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Okay so bam.
Here's how it went down.
The idea of having this gigantic crossover event story has been the genesis of every creative endeavor and life-defining choice I’ve made since I was kid. The beginnings weren’t in anything that massive; playing Sonic Rush permanently altered how I understood fiction, video games, music (holy shit, the music), and most of it started with the inclusion of Blaze the Cat.
Having such a strong opposite personality to who I had come to know Sonic the Hedgehog and his friends as as a kid, and seeing all the cool team-ups and the intricacies of how she interacted with characters like Cream and Knuckles and the rest left a super big mark on me. Sonic Rush introduced me to the idea that you could have strong and mellow personalities mix and still have a really cool adventure story throughout the process of seeing them come together and, eventually, become friends and respected comrades. I found that I really, really liked the power of friendship and romance and love and all that cute, fluffy shit.
Then everything changed again because of two video games: Super Smash Bros. Brawl & Super Smash Flash 2.
The first had The Subspace Emissary, and if I thought shit couldn’t get more hype than seeing all of my favorite video game characters come together, seeing them actually interact on a large scale format, fighting against the ultimate evils of the fucking void blew my tiny 11-year-old mind. The first thing I ever actually wrote was a comic where Marth (who I mistook for a girl for the first couple of years), Link, Ike and my own OC Hiro Katyanagi (Scott Pilgrim was a massive influence on me… give me a break!) had a pop punk band named DSX, all of which was set in high school and was oddly set to a lot of the 80s New Wave music I had become obsessed with. Super Smash Flash 2, on the other hand, introduced me to anime characters I had never heard of before. Until then, Ichigo was just a cool guy with a gigantic, ill ass sword and Naruto was a clone-making ninja with a cool character design. Couple that with my cultivation of the eternal love for hand drawn animation with Flipnote Hatena and the stage was set for me to have my eyes opened up to the possibilities of what I could watch and listen to and absorb.
Of course, there’s a million different influences I could talk about – the weird, abstract humor of Regular Show, Chowder, and Invader Zim, my late nite excursions watching Boomerang (shout out to Duck Dodgers & Samurai Jack & Action Hero NOW!), years upon years of watching Youtube Poops and Super Mario Bros. Z, reading the Percy Jackson books front and back more times than I could count, Dragon Quest IX & Golden Sun: Dark Dawn during the D.C. trip right after watching Transformers 2 – but I'm already talking too much.
Once I finally decided to sit down and write this big, sprawling love letter to my childhood, the more I was stumped on how all of this would actually happen. Some of these characters are from Victorian-era England; others inhabit far-flung alternative futures and pasts. Sure, it'd be easy to just explain it all away as fanfiction doing what it does, but what fun would that be? I want things to have a good narrative, characters to go through tough arcs for the better, high stakes and ill hang-out sessions. I want the world they inhabit and the events that take place that cause them all to find themselves amongst each other to make sense and intrigue the audience - AKA, you guys - to wanna learn more.
And then it hit me – most of the characters I wanted to write about were teenagers tasked with saving the world.
Around the time I was rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender with my friends, it hit me just how young the protagonists and some of the antagonists were; outta all of em, Zuko was the oldest and he was only 16 or 17. My mind kept tallying them off; every kid in the first series of Percy Jackson is barely 16 fighting against literal Grecian mythological monsters and Titans. Naruto is focused on the use of child soldiers to fight wars & conflicts the adults had let get out of hand. The Jimmy Neutron cast hadn’t even hit puberty and had to find a way to make spaceships capable of hyperspeed travel to battle against an impossibly massive alien civilization to free their parents and narrowly escape the jaws of death, Teen Titans… well, it’s all in the name. Harry Potter, Danny Phantom, EarthBound, Sailor Moon, Spider-Man, Static Shock, X-Men. Et cetera, et cetera. It’s weird, but I felt really bad for all of them. They were a part of my childhood, but they themselves hardly got the chance to just be kids. In hindsight, saving the world from the worst evils or a tyrannical government or a reality-ending monstrosity should best be left to the adults; but then I realized, sometimes these kids were the only ones with the power to do what had be done.
So the idea finally came to me: a summer camp for heroes and protagonists alike.
Summertime is universally known as the one time of the year to relax and enjoy your time to yourself. (For the most part.) And since our heroes are teenagers, what better time allow ‘em a little rest and happiness?
Now of course, not all of the characters I included were superheroes, or even responsible for saving the world or anything major like that. A good chunk of the worlds I chose from are just regular teenagers from shows I loved growing up and into adulthood. I wanna explore what it looks like to have so many characters from so many different time periods and worlds come together and interact and everything, of course, but I also wanna make the opportunity to see some of my favorite characters have just a little time to themselves to be who they wanna be and get a little rest.
Now for the music. Here's how everything's gonna work!
I'm making the soundtrack to the fic as I go along, but I've had this in the tank for years. I've got a lotta music saved up and since it's all made up of stuff that you either A), can't find very easily on the internet, or B), spread out over Soundcloud, Youtube, Beatport, etc, it'll all be able to be downloaded/played from from a Google Drive links that I'll scatter throughout with every chapter. Some of 'em are long-form mixes that you'll have to follow along while reading, so be sure to pay attention to captions where song cues are gonna be! Hopefully the incorporation of what the Timmy and the rest are hearing and making translates good alongside the narration and your own imagination.
Now with all that said and done; let’s write an ill ass adventure.
See ya on the other side!
- ChiptuneGhosts