Farmer's life at Joja could be a really funny dark sitcom

Warning, long. I'm trying to make a background for my farmer but I'm really sleep deprived and this spiraled out of control. Just imagine a show depicting the daily life between the walls of one of Joja's mega office buildings. And considering it's Stardew Valley we're talking about you could put anything in here. And it just gets better with SVE.

Uniquely weird coworkers? Just re-watch the Joja segment at the beginning of the game. Psychopathic bosses? Of course, it's Joja after all. Work related shenanigans and conflicts? They are the backbone of every work related sitcom. Really dark comedy? There's a skeleton in one of the cubicles. But we can have so much more!

Remember Claire's movie, where a Joja inspired evil corporation put mind controlling substances in their soda to create zombie consumers and take over the world? Who's to say that Joja didn't actually try it at some point, only to cover it up later? And that Joja didn't experiment this stuff, and more, on their employees? Worker protection clearly isn't a priority in Ferngill Republic. Which leads to an episode in which the farmer has to figure out why his coworkers are acting weird this week.

Russian roulette is played every day with the cafeteria food (could be shit food, or poison or said weird experiments). Then there's the stress of having to negotiate a rise or explain your poor productivity results to your boss when there are literal corpses of former employees just laying around (my headcanon is that the skeleton was a former worker who tried to start a union and got shot point blank by a manager).

My other headcanon is that Joja has do deal with monster infestations really often. All the weird products, poor safety or hygiene regulations and all that misery will constantly attract monsters. And Joja doesn't care about the workers enough to monster-proof their building and would only cover up the incidents that get bad enough (as in multiple deaths). An episode with the farmer and 1-2 other coworkers hearing squelching sounds in one bathroom and after investigating realizing slimes are trying to get inside the building. The farmer, who just removed the drain cover to look inside the pipe quickly puts it back down only for purple ooze to come out from a slime that slammed against the grate. Cue panic because iridium slimes are very dangerous. No one gets close to that bathroom for weeks and the only reason adventurers eventually get called in to kill the silmes is because they broke the bathroom door open and spilled in the hallway and into a manager's office while he was there.

The farmer already recognizes multiple adventurers due to the amount of times they had to call different guilds to deal with the monsters in the building (maybe Zuzu doesn't have it's own guild since all those people in one place would make monsters less likely to attack but any adventurer that happen to have business in the city becomes responsible with dealing with monster emergencies). Said adventurers wouldn't really recognize the farmer since he would be just another employee in the mass of people temporarily evacuated, but there's a popular security camera video circulating among adventurers with a Joja worker fighting a shadow brute with a chair in a dimly lit hallway. Sure, that person can't really damage the monster without magical weapons and it all ends with the Joja worker managing to run out of the door or out of the window, but they are still very impressed that some random guy had the courage to face a monster unarmed and survive without major injuries. There could be multiple videos or stories passed around the internet with the farmer dealing with monsters since they were the only ones brave enough to try to do something about them, and since the farmer doesn't get hurt they are considered pretty funny.

Joja could be using the monsters as a way of punishing uncooperative workers. You ask too many questions at work, you have to retrieve boxes from warehouse #7 that is currently a nest of shadow monsters. If the worker doesn't return they'll send someone else. This way they have an easy way to threaten people into submission. Naturally, the farmer ends up pissing the higher ups very often, which leads to the shadow brute video mentioned above, among others.

Actually Joja might have unique monsters, created when normal monsters and other supernatural beings spend too much time around Joja Cola.

You can go the horror route too. The building being haunted by former coworkers - silhouettes in the mirror at night, flickers some can see in the corner of their eyes, strange whispers when the farmer is about to fall asleep at the desk. Some hallways seem to go on for too long, time passes weirdly in some rooms, doors appearing and disappearing at random... the building is nearly an eldritch location at this point due to the amount of monsters and negative feelings building up between it's walls. Part of the reason some of the farmer's coworkers are acting weird is because they got replaced by the skinwalker that made the parking lot it's hunting ground.

Really, everything you can think of can be put here. I would go with a horror show with dark comedy elements for this, since the post got increasingly dark as I was writing it. Maybe the farmer even worked for Joja for far longer than it seems, since time is iffy there?

Below the cut are my first attempts at giving my farmer a backstory, and a few more details about my AU (because at this point is too big for a headcanon). It doesn't have much to do with the rest of the post, so feel free to skip this part. Also warning, it's kinda edgy and cringy, since I wanted a reason why the farmer, who in SVE is basically a genius with an absurd amount of talents, was a nobody who ended up in a dead-end office job. So I had to give the farmer multiple handicaps to explain this.

Also, what happened with that skeleton there? Sure, Morris is a dick and isn't a good boss but he wouldn't be able to just kill Claire and let her body in the store without consequences. So where the hell was the farmer working at?

***

As a slight explanation to tie all this mess together, my farmer got kicked out of the house at a very young age, like didn't even finish high school kinda young. Lived on the streets for a while and eventually got hired by Joja - the only ones who would hire him with no education orcredentials at this point (it also explain why he's rooting through the trash so casually, or why he's willing to eat anything, including raw fish and algae). In my headcanon, aside from normal workers, Joja also hires desperate people that no one cares for and ships them in certain isolated locations. These workers have different and much more dangerous jobs than normal Joja employees, and the death rate is pretty high.

They have gated mini-towns set up with their own apartments, offices, cafeterias, etc where these workers basically spend all their time in - and they become closer to indentured workers than normal employees. So everything mentioned above would happen in more than one building. The farmer would get a small salary from which he'd have to pay Joja back for the rented apartment, food, uniform, supplies and all that, which would leave him very little money. This is a strategy to keep people from being able to leave, plus there is a high fee that those who leave have to pay for breaking up their contract (which would explain why he moves in on the farm with only some spare change in his pockets). The farmer only managed to escape due to grandpa's letter.

All this is a well known secret. Due to the prolonged war, the political class of Ferngill Republic was vulnerable to Joja's bribes and promises and not only changed laws in their favor but also constantly closes it's eyes at Joja's abuse. Also, the economy isn't doing well at this point and there are worries that the Gotoro Empire might turn the war in it's favor, so as long as Joja keeps making profits to keep the economy afloat no one will bother them. So horror (and funny) stories and videos from Joja pop up fairly often and Joja doesn't really bother to remove them from the internet since they don't fear any punishment. At this point there's an entire sub-class of jokes featuring Joja employees - imagine airplane food jokes, but with Joja and more death. Most adventurers are also aware of the monster problems Joja is creating but can't do much about it aside from killing the monsters when Joja bothers to report them.

So this would also explain why the farmer is so good at killing monsters from the beginning. He had a lot of experience with dealing with monsters while being unarmed and defenseless against them. Now that he got a sword, even a really shitty one, monsters got much easier to handle.