Why Squidward's Suicide Exists

The end of Squidward's Suicide states that the viewpoint character does not know how or why the tape existed in the situation by which it existed. However, by combining this information and various real-world concepts, and also utilizing the fact that Squidward's Suicide is not in and of itself supernatural, we can come to a conclusion on how the tape appeared in that situation in the first place.
The story itself gives us only highlights a few cryptic hints. The first one of these is that the eyes of the characters were drawn in a style in which they were "clearly not shots of real people's eyes, but something a bit more real than CGI". This is a rather cryptic statement, though considering that CGI at the time this was written wasn't quite capable of creating realistic eyes, it's possible that these are simply eyes drawn in an extremely detailed fashion.
This detail, which shows up later, shows that whoever these people were, they definitely weren't amateurs. They had the tenacity to draw eyes so realistic that they didn't even look CG. This also shows us that there had to be more than one, because one person can't have done this entire thing. They may have rotoscoped actual people's eyes to create this effect, but that doesn't necessarily matter for this theory. Only the implications are important.
The second hint given is that there are random images of children being tortured within the video. The camera holder reacts to the children, taking the intestines out of one of them. Many people out-of-universe hail these scenes as superfluous, but they have an important presence in-story. The implication is that the people who made the video want to cement the fear which the video is meant to cause.
In the story, the viewpoint character states that the child in the video was never found. At first, this may not seem to be possible. However, let me point out that someone on this team was able to draw eyes which looked more realistic than CGI. It's possible that this so-called child was a practical set-piece. Why, when you have an animator who can draw extremely realistic eyes, would one go through all the trouble to kill a child instead of creating a dummy with fake intestines? There is more to say about these shots, but I will talk more about this specific aspect of the video later, after I have finished the surface-level analysis of the situation.
Additionally, the time stamp of the story states that it was edited a mere 24 seconds before the beginning of their viewing. This heavily implies that the people who created this file must have worked within Nickelodeon. This doesn't make sense according to my idea thus far, but I will bring this back as evidence later. For now we need to analyze the short itself.
The story might seem simple, albeit tastelessly raunchy, at first glance. However, I believe that a group with the skill to transform pen-and-paper drawings into eyes more realistic than even primitive CGI, with the ability to either watch or outright create a scene of horror and death, with the stealth to edit over a tape while inside the enemy fortress, could not have simply wanted to scare and confuse. They must have had a message for which they would work with such conviction.
This short depicts Squidward, an artist who practices incorrectly to the point where his music is downright awful, killing himself after he realizes that what he has created is utterly and obviously terrible. Using what we know about how skilled and driven the member of this group who supervised the art must have been, we can easily assume that this is a jab at the animators of Nickelodeon, who deign to produce childish artwork with more regard to quantity than quality.
One important symbol is that of the aforementioned realistic eyes. When the people boo maliciously at Squidward, it is with realistic eyes. Right after Squidward's eyes are shown to be realistic, he unambiguously kills himself. This is a rather blatant metaphor for looking at something with critical eyes; when looked at with critical eyes, work that is garbage is obviously garbage, and there is no getting around that.
Now how does the child torture aspect factor into the story? Surely this gore is meant to do nothing more than to cause disgust and fear? One may think so until they analyze the way in which these scenes are presented. They are described as silent, save for a few choice moments of intense sound and movement. The more I see this in my mind's eye, the more convinced I am that the people who sent this to Nickelodeon wished to frighten them not only through the mere message, but also through their skill in both animation and prop creation.
Let me recap the theory I have just formed out of the limited first-hand information on this tape. The tape was recorded by artists attempting to mock the Nickelodeon execs and animators for continuing a show even in the face of the show's creator moving to greener pastures and implying that it wouldn't work. My support for this comes from the time at which it was shown, the use of impressive props and time-consuming animation techniques to contrast SpongeBob Squarepants' lack of these, and the story of the short being about an artist who realizes his work is awful after the people around him finally accosts him enough to induce a moment of clarity.
The only thing left to chronicle is the effect that this event has had. This is where we must view the world through more cynical eyes. For you see, the people who created the video were undoubtedly artists first and foremost. There is little dialogue, and the storytelling is sparse and mostly visual. They didn't even attempt to integrate the child torture scenes into the story.
Compare this with the show as the seasons went on. Even though Spongebob Squarepants has hemorrhaged in quality, it is universally agreed that the animation has become far crisper and more expressive, with the penchant for realism amped up to the point that some frames from Spongebob Squarepants are more hideous than Squidward with realistic red eyes could have ever been.
I'd like to see this as the network having the last laugh. If I were to see this as one of the reasons why they took the show in the direction they did, this meta-story makes the seasons from 4 on even funnier, as you can see these artists lampooning the intentions of the people who tried to scare them with fake props and overly detailed animation.
But perhaps the idea that this is an attempt to mock the orchestrators of Squidward's Suicide is wrong. Perhaps these tics simply show that those orchestrators are in power.
After all, if no one knows who made the short, why couldn't the people who made it still be working for Nickelodeon, slowly destroying the integrity of its storytelling? Is it any coincidence that their animated shows became far looser with their use of scatological and otherwise crude humor, going so far as to use suicide as an episode idea and make an entire show off of the poorly animated short Breadwinners, as if shock value were the only way they knew how to connect with their audience?
In addition, I mentioned earlier that Squidward's Suicide had to be from inside Nickelodeon due to the timing of the edits. This threw a wrench into my earlier theory of an outside force, but supports this theory of a shift towards content which could be described as more in line with the ideas oozing from every frame of Squidward's Suicide.
Using these trends and this information, Squidward's Suicide seems less like the flailing efforts of some shady group of artists and more like a legitimate prank which doubled as an unintentional warning, foretelling Nickelodeon's slow decline into skilled artists telling ham-fisted and pointless stories.
That, in my humble opinion, is far scarier than a stupid tape.
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