First appearance: S4E4 — Death Dealers — The Scourge v Bone Daddy · watch it on YouTube
Bone Daddy is a six-foot-seven necromancer with luscious locks, a sleeveless coat and “the amount of charisma to fill a pool of your blood.” He raises the dead as his “children,” calls the arena his nursery, and fights alongside his favorite, the skeleton Darcy, who sometimes becomes a towering suit of bone armor around him. He has fought three Deathmatches and won none of them, but he lost each one in such grand, heartfelt and deeply strange style that he keeps getting brought back before the Acolytes.
Story
Death Dealers
Bone Daddy first came to The Void in S4E4 — Death Dealers — The Scourge v Bone Daddy, during the reign of The Shadow King. The Grandmaster opened a portal with her blood-soaked amulet in the throne room of The Dread Fortress, and he walked through to face The Scourge. Their feud began before a single blow landed, because each man insisted that going sleeveless was his signature look. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” Bone Daddy told him, and then trapped the Scourge in a neat little logic box: if he admitted Bone Daddy was better he was a loser, and if he didn’t he was a liar. He also called his rival a “dingus,” which nearly started the match in the throne room. When he heard that every goblin at the Fortress gets a pet chinchilla, he announced that his prize would join his army of the undead.
The arena was a dark dungeon used for “arm fights,” with old limbs strewn about. The Scourge summoned two jet-black flying reptiles, the Hammer and the Anvil, and turned into a giant constrictor snake. Bone Daddy explained that his name came “not just for my proclivities in the bedroom and in the dungeon,” then raised his skeleton children: Dabby, Dibby, Doobie, Dino, Gabi (also called Gibby), Dobby and Darcy, who still had a few strands of blonde hair and one green eye. The first one to swing at the Scourge missed so badly that Bone Daddy fired him on the spot. He gave a shoulder rub to Dobby, who had also missed, and reassured him that everyone gets nervous in front of a crowd. When the arena’s chaos turned to folding chairs, the Shadow King sprouted shadow wings, dove down and smacked Bone Daddy across the face.
When the Scourge brought up his sainted mother, Bone Daddy offered his condolences and added that “she did get to learn both reasons why I’m called the Bone Daddy.” His skeletons then climbed onto each other’s shoulders, Darcy elbow-dropped down through the stack, and all of them merged into one giant skeleton. When The Box of Chaos fell, Bone Daddy offered the shadowy creature inside it his complete collection of state quarters, all fifty, with two Wyomings thrown in. In return he got an amulet of health: a bleached skull pendant bleeding red down his chest to his navel. He then gyrated so hypnotically that the Scourge lost his focus. Later Bone Daddy told Darcy to open up, climbed inside her rib cage and wore her like a mech. The family moment soured when Darcy tried to stab the Scourge, overbalanced on a natural 1 and drove the wrong end of the sword into her own good eye. “I’m sorry I failed you, Darcy,” Bone Daddy said.
A cold breeze swept the arena, goosebumps rose, and “some shrinkage” set in: everyone shrank by a size and their voices went squeaky. “Look, it’s not always like this. I’m just tired, okay?” the Scourge protested. Then the Shadow King turned the floor into wooden planks floating on water under an electric dome he called the Hexadome. In those close quarters, the Scourge coiled around Bone Daddy and struck him with a holy smite (“If only the Bone Daddy used protection,” the Grandmaster sighed). Bone Daddy fell out of Darcy’s chest and asked her to “take your daddy for one last ride.” She carried him in her arms, “the way that he never carried her,” and he begged her forgiveness. A single tear fell from her empty eye socket, and she stepped off the edge of the platform into the void below with him. The Scourge, moved, vowed to raise Bone Daddy statues in every graveyard to the horizon. The Shadow King then pulled a bone from a dead body in the arena and rammed it down the Scourge’s throat, ripping through his mouth and shoving the bone and his whole arm down into his chest, so “a piece of Bone Daddy can be with you forever.” Afterward, Bone Daddy’s final words were a warning: “if the bones are rocking, he best not come knocking.”
