Rebuild of Elmer Studios, year eleven

 First of all, I’ll get the obvious point out of the way. Yes, new posts have slowed to a crawl. There’s a number of reasons for this, but one of them stands out above everything else.

At the end of the day, this is still a hobby for us. Real life is still our priority, and our post rate reflects that. We do this for fun, but we have other things going on as well. This includes other writing projects that are going to eat into our time and ability to focus on what we’re doing here. And yes, these are original projects, not ones that are making fun of bad fanfics written by other people.

With that being said, our plan is to continue posting, even if at a reduced rate. We’re no longer going to adhere to any schedule, but rather post these things as they get done. This might mean that we could end up going a month without a new fic, or that we could get a number done at once. But most importantly, it’s about having fun. And that’s why we’re here.

So let’s take a look at what actually happened in Year Eleven of the increasingly anachronistically named Rebuild of Elmer Studios.

 

Crossover Season, redux

Last year’s Crossover Season continued, although it was now moving in a different direction to before. As with Death’s Fixer last year, it gave us an opportunity to engage with franchises that we hadn’t covered before, while using the goofy crossover premise as a way to avoid some of the obstacles that had made them inaccessible.

Case in point; the Mass Effect franchise is known for massive, cinderblock sized fics that are usually dry as all get out. However, thanks to the goofiness inherent in crossovers, we managed to get a foot in the door, which gives us options for more.

Batman: the Future Knight was a very fun case where we had a fic that was driven by pure videogame logic, even to the point of putting an enemy health bar in the narrative. Ironically, for our first Mass Effect fic, it also turned out to be a case where it’s debatable if it even needed to be a crossover to begin with. The fic could have just been entirely about Batman punching people without the crossover, and it wouldn’t have made any difference.

Conversely, After Cybertron bought us back to the ever-popular Transformers crossover. This one served as an interesting exploration of the perils of a crossover, where Optimus Prime ended up completely usurping Shepard’s role in the story, to the point where we had to wonder why she was even there. Sadly, it ended with the introduction of the author’s pet OC. I say sadly because they were so over-the-top edgelord tryhard that they likely would have ended up being hilarious.

 

Hello Crisis, my old friend

The crossovers also saw us reunited with the past through the same franchise, albeit in different ways.

A Trek into the Past saw us reunited with the works of Brett “Darkwind” Handy, who I have to say is one of my favourite authors that we’ve ever covered here. This fic was very different to Bubblegum Shift, however; less goofy and more just long, dry and dull, but at the same time, featuring a lot of very stupid characters doing very stupid things. Sadly, with the death of Brett’s personal website, the rest of his body of work are entering into the ‘lost forever’ category.

On the other hand, we also revisited Snakes in Megatokyo, another crossover which we had covered in past. My memories of it were that it was goofy, but on a second pass, it was a lot less so. Jarring tonal shifts, some very unfunny attempts at humour, an unwieldy crossover that never quite came together and some content that had aged very badly made it a lot less fun than I had hoped for.

Will we ever do a BGC 2040 fic? Probably not. Simply put, there’s so few of them out there.

 

You don’t know Jack

Our single biggest fic of the year, however, was the amazing Ready Player One – The Adventures of Jack. It was one of those cases where the fic delivered on every level, from a bad plot to a terrible lead character to poor use of the canon cast to massive plot holes to a comedically ineffectual villain and more. Furthermore, it was a rare case of a fic actually reaching its conclusion rather than simply wandering off, which made it a rare treat. However, when it also finishes what you think is going to be its main plot less than halfway in, you begin to wonder what’s really going on.

 

And that was the beauty of this fic. It managed to throw out the setting and instead lose its way in the weeds, focusing on the minutiae of pointless details. So instead of amazing video game adventures, you’re reading about the Canadian tertiary education system, household chore assignments, strip mall karate dojo lessons and all manner of other incredibly mundane, dull and boring things that are adding nothing at all to the plot. And yet, the fic continues to focus on all this. Furthermore, its actual plot only works because the villain is basically being given free reign to do whatever he likes, even though those in charge say they could stop him at any time – but never do. However, he’s also a completely ineffectual punching bag for the protagonist. It’s a strange conundrum.

 

But the real prize has to be Jack himself. It’s not just that he’s your basic indestructible god-mode win at everything type that gets us. No, it’s his real world persona, in which he’s a whiny, needy, entitled, stalkerish creep who constantly whines about how awful his privileged upper middle class life is while crying over the fact that he doesn’t have a girlfriend (even though he’s basically leering at the one girl who likes him for no reason at all). He’s an amazing collection of terrible traits that gives Kale “I like Zabanya” Cassel a run for his money.

 

And yet, he also wasn’t the creepiest incel we saw in a fic this year.

 

Get down and get gunting

My pic for fic of the year would have to be Ready Player One – The Adventures of Jack for all the reasons outlined above. Really, that fic was a gift.

 

Likewise, if I had to pick a character of the year, I’d go for Akira from Programming from the aforesaid fic. Her job basically amounted to making terrible decisions that would affect literally billions of users, and then keep doubling down on them throughout the rest of the fic. At no point did anyone ever address how bad her decisions were, but rather they would continue to heap praise on her and let her continue to build on her terrible ideas while actively making things worse.

An honourable mention needs to go out to Ken the nanotech future space lizard man from Pack Rat, for two reasons. The first is that he does have such a stupidly overdone origin story to the point where you wonder how the author came up with it. The second is that it's entirely irrelevant to the fic as a whole. 

So what’s next?

At this point, episodes 465 and 466 are in various stages of work, and should be completed sooner rather than later. We’ve also picked out several more fics for episodes to come, and yes, not all of them are crossovers. And, as always, if you have a fic that you would like to donate or a suggestion, then drop us a line.