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What if SP was in fandom?
A/N: This is so not an original idea. Some of my favorite fics of yore dealt with this question and so I decided to try it out for SP. Sorry if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Stan Marsh was one of those average college students. He was the typical A-B student and hung out at home on the weekends. No one else at his school knew he was actually a BNF in fandom.
He was mostly a lurker at first choosing to spend his real free time playing video games and not actually contributing to fandom. Then he read this one Lost fic and knew he could do something like that, too. He began getting into Heroes like something fierce and decided to write a fic for it. It ended up being over 100,000 words long and was posted by chapter each week. He wrote it before school, during school, and after school. Once he was done he felt a little hollow but after the reviews started coming in he couldn't believe the kind of response he was getting.
He continued writing fic and making his own comics for Heroes until his dad began getting concerned about him spending so much time in front of the computer. His parents bought him a video camera for his birthday in hopes that if he kept doing this fandom thing he'd at least use the camera to go outside every once in a while.
It worked.
Stan became really popular posting videos he roped his multimedia class into helping him make. They were a series of mini-dramas based on video games like Call of Duty and Halo. They got made fun of for the costuming but because Stan was such a natural writer those comments stopped after the second episode of his eight parter where the main character's best friend went AWOL only to appear at the end of the episode on the enemy's side. It was a little clichéd but some theatre student had got wind of Stan's projects and joined it and the guy was seriously a good actor.
He was thrilled by all the feedback he was getting but not quite so much as the feedback he got from the author of that one Lost fic he fell in love with. It was some guy in the next state named Kyle. They began messaging in December and when Kyle suddenly stopped responding to his e-mails Stan thought maybe he had pissed him off or something.
"I'm Jewish, dude," Kyle IM'ed him back nine days later. "It was Hanukah."
"O RLY," Stan typed back and sent him a Community manip of Chevy Chase. They've been best friends online ever since.
Kenny was one of those fans that n00bs couldn't really believe was a BNF. He was always late checking out the newest fansubs and wasn't able to buy the latest Kingdom Hearts game until it went down to $20 at Wal-Mart. Where everyone else was busy with school he was busy with work. His blog posts pretty much went like "Just saw last week's episode of Gossip Girl. WTF was that train wreck? Too tired to deal. Going to bed." Fandom reacted by tilting their collective head to the side and going "Huh?"
Kenny was a BNF because he was the epitome of the starving artist brand. He once survived on the seasoning packs of dollar store ramen noodle and honey and ketchup packets he store from McDonalds for two whole months to buy a tablet. Kyle immediately set up a account for him to at least order the occasional pizza in exchange for Avatar fanart.
In Kyle's opinion, it was totally worth the monthly $60 spent.
Kenny was a phenomenal artist who produced work that one wanker on fandom_secrets swore he simply stole from a DVD special feature on concept art for The Dark Knight. Kyle immediately started a flame war against the kid (turned out it was Cartman, big surprise) while Stan wrote a series of blog posts on the most famous starving artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Kenny merely shrugged his shoulders and went to work hatching new ideas for a Justice League fic.
Even though he was a big supporter of Kenny's works Kyle felt slightly envious at the higher quality compared to his own. Kyle often zoned out during his classes to doodle ideas for his stories. It got really bad during the release of the last Harry Potter book when he was one of the first people in fandom to not only pick up his copy but finish it, too. He then spent three months straight being one of the most talked about fans with all the art, speculative fics, and comfort fics (he didn't see how it was fair for Harry to come back to life but not Sirius to be totally gay with Lupin because – Tonks, really? Go die in a fire.)
Kenny read the book when it finally got to paperback and then spent six months picking through the pages. Once he was done he dedicated the month of July to Potter and produced a new work of art or fic a day. The quality completely outshone everything Kyle had done and he found himself swallowing down his disappointment thickly while he typed comments like "Goddamn, Kenny. That was the hottest smutfic I've read this year and I don't even like twincest!"
He tried to be a good friend because honestly… Kenny was the second coolest person in fandom to Stan in his book at least.
