A fair warning: this foreword contains spoilers for the following story, so you may want to skip this if you do not wish to have any of the story elements spoiled for you.
One thing that I want to go ahead and get out of the way and off of my chest before I go into more detail about this story is that the first annual Sharuby Week in the Loud House fandom turned out to be the only annual Sharuby Week… despite the majority vote being in favor of such a week when I ran the poll on my now-permanently-suspended Twitter profile (which I have since actually tried badgering Elon Musk into lifting said suspension, since, by his logic, I was suspended for, "Exercising my right to free speech") back in the spring, absolutely nobody participated in or contributed to the event, which was quite a disappointment. I still made my own submissions, though, which I have organized into a gallery on Deviant Art (since I am now suspended from both Instagram and Twitter, and pretty much had nowhere else to go); if you are interested, you can take a peak for yourself (just remember to remove the spaces from the URL):
www dot deviantart dot com yoursavinggracehere / gallery / 84859299 / sharuby - week - 2022
It would seem that this will have to be where all of my illustrations, visuals, and other pieces of fan art will have to be posted from now on, so any illustrations I have drawn, screen caps I have edited, or OC's I have designed for previous stories of mine, can all be found on Deviant Art now.
Otherwise, despite Sharuby Week's failure, I am still pleased just the same to see that the Sharuby ship in general continues to gain momentum... I doubt that it'll spread like wildfire, but it does seem as though that more fans are onboard with this ship! Hahahahaha! Get it?
Now then, on to our foreword. I wasn't exactly sure just how soon I would write another installment in the what will now be collectively titled the Sharuby Saga (and yes, I know I really need to attempt to actually start working on The Creature From the Loud Lagoon Vs. Snow Hair and the Seven Louds, since I have never gotten around to it), but, as you can probably imagine, I have had a number of cute and fluffy little scenarios involving our two little cinnamon rolls pile up within my cavernous cranium even before This Will Be Our Year had finally wrapped up – the only thing was trying to build actual structured stories around these scenarios, but as it turned out, a lot of these scenarios just did not hold enough water to turn into actual stories. Having said that, this story has a little of everything, but, otherwise, is structured around two rather specific, yet similar themes that I knew for certain that I wanted to write about in further Sharuby stories.
For starters, this story picks up exactly where This Will Be Our Year left off, which makes this the next installment in the Sharuby Saga… chronologically, that is (more on that in a minute). While this installment will be set in the source material's current timeline that began in season five, unlike how This Will Be Our Year revisited the specific episodes that featured Shannon, Ruby, and their fellow drama classmates from seasons three and four, this installment will not actually be revisiting "Director's Rut," even despite how it gave Shannon her biggest role in an episode yet… however, there will, at least, be some explanations offered to give much-needed context not only to Ruby's conspicuous absence from that episode, but also Spencer's return to theater (after This Will Be Our Year went to such great lengths to explain why he dropped out of theater in the first place). This story is going to put far more focus onto Shannon and Ruby, as they are still in the early stages of their relationship, so there are still certain things that they have to work out between them... which also means that any of the more major canon characters, such as Luan or Benny, will have even less to do in this installment. Sorry.
On another note, as of now, both Shannon and Spencer have official character biographies (as does Mrs. Bernardo), albeit clearly written based on their depictions in "Director's Rut"... perhaps this is a sign that, maybe, we will be seeing more of them in the source material in the future.
! SERIOUSLY, SPOILERS AHEAD! SKIP THIS IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE SPOILED !
This brings us to the subject of the two themes that we will be covering in this installment, both of which have particular emphasis on Ruby. The first of these themes deals with some of the psychological damage caused by her previous relationship with Spencer, and how she ends up letting that influence how she takes charge of her current relationship with Shannon; the other, similar theme deals with how she and Shannon take different approaches to their relationship, with Ruby feeling that Shannon is dragging her feet and moving too slow, while Shannon feels that Ruby is rushing things and moving too fast. While Albertson and I have had our own separate takes on certain aspects of their relationship, one of the things that we have agreed on is that when it comes to the two of them, the more outgoing Ruby would certainly be the alpha of their pairing, while the shier and more reserved Shannon would be the beta. These were themes that I was really interested in writing about for the Sharuby Saga; I felt like they needed to be explored a little more deeply, and since they both are rather similar, working both of them into a single story made it seem logical that this would be the next story in said saga (I actually had plans for a different story altogether, but I am now saving that one for the following installment).
