Subject: Concerning your agents.
Author:
Posted on: 2012-01-27 17:19:00 UTC

First of all, your paragraphs need lines between them to make for easier reading. Both this page and your writing sample look like one long, unending paragraph. If you do not wish to have lines breaks, then you need to indent your paragraphs, as in a printed book.

Now, onto the characterization of your agents.

The PPC's base is humor. Nothing about your EEC idea or your characters tells me there would be humor in your spin-off. Zoe Whittaker's angst-ridden past is not humor. The Answer's "irrational behavior" isn't humor. ('Lol random' as actual humor is incredibly difficult to pull off.)

Zoe's background and personality is utterly antithetical to the tone of the PPC; the PPC is not based off of rage and malice, and it has no patience for agents who wallow in their own misery. The Answer's background is more interesting, but so focused on making his character bizarre and eccentric that he's bound to put the readers off a little, especially those who are new to your PPC work.

I can tell that you spent a lot of time on the backstory, but nothing you created there seems like it would contribute in a positive way to the Canon Protection Initiative. If agents' backstories are needed, they are there to a) help them fit better into the world of the PPC, or b) to help the readers sympathize with them better. Neither one of those is true in this case.

For an example of a better way to approach this, suppose you created an agent who came from a badfic, and as a result had too much backstory to remember properly. The realistic results of this are that his memory of where he came from is constantly changing and contradicting itself. Sometimes it gets him down, but most of the times it's just a bit embarrassing, and it's also a good ice-breaker for introducing himself in the PPC Cafeteria. These conflicting backstories would not be a random conglomeration of dialogue that could come from a generator, or an excuse to have him infused with multiple personalities. Rather, they would be the result of one brain trying to interpret two or three coherent, yet contradictory sets of information.

I should mention that you have a good grasp of spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. I would recommend reading more spin-offs and MSTs (perhaps in the Sue-mocking communities) before attempting to get Permission. This is even more the case considering your writing sample, which I will get to in the next post.

~Araeph

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