This is one of the rare occasions where I am going to draw the 'English is my second language' card. Some of the thought and concepts below have been difficult to express and translating then have been doubly so. If anything I have said comes off as insulting or flippant I probably didn't mean it that way. If anything is unclear, please ask and I will try to elaborate.

I don't remember exactly how and when I found the PPC. My profile says 2006 and through OFUM but I have quite possible been years before that and maybe through Suedom, rather than OFUM. I remember reading the stories and also reading through lists of fanfic-terms such as 'Sue', 'lemon', 'slash', etc. Oddly enough I did not read or write fanfic and had no plans to, but I took it in as good general writing advice. I learned that there was such a thing as 'wangst' and the it should be used sparingly, if at all. Then I stopped reading and went off and wrote stuff.
I rediscovered the PPC a couple of years back when looking for a certain detail to rip off. That's how I found the Wiki and the Board. I then poked my head into ff.net and stumbled over a HP/Labyrinth fic so utterly horrible that I vowed to slay it, but, having no agents, didn't do anything about it.
Fast forward to last year, where I had a few characters to spare and, looking for somewhere to put them, thought of the PPC. That's when I finally introduced myself on the Board and, after a month, applied for permission and got it. Today, after seeing how many people's requests get shot down, I'm actually a bit surprised but there we go.
I tried to take an active part in the community, until a certain episode and later a follow-up, put a dent in my enthusiasm for the community. Note, that this had very little to do with my own role and much more to do with all the resentment and old grudges that were suddenly being aired, shattering the illusion of one big happy Board who got along despite of differences. I still tried to participate but I was much more aware of the possibility of stepping on toes.

But oddly enough, what really made me draw away from the Board was earlier this year, when there was a call for more in-depth concrit. Now I understand that giving and receiving constructive criticism is important - which is why I am in two writing groups where we do just that. I have neither the time nor the inclination to write long reviews of missions as well. But since it seemed to no longer be 'allowed' to just drop in and say 'read your mission, good work, funny' and the drop put again, I stopped commenting on missions altogether.

The concrit issues made me feel guilty for not putting in the effort and old issues were still festering right under the surface and people seemed to be slamming each other with the rules all the time. Except for rule 4, which might as well not have been there. (Note that I don't claim this to be in any way True. This is simply how things looked from my skewed POW.) I had my own real life issues and the Board just seemed to put me in a bad mood, which I didn't need so I left.
In the last month or so, I have taken to lurking, but am still having a hard time mustering any great enthusiasm.
I am writing on a new mission as well, trying to think of it as something fun and insane, and not stressing out over whether I'm putting in too many direct quotes from the badfic or whether it is too dark for some people's tastes.

This should, in part, answer question 1, 2 and 3. I am going to skip question 4. I guess that I am part of the new generation. But I am older than a lot of Boarders in the old generation and I did not come here from TV-tropes and I was perfectly able and willing to read the FAQ's when I joined. (And none of this was able to save me from being carried away by the feared drama-llama.) I don't feel that new Boarders are a homogeneous group any more than old Boarders. And like I have already complained about in length, I think that the old grudges and rule 4 being ignored are much larger problems than a steady influx of newbies asking how to get permission.

Question 5. I try, don't I? I submitted for the Swan co-write, I helped sort through the Sue-pages. I want to start reading an writing missions again.
What I would like to see on the Board is greater tolerance. Tolerance for the fact that people are here for different reasons; some are here to spork badfic, some wants to use this like I use my writers' groups, some have drifted away from the fanfics and are just staying because of the social aspect. Some are only on the Board other barely leaves the chat. And so on and so forth.
I'm am not saying that it is impossible to 'do the PPC wrong', because it has happened, I've seen it happen. But it is rare. Most of the time people are simply doing it differently than someone else would do it.

Yes, another grumpy old-timer is crawling out of the woodwork! Muahahaha.

1. What brought you here? What made you connect to this community? How have your feelings changed over the years?

What brought me here? Mary Sue.

I remember my first exposure to Mary Sue in fanfiction quite vividly. His name was Tai-Shan, and he was from the Mulan fandom. Tai Shan was a great fighter, a spectacular lover, sweet, kind, witty, saucy, and anyone who criticized him turned out to be wrong or a bad person. Suffering from an angst-ridden tragic past, he nevertheless found true love with Li Shang, the title character's canon love interest. He did this by a) stealing some of Mulan’s more endearing character traits for himself and turning her into an adulterous ice queen, b) snidely insulting Mulan every chance he got, and c) being so beloved of his Suethor that she cut off Mulan’s head in her fic, just so Tai-Shan could be paired up with Shang at the end.

Now, the author (one of the older ones back then, at 22) wrote extremely well when Tai Shan was nowhere to be found. But once Tai-Shan reared his irresistibly sexy head, all of a sudden the characters began to act nothing like the characters I had come to know and love.

I was bewildered. I was conflicted. I thought there was something wrong with the way I was viewing the story. I mean, it was obvious from what the author said about Tai-Shan that he had to be the most wonderful and perfect character, much better than Mulan herself. So why did I hate him so? I might have ignored Tai-Shan’s stories altogether, except that everyone else in the small fandom had read them, too, and virtually all the feedback was positive. I couldn't shake the feeling that I wasn't getting it.

This feeling drove me completely away from fandom, and it wasn't until two years later that I decided to come back...just in time for the Sue-athon that directly followed the release of The Two Towers and the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. But before my sanity could be shattered altogether, I was rescued: an almost simultaneous effort by Megan@Midnight's PotC:PPC on fanfiction.net, and the PotCSues livejournal. There is a line that I remember from her journal and will never forget: If your plot requires you to off a canon character so that you can pair your original character with the deceased canon character's significant other, you need a new plot. Also, your character is a Mary Sue, no matter how many litmus tests you claim to have taken. Hey, I thought, that’s exactly what had happened in the Mulan fanfiction I read! Suddenly, I understood why Tai-Shan had bothered me, and I realized that the likes of him bothered other people, too. I found a name for something that had been niggling at me like an itch I couldn't scratch, because I couldn't identify it. It wasn’t overall bad writing; it wasn’t a random jumble of character traits that I didn’t like. It was a specific, deliberate attempt to wedge a character in where he didn’t belong and accomplish his personal goals, rather than helping the canon story—to which he owed his existence—accomplish its goals.

At last, I could define the bane of my fandom. The name for Tai-Shan and all his ilk was Mary Sue (or, in that case, Marty Stu, but a rose by any other name would smell as nauseatingly sweet). Mary Sue existed to have the story serve Mary Sue, to the detriment of the other characters and especially to the canon. Fans gravitate toward Mary Sue because s/he is a character that is perfect for wish-fulfillment...as long as you don't wish for canon to be the real focus of the story.

To me, it was a genuine relief for me to discover why I hated a particular fanfiction character type that kept cropping up and getting in the way of my enjoying the stories on the Pit, even the ones that were otherwise well-written. (This is also why the idea that Mary Sue comes from bad writing, rather than encourages bad writing, is false.) Identifying a Mary Sue for what it was made me a better reader and a better writer.

If PotCSues helped me identify what a Sue was, credit goes to the PPC for actually helping me to do something about it. There seems to be a metafandom retcon about Mary Sue's reputation among the pro-Sue group: that Mary Sue was initially value-neutral, then later despised for being female, and only later did some brave souls begin to "question" this portrayal of the Sue. This is a complete fabrication. The original Mary Sue was intended as a parody, and the character type itself was treated with genuine disdain until the popularization of fanfiction with the advent of the Lord of the Rings movies around 2001. Then fandom became inundated with Sues, and no one batted an eye at it. In fact, people encouraged the writing of Mary Sues and self-inserts, even more enthusiastically and with more punctuation abuse than they do today.

Like a large part of the Mulan fandom back in the day, many writers just did not seem to understand why Mary Sue creation was such a bad idea. I hope that what I have done with my missions is deconstruct the idea of the Mary Sue and help people understand why her existence is detrimental 1) to the canon, and 2) to the very nature of storytelling.

2. What stuff have you gone through, man? I wanna know. What did you bond with people about in your heyday?

Basically, I had found a group of people who got as emotionally invested in stories as I did. Anytime I saw a particular aspect of a plot in canon that I loved, or a particular Suefic drove me up the wall, I would talk about it. I also gravitated toward forming friendships with people in similar fandoms--basically the Big Three for that time (LotR, HP, PotC). And I discovered a couple of fellow history geeks, which was pretty fabulous.

3. What keeps you here now, even if you mainly just lurk? What do you get out of it, or hope to get out of it?

Oh, these days I feel like I mostly get called in when things get messy or there's a big decision to be made. This is because I'm one of the oldest PPCers still around (and yes, getting towards the late twenties at 26), and honestly, I didn't think the PPC would survive as long as it did. By the time I arrived on the scene, Jay and Acacia had just left, and I fully expected the PPC to wither away and die within the next year or two. But now? Now, it's been 10 years we've had this silly Board! I stay in hopes that I can help keep the original spirit alive and lend a hand when things get too off-kilter.

4. How do you feel about the latest generation of PPCers? Do you have trouble relating to their interests, such as fandoms, and to their place(s) in life?

My opinion more or less matches an earlier post by Neshomeh: I've noticed a disturbing trend among newer members toward levels of power and aggression, completely unmitigated by an appreciable sense of humor, that I have no doubt would make Jay and Acacia regret ever leaving the PPC for others to write about.

I will admit that I may be biased because of how hard it is to form close-knit friendships with a group that is growing increasingly larger, more diverse, and less directly connected with fanfiction. I've already made my friends in the PPC, and while making more friends is an idea that I like, the reality is that it's very difficult with such a sparse range of common interests and a shift away from complex discussions of Sue-based issues ("Let's discuss why Sueish appearances fail to be impressive.") toward superficial potshots at badfic ("Look! Badfic! Eww! Look! Another badfic! Ewww!").

I think we need to be more stringent, not in how many newbies we allow to join, but in what kind of newbies we allow to stay. To put it bluntly, I think we are too afraid to kick someone out if that person has repeatedly made him or herself unwelcome by flaming authors, posting disparagingly about a group of people, flouting the rules of Permission, etc. My theory is that this stems from the old idea that we needed everyone we could get on our side, as outnumbered as we were back then. Now, there are a ton of Boarders, and we shouldn't be afraid to whittle that number down if some of the members are shown to be repeatedly misbehaving.

As Neshomeh said: If your goals are anything but both humor and good writing, then please, go away.

