Subject: "... If you need to talk about this, I'm here."
Author:
Posted on: 2022-07-09 14:56:46 UTC
"And that's not a joke, or an attempt to garner information, or anything of the sort. I'm just here for you, if you'd like someone to be."
So I was trawling Ao3 this morning and came across a curiosity. I've discovered an author who has inserted the same Mary Sue into about 30 different canons (all different stories) for the express purpose of seducing the female characters.
I've not gone through any of the stories in depth yet to confirm they're bad enough to class as badfic, but it did present some interesting opportunities if they are. I considered sending my agents against the same Sue on multiple occasions, but then also wondered if it would be interesting to turn it into some form of multi spinoff Crossover. Many agent pairs dealing with the same Sue at the same time.
Like I said I need to go through the actual stories themselves, but I thought I'd throw a link in here to let people consider, and also gauge opinion. Link
Update: Having read a couple they definately count as badfic. Also it's not just seducing the female characters, the "Hybrid Hermaphroditic Vampress Goddess" managed to impregnate large swathes of female characters, as if attempting to build a mint army.
These are definitely badfic. The prose is some of the most beige I've ever seen, there are few commas or periods, and there is no characterization whatsoever. Overall, the series seems boring, which works especially poorly for smutfic. This is just me, but I don't see much humor potential here; beige prose and bad SPaG are annoying, but I don't know how to make them funny in a mission context. I think most of the jokes would have to come from Agent interactions rather than from the fic itself.
The problems I see are more structural than anything. None of the fics I read established who Marcella was; she's just There. On the smut side, I have to wonder what exactly the point of making Marcella a hermaphrodite is. The description doesn't mention that much. You could replace her with a cis man with long hair and only a couple of sentences would need changing. What's the point of kink if the kink isn't described?
My initial thought is, first and foremost: we don't author-bash. By sporking all/most or even some of these fics by this author, we could be accused of focusing too much on one person, bullying them, even if the work is questionable. I personally feel that, by sporking some of these fics and threading them into One Big Plot, we could be trending over into that territory, making it seem like we're picking on the author. If we spork more spread out and not just in one huge clot, maybe it'd be better.
My second thought, upon reading through the comments here, is that the work both have certain fetishes in them that are repeated and are transophobic (if I misinterpreted that, I apologize. I saw that they were explicit and noped out). As at least one person has noted, by sporking this fic in a mission, we (and the mission itself) could be seen as transophobic, despite it being the work that is. On that level, I'd say we shouldn't mission them, either, or if we do mission one of these fics, we are very careful to point out that we aren't being transophobic. Writing about a trans character in intimate relations with other characters is perfectly fine, it's just how this was pulled off seems bad.
Of course, I haven't read the fics because I don't typically read something explicit (although I have in the past) and just wasn't in the mood, so take these opinions as lesser than someone who has read the fic.
-kA
My fandoms ain't in there 😆 (likely because they're mostly full of boys)
I'm going to read just one of them to get an idea of what we're dealing with (the Inspector Gadget one. It will likely cause me to scream "My childhood!", but that's also the canon I'm most familiar with of this huge pile of trainwrecks) but here's some things I will get out of my chest that are regardless of the actual level of Glaurungness of this huge pile of fics:
On one hand, this provides the setup for an interesting group effort in crossovering spinoffs and doing collaborations. Have a set of newish Agents get assigned their first Marcella, but get support from a more experienced set that already bagged a couple of them has a great narrative potential.On PPC storytelling and worldbuilding potential, this is a goldmine
However, on the IRL side of things, there is a problem. A group of people, from a community often maligned as trying to be the Fandom Police, targeting several fics from a single author. It's basically walking on a minefield, one wrong move and we'll be in the center of big internet drama as "these bullies who decided this one poor guy had to be mass attacked and mercilessly ridiculed!"... well, any PPC missions has a chance of sparking controversy and it did happen in the past, but this has, let's say, a higher chance of the explosion being big,
So, I believe there should be a good bit of thinking done before we decide if we should use it as a "PPC Special Operation" setting or not.
