Monday, April 22, 2019

Rebuild of Elmer Studios, year seven

In reaching the end of our seventh year of the Rebuild of Elmer Studios, we passed another important milestone. At this stage we have outlasted our original incarnation in terms of lifespan, even if we also passed the first incarnation’s episode count some time before that. (Some disclaimers apply). And at this stage, we have enough material to likely see us through our eighth year as well.

This year we produced a total of twenty-two episodes. While I would like to say that it was a slow year, the truth is that it’s become the new standard. I did try to set a goal of two new episodes per month, but the simple fact is that real life is more important. However, I feel that this year we were truly blessed with an exceptional crop of fics (even accounting for the last part of Coalition War Story, which was a holdover from the previous year). There was nothing that was truly bad or awful, and instead what we had was entertaining in its own right.



Some Guy Called Steve

One of the things that we found really entertaining in this last year was a pair of Author OCs that were the center of the universe while not actually doing anything or contributing anything to the story. Both of these two managed to achieve this feat by entirely different means.

First of all we have Derek from Transformers Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. What does Derek bring to this tale of superheroes and giant robots? Why, he knows the layout of one school in Iowa, a skill that happened to be marginally useful for that very specific situation. And this is, of course, discounting the number of technological assets and resources that could be bought to bear in order to make his role entirely redundant. None the less, the fic seemed to try its darndest to keep the focus on this one guy who, all things being equal, was not very interesting at all.

However, Steve, the titualr Vault Dweller from The Vault Dweller (and it’s sequel/continuation/whatever it was supposed to be, War for the Wastes) managed to go above and beyond that in his utter lack of contribution. Unlike Derek, Steve didn’t even possess a marginally useful skill that was somehow vital to the outcome of the fic. But that was okay, since Steve himself was entirely redundant to his own story. He could have been entirely written out of if without changing the overall plot at all. In fact, the cast basically abandon him in the middle of the story and go off to do their own thing.

However, for all that, Steve had his own strange charm. He was bumbling and inept, and spent most of the fic looking for ways to hurt himself while annoying gun shop owners. And the fic kept rewarding him for this, giving him a prop girlfriend and a nice house while a war was supposedly going on around him. Unlike Derek who was bland and dull, Stvee managed to be enjoyably so simply because of how irrelevant he was to goings on.

Fanfic of things that are fanfic of other things

While Steve and Derek were entertaining in their own ways, this last year really stepped it up a notch when it came to fics with entirely original casts. Both of these fic were gifts due to their sheer loopiness and levels of stupidity, while also failing to develop their cast herds in any meaningful way. Both of these fics were also crossovers, albiet not conventional ones.

First of all was GBF Old Wars Waged Anew, a Build Fighters fanfic featuring a central OC who is a pushy, obnoxious, unlikeable jerk who enjoys ruining everyone else’s fun and has no regard for other people. However, this was not Kale Cassel (even if he did act like it) but rather Sam who quickly proved to be an entirely different brand of stupid. And while he didn’t have a Zabanya fixation, his Gundam choice proved to be amusing in its own right. However, Sam headed up an entirely original cast of incredibly shallow and poorly defined characters.

First was his brother Allen, who’s only distinctive traits were that he was Canadian and failed at everything he did. His two team mates were no better; one had no life beyond being an Internet Pseudo-Celebrity, while the other seemed to have been thrown in because the author needed a fourth man to fit his premise. And then on top of all of that was Allen’s rival, Jeremy, who’s interest in him seemed to go well beyond plastic toy robot fights.

But the real gifts in that fic were Sam’s parents. His father basically abandoned him at the airport and vaguely hoped that he would make contact with his mother and/or brother. From there, it seemed that his plan was to essentially force Sam on them for an indefinite period. However, that in turn paled before Heather, Sam’s mother. First and foremost she was an enabler who unquestionably supported Allen’s hobbies while ignoring the obvious mental distress he was suffering due to said hobbies. On top of that, she ran a restaurant that had strange opening hours and used unpaid, forced labour as a part of its operation. I can only assume it was some sort of insane tax write-off.

However, on the other side we had Ready Pegasus One, which was built around an entirely original cast who quickly coalesced into an amorphous blob. At their head was Jimmy, the designated protagonist who was the only one of them who really stood out, and that was because of his strange obsessions. Putting aside the fact that he was ticking every box on a list of cringy anime fanboy cliches, his focus on all things wolf-related resulted in a somewhat skewed set of priorities. After all, this is the guy who put more value into the life of his virtual pet than in the real lives of his so-called friends.

The rest of the cast were incredibly weakly defined. They each had a name and some supposed signature ability, but none of it mattered because they had no actual personalities and were largely interchangeable. It didn’t help that the fic itself largely rambled on without a plot for ages while simply throwing new superpowers and magic items at the cast. Along the way characters would randomly come and go while failing to have any measurable impact whatsoever.