5. How do you think you could get more involved, if you want to? How can we help?

I can't, at the moment - Real Life, and all that. But I'd probably enjoy more LotR-based topics, as well as issue topics that we used to debate on (without the debates getting too heated, even!). And I'll probably finish up my mission writing within the year, just because I sense that my days in fandom are winding down. But I'll be back lurking again, because as it says on my wiki profile: much like super-bacteria, I refuse to go away completely. :)

~Araeph

I know I’m a lot newer than anyone else that has posted in this so far, but there were some interesting questions asked. I may not be able to give answers to all of them, but I can make some guesses.

1. What brought you here? What made you connect to this community? How have your feelings changed over the years?

I found the PPC through TV Tropes, as many do, although I’d only been on the TV Tropes website for a couple of weeks myself before coming here, so I don’t really think of myself as a troper. I’d decided that I wanted to get back into writing, and had found a few bits about good and bad writing (this was when I first discovered the creatures known as Mary Sues), and while looking through them I found the link to the Original Series.

I read the missions, and enjoyed them, but at first didn’t realize that it was anything more than that collection. It was only when I was trying to explain the concept to some of my friends (who were interested and asked me to send them the link), that I noticed the link to the Board. From there, I found the Wiki, and with the realization that this was something I could take part in, I started educating myself on all things PPC.

So, to summarize, I found the PPC while looking for something to help with my writing. Looking at the comments left by other people, it would seem that I’ve come to the right place.

2. What stuff have you gone through, man? I wanna know. What did you bond with people about in your heyday?

I can't really think of anything coming up since I've been here that I would consider to be stuff, so... yeah, short answer for this one.

3. What keeps you here now, even if you mainly just lurk? What do you get out of it, or hope to get out of it?

Well, the main thing that’s keeping me here right now is that it’s all shiny and new for me. The things that I think are going to keep me here (even if I do eventually walk the path of the lurker) are reading the sporkings, which are some of the most entertaining stories I’ve read, and the thought that I might be able to help out other aspiring authors. I first started seriously writing fiction as a hobby (rather than as an unusually enjoyable homework assignment) around the same sort of time that the Original Series was being written, and I could have really done with being part of a community like this at that time. Knowing how difficult I found it, and only getting ‘reviews’ from friends along the lines of ‘that’s really cool’, I would like to be able to give out some of the kind of help that I wanted at the time, but didn’t know where to find.

What I’ve got out of it so far is a renewed enthusiasm for writing, after taking an unintentional hiatus that lasted a few years. I’ve also met some cool people that like a bunch of the same books, TV and films as me, and share an interest in writing.

What I hope to get out of it is an improvement in my writing ability, and a bunch of new friends that I can talk to about things like the difficulties of writing, favourite authors, great stories etc.

4. How do you feel about the latest generation of PPCers? Do you have trouble relating to their interests, such as fandoms, and to their place(s) in life?

Considering that I am a part of the newest generation of PPCers, I’d say that we’re alright (although I admit that my opinion in this case may be slightly biased). Yeah, mistakes have been made, but I think they were mostly from misplaced enthusiasm. If that enthusiasm can be properly redirected then I think it’ll be a good thing to have. As for relating to their fandoms, to me at the minute it seems like I have more in common with the older generation; Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Discworld, Good Omens, and the Wheel of Time, to name just a few. Whereas I know nothing about some of the fandoms typically associated with newbies at the moment (Hetalia being the prime example of that).

Admittedly, this may be a misconception on my part, as it’s much easier to find out about the fandoms liked by the oldbies (reading missions they’ve written, looking up what people say they’re capable of betaing for, etc.), than it is about newbies who don’t have anything like that yet. I may well now find that most of the newbies are into the supposedly ‘older generation’ fandoms I just listed.

5. How do you think you could get more involved, if you want to? How can we help?

I do want to get more involved, and a few things spring to mind about how to do that. Firstly (and most obviously), I can make a start on my own spin-off. I could also help out on the Wiki, and I probably should check out the chatroom at some point. Other than that, if there’s ever another UK Gathering, I’d certainly try to come along.

As for how you guys can help, I’m not sure about that. Pretty much everything I’ve just mentioned is down to me to take the initiative on.

I’d say just carry on as you are, I couldn’t have asked for a warmer welcome when I joined up, and considered myself to be part of the community very quickly. I feel like I fit in, and I’ve already got quite a bit out of being here. I can’t remember the last time I actually wrote fiction before joining the PPC (but it was at least a couple of years ago), and now I'm genuinely excited about writing again. Thanks for that.

It's stranger and stranger to think that technically, I'm one of the oldbies around here. 0_o When the heck did that happen?

That being said, though, I've been thinking a little about the way the PPC has changed since I was a fresh-faced little snot. Herewith, my tale and reflections . . .

I found the PPC in . . . oh . . . 2006? Thereabouts, anyway. I stumbled onto them via an extensive bit of link-hopping, from fanfiction.net to the Bagenders series to OFUM and hence, to Miss Sandman's homepage and the PPC. I must have read the entire Original Series in maybe two sittings--talk about absorbing! At the time I was about seventeen or eighteen, and had been writing fanfic for four or five years, but most of it was LOLRANDOMHUMOR and Sue crap. I'd been writing since I was thirteen, but aside from my slightly esoteric tastes (I was big into World of Tiers back then, for example--not much fandom) I didn't know what to do with myself. But I'd had success in roleplaying, so I guess I approached it from that perspective.

You'll see a lot of that immaturity in my early stuff, frankly, which is why I tend to compulsively reedit and update the older missions.

Back then, the community was a lot smaller and more close-knit. I won't say everyone knew everyone else, but there was more . . . interaction, I guess. Trolls or spammers were pretty unusual; we had a troll once ("Alexandra") who was being uber-dramatic and sockpuppeting and talking about e-mail hacks, and Al's Waiter and I had some fun deconstructing the stuff she did.

My earlier RP experiences had taught me how to put ass to chair and produce; being with the PPC, though, helped me get a sense of what it was like to be part of a real writing community, and to not be so squeamish about criticism.

I drifted along for a couple of years; aside from Agent Suicide, I suppose I've never really contributed anything humongous or life-changing to the PPC community. (And I wouldn't classify Suicide as 'life-changing.' XD) I've tried to do it a few times, including helming the Official Fanfiction University of Final Fantasy, but I learned pretty quickly that I didn't have the skill to manage something that big. If I try to get involved in something too huge, where other people are relying on me all the time, I have a bad habit of losing interest. (It's a good thing I wasn't around for the Crises.)

Around the time Subjugation went up for PPCing, in . . . '08, I want to say . . . I was in college and having a rough time of it. My first novel had been accepted for publication, and on the advice of my professors I began withdrawing from online life, so I left the PPC for a while. Neshomeh kindly agreed to take care of Suicide, Diocletian, and Ithalond, and I tried to focus on non-fiction pursuits.

Alas, the siren song of the RC was difficult to ignore. By late '10, the book had been published, and Neshomeh was living in Chicago and telling me what had happened during my absence. Before I knew it, I was eager to get back into the fray, and Suicide and Diocletian came out of retirement (or were discovered after their long stretch of being AWOL, whichever you'd prefer to call it).

Why was the PPC so hard to leave? Like I said, the sense of community. It was a small community of Grammar Nazis who dealt with a world composed of text--with all the insanity that entailed. People weren't afraid to tell you if you were doing something wrong (a tradition continued by the lovely July), but it was building-up rather than tearing down, and things weren't 100% serious. Agents, too, were bizarre and fascinating characters: nerds, geeks, oddities, lost souls, confused individuals, badly-paid but on-fire passionate about what they were doing.

Nowadays, post-Crises and all the rest, I do feel that the organization has changed. For the first time, we really have too many people to keep track of, and there's a visible Younger Generation (mostly the TVTropes incomers) who aren't sure how we do things or chafe against the old authority. Change isn't necessarily bad, but I do feel that we're in danger of losing that spark of community. Agents are getting more powerful, and while the place does feel more like a home instead of a job, there's the danger of making it a kingdom.

If that makes sense. Which I don't think it does.

I think I've actually answered most of the questions in this little TL;DR of mine, except . . .

5. How do you think you could get more involved, if you want to? How can we help?

I can't think of many ways I could get involved. I'm terrible with coding and administration, so I doubt I could be any use on the wiki, and I have no knowledge of the current interpersonal wars on the Board, so I'm not sure I can help moderate. I've been through the publishing process, though, and I've tutored in English and creative writing--anyone who has need of those things, you have my red pen. :D

I was not - and still sort of am not, to some extent - a very 'fandom' sort of person. I didn't write fanfiction, I didn't draw fan art, I wasn't really involved with any major fandom communities. The deepest I had ever delved before finding the PPC was becoming involved with a RP board centered around the tabletop game of Paranoia. Heck, I even got to be one of the IC moderators before the whole board sunk into general disuse.

That's not to say I wasn't aware of fandom and the various bits and bobs that accompanied it. Some of my online friends would occasionally nudge me into reading amusing little fics or drawings they had found on their wanderings through the internet. My response was usually something along the lines of 'That's interesting, I suppose.' Nothing from the fan community had ever really hooked me.

Then, in late 2009, I discovered MSTs.

The original Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show holds a very special place in my shriveled and blackened heart. I didn't get up on Saturday morning bright and early to watch cartoons; I got up to watch MST3K. I loved every moment, every snarky comment, every backhanded jibe. It was my Lord of the Rings, my Hetalia. It helped shape the way I view the world.

As a result of this background, I took to MSTs like a duck takes to water. I devoured them; I hunted down whichever ones I could find. Some were fantastic examples of deconstructive comedy, some were awful author-bashing nonsense, but most were just meh. They were, in some ways, an encapsulation of everything that was fanfic.

It was during my quest for MSTs and other such playful pokes at fanfic that I discovered the PPC in April 2010. I lurked around for a bit, reading this and that - the stories with Trojanhorse/Pads and JulyFlame's agents particularly stuck in my head, if I recall correctly. After a bit of hemming and hawing, I posted my introduction on the Board.

Again, it should be noted that fandoms were not my thing. What mattered to me most back then - and still does now, for that matter - was improving my writing skills. My college creative writing courses had taught me that constructive criticism, while at times damaging to the ego, was one of the best ways to improve your skills. By 2010, those writing courses had ended. I didn't really have anyone to look at my work apart from my dad. The PPC seemed like a good way to kill two birds with one stone; I could write MST-like material with a community of like-minded folks, and I could get an audience that could review my writing to a depth beyond the congratulatory clap-trap sadly found in many online writing groups. A bit selfish, I'll admit. But that's the way things go.

Connecting with the community... that's a toughie. There are times when I feel like the majority of folks here don't really know or care about me - inso much as knowing and caring is possible over the internet, of course. Part of that's my fault. I spent a great deal of my first year here still vaguely in lurker mode. I missed out on RP opportunities, writing challenges, and the like. I'm getting better about that, though, or at least I'd like to think I am.

