First appearance: S5E3, Eldritch Fangs - Ruby Rust v Robbie Clark and the Hunger · watch it on YouTube
Robbie Clark is a sunny, gee-whiz kid adventurer who fights crime alongside his best friend, the Hunger. The Hunger is a many-mouthed eldritch horror that lives in his backpack and is wired into his spine. Together they are out “stopping evil doers… and eventually assimilating all biological life into one unified, wonderful flesh sack.” The pairing of a boy who barely understands object permanence with a monster that speaks for the infinite made Robbie Clark and the Hunger a fan favorite. Their story turned out to be one of the stranger and more touching runs in the arena.
Story
Eldritch Fangs (Season of Fate)
Robbie first came to the arena during the Season of Fate, the timeline only the Arbiter lived through, when he ruled the Void as the Lord of Fate. In S5E3, Eldritch Fangs - Ruby Rust v Robbie Clark and the Hunger, Thea summoned him to face Ruby Rust, a coffee-drinking constrictor snake and coder. The fight took place on The Voiceless Mountaintop. Robbie introduced himself as a small-town boy who said goodbye to his parents and went on a big adventure, where he found his buddy. The Hunger introduced itself too: “I will consume you!” The Lord of Fate grumbled about the optics of a teenager fighting to the death, a week after an elderly champion. He called the boy neglected by parents who let him run off at ten. Robbie’s answer to “Champions, are you ready to die?” was “I don’t understand object permanence yet.”
The Hunger did most of the fighting. Its mouthy tendrils sucked the poison Ruby had spat in Robbie’s face right out of him (“the child must live”), and it chomped, threw ice-hard snowballs and popped Robbie out of Ruby’s coils like a cork. At The Box of Chaos, a tendril offered ten years of the child’s life. Robbie went pale and vomited up a pustule-red orb, “almost like a gross ball of yarn,” which the box creature swallowed. In return he got a small blue pill to “keep you going all night long,” with a warning to seek medical help if the Deathmatch lasted longer than four hours, and all of the Hunger’s tendrils suddenly went really turgid. When things got desperate, Robbie called on “the power of friendship.” The tendrils stabbed into his body, his eyes went black, and the Hunger entombed him in a single dark child-and-tendril creature. Later it sank a taproot out of his leg into the mountain to drink its life force, shrinking the peak by two inches. The Lord of Fate shouted that they had to pay for that, and Thea pointed out that the land was rented. For a second box deal, the Hunger vacuumed bits of Robbie’s liver and organs out onto the ground (“That’s really gross,” said the box creature) and got a rusty spoon.
The finish was pure horror-movie. Missed tendril spikes tore open a fissure that swallowed Ruby, and then the tendrils landed a natural 20. The Hunger unfolded like a zipper, and Robbie emerged “as if a butterfly emerging from a cocoon,” his clothes unusually clean, looking almost exactly as he had at the start. He chirped, “Oh, it looks like the hunger said that we’re going to consume you. That sounds fun!” The tendrils sucked up Ruby’s biomass, and the Acolytes gave the pair a standing ovation.
Ducks of Death (Season of Fate)
Thea brought the duo back in S5E7 — Ducks of Death — Robbie Clark & the Hunger v Bob the Barbarian to face Bob the Barbarian, a relentlessly friendly Florida man in jorts. They fought in The Duck Village. The cracks in Robbie’s head were starting to show. He remembered his last match only as “waking up and seeing a dead snake.” He said his memory went back “about yesterday” and was “full of blank spots,” and he didn’t know what an alien was. At the Box of Chaos the Hunger offered Robbie’s birthdays, little pearls of memory that the box creature gobbled (“Oh, yeah, I fucking love cake”). In return he got the Shield of the Golden King, shiny and purely ornamental. Thea gave him a pair of New Balance shoes. “I’ve never gotten new shoes before,” he said. When the Lord of Fate remembered Robbie getting new shoes on his seventh birthday, Robbie asked, “What’s a birthday?”
The Hunger whipped Bob across the pecs just above the nipples and vomited viscera and bits of a cat onto his jorts. After aliens had probed Bob’s ass, he dipped his hand deep into his jorts to throw his own shit at the boy as poison; it missed, and the Hunger ate the poop right off his hand. Bob landed brutal hits: a titanium fist to the sternum, toes in the eyes, a steel hairball, and a gator that snapped off Robbie’s leg. Between the blows, Bob kept talking to the boy about fan boats, gators and caring for each other. In one quiet moment their eyes met, and the fight drained out of Robbie, until the Hunger shredded over his eyes. “I prevent the child from connecting with another human,” it explained. When Thea offered Robbie a hug, the Hunger blocked her: “It’s mine.” Bob promised to free him: “I could be your dad in a different world… I care about you.”
