Subject: Points of Divergance / GotC agent image
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Posted on: 2022-08-05 09:32:08 UTC
The premise of the Multiversal Atlas is that each multiverse was different from inception. The Anti-Plot Continuum isn't a world where the PPC was founded in the Tumblr era - it's a world where the mindset of the Tumblr era was always dominant. PPC scientists tend to go for a semi-fixed history model, probably because they work in canons - so despite Everything Being Different, a lot of things are still the same.
So J.R.R. Tolkien always writes an epic story about nine people clubbing together to destroy a Ring of Power. Sometimes they're only doing it because they can't agree who should claim it instead. Sometimes they're all in love. Sometimes half of them are female. And sometimes, as in the APC, the number of incidents they encounter along the way is significantly reduced, to avoid anything problematic coming up.
It is entirely possible to perceive the alternate multiverse another way. The question of what if the PPC was started in our world at a different time is a really interesting one (and there's a hypothetical multiverse devoted to that exact question). But it's not what the Atlas assumes.
In line with the Atlas' version, then, and using Linstar's translation algorithm, I present: Agents David Alien and Constance The Sims.
They are designed to be unproblematic. They are the same height, because someone said men being taller is misogynist, and someone else said women being taller is fetishisation. D. Alien has short hair, because someone said giving men long hair is offensive. His name isn't Dafydd, because that was called cultural appropriation. At one point he wore a shirt, but that was supporting wage-slavery; at another, she wore a v-neck t-shirt, but that was objectifying. Both are in grey, because someone once told the Board that a black uniform was glorifying slavery. You wouldn't believe how many ways the flame and cactus flash-patches were toxic, so now they just have acronyms (which will soon be phased out, because someone has just raised the point that Latin letters are anglocentric). And of course, the use of "Mary Sue" went out way back, so now they're the Department of Problematic O.Cs. (Also about to be changed, as soon as someone notices that "P.O.C." is also used for something else.)
The point here, and the point I think Lily's making, is that none of these comments are 100% wrong. All of them can be true, in some circumstances! But you have to apply thought to them. Neither avoiding offense nor being offensive are tick-box exercises: they depend almost entirely on context. But the APC ignores context: it is literally 'you said it's bad, so it's always bad in any circumstances'.
Like the Atlas says, it's a fairly quiet, peaceful world. If every multiverse has a mirror, then the mirror of the APC one where the rallying cry is "you can't say you don't like it - that's censorship!". Certain parts of the internet are living in that one right now.
hS