We're used to seeing badfic quotes interspersed throughout missions. That's what the agents are there to observe, after all. And while they can lead to all kinds of weird or bad imagery, there's a disconnect in reading them. We know the agents are going to correct the problems by the end, and we're only experiencing the reality warping third-hand, through the agents' perspective, which makes the badfic quotes a neutral element nearly all of the time. In this story though, it's the focal characters getting warped by the inserted-from-another-story quotes, and it gives them a much more chilling and threatening vibe. After all these years of reading PPC missions, that sequence where Kate and Kira's appearances got changed, was quite a slap in the face. And unlike canon characters, who get drawn into the fic's narrative and wouldn't notice such changes, Kate and Kira are fully aware of what happened to them. Horrifying.

Rincewind's backstory is more fascinating than I even anticipated! I like that the authors don't cast her initial writing as villainous, but instead reflect (one of) the real world source of writing Mary Sues: women wanting to see more of themselves in male-dominant published canon. That said, it does feel a little weird to erase the Star Trek fandom's known historical status as the origin of Mary Sues. I know the Canon Protection Initiative started out in Tolkien and had a heavy presence in that fandom for most of its early existence, but it still feels weird to shoehorn a different backstory for the phenomenon of Suvians in the fictional setting, when the setting has always been so dependent on real world fanfiction trends. I'm currently assuming that Rincewind is an Inheritance Cycle dragon, due to the telepathy, and the somewhat aloof and predatory attitude, which reminds me quite a bit of Saphira. Eragon's original self-publishing occurred in 2002, so the timeline checks out. The reference to "Powers That Be" and "Music of the Spheres" is surprisingly uncomfortable to me; I'm used to the canons having their own native gods, but implying that the real world has one within the PPC mythology feels out of place. But then again, I don't know what/who else would have the power to force Rincewind into this Quantum Leapesque plotline, otherwise. Legal? It feels too broad in scope, even for them.

It's interesting that Rincewind assumes the PPC will find a home continuum for Odorf, when we've seen throughout the PPC + 20 project that the general tendency was to kill Cute Animals Friends, even if they could clearly be integrated into canon. I like that Andy and Saphie had a more reformist viewpoint on that than most of the community seemed to!

—doctorlit sees that Legolas has arrived at last

This mission has an interesting premise: if PPC staff knock a fanfiction off kilter, they first have to correct the fic's path before they can go on to undo it through proper missioning. It makes sense in universe; the fic's influence on the canon is ongoing due to the Words. If those Words get disrupted, they may not be fully present enough to address. But it feels like the execution didn't really carry through . . . reverting Dour K's intrusion onto the murder scene also, apparently, restores canon, despite all the other murder scenes that had previously happened. (Then again, Thranduil's murder was a flashback sequence. Maybe it was the chronological first murder, and stopping it stopped the others by pure accident? It didn't come across like that in the mission, though.) It feels like such a scenario should have required a two-step solution: fix the badfic, then fix the canon. But I suppose I'm overthinking an early iteration of a minor department . . .

See, this is why I don't drink caffeine! You get buzzed off the drug, and then suddenly there's beheaded corpses. Don't do drugs, kids! In seriousness, Katharine did a good job of taking the premise of gory serial killings in Middle-earth, and extracting humor from it without also trivializing what's happening. The legitimately hilarious errors with "Elrond's twin brothers" and "Gimli, son of Glóin's son" help, but mostly it's carried by how Dour K is written. She cracks jokes and carries on with the repetitiveness of her paperwork, because she knows it's ultimately fiction, and not even the "real" fiction. But she also feels uneasy and put off by the descriptions of the murders, and how wanton it is to portray a Tolkienverse elf committing such acts.

Boy, that is one over-powered CAD! It seems to be getting treated as the source of the Words here, and can therefore freeze the flow of the narrative. Not such a bad thing on an Intel mission, but boy, would that be way too strong against Suvians in the DMS! Freeze time, read charges and execute! Boring. The implication that the CAD is what brings the mission to an end by ceasing the feed is weird, too, and feels contradictory to the physical manifestation of fics in canon, generally.

—doctorlit thinks Rile X can go visit Upstairs for upgrades himself, instead of yelling at his traumatized teammate about it repeatedly. Dang.

It's a shame Cam didn't write more PPC fic; this is a little heavy on the "ew Sues dirty" rhetoric, but overall, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The agents start out a little short with each other, but they adjust into a cohesive teamwork mentality once the mission gets rolling. Plus, a gorilla is there! It . . . probably shouldn't be there, because of the whole "no pets or minis" on missions" thing, but I enjoyed King Kong Comma all the same. Actually, considering how genetically similar gorillas are to humans, I wonder if the Bonsai Monkey Puzzle Tree mistook KKC's mental activity for being similar enough to a humanoid's that it doesn't realize he isn't an agent? (Not that the BMPT existed when this was written, but you know what I mean. Flower senses go brrrrr.) I am, however, a little wigged out by that diet, man. Bacon and waffles? I know KKC is technically a manifest typo, like a mini, but he's gorilla enough to to make it feel weird for me to see him eat anything other than vegetation . . . Oh, another good moment for me is the opening, when Miss Cam hand delivered her sister a partner. Miss Cam is this imposing, powerful figure in the Canon Protection Initiative, but here she is hand-selecting a competent student to make sure her sister has a decent partner, and bringing her in person. It's really sweet and humanizing!

