Subject: I read too, I'll agree with Sergio.
Author:
Posted on: 2024-02-25 00:41:10 UTC
I think it's really cool you went to the lengths of drawing for each section. I do find it a little ironic that you choose Disney canons of all things for this, though.
-Ls
Just under a year ago I posted The Heir of Feanor, a retroactive DOGA mission which finally showed Dafydd Illian and Constance Sims officially getting together. In the Author's Note, I promised more on the development of their relationship. This is that more.
Tales from DOGA: The Black Reports spans something like 6-9 months after "The Heir of Feanor". It is an in-depth exploration of the question of what happens when you go on a string of missions with someone who is also your brand new romantic interest. Spoilers: it makes you kind of distractable.
The canons are various Disney animated shows, all appropriate to the setting (early '00s). There are also illustrations. Some of them show a fair amount of skin.
Overall I'm not sure where "The Black Reports" fall on the fluff-smut axis. There's a lot of quite intense flirting, and much kissing, but I don't think anything actually dirty happens on-screen? If you reach the first picture and are fine with it and the scene around it, you'll probably be fine with the whole thing. I don't recommend pulling it up on a work/school computer though, because... pictures. :)
I've been sitting on this story for over a year, because including the pictures made me nervous. I hope you enjoy it.
hS
As I’ve said on the Jenni/Jacques series, I don’t really have any emotional response to . . . gonna say “flirty stuff,” so I sorry I don’t have much to say regarding checks notes the primary focus of this story. But! I did appreciate the disguise generator war as a very amusing gag. (Not one I would want to be part of myself, as my . . . torso is not appropriate for public viewing, but.) If nothing else, it shows that Dafydd and Constance are comfortable enough with each other to, well, cause some wardrobe sabotage. And the nice thing about the wide variety of settings Disney likes to adapt is that gave you quite a variety of costumes/species to play around with. (There’s Fantasia fic? Seriously?) I was especially amused by Constance Uno-reversing Dafydd’s merfolk disguise, as well as the fake-out in the final story after referencing Ajy and Acacia’s invisible mission. I also appreciate Thanduril becoming the adult in the room, and preventing the agents from escalating the disguise war too far. Tough love from the little fire demon! And probably a tough fix for DoSAT afterwards!
Poor Steve and Selene; they really got third-wheeled into the background by this romance, didn’t they? Hopefully they had plenty of adventures of their own going on, and didn’t get stuck in their RCs alone too much. Unless, of course, that’s what they preferred!
Heh. Of course Dafydd would appreciate Fantasia for its musical focus! And I love that each chapter is named for a musical track from the series’s original installment!
Other minor likes on my part:
-Dafydd drinking literal dew from a mountain (but which mountain!?)
-Hades having enough willpower to break out of the fic for the extremely important purpose of criticizing the appearance of a peer
-foreshadowing Disney’s eventual adaptation of “The Snow Queen” into Frozen
New words you taught me:
-lilo: it’s the “windex” of inflatable mattresses!
-kinchin, sort of: Wiktionary’s quote selection indicates that I’ve already encountered this in Oliver Twist, but I didn’t pick it up enough from there to recognize it here.
And a few typos:
The agents strolled through the undefined fix-space until they found a more solid area.
I’m betting that’s an autocorrect from “fic-space”?
"It's a bit worse than slightly legs!"
Is . . . is that an autocorrect of “sightly”? Legs are a bit out of my wheelhouse . . .
"We're supposed to have a mission, Constance said dazedly.
The closing quotation mark was rendered invisible by the broken disguise generator . . .
—doctorlit doesn’t have any legs of his own, and no one here can contradict that (Tomash, Neshomeh, Phobos, Iximaz, GMA, and Thoth, don’t say anything!)
Slightly more seriously, I have read the thing and I liked the thing - the whole back-and-forth disguise warfare worked quite well, I think.
