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Pencil 2.O Wikia

Because The Real-Life Stories of BFB implies that it's happening in the real world, and because The Stories of BFB in Real Life carries a tone of overriding the canon. Just imagine Real-Life BFB to be the title of a TV show from the days of yore.

Actually, that's exactly what Real-Life BFB is: a TV show from the days of yore.

Author's note: I've decided to make this post to clear up some grey areas that were once there. Last year (i.e. a few days ago), I created a page with all the "human" names I used for the BFB characters just to see how inconsistent I'd been. It turns out there are a lot, maybe in the hundreds. Because my interest in BFDI has grown over the past few weeks[1], I've spent that time working on insanely detailed backstories for each contestant from the show—and that includes basic information like the city they come from and even what year they'd be in if transposed both within and outside the universe of Pencil 2.O.

As this mini-series (can I call it that?) will become quite long due to the number of BFB contestants there are, I have divided it into several pages whose links you can click on at your convenience:

Real-Life BFB
Main infoProduction info

Yearly overviewShow timelines (Timeline of RLBFDIRLBFDIA • RLIDFBRLBFB before and after the split • RLTPOTExtra scouting) • General timelines (pre- and post-1950)

Differences from Pencil 2.OAestheticsMethodology (NamesNationalitiesHeightsAgesColours • AccessoriesTeam portraits) • Beyond the 64

TL;DR: InfoTimeline of the final project (part 1part 2part 3)

The (slightly un)official RLBFB yearbook! (Alternate takes)

Things to consider[]

This page is about Real-Life BFB,[2] as in (as I quoted in the pictures later) the alternate universe where the characters from the original BFB are really H. sapiens. In other words, it's part who-knows of my original BFDI/BFB humanization project, which has since been deprecated. So sad, but that's how things ought to be.[3]

On name ambiguities[]

Yes, it is true that Match's last name is Zapałka in the canon of P2O and in my headcanon for BFDI. And yes, Badhrasa is one of Pencil's names in the same universe. But since the characters in RLBFB are humans and not objects, the usage of object-related names—or even unrealistic ones for the time and place—have been avoided. In other words, Match has a different surname, and Pencil's "middle name(s)" is now written "middle name".

There are exceptions, though. For example, Bomby's last name in RLBFB is the same as in P2O. It's Kaboumogo, which is quite normal in the world of objects but likely incorrect in the human world. But since Bomby is such a minor character in P2O and his surname was unknown before late 2020, I've decided to let it stay.

On dates[]

I'm going to say this straight away: RLBFB takes place 48 years before whatever day it is right now.

It's the reason I almost wished you all a happy 1973, and why I assured everyone that there were no mistakes in the preview image I posted on New Year's Day.

For the purpose of this section, let's imagine that BFDI and its various spin-offs are aired differently in three different universes.

  1. How humans see it: BFDI started on 1 January 2010, BFDIA on 30 June 2012. This is the air-date present on the YouTube videos, if not on the Other Wiki.
  2. How the objects see it, at least in the P2O canon: BFDI started on 1 January 2008, BFDIA on 30 June 2010. For this, you should just subtract two years.[4]
  3. How RLBFB was aired: BFDI started on 1 January 1962, BFDIA on 30 June 1964. For this, you subtract forty-eight years. Remember, this is an alternate history page describing a timeline when people all over the world tuned in to Real-Life BFB. It was a time when most television sets were black and white and when reality shows were unheard of.

Why 48?[]

Originally I planned for the human series to take place 50 years before the present and not 48, but I realized that that'd be unfaithful to the universe of P2O. So I changed it to 48 years.[5] None of that matters, though, since the two shows are completely unrelated, but 48 years stuck.

More information on why 48 and not, you know, 0 can be found on the AESTHETICS page.

On birthdates[]

In the images you will see later, you'll notice that each contestant has a date of birth. For example, Thomas Ball [Tennis Ball] was born on 3 October 1916. It may seem like a mistake (What's a 104-year-old doing in TPOT?), but it is still consistent with the birthdates of the BFB contestants in the P2O universe. Add 48 years and you get something more accurate: 3 October 1964. That's the date Mr. Ball was born in accordance with the events of Pencil 2.O.

