This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
The Bad Wolf: I just started an episode recap, but the category template isn't coming up right, its not going in the right directory, I tried just cutting and pasting it from one that did work but that's not helping, any ideas ?
Air Of Mystery: I had an idea for another page. Yes, again. I was wondering - if we have a list of villains, could we have a list of other characters? It might be nice to list recurring characters that aren't mains, is all.
AirOfMystery: Tropers! Fast Eddie has approved a second season! Please note: this does not mean that you can't add more eps to the first season. I've written a few titles down in Season Two to start us off; feel free to write them or change them.
Fast Eddie: That's it? Some titles? I thought you had an eppy you wanted to share. We've the Title Bin for just a few title ideas.
Air Of Mystery: No, no! The titles were just suggestions, although I do want to write the two-parter.
Fast Eddie: Oh, cool. Maybe you should throw your dibs in. Best way is to put in the [[AATAFOVS:Main/AirOfMystery]] line, with a note it is under construction.
Scrounge: How many episodes should each season have, by the by?
Air Of Mystery: As many as you want plus one.
HeartBurn Kid: OK, is somebody actually planning on making an episode called My Ass MY ASS, or can we safely write this one off as vandalism?
Ununnilium: I'm thinking the latter.
HeartBurn Kid: Yeah, I guess so, especially since it got pulled. Still, you never can tell when the Vamp Benders are involved.
Cassius335: Uh... lost now.
Fast Eddie: pulled ...
Sockatume: Am I going mad, or has this meme complex become self-aware?
Being X: you are indeed going mad, as am i, you may be on to something though...
Scrounge: I'm thinking I might do the "Ass" one purely to be snarky... I just need a good reason for a donkey to need bodyguards and a way to get it on a blimp.
if season one is all we have on the episode guide, whatever happened to season two? that had some of my fave episodes!
Seth: Well we haven't recapped even half the episodes yet, we only have about 2/3rds of season one and haven't even touched seasons 3 through 8. Why don't you try and recap some of your favourite episodes from season 2?
Scrounge: But we're still missing the books! And does the comic continuity count for nothing around here?
Seth: We just recap the TV series, the books are a little past our scope. But hey if you really want to, nothing stopping you.
Air Of Mystery: I'll admit I would quite like to have a hand at explaining the comics. Particularly Issue 78.
Scrounge: Yeah, what was with that "red story gate" thing anyhow? LATER: There. Added spots for the novels and the comics to the markup. I'll try to dig up issues 51 through 60 so I can recap the "King Of The Forest" storyline.
Air Of Mystery: The Red Story Gate was a Satanically-tainted Story Gate that enabled whoever used it to travel to alternate dimensions. Duh!
Seth: I've added some guidelines, please recap entire arcs in the other media. The TV format seriously restricts the series and you should feel free to finish whole stories when recapping the other media. I also pointed out some of the main differences between comic and TV continuity, feel free to add any others you noticed.
HeartBurn Kid: I've been wanting to write a recap of the Save Our Students episode, but I can't think of the name... little help?
Scrounge: "Schooled", perhaps? Or were you maybe thinking of "Desk Jockey"?
Seth: Was that the one set in Bayside?. I think it was called Wayside Bayside?
Scrounge: ~Disappeared into the abyss~
Seth: Why nothing happened here at all ~Uses Flashy Thing~
HeartBurn Kid: Schooled! That was it, though I think they called it Wayside Bayside for the UK airing.
Fast Eddie: pulling ...
Seth: I will fill that in eventually but i won't re add it until i do.
Fast Eddie: Cool. I'm withdrawing ...*Nexus Interuptus ... so that someone else can have a swat at the Buffy pastiche, if they want it.
Fast Eddie: pulling ...
- Show Stopping Musical Number
- Twenty Two Short Stories About Vampires
- Plastic Gear Bose Einstein Condensate
Fast Eddie: Dang. If Janitor could do her acronyms better, I would look less the fool in the history.
Janitor: Phlbbbt! All your crazy English letters look the same to me.
Cassius335: Why is the symbol for Anarky being used as the symbol for the Vampbenders pages? Not complaining, just curious.
Eponymous Kid: Okay, okay, stay with me... is there any way actual media can be produced of this series? Because if the Show Within A Wiki got to be an actual show, Kujibiki Unbalance-style, it would be, no doubt, Totally Radical.
The Bad Wolf: can we get some mark up for recaping non tv bender media like comics or books ? or are we thinking of those all as "episodes."
Robert: The Christmas episode will notionally be a TV Movie made
This is just a trope heavy parody, but even so, I'd rather only leave dangling plot threads on purpose, as part of the joke, or to set up future episodes.