Part of the problem seems to be that my 'fandoms,' so to speak, don't seem to be too much in vogue with large sections of the PPC population. My focus so far has been on video games and contemporary cartoons. There's occasionally a bit of Kingdom Hearts or Mass Effect talk, but not to any great extent. Nothing that would inspire bonds over. And I can't recall ever seeing someone in the PPC discuss Avatar: The Last Airbender or the Teen Titans cartoon while I was present.

I haven't really forged any close connections with anyone here, sad to say. You know, maybe enough to toss around a few jokes or whatever in the IRC, but for the most part I've remained somewhat disconnected from the sheer closeness of the PPC community. At least, that's how I perceive it.

I've been around long enough to have seen some stuff, some drama popping up here and there. The PPC2 debacle and the increasing friction between the Board and the IRC are the two that immediately come to mind. Not really sure what I can say about those incidents that hasn't already been said in some way or another.

The newbies... I can appreciate their sense of enthusiasm, but it is like trying to deal with a new puppy at times. There's a lot of repeated requests, a lot of face-palming, and occasionally one of the old guard has to clean up a mess and deliver a scolding. I can't really relate to stuff like magical girl anime shows or Hetalia (the historian in me is somewhat put off by it,) but I'm in no place to judge. The Last Airbender, remember?

Still. Despite the stuff, despite the newbies, despite the sense of outsider-ness that I still have in regards the PPC community, I have no plans to leave. Like Nesh said, I'm not done telling stories about my agents. I can't be certain that I'll ever run out of stories. Even if I did, there are still more characters rattling around inside my head. They have stories of their own that need to be told.

My writing skills continue to improve and evolve. I saw that clear enough just by going through all my missions from the time I joined until now. It's working. Take note, newbies: for all the craziness and occasional drama, the PPC can help you improve your writing. You know, provided you're willing to listen to criticism. So when the old guard says they're trying to help you, believe them.

In short, I'm like that friend in college who you invite in to sleep on your couch for one night and then can never get to leave. You're stuck with me, PPC.

P.S. - "We went through some stuff, man." I immediately pictured Nesh as the Dennis Hopper character from Apocalypse Now the first time I read her post.

Is "midbie" the right term? I've not even been on for a year but I don't exactly feel new anymore.

I can't say I have many things to write about, since I don't frequent the IRC and check the Board every once in a while but here goes...

1. It was a dark and stormy night It was a nice day outside. The sun was shining, the kids were playing outside, and I was holed up in my room derping around on TV Tropes. Granted, there was a much better way of killing time (such as mowing the lawn) but I had recently discovered the magic of bad fan fiction by following a chain of links on TV Tropes. I read the summary of My Immortal, then the actual thing itself while laughing hysterically. I read more badfic, then looked up the definition of "Mary Sue" then "Mary Sue hunter", and eventually found the PPC that way. After many months worth of lurking around the Board, reading new and old missions, reviewing newbie guides, and thinking about a potential agent pair, I eventually gathered the courage to sit down and introduce myself. So here I am!

2. I don't think I've hung around that long to have gone through the big things everybody's talking about.

3. As odd as it sounds, the PPC is my fandom. I love its characters, I love its universe, and I especially love its premise: sending underpaid and overworked snarky agents into badfic-ridden worlds to right the wrongs. I stick around to see what becomes of them- and add to the saga with my own spinoffs.

4. The latest generation of newcomers bring a lot of new fandoms to the Board. No longer it is only about Rings: it's now about Mass Effect, My Little Pony, Zelda, Hetalia, Madoka, Harry Potter, Redwall, Nanoha, and so much more. That's a really good thing: it demonstrates that the community has grown and is branching out. The main problem is that there seems to be a barrier between the oldbies and the newbies: each doesn't really know how to approach each other. From what I gather, oldbies don't share the same fandoms/interests as the newbies and thus are unsure how to strike up a conversation with them and vice-versa.

5. How to participate more, you say? If the main problem between the new recruits and the old guard is fandoms, why can't we start up a fandom discussion thread? We could go and ask questions about a 'verse we aren't familiar with, maybe ask for some recommendations, and natter on endlessly about why we love X fandom or Y author. It would be like some gigantic buffet where we could all gather around, chat and sample the wide variety of fandoms that each of us brings to the table. Maybe we might even find something new that catches our eye...

That's it for my two cents, folks. I hope it was worth your time.

I came to the PPC through a Google search, as some of you might know. Also, as some of you might know, immediately after I introduced myself I posted a badfic I wanted sporked, only to see it get deleted soon after. That was my initial contact with the PPC community at large, and... well, I stuck around after that.

It was weird, really. Once I was introduced to the PPC community at large, I started discovering all of these terrible fanfics (and taking a look back and realizing how terrible nearly all of my early output was--it's to the point where I'm dead set on making fun of a terrible crossover I once wrote). And that... well, that eventually got me to ask for Permission. It was also something I bonded over, talking the logistics of particularly bad fanfics, writing missions, doing all that jazz.

And... well, it's been a rocky road from there. Some missions turned out okay, some got shunned, and I trust you all know the rest.

And now, twenty missions and four interludes later, I think I've finally come to a realization. It's a long story how I got to that realization, but I think what it came down to is the fact that I don't look at badfic the way everyone else at the PPC does--and that this disconnect has led to a lot of my issues with some in the PPC community.

See, when most people look at badfic, I notice that it's like 'look a horrible fanfic oh no' and then the subject is dropped. For me, I don't drop it there. If I encounter a bad fanfic, it genuinely makes me angry, to the point where I will rant about a fic in real life if it's bad enough. You can ask the guys in the Arts Criticism course I took last semester about that: we were once given a writing exercise to write about something we didn't like without using any empty adjectives to describe why we didn't like it, and I ended up writing about a particularly bad fanfic that I had on the Claimed Badfic list for a short time. I ended up reading it to the class, and when I did, the teacher actually told me that I had used an ad hominem in the short write-up I had written. The crazy thing? I didn't even realize it could be taken as an ad hominem until he pointed that out. (The ad hominem, by the way, related to the use of the word 'dunce'.) So when I look at badfic... well, to quote Samara from Mass Effect 2, I tend to think along the lines of "you're a disease to be purged, nothing more".

And I think this disconnect has led me to think about missions very differently from most other people throughout my time at the PPC. I'll admit to the fact that in some of my missions I've looked at it less as an opportunity to parody it and more as an opportunity to cleanse it from my mind, and that has led to the tendency for some of my missions to be more on the not-so-funny side and a little less on the 'oh hey let's laugh at this' side. One thing that this holds true for especially was my Subject 23 mission, which got notoriety for having an original version that's 108 pages long. That one, I know that I was not aiming for it to be a parody once Part 1 of that mission was done with: honestly, I was thinking of that mission less as a parody and more as an actual story that got all mixed up in there. The point is, that I haven't always looked at the PPC as an outlet for parody, even after I got Permission.

And I think that's a pretty good indicator for how I've felt as part of the PPC, from the perspective of someone who's been in the newer generation of the PPC for a while: I've always felt like the lonely child who only had a few friends that's trying to get accepted by the community at large yet finds himself stymied at every turn because he's just not in the right place at all. I think you'll agree that I tend to clash a lot with some of the older members of the community. And the less I say about the stupid shit I've done, the better. But over my time in the PPC, I've always felt ostracized by the old guard, but lately it's become amplified thanks to some admittedly very stupid actions on my part as of late. It's to the point where now, drama within the PPC has actually taken a physical toll on me: I've lost some of my appetite, I'm not sleeping as well as I normally do, and I just feel a lot less happy now than I did when I first joined. It's gotten to the point where I've seriously been debating just dropping the PPC and leaving the community for good. (Well, that, and I've made a colossal fool of myself these past few weeks, so that feeds into it too.)

I guess the point is that this disconnect between myself and certain people in the old guard has always tainted my experience with the PPC. I've stayed this long because of the opportunity to write missions, but there have been several times (including now) where I've wondered if it's really worth dealing with the community at large just to spork bad fanfic.

This perception problem, too, is something that's plagued my reactions to some things the old guard have said. I will freely admit that some of the responses I've gotten to things I have written/said/done have been interepreted by me as being displays of animosity or just plain old ill will: it's gotten to the point where I will blatantly disregard the advice of one of the people in the old guard just because I think that the person in question is, to put it bluntly, 'out to get me'. Is it fair? No. Can I help it? Nothing I have tried has worked, so I don't know if I can.

And ultimately, I think all this boils down to a few simple things:

1) It is very easy to make me angry.

2) It's even easier for me to dislike something to the point where I start actively hating it.

3) If I'm angry at something, I cannot let it go, no matter what I try.

And when I respond with anger... my reaction has almost always been to lash back at the thing that's making me angry. And it's true with my relationship with things in the PPC, whether it's to someone who is justifiably correct about my behavior in the PPC or it's a bad fanfic that I'm sporking in my latest mission. So I think mostly, this is the main reason I can't connect with most people on the PPC.

And if I have to be honest? I'm not sure there's anything anybody else on the board or on the IRC can do about it. I've tried a lot of different things to manage my anger, but so far nothing has worked. No matter what I do, I always remain combative with some things, especially if I'm feeling like I'm being mistreated by people. And the worst thing is, I don't know how to deal with it.

This disconnect, for me, has always been at the heart of my time here, and it's only taken me until the recent stuff that's been happening in the IRC and here on the Board for me to realize that it's as massive a problem as it actually is. And unfortunately, there's nothing that I can suggest to fix it: how can you ask others to account for your own psychology? It's not fair to the old guard, it's not fair to the newer generation, and it's not fair to me.

So... I guess to sum it up, it's been a rocky road here at the PPC, and I think the main contributing factor to everything that I have experienced here is that I have one of the worst tempers here at the PPC. To put it in the shortest terms possible: I'm not a very good PPCer. And to be honest? I'm not sure I'm right for this community anymore.

... Wow, this started as a response to the questions Nesh posed, and it's ended in what I guess can be described as a rambly self-analytical session. And honestly, this is probably the most honest I've been with myself in a looooooooong time.

Man... this feels like a Serious Business topic. So I'm gonna settle down and answer it as best I can.

WARNING: On re-reading this, I think it might be rather emotional. I'm certainly being frank about my worst times. If talk of death/suicide bothers you, might be best not to read.

