Subject: Response
Author:
Posted on: 2012-07-10 00:55:00 UTC
I definitely am not saying that I want you to feel bad, but mightn't it be possible that if people in multiple locations are raising concerns about your characters that there is something that you need to address with them?
So. I'm almost done with the first story of my spinoff (finally!) and I realized this needed to be asked before I look for betas.
One of my two agents is a Smoker from L4D. Specifically, a sapient Smoker from a 'verse that broke all the L4D rules. (Hapless bit, killed to create angst, one of the agents assigned to his badfic felt sorry for him and rescued him. And, yes, this is loosely based on something I wrote once, though I turned it from mehfic into the baddest of badfics.)
Now here's my question. The hapless bits in most of the badfics I've read, once they're rescued, revert to the rules of their own canon. So... I was wondering exactly how much the rules of the Left 4 Deadiverse would aply to him. I'm thinking they should more than not, but... in his badfic of origin, he was as sapient as a human, and I'm wondering how much of that would go away.
Well, uh. There are zero sapient zombies in L4D. As in, not a single canon example, and solid proof that there can't be, simply by the way you get zombified in that canon. In fact, I'm fairly sure it's impossible to have a Smoker. It would be the same as a random person who got turned into a zombie in Resident Evil holding onto their sapience. It can't really be done. I would recommend rethinking that agent entirely, simply because in the rule of his own canon, he's a mindless killing machine who strangles people to death and spews poison fumes.
Okay. Go look up 'Jack' in the PPC wiki. Then, come back here and tell me I can't have a L4D Special agent.
I admit, it's not orthodox, but I have my Reasons. We'll just need to keep him AWAY from the Reality Room and we're good.
Still think a Smoker is a bad plan, especially because it's badfic that keeps him sapient. Any canon-restoring event or object is gonna turn him right back.
Also, groaning and issuing orders? Not a good tone.
I think as long as he didn't get on the recieving end of a Canon Bomb or into the Reality Room, he ought to be okay. And to be honest he tends to stay OUT of his own canon for that very reason. (He doesn't want to go back to being a regular Smoker when canon fixes itself after the death of a Sue. Can you blame him?)
Sorry, friend. I shouldn't have been as harsh with you. I've just had a few people telling me with other characters of mine that 'your idea is bad and you should feel bad'. (Not here in the PPC, mind.) And so I just wanted to deflect the criticism before it got bad.
I definitely am not saying that I want you to feel bad, but mightn't it be possible that if people in multiple locations are raising concerns about your characters that there is something that you need to address with them?
They were hating the slash. I like slash, as long as it is good slash. They did not like slash, period, and were hating on it. Once I got that they were hating the slash, and not the characters being slashed, then I felt a *lot* better about things. But, ya know, I'm still just a wee bit sensitive about this, because... well, yeah.
This includes some quotes from other posts in this thread.
AB: So. I'm almost done with the first story of my spinoff (finally!) and I realized this needed to be asked before I look for betas.
Now here's my question. The hapless bits in most of the badfics I've read, once they're rescued, revert to the rules of their own canon. So... I was wondering exactly how much the rules of the Left 4 Deadiverse would aply to him. I'm thinking they should more than not, but... in his badfic of origin, he was as sapient as a human, and I'm wondering how much of that would go away.
[If you’ve read my PPC writings, then you’ll know that I do not categorically disapprove of non-human characters, even ones who should be villains. I had some questions that I posted when I started considering using Kelok as a character. WHEN I STARTED CONSIDERING. Not when I’d almost completed a mission with him in it. By then he was my character, and my responsibility. So, really, this triggered my first concern. This is a fairly large question for Skelter, and it’s not been asked and answered yet.]
AB: Jack's bad enough and he's not even close to canon.
[This tells me that you are aware that it is not easy to write a different kind of character, which is good. Although, I truly have a soft spot for Jack. He’s just completely adorable.]
AB: The problem with Skelter is that he's from an angstfluffle of a fic, in which the Specials were slowly changing back into normal human beings. (Or, ya know, dying if they were too mutated to revert, re: the Tank.) Unfortunately, their human psyche came back before they reverted all the way, so they still had all the instincts, powers, and urges of an Infected... there was just a very human intelligence trapped inside this monster's body, having to cope with them. (In retrospect, we'd been writing entirely too much Vampire: the Masquerade at the time, and I think some of that might have seeped in.)