Anyway, let's pick apart the Inspector Gadget one, shall we? It's on the shorter side (aroudn 3k wrods, most of these fics are between 1.5k and 10k from what I saw), but the tags already get me worried. There will be smut - and of underaged characters to boot. This already suggests to keep the Bleepka ready.
The writing is definitely not solid on a technical level: the run-ons are horrible, and there is no clear scene switch anywhere so we have Gadget drop off Penny at school one second, and right afterwards we have Dr. Claw drop off her uncanonical daughter (yes, it's Marcella, no points for guessing) at the very same school. How no one saw anyone else is already jarring, considering Gadget and Dr. Claw are each other's nemesis and they both drive fairly distinctive vehicles, but apparently the narration went off and claimed both Brain and Dr. Claw's cat died. For... no reason? Also, this is our first big canon break - both Brain and the cat are shown to alive and well in every series, including ones set after where this trainwreck is supposed to be set (Penny's first high-school day). Claw also feels somewhat OOC - the narration does a very lazy attempt at explaining where Marcella came from , which apparently implies Claw had married at one point but simply ran off to pursue METRO CITY DOMINATION. Oh, and Marcella's mother also died so now he decided to try to care for her. Sorry, I'm not buying this. Especially since it basically conflicts with the very existance of Talon, his actual nephew fro mthe 2015 series, and Claw's very abusive treatminet of him.
And we're just two paragraphs in. You know things are bad, when pointing out flaws is longer than the actual story.
Then we have Penny being glad of staying at the dormitory instead of going home after each day - that is already dangerously OOC for her, as not only she gets along with her uncle well, but she would be horribly worried about his wellbeing if separated from his for so long! The Inspector is, as we know and love, a bumbling fool, and without Penny or Brain around he would be in trouble at the very first case. Case in point: the Gadget and Gadgetinis series, in which Penny actually built two midget-sized androids (the titular Gadgetinis) to accompany him as neither she or Brain could. Said androids are always in radio contact with her, as well. Let's see if they're mentioned anywhere - they're no longer around by the time this thing is supposed to be set, but if they are it would be an acceptable break from canon.
Let's proceed. Penny and Marcella are revealed to be roommates (of course), and Marcella flirts right away before backtracking and saying that she doesn't want to make it awkward. The writing starts falling apart after that - the run-ons reach stream-of-consciousness level and I had to re-read some of what they said twice or thrice before it started making any sense. I do get that apparently Gadget and Penny had a bit of a rough patch after Brain's death - debatable, considering in Gadget and Gadgetinis Gadget had been told that Brain died to let the latter retire and try to recover from his PTSD, with Gadget... well, not really showing any sign of a strained relationship with Penny at all. I smell half-assed setup to get Suvian and canon to relate to each other.
... Relate? I talked too soon. Penny is already falling for her, and Marcella is also revealed to be heterochromatic (great, couldn't miss the Speshul Eyes charge). The Suvian steals a kiss from Penny out of the blue within minutes of meeting the girl, and the latter of course doesn't mind. They even exist the room holding hands (do not insert "holding hands is LEWD!" meme here. This thing is already beyond my daily intake of cringe as it is).
Lazy one month timeskip, and Penny as we knew her is gone. She now shares fashion and music tastes with Marcella, go to concerts and are dating, and of course the sex scene is theirs. I, of course, decided to skip that one. The narration then continues with the reveal of their families, the two girls don't care, and eventually get married. It seems at least this one spares us the "got a canon character pregnant" part, but the fact this story's Marcella doesn't seem to be the same as the others seems to confirm that we're dealing with multiple iterations of the same Suvian.
I don't know if the other stories do go in details about the offsprings, but I'm seriously starting to think we might be dealing in-universe with a self-replicating Suvian that propagates by seducing canon characters and then impregnating them with clones of herself. That could become Emergency-level real quick.