Of all the random shallow OCs, however, my favourites would have to be Loterag and Mogestor, largely because of how stupid their names were.

The forces of Evil believe in teamwork

This last year also bought us something new in a pair of villain team-ups, both of which had their own narrative problems, albeit for different reasons.

War for the Wastes managed an in-continuity team-up of The Enclave, Caesar’s Legion and Mister House into one army aimed at conquering... something. Actually, their overall objective was somewhat unclear, and they seemed to be both omnipresent and strangely absent at the same time. However, the real clincher came from the fact that these three groups were diametrically opposed in their philosophies, beliefs, goals and methodologies to the point that they were mutually exclusive and as such, they had no reason to work together at all.

The fic never once tried to explain how they overcame these hurdles, or, for that matter, how this alliance came together in the first place. Instead they were simply there, and existed largely to be shot up in various ways while mildly inconveniencing our designated protagonists. Amusingly enough, said protagonists were also largely irrelevant to their defeat and largely just stood around while other people did all the work.

On the other hand, Transformers Earth’s Mightiest Heroes went one step beyond through a crossover team-up between the Decepticons and HYDRA. This alliance had the same problems as the previous one, in that the two groups had differing goals and beliefs, while providing no real explanation as to how they came together in the first place. Even then it managed to go beyond those problems and introduce a new one of its own.

Simply put, the Decepticons were entirely irrelevant to the team-up, and they were not bringing anything to the story that HYDRA could not have done themselves. This problem was not unique to the bad guys, however, and extended to the fic as a whole. The Transformers did very little in the crossover besides fight other Transformers and exposit about Transformer-related matters. They could have been entirely removed from the fic without actually changing its story.

This is the Death Game that never ends

On the B-team front, The Death Games continued to lumber onwards towards its inevitable conclusion, even if it continued to take its sweet time about it. However, while it continued to pad out space and do its utmost to remove even the slightest hint of danger form this deadly murder gamer, it also managed to introduce a staggering series of incredibly stupid plot twists. These managed to not only undercut its entire premise, but also managed to make no sense at all, making one wonder why the Author threw them in there in the first place.

The fic also proved to have a certain reliability to it; the bits that were obviously copied from The Hunger Games generally were better written and made more sense than those that were entirely original. This not only came at the level of writing, but at a conceptual one as well. The premise of the child murder game arena worked, but when the author tried to explain the hows and whys the fic fell apart. Funny that.

On the other side of things, we saw more Storm Force stories for the year. Our team of substitute action heroes continued to engage in ever increasingly nonsense adventures against a variety of colourful foes (including a robot wizard and a computerised zombie and yes, people did get paid to write this) in an effort to keep an obviously dying comic alive (Hint: they didn’t). Storm Force continued its tradition of cartoony violence, shallow characters, threadbare stories and casual disregard for human life with a remarkable degree of consistency while remaining enjoyably bad.

The good, the bad and the Gundam

Overall, the year was a good one. We had a lot of very enjoyably bad fics including a few that we felt were true gifts. At the same time, we managed to get through the year without any really ugly or awkward moments (even if we did dodge a bullet; more on that to come). A part of this comes from the Death Games undercutting its own premise and removing all the lethality from the Hunger Games.

All in all, the fic of the year would have to be the Vault Dweller/War for the Wastes combo which entertained on so many levels. Possibly it’s greatest feat was making the narrative entirely separate from and ultimately redundant to the actual story. Likewise, the best character of the year would likely be Steve, simply for adding another layer of redundancy on top of all that. The most incoherent would have to be Ready Pegasus One for having walls of text and a mass of identical characters. Finally, the biggest waste of a premise was Transformer’s Earths Mightiest Heroes for not only turning an action movie concept into an endless string of meetings, but for actually making the crossover portion entirely pointless.

As a bonus, the stupidest thing of the year would have to be Sam's Sonic the Hedgehog Gundam from GBF Old Wars Waged Anew. And as if that wasn't dumb enough, it has the power to turn into a Knuckles the Echidna Gundam. I can't make this up.

Badfic? Badfic never changes

Episode 284 is presently being worked on as I write this; its one of our freshest fics ever, having been abandoned less than a month before we found it. In a feat of planning and lucky finds, we have fics in place for up to about episode 294-295, just depending on how big they end up being and how we divide them. However, as allways, we gladly accept donations and other found fics.

On top of that, we have another fic that’s probably going to run to about six or so episodes. When we found it, we intended to use it, but on later reflection we felt it’d be better suited to being a Voice 2.0 presentation due to some of its content. So look forward to that in the not-too-distant future.

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