Hm. Grammar glasses? Must be a device from OFUM, since PPC agents can normally see the Words on their own. Interesting that this seems to imply agents had to be specially trained to do so, and a far cry from the modern version of telling a new agent to unfocus their eyes and there, training done! That special neuralyzer is interesting as well, since it didn't affect the PPC characters, despite their lack of eyewear. They must be exceedingly difficult to produce, considering they haven't caught on in twenty years! Maybe they can only be coded for a specific canon, which doesn't lend itself well to most agents' workloads. I really, really like interpreting point-of-view shifts as physical relocations being forced on the agents. It's a more elegant interpretation than the little critters we've invented in the modern day, and I will likely be stealing it for my spin-off once I. You know. Have time to write again.

Names! I totally didn't get the "Agent Orange" joke until it was explicitly spelled out during the charging scene. Embarrassing! It's clever, and it also means their surnames make a pair as a manmade chemical poison, and a naturally occurring biological venom. (Taipans are venomous snakes.) The soda-constructed names are also hilarious, very PPC vibe on-the-spot constructions. But most hilarious name here goes to the badfic author for naming a background elf "Pergolas," and then abbreviating that to "Perry" as a nickname. "It is I, Perry, of Middle-earth."

—doctorlit sees the Boarders of two decades past did not want him to have much free time this week!

---

James Earl Jones removed his headset slowly, a frown creasing his brow. "This was . . . a very strange recording session."

Sir David Attenborough removed his as well. "Yes . . ." he said slowly. "Did they really hire you just to make door knocking sound effects?"

"So it seems." Jones shrugged. "A paycheck is a paycheck, I suppose. At one point, it seemed as though you were supposed to have a line, but you didn't."

"I caught that as well," said Attenborough. "Perhaps they forgot to send me the line?"

Jones sighed. "George still hasn't gotten back to me about whether he needs any voice work for the last film of the prequel trilogy."

"That's a shame. On my end, nature hasn't run out of nature for me to narrate!"

Jones chuckled. "Well, shall we go for some Cool Voice Smoothies at the Cool Voice Smoothie Shack?"

"As always, dear friend, as always."

(so is that 51 ways haha i'm going to keep making this joke whenever there's a number in the title haha)

This is one I avoided ever reading, because the title makes it sound like another example of gratuitous hostility from our earlier days. So I opened it today not expecting much, but uh . . . it's good? The opening confused me, because it made it seem like HQ was a building with an "outside," but further reading shows that the girl is a student from OFUM, which explains how she got covered in dirt and plants before reaching HQ. Oh, and uh, OFUM's library sounds nice. I support her expression of lust object! >_> But as for the gratuitous hostility, I was pleased to find that the actual list is more "here are some interesting details and references about Tolkien's canon" rather than "punch stab main haha die!" So yeah, it's a fun little piece. The censor/sensor joke is great. (Would a censor be a member of Legal? Legal did force WTF to change their name, after all!) Saying the Flowers are "prone to hysteria" might feel a little weird, but at the same time, I can kind of see it; their mental communication has the potential to form a feedback loop, perhaps? Plus, I might characterize the Civil War on Origin as feeling a little hysterical, to my reading, and the Mysterious Somebody manipulated HQ into a panic to justify his presence as a source of order. A lot of that latter may have been triggering panic in the Flowers?

—doctorlit keeps forgetting what actual dandelions look like, and needs to stop picturing them as daisies in his head

Read that one recently. Easily one of my favorite spinoffs ever, even though it only has one mission. I wish there was more.

And it certainly looks like doc will have plenty of material to review...

—Ls

It's been a very long time. :D "So long that I almost feel young again, as I have not felt since I journeyed with these children." Lovely to see you again.

I confess I haven't had a chance to actually reread the chapter I posted, but I have fond enough memories of Suedom that I've always wanted to archive it. PPC+20 just gives me an excuse.

hS

Andy! One of Suedom's authors!

stares in slack-jawed amazement

Thanks for stopping by!

—Ls

PS—Yes, your jokes have definitely held up.

The dating for Suedom is... not great. We have a firm date which it can't have started before: 16 October 2002, when Andy and Saphie created a joint FFn profile. And we have a firm date which chapter 13 can't have been written after: 9 May 2003, when it was posted on Miss Cam's site (check the source). The next chapter after that date was published more than a month later, so it seems reasonable to guess that the chapters were spaced out... and there's no evidence of non-Suedom material on the FFn profile, so it seems reasonable to guess that the profile was started to post the story.

But I don't really know. Avenue Q launched in March '03, and it seems unlikely that 13 chapters could have been written in two months... but the evidence is lacking. :(

hS

This is Suedom at its lightest. It gets... very dark. And the OOCness... I think partly is them kind of distorting the PPC to fit the story, but it could also very much be that a lot of things weren't settled quite yet. This is very early PPC, recall.

Regarding Suedom as a critique of the PPC... I know that's been said, but I don't know if that makes sense. Suedom starts in 2002. The PPC barely exists, and the Original Constitution, written in large part by Saphie, hasn't even been written yet (at least, I assume The Board would have a link to the Constitution at this point if it did, and hS's early snapshot of the board from a month after this doesn't, yet).

Suedom was inverting the sue-hunting Thing, and I can totally believe that there was a message, or writing it came out of or evolved into a dissatisfaction or discomfort with the way the PPC works, but the kind of idea of "we were there in their midst criticizing them and they didn't even know it" (which was the implication that post gave off when I read it) just... you can't really be a subversive infiltrator of a community which you yourself are currently instrumental in the process of constructing.