An introduction to the Infinite Loops Project?

[Horvus]

I recently came across the ILP started some years ago by Innortal, and decided to do some digging. But man! What a mess of threads on three different forums!
I did find some compilations, but I get a feeling I'm missing some original stories that are the common basis for everything else. In short, where should I start reading?

P.S.: I should mention that I'm not actually planning to read everything. The project covers many fandoms of which I'm only going to read a select few: Naruto, HP, SW, Fate and maybe Bleach. I skipped all the Ranma and MLP stuff which is probably why I feel lost.

 

[january1may]

I skipped all the Ranma and MLP stuff which is probably why I feel lost.

Click to shrink...

...Yeah, that was a pretty major thing. I'd say that Innortal's original stories (yes, including Ranma) started the trend, the MLP stories continued it, and everything else is based on one or both of those aside from a few exotic stragglers. Admittedly, I've never actually read any of the SB threads (that I could recall, at least), only the FF.net compilations.

To be fair, I had a similar problem when the whole Megaman thing started being relevant in a big way. I could hardly care less about Megaman, and it just confused me and felt like an extra source of darkness for a setting that didn't have much darkness otherwise.

There's a wiki, but I'm not sure how helpful it is, and it is full of unmarked major spoilers.

 

[Horvus]

I tried to avoid the wiki because spoilers, and they don't link the fics they take their canon info from as far as I could tell.
I did find some of Innortal's work on The Fanfiction Forum, but I find it unreadable, it's all garbled.
I realize asking for a reading order is a little far fetched since it's so big and there's so much of it, so I'd just like to hear somebody's experience going about reading it and if they're satisfied with how it turned out.

 

[Kalem_Lee]

Thee is no starting point.

Innortal Loops were just made for funzies and some media res.

https://www.fanfiction.net/u/681915/Innortal

Try here. The Ranma one deals with the most of it.

 

[Firehawk242]

Oof. I used to write for the thing a number of years back. It's a tangled mess. Last I knew, Wixelt over on SB had been putting together a timeline complete with pretty graphics, so if they're still at it then they're the one to look for, though that was admittedly years ago. Beyond that, it's an interwoven mess of crossovers and interlocking stories. I don't know if anyone actually knows the full story of the loops at this point.

Still, I can provide the meta-history at least.

Innortal wrote the original seven looping universes. Innortal, being a terrible writer, never really took the concept anywhere interesting and ultimately the whole thing would have died in obscurity had Saphroneth not picked them up. Saph wrote the MLP and How to Train Your Dragon loops as a sort of continuation of Innortal's work, but with the added twist of a time gap between his work and Innortals, with a few extra universes having gotten going in between. (I do not have a full or even partial list, the only one I know for sure comes from that time period is Nanoha.) From there, it turned into a group project which rapidly expanded into dozens of threads and storylines, many of which didn't really interact with each other.