I'm glad you liked it - I remember I went back and toned down the disguise war a bit, because the first draft got quite mean-spirited at times. If you liked it, that means I got the balance right.
hS
And, to be fair, I think it's quite "safe" on the smut scale - there's flirting, there's kissing, but I dare say most of it doesn't even fully qualify for making out, let alone actual smut. Still gets you to wonder "wait, did they then go on to do it like that?", but it fits with general PPC weirdness just fine.
And, well, let's get this straight: we have a lot of bad smut appear as the mission's focus in many PPC missions, it would be silly to say that some good not-so-smut shouldn't have a place in the PPC! If we have to nitpick, that's roughly on the same level I kept in some bits of The World Without Authors, which is definitely tame - you hinted at the fact that kind of action was going to happen, without showing it, and that much was more than enough to get the reader to understand they're getting more intimate and less awkward with each other.
That aside, I feel you've neatly filled in a missing link in the chain - with these snippets you really get the progression from "definitely into each other, but still awkward about it" to "definitely a coiuple", really closing in towards the dynamics we're used to see them in as a married couple! It helps that it is an insanely fun piece, too (Dafydd as a merman because Constance decided to turn the tables on him gave me a good laugh!). The only thing that left me puzzled is that you actually went all the way to find seven actual badfics when making them up on the spot would've sufficed! I assume none of them would've worked as an actual mission, though, which imakes a perfectly fine usage case then.
This piece also reminded me of a couple things. The first is that I still have to get working on that "Nikki accidentally ends up in the underwater section of HQ" interlude, and the other is that I did originally plan on not making her and Sergio retire after Blank Sprite and so I would've likely ended up doing some similar pieces myself! Probably more focused on the two of them adjusting to living as a couple more than about the flirting, but it would've surely included them trying to find spare time during a mission to... do things.
Which inspired me to do some 3D shenanigans that are shamelessly plagiarized from liberally inspired by Dafydd and Constance's outfits! Trying to keep them as worksafe as I can, on average there will be less skin showing than Huinesoron's. Also, there's just three of them as not all of those situations fit with something Sergio and Nikki's canons of specialization offer. In fact, these three are a bit of a stretch already...
1) A Whole New Timeline
"So, uhm... What's the idea here?" "Come on, don't tell me you're not enojying seeing me in a dancer outfit! It will be a good enough disguise for the SEP field to work, and maybe we can try to spare some time for some dancing later." "So that was you plan... Deal."
As TWWA has shown, Nikki isn't above teasing Sergio from time to time, so in this occasion she chose a belly dancer disguise just for his eyes. Now, it would be quite improbable for them to get an Aladdin mission, but at the same time pretty much any AU fic with a 1001 Nights theme could result in this. So, yeah, I chalk it up as "likely happened" in the "Sergio and Nikki remained at the PPC" timeline.
3) Follow That Boat
"A cutlass! My ARX-160 turned into a frigging cutlass! I hope Corolla fixes our DORKS soon, because rules or not I want to use my guns as such." "Maybe you can give it to me? I have more experience in fencing after all." "Yeah, that sounds like a plan. But why did you decide to go as a mermaid?" "I wanted to have a swim, that's why! Together with you, of course."
Making a pirate-ish outfit for Sergio was trivially easy, and I already had a mermaid getup for Nikki, since she canonically can transform into one. Though this model is the one I recently made for TWWA, after Nikki recovered her powers - her tail is no longer pale blue but green as the mermaid transformation "melded" into Lyrical Nanoha powers becoming her Rare Skill. As such, the tail's scales now take their pigmentation after her eyes', and she now sports gills while transformed (thoug this detail isn't set in stone yet). They're not in Peter Pan, of course, but likely in some kind of crossover between one of their usual anime canon and One Piece. Or perhaps a Cardcaptor Sakura pirate AU. Name any kind of AU, someone's bound to have made a CCS fic with that theme. As whether this leads to any "underater action" by the two of them... well, they did a lot of underwater diving during their honeymoon, Keiko was conceived during said honeymoon, Keiko's magic is water-themed. Corolla thinks the last one is no coincidence. Sergio and Nikki never managed to refute the allegation.
