Subject: Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with Buffy.
Author:
Posted on: 2023-01-10 23:55:40 UTC
It sounds interesting, though. Would you recommend it?
Subject: Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with Buffy.
Author:
Posted on: 2023-01-10 23:55:40 UTC
It sounds interesting, though. Would you recommend it?
Been a lot of story links on the Board recently, huh? Well, here's one more! =D
Technically this is a twofer, since it begins in media res in an HP mission. Bonus!
Matchmaker (Ao3)
In which a former bird goes on a mission, a pairing is made extremely prematurely, and someone gets punched in the face.
The main fandom is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which definitely had a decent chunk of Sues back in the day. Despite its popularity it has relatively few missions. But now it has one more! I hope that I've added enough explanations and such so that people not familiar with the universe can still follow along with the mission.
I am kind of curious of how many on the Board are familiar with it... I might want to write more Buffyverse missions. It has so, so many weapons
Anyway, enjoy! Thanks to Neshomeh for beta'ing.
/Ekwy
More comments on AO3, but yes, I enjoyed that.
hS
Oh, sweet, it’s pre-season seven, so I get to read! (Just finished season six last month, heh heh!)
That opening assassination is great! It’s such a very PPC-style outsmarting of the Suvian, leading her on with her own power before tricking her with a B’rer Rabbit gambit. I was initially laughing about her eucalyptus wand, but then I remembered what good exhibit decorations eucalyptus wood makes, and honestly, it feels like a good idea for wands. They would be nice and sturdy, hard to break by accident . . . although maybe shooting magic through them would make them more brittle?
I really like the early scene with Moira comforting Buddy. It makes sense, given how recently he’s become human, that he needs that sort of emotional attention, the way a child or pet would. Actually, throughout the mission, he reminds me a lot of Aximili, the alien member of the Animorphs, in the way he he’s watching everything with a slightly detached eye, not understanding everything he sees, and not even sure if he wants to engage with everything he sees, as far as Blank’s aggression goes. His desire for stories about the sky is cute (and a little sad!), and I can understand his frustration at things like the labels for days of the week, which are of course an arbitrary measurement for time that we only accept because we grow up under it. It’s a difficult transition, but I can tell he’s trying!
Was Autumn considering naming herself after Willow? Heh, it’s like, “autumn willow.” It would have been a good name, but going for something original is good, too. I love the mental image of the Mary Sues That Weren’t having big watch parties together to start researching canons, while they were all adjusting to HQ life . . . Oh, is that Blessie in the photo, with the reddened nose? I feel bad for her and Blank, losing Zit . . .
Poor Cordelia; her continuum gets its first mission in over a decade, and her screen time gets completely taken over by minis! I love that they’re all dressed as teenage valley girls, and the Heathers joke Blank made about them.
I more or less guessed at the reason for Moira and Buddy to have Buffyverse knowledge without watching it beforehand, though I was guessing the Buffy incarnations came before the Tolkienverse ones, not after. It’s interesting that removing Moira and Buddy from Middle-earth seems to have drawn at least one alternate pair of themselves away from the other story; I wonder if they have more unexpected canon knowledge from alternate selves to uncover?
Blank gets, uh, Very Yikes in here. As I’ve probably said before, I can understand the source of her prejudice from Sparklee, but at the same time, she’s been living in Headquarters for fifteen years at this point; you’d think she would have spent some time interacting with other reformed Suvians before this. Plus, I find it weird that she sees Moira’s little “rewrite critique” moments as a sign of delusion, when to me, it shows Moira is capable of “improving her writing,” in a metaphorical sense. Blank comes off as awfully unempathetic, and even “bloodthirsty,” as Buddy says in this mission. It just makes me sad, but I’m rooting for her to face some character development down the line . . .
All that being said, oh boy. I hope Moira made the right choice in bringing Jackie into HQ. I’m all for finding alternatives to assassination, but Jackie had a major aura of smooth to force Spike to act like he had a soul, plus I was reading on the suspicion that Buffy was feeling so tired and emotional because Jackie was actively draining the Slayer powers out of her. It would be nice to see Jackie reformed, but I don’t want Moira putting herself and Buddy, or anyone else, in danger. I hope everything works out all right!