So now, he's a human intelligence, stuck in a Smoker's body, thinking of the PPC as his chance to be a superhero, and still with an unholy hunger for human flesh. This is not going to end well, obviously. (Meaning: it will be hilarious.)
[This is the part that I have serious concerns over, and where this character differs markedly from Jack. Jack is an intelligent Hunter that does not have the urge to snack on those around him (tackle and glomp--yes, snack on--no). Not the original personality stuffed into a monstrous body and bombarded with monstrous urges and desires. Anyone dealing with that situation would very quickly--and horrifically--lose their minds. Nothing hilarious about it. As this concept is presented here would represent, to me, one of the worst tortures that could be inflicted on a character. I would raise concerns of torture if someone did this to a Sue, and this is an agent character.]
AB: I think as long as he didn't get on the recieving end of a Canon Bomb or into the Reality Room, he ought to be okay. And to be honest he tends to stay OUT of his own canon for that very reason. (He doesn't want to go back to being a regular Smoker when canon fixes itself after the death of a Sue. Can you blame him?)
[Having a restriction on a character is not a bad thing. It can make them interesting as they try to work around their issues, and you can restrict the canons that a character goes to. As evidence of this: The All-Purpose Department.]
AB: Sorry, friend. I shouldn't have been as harsh with you. I've just had a few people telling me with other characters of mine that 'your idea is bad and you should feel bad'. (Not here in the PPC, mind.) And so I just wanted to deflect the criticism before it got bad.
ME: I definitely am not saying that I want you to feel bad, but mightn't it be possible that if people in multiple locations are raising concerns about your characters that there is something that you need to address with them?
AB: They were hating the slash. I like slash, as long as it is good slash. They did not like slash, period, and were hating on it. Once I got that they were hating the slash, and not the characters being slashed, then I felt a *lot* better about things. But, ya know, I'm still just a wee bit sensitive about this, because... well, yeah.
[This response really floored me. The subject seems to have been radically shifted, but for what reason I was not immediately sure. My first suspicion was that it had to do with dislike of the suggestion that you examine your characters. However, I have given your response quite a lot of thought before jumping into a reply of my own.
Firstly, I like slash. I read slash, and I have possibly written more missions dealing with slash than any other member that has posted to the Board within the last year (of course not even close to Trojie and Pads, but speaking of currently active members). You don’t mention if these characters were canons that were being slashed or your own original characters. Writing good slash with strong male canon characters that have little canonical evidence to support slash, while maintaining that they are strong male canon characters, is a very tricky thing. Looking beyond any hurtful things that were said at this unspecified other site, was it over the slash’s existence, or how the characters were written to enable the story to be slash?
Are these concerns that others have expressed over Skelter, and that I have put into detail in this post, being said because we are being mean, or because speaking as more experienced writers we have concerns for this character that should be addressed before you continue with him?
I understand that it is not easy to hear and accept criticism, even criticism that is phrased politely and meant only as constructive. Please consider very carefully before replying to this, and please try not to deflect this question.]
I'm sorry, but I really don't see how you are going to make your third point work.
Medically repressing an incredibly traumatic experience is not humour. To use my own spin-off as an example, there is a reason that most of the drama comes from Drew dealing with his slow but inevitable reanimation.
Anything that affects your mind in such a way is not humourous. Trauma is not a funny thing. Heck, in the PPC, there is a whole subset of charges relating to understating traumatic experiences.
In short, I'm not exactly comfortable with somebody trying to play this sort of thing off as funny.
I realized you're right. That particular character point is uncomfortably unfunny and it doesn't have much to do with his character concept, which is funny. [Aforementioned concept being: Mild-mannered kid is given the 'powers' of a zombie, shoehorned into the PPC, and now thinks he's a superhero.] And the only reason to put it in was so as not to completely rip off of Jack's backstory.
Oh, well. I think I will make him a 'zombie made sentient by typoes'. Unoriginal, but funnier.
Well, if he's going to be an agent that fixes canon, and can't be around when canon fixes...how is he going to be able to fix it? It's like trying to blow up a wall with a bomb glued to your face. You're gonna get hit either way.
