It's times like these that I wish I had a fanbase.
Sometimes, I wish I was actually a decent artist so I could pull together a large collaborative project like you folks can.
Basically, I think it'd be lovely to have some kind of collaborative effort in which anything at all can be incorporated, genre and fandom and historical period be damned. The general idea, of course, being to embrace absurdity and have a little fun with culture in general by allowing it all to inhabit the same reality when doing so seems completely illogical. More below the cut.
Through a process I won't bother to recount, I wound up reading a brief synopsis of the story and characters (The many, many characters) of Catch-22, along with the actual books The Crying of Lot 49 and Midnight's Children, and it ended up reminding me of how much I love utter absurdity, illogic, cultural mashups, exaggerated satire, and questionable representations of reality. This, by extension, got me thinking of the old characters/storyverse my sister and I crafted for years, and the wonderful inconsistency and absurdity of it all.
This one ongoing story of sorts included all of the following: Monster battles, magic, alien oppressors, AU versions of obscure actual boy bands, Survivor, prophesies, sorceresses, caves that changed configurations every time one entered, cities named after video gamed characters but spelled backwards, repeated wars where everyone just got bored of fighting and stopped, possessed children, post-apocalyptic realities, match-making enterprises, teenage helicopter pilots, people being melted, villains frustrated by their inability to do anything truly evil, and repeated attempts at parties that failed miserably. It was an absolutely insane mashup, but we just kept tossing new things in and reinterpreting old things instead of starting a new story. The characters were equally bizarre and quirky, and got moreso as time went on. We're talking a deformed fellow named Igor whose catchphrase was "Igor. . . BIIIITE!", a kid whose ridiculous warmth and sunniness convinced people to give him any object he wanted and whose life goal was to warm the heart of the evilest people around, a prissy snob who had a secret affinity for setting off bombs, a girl who was kidnapped and raised by monsters for years and grew up to be a rabid fanatic Monster Rights Activist . . . they all started out normal, but ended up completely absurd and over the top, much like the story itself.
Thinking back, I'm delighted by the very fact that it's all so completely ludicrous.
AND HERE'S THE MEAT OF IT ALL: Methinks it would be fun to have some kind of collaborative project in which the rule is Anything Goes, with goal toward general absurdity and incongruity that grows with each person. I'm talking an underground conspiracy discovered by the psychic twin of Barney Rubble who was transported to the future along with a one-armed pirate who thinks he's Elvis. Or the story of Lolovivi, a Chinese trapeze artist (who is also the lover of a 30 year old Angelica Pickles) who goes on an epic quest to find her kidnapped girlfriend, forced to battle the scourge of zombie Pokemon ravaging the land along the way. Okay, it doesn't have to be THAT crazy, but you get what I'm saying. A collaboration full of quirky characters in which any element from any point in history or any bit of culture can be incorporated. The idea, which I have discovered upon looking back on my old world of Ivion, is that you inevitably end up perverting (in a non sexual sense) all of these things and poking a bit of fun with them, and generally seeing how completely things change when put in another context.
The thing is, no one person/character would have to be that over the top, because it's the combination that makes things crazy. I don't know. Maybe I'll just revive my own old characters into some kind of new project for myself, embracing the old insanity and having some fun with it. WHO KNOWS. The ideas are just now forming. I'm still working this out.
In hindsight, though no conscious derivation took place, I may have subconsciously remembered Sfe and Kory's characters for their review site, who embrace a similar willy nilly mashup of different fictional "realities".
That's all for now. Excuse me, but I must now prepare a presentation, since it's 1:34 AM.
Basically, I think it'd be lovely to have some kind of collaborative effort in which anything at all can be incorporated, genre and fandom and historical period be damned. The general idea, of course, being to embrace absurdity and have a little fun with culture in general by allowing it all to inhabit the same reality when doing so seems completely illogical. More below the cut.
Through a process I won't bother to recount, I wound up reading a brief synopsis of the story and characters (The many, many characters) of Catch-22, along with the actual books The Crying of Lot 49 and Midnight's Children, and it ended up reminding me of how much I love utter absurdity, illogic, cultural mashups, exaggerated satire, and questionable representations of reality. This, by extension, got me thinking of the old characters/storyverse my sister and I crafted for years, and the wonderful inconsistency and absurdity of it all.
This one ongoing story of sorts included all of the following: Monster battles, magic, alien oppressors, AU versions of obscure actual boy bands, Survivor, prophesies, sorceresses, caves that changed configurations every time one entered, cities named after video gamed characters but spelled backwards, repeated wars where everyone just got bored of fighting and stopped, possessed children, post-apocalyptic realities, match-making enterprises, teenage helicopter pilots, people being melted, villains frustrated by their inability to do anything truly evil, and repeated attempts at parties that failed miserably. It was an absolutely insane mashup, but we just kept tossing new things in and reinterpreting old things instead of starting a new story. The characters were equally bizarre and quirky, and got moreso as time went on. We're talking a deformed fellow named Igor whose catchphrase was "Igor. . . BIIIITE!", a kid whose ridiculous warmth and sunniness convinced people to give him any object he wanted and whose life goal was to warm the heart of the evilest people around, a prissy snob who had a secret affinity for setting off bombs, a girl who was kidnapped and raised by monsters for years and grew up to be a rabid fanatic Monster Rights Activist . . . they all started out normal, but ended up completely absurd and over the top, much like the story itself.
Thinking back, I'm delighted by the very fact that it's all so completely ludicrous.
AND HERE'S THE MEAT OF IT ALL: Methinks it would be fun to have some kind of collaborative project in which the rule is Anything Goes, with goal toward general absurdity and incongruity that grows with each person. I'm talking an underground conspiracy discovered by the psychic twin of Barney Rubble who was transported to the future along with a one-armed pirate who thinks he's Elvis. Or the story of Lolovivi, a Chinese trapeze artist (who is also the lover of a 30 year old Angelica Pickles) who goes on an epic quest to find her kidnapped girlfriend, forced to battle the scourge of zombie Pokemon ravaging the land along the way. Okay, it doesn't have to be THAT crazy, but you get what I'm saying. A collaboration full of quirky characters in which any element from any point in history or any bit of culture can be incorporated. The idea, which I have discovered upon looking back on my old world of Ivion, is that you inevitably end up perverting (in a non sexual sense) all of these things and poking a bit of fun with them, and generally seeing how completely things change when put in another context.
The thing is, no one person/character would have to be that over the top, because it's the combination that makes things crazy. I don't know. Maybe I'll just revive my own old characters into some kind of new project for myself, embracing the old insanity and having some fun with it. WHO KNOWS. The ideas are just now forming. I'm still working this out.
In hindsight, though no conscious derivation took place, I may have subconsciously remembered Sfe and Kory's characters for their review site, who embrace a similar willy nilly mashup of different fictional "realities".
That's all for now. Excuse me, but I must now prepare a presentation, since it's 1:34 AM.