Tweek was responsible for a series of anon memes roughly one month after making it kinda-sorta in fandom. He had written this comic strip in MS Paint that was of mediocre quality but everyone spread the word about it because Firefly slash was a very rare thing and the femslash even rarer. No one had the heart to tell him he could do so much better if he just used a goddamn pencil and paper.
Tweek started the anon meme because he wasn't really sure how people felt about him and was just that paranoid.
People learned really quickly to not make fun of him, though, so he was doomed to never really knowing what anyone thought about him. Someone actually told Tweek what he honestly thought about his art when Craig got involved. No one's heard from that guy since.
Craig is more like a ninja BNF than anything else. Every once in a great while he'll post something like nostalgic Wishbone fic or Dead or Alive art causing the whole fandom to drop whatever they were doing to flock to it. He's the one person in fandom probably better at creating shit than Kenny but because he rarely does people tend to forget about him.
He likes it that way.
He does make an appearance in group chats about Battlestar Galactica but pretty much lurks the whole time. Most people figure he's merely logging in because apparently he's friends IRL with Clyde and Clyde is really active in chat rooms regardless of fandom. Kyle made the mistake of forgetting he was even in there one time when he began ranting about Token's latest critique of The Office when Craig typed "Huh." in the chat window reminding everyone of his presence.
The next week Kyle noticed a charge on his credit card to some adult store the same day a box of dildos and sex toys arrived at his dorm. He was punished by the RA and had to endure snickering from the other occupants of his floor until the guys across the hall got caught in the communal showers doing some BDSM with the toys they bought off Kyle.
No one could figure out how it had happened until Stan wrote a blog entry about assholes taking things way too far. His account got hacked and over the period of nine days "Stan" posted blog entries that defamed gays, called for re-enslavement of blacks, and outted himself as a Republican. Stan was mortified and had to contact the blog site's administrators to figure out what the hell was going on. They banned him from the site forcing him to set up a new blog elsewhere because according to their servers all those blog entries had been posted by the same ISP number.
There was a bit of a joke within fandom when comment threads were proving intellectually engaging or drabble dumps producing really hot porn that any minute now "that Kevin kid's gonna fuck this thread up."
"I do not," Kevin replied. "You guys are jerks. Hey did you see that interview with Miley Cyrus last night on Leno!"
The conversation had been about use of legitimate science in the Big Bang Theory and what was really occurring in the field at the moment when he stepped in with that gem. Because really? After the whole Team Coco thing no one under the age of 40 watches the Tonight Show.
Butters was one of those n00bs that came in through Twilight and everyone knows about and makes fun of because not only are his fics complete shit but they're filled with terrible spelling and poor grammar. Everyone needs someone to hate though, Butters figured, so he didn't bother to improve.
But then Bieber fever hit the country and when fandom made fun of him for being treated like a sex symbol at the age of 14 just because he was banging a Disney star Butters couldn't stand idly by and watch that happen.
"Leave Selena Gomez alone, guys," he posted. "She's just a sweet little girl from Texas who never hurt nobody."
"She makes my ears bleed," Craig wrote back and hacked Butter's accounts on LJ, Twitter, and tumblr. Needless to say, Butters was completely shocked when he got home from classes. He merely sighed at his computer and went through the long, arduous process of deleting all the spam mail in his inbox for Viagra and sex pal invites set up through Craig's List.
The irony was not lost on Butters.
Token was a definite elitist. Where Stan went about nonchalantly thanking every reviewer, Kyle played fake modesty, and Kenny barely replied unless you were on his AIM Buddy list – Token would reply to comments raving about how good his fic was with "Of course, it's true to the source canon."
Token loathed most of the trends in fandom. If everyone was preoccupied with Bleach and the latest Final Fantasy Token was gushing over the latest BBC venture to compete with Hollywood's over the top, special effects laden disasters. He liked to think he was bringing a little bit of culture into fandom.
"Yeah, yeah," Token rolled his eyes during a discussion with Stan and Clyde about what exactly shinigami were, "that's great and all but have you seen Sherlock yet? It's a modern retelling of Holmes but the characterizations are spot on. Not to mention they don't bother to hold back on the gay. It's nothing more than conjecture to bait new fans but it's done so well that I can forgive them."