You’ve got a floating “r” here:
“A tiny crack in the shell, and it was Buffy the Vampire Slaye r.”
—doctorlit will totally get around to season seven at some point, but might skip all the comic seasons because graphic novels tend to be expensive
Overall, very fun read that's also a good exploration of the PPC as an organization and does a good job of being constructive.
Not gonna lie, Nesh has been the victim of a lot of my idea bouncing when it came to Buddy's transformation over Discord. XD She was absolutely vital in that process and I am not surprised at all that some aspects of her work made it into mine. Those morphological fields are in dire need of stabilising. Can't have unstabilised morphological fields!
Buddy would love some shinies, pls. He would keep them in a pile and just... look at them. They're so good. And so shiny. I think he would maintain human form, but he would also be more inclined to pick through his shinies with his teeth and stay really really close to his pile, and definitely keep it in an order that only seems to make sense to him. Like... part crow, part dragon and also part bower bird. David Attenborough might come by his pile and disturb something on purpose, just so there will be shots of a deeply affronted Buddy putting it back in order.
Thank you for reading, glad you enjoyed!
/Ekwy
I enjoyed this story a lot; it managed to hit a wide range of emotions. The encounter with the shapeshifter was hilarious to read, while the conversations near the end made me thoughtful. I could follow along quite well despite being unfamiliar with the show. Great story overall!
Wonder what Moira will do next…
Nice to hear you enjoyed it without knowing the fandom, too. We'll see how Moira handles this situation... Will it be a smart way? Probably not! =D
/Ekwy
It sounds interesting, though. Would you recommend it?
The first season is... almost aggressively 90's, but has its own charm. It's a very beloved show with compelling characters, where stakes feel raised with every progressive season (there are seven, and there was also a spin-off called Angel which itself got five season and is good for its own reasons). The characters also grow up during the course of the show, from high-school students to young adults with some really good arcs all around. It's a very funny show, and the reason why TV Tropes exists because of how referenced it is.
It is not perfect. I could go into detail about behind the scenes stuff, of which there was a lot and more has come out fairly recently about exactly what it was like to work with Joss Whedon, but the show also shows its age in certain other aspects. All in all though, I still would recommend it. It has some of the strongest writing I've ever seen, some of the most brutal emotional arcs, and it remains what it is throughout. It never loses sight of what it's trying to say.
It was a formative show for me and I will always love it. No dragons as far as I remember, sorry. I tried to find something to compare it to on your list of fandoms below, but I'm not really familiar with a lot of them. XD (Apart from Phantom, Discworld, Animorphs, ATLA, and the SCP Foundation. We have some overlap, just few dragons!)
Welcome to the Board by the way! It's lovely to meet you. I'm Ekwy. I suppose I count as an oldbie because I first found the PPC in the mid-2000s when I was a teenager. Then I stopped visiting for a bit (okay, a long bit). I only came back in 2021 and have been active again since.
I usually give out happy thoughts to newbies, so here, have one! I hear they can help you fly.
/Ekwy
Nice to meet you, too. And I'll definitely put Buffy on my to-watch list.
Sorry about being unclear. I'll read the mission; it definitely looks interesting.
I loved this so much! You mentioned Mina (I promise, I will work on that interlude. Soon!) and RC 8, and... just... I loved it. The way they tricked the first Sue, Moira and Jackie’s interaction, just... I loved it. Maybe Jackie can interact with some of the Sues Mina’s rescued
You did have a few stray spaces, including one inside of “Slaye r” at one point.
—Ls has not seen Buffy
Glad you liked it even if you don't know the universe! I do recommend it though, still. My opinion of it is near-identical to Blank's. It has its issues, it is by no means perfect, but for the most part it holds up. (I've been watching a lot of Reactors watching it on YouTube lately and having a blast with it.)
Don't feel stressed about the interlude. =) I know what it's like to have a lot of projects going at the same time. No rush!
I went space hunting, an activity that definitely sounds a lot cooler than it is. I think I got them all?
/Ekwy