Regardless, the level of the story I checked is Kill It With Fire. Or a stake, considering her vamipiric alternates.
and in that one she's a blood elf whose excuse for getting with Cassandra (adopted daughter of the captain of the guards in the Tangled animated tv series) is that they're soulmates (cue Eledhwen rolling her eyes from New Cal). I think she might have impregnated Cassandra by the end of the fic; I was skimming very quickly through their wedding night.
But yeah it seems like a good deal of the fics have flimsy setups to get the Sue to seduce some random female canon, and then marry her, and then very dully-described, beige prose smut. That's honestly one of the things I would be very careful about if someone did want to mission this -- the, ahem, genre that Marcella falls into is one that fetishises trans women, which, when taken with context of PPC Agents viewing Suvians in general as predatory leeches on the canon.... can get hairy very fast.
So that's why I'd be very uncomfortable with missioning this series, even if there's a lot of potential for some sort of story featuring a megalomaniacal Sue with an army of clones ready to literally seed the multiverse with more clones. It has potential to be a thrilling read, but I would be very wary of how the agents describe the Sue and her actions because of the obvious fetishes that the Sue is catering to.
The portrayal of the relevant Suvian is not "trans girl has an adventure and finds love" but "fetishized portrayal of a girl who also has the Tab A so she goes around putting it in Slot Bs", but there's still unfortunately ground for an oblique accusation of transphoby for tackling a story that could be read as transphobic itself.
This is what makes this utter ridicolous, correct me if I'm mistaken (this is stuff I'm not really an expert in) but I don't think the relevant Suvian is actually even a transexual to begin with: she's stated as an hermafrodite, which implies she was, uhm, born with both the Tab A and the Slot B, and I assume also a set of Spheres C or equivalent somewhere considering she can impregnate. In particular I suspect she's a western example of the futanari fetish: female from the waist up, male (or at least with male parts on top of the female ones) from the waist down so the author and/or artist can have "girl on girl is hot" and "true sex is penetrative" together (and I think you can agree with me how wrong is it to enforce that second one, especially with non-het couples). A fetishization that, at least to me, is no worse than transphoby itself because, well, it does not care about actually writing a trans girl at all!
Pardon me the french, but they just put a dick on their pet wish fulfillment character so she could shoot loads inside other girls. The very fact one of the "canons" involved (the author of these fics is the only one who ever used the tag so I suspect it is something they made up) is apparently called "Innocent D**kgirls" shows it all, because, correct me if I'm wrong, I highly doubt a male-to-female transexual would normally be flattered by being called a "dickgirl".
Which, as I said, means we're walking on eggshells risking being called transphobes when in fact the badfic itself is the transphobic one, or at the very least not a story that cares about transexuality at all. It's ridicolous, and sad.
This is exactly why I wanted to bring it to the board for discussion. I'd originally glanced at the Dungeons and Dragons story, when I found all of the others. The Scooby Doo one in particular had some rather, sweeping comments regarding the sexuality of hermaphrodites that could easily fall into the offensive category.
Like Turbo said, they seem to definately fall into the kill it instantly category, but are they better left ignored, dealt with in a massive fashion or taking it more subtly.
Sometimes a gold mine turns out to be fools gold.
Suppose we just banished this literal demon back to her own universe rather than killing her? In other words, treat the stories like implausible crossovers. Or, more precisely, proper trans-dimensional hopping.
It wouldn't remove the necessity of treading lightly with any critique of the kinks as portrayed, but it would make it more plain that the message is "you're free to do what you want in your own home, but not anyone else's."
We have people well qualified to do sensitivity checks, too, if they're willing.
And there wouldn't have to be a detailed sporking of every fic. Take a few examples from representative continua, preferably featuring different versions of the character; assemble a master charge list from the individual ones; get enough agents in enough places; and do one big ol' exorcism.
... It could be done that way, anyhow. I'm on the fence with everyone else on whether it should be done. Great lore in-universe? Yes. Potentially worse optics than usual out-of-universe? Also yes.
