At first, I was just going to post something like this as a preface with the first part of the first “episode”, but then I thought there was enough need-to-know material to make a seperat post for, especially for readers here.
Truth be told, there's actually quite a lot to dig into here, and while I am going to try to cover quite a lot of it in this post, but there are still some things I'll have to cover with each part as they come. I'll be starting with some history to this, because it's at least interesting, if not something people need to know in order to get more out of the series. There are also some whys to this that might explain some things in the series itself as well as a few bits of things I've done in the fifteen years or so since the series met its untimely end due to real life issues. As always, there are some other little tidbits that will work their way in here and there as well.
The Digimon: Digidefenders fan fiction series was something of a collaberation between myself and a person using the handle Phantom1 that took shape sometime in 2001 or 2002. I can't recall exactly when, sadly, because this was close enough to twenty years ago now that we may as well call it that. With that in mind, it should be noted that I'll definitely be getting some details wrong here, because, well, it's been no less than 18 years ago now, and one tends to forget quite a lot in that amount of time, regarless of relative youth and strenght of mind. Also worthy of note is that I am working on this from memory, which is significant both for the amount of time that's passed and the fact that I'm 43 years old as I begin writing this, so my memory isn't what it used to be, either.
Phantom1 and I were both fans of the Digimon anime and Mystery Science Theater, both of which were either current or recently ended. At the time, I'd been doing Mystery Science Theater treatments of random fan fiction I'd found around the web or in the AOL forums or whatever they were at the time, and the goofy spam email I was getting at the time. I'll admit, I've already said it's pretty much been twenty years since since I was doing all this, but I gotta say, it seems like the quality and variety of both has gone way down since then. It could just be that I'm looking in the wrong places for the fiction, but that's a topic all its own, potentially for later.
I can't recall exactly how Phanto, as I came to call him, and I crossed paths initially. Like I said, we were both Digimon and MST3K fans, so I'm thinking it was probably through one of the related newsgroups or forums that were around and relevant at the time. He, or at least I'm assuming Phanto is/was male, had the idea for the initial “episode” of a Digimon fan series called Digidefenders and was looking for either a beta reader or somebody to do a MiSTing of it, and I volunteered. Another potential origin for all this is that he contacted me specifically on account of my having a bit of a reputaion for being the kind of guy people could come to for that kind of thing, which is something I'll get to later on in the post because it has some relevance here.
Regardless of how it actually got going, one thing I'm a good deal more sure of is that I read the thing, liked the idea, and agreed to do the MiSTing portion if he'd make a series out of the fanfics. A quick check on Fanfiction Dot Net tells me that there were ten parts officially released, and I'm pretty sure I did MiSTings of all of them, though I somehow only managed to save nine of them, in eight parts because the last one I've got is a double feature with Phanto's nonstandard MST character crossing over with mine after having done one of my fics in their series. At one time, I had access to all the parts I'd finished, but for the life of me I don't know what happened to the last one since the last time I'd bothered to go looking for it. I know I had it when I moved into the apartment I live in now because I sent it off to an archive site that was hosting the first half of the series after I'd moved in here, along with some other similar work I'd managed to salvage at about the same time. I must have deleted all of that not long after because I'm a fool like that and must have thought I at least had that one in the zip file with the other parts. Plus, at the time, I thought that archive site was going to be there for all eternity, and I was tragically very wrong about that, so there's one chapter of that lost to history, and at least as many more of the original fic that never went up on account of real life happening to both of us, and here we are, two decades later.
As I move forward with this, I realize that many of the things I thought I'd be mentioning here are worth bringing up to explain briefly as they pertain to the MiSTing series I'll be posting soon may actually be worth doing individual posts about later on. One of those things is what, exactly, a MiSTing is. In a nutshell, those are fanfictions for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 television show, where fans like myself and many, many others would treat other fan fiction, newsgroup posts, and the like as if they were low-budget movies and have the characters from the show “watch” and riff on them. That's where I got my start, basing my earliest works on the Sci-Fi Channel era of the show, with Mike as the human subject and Pearl Forrester as the mad scientist character forcing him to watch the bad movies. Most often, these were considered “standard” for the fandom because they used the characters from the show itself.
