The Real Ghostbusters 2024: Every Future Has A Past By Ghostdiva and Fritz Buagh
June 2024--Timeline Year Forty-Two
Eden Spengler and Edward Sanders. Johnathan Spengler and TJ Anderson. One couple only met a few months ago, the other has known each other for three years. Both are grappling with emotions and questions they're not accustomed to. But the future is calling, and it's time for some decisions to be made, and lives to be lived instead of just dreamt about.
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This is a collaboration--Ghostdiva, creator of Dr. Edward Sanders, sent me part of a story an embarassingly large number of years ago, and we agreed I'd finish it when the time was right. Well, since the story was intended to take place in 2024 all along, and it's now actually 2024 for real, I knew it was time.
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You might notice that the logo now says "The Real Ghostbusters"; it's something I've been thinking about doing for a few years now. It really started about the time
Afterlife was getting ready to come out in theatres, when it was often referred to simply as "Ghostbusters 2021" (and "Ghostbusters 2020" before that, but Covid happened). I began to wonder if there was some way to make it a little clearer what I was still doing.
I mean, I made sure to put a disclaimer on my FFN profile stating "I came up with this continuity twenty years ago--Afterlife isn't part of it". And for the most part, I just don't want to write in that universe. And I'm sure I'm chasing away potential readers (and maybe even some of the few I still have) by saying that, but, well, so be it.
And I wondered if there was a way to make it clearer. Might it be time for a slight bit of rebranding to my stories?
Back when I started, two movies,
The Real Ghostbusters, and
Extreme Ghostbusters were all there were in official Columbia Pictures product. At the time my operating paradigm "It's all part of the same reality and it's all
Ghostbusters. And I labeled most of my stories accordingly...
So maybe it's time I more obviously embraced what I knew years ago, but 2021 drove it home to me: I can't pretend to be anything but an alternate universe fanon anymore. I'm not in continuity with the current movies and honestly, with Deadbeat Dad Egon and that entire backstory I loathe, I don't really want to be.
But maybe the answer is rather simple. Quit labeling everything simply as "Ghostbusters". Because I still consider most of what I do a more or less valid future
to the two animated series So what am I doing? Most of the stories on the Ectozone previously labelled "Ghostbusters" have became "The Real Ghostbusters" with an appropriate logo change.
And the Ectozone's "Ghostbusters 2020X" hast been relabelled "The Real Ghostbusters 202X", using the modified logo you can see
here Short, simple, makes it clear that the product is based on an extension of animated continuity instead of using
Afterlife and
Frozen Empire as their canon.
A few important clarifications:
This won't affect anything in the stories themselves. I'm not going to go all Marvel UK and having the characters start being referred to as "The Real Ghostbusters" in the stories themselves, anymore than the character played on TV by Ncuti Gatwa and over a dozen people before him is actually named "Doctor Who". (You'd think since Marvel UK was publishing the DW magazine at the time, they'd know how this works
)
Extreme Ghostbusters stories and franchise stories (ie Ghostbusters West Coast Division) will not be changed. Apocrypha stories will be left alone. "Chronicles of Gozer" is now marked as a Ghostbusters International stories.
Hope you'll give it all a look.