Boyfriend

Boyfriend, alternatively referred to as The Boyfriend, is the protagonist of Friday Night Funkin'. His main goal is to gain approval to date Girlfriend, but he must sing off against her evil ex-rockstar father, Daddy Dearest, as well as the many other characters that stand in his way.
==Appearance==
Boyfriend is a young, light-skinned man with spiky cyan hair and a confident expression. He wears a magenta-white T-shirt with a red prohibition sign, baggy dark blue pants, pink-red sneakers with magenta-white shoelaces and soles as well as black dots on the quarters, and a backward pink-red cap with a dark blue brim. He holds a bluish gray microphone in his right hand while keeping his left hand in his pocket, and is drawn in a chibi style.
During Week 4, his hair is blown around as a result of standing on a moving car.
During Week 5, he wears a red parka with white fur, light blue pants and light brown snow boots, to suit the Christmas theme.
During Week 6 and as the opponent of the unused song Test, his regular appearance is brightened and rendered in pixel art style. He also moves his microphone differently.
During the last track of Week 7, he holds Girlfriend up by the waist with his left hand.
==Personality==
Boyfriend is portrayed as a young, overzealous rapper with a love for music, donuts and his girlfriend. He loves to sing and show off his skills, resulting in his confident and cocky character. He is very determined and persistent on reaching his goals and won't let anyone get in the way of his success, even when threatened with death.
Boyfriend is implied to be clingy, as he is never seen without Girlfriend by his side. He is also very stupid, which, when mixed with his overconfidence, results in him being essentially fearless. This is demonstrated during both Monster and Winter Horrorland, where he does not appear to be afraid despite Monster's constant threatening of him and Girlfriend. Despite this, he has street smarts as he knows how to heal people. Boyfriend also shows that he gets bored of scary games, as he once almost fell asleep while playing one.
Boyfriend has been diagnosed with ADHD and ASD. Oftentimes, he will simply beep at strangers instead of talking, although he often does communicate verbally with those whom he is close with. He is also a creative individual, which is demonstrated by his talents as a musician and freestyle rapper. The ERECT remixes show that he can even put his own twist on the songs of others in an instant. Furthermore, he is never found without his red cap. Boyfriend has low levels of empathy, but he has good intuition. He may live in a messy place, as he does not wash his dirty clothes and continuously moves a pile of them around his room depending on his needs, which also suggests that he has executive dysfunction. His object permanence is also not very good at times.
Boyfriend seems quite willing to do immoral things, from tricking children watching YouTube videos on iPads for money and cigarettes, to getting as much free food as possible from McDonald's while holding the store hostage, hogging up drive-throughs and vandalizing PlayPlaces, Boyfriend does not appear to care if the things he does are wrong as long as he can get what he wants. In addition, he appears to be somewhat destructive and influenced by anger, as whenever his phones fail to work properly, his first instinct is to destroy them in bizarre and extreme ways.
==Relationships==
===Parents===
Boyfriend's parents seem to be willing to make sacrifices for him, as they floated him the entry fees for public college. However, based on the fact that Boyfriend simply stopped showing up to class so he could instead read comics in the library all day, he may not be very interested in or appreciative of the things that his parents want or do for him.
===Ritz The Rat===
Ritz The Rat is Boyfriend's brother. The two of them both enjoy singing and rapping. In art by MKMaffo, the two are depicted as the best of friends, though the canonicity of the art is debatable.
===Girlfriend===
Girlfriend is Boyfriend's partner. The two love each other very much and are never apart. Boyfriend is determined to do whatever he can to stay with Girlfriend and protect her, including by singing off against her parents and others. Their closeness is shown when Boyfriend happily catches Girlfriend and receives a hug from her during the cut-scene for Stress thanks to true love.
===Daddy Dearest===
Daddy Dearest hates Boyfriend for dating Girlfriend and wants him dead, as he often tries to kill him when the couple are trying to enjoy spending time together. Even though Daddy Dearest is an evil demon, Boyfriend is not afraid to face off against him in rap battles in order to be allowed to date his daughter. Despite his hatred for Boyfriend, Daddy Dearest compliments his singing skills in unused cutscene dialogue for Fresh.