BoneBound Brawl
In S5E10 — BoneBound Brawl — King Bofus v Bone Daddy (and Darcy), Thea summoned him to a frozen mountaintop to fight King Bofus. The Lord of Fate asked whether he hadn’t died last time. “Bone Daddy can never truly die in any way that matters,” he replied, at least as long as Darcy, “my true love,” nursed him back. Thea bowed at his feet. Bofus learned that Bone Daddy’s given name is Bonald Daddison, though only his mother is allowed to use it. Bone Daddy called himself “nothing if not a mommy’s boy.” He explained that he wears a sleeveless coat because his mother always told him to wear a jacket in the cold. When asked what Darcy is to him, he said the relationship “hasn’t really been set in stone yet.”
Thea handed out magic pom-pom hats. Bone Daddy’s pom-pom turned out to be made of teeth, stitched by his ex, Tina the Tooth Fairy. His mother turned up in the stands wearing a matching hat. He opened the fight with a cowboy whip charge, then wrapped the whip around Bofus’s neck from behind, and Bofus was mildly aroused: “Joke’s on you, I’m into this… Harder, daddy.” Over the next stretch Bone Daddy whipped away a volley of frogs that Bofus fired from his face, leaving each with a red welt on its butt cheeks (one winked at him, and he winked back), and refueled on Totino’s that his mother threw to him from the stands. He also lost faith in milk entirely after Bofus declared it was made up by “big milk.” Then he unleashed his signature move: “Death Armor Reborn in the Combat Yard. D-A-R-C-Y, Darcy!” Darcy’s ribs swallowed him whole and bones rose from the ground to build a mech, and its giant fist, “Daddy’s Girl,” drove Bofus’s head down into his body. Bofus reinflated, hit back with a Frog Splash, and tried to summon the Tooth Fairy through a portal, but instead his own ex fell through into the stands: Bone Daddy’s father. “My parents separated when I was four years old,” Bone Daddy explained. When he asked whether Bofus had fucked both his mother and his father, Bofus answered, “I left your mother alone. I went after your dad,” whom he called Craig, and Bone Daddy admitted he’d learned “everything I know from my father.”
Mech Darcy hurled Thea at Bofus like a basketball, and the sonic crack of her flight brought down the Box of Chaos. Bone Daddy fed it his sunglasses, since he had spares, and the shadowy figure inside awakened his “inner monster.” Pink and yellow fire raced between every bone of Darcy, and his flaming fist set Bofus’s pants alight. Bofus, in turn, pulled Morir’s Cataclysm and a ring that once belonged to the Arbiter from the Box. Finally Bone Daddy summoned his mother and father onto his shoulders and raised a tidal wave of bone that grew until it shadowed the whole mountain. The clash ended dead even, and both champions were spent. The wave grew beyond even his control. His father reminded him he had forgotten the only rule, to listen for the safe word (“water buffalo”). Bone Daddy’s life flashed before his eyes, and Darcy’s skull nodded down at him: it’s okay. The bones buried both champions in a mountain that was declared a monument to the battle. The match had no winner. Both were revived in the locker room while goblins picked bone fragments out of them, and Bone Daddy left one last lesson: “Never forget to say thank you, daddy.”
Bone Rust
In S5E13 — Bone Rust — Ruby Rust v Bone Daddy, Thea brought him back again, this time in a tavern against the snake Ruby Rust. Her revival magic left both champions glitching, and Ruby was still twisted inside out from the hunger. “These guys were dead half an hour ago,” the Lord of Fate noted. Bone Daddy pulled fire from the hearth with his “Bone Daddy Arcanum,” then ripped the bones straight out of the Acolytes in the stands, leaving “bags of meat” behind, and fused them into a shifting bone cage. When Thea asked whether he’d had a name before Bone Daddy, he thought of his mother and his father, Charles. “Bone Daddy’s always been Bone Daddy,” he said. He also revealed his patented hammer shorts, so short and baggy that “you might see a little bit revealed if I move too quickly” (Thea asked whether he’d brought his own snake to the fight). When a cursed morning coffee forced both champions to try not to poop themselves, Ruby shat out of his cloaca, but Bone Daddy held it in, thanks to practice and his “buns of steel.” He then swung off Darcy like a trapeze artist to whip Ruby’s skin open “like a hot sausage.”
