adventures in outer space

For @controlbrain

Hey there! I was your secret santa! I was really psyched when I found out, I’ve loved your art for like years now in the IZ community lol. (Also I’m super sorry this is coming out so late. I’d really hoped I could of finished it earlier than this but my holidays got really busy. And sorry for any errors I may have missed.) Anyways, I decided to try and combine both of your suggestions into one fic! Where Dib goes out and has a grand old time while Zim feels like he’s being tortured lol. I hope you enjoy the outcome! Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! (You can read this under the cut or over on my AO3)

“Night of the Walking Lame”

word count: 2236

✦✦✦Invader Zim Secret Santa 2017✦✦✦

This exchange is open to everyone. 

Participants will be assigned a request from another participant that they fill and then submit at the end of the secret santa. Gifts can include art, fic, cosplay, ect. (The submission page has a section for preferences that will help me match people by compatibility)

Your gifts can be as elaborate or as simple as you feel is appropriate! Don’t worry about doing anything overly fancy, we’re here to have fun.

If you decide during the exchange that you’re not able to follow through, please contact me before the end of the event so your recipient can be matched up again. I’m also looking for people interested in being backup Santas to help fill those gaps.

Signup link is here.

Signups are open until December 3rd!

Participants will receive an email with instructions and assigned recipients on December 4th!

You can send in your finished gifts any time between Dec 20- Jan 1st!

Tumblr blog for this secret santa is @izsecretsanta

Tag for this event is #izsecretsanta: I’ll be tracking it!

VERY IMPORTANT HOUSE UPDATE.

Jenny and I get asked a LOT about the state of the show we were developing. Short story is it didn’t get picked up as a series. It’s one of those things you deal with as a creator, putting years of your time and life-force into a thing, almost four years for us in this case. It’s never a good feeling agonizing to make something different and see how seemingly easy it is for things that are easy sells with no identity beyond “It’s like that OTHER show” to slide through the process.

They bought the rights to Very Important House before shelving it, so we can’t do anything with the idea unless the  rights are bought back for the kind of money neither of us have just sitting around. It’s one of the worst feelings as creators because a shelved idea of ours is still alive, like Frolie and Grampa are trapped in cold storage at a place that has no desire to do anything with them.

This isn’t any kind of condemnation of the studio or the people we worked with. We had some good people behind us, some bad, but attitudes and climates change over the course of so many years at a studio, and the thing you’ve created no longer seems to gel with the direction of programming going on around you.

A studio pouring money into development is not a favor done, it’s a necessary part of what keeps things in operation. Ideas are the lifeblood of the system, and the creators sacrifice something just as valuable as money: their time and dedication to a project that takes them out of circulation for years at a time while not necessarily having a job that could be considered at all safe and secure. The best outcome of a situation where the studio decides the idea simply isn’t a good fit for them is one where the idea doesn’t die but survives on with the creator who still believes in the idea. To come out of the end of that process, years later, and not even own the rights to a thing the studio doesn’t want to produce, well, it’s heartbreaking.

As much as it is the nature of the business, it should not be the norm.

We’d still love to see VIH get made, we think it’s badass. We really do! We think seeing even the TINY amount of it come to life that we did was amazing. Since then, we’ve moved on to work on other projects separately, but we still  hear Frolie and Grampa yelling in our heads.