#the combo of being absurdly mean and phrasing things in the most minimizing and casual way possible is so much fun to write

[godsfavoritescientist]

AITA for throwing a party for my best friend?

I (NB, 1 trillion) recently befriended someone (M, 60+) for the first time in ages. At first I only spent time with him because I felt sorry for him (he had no other friends), but after I got to know him, I realized he was really smart and fun to talk to.

Early on in our friendship, he asked me for help with an important project he was stuck on, and I agreed right away. I dedicated several years to helping him out, doing everything from giving him an idea that would solve all his problems once completed to walking him through complex math to encouraging him to keep going when he hit roadblocks. Every single time I helped with the project for all those years, I stayed up all through the night working on it with him.

A year before things started to fall apart between us, he invited a different friend to help with the project too, who I’ll call “F.” This guy hated the local wildlife (which my friend loved and dedicated his life to studying), and my friend insisted on keeping me a secret from F out of fear that F would hate me too. My friend also insisted on delaying his own project (which he had to finish so that he could keep getting funded to do his dream job) in order to keep F happy by building side-projects that F suggested.

Throughout his time “helping” with the project, F kept criticizing my friend and his project. Eventually, F finished a secret side-project of his own, to build a weapon that erases memories, and used it on my friend multiple times without his consent. I tried to warn my friend that F wasn’t trustworthy, but my friend didn’t do anything with my advice.

When the project was almost complete, F saw me for a few seconds and threw a fit. He used some choice words to describe my friend’s life’s work, told him he should destroy his project, and then abandoned my friend.

My friend was really upset about this, and tried to get in contact with me to reassure him. Unfortunately, I was spending time with my other friends for a couple of days at the time, and didn’t get his messages. He responded by barging into my own home, running up behind me, and accusing me of giving him a bad idea for the project we worked on together for years up until that point, probably because he was doubting his own reasoning skills after finding out that his choice to let F stick around had been a bad decision. I reassured him that he is smart (he is insecure about that) and revealed that I was planning to throw him a huge surprise party too, once his project was finished. He got really angry about this, and announced that he wanted to shut down his life’s work just to stop the party from happening.

I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t want me to throw him a party, and assumed that the stress of losing a friend (even a bad friend like F) was making him not think clearly. I also got a little bit annoyed that he could ever throw all our hard work down the drain so impulsively like that. I diligently stopped him from ruining his own creation, and waited for him to get over his moment of irrational feelings so we could get back to finishing his work, but it never happened.

He kept trying to shut down the project, and ended up losing everything because of it. When he invited yet another bad influence into his home (his brother, who had been a criminal for over ten years at that point), his brother used his diabolical mind to come up with a way to use our project against him, in a way that trapped my friend in a really dangerous situation for several decades.

I looked for my friend for the entire time he was lost in a dangerous situation, but I had no luck. And right when my friend miraculously found me, his brother separated us again. But there was a silver lining to this situation: my friend’s brother accidentally created a way for me to finally reunite with my friend and throw him the surprise party I had been planning.