The other hanging plot thread from season one is the crystal of ultimate power, which the dark council were collecting pieces of. It was there to give them a reason to stay together - wait until it's assembled, then backstab each other to claim mastery - but fear of the big hitters can do that. All 666 members clearly aren't equally powerful. There are, let's say, 13 of them, who form the collective leadership, a group small enough to make a workable committee.
Also, with Cleo joing the council, her evil twin Oelc becomes redundant. I've suggested she might actually be a time travelling Cleo, but a Heel–Face Turn for her has potential too.
Feel free to add book summaries to Heart Club of Darkness; I'm not going to write all 1001.
Renita: How about we have Cleo and Oelc do the Fusion Dance and combine into a single entity called Cleelc?
Robert: That works too. Oelc doesn't have much personality - her only appearance is in Circus of Fear, where she's affably evil, and strongly objects to a rival evil twin - but she does have troll minions. The fusion dance gives Cleelc minions, and memories of a long career in evil, which cements her conversion.
Mjb: I should way in on this. With Fluffy as a semi- Deus ex Machina, you could put in a few sentences about how having the huge load of powers can tempt her to the dark side. It'll be a great Handwave for why we rarely make use of these powers even after they become widely known.
Cleo and Oelc could become a sort of evil Yin and Yang: one in black, one in pink, one mental, one physical. But come to think of it, combining them could create a major villain with minions, psychic powers, and experience. In other words, just the sort of long-term opponent to keep the Benders busy for at least 3 episodes in season 4.
Do you want the Christmas episode as a finale? Many Christmas episodes are like movies, without continuity. But if it just has a holiday theme...
Robert: The Christmas episode is a one-off, in the UK style. There will be three magical cheerleaders (Jane, Joan, and Jean), minions of Dread Queen Dierdre, who can't do anything physical. They'll exposit about why Fluffy is helping them, then all four will be cleansed by the climactic song about the meaning of Christmas. Cleelc as a major season four villain sounds good. We could have the two fuse in a third season episode, as the B-plot.
Mjb: Sounds good. We should come up with words for an original version (and it can come off great or terrible and still be tropey). If we want to do the melding, we've got three uncreated episodes left to do it in (Renita could put it into AATAFOVS/Revelations, but it would be forced). Does anyone know what Pepinson is planning for the newest episode? It looks like it involves Plastic Gear (does that also include Naked Boss?).
Renita: Yeah. Revelations is basically where I reinstate the status quo before the next episode. ie, Nuclues gets defeated and loses his body back to Nerdly, the Vampbenders are de-brainwashed by Loki after having been hypnotized in Lady N'Hemia's Lotus Eater Machine, with the only lasting changes being that we now know where Nucleus comes from and that the Dark Council have another of the artifacts they need to try and summon the Executives.
On that note, does anyone mind if I made Dead World's Hand into the artifact set needed for that summoning ritual? Since most of the cards are out of print, old copies of them would be sufficiently hard to come by.
Mjb: Well, since Hand is a Council member, at least one of the cards is already there. The earlier artifacts were not described as cards. The description is like "When completed, they will allow an ancient evil to peer into this universe..." Maybe if they need whatever they've got so far, plus the cards, plus some sort of "capstone"... Then it would take long enough to be completed during the season 4 finale. Also, with such a long set-up process, I vote that the Executives not be resolved until at least one episode after the Council finds them. Cities can fall, the sky can go dark, and the Benders will barely survive until they can close the portal/gate thingy. A "card" such as this has to be played for maximum effect.
Renita: I was very unspecific about what the first and second artifacts (featured in Back in Black and the N'Hemia/Nucleus Trilogy) were, because I hadn't decided what I wanted them to be. Then I noticed Dead World's Hand in the Evil Dramatis Personae and connecting them to the Executives just made sense. Though, yes, it'd be more logical to say that they need the cards, plus more artifacts. Also, if we're going to use cards, we could make a Yu-Gi-Oh parody out of it and have the other artifacts be components for some form of duel disk that the Council need in order to challenge the gatekeeper to the Executives to a card game for the right to unseal them.
Just out of curiousity, is Season 4 going to keep the Darker and Edgier theme or is the idea that this approach to scriptwriting went down really badly with the viewers and was abandoned as a result?
Mjb: I don't know, do you have a ton of Darker and Edgier plots to try out? I don't plan ahead too far, a plot springs to mind in about 20 minutes once I decide "Time to make another episode!".
Basically, I (and someone else on the forums) individually came up with plans to make a Dark and Edgy season 3. Now, it turned out that the pilot full of death, corruption, and, heh heh, revelation, had way too much development, and kind of diluted into the 3-part. Still, everyone's done their best with the season (Seduction as an example), and we're doing pretty well. So if you have concepts for at least 3 ridiculously dark and edgy in season 4, we'll pull some other stuff up to go the rest of the way ("Viewers responded positively to the inclusion of popular content."). But please understand that I am in no position to dictate season 4, and Robert's the only other person making episode content at the moment.