In the end the Hunger seized full control: “You will join me and he will forget that this ever happened. He will be happy and he will be mine.” Bob called it a dirty bastard, and for the faintest second Robbie’s eyes cleared. “I think I want to be a Florida man too.” Robbie clawed his way out, took Bob’s hand, and the Hunger melted into bubbling ichor, leaving only a backpack behind. Bob won the match. Thea opened a portal to a rusty fan boat inscribed “Bob and Robbie,” and as the two left for Florida, Robbie’s jeans magically turned into shorts. In Dried Blood, Robbie’s message was that sometimes an adversary turns out to be an ally, “even if there’s some weird dark eldritch force jamming spikes into your brain.”
Ether Drifts (the Season of the Trials)
The Robbie Clark who arrived for S6 Ep3 — Ether Drifts Part 2 — Team A deathmatch (Atlas v Robbie Clark and the Hunger v Copycat) was the version from the real timeline, and he was still very much joined to the Hunger. He fought his own teammates, Atlas and Copycat, on an asteroid in The Ether Drifts. The winner would lead Team A for the Grandmaster. Robbie had already named the team, and he mentioned eating puppies, which “have a great amount of nutrients for their biomass.” That sent the Grandmaster off to keep Doug away from the arena. She also bet on him to win.
Atlas tore off Robbie’s backpack, and Robbie tried a lost-child act (“I just want to go home”). When that failed, he tilted his cap down: “you should have seen season one.” A new backpack erupted from his flesh, revealing he was not a human child, and the old one turned into a skittering insect that bit Atlas and stole his arm. Copycat transformed into the Hunger’s disapproving mother and grounded it. Robbie talked his friend down (“Do you remember when she made lemon squares?”) and let the sting drive him. He traded a copy of Everybody Poops to the Box of Chaos for a ring that had once belonged to the Arbiter, then kicked “mom” in the nuts.
Buried under the wreck of Atlas’s giant ship Mateship, the Hunger lifted Robbie’s broken body in an exoskeleton. It sprayed spores over Atlas, who grew a mouth (and, by implication, an exit port of sorts) and joined the collective. When Copycat became a black hole and threw everything she had at the entire arena, Robbie and the Hunger “have seen the void before and are unmoved.” The Grandmaster declared them the winner and the team’s leader. Robbie gave the team its official name: the Unbreakable Redacted Friends. Then, as his tendrils settled on his teammates’ shoulders, he whispered, “We’re going to take these motherfuckers down.”
Personality and Abilities
Robbie talks like a Saturday-morning cartoon hero, full of “Oh boy” and “G. Willikers.” He thinks nipples are gross, wishes for root beer and loves casserole. He stopped going to school “when I was too young” and admits he forgets things “because I am a child.” Whether that innocence is real or a mask became the question at the heart of his story. The Hunger has fed on his memories, his years and his organs. By the Ether Drifts he was cheerfully using sympathy as a weapon, and he openly called the Grandmaster and the Arbiter “the real meanies.”
In a fight, Robbie himself has only his child punch, his child kick and, when desperate, a kick to the nuts he learned in school. The Hunger has everything else: hundreds of tendrils with mouths, lamprey bites, spores that make enemies docile, regeneration, life-draining roots, and the power to entomb Robbie in a single monstrous form or float him “Akira-esque” and fire beams of friendship eldritch energy. It also keeps a sticker book it has been filling “for eons and eons,” stuck down with Gorilla glue.
Relationships
- The Hunger: his partner, his backpack and possibly his spine. It calls Robbie its vessel and insists the two “cannot be separated.”
- Bob the Barbarian: the Florida man who beat the Hunger and freed Robbie in the Season of Fate, then took him away on a fan boat.
- Ruby Rust: his first opponent, whose biomass the Hunger consumed.
- Atlas: a teammate he fought and absorbed into the collective, then led.
- Copycat: a teammate he called a friend while promising to recycle her biomass.
- Thea: summoned him to his first fights, gave him new shoes and tried to hug him.
- Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: bet on him and named him leader of the Unbreakable Redacted Friends.
Memorable Quotes
- “We’re here to save the day. Stopping evil doers… and eventually assimilating all biological life into one unified, wonderful flesh sack.” (Eldritch Fangs)
- “I don’t like to clean up. I just leave town with the collected biomass.” (Eldritch Fangs)
- “What’s a birthday?” (Ducks of Death)
- “Is everything you said true?… A place of friendships and alligators and fan boats and Florida men and nipple tornadoes?” (Ducks of Death)
- “Just because you can sit in a driver’s seat doesn’t mean you know how to build a car.” (Ether Drifts Part 2)
- “We’re going to take these motherfuckers down.” (Ether Drifts Part 2)