I will go ahead and say this: unfortunately, neither of these themes paint Ruby in a particularly positive light, and as a matter of fact, she may even come across as genuinely unlikeable at certain points in the story (writing her in this installment has not exactly been fun), but that also doesn't mean that she still can't grow as a character, learn from her mistakes, and strive to not only be a better person for her own good, but also to be a better friend and girlfriend to Shannon as well. While this is bound to bring some unwanted, yet necessary drama between them, I believe that Ruby needed to go through these experiences so she could see that there are right ways and wrong ways to handle a relationship with your partner - as even Mr. Anonymous once pointed out in a review, sometimes a storm cloud has to disrupt the sunshine and rainbows in even the happiest of relationships.
This time, I am flying solo in the writing process, however, this does not mean that Albertson and I have parted ways in our partnership… quite the contrary, as it turns out, he has had some separate Sharuby material up his sleeves that he has since published himself, including two stories of his own, Card Tricks, and Slumber Party, both in which he had taken the initiative of advancing the Sharuby Saga timeline years into the future to further explore his own interpretations of how much Shannon and Ruby's relationship would develop and evolve over such passages of time; if you have not already, give them a read (though, be warned, Slumber Party has been rated 'M' for obviously lemony reasons)…
www dot fanfiction dot net / s / 14138931 / 1 / Card-tricks
www dot fanfiction dot net / s / 14147830 / 1 / Slumber-party
While Albertson has taken the creative freedom to sort of break off into his own timeline within the Sharuby Saga that I have had no involvement in, we have had a number of consultations just to ensure that the overall Sharuby head canons and continuity remain consistent in spite of the differences in our separate timelines, whether it pertains to the dynamics of Shannon and Ruby's relationship itself, or other elements (such as their families). Having said that, he will be requiring my collaboration for something really big he has been planning: (SPOILER ALERT AGAIN) Shannon and Ruby's wedding! Otherwise, this and my following Sharuby stories are solo projects on my part, which is why I am making it a point to note that while this is not necessarily the next Sharuby Saga story that has been written or published overall, it is the next one in the chronology of the Sharuby timeline, since, again, this is a direct follow-up to This Will Be Our Year... I suppose, in a sense, these installments could be considered (somewhat indirect) prequels to Albertson's outings.
(On an unrelated note, it's sort of ironic that the drama club is so into card games, because, as you may recall, the original working title for This Will Be Our Year was 2 of Hearts).
One last thing I want to address is to put everyone at ease and say that, thankfully, this is not going to turn out to be another monster story like This Will Be Our Year turned out to be. In my defense… okay, our defense, Albertson and I had so little to work with when we started collaborating on that story, but we had so many different elements that we had to build up, that it was essentially like trying to build a house with only three bricks, and between the two of us, we ended up taking that story into so many different directions –some of which were planned, some of which were unexpected- that we ended up building a freaking mansion with those three bricks! It accounts for why that story ended up running as long as it did: both in chapter length and word count, and the amount of time that it took to complete the darned thing. To my relief, this story has a simpler, and much more straightforward plot that looks as though it can be contained to (an estimated) eight chapters, including another epilogue, so this won't be nearly as exhausting as This Will Be Our Year turned out to be. (This one took about a month to write, as opposed to This Will Be Our Year practically being a full-term pregnancy between Albertson and myself - what proud papa's we were).
Not only that, but the structure of this installment will be different as well: in spite of the two central themes that this installment is built around, the structure is going to be less of a singular storyline that unfolds over the course of ensuing chapters, and will mostly be more vignetted as a series of random events that contribute to the overarching plot and themes of the story – some of these vignettes will be of the aforementioned fluffy little scenarios I've imagined for Shannon and Ruby that obviously didn't have enough substance to build whole stories around, while others will be flashbacks, either of events that will be addressed within the timeline of this story, or calling back to events of This Will Be Our Year… for clarity, I will note each of these in author/footnotes in the chapters to come, as though you would even care for such pertinent information.
Now that I have gotten all of this out of the way, let us get started with The Sharuby Saga: Free To Be You and Me, as a whole new school year begins for the now-sophomore Shannon and Ruby!