I haven't read Little Miss Mary, but I want to read it now. Thanks for piquing my interest.

But that is a good point. If the PPC loses sight of it's original intent, the entire point is lost. I'll have to keep this in mind when I write my stuff in the future.

Of course, a bit of dark humor and satire, maybe even downplaying the seriousness of otherwise serious situations is called for.

This is giving me ideas just sitting here writing this. I have to get them down.

~ Dark Brother 16

~ Semper erit insanus

I probably coulda worded my post better. More what I wanted to get across was that if too many people jump on Ixi and Dawn's wagon, which is a perfectly good wagon, as far as I'm concerned, we have the potential to get really dark really fast. So this was mostly an attack of Orange can't word important things properly syndrome. It's an extension of Orange can't spell correctly syndrome. So sorry for causing a fuss, just wanted to get my opinion out there.

Little Miss Mary was a *legendary*--I don't think it should be handled in a trivial manner! Besides which, it's a truly horrible story that trivializes pedophilia; I wouldn't want to treat it like an afternoon's entertainment.

I like it when missions get serious without being melodramatic, when agents fight real threats, when they get away by the skin of their teeth. I like a good fight scene or a well-planned ambush.

The PPC isn't as small a world as when it got started; it's not really just about laughing at badfic anymore. We're writing in a well-developed world now, and just like real people's lives get serious sometimes, our characters' lives will get serious sometimes.

We've moved from Bilbo chanting rhymes at Mirkwood spiders, to Sam facing down Shelob with a frying pan. That's the way things happen when a world gets bigger.

If you want to write humorous stories, write them. Let others write their more serious stories. PPC writers should be free to write whatever they want, as long as it's good writing, as long as it doesn't infringe on someone else's story or change the way the PPC and HQ work.

We've banned Emergencies partly for precisely that reason: Because we don't want one writer to declare that something they write about must happen to everyone, and pull others into their serious story. So someone else writing a story in which an agent deals with a real threat, by no means keeps you from writing a story in which the worst threat is from snorting Bleepka out your nose while laughing at the badfic.

If you want the PPC to be more light-hearted, you write light-hearted stories. There's no need to dictate what other people do with their own agents, within the bounds of non-melodramatic good writing. With such a huge variety of writers doing their thing, we're going to have a huge variety of tones. Unlike a multi-author published series, we don't have to worry about keeping the tone the same for each installment. Because we don't have to be homogeneous about our writing, we can have a serious, hard-fought battle with a Warrior!Sue in one story, and still have the next one be a light-hearted story about a couple of agents trying to cope with cat disguise in a Warriors fic.

I know that the people who lived through the Emergencies and their accompanying problems might be wary of serious stories, but please, trust me, this isn't the same thing! No one is keeping you from writing what you want, and if they did, all of the Board would call them out on it. Our agents experience the PPC in their own ways. Just like a light-hearted mission can't prevent others from writing serious ones, a serious mission can't prevent others from writing light-hearted ones.

Because like Neshomeh said, yes, we've seen this happen before, and it is actually very, very hard to steer things off that path when it's happened.

What Neshomeh didn't mention with her response is that around the same time as all these events and emergencies and what not (That eventually led to the creation of Catastrophe Theory- as you can see we successfully entered what should have been the DOOOOOM stage without DOOM actually occurring, well done us, unless we weren't paying attention when it actually happened, which is a distinct possibility) the PPC page on TvTropes was created.

And filled very much with things that were not what we at the time considered to be in the mainline for the PPC, nor do to this day, for that matter.

So the end result was we got a lot of newbies who arrived with the Completely Wrong Idea about the PPC and that we were serious and were in it to dismantle writers and mock them (which is a concern voiced below by Silentthunder in another thread, as can be seen) and that the PPC as a concept was 100% serious, rather than being what it is. Some of said people managed to work their way through it and are in fact still around, but a lot of them were rather displeased at the fact that we weren't here to smack fanauthors into submission to acknowledge How Canon Should Be Done- several, in fact, didn't like fanfiction at all! I'd rather not round two of that, personally.

That said, I'm also more than a bit put out over the fact that it's entirely consumed the board since that mission was published- while I'm impressed that said fic was taken care of and a mission done out of it in a relatively short time period, considering what's happened with most of the other Legendaries- at the same time I'm kinda put out. I can't read this mission for a good week, if at all, because it's definitely not something I can read while at work, or access through the only current internet source I have without a significant chance of getting into trouble.

There's nothing like feeling like you're missing quite a bit when you can't even see what it is that's going on and a chunk of what's following in the flurry is related so is also filled with spoilers.

First of all, it was a mission to a Legendary Badfic - making it easy would be anticlimactic at best, and bordering on Suish for the agents in question. Just look at the Celebrian mission.

