Subject: Personally, I think they're stupid.
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Posted on: 2016-10-23 14:10:00 UTC
They fit pretty well into things like Welcome to Night Vale, though, and since there's no cure for stupid I just roll my eyes and move on.
You know those things?
You know, all that 'Roswell was aliens' and 'George Bush was aliens' and 'That random bloke in the crowd was aliens' and 'That rock that nearly tripped me over as I walked to work was aliens.' and 'Those things in that movie with Ellen Ripley was aliens.' All that nonsense.
Within PPC canon, where do they fit? Do they get their own continua, or are they something else, or are they just bollocks?
I imagine they'd work similar to old sort've mythology and folklore, but I'm not sure where those fit in, either.
Urban legends (somewhat connected, though, I suspect there's a difference I'm not noticing that'll tear the whole thing down), according to the wiki, seem to exist, what with Bloody Mary being summonable, and all.
You lot got thoughts?
Or, er, a link to a page answering my entire question that I missed completely like a ponce?
Discussion's over, fellows. We got ourselves an answer.
Pack up, ship out, move on, thread's dead, let's all pretend this never happened.
Discussion's back on, fellows! Lost ourselves an answer.
Pack down, ship in, move off, thread's alive, let's all pretend this happened!
Generally speaking, there's not really a "canon" out there of those kinds of stories; they tend to vary dramatically depending on the telling, after all. And in general, I usually see PPC continua being narratives that have consistent recorded forms. Fairy tales are a good example; there are many different published versions of a single tale that have contradictory details (Perrault vs Brothers Grimm, for example), so you can't really enforce canon for them as a whole, though maybe you could for a specific version. Plus, most conspiracy theories are supposedly true events in World One, so it kind of falls into the category of RPF if you think about it.
That said, there are certainly plenty of continua that are influenced by conspiracy theories, X-Files being one of the most well-known. And as VixenMage mentioned, the PPC itself is probably rife with its own conspiracy theories, as well as potentially being a source of them in World One. That'd be an interesting background for a World One agent, actually; maybe they found the PPC while trying to figure out where exactly all those young people who get mysterious jobs and then disappear have gone.
So, for it to be a continuum, it needs to have a proper, consistent canon?
That, there, is intriguing. Hadn't thought of that.
I still reckon they ought to have some presence, though, right? Especially considering how closely related they are to actual continua.
P'raps they're ridiculously ridden with plotholes, being all inconsistent-like. Constantly warping all over the place, and practically unreachable.
Dunno what RPF is, or what the Rwandan Patriotic Front has to do with any of this, however.
RPF = Real Person Fic, usually involving popular actors or musicians. It's a fairly controversial subject, as many people (myself included) feel that it's an invasion of privacy at best, and profoundly creepy at worst. It is outside the purview of the PPC.
The requirement of consistency is just personal interpretation, largely based on the way that you see movieverse vs. bookverse canon in some fandoms, and occasionally charges for being inconsistent as to which one is being referenced. I imagine that, depending on the fandom, it can get massively more complicated; just think of comic books, for example. But even still, there's an expectation that there's a specific version being referenced, instead of a conglomeration of multiple versions. It seems like it'd be hard to enforce stability in something that doesn't have stability in the first place.
What kind of presence are you thinking of, and what kind of close relations? I admit that part of my confusion stems from the fact that I'm really only familiar with urban legends and conspiracy theories as they relate to fictional canons. And different canons tend to put extremely different spins on the same story. Look at the different versions of Bloody Mary in different series, for example. They're all based on the same source story, but they vary pretty sharply.
Yeah, that's bloody weird. I get pangs of guilt from using nonexistent characters, let alone real people.
We've had missions of those before, though, haven't we? What changed?
My main thoughts on their presence is mainly how similar they are to proper canon worlds, main difference being consistency. Can't see, logically, why they wouldn't have some sort've presence, or an explanation for the lack of them, y'know? From a worldbuilding perspective, or whatnot.
I mean, as you said, it's not like they'd get enforced too heavily (or at all) by the PPC, but, y'know.
I mean, on a low-level scale I just assume the PPC is full of them. All Cafeteria food is made from the bodies of Sues, in some way or other. The Flowers are aliens. The Flowers are Old Ones. The Flowers have a secret plot to drive all PPC agents insane. There's a department whose job it is to kill agents when they get too close to being Sues. The Escher Room provides a secret portal room to outside the multiverse. Makes-Things is immortal. Makes-Things is secretly a Flower.
I mean, there has to be, right? So much of the reality in HQ is constantly in flux anyway, you'd think these things would thrive. I think they'd be part of the canon in that they're absolutely something Agents would believe, but conspiracy theories are by definition usually counter to canon itself. Does that make sense?
(And yes, I do think the ones in Real Life are pretty bad.)
Lots of crazy people knocking around, too. Quite the perfect environment for breeding that sort've stuff.
I mean, a swimming pool? In HQ?
Psssh. Everyone knows water's a myth.
I mean, there's also that Rule of Funny. The more someone believes one, the more bollocks it'll be, and vice versa. One've the best parts of PPC, that!
After all they are presented as theories instead of stories or anything like that. They get disproved rather easily too. Only time I could imagine they hold any effect is if the canon someone was in used one of them.
They fit pretty well into things like Welcome to Night Vale, though, and since there's no cure for stupid I just roll my eyes and move on.
You find some kind of issue with the possibility that the world is actually flat, in spite of evidence being garnered from simply looking at the ocean?
And that the government is spending millions of dollars making sure everyone thinks it's round, just because they're a bunch of nobheads?
Or that the real truth behind everything we know actually sounds like really poorly written sci-fi?
Pssssh. Enjoy your cage, sheeple!