Not that I'm especially worried about bruising this particular author's ego. It seems clear they know exactly what they're doing and don't care what anyone thinks about it, or they wouldn't be flooding AO3 with 200+ bloody fics all in the same vein. >.>
~Neshomeh
And it would shift a lot of the drama from "bagging her" to "make sure she doesn't touch and burn any world outside hers". With just a bit of care and, of cours,e cross-checking each other's works, we can basically turn this into a big containment operation, which still has a lot of community effort potential, but ultimately we would pretty much avoid the big controversial topic entirely.
It woulkd become "Marcella is absolutely free to do what she does and be who she is - we have no grudge against her peronally (or after her author). But we'd like her to not hop around seducing and impregnating all the canon girls in the multiverse, thank you."
And, with the right disclaimers, we should be able to make it clear that it isn't a raid agaisnt one author we don't like, but that we thought the badfics themselves provided a good starting point for doign something a bit bigger than usual (while being, well, badfics).
In fact, I think that we can ultimately avoid the "dogpiling" aspect by... releasing only one story. Basically, those who are willing to tackle this choose a single one of these badfics to have one of their agent teams in. We roleplay/cowrite the big pre-mission meeting with, I dunno, the Board of Department Heads? In which the assignment is stated. (We have a problem with this character somehow propagating herself through the World Worlds. We have to banish her splinters back to her world before she seduces the whole multiverse.). The missions' scenes get alternated, to have the effect that the teams are working simultaneously, and then we have the big simultaneous exorcism at the end. Followed by whatever roleplayed wind-down, havign a drink at Rudy's, whatever we want to get the agent teams interact with each other a bit more.
It would be, in the end, just one mission, tackling a single Suvian (but it different world at once), without actually killing her or even judging character.
I’d read it, but not cowrite it. Just...no thank you.
—Ls was squicked by the content warnings alone.
I missioned the infamous Wall of Tags fic, “S*xytimes with Wangxian”, wherein their later chapters have the titular couple hopping around to other fandoms having questionably beige sex with other characters (and also certain kpop groups, but I didn’t cover that portion of it because I don’t deal with RPF). The plan in the mission was to rescue all kidnapped canons and set up a Creativity Shield so that the fic itself wouldn’t damage the rest of the multiverse. The latter didn’t happen because the fic itself got deleted during the mission, but this could also be a good candidate for seeing a Creativity Shield put into action. You could have agent teams fetching the Sue’s clones and bringing them back to her original world, and then setting up a Creativity Shield there so they can’t affect the rest of the Multiverse.
Incidentally, if you go with that approach, you would also thematically line up with the “League of Mary Sue Factories doing cloning experiments” idea that I’ve been playing with in my stuff. So that could be an interesting addition to the lore, if Marcella is treated like a Suvian with a clone army set out to mess with the rest of the Multiverse.
I've just read the Captain Planet one. The OC Marcella shows up, heals one of the villains and instantly turns her good, makes both said villain and Gaia (aka the spirit of Mother Earth) fall in love with her, and proceeds to have it away with both of them.
It's everything my Jenni lives in fear of being seen as.
With offensive terminology to boot.
I feel personally affronted. I need some time to process this. {X' D
~Neshomeh
"And that's not a joke, or an attempt to garner information, or anything of the sort. I'm just here for you, if you'd like someone to be."
Jenni pushes her mug of tea away and lets her forehead thunk softly on the table within the circle of her arms. "I want to help her. Because surely if I just explain that what she's doing isn't the harmless fun she thinks it is, she'll want to stop, right?" The nurse waves one hand vaguely in the air, indicating she know the absurdity of what she's saying. "Never mind that I hear she's got over 200 stories already and looks like she was designed to be little more than inflation-fetish fuel..."
(( 1. Awww. ^_^
(( 2. No, really, I looked at the character art. I would not recommend this to anyone who doesn't already know what an inflation fetish is. Or, well, anyone, really.
~Neshomeh ))
Just . . . no.
—Ls does not want to read any of those fics.
If it is Trollfic it's insanely huge. Digging a little more there are over 200 fics, over an almost two year period!
The Division of Multiple Offenses is what you want.