Secondly, and the main point... that's one mission. There's no rule saying that all missions have to be that level of serious. Even a lot of Rina's previous missions have been much more light-hearted. You're making a generalization about the direction of the entire organization based on one story.

If you really want there to be more funny, light-hearted missions, then you should write them.

I note that none of you who have replied so far were around back in, eh, was it 2006-2008 when hS was writing The Reorganization and Crashing Down, and Tawaki was doing the Assimilation Crisis and the Key to Canon thing and Mirror Multiverse thing and the Macrovirus Epidemic and the Mary Sue Invasion, and Laburnum was busy trying to push the limits of squick in missions?

Yeah, other people tried to do the same stuff. It didn't go well. It started getting out of hand. That's when we started writing the FAQ for Newbies, Guide to the PPC, etc., to stop people doing that stuff and joining because they thought we were ALL ABOUT that stuff.

So, as long as it's just Iximaz we're probably cool, but I'll second OrangeYoshi's wish not to see the whole PPC try to emulate her, even if she is the hS of today what with being madly prolific and wildly popular and an all-around nice person. Because it wasn't fun the last time it happened. If we can make sure it doesn't start this time, so much the better.

~Neshomeh

I don't mind darkness. There are people who may found the PPC being too... childish? There are people who may found it too serious.

It's like Harry Potter - it started as a childrens' book and gradually went darker, as its readers were maturing. I like to think of the PPC in the same way.

As Ixi said, life is not all sunshine and turnips (I think that's what she said ;D) - things are bound to get bad, or have an unexpected turn. The PPC is a pretty good representation of that. Under that mask of Time Lords, Pokemon and fiction, those are some pretty serious human problems which may make you think some things through.

Also, trust me - LMM and Ixi's spin-offs are not the darkest things you'll ever read. Just wait until I get hold of the wheel.

I personally don't have any problem with things getting dark every now and then, if there is good reason for it to happen. The darkness makes the light that much brighter and it propels characters toward growth.

Even back to the beginning, there has been darkness in PPC stories. Some of the greatest moments in the best spin-offs have come from seriousness and darkness.

What you should have a problem with is darkness for the sake of darkness. I find a lot of grimdark stories fall into this trap. We have to have gore/death/trauma because those things are edgy or cool. If it doesn't serve the story or the characters, then there is no point.

So, ask yourself, does the recent seriousness and darkness serve the stories and characters that they inhabit? I think you'll find that they do. Do you need to like them because of that? Not even remotely.

-Phobos

Yeah, the PPC is mostly a humorous setting, but it's not always. There's a reason why we have frequent references to agents snapping in action, agents dying in action, agents running away from HQ and being declared MIA...

Face it, for all the humor it has, it's not exactly fun to be an agent. They're harried, they're tired, they're overworked and underpaid. And the longer a spin-off goes on, the longer an agent has to buckle under the stress. And considering Rina held a record of 36 recorded missions (which, I think, is the second-highest number overall; someone correct me if I'm wrong), she's had a lot of time to reach snapping point, especially considering what she's already gone through.

The PPC isn't always sunshine and rainbows. Look at the various Sunderings. Look at the Reorganization. Look at the Emergencies that have left hundreds, if not thousands, dead and injured. Look at the other Legendaries, at C*l*br**n; I mean, Dafydd died on that mission, and would have stayed dead if it hadn't been for Constance. Look at Subjugation, where most of the agents never came back.

I can't help but feel a little offended, though, that you're dismissing months of work out of hand like this. This has been in the making since February, and we've put a lot of effort into it. Many hours spent writing, rewriting, planning, discussing, betaing, polishing. Every PPCer gets to decide the overall flavor of their spinoff, and this is what we've gone for. We want to explore the consequences of being an agent, and how it really isn't the greatest job anyone could ever ask for.

But if it makes you feel any better, LMM is about as dark as my spinoff's going to get. Everything will be lighter from here on out.

Well, I won't say 'we're heading'. I'd say 'Ix's spinoff (and parts of the spinoffs of other connected people such as DawnFire) are heading'. That's their choice as writers. Other people write different things.
Also, I'd like to point that while LMM — and its repercussions — is rather serious and dark, it is not WH40K levels of grimdark and it's certainly not grimderp.
It's been done before, too; look at Tawaki's adventures, or read Caddy's writings — there are some serious moments there, too.
What's more, if you look beyond the funsies and at things usually played for laughs here, you'll notice that the PPC is an organisation of overworked misfits with barely functioning tech fighting a battle against Eldritch Abominations; the bosses are negligent aliens; and so on. For the most part, it's played for laughs but it can be played for drama as well.
Last but not least, it feels to me that reading LMM and saying 'oh no we're going SRS BSNS grimderp stahp' is kinda rude to Ix, DF and the rest of the people and the huge amount they put into this arc.