How Marmy Spent Her April Fools Day · 9:31am April 6th
I keep forgetting to do these. But allow me to enlighten you as to what I'm juggling at the moment:
- A Tumblr blog about my legacy within Odd Squad, because people are, for some reason, inquiring about it
- A Tumblr blog about Odd Squad UK, because on Celestia's sun-laden ass, its network meddling is a crisis worth addressing
- A Tumblr blog about a first-time watcher's (hey, I think that's you!) guide to Odd Squad, because people keep asking me for stuff like I'm the goddamn manager at a Target
- My Odd Squad fic, Now is the Mortal Life (this is getting boring, huh?)
- Fourteen ponefics, excluding the needs-to-be-updated Solar and Lunar and Double Residency
- The worst time management ever seen in a person
- A terrible sleep schedule that direly needs fixing
- ...Life. Life as a whole
Can you really blame me?
Well...maybe. If you've read my two April Fools Day stories.
So for April Fools Day this year, I published two stories. One was a strict non-crossover story about Luna overdosing on the delicious concoction known as hot dogs. The other one...was this.
It's safe to say that most, if not all, of my Odd Squad crossover ideas are birthed in the franchise's dedicated Discord server. I...genuinely couldn't tell you where the idea of "Oprah beats up a bunch of FiM villains" came about. I do know that it was inspired by the server.
I had started work on the story back in February. At the time, I had wanted it to be sort of a serious story. A little immortal human girl like Oprah fighting all sorts of G4 villains is an interesting concept to explore. But I had the concept of "Odd Squad agents go to Equestria" on the back burner, and I didn't want to blow it on something as simplistic as Oprah going to Equestria just to fight every antagonist Friendship is Magic has ever had. It's good, but it's not something that'll break 500 views and make people go, "Okay, I have absolutely no idea what the author's crossing over MLP with, but I'm digging this." I needed to make a bigger bang than that.
So I decided to keep it within the grounds of the Oddverse.
And the more I thought about it, the more I could see it being my first-ever crackfic.
Now, for the record, one of the things I have in common with others of my generation is that I favor "lol random" humor to cope with the pain and sadness of everyday life. Not every bit of "lol random" humor makes me laugh, but it's better comedy than a good chunk of sitcoms I've seen. Seeing as how a majority of crackfics revolve around that type of humor, I thought I could try my hand at it, maybe even find my area of expertise in the process.
I began using the search function for crackfics. I read through a few stories of well-known authors that I already follow, throwing them into my Writing Inspiration bookshelf. Right away, I knew that crackfics could generally be "ridiculous stuff happens and terrible writing gets a pass" if the author wanted it to, but common sense would tell someone that most people prefer a crackfic that's off-the-walls but still well-written. That's the kind of story I wanted to create. Something that made people laugh, but wasn't the absolute dreck most of my other stories are. Something that was actually good.
The Discord server soon began to delve into talk of the Odd Squad episode "O is Not For Old". For the uninitiated, it's an episode revolving around the agents of Precinct 13579 trying to plan Oprah a surprise birthday party, with things going downhill right fast when she gets sent to an auto body shop in pursuit of a juice box hidden under the hood of a car, finds said juice box, and returns to Headquarters early. What ensues is a lot of stalling, a lot of arguing, and a song about potatoes that became a very short-lived phenomenon.
The episode also has Oprah fighting off oddity after oddity and curb-stomping each and every one of them.
And with that, fellow human beings, I had my setting.
The choice to write from the POV of O'Malley in the first chapter was a way to give an underutilized and oft-forgotten character a bit more depth outside of the few episodes he was in. (And I say "was" because, you know, children. They grow up and stuff. 'S human biology.) The choice to make the first and eighth chapter titles twists on lyrics from "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" was something that came together when TuneIn decided to broadcast the song on my local variety radio station in the midst of dealing with water pressure in my shower that had the same strength as a pee stream. And the choice to bounce focus between Oprah and the other party guests, while also attempting to keep the focus largely on Oprah, was based on "O is Not For Old", which did the same thing.
As I published chapter after chapter, saving the publishing of the story for when all chapters were complete, April Fools Day came closer and closer. I didn't really have anything in mind for April Fools on the fic side of things, but when I heard about 2024's iteration of Crackfic Storm, I decided to go for it...with a different story. I began to realize that there was no way I would have Looks Like I'm Gonna Have to Start Trying done in time, and so I was forced to go with a concept I came across when I caught the smell of sauerkraut from my mother eating hot dogs.
It wasn't good by any means, but it was something that wasn't gut-wrenching. "Mid", as the people of my generation say. I entered it into Crackfic Storm and continued working on the crossover crackfic.
The final chapter was posted a day after April Fools. I didn't want to half-ass it, and instead decided to let my brain work its magic in doing two things at the same time: thinking "how should this story go?" and allowing my fingers to type away. Once it was published, I sent the story through the auto-approval queue, lobbed it into groups' bookshelves, and let the literature gods do their work.
...Yeah, given how Odd Squad isn't a niche IP in general but is very niche in the realm of FiMFiction, you can probably guess how the stats went. Barely broke 100 views, and was entirely overshadowed by the Explosion Event of 2024. (But let's be honest: that legendary story eclipsed over 90% of the site's stories. "God damn" is the understatement of the year, and we're still in April.)
Reading over it now, I find it funny that I laid down the groundwork for spinoff concepts I can work into future stories. A girl who comes from a world full of child villains fighting against a child villain in a world where those aren't all too common is good. Like finding a hidden gem no one else is willing to touch, only I'm going to put my hands all over it and no one can stop me.
I also managed to work in quite a few references to other pieces of media in the story. Some obvious, some not-so-obvious. If you want to go nuts finding them, go nuts. Have fun. I won't stop you. 
Overall, though, I'd say I did pretty well for my second crackfic. I could go far wilder, of course, but there's "going batshit insane" and then there's "balancing an actual plot while also being silly and funny". Two different breeds, you see. I think I prefer the latter, but the former's good for a pick-me-up.
So with that out of the way, I thought I'd list the fics from my Writing Inspiration folder that helped me in the making of Looks Like I'm Gonna Have To Start Trying. Give them a read and have a laugh. (And follow the people who made them, if you aren't following them already.)
As for future plans -- because who knows when I'll be making one of these blogs again -- I'm currently working on my Odd Squad fic Now is the Mortal Life. I'm also about halfway done with the latest chapter of Solar and Lunar, and putting Double Residency on a temporary hold until those two fics are done. And fixing the sleep schedule. That too.
See you all in the next thing I put out, whenever that may be.