1. First off, I found the PPC in 2008. I was nineteen, in university and failing badly due to a hell of a lot of stress. it was also the first time I had ever had unrestricted access to the internet. I'd been able to use school and college internet, but the siteblockers were so heavy there I had trouble doing necessary research, let alone surf the web. At home... well, my mother was paranoid enough to never let me use the computer without her hovering over my shoulder in case I saw Bad Things, and once I moved out when I was seventeen my only access was the college system.

So at university, reveling in the newfound freedom, I stumbled onto OFUM while looking for LOTR stories. And then I looked around and found a link to the PPC. And, eventually, in April 2008, I peeked at the Board. A lot of things that I didn't understand were going on, mostly to do with something called a Macrovirus. I was extremely nervous; a lot of warnings were running around my head about the dangers of talking to Internet People.

But I was really hoping to find people I could talk to about things I liked, things that nobody I knew already had any interest in. So I summoned up my courage and posted a tentative little message introducing myself.

All my fears dissolved as a massive wave of friendliness washed over me. People were giving me amusing presents, inviting me to chat on MSN, helping me to shape my first Agents, and I realised that the PPC was somewhere I felt happy. Crazy IM roleplays helped on the days I was really miserable. I could chat to people about anything and everything. I made a number of very good friends who I trusted a lot.

I went to my first Gathering about three months later - I felt integrated enough with everyone by that point that I dismissed the warnings about meeting strangers out of hand. We were going to meet as a group, and PPCers wouldn't hurt me. I wasn't disappointed, and since then the PPC's been a rock for me even when there've been explosions of disagreement and unpleasantness. No matter how bad things've got, you guys're here.

2 + 3. My first experience of the PPC was the 2008 Mary-Sue Invasion, and I really threw myself into that. As people who were around then can testify, I talked Trojie into helping me mastermind the foundations of a movie/radio play based on the sheer epic that the Invasion produced. While that has sadly fallen by the wayside, I do have the original plans knocking around somewhere. I got talking to a lot of people through Trojie, actually; she was mumsy and took me around to say hello to people and made sure I didn't run away in fright, and was a great help while she was around.

Since then I've more or less dipped into and out of things that caught my interest, but I bonded with people more over how much fun we had in chats than on the Board itself. Even though we don't chat very often these days, July's been a great help to me, especially at my absolute lowest point. I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for her pretty much bullying me, in the middle of the night, to stop and rethink what I was about to do to myself. (If you see this, July, all the hugs for you. Won't ever forget that.)

Platinumyo, as a number of you might remember, was one of the people I grew close to early on; we were an Official Board Couple for quite some time, and being with him was my first experience of a romantic relationship. We're not together any more, but I still think of him as a special friend of mine. A number of people I knew back then have slipped away from the PPC - Oozaru Angel, Sara, Fynn, Jai - but others have stayed around, even if they lurk even more than I do these days. KGarrett, Rilwen and Lycaenion especially are the three I'm closest to these days, and I wouldn't have met them without the PPC.

And one thing I remember very strongly is that about a year after finding the PPC, I lost my brother in a road accident. My family pretty much splintered around that - my parents especially, and being the eldest child I was caught in the middle - and I had no RL friends to turn to. My mother cut her ties with me for several months for "siding" with my father, and I couldn't turn to him for help because he lived down the other end of the country. All I had left was the PPC, and you guys offered me shoulders to cry on and all the sympathy I could have ever hoped for.

I lurk a lot these days; not as much seems to catch my interest enough to comment on. I'm not much for writing missions any more, though I RP theoreticals regarding my Agents a lot in IM chats. But as I've said before, the PPC's a rock I know I can come back to. The community here is wide-ranging and often opinionated, but rarely in such a way that we can't all find a way to get along regardless. What do I get out of it? The nearest thing I can get to a proper home on the internet.

I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I say the PPC's pulled me through the very worst times in my life just by being here. If that's not a good reason to stick around, guys, then what the heck is? :)

4. I don't really interact much with the newest PPCers. I have to admit it's mostly because I don't feel I see anything in common with them other than the PPC itself; my fandoms seem to be a bit older, and I'm not as vocal about them as I once was. (Although I seem to've picked up something of a reputation as a Tolkienite, if July's past hints are to be believed. :P Not that I'm complaining.) I just prefer to sit back and watch the newer PPCers develop things, and offer a bit of guidance and advice and occasionally beta-reading where I figure it'll help. I guess I feel sort of mumsy to the new people now.

5. I'm pretty happy as I am, really. I get involved as I see opportunities, and that's enough.

- Cassie, apparently essay-writing

As I read these autobiographies, I have come to realize that I don't fit anyone's description of PPCers. Now, I'm not saying "I don't fit exactly into what every person has said." I am saying that I don't fit at all.

I never read fanfiction until I started work on my first mission. I still only read fanfiction when looking for a new mission. I've never read OFUM, and I still haven't finished TOS (I blame my dismal reading speed). I never wrote anything before I joined up. I wasn't really involved in any fandoms. I don't particularly like Lord of the Rings.

So how did I end up here and why did I stay? Well, the answer to the first bit is a little cliched. I'm here because of a girl. Neshomeh, to be exact. I joined because this thing online was very important to her and, since we had been dating for a while at that point, I figured I should meet some of her friends. I stayed because some of you became my friends.

I joined the Board in the second half of 2009 (I was 23), so I missed the emergencies and the moratorium on them. I know a lot about what went on in those days because Neshomeh talked about it while we were walking the track in the campus Rec Center.

Though I have not been around as long as some, I have seen some stuff. I was here for the conversation with Boosette and So Sue Me. I was here for the departure of Trojie and Pads, and the failed push for more people to write non-Sue missions. I was here for the fiasco involving #PPC2 and all the horrendous drama that entailed.

Despite all of that, it hasn't been all bad. I was here when, to paraphrase a more eloquent writer than myself, the universe pulled Makes-Things out of its ass and sent him back to work. I was there for a Gathering in Chicago. I was here for food fights, water fights, snowball fights, shipfic fests, and badfic games.

Most of that stuff happened around me, though. What have I done here? I made the Postal Department more than just a reference. I've been praised by people whose work I respect (including a published author). I somehow managed to become a Permission Giver. I called out the entire PPC when a troll accused us of author bashing (the troll was right about the author bashing, but still a troll).

It has been a strange journey for me. I've written things, which is new for me. The very first thing I really ever wrote for myself ended up in my permission request a few months later. I made friends, mostly through the IRC, who have progressed beyond "friend on the internet" to just "friend." I have helped them through their problems, and they have helped me through mine.

So, I think that answers the first three-ish questions. Let's move on, shall we?

What do I think about the newest generation? I think they are good people who just need to slow down, read, and listen. Honestly. I know that the PPC is a big exciting place, but that doesn't mean you need to run around so fast that you miss what people are trying to tell you. Chances are good they were warning you about the coffee table you just tripped over. You can still be excited without barreling ahead at full speed. Pick up speed as you go, when you know where the furniture is.

We point newbies to the Newbie FAQs on the wiki and they don't read them. I know they don't read them because, if had, they wouldn't be asking 75% of the questions they are asking (often in the IRC, for those who are wondering). Sedri, Neshomeh, and several others worked really hard to make those FAQs as accessible and easy to understand as possible. When someone complains that they are too difficult to understand, that tells me they aren't trying.

Now, I'm not saying asking questions is bad. I am saying that the FAQs were created for a reason, they are easy to find (especially when pointed at, as is often the case), and easy to understand. We don't want to have to spend all day answering the same question for every one of the legion of newbies we've gotten lately.

Listening is also very important. When someone asks you to stop a behavior, and gives you a reason why (for example: stop doing X because it is triggering for some people), then you should either stop, or give a good reason why not. ("I don't want to" or "I can do whatever I want" are not good reasons, by the way.) If you agree to stop, but still need to be told 3-4 more times, with the other person getting more and more frustrated and angry, then you either aren't listening, or are willfully ignoring them.

As for the rest of the newbie question, I relate to them about as well as I relate to fans of the Lord of the Rings. That is to say, not well, based solely on fandoms. I relate far better on a person to person level than on a fan to fan level.

I'm more involved in the PPC than is probably good for me, at this point. In my other life, I have a part-time job and help run a theatre company, so there is a lot going on. The fact that I can give the PPC so much of my time is amazing. But I do it for a reason.

There are a lot of things going on in here. A lot of personal disputes have been left to fester and spill out into the Board and IRC. I noticed, even before I joined, that people in the PPC were unwilling or unable to speak out against the things that were wrong in the community (author bashing and the lack of concrit, for instance). So, I've taken it upon myself to speak up if no one else will.

It has not done wonders for my reputation, at times. I have been accused of trying to turn the PPC into my own little sandbox. I'm okay with all of that. If people ever get fed up with me and ask me to leave (not likely, I know) then I will at least leave knowing that the PPC has less author bashing and more concrit than it did when I joined, and is a better place for it. That's why I'm here.

I've been tempted to leave a few times. When the level of respect for other members of the community has been really low. When it looks to me like people would rather throw out all the rules and just bash authors and swear like sailors. In those times, I want to turn my back on the PPC. I don't do it because I am a stubborn son of a mother, and I won't give the people who want to dismantle the spirit of the PPC the satisfaction of winning.

So...yeah. This is a lot longer than it was intended to be. Anyway, that's my deal. I'm here, doing what I do, for Neshomeh, and July, and hS, and AnnaBee, and Himochi, and Data, and Bryn, and Maslab, and VM, and anyone else who ever has or ever will find the PPC and wants to be a part of it. The form of the community may change, but the spirit will remain, if I have anything to say about it.

-Phobos

Wow. I'm kind of blown away by the level of thoughtfulness and feeling you're putting into these responses. I want to reply to all of you and give everyone the same in return, so that may take a while. ^_^;

Meanwhile, thank you—in advance, to those who have yet to post. Old or new or somewhere in between, I really appreciate the time you're taking to engage openly and honestly with this topic. Reading your stories, it's clear that the PPC has personally touched you all in different and yet not-so-different ways, and it's really heartwarming.

~Neshomeh

I guess I fall into Oldbie status as well, having been around since just before my 19th birthday (at the beginning of 2005).

I got into the PPC via what you might call my second internet geeky phase. In 2001/2002 when I was finishing high school, I found a whole bunch of random LoTR messageboards and humour sites (Flying Moose of Nargothrond and the Barrow Downs being two notable such sites) and wasted much time that I probably should have been spending studying. Perhaps I even came across a fleeting reference to the PPC, but if I do, I don't recall it...

Then 2003 came and I started university and got caught up in doing other things and it took me a year or two to get back into online geekery. I spent a summer research project doing computer modelling, which meant I had a lot of free time in a computer lab, and rediscovered the LoTR fandom, started writing fanfic and even wrote a story or two on the Henneth-Annun story archive.