In the series I'll be posting over the next few months, I'm actually using a whole slew of other characters to make jokes about the stories instead, one of which is an obvious variant of myself in my mid twenties. This part will tie into what I was saying before about how I had something of a rep for taking requests in this regard. See, when all this got started, I'd been doing MiSTings for a couple years using the standard characters I mentioned above, and I was apparently good enough at it to have a few fans. At some point in early 2001, one of those fans emailed me specifically and asked me to do a MiSTing of this fan transcribed version of the first Rugrats movie. I figured I'd be a sport and oblige the guy because, well, I was thrilled and amazed that I had people who liked my work that much. Still am, really, especially after all this time, on account of my not having done much fiction work the last 15 years or so. When I took on that project, I decided it was time to do something I'd been contemplating for awhile by then anyway and move to a setting where I was “watching” all this stuff by choice myself instead of having villians subject victims to it because I was having a hard time wrapping my head around that.
The character I came up with was pretty much the side of myself who just wanted to eat junk food and partake of whatever screwball, offbeat media that he happened upon, be it fan fiction, movies, TV shows, junk email, and so much else. After that first outing, I decided it would be a good idea to have more than just the self-insert character in the theater, and the idea I had for that was to use characters from whatever franchise the story I was working with was from show up and join me to make fun of whatever it was we were supposed to be watching. This was in part because coming up with better jokes was easier with multiple characters to work with. It was also in part because the version of myself I was using in these is kind of like the real me in that he was smart enough to figure out most of what was going on, even if it was entirely the wrong idea, and having other characters there to interact with was usually a good thing.
There was a whole continuity I had in mind for these things back in the day, and this series was the central part of it. That's kind of why the character visiting mine in the piece I posted back in March was a Renamon, one of the creatures from the Digimon series. At the time, the third season was the most current one, and I particularly liked the foxlike creature one of the human characters partnered with. With that in mind, I figured I'd do something similar here so that my character could have a regular partner with brains enough to counter my character's tendancy to be a doofus most of the time. There's a reference to a previous episode where it was just those two characters at the start of the one I linked to above that was a much better piece, on account of there having been more to work with and more interaction between the characters. I'd repost that one, too, but it's been lost to time and cyberspace, I'm afraid, due to the loss of the hosting site it was on.
I know I've left some things out, and I'm sure I haven't done as good a job of explaining a lot of things as I think, so I'm going to conclude this with some links to resources that I hope will fill in at least some of the gaps.
The best resource for the whole Mystery Science Theater fan fiction thing is The MSTing Canon. It summarises what the genre is and the history thereof as well as provides examples of common subject matter and true classics from the “good old days” when all this was still somewhat popular and common.
The Mystery Science Theater Wiki provides quite a lot of background information on the show itself, including an explanation of the general concept, a reasonably complete history of the show, character information, and even a list of episodes spanning all twelve seasons.
A site called Satellite News also has a good FAQ section that gives some quick answers to common questions about the show, though the main site is more a “this date in history” sort of thing for the show.
The best I've got for the Digimon aspects of this is another Wiki, this time the aptly named Digimon Wiki. This one covers the whole franchise, which includes a constantly evolving anime series, at least one video game series, and a collectable card game. The most important parts for the series to come can be found in the Digimon Tamers section.
With all that covered, it occurs to me that there are still a few hows and whys that I need to cover that I haven't here, as well as a little history that still needs explaining. I'm going to wrap this up here, however, and do that as a second part to this. My reasoning here is twofold: firstly, I know there are time constraints involved, both for myself and those of you reading this. While I know that there are some that have all the time they could want to read things, there are many more that don't, and I've already covered plenty here, even without the reference material.
Secondly, while I do like having longer-form content that's not specifically video game related, I don't want “longer-form” to mean a million pages at once. Two to five pages seems like a more reasonable length to me, and I'm already up to three, so this would be a good place to pause for awhile anyway.
Plus, this is the sort of post where I'd actually like to encourage questions and comments, so I know what to address beyond my own thoughts and ideas in part two. I would prefer said questions and comments directly on this post so I know where to find them when I need them. Thank you in advance, and I'll see you next time.
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