Rebuild of Elmer Studios, year ten

Ten years. Wow.

Honestly, when we started this project, we had no idea where it would go. The whole idea of ‘rebooting’ Elmer Studios was a sort of ‘sure, why not’ thing with the plan being to simply keep going for as long as we could or as long as we had material to go on with. Instead, the whole thing took us in completely unexpected directions. The B-Teams, the lost pilots, the guest cast, Storm Force and the rabbit hole that it led us down and so on.

Had you asked me where this would be in 2012, I would have had no clue. And yet, here we are. And we’re still going.

In the last year, we covered seventeen episodes, which was on the low side of things. There were mitigating circumstances, including a problem with uploads that meant that there were no episodes released in October of 2021. But that wasn’t all that happened.

 

Crossover Season

The biggest theme of the last year – in fact, the most recent episodes, became crossovers. The three crossover fics we covered, Mutants versus Zombies, Death’s Fixer and Son of Primus, were collectively known as ‘Crossover Season’ to us. The plan wasn’t originally to do a bunch of crossovers back-to-back, but rather it was simply a product of the fics that we selected. With that being said, all three of them were prize finds in their own ways.

Goofy crossovers always are their own special brand of fun, but these three were good in their own unique ways. Mutants versus Zombies seemed to forget that it was a crossover; the majority of the crossover content could have been removed without changing the fic as a whole. Son of Primus went one better, to the point where it really didn’t even need to be a crossover at all and, if anything, the crossover seemed to be making the fic more complicated then it needed to be.

But in a strange way, Death’s Fixer was the best crossover we’ve ever really dealt with. The crossover was made to work, and the two different franchises were actually remarkably well integrated. Above all else, the crossover wasn’t conceptually bad, which was a rarity in and of itself. Sadly, it then fell down in the actual execution.

Death’s Fixer was also a first for us. For years, we’d tiptoed around the fringes of Harry Potter fanfic without actively engaging in it for a variety of reasons. Conversely, a crossover was a good way to engage with the franchise without going full head-on into the sheer screaming insanity of it all.

 

Some guy called Stank

If I had to pick out the most bizarre fanfic of the last year, I’d have to pick Zoids Battle Saga. In fact, if I had to pick out the most bizarre fic we’ve ever done, it’d be a strong contender because this is a fic that is strange in so many different ways.

From a structural point of view, the fic is strange. While divided into multiple chapters, it was formatted and uploaded to fanfiction.net as a single block chapter. However, even for that, it was also obviously incomplete with none of its many, many, plot points being resolved. In fact, many of them were still not going anywhere or related to each other in any sort of meaningful way, nor was there any real indication of how they were going to achieve it. On top of that, while the fic was dated to 2017, it did appear to be an upload of something that was a lot older.

Form a writing point of view, however, it was a mess, but an incredibly amusing one. It had a herd of poorly defined original characters, strange, stilted dialogue, randomly inserted Zoid stats, an incoherent mess of plots that flew all over the place, things that were introduced with little explanation or indication of what they had to with anything else, the magical exposition fairy, soup, prune juice, a block exposition introduction that was irrelevant to anything else, sandworms and Kenji with his beloved peasant village.

Seriously, what the hell Kenji?

Oh, and then the last chapter undercut the protagonist’s entire motivation, so there is that too.

Zoids Battle Saga was that rare sort of fic that is a gift; a bad fic that just keeps getting stranger and stranger as it goes while being bad in all the most amusing ways. It was that rare fic where you can go ‘what the hell’, then keep reading only to go ‘what the hell’ again.

 

The good, the bad and the prune juice

Asking which was the ‘best’ fic of the year is a hard call. From a purely technical and conceptual point of view, Death’s Fixer was the best of the year. Well written, well realised and with a crossover that actually worked, the fic was probably the most competent one we’ve covered. It also didn’t hurt that it was remarkably breezy and easy to work on compared to many others that were far more of a slog to get through.

However, if you had to pick the most amusing fic of the year then it would have to be Zoids Battle Saga for the reasons we outlined above. A goofy, incoherent mess that couldn’t decide on a tone, direction, theme, central story or apparently even a lead character. And, like Death’s Fixer, it was breezy and a lot of fun to work on.

Finally, if I had to pick the best character of the year it would probably be Stripes from Son of Primus. There are a number of reasons why, but most them come down to the fact that he's just so stupid and goofy. His habits of falling through space, running away from danger and being oblivious mean that a character who should be annoying instead comes over as more silly than anything else.

 

So what about year eleven?

Episode 445 is currently in its final edit pass and should be up soon. Likewise, work has begun on 446, which is going to be the first in a series. We’ve selected fics for up to episode 453, with several potential ones for episode beyond that being under consideration. And, as always, we’re open to ideas and suggestions for future fics to review.

So instead I'll leave you with a philosophical quandary. The 'Rebuild' name came from the Rebuild of Evangelion series of movies as a tie in to DELTA Invasion, the fic that was the point where we restarted the whole things. In this last year the Rebuild series has finally ended after so many delays... which means our own 'rebuild' name is feeling somewhat anachronistic.