First, where are you guys getting the idea that an agent being present for a canon-restoring PPCing, in their original universe or another one, will do anything to them? I can think of several reasons I've never heard of this before: the fact that the agent's home universe tends to become the PPC once they leave their story of origin; SEP fields; a canon isolation feature of the uniform that specifically prevents agents from getting sucked back into their canon (not oft mentioned, but described in the Glossary of Useful Technology under "Uniform"); and the fact that preventing agents from working in their continuum of origin would stymie a lot of potential humor and character development; these come to mind. I'm seriously puzzled by this.
Second, Plat, you said something to the effect that you think this character is a bad idea because he has traits leftover from badfic. I could name many, MANY other agents to which this applies, the top of the list being Dafydd Illian, so this also confuses the heck out of me. Overcoming those things, taking a poorly executed concept out of badfic and reworking it, is part of what makes badfic recruits interesting to read about, IMO, so since when is this automatically a terrible idea?
Also, for the record, you might have at least read this thread entirely before commenting on it—if you had, you would've known about Jack. Telling someone what they should and shouldn't be doing without informing yourself about the context is just as poor form as issuing demands, so please cool it.
Let's all try to be rational and respectful, okay?
~Neshomeh
EVERYONE else seemed to be thinking this, and so I assumed there was something I was missing. >.> I tend to assume this, as I'm still wearing the noobhat.
Thanks for clearing that up. :)
No rhetorical questions here.
Also, which thing(s) are you talking about?
~Neshomeh
Clarification: I meant about reverting if he went into his canon. EVERYONE ELSE was assuming he'd revert when canon got fixed, so I did too. My bad, sorry 'bout that.
Really, now. Are you talking about everyone in this thread, everyone you've talked to about it here or elsewhere, everyone in the world...? Specifics, please.
~Neshomeh
I assumed they knew something I didn't.
A few quotes from people's responses in this thread:
Phobos - "Honestly, it is your character, so you should make the final decision on how much this affects them. ... That said, I can't see a canon-accurate Smoker being recruited, so I would assume they didn't fully revert." Emphasis added.
Myself - "I don't think there are actually rules about this. In my experience, what happens to recruits once they're pulled from their badfic is highly dependent on circumstances and author preference."
PitViper - "Anyhoo, the best answer to your question that I can think of is: however many rules that will make your spinoff as fun to write and funny as possible. ... Go nuts and have fun. That's they only rule we have on this kind of thing."
I think you and Plat are the only ones in this thread who have said anything about OCs automatically reverting to a canon state, whether pre-, during, or post-recruitment.
You assumed, all right, but I have to wonder if you didn't really read the thread you're basing your assumptions on. The only other possibility is that you misapprehended what you were reading. Either way, choosing not to read or actually not understanding written words, that is a pretty serious problem in this neck of the woods, and it appears to be an ongoing one. What are you going to do about it?—and again, this is not a rhetorical question. I'm serious, because I want you to stop running into trouble so you can have fun. What steps are you going to take? What's the plan?
~Neshomeh
Is that this only applies if he's in his home canon. If he's in the Potterverse canon and it fixes, he's fine. If he's in the Firefly/Serenity canon and it fixes, it's fine. If he's in the bloody 28 Days Later or Dead Island or what have you canon, he's fine.
...If he's in the L4D canon, it ends badly, which is why he's not allowed in his home canon.
PitViperofDoom, is this right?
Cool! I'll be sure to look out for when you post it. Good luck!
... It also reminds me that i should probably get to work on editing stuff and writing my own >.>
Don't worry too much about it. :)
Ooh, another Special Infected agent! Jack the Hunter will find this development interesting. Think they'll hate each other?
Anyhoo, the best answer to your question that I can think of is: however many rules that will make your spinoff as fun to write and funny as possible. What canon rules can you use to cause jokes and gags and shenanigans? We're all about humor here. Hence why my Hunter agent is totally blind, completely incapable of opening a door, tends to attack the console when it goes off, and greets people by tackling them to the ground and commenting on what they smell like.
Go nuts and have fun. That's they only rule we have on this kind of thing.
Skelter is TERRIFIED of Hunters (they were the Designated Bad Guys in his fic) and will go to comical lengths to get away. Unfortunately, he's slow and lurches, so Jack will be able to get him. XD
Oh, and if you're interested, I need a teamup to write Dark Yagami's mission. >u>
Hehehe... will do, matey, will do. :)
Oh, that's too bad, Jack is very... enthusiastically friendly. Physically so. And he considers social graces, personal space, and boundaries to be optional. (Considering it's the PPC he may be partly right, but...)
*u* I might be...
