Sarah G. Lato was not having a very fun year. Ever since Gumball's family left Elmore had gotten a lot more boring. Alan had seemed to take over the classroom, regularly droning on and on about a variety of subjects on being nice and... staying out of trouble. No ones really caught her attention like the Wattersons did, and it was making life almost unbearable.
Shrugging to herself, she opened her laptop during the fifth speech Alan gave on the importance of friendship and began transcribing her most recent real person ship fic to her Ramblr blog and a variety of fanfic sites. The more people who see it, the more likely she could find someone willing to ask her about her friends! While on the rather dead Fanficworld.net she discovered something interesting. In the past 8 months or so, the amount of Camp Pining Hearts fanfics on the website had almost tripled. While fanbases for old children's media was hardly anything new, Camp Pining Hearts wasn't a particularly popular show with the fanfic community. Checking it out Sarah wasn't surprised at all when it seemed the vast majority of these fics were made by one person.
ColRegPeri2F5L5XG seemed very, very committed to pushing her favorite ship; and wrote almost 30 different fics on Peirre/Percy alone. She also has half a dozen fics on Gemsonafying the caste (Sarah herself had a few Gemsona fics herself, until Carmen told her that was insensitive to both the people who lost their homes in the Gem Invasion, and probably the Gems themselves). The quality of the fics themselves were… less than good. While the author seemed to have a very good understanding of the show, she seemed to fall flat when it came to writing relationships. A bit too much focus on how they physically compliment each other in the challenges; regularly bashing and killing Paullette as much as possible, and a terrible misunderstanding of Canadian culture. She left a couple scathing comments and contact info in the writers DMs, since even an angry fic writer calling her names was more interesting then watching Banana Joe tell bad jokes for 2 hours. Maybe she can help this newbie writer and bond over their shared hobby!
Shortly after she got home her phone began to ring, with caller ID telling her it was from… East Canada?
"Hello, Sarah G Lato speaking"
"Ok I don't know who you are "Sarah" but I'll have you know that Peirre and Percy compliment each other perfe…"
"ColRegPeri? Uh yeah I guess I diiiiiiiiiid say that my preferred Peirre ship was with Polly… but that's not why I wanted to talk! See I figured that your fics could get a lot more people to read them if you did just a couple of things to improve them."
"Get… people to read my Camp Pining Heart stories?" it sounded a lot less aggressive, but still fairly dismissive of Sarah's opinion and that whoever this was would rather just get this over with.
"Yep, you see the first issue you seem to have is you only post on Fanficworld, most Fanfic writers have migrated to other websites like OurOwnArchive and…" You go on for around 5 minutes just listing the websites you regularly post by order of popularity.
After you finally finish after explaining the fall of Ramblr Peri interrupts.
"I don't really care if other people read it. I don't care whether a bunch of Rubies can see it or not"
"Well yeah, you should write for yourself and all but maybe if your fanfics are good enough it can get enough "rubes" to see it that the original caste and crew might want to make a new season"
"I can get… a new season of Camp Pining Hearts?"
The voice, previously annoyed and dismissive, immediately turned attentive and somewhat desperate.
"Yeah, just improve your fics quality, here are some starting points"
Sarah proceeded to spend the next 4 hours telling Peri about the ins and outs of fanficwriting, with her pupil taking notes all the while. They covered things like how to properly bash a character without getting a million DMs from said characters fan, the importance of tagging every little thing in the fic, how to interact with your fics fans; and of course shipping. Lots and lots of shipping.
"And so if you really wanted to ins and outs of writing a love triangle, my 45,000 word Real Person Dark/Comfort fic Paper and Spines has a good one between Alan, Teri, and Carmen with only a few hints of Lem…"
"Ok, I'll read it in a couple hours but I really got to go "Sarah". Before I do I want to ask 2 things. One, where are you and are you human, two why are you helping me?"
"That's 3 things, but I live in Elmore, I am an ice cream cone, and I'm helping you because…' Sarah paused for the briefest moment. The honest reason was she was bored, life seemed to have jumped the shark where she lived and she didn't know how to react. "...because I saw someone who needed help in showing the true greatness of her favorite show?"
"That's true. Every time I try to talk with Jasper or one of Blue's Court about this I get told "Get back to work" and "We're behind schedule stop watching those stupid cartoons." It's nice just to have someone I can talk about the show to. The only other person who seemed to like it was this weird fat guy named Control Freak."
"Ah yeah he's into a lot of obscure show's, he sometimes comments on my fics. But if you ever need more advice just call me!"
After hanging up the phone Sarah began looking up for a bit. Sure life in Elmore had gotten a bit stale, but there were plenty of people outside of Elmore she could stalk incessantly. Maybe a cross country trip is what she needs to find something fun. She might even find Gumball Again!