Then, early in 2005, I read OFUM and it quickly led to me reading the Original Series, and then I posted here and quickly became hooked on the PPC. I started two missions, and the gigantic crackfic that is the Les Miserables Songfic Crisis... and then they all came to a grinding halt towards the end of 2006 when I was trying to finish my thesis.

2005/2006 were the "golden years" of the PPC for me - we had a great group of not-quite-newbies ('middlebies', we called ourselves): of whom Rez, Gundamkiwi, nscangal and Eris86 are probably the most notable, and then a little later the wonderful Tungsten Monk came along and got me hooked on Stephen Pressfield books via the character of Agent Suicide, and I seem to recall Vixenmage turning up around that time.

I remember all sorts of craziness, like the great PPC Board Snowfight of 2006, hS's Odd Day getting even odder, much ado about space pirates, and for some reason an entire planet made out of cinnamon. The Board was wonderfully random back then!

We also seemed to have serious discussions a lot more frequently, without it disintegrating into flaming.

When I started full time work in 2007, I was commuting 4 hours each day and had no free time. I moved city after a couple of months, but then it took me a couple of years to get an internet connection at home - and it just didn't feel the same posting to the Board from work. When, eventually, I got back on the 'net, a year or two had passed, and it seems that my PPC momentum had passed with it, and since then I seem to have done too much lurking.

I still read the board once or twice a week, and try to post more frequently - and I even managed to finish two missions back in 2010 (even if I did promptly start on another three which are still unfinished!) but I've felt a bit more disconnected since then. I felt as though something big had happened to the PPC while I'd been away and it took me a while to work out what had happened. (E.g. it took me about 6 months to realise exactly what happened in the Macrovirus epidemic back in 2008!)

Similarly to Neshomeh, I stick around because I feel I haven't written all my Agents' stories yet (and at my current rate, I'll probably have grandkids before I do!).

I do find it hard to keep up with all the newbies (in a getting to know them sense) - partly because so much PPC happenings occur in the IRC these days, and time differences plus my hectic RL schedule mean I'm very rarely in the IRC.

Fandom-wise, there's a lot of fandoms being discussed these days that I know nothing about. Sometime's it's frustrating, sometimes I view it as a great way of getting into new interests. Although whoever pointed me at A Song of Ice and Fire, I'd like to hit, since it has now taken over my life and I get no sleep anymore by staying up to 3 am to read!

Thinking back about when I've been most active on the Board, I think it was in times when there was a sense of shared activity going on - things like the Snowfight, or having mass RPs or the Multiverse Monitor!

Obviously we're not keen on repeating the angst of the Macrovirus epidemic, but I'd love to see some more of that collaborative atmosphere come back to the Board. Of, if it's there, maybe I just need to look harder.

Anyway, this is a long ranty rant of rantiness, so I shall leave it here...

So, I sat and agonized over what I should say, since some people (July) were poking me the instant I mentioned that I didn't think three years was long enough to qualify me for olbie, or even "older in general".

I no longer remember precisely how I found the PPC. Just that it involved Tv Tropes. I do remember that I read through as much of the wiki as I possibly could in one sitting, then moved on to hS's Celebrian mission and MST, then Trojie and Pad's stuff, then Laburnum's. Some point around then, I decided to join the board, and so I did. It was probably another several months before I even bothered with the original series.

Honestly, I'm still in my heyday, I think. So mostly, this slightly disconnected bit is here to serve as a thank you. Thank you to the lot of you for existing in the fist place. Because of the PPC, I have met people who I now consider some of my closest friends. I met my first boyfriend, and ended up in my current relationship, which is arguably the healthiest relationship I've ever been in.
Thank you, specifically, to July, who may not know or remember, but who managed to remind me that I'm not such a terrible person, and to Bryn who sat with me all night when I had my first panic attack, and who talked me out of doing something irrevocably stupid. Without either of you, I would not still be here.
Thank you, too, to Dann, for being... Maybe not a role model exactly, but someone I look up to.

As for why I'm still here? As I said before, this is where some of my closest friends are. I do hope to one day have a successful spin-off, but honestly that's taken a back seat to just being part of the community.

And the newbies? A lot of them are cool. Others annoy me. It's not the endless rambling discussions. That I can handle, even if they're occasionally irksome. It's the constant asking of the most basic questions. Questions which are answered in our guides. We are a community of writers. You'd think it wouldn't kill people to do a little reading. If you have a question, take the initiative, look and see if you can find the answer on the wiki. If not, then ask someone to point you in the right direction. And by Vera's tits, listen! If you ask a question, pay attention to the answer, so that you're not asking a question with the exact same answer a week later.

I'm honestly not sure how I could get more involved, though. I mean, I actually post on the board relatively often now, I'm always in the IRC, I've been voted into DA status twice now (to my eternal confusion), and I'm a fairly regular beta-reader for the folks that ask me. Considering the fact that I'm actively working on my first mission, and I have another mission and interlude planned, I have no clue how I could be more involved in the PPC. Maybe organize more stuff like the shipfest and whatnot, but I don't have the motivation for that.

- Data Junkie, who has no better way to sign off

This probably won't be very elaborate. I'm terrible at phrasing things, but I'll do my best.

A couple of years ago, my best friend sent me a link to the Original Series. She said they were hysterically funny stories about people going into bad fan fiction to fix it, so I decided to take a look.

Back then, fanfic meant absolutely nothing to me. I didn't read it, or write it, or give a toss about it. I knew it existed, but that was about it.

The Original Series really opened my eyes. I haven't read LoTR, but I hated the badfic in the Original series because I could tell that it was badly-written rubbish that often had little to no resemblance to the canon.

After that, I started reading the spin-offs. I fell in love with everything Trojie and Laburnum wrote, especially Laburnum's stuff. I didn't think I was good enough to join, nor did I have the courage too- everyone on the Board was way out of my league.

I read OFUM, too. It was funny, and I loved it. I read other OFU, and fell for them as well.

Eventually, I realised in the course of my original-fiction writing that I needed feedback from people who knew what they were talking about. Eventually, I realised that if I joined the PPC and wrote missions, I might get the kind of feedback that'd help me be a better writer. I really wanted to join. I dreamed about working with Laburnum or PoorCynic or one of the other writers I idolised. It took all the guts I had, but I finally joined.

At first, it was fantastic. I talked to people who loved the same fandoms I did. I wrote missions that people liked. I co-wrote a few things with other writers, and I even got to work with Laburnum (though we never completed it, sadly).

And... well, it went wrong. I didn't bother using a beta. I failed to see the problems in the works I'd written. Eventually, I screwed up bad enough that July and Dann took my Permission away and told me to rewrite everything I wrote. It hurt, but I realised how badly I screwed up, accepted responsibility for my myriad mistakes and decided to look at it as a chance for improvement.

Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse. Amid real life struggles, I learned a lot about myself, and most of it was negative, particularly all the things I learned about some rather nasty disorders I had the 'pleasure' to acquire. A lot of people I liked left the board, and in some cases, like DML, I never learned why. I often wondered why I was still part of the PPC. There was a huge influx of newbies, so much so that I often had no clue who anyone talking was. I lost interest in pretty much everything.

Why did I stay? Ultimately, I don't want to leave. I may never finish rewriting, and thus never get my Permission, but there are a lot of people here I really like and look up to. Even if I can't write missions, I can still help- I beta'd one of Antigone's missions, and that worked out fine. All I can do now is try to help everyone, because that's what I love doing. Maybe I'll finish rewriting, when I'm not deeply depressed and struggling with university. Maybe I won't. But I'll still be here.

It's no good, I really need a cape to lurk properly.

Found the PPC when I typed 'Mary Sue' into the search bar on FF.N on a whim; I honestly don't remember how I found the Board. I feel like it may have been a link from someone's FF.N profile, but I don't know whose -- Miss Cam? J&A's? P@L's? No clue. Not even sure I'm correct. That was closing on a decade ago, sooooooooo (note that this can't be true, because I'm not old enough to measure my life in decades. Yikes).

I connected because the people here were awesome. The fandom stuff was always secondary to the community and the awesome off-topic threads -- serious ones, which stayed polite and respectful because we genuinely respected each other, and the hilarious, manic, long threads about snowballs and food and whatever came to mind.

It was the first message board I'd ever joined where people actually treated each other like equals, even those who had a real claim to being More Equal Than Others (Jay, Miss Cam, a few other BNFs). We loved newbies and welcomed them with gifts and mini-Balrogs. It was like an internet group-hug all the time. I grew my hair out and started wearing tie-dyed peace t-shirts. (I'm joking, I already had long hair and would never wear tie-dye. What do you take me for?)

And then hS joined. I won't say I fell in love with him instantly, but I will say that he joined in September and I was researching spousal immigration laws by December. What can I say? He's practically perfect in every way. And yes, we had plenty of long personal conversations on the Board, because I was terrified to add him to my MSN list (LOL MSN messenger! Wow, that was a long time ago) and I had to get my flirting in somewhere.

I've been around for most of the Board, so I've seen most of the dramas and changes over the years. The ones I actually remember are the ones that touched me personally -- Thalia, because I was very deeply involved in that one. A few dramas with GreyLadyBast, which nobody remembers but me. The ongoing years-long drama with the married middle-aged man who was dating three very underage PPC girls at the same time, that was a goodie -- oh, all the dramas that originated from the first few attempts at PPC chatrooms. Lots of personal life dramas of people who are long, long gone -- illness, depression, accidents, poverty, abuse, relationships and breakups oh my. Fandom upheavals, eh, not so much.

I said before, I'm still here because hS is. My internet activity has mostly shifted to medical blogs and skeptical science blogs at this point (oh yeah, and mommy boards), which is a far cry from the PPC. But I try to keep an eye on the Board so I know what hS is talking about when he brings it up. I dabble in PPC writings occasionally, but I wouldn't plug them on the Board anymore. hS has recently started slotting his characters and his original PPC creations into an original setting; I might try to do the same, or I might just quietly let them go.

I don't have a feeling about the newest generation of PPCers. Personal stuff seems to be shunted off the board into the chatroom in order to preserve space on the Board. So I recognise names, but I no longer particularly recognise people. But there have always been fandoms I didn't particularly relate to -- even parts of the fandom that brought me here (I've still never read Silm. cover-to-cover, so . . .). So that's nothing new, really. But the relationships have moved away from the Board, and I don't have the screentime to chase them down, so I probably won't ever be active again.

Like VM, I will never regret joining the Board. If I hadn't, I wouldn't live in England, I probably wouldn't be married or have one-point-five-whatever kids, and I certainly wouldn't be married to hS. And what sort of life would that be? I'm lightheaded just imagining it.

