Punchbags 2025: When Elimination Became the News
During Elimination 2025, I joined Team Punchbags expecting attacks, revives, arguments and the usual event chaos. I did not expect a team leadership election to turn into a miniature political media industry.
When Malice and Pinguux emerged as leadership choices, I started making deliberately over-the-top campaign material for Malice. The joke was never that Malice was the flawless candidate. Quite the opposite: the campaign leaned into chaos. Anti-Pinguux posters appeared. Malice became a heroic revolutionary, a glorious comrade and, at one point, a candidate apparently bribing a penguin for votes.
Then real team drama began catching up with the satire. Discord arguments, leadership friction and Malice's removal from discussion gave TornBC TV new material. Campaign ads became breaking-news segments. A black-bear anchor reported from the studio. Tactical bears appeared in the streets. Punchbags eventually received the sort of monument normally reserved for fallen empires.
The result was a running series of short videos and images made alongside the event rather than after it. They are not an official history of Team Punchbags, and the news framing intentionally exaggerates what happened. What they do preserve is the mood of Elimination: competition, personalities, arguments, absurdity and the creativity players build around Torn's events.
The original generated source files for many of the shorts are no longer available, but the published YouTube copies survive. I have gathered those videos, the campaign artwork and a simple timeline into The Punchbags Files on TornBC TV so the whole strange little chapter can still be viewed in order.
Sometimes the best part of an event is not the score at the end. It is the nonsense players create while trying to get there.
