Year nine of the Rebuild of Elmer Studios was one of those strange moments where things took completely unexpected turn. We’ve now completely overtaken the original iteration by a considerable degree, even allowing for spin-offs, side projects, collaborations, lost episodes and the like. And that’s only going to increase.
In the last year we finished twenty-three episodes, an increase over past years. There may have been mitigating circumstances that did prompt that increase in productivity; something to do with us and the rest of the world being stuck indoors with nothing better to do with their times. It’s not quite the fabled two episodes per month I’d wanted, but it’s about as close as it’s ever going to get.
The Reschedule
I talked about this a bit in last year’s recap, but I thought that it was worth explaining this a bit more to show just how messed up our schedule got in the last two years. Originally, we had acquired four chapters of Chronicles of the Mad Dog Squadron in late 2018 (!) for riffing the plan for it to occupy the early 2019 portion of the schedule, coming off Shadow of a Phoenix. This would then be followed up by Escapism. But then everything was thrown off for a number of reasons.
First of all, Shadow ended up being longer then expected, which threw things out. Then on top of that, I found the rest of Chronicles of the Mad Dog Squadron on another archive, which meant that now instead of being the planned two episodes it was going to be six or seven. That led to it being moved back with Escapism and Fragments of Zero occupying the slots from episodes 396 to 399. All sorted, right?
Only on top of all that, Fragments of Zero turned out to be a lot longer then expected, filling up all four of those episodes. The result was that Escapism was double pushed back to after Mad Dog Squadron. This also had the side effect that some of the riffs on those two fics were done months apart from each other.
Chronicles of some very awful people
Mad Dog Squadron was one of those cases where a fic turned out to be very different to what we had expected. What we initially found was the upload of the first four chapters on fanfiction.net, which provided us with a tale of jerks flying magical wizard aeroplanes to fight the Illinois Skull Nazis. On the surface, it looked good. Goofy premise played entirely straight, unlikeable designated protagonist that’s easy to beat up on and the simple fact that it was Rifts fanfic were all good elements that fed into what we liked. Or maybe we just settled on it because there’s a character called Wank. We’re stupid like that.
I began work on it as a part of the original schedule discussed above. The initial four chapters seemed to go over well; even though the characters were aggressively unlikeable, the fic seemed to go well. And then while searching for other fics, I came across a Rifts fanfic archive that had the entirety of Chronicles of the Mad Dog Squadron on it. Eager to have more the fic, I quickly collected them and laid out the plans to do the rest of the fic.
And then I got to Chapters 6 and 7. Hoo boy. Really, what can you say about a fanfic that starts out with magic wizard aeroplanes and then dovetails into Holocaust imagery? Based on this, we decided to shift the fic over to became a Voice Two presentation.
Even then, Mad Dog Squadron proved to be a lot uglier then we expected. The characters moved from ‘unlikeable’ to ‘aggressively awful’ in every way. Key among them is designated protagonist, Lance Andrews. The author clearly was trying for ‘loveable rouge’ in intent. What we got was a straight-up date rapist who was homophobic, actively antagonistic and deliberately provocative, while also being a virulent gatekeeper and engaged in actively making things worse for everyone around him and never taking responsibility for his actions. Naturally, the fic never once calls him out of any of this and instead congratulates him at every stage for just how terrible he is. The rest of the cast are similarly aggressively unlikeable at every level to the point where the only actually sympathetic character in the whole fic is an Illinois Skull Nazi.
With that being said, the fic still gave us a lot of material. In many ways, the awfulness of the characters gave us a lot to work with. Wank being insanely racist, Jabo and Gooney being incredibly homoerotic, everyone dumping on Sake and so on. Other things such as the sheer stupidity of the premise, the fact that many of the supporting characters were defined more by their aircraft than anything else, Mad Dog’s bizarre business model, the aggressive gatekeeping and so on also helped. However, the fic did turn into something of a slog.
