Wholesome Dog's Birthday Adventure

A week after reading it the first time, it's clear this story will retain a place of prominence in my heart as more than the sum of its parts. It's linked in with all the good vibes of the New Year's art stream from MHD, and having read it at 3am during that special stage of sleep deprivation that feels like being drunk.

The funny thing is that just like an hour before it was published I'd made a comment on how weird it was that Sherbet himself, Wholesomeness Personified, pretty much only wrote horror, I am pretty pleased with this method of being proved wrong.

A sugary sweet game bringing Wholesome Dog to a wider audience, if written by lesser mortals seems like it would be done ironically or at least be a little too referential and self aware. But aside from the obvious reference to Wholesome Dog that carries the whole plot, and the fact that Sherb is clearly having fun almost winking but not quite, everything in here seems sincere and (of course) wholesome. It even came with some good life lessons in there for the imaginary audience of five year olds. And the pictures are just icing.


It's still a shame the Censorship Board made you put gremlins in a role clearly written for goblins, but I suppose it makes sense that they'd consider goblins too scary for children. Some would complain and call this a kind of intentional gremlinwashing, but with the token inclusion of Other Wholesome Dog I think you're in the clear from these kind of allegations.


Anyway, this was a joy to read, so thank you for writing it.

This is the greatest story to ever grace my eyes, nothing will ever compare to this absolute Shakespearean masterpiece. Let's start with the sophisticated writing style, seemingly simple and cartoony to the untrained eye, but in all actuality it goes much, much deeper than that. Let's start off with the starting image, it may seem like a standard text conversation at first, but it has hidden meanings. For example, it says the text message was sent to WD at 4:40 PM. 440 is an angel number, warning WD to trust his intuition as a dog to eat when DBFS kidnaps him, as that provides two great endings.
Also, the fact his phone was on 34 percent foreshadows one of the endings, as the angel number 34 signifies new beginnings, and in one of the drink the stew branches he befriends DBFS with cake and birthday celebration. Then before he runs out the door he makes sure he brushes his teeth. We’ll come back to that later. He wears a sleeping cap in the picture for this part of the story, but actually, it’s not a sleeping cap. It’s a santa hat, and it’s blue. Blue santa hats are used in US police department santa outreach programs, showing WD’s desire to keep his community safe while also making sure they are taken care of.

Now the next page, DBFS mentions his bungusfungus cotton. This may seem just like a wacky ingredient that the author threw in there, but even it has a deeper meaning and is integral to the plot. Now as you probably know bungus means asshole, and fungus is mushrooms, but thats not just an inappropriate joke, that’s a reference to another one of his friends, Columbus Capybara. You see, capybaras are unable to digest sugar, and it just ferments creating gas in it’s intestines which it releases from its bungus. Now you might be like, Bezro, how does that relate to anything? Well, there is a fungus called aspergillus niger, which contains plenty of simple sugar as it breaks down polysaccharides into simple sugars and spread them around the biomass. The aspergillus genus is known for being mold, and do you know what grows mold exceptionally well? Cotton. Now it is said that DBFS was looking for his own supply of the cotton, in the middle of the woods away from his lair. And he just happened to stumble across WD’s path? I don’t buy it.I do believe he needed the bungusfungus cotton though. He knew that Colombus Capybara was friends with WD, and he wanted to kidnap Colombus Capybara and forcefeed him the aspergillus niger laced cotton. As the cotton was good fiber, and the fungus would cause a lot of inflammatory gas, he knew that he could cause excessive defecation of the capybara. Now why would he want this?

There are two reasons. The first, is because he’s blind. Due to the large amount of grass and plants in a capybaras diet, it would be rich in provitamin A carotenoids, which can be refined into vitamin A, and a deficiency of vitamin A can cause blindness. The reason he was blind, was due to the fact he ate no food containing any sort of vitamin A. Now, how do I know he didn’t eat food containing vitamin A? His skin color. You might think the picture of the pumpkin at the magical ending page is just a goof, a silly little picture, but it shows something. An event made him severely depressed so he turned to alcohol, and before long he couldn’t consume anything but alcohol, and he developed jaundice. And to keep himself alive, he fed himself magically, but that worsened his organs and caused his skin to turn orange. That’s also why he loves stews so much, he hopes eating those types of food now might bring his eyesight back. But, he knows deep down it won’t work, he needs something more. That, is where the vitamin A refining comes into play. He wants to create a cure to his blindness, and he will do that by experimenting with vitamin A, what caused his blindness in the first place.

