User blog comment:Rhonda the stalker fan!/Total Drama 30 Day Challenge: Day 27/@comment-1874924-20180729194731

When I became active in the TD fandom in 2010, competition stories were already so common that it was hard to come up with wrinkles no one had done before. And yet, despite my muse being better at refining than creating, I managed to do it twice.

To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing else remotely like Total Drama Island, by Gilbert and Sullivan (Featured Story, June 2011), which is the work I joined the wiki to promote. Sure, there are songfics, but nothing approaching the scope of TDI-G&S. Instead of a single song, TDI-G&S uses 8,000 lines of lyrics, comprising about 75 percent of the total verse content of the 14 G&S operettas (excluding repetitions and blank verse in the spoken dialogue.)

For those not familiar with TDI-G&S, the premise is, "What if Gilbert and Sullivan had written Total Drama Island? The story arc is strictly canonical and the episode synopses have only enough detail to support the verse references and cover major plot points; so it's technically an adaptation of TDI, but is really more a work of scholarship exploring the surprising level of commonality in these seemingly disparate franchises. (My purpose in crossing them was to introduce TDI fans to the G&S series.) In effect, it turns TDI into a comic opera.

Not only was I the first to come up with this idea, I am quite possibly the only person in the fandom--maybe the world--who could have come up with this idea unprompted. Cross-referencing is what my mind does better than it does anything else, and TDI-G&S makes full use of that. The project ate most of my spare time for 18 months.

While The Legend of Total Drama Island is less groundbreaking, it too has multiple premise elements that nobody appears to have done before. Bruno previously mentioned the guessing game fodder concerning Brett's parentage. Eschewing the standard format of one (or less commonly 2 or 3) chapters per episode in favor of the 1,001 Nights style ending every chapter on a cliffhanger, with the attendant decoupling of chapter endings from episode endings, is another feature nobody else appears to have done before, and which may still be unique in the fandom. Likewise, the use of a framing device appears to have been a first among competition stories.