History

Misfits

Noah was born on May 12, 1999, to James and Isobel Foster, in Lakewood. His mother doted on him, but his father was emotionally withdrawn and prone to wild mood swings, frequently leaving home for long stretches of time.

A scrawny kid with a big mouth, Noah quickly earned a penchant as a soft target for bullies and spent his school days being pushed around and picked on. It wasn’t until fourth grade when somebody stepped in on his behalf. Audrey Jensen, no stranger to bullies herself, intervened to defend Noah in a fight. Noah was grateful and, though Audrey had no intention of sticking around, continued to insinuate himself in her life until she finally caved in and became his first friend.¹

Noah got to know some of Audrey’s friends: older girls Amanda Steele and Jamie Teague, the latter of whom also played a part in defending him from schoolyard bullies.² Noah was aware of Audrey’s friendship with Emma Duval, whom she’d known since they were very little, but soon realized Emma wasn’t as up to hanging out with him as Audrey’s other friends were. Noah chalked this up to Emma being wary of associating with a nerd, and never made a fuss about it, though Audrey was quietly troubled.

Just because he was a butt of jokes, Noah wasn’t a complete victim and, in middle school, cultivated a smart-alec streak to match his precociousness. The extent to which he may have been enabled by the knowledge that he had a coterie of tough girls to defend him from pushback is debatable. Among other things, Noah was responsible for a feat of small-scale cyber-terrorism he coyly dubbed the Great Soft Server of 2011.³

Absent Father

Jim Foster left home for good when Noah was 13 years old. A rumor spread like wildfire that he’d eloped with a waitress. Isobel bore the scandal as well as she could, but the emotional strain was plain for Noah to see. Never particularly close to his father, he nonetheless felt the loss of a paternal figure, and resented what the rumors were doing to his mother.

The rumors had their way with him as well. At Garfield Middle School’s seventh grade dance, Noah was singled out and taunted about his deadbeat dad by the likes of Nina Patterson and Brooke Maddox.

AV

During his freshman year at George Washington High, Noah joined the AV Club to indulge his fascination with film and technical ephemera. He encouraged the ever-introverted Audrey to join as well, given her long-abiding interest in film and photography.

While in the club, Noah and Audrey developed an acquaintance with Kitty Wright, a senior who’d transferred to GW High a few months prior. Kitty and Noah shared the habit of hanging around the school’s archival film library after hours. In this way, Noah learned of Kitty’s interest in the 1994 Brandon James murders. Noah was already familiar with the massacre, owing to his interest in horror and the tragedy’s status as a local ghost story, but he’d never taken it apart from an analytical perspective before.

Noah knew Audrey was struggling with the loss of Emma to the school’s “in-crowd”, a clique composed of the very people who’d made life so difficult for Audrey and Noah when they were kids. Noah encouraged Audrey to find a creative outlet to soften the blow of Emma’s perceived betrayal. Audrey saw the sense in this and began working on a documentary about Brandon James.

Meet Cute

On the evening of October 18, 2015, a video was posted to YouTube depicting Audrey making out with a girl. The video promptly went viral and incited a slew of hateful and mocking commentary over the two girls depicted, who were summarily forced out of the closet.

Noah, worried Audrey would do something reckless, got in touch with Amanda and pulled her out of work.⁴ She gave him a lift to the Maddox mansion, where Brooke was hosting a house party that, as Noah had deduced, Audrey was crashing, having already concluded who was responsible: the in-crowd…and Emma chief among them.

Noah and Amanda arrived just before Audrey and Brooke, who’d been defending Emma, could come to blows. The exasperated Brooke left Audrey with them, bringing Emma into the house.⁵ Audrey didn’t linger but, before Noah and Amanda could follow her, they were intercepted by Nina and her perennial on-again/off-again boyfriend Tyler O’Neil.

Nina and Tyler were their usual charming selves, and Amanda wasted no time going after Nina for uploading the video, though Nina denied any knowledge. Exasperated, Amanda turned to Tyler and wondered why he was defending her so adamantly, given all Nina had taken from him, insinuating Nina was being unfaithful. Tyler jumped to the conclusion that Nina was cheating on him with Jake Fitzgerald (a not absurd notion, given Nina and Jake had dated briefly the previous year) and confronted him. Jake, pretty sauced after chugging a keg through a hose, laughed off the notion he’d ever go back to Nina, provoking Tyler into tackling him into Brooke’s pool.