===Pico===
Pico and Boyfriend used to date,:File:PICO AND BOYFRIEND IS CANON SHUT UP ALREADY.jpg though little is known about the relationship they had. It is known that the reason for their breakup is "complicated," and it has been hinted that they sang together in the past, as Pico raps with Boyfriend in Week 3 due to nostalgia and old habits. This implies that Pico misses him in some form.
Pico is loyal to Boyfriend in the present day, betraying his employer Daddy Dearest by sparing Boyfriend after being hired to kill him and saving his life when he was hired to confirm Boyfriend's dead body. Boyfriend appears to be fully comfortable being around Pico and even sings with him happily, but it is otherwise unclear how Boyfriend feels about Pico.
===Mommy Mearest===
Like Daddy Dearest, Mommy Mearest hates Boyfriend greatly, partaking in the plan to kill Boyfriend by having him fall off a plane and making him sing off against her on top of a moving limousine. Not much else is known about how Mommy Mearest and Boyfriend feel about each other.
===Skid and Pump===
Boyfriend is friendly with Skid and Pump. When the children arrive at Girlfriend's house while out trick-or-treating, Boyfriend gladly lets them play by singing with them, even though they are trying to get Girlfriend for Monster.
===Monster===
Although Monster wants to eat Boyfriend, the rapper is not afraid to face off against him in singing battles, even as he constantly makes threats toward Boyfriend and Girlfriend. Thanks to Boyfriend's rapping skills, Monster is easily defeated each time before he can do anything to the couple.
===Senpai===
Senpai is initially friendly toward Boyfriend, deciding to engage in a serenade between gentlemen to decide who will be able to date Girlfriend. However, after Boyfriend beats him in a rap battle, Senpai gets very angry at him. He threatens to rip Boyfriend's testicles off as soon as he is done letting Girlfriend gargle his own. Despite this, he wants to upstage Boyfriend without violence. Boyfriend doesn't seem to care either way, simply responding to Senpai with beeping noises before both of his songs.
===Spirit===
Due to Spirit's apparent distorted sense of justice, he believes that it is fair to take Boyfriend and Girlfriend's bodies for himself in order to escape the dating sim game he was trapped in. Even with this threat, Boyfriend remains undeterred, as he confidently rap battles the ghastly soul without saying a word to him beforehand and ultimately wins.
===Tankman===
Tankman is very rude to Boyfriend and only decided not to kill him on sight because he had a boring day. Though he compliments his performance the first time, he is just as quick to insult Boyfriend about his girlfriend. Tankman does not take losing to Boyfriend twice lightly, as he ultimately decides to order his men to kill the couple in retaliation. After the soldiers are stopped by Pico, Tankman decides to settle the situation by challenging Boyfriend to one final rap battle. Despite his vulgar attitude, he was impressed enough by Boyfriend to share another compliment halfway through Stress, saying "Heh. Pretty good!"
===Darnell===
Darnell is one of the people hired by Daddy Dearest to kill Boyfriend. He appears to be very determined to get his job done as he battles Pico to do so.
===Nene===
Nene is one of the people hired by Daddy Dearest to kill Boyfriend. Like Darnell, she selfishly does whatever she can to get the job done.
==Trivia==
===General===
*ninjamuffin99, PhantomArcade and Kawai Sprite have all stated that Boyfriend's name is simply Boyfriend.
**An official T-shirt created in collaboration with PKettles and Shark Robot refers to him as Boyfriend.
***Additionally, there are currently two opening lines in the introduction sequence for Friday Night Funkin' that disconfirm two names that Boyfriend has been commonly referred to as: "His name isn't Evan, silly TikTok" and "His name isn't Keith, dumb eggy lol."
****ninjamuffin99 has made a TikTok pleading with people to stop calling him Keith, saying, "His name, his name isn't Keith, it's not Keith. I'm, I'm sick of seeing everyone calling him Keith." Despite this, he has stated on Reddit that people can call Boyfriend whatever they want.
