| abstract
| - Assignment 2 is a series of short stories written by someone ostensibly called 'James Fresco', though this is most likely a pen name. It is also the name of a character who appeared once. The series is very little-known. There are eleven stories currently written and available online, each ranging from around 4,000 to 5,000 words. The stories centre around the everyday life of the narrator and main character, Stanley Brown. "This man does whatever he feels like at that moment. He is a teacher at a high school. He is awesome." The eleven stories are divided into three arcs, in which he is firstly a schoolteacher, then someone who randomly travels the world, then a university professor. And a knight. The stories are big on randomness. Everything makes sort of sense, if you accept the genetically enhanced monkeys and the robots. And insanely improbable coincidences. Sort of. Kinda. You may "find the stories a cavalcade of insane hilarity, or you may just wonder what the hell the author was smoking when he wrote them. Maybe both". The story grows from 'Stanley Brown making random things happen' to 'random things, many of which are caused by Stanley Brown, happening'. Hilarity Ensues. Assignment 2 is available in its as-yet-entirety for free here. This series contains examples of:
* Black Comedy
* Calvin Ball
* Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: This, quite deliberately, happens to Stanley Brown's mother, who features regularly... for the first two books, after which they are literally never mentioned again.
* This is played brutally straight as directly after this scene Stanley Brown thinks about all the people who've left him in some way, and doesn't mention her.
* Crazy Awesome: Stanley Brown, 100%.
* Crowning Moment of Awesome: The page quote. Other contenders, but that one deliberately invokes the trope.
* Crowning Moment of Funny: Since this trope is by definition subjective, most of the series can qualify.
* Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Occasionally invoked, often subverted.
* Dude, Not Funny: Notably, neither rape nor the murder of minors occur in these stories.
* Gosh Dang It to Heck: From Stanley Brown's rewriting of Macbeth, "Deity fornicating blast it!"
* Averted heavily in the series as a general however, and subverted in the same story itself with the precision f-strike Macbeth gives at the climax of the story.
* Hilarity Ensues: Step One: Stanley Brown says or does something. Step Two: Hilarity Ensues.
* Put on a Bus: Stanley Brown's mother, introduced as though they were a main character, gets committed to a mental asylum in the second story.
* Precision F-Strike: At the climax of Macbeth, a Novel:
* Shout-Out: When flooring the accelerator of a car, Stanley Brown likes to shout 'gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire, ooh!', the opening line to Metallica's song 'Fuel'. More obviously, he's once speaking in solemn tones and lapses into the spoken word into from Iron Maiden's 'The Number of the Beast'. (And then starts singing the opening riff'. Unacccountably, a hypotherapist who randomly decides to put him under hypnosis quotes the entire spoken dialogue from the intro track to Dream Theater's epic concept album 'Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory'. There isn't even a prelude to this. He just does it. Can we say that James Fresco likes heavy metal?
* Also, to This Very Wiki at one point, where he reflects upon the phrase Department of Redundancy Department.
* So Bad It's Good: Stanley Brown's novels, Lance MHS and His Adventures in Bigface's Castle Boat and The Gift Horse Who Saved. Also, we assume, Voyage to the Land of the Rainbow Howler Monkeys. Overlaps with Stylistic Suck.
* Squick: He had a relationship with a student, Rita. He claims to be genuinely in love with her, and it all seems fairly platonic. Oh and then he hunts her down when he figures out she's turned eighteen. Yeah.
* Unreliable Narrator: Occasionally. Mainly it's just flavoured by his personality, at other times he deliberately rewrites things in his own memory, though the story gives us hints to this. Or maybe it doesn't? Sometimes he simply forgets things, such as wondering why the 'love of his life', Rita, dumped him and then remembering only when told that he killed her uncle and then put his severed head in her letterbox'.
* What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?: Stanley Brown having a swordfight with a three foot tall genetically enhanced monkey. And winning by throwing a ninja issue kunai knife into its neck from a distance. )
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