I've talked very briefly before about Super Smash Stadium, hands down the best massive Super Smash Bros fanfiction out there.
Okay, so I may be a bit biased since I was a part of it, but it was the first of its kind and the biggest, and while it was rather awkward early on, but I personally like to think that it eventually transcended the genre and became more than a mere fanfic but actually a great creation in its own right.
Even so, I will admit is that it was never perfect. Following are the five lowest points in Super Smash Stadium's history.
(I should note, however, that I will not be counting anything from after Metal Man took over the site, meaning nothing from Season X1 or X2. This is specifically about the site's original run. If I was going to include Metal's contributions, it would be as "absolutely everything involving Metal Man.")
5. Ash Ketchum
"But wait," I hear you say. "Ash Ketchum being in Super Smash Bros would be stupid, sure, but how is it one of the worst things ever?" Well, what if I told you that he didn't have any of his pokémon with him, not even Pikachu? What if I went on to tell you that he was a clone of SSB fighter Ness, who mastered all of Ness's psychic techniques after a single training session? And what if I also told you that, in order to differentiate his moves from Ness's he screamed the obnoxious pun "PokéThunder" instead of PK Thunder? And what if I now ask you to please put down the knife because murdering the author wouldn't be worth it?
Maybe a little explanation would help. Early on all SSS matches were created by having the characters fight in the actual Super Smash Bros game and writing down what happened, and so any original characters had to be clones of existing characters in order to facilitate that. This was also before Pokémon Trainer was an official character, so we couldn't just clone him.
Why make him a clone of Ness, specifically? Why not just let him be in the Stadium as a non-fighter, being the trainer for Pikachu? Why use that godawful PokéThunder pun? Only the original author - Lemmy Koopa - knows for sure.
The writers work in mysterious and often stupid ways.
4. Yoshelly
If anything about SSS spoke to the "teenage kid's fanfic" stereotype then Yoshelly, a superfluous pink Yoshi described in her first appearance as "the most famous Yoshi at Dinosaur High School", was that thing.
Yoshelly was born from a strange combination of feminism and misogyny. On the one hand, the stated reason for her creation as a character was a perceived lack of female characters in Super Smash Brothers. (This was in the time of the first game, when the only definite confirmed girl was Samus Aran, though we were also operating under the idea of Jigglypuff being a girl.)
But on the other hand her first appearance involved her being given away as a love slave to the winner of Match 8, so yeah.
Yoshelly never had much in the way of personality, power, or impact on the plot and, like most of the other characters on this list, she was thankfully done away with by Lord Reid during the Comic Match in season 3.
3. Kirbetty
Kirbetty, like Yoshelly, was supposedly created because of a perceived lack of female fighters, and like Yoshelly she was a poorly considered mistake who was thankfully ended in the season 3 Comic Match.
Also like Yoshelly, Kirbetty was introduced to act as an existing character's girlfriend, in this case Kirby's. What makes Kirbetty worse by far is that, unlike Yoshelly, Kirbetty actually replaced an existing character. The storyline already had a girlfriend for Kirby in Jigglypuff, and when Kirbetty joined it was as part of the "cat fight" that forced Jigglypuff to leave the Stadium until the very end of season 1.
2. The Rex Storyline
This was an attempt at an "interactive story" connecting the website with the message boards. The villain of the story, Rex (or as he was known on the boards "!REX Airship!") was going to appear on the message boards for a bit to mess with the fans, before getting defeated by all the heroes of the Stadium. I know, it sounds fun and it possibly could have been.
But then they let Lord Reid play the part of Rex.
While we all thank Reid for ridding the Stadium of Ash, Yoshelly, and Kirbetty, that doesn't change the fact that he was also very sadistic, selfish, and generally kind of an asshole. Rather than lighthearted riffing and playing with the fans, he tormented people, pretending that an insane hacker had taken over the site and was going to destroy it forever. This was especially bad considering all of this happened only a couple of months after a real hacker actually did take over the message boards.
The Rex storyline was by far the lowest point for SSS. A large chunk of the fanbase ran away from fear or stress, and even more left out of disgust after Rex's true identity was revealed. The only reason the Rex storyline isn't number 1 is because, while it was highly damaging to the fanbase, it wasn't so much for the site itself and a newcomer to the site now wouldn't even know very much had happened. The same can not be said for...
1. Ganna Legacy
Ganna Legacy was a story written by SSS's then-president, VGW. It was sort of a fanfic, in that it included a small handful of characters from Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, but it was mostly it's own thing. I know you're probably asking, "so what's the problem?" The guy is allowed to write more than one thing. Unfortunately, VGW disagreed with the previous sentence.
Even though the stories had dick all to do with each other, VGW decided that they must be one, and that SSS was the one that was going to have to change to accomodate the new material. Ganna Legacy became required reading to understand the plot of season 2, which was really bad for two reasons.
First, Ganna Legacy sucked. It was boring and mostly existed as an ego wank for VGW's Marty Stu self-insert character, Dark Horse.
Second, the story was never actually finished and then what little there was got lost in a server crash, officially rendering the entirety of season 2 incomprehensible.
But wait, Ganna's legacy of shame doesn't end there! When VGW stepped down at the end of season 2, he was replaced by Zeratul, who proceeded to overreact to the whole debacle on a level somewhere between "anime villain" and "political pundit." Reasoning that season 2's problems lay with the fact that it had a story (as opposed to this particular story simply being bad and poorly executed) Zer banned the entire concept of story from the site for season 3. He immediately terminated any and all attempts at ongoing story arcs, character development, and even running gags. In the end, the rest of us were left to come up with a story for the season 3 finale at the last minute, after Zer dropped off the edge of the Earth.
So basically, Ganna Legacy was responsible for ruining two entire seasons of the site. That's why it remains the lamest part of the entire Stadium.
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