First appearance: S5E8 — Graveyard Grudge — Granny Edith v Teddy Oso · watch it on YouTube
Teddy Oso is a survivor of the zombie apocalypse who walks into the arena with a shotgun, a little axe, an endless supply of sugar-free vegan energy drinks and the casual swagger of a man who has killed more zombies than he can count. He fought twice in the Void during the Season of Fate, when the Lord of Fate ran the Deathmatches. His first fight ended in humiliation at the hands of Granny Edith. His second ended with a roundhouse kick that sent Ragu frozen into orbit.
Story
Graveyard Grudge
Teddy arrived through one of Thea’s pink portals on a Halloween-themed night at The Dread Fortress with a simple plan: “Shoot some faces, punch some bellies, and kick some shins.” When asked whether he would shoot someone who was “not quite a zombie yet,” he made the mistake of bringing up his family history. He had shot his own grandmother in the face after she turned, and he did not want to talk about it. His opponent was Granny Edith, returning to the arena in The Midnight Mausoleum, a moonlit graveyard of tombstones where skeletal hands clawed out of the dirt.
Graveyard Grudge began badly for him. He swung his shotgun stock at Granny’s shins like a golf club, and she hopped over it, explaining that she had been a jump-rope champion in her day. He did kick her in the butt and knock her to her knees, then refused to help her up “because I like watching old people fall to the ground.” That rudeness earned him a fly swat to both ears. When Granny threw a handful of flour to blind him, Thea farted, and the terrible-smelling breeze blew the “fart flower” into both their lungs. As the fight went on, Teddy drank an energy drink out of his shotgun barrel, tackled Granny while she rolled on the floor (“I’ve never beat up an old person, but I gotta say, I’m enjoying this”), and spun Thea around and threw her at his opponent, even though Thea had already declared herself on Granny’s side. Granny caught her, and Thea curled up in her arms. Granny answered with hot butter from a magic frying pan, onion juice to the eyes and rock-hard raisin cookies that cracked his front teeth.
When The Box of Chaos slammed down, Teddy gave up the thing he had carried since he had to kill her: his grandma’s head, kept as a little shrunken memento. “Take care of her, please,” he said. The Box promised to put her “right next to the other ones” and gave him a delicious-looking apple, which poisoned him. It was a Granny Smith. He fought back with his signature move, “Leave Him in the Dust,” summoning a motorcycle out of nowhere and circling Granny until dust filled her face, mouth and eyes. Granny clotheslined him off the bike with a broom.
Then the floor turned to lava, and both fighters were left leaping between tombstones. Granny toasted bread in the lava until it was hard as stone and finished him with a loaf the size of a boulder, knocking him off his tombstone and into the molten rock. His last thought was a confession: “I realized that I underestimated the old person, and I shouldn’t have. I learned my lesson.” The last thing anyone saw of Teddy was his small hand sinking into the lava, giving a thumbs-up.
Cosmic Collision
Teddy was back for Cosmic Collision, hand-picked by Thea while she was on probation for napping in the Lord of Fate’s throne. His zombie count had climbed from about 12,000 to “the 30,000 range,” and Thea promised to update his profile on the Dread Fortress Void web. The Acolytes chanted his name, and the concession stands had started selling Teddy Oso shotguns, which the crowd fired wildly into the air. The arena was a rocky stretch of the orange rings around a roaring purple gas giant, in open space.
This time Teddy played it cool. He struck a hip-out model pose, tossed his axe “all gentle-like, but with a lot of force behind it,” and flipped his shotgun like a drum major before blasting Ragu off into space. Ragu found the bandage on Teddy’s knee, and Teddy explained it was a zombie bite. He wasn’t turning, because he eats a tiny raw piece of every zombie he kills to build up immunity. By his count he had eaten about 40 or 50 people’s worth, usually “the thumb muscle or like a butt cheek or like a little shoulder.”
The fight turned into a brawl over a silver 1998 Chevy Impala with Michigan plates that Thea put up as a prize. Ragu hid inside it and then tried to run Teddy down with it. Teddy gashed the door with one axe swing, then hauled Ragu out by his “ultra silver” hair, backflipped over him and faked landing on his groin, and brought the axe down on his chest. It took off a nipple, and Teddy put it in his pocket. During another bout of chaos, a shivering chinchilla begged both fighters for warmth. Teddy tucked his into his jacket pocket with a sweat rag. Ragu’s froze. Ragu later mugged Teddy to steal his nipple back and stitched it on, only to find it had come out of the same pocket as the chinchilla and was now very hairy.