Now why Colombus Capybara? Surely theres nothing that special about him. And you would be right, nothing biologically out of the ordinary. However, DBFS has a personal grudge. See, Columbus capybara actually murdered DBFS’s mother. Now, I know I sound crazy, how the fuck could I possibly know that. Well I’ll tell you, and once again it has to do with the artists depiction of DBFS. He is a pumpkin, and capybaras love to eat pumpkins. And your probably like, yeah, so? Lots of animals like all types of plants, but another thing. Columbus Capybara’s namesake, Christopher Colombus, brought pumpkins to Europe for the first time. So that shows, Columbus Capybara killed one of his family members at least, which also was a reason for his alcoholism.

Alright, enough about capybara shit, lets move on to the worst little faggots to ever fucking exist, the stupid son of a whore potato stew goblins. Now, I have proof they had a direct connection in the September 11th attacks on the twin towers. Wait wait wait, let me explain. Everyone knows the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden. His last meal was lamb chops with chicken curry and rice. And sheep, the animals that give off lamb chops, love to eat potatoes, they help put weight on them and are overall good for them. So potatoes are already linked to sheep, and by extension dogs because dogs herd sheep. Bin Laden was reported to test chemical weapons on dogs, so the potatoes were already connected to chemical warfare that Al-Qaeda used, and that makes them members of it, or at least associates. And do you know when a ton of potatoes had to be ‘destroyed’? Somewhere around 2001, due to the discovery of the first cases of potato wart. 300 million tons of potatoes were ‘destroyed’, but I don’t think they were. I think the stew gremlins formed together and turned those potatoes into fellow stew gremlins, and moved back to Iraq with them. Then, the 9/11 tragedy was planned. From there they helped them train and plan the bombers, and the rest is history.

Now another thing, this whole story occurs in a simulation, none of it is real life, just a computer driven experience for Wholesome Dog. First lets start with our favorite antagonist, the Dastardly Blind Forest Sorcerer. Now first, lets take that name apart. The acronym would be DBFS, which is also a command when coding. It’s the dbfs/: command, which is a way to store and access data in Azure Databricks. And also, the sorcerer is obsessed with stew, which is also a term in coding for a sort of staging area before coding, so the author also references computers with the sorcerer.

Also, on another note, in his stew he puts cucumbers, which sounds pretty odd. But, if he’s using bungusfungus cotton in his stew, which we’ve deduced to be cotton infected with the fungus strain aspergillus niger. But some species of the same family of fungus can cause internal bleeding, and vitamin K helps to clot blood. Cucumbers contain vitamin K, so he appears to have added the cucumbers in case he grabs cotton infected with the wrong fungus. Why he wants to eat the same cotton he uses to torture a capybara is unknown, I guess it just tastes good. But here’s the thing, and where the developers of Wholesome Dogs virtual reality overlooked something, theres no way DBFS could have had access to cucumbers, because cucumbers are for the most part only grown wild in California, and the sorcerer seems to only forage for his ingredients, as shown by his searching for bungusfungus cotton and his mentioning to previously using beetles in stew, all things he could have foraged in the forest. Also there’s no way he could buy it from the store, because he can’t leave the woods (we’ll get to why later). Now, a question you probably have is, “How do you know he’s not in California? Are you retarded too you little toaster fucking faggot?” And while the answer the the second question is yes, I also have an answer to the first question. I could go in about how the leaves change and pinpoint the exact time it all happens and all that, but the simplest answer is the fire hat he receives. The California fire department has never used red fire hats like the ones depicted on Wholesome Dog, at least from what I could find.

This insane attention to detail and him putting these things in his stories for us to discover is what makes Sherbet one of the greats of this site. Keep doing what you’re doing.

I got the magical ending!

I am enlightened

Of your celfony

i love you wholesome dog!

wholesome dog is so crazy! i love him!

I got the true ending!

There's really good branching, and the story is really well written. Even though it's a kids story, it's fun for all ages. Sherbet did a great job on this story.

This was very cute!

I got the best ending right away. Wholesome dog is safe, so that is an 8/8 from me.