*****He has also confirmed his name to simply be Boyfriend on Reddit.
******The lyrics "boil 'lil boyfriend," in Winter Horrorland also refer to Boyfriend by name.
*Boyfriend is his only canonical and official name. However, ninjamuffin99 has intentionally confused the Friday Night Funkin' fandom by spouting out random names on his Twitter and TikTok accounts. There have been several attempts to figure out his name (names in bold have been disconfirmed), including:
**Keith (on TikTok, has been stated several times to not be his name).
**Evan (on TikTok, based on misheard lyrics from the song Monster).
**Luis (on Twitter, named after Luis).
**Cam (on Twitter, based on ninjamuffin99's real name, Cameron. It was commonly used after becoming the first result when searching for Boyfriend's name on Google).
**Jack (on TikTok. While it was never disconfirmed, it is presumed to be another fake name).
*The color of Boyfriend's shoes and jeans were decided by PhantomArcade, whereas the prohibition sign on his shirt was a design choice by evilsk8r.
*Boyfriend is tied with Girlfriend and Spirit for having the least tracks out of any character in Friday Night Funkin', having one each.
*Boyfriend originally had magenta hair instead of cyan blue, revealed in early concept sketches of Boyfriend released by PhantomArcade.:File:BOYFRIEND FIRST CONCEPT.jpg
**Additionally, his shoelaces were originally blue instead of white.
*Boyfriend has the most unused animations out of any character in Friday Night Funkin'.
*While Boyfriend's singing voice is provided by Kawai Sprite, the game's composer, Boyfriend's groan after losing a battle was provided by PhantomArcade, the game's main artist and animator.
**PhantomArcade also confirmed that he will be voicing more sound effects for Boyfriend. Additionally, he stated that Boyfriend's canon voice will probably end up being the one used in Fresh (Boyfriend Remix).
*Boyfriend makes a cameo appearance in Sr Pelo's animation "Spooky Month 3 - Unwanted Guest" as a background plushie. He also makes a cameo in "Spooky Month - Tender Treats," in which a trick-or-treater is dressed as him. The Spooky Month series is also where Skid and Pump originate from.
*At the end of most of his turns in Bopeebo and, as of the Week 7 update, his first two turns in Tutorial, Boyfriend will briefly strike a V-sign pose.
**Boyfriend has variants of his V-sign pose for Week 4, Week 5 and Week 6, although they all go unused.
*Like Girlfriend, Boyfriend is afraid of lightning, as shown in Week 2. Whenever lightning strikes, Boyfriend will briefly wince and shudder. 
*In the Game Over screen, Boyfriend is revealed to be slouching his knees, adding to his small appearance.
**Even when he isn't slouching and when Girlfriend isn't wearing her heels, she is still taller than him.
***A Reddit comment by PhantomArcade implies that Boyfriend and Girlfriend appear very short as a symbol of their innocence.
*Boyfriend's original icons in the Ludum Dare prototype and older versions of the Newgrounds demo consisted of a small yellow circle with a yellow cap, blue eyes and a smiling mouth. In the Week 4 update, his icons were replaced with a blue mouthless head that more closely resembles Boyfriend. Pressing "9" during any track will cause Boyfriend's new icons to be replaced with his old ones again.
*There is a 1 in 1000 chance for the pause menu or Game Over screen of Friday Night Funkin' to change to resemble that of Gitaroo Man, in which Boyfriend's head (drawn by Wandaboy) will appear over a message saying "Replay this game?".
*Boyfriend's head appears on Roblox as a formerly purchasable hat accessory for the player's avatar.
*It has been noted that Boyfriend's attire, from his red prohibition sign T-shirt, blue pants, and red and white shoes, is strikingly similar to that of a character from a 2009 Flash animation by Newgrounds user Zarla around the 1:52 mark.
**In a Reddit AMA, PhantomArcade confirmed that the similarities are purely coincidental.
***Another character resembling Boyfriend appears in an episode of the 1994 animated series Mega Man. The character, named Bobby, wears a backward red cap and a red prohibition sign T-shirt; moreover, the two characters have slightly similar names and personalities.
*The concept of Pico being Boyfriend's ex-boyfriend started out as a head-canon within the Friday Night Funkin' fandom. This headcanon gathered so much traction that Tom Fulp, the creator of Pico, Tweeted jokingly that "this is official Pico 2 canon," leading people to believe that it was true. ninjamuffin99 initially said that this was a joke but later changed his mind and confirmed it was canon.
