I stammer and stutter my way through another podcast thing, probably frustrating listeners to no end as I struggle to remind my brain and mouth how to collaborate.
I stammer and stutter my way through another podcast thing, probably frustrating listeners to no end as I struggle to remind my brain and mouth how to collaborate.
My second appearance on Undercooked Analysis, where we read a confusing experiment by Dead Palette. I do some crazy impressions and stuff.
I join the Midnight Marinara crew for the first time to read My Last Camping Trip, AKA “Lord of the Flies, Boy Scouts Edition”.
I got so swept up in the fallout of this interview that I totally forgot to share it on my own damn website. I encourage any writers on wordpress to read it, and to read the other Writer’s Lounge articles for the detailed backgrounds and insights of other internet authors.
If you have any questions or comments, just post them here, since the interview’s comments section has been closed.
Several Julie-related updates this week. First, Julie C.O.P.S. Out (Series 2, Ep 3) got a significant revision: turns out Tre-Harr finished his fanfic after all, so I got to add more material and more riffs to that episode.
Second, Episode 17, Psychological Swiller, is finally uploaded, and involves more Owlfeather Academy alumni engaging in magical shenanigans. Roasting on the stake this time is a relatively reknowned creepypasta called Psychologist, by CrashingCymbal. I haven’t read his other creepypastas, but given how he was a Writer’s Lounge interviewee at the Creepypasta Wiki, I sincerely hope they’re better than this one.
You may also have noticed the new banner, which also features Jules. Apparently she has a great agent.
Hope Ep 17 was worth the wait to all three of you who actually read this webseries. Click the Fan-Friction tab and get reading!
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However it was around this time that Stephen started acting strangely.
It was nothing too major. Hell, back then I didn’t even see it as a problem. He started growing a huge interest in Psychology. The study of the human brain of course.
>FURY: (narrator) Meanwhile I developed a keen interest in the Obvious.
Two new episodes are finally up: Noh Pain, Noh Gain takes Arnold to Japan in search of a legendary sword, and forces him to choke down the terrible creepypasta Wendigo of the Hurricane, by 1dra7. Then in Failbreak, he’s reunited with femme fatale Bonny, who is used as a pawn in a scheme that might just destroy the DIS, unless he can stomach the dreaded Sesame Street/Twilight crossover A Crazy Furry Hell, by TwilightCullenLvr9 & Angelnlove52. It’s a double-dose of internet pain, Fan-Friction style!
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“Uhhh…Edvard, vut is she? She doesn’t get picked up on my vampire radar,” the count explained as he looked back at me with confusion written all over his little purple, Styrofoam-looking face. I snorted as Alice explained that I was have vampire.
>ARNOLD: You mean “I can HAS vampire.” Learn to meme!
Ep 11 is now available for download, featuring a riff of “NoEnd House,” a popular creepypasta.
The adventure segment got a little goofier than usual, but I blame the source material. For some reason it’s tougher riffing creepypasta than it is fan fiction, but I’m not sure why. The plus side to doing pastas over fanfics is that pastas are usually one-shots, not 28-chapter monsters.
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Room four was dark, but it didn’t come close to what was completely engulfing me. I wasn’t even sure if I was falling after a while. I felt weightless, covered in dark. Then a deep sadness came over me. I felt lost, depressed, and suicidal. The sight of my parents entered my mind. I knew it wasn’t real, but I had seen it and the mind has trouble differentiating between what is real and what isn’t. The sadness only deepened.
>AEGAEON: Maybe I was too harsh on this story. Maybe it was a writing experiment, like “tell a story without metaphor or pathos.”
>RHODES: Somebody should’ve told him to tell a story without WORDS.
Greetings, fellow riffers! I’ve restructured the Fan-Friction page and capped off the official first “season” of the series, since The Continuity Continuum felt like a good finale. Season 1: Arnold Odyssey feels pretty complete now, since it’s comprised of the original 4 (re-vamped) episodes and the new episodes that resulted from the series revival (including the two crossovers and the introduction of creepypasta riffs).
Season 2 has officially begun with a 64-page special featuring the ungodly huge One Direction fanfic “Unexpected Fate” by TuxedoNails, counted among the highest-rated 1D fics on the ‘net apparently. I had no idea boy bands had fan-fiction, let alone fanfic communities, so I couldn’t pass it up. Turns out there’s even fanfic communities that are so exclusive you can’t even read the fics, let alone post them, unless you’re a member. Kind of mind-boggling.
I have a bunch of stuff queued up for this season, including more creepypastas, so I hope you nice readers will stick around (all three of you).
-Applebetty
During the internet fanfiction boom of the 90’s, doing Mystery Science Theater versions of bad fanfics was a relatively popular thing: it wasn’t uncommon to visit a favorite fanfiction emporium and find “MSTs” as one of the genres. “Lemon” fics — AKA fanfic erotica — were the favorite targets, since they were almost always the worst of the worst, combining tasteless content, asinine plots, annoying characters, and incompetent rhetoric into a rancid, godawful package.
Lampooning bad fanfics was a fun humor-writing exercise — taking something truly terrible and making it funny — but it was hard to pull off. Sometimes you’d luck out and find an MST’er who was actually funny (Loden Taylor’s “Escher” series inspired me to do MST’s in the first place, and fellow riffer Karthesios became a longtime friend of mine), but the vast majority of fanfic MST’s were painfully unfunny… especially to the original authors. It wasn’t long before author complaints began to pour in, and fanfic sites all over the web began to forbid MSTs altogether in their site rules. As quickly as it’d proven popular, the art of MST’ing basically died off, reduced to small communities skulking in obscure corners of the internet.
So why the hell would I continue to do it? Because an MST’er is ultimately a critic: one who feels obligated to pick apart bad internet fiction in an era where “crap” is the standard for too many readers and authors. And because I wanna have a little fun and express myself while doing so.
My early efforts, called Mike’s Desk Theater, followed the typical fanfic MST structure: a framing device which introduced the riffers and established why they had to riff bad fanfiction; and the fanfic riff itself, which was the bulk of the episode. A few years later I tried doing fanfic MST’s again, but they were outlawed by this time and I didn’t have anyplace to upload them. This new run of MST’s was called Fan-Friction, and unlike Mike’s Desk Theater, it was funny rather than tiresome. Fan-Friction took a unique approach to the MST format by introducing the fanfic(s) in a different way each episode: one episode the fanfic is a method of brainwashing, the next a means of coding an important message. I only wrote four full episodes before retiring from the hobby again for a decade.
I recently returned to Fan-Friction while between serious projects, to remaster the old episodes and write new ones: new riffs bookended with newer, better framing devices. All of them are as amusing to new readers as they are offensive to the original authors. I hope Arnold and the gang bring you lots of laughs, if not a bit of nostalgia for the good ol’ days when publicly mocking terrible fanfics was acceptable behavior.
– Applebetty