6) Hawaii Undercover
"So... We're PPC agents undercover as tourists, tailing a Suvian who fooled NCIS into thinking she's a part of their team, while said team is also undercover as beach bar staff." "Yeah, it's silly. Not really the typical Hawaii vacation, huh?" "We're sticking aroung for a proper one after this mission." "Deal."
While I never wrote any mission in those, Sergio is also "cleared" for several police drama series, NCIS being one of those. And NCIS has an Hawaii spinoff, while there is also Hawaii 5-0 set there. Goes without saying that if there's a place that a young couple from Earth will gladly get liberal with how long the mission cleanup took, that's Hawaii.
Though I feel like you may have averaged more skin than my equivalent three pictures... not sure, though.
I can neither confirm nor deny the occurrence of "action" in the later parts of these missions (if you can even call them "missions" when not one of them was actually completed). Well, no, I can deny something - Envinyata: Wedded Bliss, strongly implies that their "elvish wedding" took place in May 2006, immediately after Dafydd proposed. But as Dafydd says somewhere in the Black Reports, a 21st century relationship is a long way from Elvish norms, so who knows what he would have thought it acceptable to get up to?
(Heck, technically an Elvish wedding consists of "action" and an exchange of vows. If Constance views Dafydd's proposal as that exchange, that would explain her comments in "Wedded Bliss" while saying nothing at all about their prior relationship.)
You asked why I used real badfics. Partly because I don't really like using fake ones - it feels like cheating, plus I always wind up making them into obvious parodies (Dafydd came from one with a character called, like, "Marianna Suzeanna"). And partly because it was fun to dig through the FFn archives and find fics which were written early enough to use. I did the same thing for (some of) Apples and Oranges, which I really ought to get back to someday; and I have a lingering desire to write a 1992 (Lofty Skies-era) spinoff using stories from the various zine archives.
hS
Let's see...
First one, my team wins - Dafydd narrowly wins against Sergio due to his sleeveless thing being somewhat more closed, but Nikki is showing far less that Constance - she has (half) a skirt! A much more covering top! Other random bits! And Constance has basically a black strapless bikini (no, I'm not considering the utterly transparent trousers as covering anything)
Second one... yeah, yours narrowly wins here. Nikki and Dafydd are pretty much exactly equal - seashells and merfolk tail. But Constance has sleeves and there's no gap between shirt and trousers, so she wins against Sergio by a small margin I guess.
Third one is interesting. Sergio and Nikki are more dressed than Dafydd, who is shirtless, but less than Constance who is in a full uniform.
So I dare say that on average the skin ratio in these three is equal. But! I haven't shown mine as almost naked centaurs, or stark naked humans hiding behind bushes! So if we take overalll piece against piece mine average less skin shown because those two really ruin your average.
... This is a silly discussion, isn't it?
I think it's really cool you went to the lengths of drawing for each section. I do find it a little ironic that you choose Disney canons of all things for this, though.
-Ls
There were a few reasons behind that decision:
I've decided - and I think canonised somewhere in the Black Reports - that Dafydd learnt modern English through children's entertainment. He started with Dr Seuss, and then picked up Disney. So he actually knows the canon, which he doesn't for most other things.
The Black Reports grew out of a collection of similar, shorter tickets in a broader range of canons. I think it was an early version of the Aladdin one, then Labyrinth, LotR, and... might have been a version of the Peter Pan one? When I decided to make a themed collection, I stuck with what I'd already started.
I drew the Aladdin picture before I decided to write the Black Reports, so I wanted to keep it in.
They're canons I either knew or could easily look up. Having faced difficulty with things like The Parent Trap or Skulduggery Pleasant in the past, I appreciated the ease.
It was funny. ^_^
hS