Thank You, Ryan

I can count the number of interactions I had with Ryan Davis on one hand. They were fleeting, insignificant Twitter messages between a fan and a public personality, between a subscriber to a website and someone providing customer support. he steered me towards sociaimprints.com when I had an issue with a t-shirt order. He retweeted a photo of my beagle-corgi mix when I engaged Eric Pope in a joke about Sleeping Dogs, and, in a message I've cherished even before today's tragic news, he called me a motherfucker.

It's easy to think we know the guys who make up Giant Bomb. The site stands out because each member of the staff injects so much of his personality into what they cover and how they cover it. Each week, there's a Giant Bombcast that opened with Ryan's infectiously enthusiastic "Hey everybody, it's Tuesday!" kicking off a two to three hour discussion of video games that usually, quickly, devolves into four friends sitting a room, talking about their lives. Quick Looks and the Endurance Runs are just as much about how the crew reacts to a game as the game itself. But for as much as Ryan, Jeff, Patrick, Vinny, Brad, Dave, Drew, and Matt have been willing to share with us over the years, the reality is they spend a small portion of their lives being honest with us in front of a camera or a microphone, and then go lead separate private lives. Some members of the community have struck up wonderful friendships with Ryan or other members of the staff, but the reality is I remain a fan, not a friend, and this is why I'm having so much trouble processing the news of Ryan's death.

Even though I never met him (being in the same room for a PAX East panel hardly counts as meeting someone), it's clear that the people who did know Ryan loved him. The tributes from Casey Malone, Max Tempkin, and Justin McElroy put this into words more beautifully than I ever could. But I think Ryan's honesty with the community here at Giant Bomb, the way he let us into pieces of his life make it easier for us to empathize with those who truly knew Ryan. For the rest of us, we knew him in our own one-sided way. I knew him as the host of the Bombcast and various live shows. Those podcasts and show archives meant quite a bit to me, as listening and watching helped me deal with my own stresses and anxieties.

I can't figure out why I'm taking this so hard, especially when one of our only meaningful interactions was him calling me a motherfucker. Actually, it's because of the spirit in which he called me a motherfucker. There was some discussion, either on the Bombcast or on Twitter or in Quick Look, where Ryan made a reference to The Color Purple. This was when he and Gary Whitta were regularly pulling down the e-trousers and comparing their...Klout. I sent Ryan a tweet along the lines of "Since I can't give you +K in The Color Purple or Toni Morrison, I gave you +K in Morrissey." His simple, honest, endearing response to someone he had never met was "you motherfucker." I took it in the warm and friendly spirit in which I'm sure it was offered.

I miss Ryan Davis, and I never even knew him.