me paraphrase Jake Roberts. If I faced either a hundred rabbit-sized eldritch gods or one eldritch god-sized rabbit, I could be in a tank and armed with a fully loaded gun. I’d still jump out and shoot myself. I don’t want to wound the anomaly and piss it off.

Q: In the video “drop” you utilized a bit of cinematic shots and editing that weren’t in the whole vlog/found footage style. Was this mostly because you liked how it looked, or was trying to subtly demonstrate that it was indeed actually a series the main motive?

A: I actually purchased a DSLR and started shooting the series with it, starting with the rap in back. While I still wanted to do found footage segments, I also knew that I wanted to incorporate more action into the show. I’m not exactly rolling in cash, so I didn’t want to risk breaking my new camera falling over myself. I figured the DSLR would allow me to have more control over the image produced, so I could go for a more cinematic look and also work in the additional action seen in drop or box (for the editor).

Also, there’s a storyline reason for it. I feel kind of weird admitting that because I don’t know if the storyline is still heading that way, but there’s been some foreshadowing in regards to whose point of view we’re seeing the cinematic sections of the show from. Without giving away too much, box (for the editor)’s rap is directed towards this figure and hints toward their identity/role in the series. Also, there is a very specific detail in drop that basically spells it out.

Q: You made an entire mixtape for the character of Kid Bitter. How’d that process go? How’d the idea come about?

A: I actually conceived the idea of a webseries based on kid bitter as a promotional tool for my raps. I was a huge fan of the way Cloverfield used an ARG to familiarize viewers with the backstory of the attack on Manhattan and the characters seen in the film. Initially, I thought I would just make some kind of web presence for kid as a character, but that quickly became more of a narrative after I made neighborhood tour.

Anyway, over half of ultrasound was already written when I decided to actually release a mixtape. I met Dylan (The Music Man/LOTI) in a chatroom for the 10 Cloverfield Lane ARG. We eventually found out that we lived within an hour of each other and started talking more often. He told me he made music. I told him I wrote raps. He said he mostly makes rap instrumentals. So, I sent him some stuff and it turns out we matched stylistically. Around this time, we were also working on an ARG based on 10CL called ETRA. He told me I should come out and record some stuff. I was pretty nervous about the idea, but ended up recording a song (high on rest) during a recording session for The Official ETRA Podcast.

I hated it. I intended for my delivery to sound robotic to reflect the lyrics’ depression-based content. I thought it came off very wooden. I was going through some stuff at the time and I think I wasn’t in the right mindset. When I heard it again, I thought it actually sounded pretty much right on and the fact that it actually made me depressed when I heard it was perfect.

I didn’t record for a while and wrote more stuff in that time. Those bars made up the rest of the tape. The recording process became easier once I got more used to hearing my voice on a beat, but it was pretty slow at first. Overall, the recording process took a whole year. Way too long. I sat on the tape for a few months after that, worried about what people would think when I released it.

Then, I released it and nobody really listened to it, so I guess I didn’t have anything to worry about.

Q: Is there any advice you want to give to anyone who wants to make a webseries?

A: Starting with a cliche, just do it. I started off with my cell phone and that’s it. No editing software. No lighting. No sound equipment. Just me, my cell phone, and a significant lack of shame.

Other than that? Plan ahead. If you know where you’re going, it’s much easier to know where to start. Look at TribeTwelve. Adam Rosner pulled off a superb twist just by including a subtle audio cue in a video that only became relevant over a year later.

And don’t be afraid to be unoriginal. No story is original anymore. We’re all just retreading the same plot structures and character arcs over and over again. The part of the story that is unique is the creator’s perspective. If you communicate your perspective honestly and earnestly, that alone will make your work unique.

I greatly enjoyed having this guy “on” if you can call it that, and I encourage you to check what he does out. As always, below is a directory of every link associated with the topic, and if you have any feedback or thoughts of any kind relating to the blog itself, head on over to @PuzzlingMatters on Twitter.

Kid Bitter:

YouTube: Here

Twitter: Here

Facebook: Here

Instagram: Here

Soundcloud: Here

Ricky Davis:

YouTube: Here

Twitter: Here

Instagram: Here