Speaking of which, any clue about Pepinson's piece? It's empty so far, no work after the title. All I put in was the basic navigation.
Anyway, I've decided that no Dark and Edgy season would be complete without a zombie survival horror, so that's the content of the Noisy Valley episode. I'm proud to finally describe the world the Benders actually live in.
Robert: Do Executives ever admit error? Rather than reversing direction, take a sharp left, and go for Dark but Safe, or Light but Edgy.
Renita: True. I think, if the writers were to try and back away from the new direction, they'd do so in a way that was discreet enought that they could avoid admitting fault, with the process taking place over a prolonged period of time so that people didn't notice. Though, personally, keeping up that level of Dark and Edgy is already proving difficult, since it's basically just the same gags revolving around sex and gore over and over again. Unless I was going to do another Hotter and Sexier episode with the Sex and Porn tropes that I missed the first time around (after all, AATAFOVS does use all of the tropes in our catalogue), which I could do at a stretch, I'd be OK with the idea of going with a different approach in later seasons if that was what other people wanted.
Mjb: There are thousands of trope pages. What we need to do is compile a list of general categories that have not been used at all, yet. Since the series usually has a comedic side, it's hard to maintain Dark and Edgy... unless we can find some way to torture someone... Maybe if we do something symbolic involving a person hung from a tree for days on end... We've still got some of the Edginess and Darkness left in the tank. I vote that season 4 be Gray and Almost Edgy on average, which means we can do anything that pops into our heads, instead of trying to fill a quota.
Robert: How many episodes do we need for the season 3 finale? I've got an idea for a non-finale episode, though it could also work as a comic arc - darker and edgier elves out-monstering an eldritch abomination. When it comes to picking sides, Avatar says something like 'You're both complete monsters, but at least it's honest about it.' I can throw in most of the darker fantasy tropes we're still missing, and the elf prince can do some exposition about the dark council's true plans. However, it'll be a little while before the rest of the plot gels.
In the longer run, we could have a future season descend into canon wars between writers - covering those tropes - with the final couple of episodes becomes pretty surreal, before a finale that gives the series a partial reboot, including a tone change.
Renita: You mean intentionally Continuity Snarling each other? That could be cool.
Mjb: We're at 11 once all current titles are filled out. That leaves two, which isn't really enough for a continuity war. You can still do the fantasy thing if you want, since that's a trope we haven't hit yet.
Robert: As I said, the continuity war wouldn't be this season, it'd be a future season - perhaps season 5.
Knight Random: I had a vague idea for a comics storyline that would cross over the different AATAFOVS continuities, the Secret Infinity Crisis Gauntlet Invasion Wars. Of course, if there were two different completely contradictory continuity wars that might be even better.
Renita: Feel free to remove my three parter. Sorry, but I don't think I'm going to get around to finishing it.
SpiriTsunami: Actually, we might be able to work another trope out of this development...I've been looking for a place to jump in on the fun. Permission to take it from where Renita left off? I'll leave everything she already put up intact, thus providing us with yet another trope—the writer changing literally mid-episode (part two of the three-parter.) Also, another thing I've been thinking about: while we already have Spin Offs, we should probably add some subtitles to the parent show for some of the later season, thus allowing us to fulfill the trope of The Original Series.
Renita: Ala "Trial of a Time Lord - The Ultimate Foe" in Doctor Who? I'd be OK with that. Feel free.
Knight Random: Well, I couldn't resist this madness any longer. I decided to start giving the comics some love. Hope that's OK with everyone. I also have an idea for a Season 3 Christmas special which would be the inevitable Christmas Carol pastiche.
SpiriTsunami: Sounds good. Another thing that's been bothering me: the intro page to My Little Rainbow Princess Pretty Moon Shortcake mentions that there was a Poorly Disguised Pilot for that show. When does that happen? Does that happen in Season 4, or is it going to take the place of the now-unknown Season 3 finale?
Leliel: Hey...since Mo'Mecha Mo'Problems is dead, can I take it?
I can't wait to be a member of TVTW.
Fast Eddie: Go for it.
SpiriTsunami: But remember, it was set to be the season finale. No pressure, though.
SpiriTsunami: I do hope I haven't caused any problems by utilizing the Four Is Death trope on the artifacts... Oh, wait, right, if I caused a problem, it could just be the start of the Continuity Snarls. Okay, then, I apologize for nothing.
Wait...But I may have sped things up too far. Unless, as you said, there's more to it than just the artifacts. Plus, at least for the time being, the Benders have one of the artifacts...Okay, yeah, we probably can carry this out until the end of Season 4.