Amanda and Noah ditched in the resulting confusion. Noah breathlessly wondered if Nina and Jake were really hooking up, and Amanda remarked she had no idea, but a taste of Nina’s own medicine couldn’t hurt.⁶ Noah and Amanda were separated in the fracas, Noah caught up in watching the ensuing drama as Brooke reemerged to rake the guys over hot coals for messing up her party. Irate (and not at all helped by the Jake/Nina rumors, despite Jake’s cloying insistence they were false), Brooke called off the whole party, ordering her guests to hit the road.

Realizing Noah was the last party crasher standing, Brooke was about to turn the full force of her ire on him when her friend Riley intervened, offering to show Noah out. As they walked through the garden to the front of the house, they chatted, realizing that, despite both being in Honors classes their whole time in high school, they’d never had a real conversation. Noah was surprised to find himself enjoying Riley’s company: she wasn’t nearly as high maintenance or vapid as, say, Brooke and Nina. Most importantly: Riley seemed genuinely interested in his nerdy esoterica. Riley complimented Noah’s Skeletor logo tee and Noah promptly geeked out, telling her it was inspired by the Fabulous Secret Powers meme.

Riley apologized for the night’s drama, only for Noah to insist she had nothing to apologize for compared to the likes of Tyler, who Riley was compelled to offend, claiming there was more to him than met the eye. Catching Riley’s fondness for Tyler, Noah nearly admitted the Jake/Nina business was all made up, but lost his courage.⁷

Hyperfixations

Noah woke the next day to huge news: murder had come to Lakewood. While he’d been trying to bail Audrey out at Brooke’s party, two freshmen, Stacy Winters and Brock Carmichael, had been killed at Stacy’s house. Her parents, Robert and Gina, had been found dead shortly afterward, of unknown but decidedly mysterious causes.

Years of fascination with crime and criminals seemed to have finally found a practical application. Arriving at school to find the place surrounded by sheriff’s deputies, Noah could barely contain his excitement and had to be reigned in by Amanda, whose brother was a deputy himself.

Noah’s buzziness was a stark contrast to Audrey, who had to learn about the murders from her friends, having ostensibly been “detoxing” to avoid more blowback from the video. Noah pointed out that, at any rate, the killings would surely have pushed the video out of the local headlines.⁸

Noah remained irrepressible as the school day began, butting into a conversation among the in-crowd ahead of first period English, to opine on the “bystander effect” that likely had a part to play in nobody intervening to help the dying Stacy, even as she bled to death in the middle of her street. This statement, made in front of football player Zach Henderson, whose mother had found the body, didn’t go over well.

As it happened, Noah found an avenue to talk about the murders in class as well, thanks to the paper he’d written on The Great Gatsby, wherein he’d attempted to find thematic resonance between the novel and the 1994 Brandon James murders, a topic that, English teacher Mr. Branson reluctantly agreed, was “scarily serendipitous”. Taking advantage of a pair of virgin ears in the form of transfer student Kieran Wilcox, Noah launched into an oral history of Lakewood’s home grown ghost story, leading into his essay’s argument, linking the novel’s Daisy Buchanan with the mysterious “Daisy” who was allegedly the object of Brandon James’s affections.

This kicked off a wide-ranging debate about the applicability of this comparison, with Riley pointing out that Gatsby and Brandon James weren’t suitable parallels at all, given the privilege Gatsby had. Emma bristled at Noah’s insinuation that Daisy and, by extension, Brandon’s victims, were “careless people” who were fundamentally incompatible with outcasts like Brandon, accusing Noah of suggesting they deserved it, which Noah claimed he hadn’t meant at all.⁹

Appearance

Noah is a reedy young man with a pale complexion and a lanky frame. He has sandy brown hair typically trimmed in an unfashionable sloping shape that prematurely ages him. His eyes are a dark slate blue.

Wardrobe

Noah’s style is quirky and deliberately kitsch. He wears logo tees habitually, some of which he’s designed himself, such as the Skeletor tee he wore when he crashed Brooke’s Big Beautiful Bash.¹⁰

Personality

Noah compensates for his unprepossessing appearance by being a motormouth, channeling seemingly boundless nervous energy into words. He doesn’t have a filter and frequently talks himself into trouble, though he can occasionally use his words to get out of messes as well.

While not confrontational himself, Noah is devoted to the few friends he has, and will always intercede for the people he loves.

Noah’s analytical tendency means he can overthink things, getting lost in details at the expense of the bigger picture.