Naturally it was abandoned in the middle of the story, even if we have some theories as to why that relate to matters beyond the writer’s control. On top of all that, the archive hosting the fic disappeared while we were working on it. This means that barring some unexpected development, we have the last copies of the fic existing. This seems to happen a lot.
And we will never mention the Split-S again.
Fabric about writing a fanfic
After the mess that was Mad Dog Squadron we went back to something we knew we could rely on. Build Fighters – Next: Kai gave us the two things we’ve come to expect from Build Fighters fanfic. The first is an unlikeable lead character, and the second being the request for OCs.
The nicest thing we can say about Alex Leongard is that he’s not Lance Andrews, which is a pretty damning statement in and of itself. Instead he was a whiny, resentful little snot who was actively awful to everyone around him, especially his foster sister. Throw in a huge heap of resentment that he chose to stew in and a heaping of odious self-importance and you have an actively unlikeable character. That he took small breaks to have conversations with himself and his toy Gundam only added to the strangeness.
On the other hand, the fic did present us with something new. A not inconsiderable portion of it was spent on Alex writing his own fanfic within a fanfic, which served to add a layer of meta-commentary that we really didn’t expect, even allowing for the fact that this is a Build Fighters fic already (Which itself is basically meta-commentary on the fandom as a whole). Of course, this looped into a persistent issue we get in these fics; the author demanding that the readers send them OCs and in essence write their fic for them.. That they were requesting OCs for the fic within a fic only added to it.
What the hell did I just read, parts one and two
In many ways, Hatred Versus Love and This Is My Life were effectively the same fanfic. They both featured a blatant author proxy who had one of the canon cast as their prop love interest. They both also featured overly complicated backstories for those OCs that ultimately were irrelevant to the rest of the story. And both were clearly written without any actual thought to the story and with the author making it up as they went along.
The main difference between the two is in the execution. This Is My Life kept slowly stumbling forwards, even though it became obvious that not only did the writer not have any larger plan for it but they also seemed to lose interest in writing it but continued anyway. Conversely, Hatred Versus Love clearly had no long-term plan, and instead the author kept just vomiting out chunks of story for the sake of it. You can see this in its utter inability to stick to any one thing for more than a couple of chapters, as well as its habit of dropping plot points without ever resolving them and never bringing them up again.
Looking back at it, Hatred Versus Love managed to be one of the most incoherent fanfics that we’ve ever done. It didn’t help that Faith’s backstory kept changing and that she would develop new powers as the plot demanded, nor that it seemed that the author didn’t even bother going back to check their previous chapters for consistency. I rate it only just above Leena Frost-Wagner: Astonishing X-Men, which is a pretty damning statement in and of itself.
And we shall never speak of this again
Overall, the ‘best’ fic of the year would probably have to be Washed Up City. It’s that rare fic that’s not actively bad in any way and has some decent ideas in it, even if it suffers terribly in the execution. It doesn’t hurt that Waterspout isn’t a bad character in and of himself, even if he does need to learn the value of personal space.
An honourable mention needs to go to Bubblegum Shift, specifically its fifth (and final) chapter. We hadn’t covered this one in the original version, so discovering it and riffing on it was a pleasant surprise. It doesn’t hurt that while it is a bad fanfic, it’s very much enjoyably such for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that while the OCs are stupidly overpowered, they also are as dumb as all hell.
It goes without saying that the worst fic of the year was Chronicles of the Mad Dog Squadron for all the reasons we outlined above. Likewise, Lance takes out the worst OC of the year for managing to be aggressively awful at every single level.
Finally, we need to hand out a special ‘why even bother’ award to Escapism. While outwardly a Transformers/Fallout crossover fic, the truth was that it really existed only to showcase the author’s amazing creepy robot girl OC. Between that and a few other things, the Transformers part of the fic was largely irrelevant, and could have been written out with very little change to the overall story.
What comes next?
At present, episodes 427, 428 and 429 are in various stages of writing and should be appearing soon-ish. On top of that, we have another eight or so episodes solidly planned, depending on how the division of parts go. And, as always, we are looking for more fics; if you have any ideas or suggestions, feel free to drop us a line and let us know.
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