When one of Thea’s band-aids ended up on Ruby’s cheek, Bone Daddy branded her a traitor: “Ruby Rust may be first, but you’re next.” Thea then let out the longest, loudest, stinkiest tuna-and-pickle fart of the night between the champions, and it coated both of them in pink glitter. At the Box of Chaos he traded ten pairs of unsold hammer shorts from the lining of his coat. His first prize was a vial holding the shadow of the Shadow King, which weighed heavily on him. After he complained, the figure dug out the Shield of the Golden King, and for a while the sight of a giant skeleton mech with a golden shield looked “anime as hell.” Then Ruby’s signature “big squeeze” landed on a terrible defensive roll, and the shield shattered.
Wrapped in Ruby’s coils, Bone Daddy wondered aloud whether it was time “to hang up the hammer shorts.” He offered to be assimilated if Ruby would only spare Darcy. Ruby dismissed her as “nothing more than a table,” and Bone Daddy’s fury returned: “No one talks to Darcy like that… She will outlast us all, even the Lord of Fate.” He threw both of them into the fireplace. Ruby, briefly restored to his true form, swallowed him whole like a constrictor, and Bone Daddy met the final crush with another dreadful roll. He was ground into bone dust. With his last gasp he punched a hand out of the snake and let go of one of Darcy’s finger bones. “I hope that finger bone can find her way home.”
Personality and Abilities
Bone Daddy is tall, pale and spindly. He wears a sleeveless coat, very reflective sunglasses (he always carries spares) and, when it suits him, the shortest and baggiest hammer shorts imaginable. He describes his build as “a single meatball on a stick.” He carries a whip and a flask of bone marrow, and he drinks only whole milk. He is a showman to the bone: he gyrates, monologues, plays a pro-wrestling heel, and calls himself “the despot of death, the dominator of the departed, the daddy of demise.” Under all the swagger he is a devoted son, a sentimental ex of the Tooth Fairy, and a father figure who insists he is “no absentee daddy,” even though the Scourge had his doubts.
His magic is all about bones. He raises skeletons and zombies, rips bones from the crowd to build swarms and cages, escapes grapples with “the patented bone swirl,” and throws fire from the hearth. His signature move turns Darcy into Death Armor Reborn in the Combat Yard, a bone mech with a giant fist called “Daddy’s Girl.” His most desperate move is a tidal wave of bone.
Relationships
- Darcy: His favorite skeleton “child,” “true love,” battle mech and the one being he truly cannot bear to lose.
- The Scourge: His sleeveless rival, who killed him and then vowed to build him statues.
- King Bofus: A man-frog who fought him to a mutual burial and turned out to be his father’s ex-lover.
- Ruby Rust: The non-Euclidean snake who swallowed him and ground him to dust.
- Thea: She revered him, then, as he saw it, gave his opponent a band-aid, and he swore she was next.
- The Shadow King: Smacked him with a folding chair from the sky in his first Deathmatch.
Memorable Quotes
- “And when you do that, you’re a loser, and if you don’t, you’re a liar.” (Death Dealers)
- “Darcy girl, I’m sorry. I done you wrong. I never got to do you right. Will you forgive your Bone Daddy?” (Death Dealers)
- “Bone Daddy can never truly die in any way that matters.” (BoneBound Brawl)
- “Death Armor Reborn in the Combat Yard. D-A-R-C-Y, Darcy!” (BoneBound Brawl)
- “You listen to me, Rust. No one talks to Darcy like that.” (Bone Rust)
- “The greats only become great when they get to go out on their own terms. And I decided too late that it was my time.” (Bone Rust)