u/Delicious-Spring-877

I’ve had this idea for a while now, and I think it’s quite good, but since I have ADHD, I have tons of story ideas all the time and I’m never motivated to work on them, so I’ve decided to just share what I have so far.

The episode would be called The Errands, and would be a team-up episode between Rob and Larry, two characters I really like who have a lot in common. Here’s the setup and general plot:

It opens with Gumball and Darwin having a convo while walking on the sidewalk, but when they pass by the “folded” spot, it zooms in, and we enter the Void. Rob’s been living there, subsisting on the discontinued food products floating around. He checks the fridge and realizes that all he has left is purple ketchup and a can of soda — he drinks it, spits it out in disgust, and comments about it being from that time they changed the recipe. He decides it’s time to leave the Void for his regular errands.

While out of the Void, he keeps his new shadowy hood up and is generally shy, but when he gets to the store and sees Larry, he puts the hood down. He chats with Larry as he checks out his groceries, and narration from Rob indicates that Larry is the only person outside the Void he really talks to, and they’ve become friends. He’s approachable, he’s so sleep-deprived that any risk of accidentally exposing the truth of their reality is nullified by his already loose grasp on it, and he’s at every single store Rob shops at. As he narrates this, Rob starts to realize how weird it is that Larry works so many jobs. He asks about it and learns just how insanely stressful it is. Keenly aware of what it’s like to be a screwed-over minor character, Rob wants to change things. He elects not to use the laptop to rewrite reality because it’s too risky, so he spends the day running interviews to fill some of Larry’s jobs, which of course leads to antics.

I don’t have as much for the rest of the episode, but I do have some general bits:

Gumball and Darwin show up intermittently, evidently on their own adventure, and Rob hides every time so they don’t know he’s still alive. Larry, having suffered the chaos of the Wattersons many times, doesn’t question Rob, and starts alerting him when he sees them.

After many failed interviews, Larry tells Rob that he has to keep his jobs anyway, since all the damages caused by the Wattersons put him in severe debt (which is canon). Fury at the unfairness of this motivates Rob to get Larry a pay raise/promotion in as many jobs as possible. Of course, the promotions lead to even more work, and things get chaotic.

I also want there to be some acknowledgment of Larry being a rock. The show often builds jokes around characters’ species, but never with Larry. Maybe some antics cause Larry to fall from a height onto his face, and he’s fine because he’s a rock. But then, later, antics involving a new hire at a factory leave Larry stuck on a conveyer belt inching towards the machines, which he isn’t scared of until he realizes they’re designed to cut stone. A hole gets drilled in his head, which doesn’t hurt him, and he seems fine until a bunch of gravel spills out of his head and he passes out. Rob realizes the gravel must be his brain and hurriedly scoops it back in. Larry says a nonsense phrase in Tagalog, so Rob shakes him, and he talks normally again. Rob asks him about his brain being gravel, and learns that it used to be one solid rock, but working an impossible number of jobs all at once has literally fractured his brain.

Finally, after all of Rob’s efforts, I want there to be a small change. At least one of Larry’s jobs permanently filled by a different character for the rest of the series.

(If you want to write a full fanfic of this idea, let me know. I’d love to do a collaborative thing.)

I’ve had these parody lyrics floating around in my head for a while now and I simply must share them, so here they are:

If I see you now

I will punch you all the way to Curaçao

Hoping that the fall won’t kill you

I would rather you die from shame

I want you to panic at the mention of my name

Oh, the burning pain

Every time I’m suffering and you’re okay

Karma, won’t you pay attention?

How I wish you’ll wake up one day

To a pack of badgers that proceed to eat your face

‘Cause when I think of you

I want to walk right through

And tear your feeble limbs apart

And I sound like a loon

But fuck each grain of you

And know I loathed you from the start

[scat break]

What’s a girl to do?

Burning red and nauseous at the thought of you

Raging, fuming, all-consuming

Rage is driving me a bit insane

Worsened by the horrid truth that you don’t care the same

‘Cause when I think of you

I want to walk right through

And tear your feeble limbs apart

And I sound like a loon

But fuck each grain of you

And know I loathed you from the start

And know I loathed you

It hurts to know you

And know I’ve loathed you from the start

Right now, Martin exists as a terrible parent to shape the Blyndeff sisters’ backstories, a deconstruction of the bumbling dad archetype, and a hate sink. He sucks, and of course he does, because he’s written to be hated. But he also interests me. I wanna see him feel emotions other than cheerful jokiness. He has the potential to become either way more sympathetic or way more hatable, and I’m curious as to which way it goes.

Molly got kidnapped, and we haven’t yet seen the fallout of that on the Blyndeff side. Will Martin come to rescue her? If so, will it be out of love, or to get her back to work? Will he rescue her at all? In Prison of Plastic, Molly remembers a family vacation where Martin knocked his sunglasses into the ocean and instantly forgot about them. Is it possible for him to “forget” about Molly? Will he start doing his job, or make Lorelai do it, or ignore all of it and go broke?

I’m also eager to explore how he feels about Calliope. The sunglasses memory shows that he’s good at suppressing upsetting things. No doubt he’s suppressing Calliope’s death. He probably hasn’t thought about her in years. Can he remember her at all? What would it take? If he does, will it break him? Will he admit that he’s coping badly? Or will he lash out because of it? What would that look like? When he stops making jokes, who the hell is he? It’s an unexplored frontier that I’m frankly excited to step foot in.

I know inklings make up the majority of the population in this continent and a ton of octolings have been immigrating to the surface recently, but as a branchling (a sea slug person, for the unacquainted), I still kinda wish I could find more folks of other species on Squiddit. Besides that one human, I don’t think I’ve seen a single other non-cephalofolk here! So if you do happen to not be a cephalo, please comment so I can feel less alone. And maybe some of you cephalofolk can recommend Squiddit to your other species friends? (Do you guys have other species friends…?)

There’s plenty of ways to get creative with minis without using kitbashing. Some of my techniques:

•Using horns to add bangs to hairstyles is something I do a lot. Horns are also useful for making hair that’s visible under a hood.

•Certain horns can also be turned into tusks with the right angle.

•If you increase the weight of a character’s ankles, you can give any pair of pants a flared/baggy cut. It works best if the shoes don’t cover the ankle, though.

•I’ve made a bunch of Pokémon minis, and to give them Pokéballs, I add the Splatter Gradient decal to a ball, rotate it until it covers the top, and adjust the Wrap so there’s a small semicircle gap.