Heh. That I gathered from your spinoff. (Poor dear Caleb...) Skelter will just play possum till Jacky skeddaddles. And Lola and Caleb will trade looks like 'I know that feel, bro'.
Speaking of which. DarkYagami needs at LEAST two teams of agents, prolly more like seven or eight but understaffing being what it is... yeah. It's a MONSTER of a fic.
Charming, occasionally, but... it has its own drinking game.
I'd love any help I could get. None of my other potential co-writers could keep up their interest in the project. ^^; Would you be willing...?
Also- I *KNOW* you know the L4D canon, do you know 1984 at all?
Yes, DarkYagami's fics are quite the undertaking... I did his Harry Potter one. That was fun, though. Got a lot of good jokes out of it. Are you planning to do more than one fic or just Light and Dark?
I need a cowriter for this, just due to the sheer MAGNITUDE and the HORROR of it.
If you wanted to team up...
My two agents are Lola, the Homestuckian kid (basically: human from a parallel version of World 1 that sort of functions like a video game, with a massive sense of irony) and, well, poor benighted Skelter. Your Agents (I'm assuming) would be Caleb and Jack, unless you had another set to use.
They get teamed together because 'the human whose name is written in this note shall die' is bloody useless against zombies, let alone a Twipire. Of course, this means Caleb and Lola must contend with spazzy!Jack and frightened!rabbit!Skel.
It'd be an epic sporking, along the lines of 'Ring Child' or the future one of 'My Immortal'. You game?
Normal kid or actual Sburb player? Just curious. (My best friend finally dragged me kicking and screaming into that fandom almost two month ago, and I just finished catching up a couple weeks ago. My deviantArt gallery is starting to fill with fanart. It is glorious.)
I am so game, you have no idea how game I am. If you have a gmail, we can googledoc this. You can reach me at pitviperofdoom@gmail.com
(Apologies to anyone who isn't a fanStuck and had to read that. >.>)
Well, I was thinking sBurb player, but I'm *not* caught up yet, so that might be a bad idea. I'm somewhere in the midst of Act 5. Either way, the whole 'sylladex' thing is TRULY in the spirit of the PPC. Balky, kludgy equipment that tends to blow up in your face if you use it improperly...
Sure. My gmail is sciencefair200@gmail.com
were doin this man. where makin this happen.
YoUr gAmZeE Is oFf
SpAcEs cOuNt, As dOeS PuNcTuAtIoN
AlSo, GaMzEe uSeS NoRmAl gRaMmAr, BuT No eNd pUnCtUaTiOn
UnLeSs YoU'rE gOiNg FoR pRe-SgRuB, iN wHiCh CaSe It ShOuLd LoOk A lItTlE lIkE tHiS.
obviously sober gamzee is the easiest to do. WOULDN'T YOU SAY?
(Obviously I left out all the swearing that technically counts as part of the quirk.
I, uh. I maybe obsessively studied the quirks of all the kids and trolls. Also, I kind of roleplay as Gamzee on Pesterchum and Trollplay/Trollmegel a lot. He's kind of my favorite. How can he not be? When he's stoned, he's absolutely huggable, and when he's sober he's got this aura of command and pupeteering that makes him seem like an absolute badass.)
Hehehe. Oops. Gamzee is not the troll I usually RP.
1 T3ND TO RUN T3R3Z1 with the occasional lapse of Rose Lalonde or KARKAT, SPAMMIT. So I don't usually know how to run the others.
Mind, all the trolls are lovely. All of them.
As far as quirks, though. My favorite has to be Eridan. Couldn't stand him as a character for the longest, until someone pointed out the comparison to Doctor Horrible, but I've always enjoyed puns, so I love reading him, Fef, and Equius. Eridan beats out the others, though, because he types rather like I talk.
As far as RP goes, Rose and Karkat are always fun to play with, and I have a friend who does the Condense and "LOVE MSATER ROXAAAY!", who is always amazingly fun to watch.
All the trolls are my favorites. XD
Awesome. Just a heads up, though, I'm going to be gone for the next week starting this Saturday, so if we could get started on this after that, that'd be great.
I'm gonna be Away From Keyboard all this weekend (yes, all of it), and then I'm finishing my first spinoff. And then... D'ark Yagami's going DOWN, yo.
Now I've got a troll forming in my head with traits of both Vriska and Gamzee, especially the psychopathic murdery ones, and she/he/it won't go away. Thank you ever so, I really needed another plot bunny.