I admit, my experience with the PPC is not like those that have posted here. But my story with the PPC goes back a lot further than when I first joined in late 2009.

Fanfiction was how I started on the internet in earnest. I had dabbled in a few things- Lego Online games, Neopets, and- *shudder* Barbie Online. I was about 7. I’d keep dabbling in Neopets until I was about 10. And then something changed.

I got my first laptop. I had gotten my first computer when I was eight, and I loved it. But I was also eight and terminally shy. My mother had put the fear of god in me regarding the internet and the people on it and that they were all horrible people and think of the danger (This will come into play in just a moment, I swear).

It was my 10th birthday, and I had just hit double digits and gotten my first laptop. Feeling terribly grown up, I found a link to deviantart somehow, and tracked down some labyrinth fanart by Pika la Cynique. I loved her style, and her humor- and then I found her OFUM fanart. I then spent the next few weeks devouring both OFUM and its sequel (Which was still updating at the time).

Mystified by her Celebrian fanart’s notes of “Hates Vanilla Ice Cream” and “Celebrian” I did a little googling.

That is when I found my first PPC fiction. Reading hS’ mission/MST of Celebrian, my interest was peaked, but I lost the link halfway through and read it on my own time without commentary. To say it was... eyeopening would be an understatement. It being my first foray into... adult things, and fanfiction. I kept digging through Miss Cam’s site, looking for more OFUM, but instead found the TOS. I read it. And then I read her sidestory. Loving every second of it, I ventured for the first time onto the board in 2005ish. I remember sitting at my desk, my ‘Hello!’ post all typed out and ready. My username would have been Rosefairy4905.

I was five seconds from clicking post. And then the guilt and worry hit me. What if this wasn’t safe. What if they (the PPC) were dangerous. I didn’t know anything about these people. What if I was just falling into a trap. Having a mild panic attack, I closed it down and made myself put it out of mind. Better safe than sorry.

It would take another two years or so, when I moved to Connecticut, before I turned to fanfiction again. Let me clarify. When I was living in Washington, I did have friends. Not many, but a few. The kids who lived on my street, as well as two girls whose mom was friends with mine. These were kids I had played in the mud with, had chased around with sticks, and picked berries with. Had built and stormed forts with.

When I moved to Connecticut, I lost contact. I had no one. For 11 months of my life, I didn’t go outside but to walk to the bodega, three blocks down. I didn’t have any friends- and at the time, my parent’s marriage was strained. I heard screaming matches and threats of moving back across the country to my grandparent’s house. So I turned to the internet. I admit, I had some downturns. I tried my hand at writing, but my own self-critical nature stopped me from ever posting. And then, I started to read fanfiction again.

Admittedly, it was Labyrinth fanfiction, then Harry Potter, then LotR. Having been a big fan of these all as a kid, I devoured the fandoms’ output ravenously. And, I admit, I read some pretty terrible stuff. I found the PPC again, and this time there was a wiki- but I didn’t get as far as the board that time. I had decided I was going to write my own fanfiction. It was... mediocre at best. I had teetered off by late Septemberish 2009 when I killed off my penname persona. Yes it’s up on FF.net. Yes it’s a little painful. I know.

And then Twilight hit. It was big, and popular, and it’s what girls my age were supposed to be reading, so what was the harm? I kept seeing all of these rave reviews and the movie was coming out soon, so I set my heart on it. I was going to read Twilight and it was going to be amazing and I was going to love it because that’s what I’m supposed to be liking. Keep in mind I was still heavily isolated in Connecticut at the time.

It lasted for about three books. See, at the time, I was still under the impression of, if it was printed or on the internet, it was good. Mostly due to my own insecurity, and assuming that only the highest standards of books could ever pass the impossibly high standards of publishers. SURELY IF IT IS PRINTED, IT IS GOOD.

And then I read Breaking Dawn. Dear god. That book... I... Okay, even when I was reading the books as a twihard, I was rooting for Bella and Edward to be together... because I didn’t like either of them. I was Team Edward, because I thought Jacob was way, way too good for Bella. And when Book four hit, my illusions were shattered.

I got the fourth book on December 19th 2009, three months after arriving in Louisiana.

I joined the PPC on December 22nd 2009.

I loved it. I had been lurking the wikia and had already formed a crush on Dann (I was a sucker then, I’m sorry.), and July was my hero, and the thought of being in the same community as them as a dizzying prospect. The next few days after joining the PPC went as followed.

Press Post on the board.
Have a panic attack and regret it.
Go “Oh my god I’m gonna be in the same place as July!”
Have a panic attack and regret it.
Go “Oh my god July added me on Yahoo Messenger.”
Have a panic attack and regret it.
Talk to July on Yahoo.
Come off as a psycho bubbly babbling fangirl.
Have a panic attack and regret it.
Venture into the IRC
Have a panic attack and leave.

You get the picture. I eventually got up the courage to be a slightly more... permanent presence in the IRC, but... to be frank, I don’t think I was much better than certain boarders now. I requested permission two weeks after my starting post. I was bubbly beyond belief. I had no sense of grammar, punctuation, or capitalization (those who have read my fanfiction will be painfully aware of this.), and to be frank... I was probably painfully annoying. But I didn’t spend much time on the board.

While my mom’s advice had made me scared of IRC channels, it was nothing, NOTHING like the fear she put in me in regards to forums.

I still have panic attacks when I have to do things on here. I’ve deleted everything on this doc and rewritten it half a dozen times now.

From here on out, this is where my PPC experience differs so highly from say, July, VM, and hS.

The PPC IRC community was my first, and still is my only real internet community. 99% of my social circle is online. 95% of that social circle is on the PPC IRC channel. But while my board interactions have been few and far between, I flourished on the IRC. It mellowed me out, it gave me confidence. It told me when I was being a stupid whiny brat, and then helped me move past it. It helped me when I was down and heading for a nasty depression, and panicking over my first date- I’m sure Dann and Maslab remember me going into a tizzy over being in a tizzy because oh my god what if I get a stress pimple on my nose and what if it gets to be a quarter sized and then I have a quarter sized pimple on my nose, and then what if it pops and scars, and then I’ll have a quarter sized scar on my nose and ohgodIcan’tdothis.

But I never had any of the standard oldbie bonding experiences. I’ve never been in a crisis. I’ve never really participated in any big threads, Silly, fandom, RP or otherwise, beyond the shipfest. I’ve written one mission, and it was a co-write three years ago. Hell, I wasn’t even aware of the Boozette thing until it had already passed.

The IRC is my home. And while I run away and hide and self-deprecate like it’s going out of style, and while I will probably never stop hating everything I do because it’s not good enough or it’s just not right or whatever, the IRC was the one place I could carve out a corner and hide in it. I wasn’t a tablelamp or an obstacle. Because of the IRC, I found a relationship. And then lost it. Only to gain another. And then accidentally form a love starfish with too many legs shifting on and off and got wildly confused for a while. But now I’m happy. Even if my love life might as well be in Schrodinger's Box half the time.

I've graduated from high school, moved several thousand miles, coming up terrifyingly fast on my third birthday in the PPC, and just finished my first year of college. I've wreaked havoc and turned boarders into cats. I ran a madcap RP involving a wooden spaceship and several PPCers. I believe it was some mix of Peter Pan and Star Trek. Also a jungle island. And Halo.

I’ve had my ups and downs. The fighting near the end of last year, as well as a horrifyingly scarring experience made me drop off the radar for nearly 4 months. I’ve vanished from the IRC before, saying I won’t come back, saying I’m not worth it that I’m not good enough, that it’s just not fun anymore. But I always do return.

I don’t know how I’ll contribute more. To be honest, I’m still scared of the posting board. But that’s more because I’m terrified of technology and new things.

Though I don't suppose I can get y'all to sign an autograph before I go? For old time's sake ;)

For the record, the tone of the latter part of this post had me terrified that the last paragraph was going to be "...and that's why I'm not going to be around anymore." I'm very, very glad that is not the case. This place really, really would not be the same without you.

I think about this stuff more than I should, probably, because the PPC has been central to some of the most important parts of my life. I mean - this is where I met Dann. That alone makes it - this little hole of fandom, a forum for a subgenre of a subgenre of a subgenre, almost a subculture in and of itself (we have our own slang, even!) - makes it important to me. I've joked about this before, how every time I went "Bah, I'm done with that place," I was betrayed by the 'Board url being a muscle-memory reflex.

But it's true. For a very long time, the internet was in some ways the only place I could be myself; fanfiction was an escape from the life around me, and fandom friends were the people who accepted me for who I was. Sometimes it's hard for me to relate years to things, even by age - I don't remember how old I was when I started reading fanfic. I remember finding ff.net on a rainy day in my grandparents' basement, while my siblings and father battled. I remember finding OFUM and the PPC when living at my dad's then-fiancee's house, when it was very clearly, in hindsight, a form of escape. And I remember a friend from the PPC calling me, late one night when I was the closest I've ever been to a very irrevocable and very poor decision, to talk me back into sanity. I wrote stories to get away from reality, and I read them for the same reason - and somewhere along the way, the stories became important for their own sake as well.

Careful timeline-gauging, though, puts it in fall of 2005 when I mentioned the PPC to someone on an RP, and they pointed me in the direction of the 'Board. So I wandered in, looked around, and decided to stay. I'm glad I did. I will always be glad I did - no matter how frustrating drama might get, no matter how annoyed I sometimes can be with things around here, I will never regret joining the community. And I truly hope none of you do, either.

I still wince when I think about the kind of person I was back then. I posted in capslock, I ranted, I complained, I was fangirlish and loud and, I'm sure, quite irritating. I wrote angsty poetry, and purply-angsty prose, and I was convinced it was good. I had very skewed ideas of what was important. I still remember with some shame the time I posted a full-caps rant about a kids' book called Dragonology, got a raised eyebrow from pretty much everyone, and slunk into the shadows for a while. That probably wasn't even the worst of it. That, mostly, is why I growl at people when they complain about some of the newbies being loud, annoying, fangirlish. A lot of us were there. But the then-oldbies, they sighed, they made annoyed noises sometimes, and I'm sure they were often more frustrated than they let on. But nobody told us to shut up. Nobody told us to go away. Nobody told us we were Bad PPCers for it, or Bad People, or that we didn't belong. That's why we're still here, after all. That's why we've grown into this place, and along with it, rather than away from it. (And some people have grown away from it, and that's fine, too. Just to be clear.)

