Worldbuilding a phone call: The narrator's world¶

This story takes place in October of the early 2000s, during fall break from school. It's a specific moment in time when technology sat between eras—DVDs and Blu-rays were the standard way to own media, but the internet was becoming something else entirely. Streaming sites existed, though they were often sketchy, illegal operations that appeared and disappeared overnight. Many households still had landlines, often cordless phones that let you pace around the house during long conversations. This was before smartphones, before social media as we know it, before you could text someone a link to what you were watching. If you wanted to share something, you had to talk about it.

Tim is somewhere between fifteen and seventeen years old, still in school, and decidedly a geek. He loves anime, but he's not the stereotypical japanophile—his obsessions span wider. He reads Asimov and Le Guin alongside fantasy epics by Tolkien and Marion Zimmer Bradley. He plays Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with a group of guys who share the hobby but aren't really friends. They're just people who happen to roll dice together. Tim considers himself to have exactly one real friend: Chris.

Chris is in Tim's class and shares many of his interests, though Chris leans more toward being an outdoor person. He'll nerd out with Tim when the mood strikes, but he also has other things going on—including a girlfriend. They're best friends in the truest sense, which means Chris tolerates Tim's tendency to call at the strangest times, day or night, whenever something has grabbed hold of Tim's brain and won't let go.

In October, that something is Bloody Catboy, a late 90s anime that Tim discovered on one of those temporary, questionable streaming sites. The series tells the story of Jax, and Tim becomes completely, utterly obsessed. He watches the season, then watches it again. He thinks about it constantly. He needs to talk about it, to process it, to share it with someone. And there's only one someone who will listen: Chris.

The calls happen at all hours. Tim doesn't care if it's 2am or the middle of dinner or when Chris is supposed to be meeting his girlfriend. When Tim needs to talk about Bloody Catboy, he calls. Chris answers, because that's what best friends do, even when your best friend is spiraling into an obsession he doesn't fully understand yet.

The transcripts you'll read are one-sided—Tim recorded his own voice during these calls, which means you'll only hear his half of the conversation. You'll need to infer what Chris is saying from Tim's responses, interruptions, and defensive reactions. You'll hear Tim get excited, go on tangents, interrupt himself, and slowly unravel as he tries to explain why this show has consumed him.

This is also a story about Tim's development, though he doesn't realize that's what's happening during these October calls. Watching Jax's journey does something to Tim—shifts something in how he thinks about himself, about bodies, about the boxes people are expected to fit into. He experiences what will later be understood as his gay awakening, though during these conversations, Tim neither recognizes nor admits what's happening. The acknowledgment comes later, in the months after.

By early February, when Tim begins transcribing these recorded phone calls, something has changed in him. He knows more about himself than he did in October, even if he doesn't yet have all the language or courage to say it plainly. But he also knows something else: Bloody Catboy has been deleted. The streaming site is gone. The anime seems to have vanished from the internet entirely, as if it never existed.

This bothers Tim intensely. Something that mattered this much, that changed something fundamental in him, shouldn't just disappear without a trace. So he's decided to preserve it—first by transcribing these October calls and publishing them here, then by using those transcripts to write an actual book. A proper book with real prose, refined and shaped but keeping the energy of what these conversations were. That's the plan, anyway. To make sure someone remembers that Bloody Catboy existed and mattered.

The world of these phone calls is small: a teenage geek's bedroom, a cordless phone, a best friend who keeps answering, and an anime that somehow got under Tim's skin in a way nothing else has. It's fall break in the early 2000s, and Tim has discovered something—both about Jax and about himself—that he can't stop talking about.

Everything else unfolds from there.