**On the 1st of April, 2021, Tom Fulp updated the original Pico's School game for April Fools' Day, ending with Pico revealing to Cassandra that he and Boyfriend are a couple and everyone at his school accepts them. The day after, this version would be released as a separate game set in an alternate timeline called Pico's School: Love Conquers All. As Pico and Boyfriend's relationship was portrayed in a positive light, the game indicated Tom Fulp's approval of the idea of them once having been a couple.
*On the 22nd of May, 2022, JohnnyUtah uploaded a piece of artwork depicting a much more muscular and seemingly older Boyfriend next to a surprised Girlfriend. Image mirror available. PhantomArcade has confirmed that he will find a way to officially implement it into Friday Night Funkin'.
** Comments made when the image was uploaded to Twitter revealed that the muscular Boyfriend is from an alternate timeline where he was forced to kill Girlfriend for unknown reasons, and that the Girlfriend in the image is a blow-up doll dressed to look like her that he's kept as a companion since the incident.
===Lore===
*The reason why Boyfriend and Girlfriend began dating is not because of their names, but because they thought that they were cute.
*Boyfriend is bisexual.
*Boyfriend knows a lot of fingerboard tricks, and it's one of the reasons he won Girlfriend's heart.
*Boyfriend has a dog who lives at his parents' house, with his mom taking care of the dog.
*Boyfriend's favorite Newgrounds game is Newgrounds Rumble.
*Boyfriend loves donuts the most out of all the Friday Night Funkin' characters.
*Boyfriend likes Brisk iced tea and milk.
*Boyfriend likes drinkable yogurt. Girlfriend is sometimes really nice and gets him some; if she gets him 5 of them, he will drink them so fast that he starts choking because he isn't swallowing fast enough, and he then spits it all over her face. Girlfriend buys them for him anyway because she loves him.
*Boyfriend's hair is not dyed and is naturally cyan blue.
**One of Tankman's Game Over quotes pokes fun at this fact, as he questions (and mocks) the nature of his hair color, stating, "I guess your shitty blue hair dye got in your eyes. It's okay, it happens to all of us."
***PhantomArcade has stated that "Tankman claims his hair is dyed to be a condescending asshole, in reality[,] it's naturally blue."
*Boyfriend's beeping noises are not a language, but just random sounds he makes.
*Ritz The Rat was confirmed to be Boyfriend's brother, with ninjamuffin99 describing this as a Stuart Little situation.
*Boyfriend is neurodivergent, as he has ADHD and autism.
*Boyfriend likes to listen to Kanye West.
*Boyfriend and Girlfriend cannot be hypnotized or mind-controlled into not loving each other. Their love for each other is practically the only thing that occupies their minds, and they would die without it.
*Boyfriend doesn't know what the Pizzagate conspiracy theory is.
*Boyfriend does not wash his clothes. He keeps a pile of dirty clothes on his desk chair where he goes to make music; when he wakes up, he puts the clothes on his bed, and when he goes to bed, he puts them on his chair.
*Boyfriend acts extremely enthusiastically when Girlfriend cooks him dinner, which is PB&J sandwiches.
*Boyfriend and Girlfriend's favorite animal is a Hominid, not realizing that a Hominid isn't an actual animal.
*Boyfriend can't read fast enough to watch subtitled anime, which makes everyone around him concerned that he is lying and possibly can't read at all.
*Not much is known about Boyfriend's parents. The only information known about them is that they got him into a public college, paying the entry fees, only for him to stop showing up. This subsequently led to him dropping out. During his time at the college, he preferred to read comics all day in the library instead.
**In a 2021 Reddit AMA, ninjamuffin99 stated that Boyfriend's parents work in accounting. However, when someone called them his "accountant parents" in a donation message during a live stream that PhantomArcade made in 2022, the latter seemed confused, suggesting that ninjamuffin99's comment was a random joke and not canon.
*Though his chibi-styled appearance may suggest otherwise, Boyfriend is a powerful and capable fighter.
