Huh, alright then.

Question about mission qualification! by OrangeFox on 2023-01-30 01:46:47 UTC Badfic report Reply

So I’ve had this book lying around for a while now, and I’ve been wondering if it counts as missionable badfic. Here's a link to its Goodreads page.

It seems nearly indistinguishable from standard badfic - there’s numerous spelling errors (‘sevana’ and ‘emreld,’ for examples), there are unlabeled time skips and scene skips in multiple places, and the book gets so many canon details wrong it’s unclear if it was even researched. The only thing that makes me wonder if it’s not actually missionable is the fact that it’s published.

It clearly advertises itself as fanfic (‘an unofficial Minecraft story’) but I remember hearing that the PPC avoids sporking published works. However, from what I could gather this rule applied to books that were fanfics in spirit, like the Inheritance Cycle and that Shades book. I feel like this work is rather more blatant about the fact that it’s, well, fanfiction put to paper. Regardless, I wanted to check in with you guys and make sure that was the right interpretation, because I really don’t know. Cheers!

-OrangeFox

Hmm. I lean "no." by Neshomeh on 2023-02-01 19:06:23 UTC Reply

I'll start off by saying that attempting to mission anything novel-length is generally not worth it. Unless the problems are immediately obvious and you can give the mission a satisfying ending after a few chapters, it requires really solid planning to cover what you need to without dragging the mission on and on, and it starts feeling more like work than fun. Trust me, I've got a couple of long ones stuck on my backburner due to burnout (whether my own or a cowriter's).

As to whether or not missioning it is allowed? The link didn't work for me, so I Googled the title, and I found out it's distributed by Actual Publisher Simon & Schuster, and it's not the only one of its kind. I think that counts as published enough to make it off-limits for missioning. Mojang is officially at least tolerating the existence of books like this, so they're a step above regular fanfic on the official-ness ladder.

That's not to say you couldn't MST it, though.

~Neshomeh

Huh, alright then. by OrangeFox on 2023-02-01 21:54:10 UTC Reply

I'll prolly just play it safe and stick to an MST or something. Thanks for the feedback!
Yeah, I’ll just second this. And add that I would definitely read an MST. (nm) by Linstar on 2023-02-01 20:11:13 UTC Reply

I'd totally read an MST, too! And while I'm at it, I'm thirding what Neshomeh and Linstar said. by Thunder on 2023-02-02 00:09:05 UTC Reply

Better to err on the safe side.