But that's why I'm still here, I suppose. I have fun writing agents, but as anyone who knows me, or even doesn't know me but can do the math of ((2012-2005)/3) can attest to, I'm obviously not here to Write Missions or Take Down Badfic. I'm realizing these days that I barely even recognize modern PPC canon, with a few exceptions. I'm not here for the badfic, I'm not here for the excitement of missions - don't kill me but I barely read missions anymore. I'm here because people I care about are here. I'm here because this is a place where people can have long rambling conversations about Hetalia pairings, and philosophy, and theology, and trends/tropes of Sci-fi vs. Fantasy, and because this is where my friends are. That's what keeps me here. Friendship, and, as you say, a place for people who don't fit into World One so well.

I don't share fandoms with all the latest generation of PPCers, but I have no doubt that, external differences aside, we have a lot in common. We ramble about things - it's not pedantic when it's interesting! We nitpick. We snark. We like to read, we like to write, we like the idea of universes tiny and immense, and no matter how little we have in common, I guarantee many of our Secret Worlds are quite similar. We're prepared to admit that the person on the other side of the screen has a thousand secret worlds inside them, even if the contents of those worlds might shock and unbalance us. We're strange. We're a bit twisted and a bit bent and it makes us that much more awesome. We do things like wander cities in kilt, Hawaiian shirt, and boots. We do things like propose alliances with pigeons, or declare ourselves mad scientists and anyone who signs the contract hapless interns. We have had entire threads - and this was definitely not that long ago ...was it? in which we discuss the horrible things we have done to dolls.

I'm sure that every statement up there will have at least one person go "Well, I don't," and that almost proves my point, I think. We're a contrary group who is the stronger, not the weaker, for our differences - and I will stake anything you care to name on the resolution that any generation of PPCers you care to name, anyone who pops in here, looks around, and goes "Shiny! I'm keeping them," is going to fit right in, if we give them a chance.

So - that's my answer, I think. Give each other a chance. Stop raising our hackles every time something unfamiliar hits the waters, and yes I include myself as part of that problem, and welcome the people who wander through our doors for what we have in common, including our differences.

(1) This stretches back a bit before the PPC. Way, way, way back when, in 2001 or so, I hung about on TMFFA- Tenchi Muyo Fanfiction Archive. There was a pretty solid MST community there, and my favorites back then were mostly in a group of MSTers who had a vague shared continuity going on which even resulted in them writing a non-MST mass crossover of all their groups getting together in an attempt to have a party (and instead having many, many shenanigans occur).

MSTs never quite scratched my itch, though.

And then, I found something that did.

It was an organization which was "dedicated to save everyone on a physiological level. Save them from the thing that drives most men crazy...BAD FANFICTION." The agents were crazy, and just a bit manic about protecting the canon. It referenced Monty Python, Terry Pratchett. It used word play and humor in its narrative while it went through the badfic. The agents spent their time waiting through for the worst of it before they killed the fic, bickering with each other, and accidentally breaking their electronic equipment.

This was written nearly a year before Jay and Acacia would have even been able to see the Fellowship of the Ring, and well before the first PPC mission.

That said, it was fairly cruddy, and its SPaG was fail. It did, however, set in me a desire to want to do something like that. Not right then, because I was the opinion that my writing wasn't good enough to do something like that.

So, I read MSTs. Tried to write one, never quite finished it. Read normal fanfic. Found I had an inordinate fondness of crossovers and AUs. I eventually braved up, and registered. I wrote reviews. I wrote a http://www.tmffa.com/displaytext.html?id=4277">fic, at the proud age of TWELVE AND A HALF. It is terrible and twee. Tried to write another MST when I was not quite so TWELVE AND A HALF. Never quite finished that one, either.

Around when I was thirteen, I began the migration towards fanfiction.net, and then to Gaia Online. I drifted around for a few years but nothing quite caught me the same as TMFFA with how the community felt.

Some way or another, I found OFUM and then TOS in 2005 or so. Saw the board. And promptly ran in the other direction because it looked funny and people were being a bit too intense about some fan movie in production.

Came across Laburnum's stuff on FF.net which ended with me reading her stuff and then rereading TOS and OFUM and actually posting here. And I stayed. Because it had what I had wanted since I was eleven. A premise that had caught my eye, a group of writers that had fun together and involved each other without being clique-y. That feeling of being someplace that was respectful of one another, and actually caring enough to be aware of what you were doing before doing it, and differences not mattering because it was a nonissue was amazing. Before, I was sort of always on the fringe, or being 'one of the guys', since my main hangout online before this was the Red vs Blue forums.

(2 & 3) It led to me getting sort of stuck here, in a way. Because I wanted to do stuff for the community. So, the first few months I was here, I dug in, and I read every single thing that was on the list of PPC stuff. I checked the websites with all of the PPC information organized on it again, and again, and again. And then I accidentally'd a question. And another question. And a thought. Then, a few more.

And then we ended up with wiki.

2008 rolled around, I wrote missions, and I was working on the wiki, and I wanted to do more. So, I might have ended up coercing hS and Sara into helping me produce the first radio play, by way of them recording the lines and me being bewildered at Audacity and putting old dreams to reality and making a radio play- if with someone else's work.

It still wasn't quite enough more. At this point, I was v. enamored of Huinesoron's contributions to the overall narrative of the PPC and his contributions at large. I also took a deep, intense, and probably somewhat perverse thrill at calling him 'Boss' and 'Chief' because it worried him so. (This is something that I should probably have not done. Though, I must say, it was amusing, seeing this figure, who, to my very new self was practically a deity, not-quite quaking in his boots at someone addressing him as being a leader type outright rather than actually treating him like one. It's a good thing hS isn't actually a deity or I would've been smote more than Araeph.)

So, I asked about writing an HQ-wide thing, and people were open to it. I divulged what it was, and said when I'd have it set, and asked for volunteers. Plenty of people volunteered, and were more than interested, and said they wanted to join in.

The board's anniversary party took place in the meantime, with a bunch of us RPing as Flowers. It was fantastic, and just overall hilarity. I played as the Daisy (the other one, from the plays), and Trojie as the Queen Anne's Lace, and we ended up embracing the utter crack of it and had the two Flowers get so drunk they wandered off to have some alone time, if you understand what is being said here. And then we decided it had to be an ongoing romance, clearly.

That RP, though, was interrupted with a Tawaki event. So, the RP closed with the macrovirus occurring, and Makes-Things dying, which kinda wrecked my plans, and made a whole lot of us upset because we had no idea what to do with Makes-Things being dead. What do we do? Do we ignore it? Can we ignore it? He made it be announced on the board. What will we do without Makes-Things? Why didn't he ask?

I ended up trashing my event story, because even though I had said when it would happen, it was a bit difficult to actually do it, since it was supposed to be set in late March. In HQ. And have Makes-Things be the key to solving it, and by the time late March came around HQ was filled with macroviruses and abandoned, and Makes-Things was dead.

There was a lot of upset and angry whispering in private for a few years, because no one was really sure what to do. Between Tawaki's events, and then the items later in the same year, eventually it was decided No More Emergencies. Because 2008 had way too many, and people were beginning to feel cynical of the whole thing and tired of it all. We just wanted things to continue. Write on our own without having someone order and jerk our characters around or wreck stuff we wanted to do.

Later in 2008, PG voting occurred, and it was my first time being there for it. Someone nominated me, I flailed, plead that I was too new, and resolved to avoid being nominated for as long as I could, by any means necessary. This later resulted in me consciously disappearing for months at a time and minimizing my appearances on the board when PGs started to become scarce, starting up the nominations myself, or bumrushing the thread as fast as I could to shove nominations for people who would do a good job and were well known enough that I'd be ignored completely.

That said, the cohort I was in, when I joined the PPC, we did a lot of interconnectivity in our stories. We mentioned a lot of each other's agents in interludes and missions- which were another thing that popped up all at once, it felt like; I think my spinoff was among the first, if not the first, of that group to start doing many HQ stories, and have a significant portion of my spinoff actually involve HQ, rather than it just be mission after mission with our agents- and things felt more like a huge net with all these little references and comments going on connecting everyone's spinoff together without it being a big huge crossover.

It felt a lot more organic that way, since it wasn't this intense divide where all the characters you saw in a given person's spinoff were entirely theirs or a big howdo because my gosh, it's a crossover. It just... was. At the same time, there were some changes that I think reflected a different mentality.

Agents started getting kids. And by getting, I mostly mean adopting en masse. The explosion started wth 2008, really. Marsha. Sally. Jason. Before that there was Molly and Moses, and it rolled into something ridiculously large later.

A vague idea of a 'home' life started showing up more and more. RCs with kitchens began appearing. The city in New Caledonia ended up happening.

All of this just adds up. The PPC itself just changed into being something with a sort of verisimilitude. It became its own actual little world. Rather than this disjointed mashup of mission after mission without any real suggestion of there being a beginning or an end, or events in between, or people doing things and having interests. The agents went from being little contained predefined humorboxes who were there to provide the funny while finishing the mission to people who ended up with story arcs and friends and things happening. The floating timeline that was sort of assumed before changed, and we were suddenly nailing actual months and years to when things were happening.

It was this really brief but awesome time, to me, at least.

Things started to change though, after 2009. People started to join in from TvTropes, and we began to notice a change in the demographics. We suddenly had a lot of guys showing up, one after another, when before we barely had enough to manage a decently sized boyband. The turnover rate, the amount of newbies we got, both seemed to spike, massively. We'd have floods of people show up who disappeared after a few posts and it began to bog down.

At the same time, I started the chatroom. It was kind of godawful terrible in the beginning, because the worst people were automatically drawn to the chatroom, rather than the board. I wish I was kidding. It was filled with scum. People we didn't actually want here. People who didn't belong in the PPC. And I wanted them way, way, way away from me and as far away from the PPC as possible.

I was asked to keep the chatroom running and not ban or kick them out because we didn't want them on the board. So, we had super misogynist dude who wanted to be in the PPC because he wanted to join the military and he wanted to kill Sues because they were girls, and super creepy furry dude who kept hitting on the youngest member of the PPC and then a married person and kept talking about how he wanted to write about underaged cartoon characters having sex. He kept talking about characters he wanted to have sex with- some of whom we'd classify as kids. There were a couple others as well, but they were not as terrifying, but they were still pretty bad.

Because of that, we ended up losing people, like Piph, because there were chatters who didn't give a whit about what they said or to who, even if it was against the rules of the board, or if it got others in trouble or not.

Eventually he crossed a very large line, and people were feeling more than just uncomfortable, and I banned him, and told the board what he'd been up to so he couldn't garner sympathy and so he'd hopefully clear out. Thankfully, he did.

It didn't fix very much, but it made the chat significantly less creepy and helped make it decent enough that non-creepy people slowly became the majority in there (albeit through me begging them not quite on hands and knees to please, please join the chatroom and stay in there).