(The lusus seems to be like Goatdad with eight eyes and spider mandibles, and his irregular visits are to collect the 'snacks' his wriggler's collected. Woe betide if there aren't enough...)
Good to meet you, friend. But yikes, that sounds like a SCARY troll. o.e
...Cunning, devious, psychopathic, murder-y, and insane? Sounds like the perfect PPC agent.
Go reread TOS and tell me where 'psychopathic' fits in. Or where 'murder-y' is acceptable. Or how 'insane' -actually insane- fits into the quirky space.
That is a Do Not Want, Does Not Belong. We chased Doctor Hello out because he was boasting and trying to be psychopathic, murder-y, and insane and thought that was what the PPC wanted and has.
It is not.
I did not mean that seriously, nor should you make a sober Gamzee your agent. It was seriously just a joke.
I don't think there are actually rules about this. In my experience, what happens to recruits once they're pulled from their badfic is highly dependent on circumstances and author preference. I tend to take them exactly as they come, and then make them better. For me, that's the only reason to recruit a character: to take the concept and make something decent out of it. Otherwise, just let 'em assimilate into the canon or, if that's not possible, kill 'em.
For instance, Ilraen at the time of his recruitment was a special case in that bit characters who do pretty much nothing were generally just put out of their misery or left to assimilate, because there's supposed to be something there to work with already for them to be agent material. Pretty much all he had going for him was being an Andalite, and Twiggy and I didn't want to pass up the opportunity for an Andalite agent. But anyway, the point is that he was a blank slate in the fic, and he stayed a blank slate upon arriving in HQ. It took a lot of work on FicPsych's part to get him field-ready (this is why recruiting blank slates is not generally encouraged), and he's still not really a true Andalite, having missed out on being brought up as one. That's the concept I wanted to work with for him.
For Agent Derik, on the other hand, I wanted a messed-up Pernese guy fully aware of what his Sue did to him, not a Stu-faced cardboard cut-out, so I chucked him in the Reality Room to fill in a plausible backstory and provide some actual consequences for taking Thread to the face.
I don't recommend throwing your zombie in the Reality Room, for the record.
Agent Gall is a bit different: she got cut free of the badfic's narrative early on, by the badfic's own hand, so when I brought her back it was on the understanding that she turned into a canonical Viking once she was freed. True to my form, though, she still has the rudimentary personality traits and description she started with, just aged up from her last appearance in the story.
I guess the only "rule" I'd suggest is that whatever you do, you should devote some narrative time to showing how the character gets from his state in the badfic to his state as an agent. If it isn't going to be part of the story, if it isn't going to affect him as a person, it might as well not happen at all, IMO.
~Neshomeh
Honestly, it is your character, so you should make the final decision on how much this affects them. If you think that having them be a completely canon Smoker would be best, then go with that. If not, go with something else.
That said, I can't see a canon-accurate Smoker being recruited, so I would assume they didn't fully revert. Beyond that, go with your gut and see what the betas say.
-Phobos
Jack's bad enough and he's not even close to canon.Lucky for everyone, if he did somehow revert, the PPC's fairly, ya know... flat. No ledges to jump on and grab people... thank heavens.
The problem with Skelter is that he's from an angstfluffle of a fic, in which the Specials were slowly changing back into normal human beings. (Or, ya know, dying if they were too mutated to revert, re: the Tank.) Unfortunately, their human psyche came back before they reverted all the way, so they still had all the instincts, powers, and urges of an Infected... there was just a very human intelligence trapped inside this monster's body, having to cope with them. (In retrospect, we'd been writing entirely too much Vampire: the Masquerade at the time, and I think some of that might have seeped in.)
In the fic I created for him, Skel was the fairly 2-D brother of one of the main characters, who was supposed to have ADHD and be the 'comic relief'. In other words: a Smoker running around like Jack on acid, unable to stop. He tried to resist the badness of the fic, though- as with all characters- his attempts ended in failure.
The party got mobbed by a bunch of non!canon!psychotic!Hunters and he died, for no good reason. One of the agents took pity on him- he *did* try to resist, and she might have had an inexplicable soft spot for some of the Infected.
So now, he's a human intelligence, stuck in a Smoker's body, thinking of the PPC as his chance to be a superhero, and still with an unholy hunger for human flesh. This is not going to end well, obviously. (Meaning: it will be hilarious.)