Skills

Tech: Noah is a tech wiz and computer prodigy, able to use his skills for good and ill. He has aspirations of attending MIT.¹¹

Crimes Committed

Responsible for the Great Soft Server of 2011.¹²

Trespassed on the Maddox property to keep Audrey from doing anything reckless in the wake of the kissing video.¹³

Development

Noah was a main character throughout Scream the TV Series and consequently has been part of the Scream Roleplay Universe since its inception. Since 2015, he has been portrayed by three people, and only two discounting The Story so Far.

In the 2015 Season 1 AU, Noah was portrayed by BeartoothGuy. Though BeartoothGuy eventually joined the May 2016 Season 2 AU, Noah had already been claimed by forum co-moderator AbedFan, who has portrayed the character ever since.

For years, Noah never had a documented birthday. This finally changed in 2023, when AbedFan created Noah’s Year One yearbook page, providing the date of May 12, 1999.

Other Interpretations

Season 1 AU

Though Noah is nominally still a victim of bullying in the Season 1 AU, he apparently had enough cachet to obtain an invite to Brooke’s house party at the start of the game, and brought Amanda and Audrey along as guests.^{14 15}

Trivia

AbedFan has been portraying Noah since May 2016, reprising the role for the October 2016 Season 3 AU and returning in 2019 for The Final Retreat. Brooke Maddox is the only other canonical character to claim such a consistent tenure. Fittingly, the romance plot between Noah and Brooke is one of the oldest continuing narrative threads in the SRU.

Noah’s dream college is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He shared this ambition with Riley and, to his surprise, Tyler O’Neil.¹⁶ As it stands, he’s the only one of the trio who still has a shot of making his dream a reality.

Noah is, or at least was, a fan of the Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card game, and still carries a deck in his bookbag.¹⁷

Noah is a Troper: that is, he is familiar with TV Tropes, the extensive online encyclopedia of storytelling devices, frequently namedropping tropes to his clueless friends.¹⁸

Noah professes to understand why his generation no longer reads for pleasure, but he must consider himself an exception to the rule, being familiar with A Song of Ice and Fire and bristling when Riley calls it by the name of its TV adaptation, Game of Thrones.¹⁹

For all his professed knowledge, Noah isn’t infallible. He has cited the Kitty Genovese case as an example of the “bystander effect”, despite more serious scholarship challenging the number of witnesses who allegedly ignoring the dying Genovese’s cries for help being greatly exaggerated.²⁰

Noah’s faceclaim, John Karna, is shared by the wily Irish youth Cillian O’Halloran in Big Trouble in Little Lakewood: 1846.

Quotes

Now, there’s no need for violence! We can all be reasonable adults. Undeveloped pre-frontal cortexes notwithstanding.

Noah breaking up a fight between Brooke and Audrey

Sidekick. Always there when the going gets tough, with a snappy remark and a gung ho attitude, until the target audience gets too grown up and the happy bastard gets shot in the head.

Noah diagnoses his archetype

That’s the algorithm for you. Feeding you whatever drivel the local mouth breathers are gulping up and presenting it ‘For you’.

Noah resents the kissing video popping to the top of his YouTube feed

Hey, it’s not my problem if our public servants have twitchy fingers, but if they want to go the lawsuit route, my Mom’s been eying the Columbo box set…

Noah tells Amanda there are benefits to being shot for annoying the police

How easily we all become content in this malcontent world.

Noah opines on the perils of his content-hungry generation

We don’t read because reading isn’t as colorful, it’s not as loud…you can’t game it the way you can game other media.

Noah hypothesizes reasons for his generation’s alleged disinterest in books

The perils of hyperfixations. Every now and then they become relevant.

Noah’s true crime obsession is back in vogue, which is great for him but bad for everyone else

Gallery

1. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 5 ↩︎
2. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 4 ↩︎
3. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 4 ↩︎
4. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 6 ↩︎
5. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 1 ↩︎
6. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 4 ↩︎
7. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 5 ↩︎
8. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 13 ↩︎
9. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 17 ↩︎
10. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 5 ↩︎
11. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 5 ↩︎
12. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 4 ↩︎
13. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 1 ↩︎
14. Season 1 AU: Pilot, Post 4 ↩︎
15. Season 1 AU: Pilot, Post 7 ↩︎
16. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 5 ↩︎
17. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 13 ↩︎
18. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 13 ↩︎
19. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 17 ↩︎
20. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 17 ↩︎