The amount of people coming from TvTropes grew and grew. We had a lot of them sort of get angry or upset at us, because we weren't what they were expecting, and trying to remove ourselves from there didn't really work. We were accused of whitewashing, and censorship, when really we didn't want to be overun with people who thought we were actually policing the fandom and that we have the right of way to order people around. We still get a lot of that.

There was also the Boosette thing, which lost us a few people who didn't want to Be Like That, be fandom police, be bullies- and it reflected the change, too, with some a couple people actually going out and being in attack mode, and being insulting. The vast majority, though, took it in stride, and we made a conscious decision to make a move towards something a lot of us had already stepped towards. That, at least, helped us grow in a lot of ways.

We did our best to try and change things so everything was as clear as possible. To make it clear that we aren't misogynists. That we aren't fandom police. A lot of the guides we have today were written with this sort of thing in mind. We had people show up who didn't really know that we were here to have fun, not be mean. People who wanted the PPC to be some grimdark fascist police force who are supercool and awesome and kill things and make Sues go splat in a violent messy way. But, some of those elements have still sort of leaked in.

The verisimilitude sort of ended. Spinoffs started to become punctuated with dramatic things, in 2010. Even if it wasn't really needed, the whiff of melodrama became infused in a lot of the new stuff. There's this desire of wanting agents to be badass, or edgy. More than a few touches of glitter and special are abounding.

Then there was all that stuff in 2011. It wasn't really good. It wasn't fun. It hurt in a lot of ways. I gave in, finally, towards the end, out of utter despair and depression. A few years back, when the PPC was one of the very, very few things giving me a reason to stay alive right then and there, the way I was being treated, and the way the people I cared for were being treated might've caused me to have killed myself. I don't know, really.

(3) If I was reasonable, I would have probably called it a bad job, given up, let it go and move on. I probably should have, to be honest. The thing keeping me here then, and still now, for the most part, is that I've invested so much of myself here. I don't want to give it up.

I made the PPC my home, and I want it to stay my home. I want my friends to be able to feel like they belong here still, rather than like they should leave because they don't fit in anymore, or because outside perception, or because they're getting fed up with things.

(4) I don't really like a lot of aspects of the newbies. (What a surprise, everyone says.)

I don't really like how we've carefully collated all of this information, how we have all these guides set up, in as clear and simple language as possible but people still don't understand. There is a template in one of the guides that is almost but not quite a fill in the blank to show how to do a mission, and people still do not understand how to write a mission, or they ignore it. We still get people who are intent and want to do things grimdark, even though we go no, no way bro, we do not do the grimdark and angst of darkness and tears of blood as we violently enjam this sword in the face of the sparkly Sue.

We didn't have these guides until very recently. But, now they're something people need just to understand the PPC, somehow. Instead of people figuring it out from reading spinoffs, they need guides to tell them what to do and how. What changed? Why do newbies need these very thoroughly written out guides now? Why do we still get people asking us how to exactly do something? Why do we get people asking us questions that are more and more basic?

We're becoming a group that needs everything carefully outlined- what can and cannot be done- so people can understand and join in, and that worries me. There are things I want to write that I am afraid to publish because I can't just write it for my own enjoyment or that of others. I have to keep in mind "If I write this, how will people take this? Will they decide they have to do this too? Will they decide they can do this as well, even if they don't necessarily have the skill or tools to do it? Will people understand what I am writing? Will this cause trouble?" This is what happened with Huinesoron's most recent set of stories.

There is a time and place for everything, for the most part, but we're having to put these things in absolutes more and more because it's becoming increasingly cle

(This wasn't meant to be an essay, it was supposed to be short...)

I came through OFUM too! I think. Someone mentioned mini-Balrogs in a review of one of my stories, and that led me to OFUM, which led to the PPC. Of course, I didn't find out about the Board until ISPCE was written (oh dear, I'm not sure I should be linking to that...). The first two things I remember seeing (after a thread by Vemi asking if I should be asked to join) were Talk Like A Pirate Day and the Thalia Weaver drama - which places me in mid-September 2003, if anyone's counting.

Why did I stay? Well, by that point I'd already read TOS (and maybe some spinoffs?), and I really enjoyed them - back then pretty much everything was LotR, so I knew the fandoms like the back of my hand - witness the name - and that meant I could understand why they were funny. The Cheese Elves of Rivendell are funny all the time, of course, but the lesser things - the ones that rely on the canon being warped - are what really makes a PPC fic for me.

And that (to drop out of chronology for a bit) is what's stopping me from reading most of the new stuff - I don't know any of the mostly Anime fandoms, and 'Gasp! Ghan-k'cho said 'okay'! Doesn't the Suethor know he'd turn blue if he did that?' isn't particularly interesting if you've never heard of Ghan-k'cho.

(Right, back to the DeLorean) I have a lot of memories from the Board - it's been a major part of my life. I was pretty mixed up when I joined (personal lives are a pain, did you notice?), and it was the friends I made here - BeautyID, bjam, WriterfromRivendell, Luthien, Rath, and of course and most especially my dear wife Kaitlyn - who turned me into a reasonably well-adjusted person. In fact Kaitlyn saved me from a love life that was already a solar-system-sized halo of debris, and in less than a year I was in a stable relationship with her.

I remember, in no particular order, the Battle of Goldberg, the Snowfight, the LotR roleplay (I was Gandalf - and that's the first and last time I enjoyed the chat ;)), red wolf the weird... it just goes one.

I also have a particular fondness for the PPC Gatherings, since I started them and hosted most of them - it brought the PPC into the real world, and made me feel like a real person - again, a difficult task.

I also also fondly recall the ideas I came up with with others - things like DOGA (which is apparently quite popular) with Raven Firedragon/Selene (who left), The Reorganisation with Vemi (who left), Crashing Down with Starwind Rohana (who... left... am I the common denominator here?), and even hashing out the background for Origins with KGarrett (who may still be here!). The actual writing has been a chore at times, but the ideas are the thing.

And that's what keeps me here. I may not read many missions, but the ideas still fascinate me. Things as simple as that Unless You Hadn't Noticed - okay, I turned it into probability/consciousness-based navigation in the Playscriptes, but it was an awesome idea first. I like the world of the PPC - I'm just not necessarily that attached to all the individuals in it (hence why I can write Time Will Decide For Us, which has no characters and barely any locations in common with today's PPC - but still embodies the idea of the Protectors, at least to me).

And then there's the community. We oldbies have always had a bit of a Get Off My Lawn feel towards newbies - and I remember when virtually everyone here was That Annoying Newbie (obvious exceptions excluded - and I'm sure I was one too!) - but in all honesty, you lot are the same as we were. There's the excitable ones (hi, AnnaBee), the quiet ones, the ones who take everything very seriously - and yeah, All Of This Has Happened Before. Anyone remember Luthien? Very high-energy, stuck around for a long time.

The difference is, back then, we were the young ones. There were older people in the PPC - Bast, Miss Cam, Mum'sTheWord, Boz4PM - and I'm sure they shook their heads disapprovingly, but they've all moved on now. We're the ones who took their place, and yes, there's more of us.

But the nature of PPCers is still the same - intelligent people who don't really fit in in World One, and have a fascination with fandom. The PPC - the Board especially, to this old married codger - is a place where all of us can come together and just enjoy being... us. It's a place for conversation, for silly games and serious discussion, for fandom rambling and... everything. And yeah, I wish the rambling was more about Lord of the Rings and less about Hetalia and co, but is there a difference between their discussions of the... what, singing voices of the cast?... and our debating Do Balrogs Have Wings? No. Except now we can't get involved.

... oh oh oh! I found out some awesome things I didn't realise today while browsing Encyclopedia of Arda. F'r instance, did you realise that the last Dunedain of Cardolan retreated to the (later) Barrow Downs ahead of the forces of Angmar - and then lived there for two hundred years before the Great Plague took them out and the Wights moved in? And that Bombadil implies he knew them personally when he takes a brooch from the mound? That's a story I wish I'd written - the tale of Tom Bombadil's defence of the vestige of Cardolan against the Witch King - his protection of their struggling civilisation - and his anguish when they finally succumbed not to invaders, but to the ravages of nature.

Also, the story of Aranarth, son of Arvedui Last-king of Arthedain, puts me in mind of the Belgariad, and specifically Prince Geran - here, too, we have the sole heir to a royal house now in hiding. Aranarth doesn't have Polgara to keep him safe, or to break the royal mindset (in Polgara the Sorceress, she eventually retreats to her mansion to wait for Geran to die, he's so innately princely) - but he sent his son Arahael to be raised by Elrond, breaking in his own way that possible chain of 'I Should Be King's. And there's another story I would have written - maybe along with that of Aragost, the Chieftain of the Dunedain who might just have helped rescue Celebrian...

As you can see, I still have a fandom brain. Unfortunately, my fandom barely exists any more... and that's not something the Board can change.

hS

Wow. It takes a lot of courage to get that personal, especially on the internet where what you say is always going to be accessible in some way.

I think what brought me here was a need to understand why. Why is there so much bad fanfiction? Why do people make Mary Sues? Do they realize that what they're writing is bad? Do they know that they're twisting someone's creation so horribly?
I think I wanted answers. I don't think I've gotten them yet, and I might never get them. I think I'm okay with that.

I've stayed here because I've really found a group of people who accept me. I've always had trouble making friends, partly because of shyness and partly because I'm so different from a lot of my peers. It's difficult to find another girl who plays video games as much as I do, and the boys who do I have trouble connecting with, due to the difference in gender.

This led to a lot of insecurity about my self. The insecurity was made worse because of my rampant OCD. I was always anxious, always worried about doing things right, and I was pretty much a mess.

In my introduction post, I asked about my mental representation of myself, Mimkana. I felt that she was a Sue, and I was asking if that was okay. The response I got was "Yes. It's okay. A lot of people have Sues in their heads." The person who seemed to put the most thought into that response, was Neshomeh.

So, I started chatting with boarders on the IRC. I felt accepted. It didn't matter that I was different. No one could tell over the internet, and if they could, it was made apparent that being different was what everyone here had in common.

Over the past year, I've grown. I don't think- actually, I KNOW that I couldn't have grown so much without the PPC. I've gone to a new school for my sophomore year, but I didn't really feel the transition. Sure, my grades slipped, but I wasn't hurt emotionally. I'm happy. And the PPC is part of the reason why.

Over my spring break, I started doing heavy exposure therapy, to help my OCD. Exposure therapy is basically purposefully triggering the things that bother me, until I don't have a problem with them anymore. It was hard, to say the least.

I've grown creatively and as a person, in the past year. And I have the PPC to thank for that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPG9ZFNHFqE

Thank you. Each and every one of you.