*Although Boyfriend reps Newgrounds, he made a YouTube account and got advertisements enabled on it. Since he hates working part-time jobs, he uploads 3D videos of sex in Roblox to make money on the side. Despite the videos being age-restricted, he profits from the videos based on the views and CPM and uses the money to buy cigarettes, implying that he likes to smoke.
*Boyfriend's favorite burger order is a burger from In-N-Out Burger with jalapeños, pepper Jack cheese and the Animal Style spread.
*Boyfriend and Girlfriend like Neon Genesis Evangelion, but only the scenes where things fight, as they are too unintelligent to understand the plot.
*Boyfriend hates the movie Cars with a passion.
**If he sees a poster for Planes, he throws up wherever he's standing. Sometimes, when he accidentally swallows things around the house that he's not supposed to, Girlfriend simply shows him the Planes poster, and they immediately get back whatever they're missing.
*Boyfriend likes to go to a Brazilian wax factory that costs exactly 1 dollar. Although they do an awful job and painfully rip all of his pubic hair off, it's really cheap, and he has fun each time he does it.
*Whenever Boyfriend fails a song and gets "blue-balled," Girlfriend holds his hand until he feels better. Girlfriend is obliged to kneel to hold Boyfriend's hand due to being taller than him.
*Boyfriend is irreligious.
*Boyfriend is circumcised, described by PhantomArcade as being a "cut king." His foreskin was apparently cut off due to an incident involving a car door.
*Boyfriend owns a copy of PaRappa the Rapper 2 that he bought from Goodwill.
*Boyfriend can easily defeat Darth Vader, but he can't beat Goku.
**In a situation involving Girlfriend and Boyfriend meeting Darth Vader, he would see Darth Vader coming ominously. Darth Vader would have his lightsaber out, and all of a sudden, Girlfriend would start charging up in the background. Darth Vader would sense an ominous force and would start to get a chill within his suit; he would pull out his lightsaber and make sure he's ready to completely try to take on whatever's about to come at him. Boyfriend would then slam his microphone into the Fisher-Price control panel on his chest, leading to Darth Vader freaking out, coughing and dying. Boyfriend and Girlfriend would then start hopping on his back and beating him up, yanking on his helmet and smacking his bald, crispy head around.
***In a fight between Boyfriend and Goku, Goku would rip Boyfriend's skin off, but as long as Boyfriend had his hand for Girlfriend to hold, he would still have the retry screen.
*Boyfriend uses $100 Android-based monthly card payment phones. He also gets angry at the poor-quality 3G Wi-Fi and drops the phones from 5-story buildings onto incoming traffic out of frustration. Whenever they crash, he throws them 200 feet off his roof; an example is him drawing PictoChat-esque penis pictures on his Samsung Galaxy before its 5 kilobytes of free space crash it, leading to him throwing the phone off the roof instinctively.
**If he got a better phone, he would accidentally set facial recognition and forget the strange face that he made, failing repeatedly as a result. He would also hold it outside a Greyhound window to film a video, and a gust of wind would knock it out of his hands, with the phone then flying underneath the front tires of an 18-wheeler truck, leading to the truck flipping.
*If Sonic.exe ever tried to mess with Boyfriend and Girlfriend, he could trap them in a nightmare dimension for all eternity, but if he mentioned there's no McDonald's, they would immediately kill him and escape. If there was a McDonald's, they would presumably stay.
**If there was a McDonald's but its ice cream machine was broken permanently, they would be fine with just being given the sweetener milk bags that go in the machine instead.
***If they were told that there was no Burger King, they might actually prefer the nightmare dimension to reality.
*When Boyfriend and Girlfriend go to McDonald's, they normally get whatever they can pressure the window clerk to give them for free. They hold the store hostage, stealing Mommy Mearest's limousine and holding up the entire drive-through slot.
**If the McDonald's were to have no Chicken McNuggets included with the Happy Meal, they would start yanking all the iron bolts and screws out of the PlayPlace.
*Boyfriend wears his prohibition sign shirt because, according to ninjamuffin99, it looks cool.
