Rob
| Rob | |
|---|---|
 | |
| First appearance | 276: Fixed Width |
| Appearances | 13 |
- For a list of comics, see Comics featuring Rob.
- For the generic Rob, see Cueball.
Rob is a stick figure character in xkcd. Rob has no identifying features and is a Cueball. In most cases, he seems to represent the same character, usually being portrayed as Black Hat's roommate. He is one of the few of Randall's characters to be given a name. In 276: Fixed Width, his screen name appears as "rob", and in 723: Seismic Waves he is posting on the internet as "robm163". In 838: Incident his username appears as "robm". In 1783: Emails, Cueball replies to his email in the title text. After the Emails comic, Rob is not mentioned for 800 comics before the name is used in 2584: Headline Words, which reveals that Randall and Rob are different people.
Name
|
This is one of 45 incomplete explanations: This summary was written by a stressed out student during finals week, and might need tweaking. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
he name for this character was discussed at length. See the following Community portal topics:
- Proposals § Cueball/Rob
- Proposals § Merge Cueball & Rob
- Proposals § Re-proposing merging Cueball and Rob
- Proposals § New character category for blonde woman news reporter (from 1699)
Rob's name originated from the comic 276: Fixed Width, where a cueball is seen at a computer, messaging someone known as 'emily' with the username 'rob'. This name appeared in several more comics, eventually sprouting into a charecter seperate from Cueball.
Initially being introduced after user:TheHYPO noticed that an page for Rob was created for this charecter seperate from, arguments on whether to merge Rob and Cueball sprung up. The initial discuss devolved into a argument about Wikipedias credibility, and the merger was reproposed twice afterwards. In all, three main stances emerged. 1) Merge Rob and Cueball into one page, 2) Rename Megan back to Cutie to maintain general/specific charecter seperation, or 3) keep it as is, with Rob being seperate. Lots of argument insued, and as you could probably infer if you are reading this, Rob remained a seperate specific character from Cueball, but Megan was not rerenamed. All proposals on this topic have since been archived.
Relationships
Rob had a relationship with a woman known as <emily> on IM. This ended tragically in 276: Fixed Width when he told her the relationship was only for sex while he wasn't really paying attention to what he was writing; he just wanted their chat responses to line up nicely on the screen. Two years later, in 2009, he had a relationship of a few months with what ended up being a spam bot. He discovered this when he asked the bot to pass what it calls a VK test, a reference to the world of Blade Runner, where they use a Voight-Kampff (VK) test to help determine if someone is a replicant. This happened in 632: Suspicion.
In 647: Scary we find that he has a nephew born after September 11, 2001, but by 2009 he was old enough to have discussions with Rob about it.
In 1102: Fastest-Growing it seems that Rob is Black Hat's roommate. In fact, it's possible that within the xkcd continuity, every time we see Black Hat's roommate, it's Rob. But with no name mentioned it is not enough to list these comics as comics featuring Rob.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
