When I was a kid, I really hated Jimmy Neutron. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who would admit to liking him (and I think the inclusion of his father over him in that Nicktoons fighting game proves my point). But I REALLY hated him. Nickelodeon had its own forums back in the day; you had to be under 13? Maybe 18, whatever. You had to be a kid to post there and had to use a parental email to sign up. Sometimes I would catch my dad still logged into his yahoo account so with a little luck I managed to sign up without him knowing. I guess I was a public nuisance even back then because the first this I did was go to the Jimmy Neutron section to talk shit about the show. Mostly just saying he was dumb and annoying and that his hair looked like poop. But before long, I saw people doing Jimmy Neutron roleplay.

Initially I would just go into the thread and godmod and say dumb stuff like ‘Jimmy Neutron comes home and his mom slaps him’ or ‘on the way to school Jimmy Neutron steps in dog poo’. I loved the reactions this would get, whether they were OOC jeers to go away or IC nullification of what I did (I remember in particular the above examples being appended to ‘on accident’ and ‘but it was his robot dog’s so it was just bolts’ which…kudos for creativity). Eventually everyone started ignoring me, though so I instead starting answering solicitations to RP (usually people asking for someone to play Jimmy Neutron’s girlfriend) and I’d give them a normal start only to end up with her leading him to some kind of trap where Jimmy Neutron would suffer physical harm. Surprisingly this deterred my partner only a few times, it was alarmingly common for them to try to then take the RP to hurt/comfort or angst territory.

I quickly grew bored of that so I found crossover RPs in other Nicktoons sub forums. These would involve sometimes every Nicktoon you could imagine, often proposing the characters were all actors who knew each other off set. I would enter in as whoever wasn’t taken and start bullying Jimmy Neutron. Once I was CatDog and kept clotheslining him with my gross long body. In one particularly active one where everyone was taken I was the police fish from SpongeBob who beat him with their batons. Courtney Gripling gave him lice for some reason, I don’t remember the logic there. The Angry Beavers would drown him. Helga Pataki would just body him, being the most powerful Nicktoon obviously. Sometimes this would be met with annoyance but to my surprise (and what I felt was validation), most of the time other RPers would join in. House parties, picnics, beach meet ups, proms/dances would all just turn into a multidimensional beat down of Jimmy Neutron. I like to think these incidents are why Neutron isn't in the NickToons fighting game.

However, much to my panic I was eventually warned and informed that an email was sent to my father. Thankfully this was back in the day and he rarely checked his email thoroughly; so I was able to delete some tattletale emails without him seeing. I think he assumed those were spam at first because he knew he hadn’t signed up for Nickelodeon. Things were good for awhile; some of the Nicktoons v JN RPs were so good that I ‘novelized’ them and spammed the Jimmy Neutron subforum with the hateful posts. Often they’d get reposted, sometimes with angry comments saying whoever wrote the text was a psycho; other times by people who thought it was funny and wanted to perpetuate it. Unfortunately this lead to my account being banned and given that I had to use my dad’s email and wasn’t allowed to have my own, I couldn’t easily make an alt. I tried to appeal to Nickelodeon via email but to no avail.

So, instead I found the Jimmy Neutron ‘fan’ mail email and started sending it my hate posts/fics/whatever you’d call them. I got in character form emails from ‘Jimmy Neutron’ saying generic stuff like ‘Hi, I sure liked your email. I am a boy genius; gotta blast!’ which made me so mad that I responded to all of them with all of the curse words I knew, cussing out the Jimmy Neutron bot. This would be one my downfall because my dad saw these profane emails in his ‘sent’ folder. He was PISSED. I was banned from using the computer/internet in his home (mistakenly believed to be where I’d learned these words) essentially until technology became so ubiquitous that he couldn’t keep it from me. But, things were back to normal for me when I went back to my mom’s.