"Right," Clyde responded. "Explosions or gay. Hmm…"
"Sherlock Holmes is gay," Stan responded. Token face palmed and died a little on the inside.
"You take these things way too seriously, man," Craig told Token during a co-op quest on WoW. They were using a voice connection to talk in real time while they played and Token thought it was a little weird hearing Craig's voice coming out of his earbuds in connection with a female character.
"Whatever, explain to me why you're a chick again?"
Craig grunted. "This is actually Clyde's account. He has more shit charged to it than my account does."
"Oh," Token replied and the two fell silent as they carried out their mission. "Does he know its charged up?"
"Probably not," Craig replied and Token decided to drop it.
Wendy was one of the few girls taken seriously in fandom. Mostly because she wrote the best essays about the political process of Star Wars and how a utopian universe like the one sought after in Star Trek could never happen. Every election year she began making posts as early as February making fun of the Republican nominees.
Every election year as early as January Cartman began publically bemoaning Wendy's impending Liberal posts.
"Women have no place voting," he commented one time on a blog post Clyde made. "They're too touchy feely and don't possess the right kind of logical faculties to make appropriate decisions for the greater good of the majority and not for the stupid minorities."
Wendy went on a tirade about women's rights and those of minorities citing the first amendment, Common Sense, and a plethora of scholarly work done since the 60s on the psychological improvement of citizenry since suffrage.
Stan and Kyle both took to her defense and backed her up on every point adding in a few resources of their own.
Kenny told everyone to go get a life.
Considering this was all unraveling on his original post Clyde had the most insightful comment of all to add.
"The fuck as this got to do with Pokémon Diamond, guys?"
Bebe was a BNF because last year at ComiCon she dressed up as every boy's wet dream – Princess Leah in her gold slave bikini.
Kyle had never been more thankful for insisting he, Kenny, and Stan exchange phone numbers because Kenny's prolonged absence made him fear his destitute friend had died from a heart attack when Bebe spammed the internet with pictures.
It wasn't that Cartman was a complete and total douche bag (okay, no, he was) but there was something… different about him that Wendy couldn't help responding to. She knew he was purposely egging her on, trying to push her buttons, and get her to stay up until four am debating the ethics of time travel in the Back to the Future trilogy when she had classes at eight am.
Cartman could be insightful, though.
They had been throwing trivia back and forth regarding big Fortune companies when they began addressing the Disney theme parks. In a moment of desperation, Cartman typed in the little chat box that people have died at Disney. Ergo, Disney is the devil.
"How can people die at Disney," she responded in exasperation. "It's the happiest place on earth."
"Think about it, no major theme park is without its safety hazards," Cartman typed back smugly. At least Wendy thought he was typing smugly.
"You are on the fucking internet, retard. Go to a Google search and see what you can find on Disney deaths." She logged off of AIM and sat at her computer screen huffing in frustration.
Twenty minutes later she received an e-mail from him raving about how unethical it was to leave injured patrons on life support until they were off the parks' property.
She most certainly did not swoon.
"Sometimes I wonder what things would be like," Kyle typed to Stan one Sunday afternoon. "You know, if they were different."
"What kind of different?"
"If we all lived in the same place."
Stan was quiet for a long time and Kyle bit his lip as the window read that he was typing a response back.
"I bet it'd be super fucked up but at least we'd all be together."
"Why would it be fucked up?" Kyle couldn't help but feel a little bit stung.
"Please, we'd probably deal with the most ridiculous shit like Mecha Barbara Streisands or pot smoking bath towels."
Kyle laughed. "Craig's guinea pig raining from outer space?"
"Ooh, alien visitors coming to abduct Cartman?"
"Butters getting adopted by Paris Hilton?"
"Yeah, shit like that never happens."
"It would if we were all living together," Kyle insisted.
"Eh, so write a fic about it," Stan typed back and invited Kyle to a billiards table on Yahoo!Games.
