I was searching the internet for information about AWE Games, the developer of SpongeBob Squarepants: The Battle for Bikini Bottom (for Windows, 2003), when I found the AWE Games page on a Mitchell Van Morgan fandom.com wiki. The page claimed that AWE Games was still in business and read like some of the information was pulled off or written by that company, which lead me to wonder, what website am I reading?
It appears that Mitchell Van Morgan is a fake Nickelodeon character and animated television series, purportedly airing eleven seasons. All the images I could find of him and his series - and there are many - look like they were drawn in Microsoft Paint. Imagine an MS Paint anime-style teenaged Michael Jackson in blue jeans and a bright red sweater, wearing a matching red Mario cap and a prominent sharktooth necklace.
Whoever is behind this make-believe cartoon is dedicated enough to generate some serious internet traffic, since Google tells me "Mitchell Van Morgan" returns about 17,600 results. There is a blogspot blog with false entries going back to 1998 (the blogspot user account was created in 2017). The Mitchell wiki mentioned above has over 1,000 pages, from what I can tell mostly ripped from other articles about real things; there are also entries about Mitchell Van Morgan on a few other random fandom.com websites. The fictional franchise has an official Twitter account, registered in 2012, which has been actively posting about him for three years. There is a YouTube account purporting to offer Mitchell Van Morgan soundtracks (I listened to a couple and some are silent, others sound well-made. Probably ripped from Sonic with audio later removed by YouTube.)
It is a mixture of admiration of the effort and dedication, of curiosity, and of boredom which compelled me to look all of this up. I was wondering, did this person go so far as to write screenplays or storyboards? (they did not) What was their motivation? It didn't seem to be an inside joke anywhere so I'm assuming it's just one person.
It dawned on me that this person might be on the spectrum, and looking back I'm not sure how I missed it the first time around. Mitchell Van Morgan is described everywhere as an 'autistic, epileptic, Afro-Latin American manga artist'. I'm guessing the side-characters are somewhat the artist's projections of actual people, too.
I'm not sure if there's a point to this story. I'm not sure if I still do, or should, admire the dedication if it was caused by autism, at least not in the same way. I can still appreciate what effort went into the drawings and online presence but, well, neither are of very good quality and both are frequently modified versions of someone else's work.
Just another of Max's Adventures in Internet-Land.
~Max