Subject: It's actually something I want to play with myself.
Author:
Posted on: 2015-08-25 22:03:00 UTC
How much alive is a canon character? Are they living persons or just a bunch of Words? Quite a challenging question to my Agents, especially since they're aware of being fictional characters themselves (being all three of them badfic recruits of some sort).
With the recent deaths of Rose Potter and Little Miss Mary, The League would probably be somewhat pissed, and would like to enact revenge on the PPC.
Rose Potter and Little Miss Mary weren’t even products of the Mary Sue Factories; they were created by identifiable Suethors.
HG
The Factories, like the other Sue-originators, produce Mary Sues who then go and... I guess fit into a space created by an author. Without them, a Suvian character would have no life or existence beyond her Words; with them, Suvians are capable of reacting to agents, and have a much greater detrimental effect on the Word Worlds.
hS
I've seen a number of sues in missions react to agents and such. Even before the factories were an established thing I think.
The Ladies' Academy and its predecessor make Sues, as does Sparklee the Suvian City. And there are other, undefined sources.
For that matter, there's been multiple competing theories about Suvians as evolved organisms infecting the multiverse. My theory is that there was a natural Suvian species, which has been improved on by the League (and cloned on a massive scale), merged with fangirls by the Academy, and so on.
But every Suvian in a story has to come from somewhere. Writers create the ideas; the life comes from elsewhere.
(Per the Compromise Theory of universe creation, that includes canon characters - they draw their life from the universe they're based on. Where (good) OCs fit into all this is unclear - of course.)
hS
It seems to me that a written Sue should be able to take on life, as it were, just as a canon character would (or, if we want to get meta, as the PPC agents do). But that it's strange and contradictory makes things interesting I suppose. You know I plan to write other "big picture" stuff (if there's room to now) so I reserve the right to go out and jot down my own ideas and such if I feel they fit, heh. It's an interesting bit of the setting to build on, especially since the same question can in a way be asked of any character from a continuum other than World One - I'm sure by some people's standards Dafyyd is no more alive than a random Sue.
How much alive is a canon character? Are they living persons or just a bunch of Words? Quite a challenging question to my Agents, especially since they're aware of being fictional characters themselves (being all three of them badfic recruits of some sort).
A brief report from the central offices at Dreams Come True, Inc, headquarters of the loyal League of Mary-Sue Factories:
I don't think the PPC would benefit from having a "villain" or "foil" working against it, especially not an organization of Sues.
Here's my view on this: Mary Sues are like a disease within a canon. Most of the time, they're not actively trying to destroy a canon; however, the way they are written naturally causes them to degrade the world around them, to bend the world around their existence. A badfic is like an infection within canon, and the PPC acts as an antibody.
Goodfic coexists with established canon, bad writing clashes and damages it. It's a naturally-occurring thing brought about through the worlds created by writing, not attacks on canon orchestrated by some shadowy force of corruption. In this case, think bacteria. There's a lot of different kinds within your body; some of it coexists with your immune system to strengthen it, while other kinds are harmful and cause you to get sick. It's not actively malicious, but you still get sick just because it's there. Mary Sues are like bad bacteria.
The PPC is basically a team of Almighty Janitors cleaning up a mess made by botched uses of a setting, not some army fighting against forces of evil. Having this League just wouldn't fit.
Obviously my post that this was just one mission was a case of misplaced optimism. As people said in the earlier thread, we don't want to go into a whole bunch of big Emergencies and darker plots. Let's leave Rose Potter and Little Miss Mary where they are, instead of trying to imitate them. Not only is it taking the PPC in a direction it's not really meant to go, it feels a bit like you're trying to use Iximaz and co's success to get more attention for your own thing.