>>528415935
>>528414585
"Mike" may really be a name of FRIEND, and when you do something to try to "be Mike", you do in some metaphysical sense actually become HIM for a time.
FRIEND looks like a hand with hooks for marionette strings between his fingers.
This could also be related to striving to become a "big shot".
This just came to mind, but remember at the very end of Spamton NEO's fight, when Spamton asks you to cut the last string, he says
>AND THIS TIME... I LIVE FOR MYSELF!!!
>NO... MYSELF AND MY [Friend(s)]!!!
But then he's severed from the strings and that KOs NEO.
And then in chapter 3 we learned that Spamton freaked the fuck out right as he was getting ready to sign a deal with Tenna.
In other words, both times that Spamton was at his highest, he tried to strike it out with someone else and he then immediately lost everything.
It's a weird and cryptic character, honestly. I don't have a conclusion here. He makes deals with people and he possibly can possess you (or at least on some philosophical level you can "become him"), and he doesn't like it when you become friends with other people.
It's been pointed out before that FRIEND only fully shows itself when Kris is alone in the party. At the teacup, or the SMILE in the S room vending machine. (He presumably gives Kris the controller, and *maybe* he spirited away Ramb.) He's invisible in ch4 and only revealed by the sound waves, and that's when Susie is with you.
I think ch5 being the "field of pink and gold" will reveal him as a main antagonist.