This means that T.B. is currently 54 years old.[6] Well, that's how old he would be now if he wasn't part of a competition show. In "Before BFDI", I mentioned that every contestant became the same age before they entered BFDI. Before that, the contestants' ranged from Snowball (over 1,000 years old) to Woody (barely 1).

The same thing happened in BFB, both in the real-life and the animated versions, actually.

Plot point: Before participating in RL-BFB, each contestant's age was meant to change. Their true birth dates (the ones in the images) were averaged with the ages of the contestants closest to the median birthdate, who were the 1944-born Ruby (born 30 July) and Lill [Liy] (born 11 December).[7]

Another plot point: As early as 1971, viewers began to notice that the contestants were getting a bit too old. In response, Four had all the contestants age five years into the past, and the effects—slightly different heights, for example—were visible by the start of 1972.

Here's how to calculate how old a contestant was at a certain point in RLBFDI history, regardless of season. Suppose you want to know how old Maja [Match] was when she was due to be eliminated in RLBFDIA 5A.[8]

  1. "Get in the Van" was released on on our universe's YouTube.
  2. Subtract 48 years, and you get a release date of for the viewers of RLBFDIA.
  3. The images show that Maja was born on .
  4. Recall that the median birth date of a RLBFB contestant is .
    • But if an episode was released after 1 January 2020, the median birth date becomes .
  5. Take the average of steps 3 and 4. Since this is a date and not a number, it's a bit more difficult. Still, the date can still be found on most spreadsheet programmes, even the free ones. For this, I got as when Maja was retroactively born.
  6. Subtract Maja's retroactive birthdate (what you got from step 5) from the airdate (what you got from step 2). The equation is as follows. . Alternatively, use this website to find what is on the other side of the equals sign.
  7. Based on what should have been obtained, Maja was 21 years, 1 month and 25 days old by the time she was to be eliminated. [And her eliminator, Eugenia, was but thirty-one!]

On canonicity[]

Many of the backstories here are intended as canon specifically for the RLBFB universe. As they are all set before the start of the series, some of them can be applied to the pre-BFDI universe of P2O as well, especially for the more obscure characters.

Unfortunately, this means that many things we take for granted, such as Pencil and Pen being the ultimate power couple or everyone living in Kenya for their whole lives, did not happen in this universe.[9] Since this takes place several years in the past, many events in P2O have become too far in the future to be relevant in RLBFB. At the same time, many earlier events are not as pertinent to the contestants' lives now as they were 48 years ago. For example, the Second World War had a huge impact on in the personal experiences of the RLBFB contestants, but nowadays it is more a matter of their ancestors.

Credits[]

It seems like a cheesy thing to do, but I would like to thank Jacknjellify for creating the BFB series in the first place, and not just them, because there are many, many people who are on the Jnj team, and without their contributions or existence, BFB would likely not exist. And if BFB did not exist, then paradoxically, RLBFB did not exist 48 years ago!

And this part is going to sound very public-television-y, but this mini-series-project-thing was made possible to comments and contributions from viewers like you. Thank you!

Notes[]

  1. Probably in anticipation for TPOT.
  2. From here written as RLBFB.
  3. I've seen it a few times on some websites (e.g., here), but the correct term for this, especially in the context of fictional animated series, is a loanword from the Japanese: gijinka, from now realized as 擬人化.
  4. It might appear so, but it's actually different: Check the Episode Guide and you'll see that BFDIA 5 aired 1 November 2010—the delays are not perceived at all in the P2O world, so they are relatively ahead in that aspect.
  5. Which was a mathematical error, mind you. If I really wanted to be consistent with my own headcanon, I'd have made it 52 years before the present, so that BFDI would start on 1 January 1958, not 1962. But by then it was too late. And besides, I find the early sixties a fascinating time period.
  6. (the two years necessary to convert from our time to objects’ time)
  7. This also applies to shows that came before RLBFB, quite paradoxically. Imagine using Ruby's and Lill's ages to determine how old someone in RLBFDI was in 1962!
  8. If this were the universe of P2O, calculating her age would be easy: the episode guide says that "Get in the Van" took place on 1 November 2010. Ignoring the age modification typical for BFDI, one can conclude that Match was 19 years old; she would celebrate her twentieth birthday on 12 December of that year.
  9. Pencil and Pen did not talk to each other at all during the course of BFB. I've got to get over that.

(Continue to the next page here.)

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