Pick Up Dandelions

Hey, are you a PPG fan looking for a simple gen fic of the PPGs just saving the world before bedtime, doing the same things they did in the original show? No PPG x RRB ships, no gratuitous angst, no high school AUs. I’ve noticed that many fans here want something like that, and I decided I might be able to fill the void. The first chapter is up now! 

This is gonna be a mostly episodic structure where the majority of chapters are self-contained, and the writing is meant to be evocative of the original show. 

Chapter 1: Ink and Pain Summary: 

At least half or a little more of the episodes either have an outright horror or horror-adjacent theme (Boogie Nights, Abracadavar) or at least have moments that are unsettling (Fuzzy Logic, Mommy Fearest). Episodes like Uh Oh Dynamo, Bubbleviscuous, and the end of Buttercrush have a lot of the most intense violence in the whole show. Even in episodes that are more comedic or action-based, the lighting is often moodier, and the starker minimalism of many of the backgrounds make things feel a little off even when they’re not supposed to.

True, you could say the darkest episodes came in later seasons (Twisted Sister, Speed Demon, Knock It Off), but Season 1 had this more consistent tone throughout. In contrast, S5 and S6 had a lot more grossout humor, which didn’t add to the atmosphere was mostly unsuccessful because it was meant to make the audience laugh… which didn’t work by most accounts lol.

It would’ve taken a bunch of liberties with the source material which the fans would’ve hated and it wouldn’t have done well at the box office either, but then in the 2020’s you’d have Gen Z ppl who saw it on dvd go “it was actually pretty good you guys are just mean”.

Well, by rewrite, I mean that I’ll only pick a handful of chapters from my old fanfic to rewrite, and the rest is gonna be original. That original fanfic was essentially kid me trying to do mostly standalone stories where each chapter is an “episode” vaguely in the style of the original show, but not doing it well at all. Lately I’ve been noticing a hunger in the fandom for straightforward gen fics and I hope to maybe scratch that itch. I’m glad I waited this long to plan on doing it so my writing could improve a lot in that time.

I’m on vacation right now, so I’m not gonna start writing it for a week, but I’ve been spending my time recently planning out a bunch of chapters in advance. I also have a full time job so I can’t write as fast as I used to but that’s a given.

I know those kinds of jokes are sadly so ingrained that even nominal kids shows can make them repeatedly, but it still IS weird that they repeated the same joke with Mojo specifically not once, not twice, but THREE times (Cootie Gras, Monkey See Doggy Two, and The Powerpuff Girls Rule) to the point where the first example currently provides the trope image on TV Tropes. If the hippies from Save Mojo had brought that up, the show would've been over, although they probably wouldn't have known about that.

Thank you PPG for breaking my art block! I finished this just last night and I heard about Tom Kane’s passing today. I wish I could have put Professor Utonium in here but maybe some other time. Maybe for this we could say this is from his POV.