The thirteenth year of the Rebuild of Elmer Studios (one of those cases where the qualifier has become almost irrelevant since the rebuild has massively outlasted the original in terms of both lifespan and number of episodes) was another good one for us. The changes to our schedule worked out well; we completed x episodes, easily hitting a steady one-per-month rate that we've been aiming for.
This last year was one of those cases where a single fic dominated the year. Not only was it the longest fic we did in this last year, but it so massively dominated the year as to blot out everything else we covered. Not only that, but it definitely became one of those fics that will be with us for a long, long time to come.
But it wasn't the only fic we covered, of course. So let's look at them first.
The world's most annoying people
We started the year with The Normandy's Nomads, which in many ways was definitive for us. It spent all its time introducing a pair of stupidly overpowered, best at everything characters and gushing over how amazing they were before hitting us with an overly forced crossover McGuffin. And then once it spent all it's energy on that setup it promptly ended without actually going anywhere. It's something we see a lot, but I have to give the fic a measure of credit for just how much effort it put into gushing over its characters and how amazing they were while actively ignoring the themes and concepts they were building on only to then do nothing at all with it.
This was followed through with A Helping Hand, which is genuinely one of the most annoying fanfics we've ever covered. At this point we're used to the stupidly overpowered original character who is the best at everything in the universe, walks all over the canon cast and never suffers any sort of consequences for their actions. What made the cast of OCs (Captain Sagara, Gunner33 and the other girl) stand out was that they were so resoundingly awful human beings in the process.
At every step, the fic had to gush over how amazing they were at every single step; how they were stupidly wealthy, universally famous and beloved, the best at everything ever and so on. However, the fic also went out of its way to constantly remind us of their negatives. Sagara is a controlling, egotistical bully who uses his wealth and privilege to lord over others. However, the fic constantly congratulates him for these traits, presenting them as being good without the slightest hint of self-awareness. Likewise, Gunner33 is a sex pest. But this is played entirely for laughs, and Sagara actively enables her.
It has to be said that Sagara is one of the worst OCs we've ever encountered. He's aggressively unlikeable, has no positive traits and everything he does is grating at best. Or maybe I'm just annoyed because Sagara made Parzival, an aggressively unlikeable character himself, the good guy
However, at least he has a personality, which is more than we can say for what came next.
Filling in forms, the fanfic
Dire Straights is one of the longest fanfics we've ever done. But that's not the real reason why it not only dominated the entire year and will stick with us for years to come. That's because Dire Straights managed to not only be bad at every single goddamn level, but it did such in an amazingly unique way that we really hadn't expected.
The thing about Dire Straights is that it's dull. And I don't mean that to say that its lifeless or flat or the like. I mean that it's amazingly flat, dry and lifeless at every single level. It's not vanilla ice cream, it's a blank sheet of A4 paper. The characters to a man have no real personality; any traits they might have had were largely informed or, more often, ones we basically gave them ourselves as we riffed. And that's not the only thing by any means. The fic managed to spend its time pinned down in minutiae, focusing on things like television brands, filling in paperwork, describing offices and waiting rooms, administrative procedures and, possibly most memorably, telling us what uniform everyone was wearing today. And to top it all off, three quarters of the fic was irrelevant, with the story (or what passed for it) only showing up at the end.
Key to all this was the lead character, or more to the point, the man-shaped void that represented the designated protagonist. He had no name or description, and really no personality of his own. Everything he did was purely reactive and any traits he had were purely informed. His relationships were one-way with his interactions with others being stiff, dry and lifeless. His romantic relationships were the only exception, where he was mostly about resenting women for having lives of their own. That's his only real trait, by the way.
And what makes it even more impressive in its own very strange way is that this fantastically dull fic is the setting. It's about soldiers piloting giant robots fighting alien invaders who also pilot giant robots. It's a fanfic about a literal space robot war and it yet manages to make this subject matter incredibly dry and dull. It's not just that it sucks the life out of the subject matter, but it almost seems to be going out of its way to avoid it. The actual robot battles are short and almost secondary, while the real focus is on the minutiae of procedures and office stationary supplies.
On top of all of that, once the fic's story finally arrives, it's incredibly stupid. Not only that, but in order for it to work, it requires everyone to be incredibly stupid and obliging to basically let it happen. And key to it all is the idea that our protagonist is an incredibly stupid and dull individual who's main role in life is to be a patsy. It's almost like the fic is mocking itself. But yet at the same time, because its so stark, dry and humourless, you know it's not.
Some awards that don't matter
At this stage there's no real point in debating who wins what this year, as Dire Straights just takes the cake at every level. While the fic was incredibly dry, dull and stupid, it also was strangely amusing because of those traits. It was such a blank slate that we could (and did) project basically anything onto it and go wild with whatever we came up with. We created our own Dire Straights with strippers and blackjack. Skits like the Dire Straights RPG illustrated just how much fun we were having with the fic and what we could do with it.
Likewise, because it was such a blank slate, we could go wild with the characters and do whatever we wanted with them. We blew their few traits out to the moon or made up new ones because there was nothing there to start with. The fic couldn't stop us! If I had to pick one as our favourite, it'd have to be the hapless Glen LaBelle who we turned into a general purpose gopher who was obsessed with inventory. That we wrote a touching memorial for him only proves the point.
Finally the dumbest thing of the year has to be the actual story of Dire Straights once it arrives for the reasons we outlined above. It's one of those cases where it gets dumber the more you think about it, creating the classic idiot plot fractal of stupidity all the way down.
What do we do when we're not counting paperclips
Episode 490 is currently in writing and should be out in the next week or two. Beyond that, we've selected fics all the way up to episode 499 which are now in various stages of writing.
We're planning something big for Episode 500, and have selected several potential fics already. We're aiming for something special here along a theme, which means we’re avoiding our usual sources and instead going deep.
And so we did.
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