Yeah, that would actually be a fantastic running joke. I might try to get that in. Did I mention, you're all as brilliant as Donna around here?

I was thinking about the issue of children on the front lines, and something occured to me that I don't think we've considered before: the Flowers may well prioritise recruiting the young.

The PPC operates on different rules to the rest of reality; specifically, large portions of it function around the Laws of Narrative Comedy, and equally large portions around belief - 'unless you hadn't noticed'.

The synergy of those two suggests something very interesting: that what happens in missions - how Narrative Comedy plays out or doesn't - is heavily influenced by what the agents believe will happen. As a non-mission example, in Crashing Down, Steve was able to convince the universe to allow him to escape by way of an awful pun - because he believed that was how things work.

Which suggests the very interesting idea that young agents - agents who believe that they can't get hurt and have it still be funny - are unlikely to get hurt, because the Laws of Narrative Comedy, influenced by their belief, won't let them. They don't think the story should go that way, and so... it doesn't.

Compare someone older - say, Dafydd. He's seen a lot in his time; he knows that stories can be full of drama and seriousness, and that sometimes bad things happen to the protagonists. And so he spends his time fighting off the urge to abuse his powers, healing injured colleagues, and ultimately dying, because he believes that's how stories go.

You don't want kids who are too young, because they're likely to not think protagonists are allowed to kill the bad guys - which is a problem for Action agents. But 12-14-year-olds are all about wanton violence against villains - without yet thinking that the heroes will suffer for it.

If you want to tie it into plothole theory - Legal's enforcement of the Laws of Narrative Comedy seems to be along the lines of controlling the plotholes generated by agents' beliefs. Yes, agents are plothole generators just like Mary-Sues - they subconsciously warp the world to fit their idea of how things should be - but Legal restrains the effects of those plotholes to keep them from damaging canon.

Or, from our perspective: Suethors write plotholes and let them run rampant. PPCthors write a good story, and justify the plotholes as Narrative Comedy. We are our agents' subconsciouses - and we're also Legal.

Bottom line: kids don't get hurt or angsty because they don't believe they will. Adults do because they believe they will.

hS

While on all accounts you're technically correct, you're also injecting too much realism and real world expectations into this.

I can't answer for KittyEden, but I'm pretty sure the reason for 'such young agents' is because she wants to write agents who are around her age- like the vast majority of us do.

The PPC is also as psychologically straining as we decide it is on a spin-off by spin-off basis, especially since it's largely humor based. While some of them touch on the deeper matters and the fact that you have to be crazy for this job to be in this job, it's all dependent on how you play it or choose to view it. After all, it's literal words- perception is key.

(I'm also going to have to disagree on your claim of not being a figure of authority- while your point of view might not always mesh with mine, and you've always taken a serious/realist perspective on the PPC and prefer a heavier tone, you've also been around plenty long enough for your words to have weight behind them because you actually can support your argument.)

-July, who seems to've found an anvil somewhere

The numbering system probably makes sense in however many dimensions HQ was designed to operate on, but from what we've seen, there've been numbers in the trillions, like in Caddy-shack's RC 481516234277, RCs with a random assortment of numbers and letters, like in Lily Winterwood's agents, and some RCs with placement indicators that wouldn't make sense in most scales, like with Iximaz's fruit-numbered RC. I realize that's just one example for each, but that's just saying that there's precedent for really strange numbers, and they don't need to necessarily be logical.
Basically, it seems that just because an RC exists as a certain number, that doesn't mean that all RCs before that number have been occupied, or possibly even exist at all. Having the potential for untold numbers of RCs doesn't necessarily mean that untold x 2+ numbers of agents occupy them at any given time.

Also, while I agree with you on most of your points, I think you're taking this issue waaay too seriously. Yes, it's important that what happens in a narrative happens for a reason, and any opportunity should be taken to find and develop new stories with a set of characters, remove what doesn't work to make something more feasible and interesting out of the ideas, and the like, but there's a huge difference between taking into account while writing a story that your characters are just barely in their teens and would thus almost certainly be out of their depth when dealing with badfic's dangers(or at least at first), and saying that writing one's PPC agents as children would be doing a disservice to child laborers or that section about their emotional maturity that I couldn't really get a grasp on. (Would that section mean that younger agents would become emotionally stunted? More prone to long-term trauma? Incompetent?) The PPC isn't exactly the same context as all of that, being more focused on comedy and all. Mostly, I see the core issues being whether or not the fact of their youth is properly explored in the story. Maybe they are Nursery kids, raised from their Improbable Incubation to defend the multiverse. That could be fairly interesting, especially since I don't think we have a spin-off that explores that side of the PPC in any more than a few one-off lines. Maybe they were recruits from a poorly-described badfic whose age stabilized unexpectedly low when they were fully realized. Maybe one was from the latter two categories, and the other is one of those many recruits who cross in due to plot holes or interdimensional problems or some regulator deep in the bowels of HQ's null space overspinning, and the Department of Personnel paired them with one of their similar age group due to a poorly-formed idea on how mammalian socialization works. As long as the details of who and what they are are realized, I think there's potential for good stories with almost any agent dynamic. There's no need to get bogged down in over-serious details.

If you're remarking on the seemingly arbitrary age limit on the survey, it's because I'd rather not play chicken with COPPA if I can avoid it.

(It's just easier to steer clear of it altogether than poke at it, from my perspective.)

I'm doing a happy little dance over here right now. I hate having to rewrite.
Anyway, my Agents will be fine with being tiny little fish in a big, drug-filled pond. Or not, but I can think of some interesting situations to put 'em in. Kay is violent, and (in RL) does karate, and Kitty exudes a metaphorical aura of insanity. Not to mention her pranking thing. I get the feeling she somehow managed to sneak out into RL and change my prompts to make herself crazier. Maybe I'm paranoid, though.

Yes, I have actually read some of Ella Darcy's stuff, including her last story, which made me cry. (But I'm pretty emotional, so bleh.) I always love those sorts of things.

Did I mention you're awesome?

~Kitty, who has been watching too many 7th Doctor episodes, and has started to talk like Ace. :-P