SpiriTsunami: Speaking of Season 4...dibs on the premiere. Initially called it on the Discussion thread for Evil Dramatis Personae. It's going to see the television debut of the Shadow Sculptors. Now, if I could only come up with a title...
A tentative title has been reached, but if anyone has any better ideas, feel free to toss them out there.
And I would like to again bring up the need to create that Poorly Disguised Pilot for My Little Rainbow Princess Pretty Moon Shortcake. Mjb has taken care of the first two episodes of that show—well, first full episode and part of the second—so I've asked him if he'll do it.
SpiriTsunami: Okay, how's this for a title: The Writers Gave This Episode A Really Long And Confusing Title To Prevent Any Spoilers From Leaking Out. The fans call this episode "TWGTEARLACTTPASFLO", pronounced "twig-TEER-lact-pəs-FLOH." Takes care of Idiosyncratic Episode Naming and lampshades some of the spoiler tropes. Think "Cloverfield" or "The Puppy Episode". I'm thinking that an episode so juicy it needs a spoilerproof name would have to be a season finale, so save it for whenever we need to drop a bombshell—Season 4 finale, maybe? I know we said somewhere that we thought it would go 8 seasons, so Season 4 finale is the midpoint and a great place for a bombshell.
Never mind, I just remembered that the finale is supposed to finish up the Artifacts arc. I'll take care of TWGTEARLACTTPASFLO as 4-11 (probably want 4-12 and 4-13 to make up a two-part finale), and I've got the perfect twist to hide behind that title: The Shadow Sculptors do a Heel–Face Turn, fulfilling the Defeat Means Friendship trope (as in their earlier appearances, they leave without actually being defeated). Thought that would be good—and the eleventh episode is the perfect place to pull that trope on the Dark Magical Girl, Persona... Yeah, couldn't resist.
SpiriTsunami: The database hates me!!!! Every time I try to edit TWGTEARLACTTPASFLO, it doesn't work! Maybe the name is too long... I guess I'll just put a note in that that's what it used to be called, maybe even put it down like that on the Episode Guide, but have the actual page name be the name used in all future airings: A New Persona Yeah, that worked just fine. And, yeah, as stated above, it's probably going to be one big homage to, well, the show that has a Fan Nickname for the trope mentioned in the above spoiler. You know which one I mean. ;D
SpiriTsunami: This is just too damn addictive; at this rate, I'll end up doing the whole fourth season! Blunder Down Under sends the Benders down to Australia for some parodies of numerous films set in the Outback, from Crocodile Dundee to Kangaroo Jack, with a Steve Irwin expy thrown in for good measure.
SpiriTsunami: Actually, someone else can take that one. I'm moving on to the next one—another one featuring the Sculptors. I like the Sculptors. And being a Live-Action TV show with largely Western roots, AATAFOVS has been deprived of many of the anime tropes, so I've taken the liberty of adding a certain Japanese-ness to the Sculptors, who are from another dimension. Expect much fun.
Leliel: Heh, it's been awhile (a year, I think). Ah well, finally got started on Mo' Mecha, Mo' Problems.
The idea that this is that Naked Boss, after realizing his Plastic Gear is more-or-less far more defeatable than it should be, asks for help from Leliel to help him turn the Plastic Gear into a truly-unbeatable weapon. To do so, Leliel gives him the Eye Of Yog-Sototh, an Artifact of Doom that powers the Mictlan's weapon systems (not the defenses and propulsion, as he isn't dumb enough to not have a way to escape when somone beats him by taking it. Now empowered, Naked Boss goes on a rampage, attempting to get to the Story Gate. As you can probably tell by the intro, he fails, and Leliel gets back the Eye to finish the job himself, but not before pontificating on his backstory. However, an act of kindness by Naked Boss softens his heart a bit, and he vows to return, he promises to never attack the Story Gate again. He then calls out Renita on her Moral Event Horizon moment when she attempts to compare him to her, since like her, he's a broken man who became an Eldritch Abomination.
Tell me if I get something wrong in the charaters' actions.
SpiriTsunami: Cool; glad I'm not the only one still working on this. I finished up The Dark Gates last night and have moved on to another episode. I'm leaving one open spot in the Episode Guide because I feel that two Shadow Sculptors episodes in a row at this point is a bit much. On the other hand, we're working with only thirteen episodes for the season, and with the season finale a likely two-parter dealing with the artifacts, I've got the eventual deciding battle scheduled for 4-11—the Sculptors retreating every time prior. I'm trying to decide if there will be any more appearances before that. Probably not, as I want to leave some space for other people's ideas.
Hmm...that reminds me; I'd put my name on the TVTW list as well, but I haven't quite worked out that episode or episodes. Eh...I'll probably save that for season 5.