**He also wears it because he is a "cool as fuk smooth ass bitch" with "nothin but style."
*When Boyfriend and Girlfriend sign up for a driver's license test, they use a fake ID, and they crash into trees and run away. As a result, the Henchmen are stuck driving Mommy Mearest's Porsche back, and she tears the Henchmen's fingernails and eyelashes off.
**Boyfriend and Girlfriend need fake IDs because they don't want the police called on them; they go to the same DMV every few months.
*Boyfriend may have a drool fetish, as he seems happy to be drooled on by Girlfriend's drool after she puts his Nendoroid figure in her mouth.
*When Boyfriend texts Girlfriend to ask if she wants Chick-fil-A, he knows to get extra Polynesian Sauce once she starts sending nudes.
*In the wintertime, when Boyfriend and Girlfriend look away from each other for more than 10 minutes and then look back toward each other, they hold their arms out wide and run toward each other to hug each other, as their object permanence is sometimes not very good. Sometimes they will go to kiss and accidentally bump into a cold pole and kiss it, and both get their tongues stuck to it for hours. The fire department even knows them by name.
*If Girlfriend became a worm, Boyfriend would still love her. While it would impact their love lives and change things, they could get used to it. Boyfriend would also figure out a way to change her back, even if it took him a decade.
*Boyfriend has no concept of race.
*Boyfriend doesn't own a Kia Soul, but he does have an electric lime scooter that he rented from the Lime application which he never returned, and keeps dodging the debt collectors. He signed up for Lime with a temporary email address, and they were never able to find him.
*The next update for Friday Night Funkin' will reveal where Boyfriend lives. Another future update will also show what Pico and boyfriend's first date was like.
*Boyfriend and Girlfriend have a poor sense of time, so when at night, they go to their local McDonald's restaurant and see that the lights are off and nobody's there, they freak out, not realizing that it doesn't operate 24/7. They stay up all night holding each other and watching movies trying to forget about the fast food place being closed, and are unable to sleep. The next morning, when they double check to see if McDonald's is still closed and they see the employees working there again, they breathe out in joy, go inside, take all the change in their pockets and order $20 worth of food.
===Inspirations===
*Boyfriend's design was likely based on the Newgrounds character known as Kiddbrute. Kiddbrute is a character originating from an account of the same name created by a Newgrounds user in early 2020, predating the release of Friday Night Funkin'. Boyfriend and Kiddbrute's designs have many parallels, including baggy jeans, large sneakers, similar proportions, a wide mouth, and a t-shirt with a symbol in the middle, with Kiddbrute's shirt having an @ sign and Boyfriend's shirt having a prohibition sign.
**Kiddbrute was once in the files of the game, under the name "ape.png."
***Kawai Sprite and kiddbrute collaborated on a project beforehand called SHAKE APE DRIFT.
****ninjamuffin99 has acknowledged kiddbrute's importance to Friday Night Funkin' in a Tweet, saying that had it not been for him, the game couldn't have existed. 
*According to PhantomArcade in a Tweet, one of the core inspirations for Friday Night Funkin' is the 1981 anime adaptation of the manga series Urusei Yatsura. Boyfriend's character is presumably based on the series' main character Ataru Moroboshi, who has a powerful girlfriend named Lum, whom Girlfriend is presumably based on in turn. Lum's blue hair also inspired Boyfriend's hair color.
*Boyfriend is supposed to represent issues that PhantomArcade had at 19 years old.
**When Phantomarcade was 19 years old, his partner's father told him to turn off the Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth music that he was listening to because it was "fruity." The father then played AC/DC music on a guitar. PhantomArcade described this as "a story about the unique dynamics within relationships that inspired the game, and why [Boyfriend and Girlfriend] are that age."
***Boyfriend is a self-insert of PhantomArcade, as stated by the latter during a live stream.
*According to JohnnyUtah, Boyfriend was loosely inspired by early Cartoon Network shows like Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls.
==Gallery==
View Boyfriend's full gallery here.
==Notes==
==References==
==External Links==
*Article on Pico Wiki
Category:Main Characters
Category:Playable Characters
Category:Original Characters
Category:Humans
Category:Boyfriend
Category:Alive
Category:Male
Category:LGBTQ+
Category:Characters Voiced by Kawai Sprite