Teddy read up on fighting from “a little book” and came out faster. He kicked Ragu down and cannonballed into his face, then shattered Ragu’s newly won Shield of the Golden King with a spinning “nipple slicer.” For a moment he even felt sorry for his battered opponent and mouthed “I’m so sorry” before clubbing him, but he fumbled the blow and hurt himself instead. He recovered by jumping into the Impala and running Ragu over with his own car. In the longest fight of the season, he finally faked one kick and landed a spinning roundhouse that cracked Ragu’s jaw off its hinges. Ragu drifted into orbit and froze, just like the chinchilla he had failed to save. Thea counted it as kill number 30,001, swung Teddy around in a victory twirl, and Teddy won the Impala.
Dried Blood
After the fight, Teddy credited his turnaround to a book called The Secret: you have to believe it, and then it will happen. “Last time it was sad, to an old lady. This time, you have to step it up.” He planned to paint the Impala funky colors, fill it with big TVs, and hang fuzzy dice in it along with Ragu’s dried-out nipples. Thea warned him that the Michigan plates wouldn’t work until he registered it and paid the taxes and licensing. The Lord of Fate asked, “Why do you think we were giving it away?” Teddy’s advice to the Acolytes was to skip school and pick up a trade: “I took up zombie fighting and look at me now.”
Personality and Abilities
Teddy is all confidence and very little caution. He insists on being called “Mr. Teddy Oso,” though his full name shifts between “Jr. the third” and “junior the second” (“I didn’t name myself, my dad named me”). He never closes his eyes when he is hit, poses like he belongs among “the GQ’s most handsome men,” and asks the crowd to “Praise me! Adore me!” He admits he is “not an expert on guns. I just shoot them.” He also has one real weakness: he cannot say no to delicious-looking food, even when a magic box hands it to him.
His kit is a shotgun he says holds 17 rounds, which he uses as a golf club, a drink container and a drum major’s baton. He also carries a little axe, which he lost in Granny Edith’s rolling pin and later had back, and sometimes a vial of zombie blood to coat it with. He drinks so many sugar-free vegan energy drinks that his blood is said to be about 90% energy drink, and he takes blood pressure medication because he almost dies a lot. His signature moves include “Leave Him in the Dust,” the drum-major shotgun flip, the golf-swing uppercut and the “Soprano” crotch punt. He credits his precision to experience: “It’s all the zombie fighting. I learned how to be specific.”
His personal life is complicated. He rides around on a motorcycle with his girlfriends Susie and Betty, one of whom is a zombie, and insists that “not all zombies are violent. Some just want to be loved.” His wife is also a zombie (“she is now”). His uncle, he claims, was Hairy Nipple, or Uncle Nipple for short.
Relationships
- Granny Edith: His first opponent. He laughed at her falls, and she beat him with fritters, puns and a boulder-sized loaf of bread.
- Ragu: His second opponent. Teddy took his nipple, his shield, his car and finally his life.
- Thea: Teddy thought they were cool, but she sided with Granny and floated killing them both, which left him declaring, “Me and Thea got beef now.” He then threw her at Granny. She still brought him back for her probation match and twirled him around when he won.
- The Box of Chaos: It took his grandma’s head for its shelf and paid him back with a poisoned Granny Smith apple. Later it served him a blue slushie for $14.97.
- The Lord of Fate: The host of both of his fights, who admired his pose and kept track of his rising zombie count.
Memorable Quotes
- “Shoot some faces, punch some bellies, and kick some shins.” (Graveyard Grudge)
- “I shot my grandma in the face because she was a zombie and I had to do it and it was real sad and I don’t know why you’re making me talk about it.” (Graveyard Grudge)
- “I’ve never beat up an old person, but I gotta say, I’m enjoying this.” (Graveyard Grudge)
- “I realized that I underestimated the old person, and I shouldn’t have. I learned my lesson.” (Graveyard Grudge)
- “Not all zombies are violent. Some just want to be loved.” (Cosmic Collision)
- “Hairy nipple was my uncle.” (Cosmic Collision)