Subject: What punishments are too harsh for Sues?
Author:
Posted on: 2011-07-10 19:19:00 UTC
I know that Drip Rat is right out, and that Cthulhu was overdone so we're giving the poor guy a break, but is there anything else that is so harsh, so evil, so mind-bogglingy punishing that it would be considered overkill for even the most heinous of Sues?
Giving a Sue to AM. Or throwing her into Nahgharash.
I think portaling Sues to Reaver ships would be too harsh.
We covered that under "Trivializing rape".
I pretty much agree with averything here: it can't be anything too horrible or realistic like rape of calamity and until Cthulhu gets down to 32000 tonnes he's on a strictly Sue-free diet.
However, what about a sacrifice to Shub Niggurath?
He/She/it is apparently relatively beneolvent to humanity and besides, I don't think a water buffalo alone will have quite the oomf for a proper sacrifice to her Buffalo cow/Black Rooster/Black pheasant hen manifestations. If someone could donate some relationship sues for said sacrifice (sometimes in the future), I feel that the Black Goat could be quite forgiving in the chcolate/soda/potato chip department.
I just hope she likes sparkles.
All funniness aside, there are certain lines we do not cross. Rape is one of them. It's the main reason Drip Rat and the Redneck Trees from Something Positive are off limits. No punishments involving rape are allowed, because they fall firmly under Not Funny. Also, it's a bad idea to trivialize horrific Real World events and crimes when making up assassination methods. So I wouldn't suggest putting a condemned Sue in the World Trade Centers, or a Nazi death camp, or a room full of KKK members.
In my mind, it's not so much "Oh, that wasn't funny," as why something isn't funny. As July pointed out, you can make anything 'funny' with deft writing, or boring with bad writing. But the point we're trying to avoid here is things that aren't funny because they trivialize Real World events-- which is, I think, what we've been talking about with something being too sadistic or horrible. Writing a story in which agents perform horrific torture on Sues is messed up because we're taking something very, very serious, something that's an ongoing fight in America right now, and using it for a satirical fanfic. Which is... bad.
It goes back to the issue with Tv Tropes; as a general rule, we're just here to have fun. I don't think anyone here wants this community to be the internet touchstone for graphic, gory depictions of gruesome murder/torture scenes... with a punchline.
I agree with Aster Corbett that a fitting death is usually in order. My favorite missions end with something suitably ironic based on what type of damage the Sue inflicted on the setting or characters, if only for the sake of making me feel better. :3
Torture is perhaps a step too far. That said, C*l*br**n. No need to make the Sue's last minutes that painful.
Anything too extreme... Torture's been mentioned earlier. That includes waterboarding, sleep deprivation, etc.
Using the t-Virus on them is out, if FEV is any indicator, along with the G-Virus. Honestly, G-Virus infected are notoriously hard to kill anyway, so it would be a Very Bad Idea to give a Sue it. (Knowing various Sues' powers, they'd probably keep their mental capabilities, which makes it an even worse idea.)
Sues aren't really alive (being mostly the manifestations of temporary self-serving desires, I guess) so assassination I feel is less 'punishment' and more 'sentenced to a fitting death.'
Most elaborate deaths are a) maybe the only thing that can kill the Sue or b) serve to make the agents feel better, so I would say that a punishment too horrible for a Sue would REALLY be one that is too 'harsh' to be in the spirit of the PPC.
Like doing something horribly unfunny.
No funny thing is too 'harsh' for Sues.
You can make terrible and harsh things that are way out of line funny. Sadistic things can be put in a humorous light, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't. We don't do torture, we don't do 'punishments' that are harsh by any definition.
Even if you might not consider a Sue to be a person, they're still people shaped, not some amorphous red evil glowing see-through blob with multiple tentacles and way too many stingers and is drooling acid from a fanged mouth.
Like I said in my reply to this thread, I think we should only be doing clean kills, not stuff that's terribly drawn out.
Torture is bad, right? But with the right spin, you can make it funny. Even humorous.
Here's an example I used in the chatroom when we got on the subject.
Feeding a Sue to the Watcher in the Water is one thing. That's a clean kill, you're not doing anything extra to the Sue. You don't need to, and shouldn't go into massive detail.
Now, on the other hand, Agent A gets out a 'Kiss the cook' apron and a funny hat and pretends to do a cooking show for her special guest at the best table in the restaurant, one Watcher in the water. Sue Skewer. Chop chop, don't forget to tenderize the meat, dear, you don't want the glitter to clump together while you cook, see, look, I have this handy morningstar we can use, and don't forget to keep her alive, it makes the meal so much tastier, her terror adds to the flavor, you see, we'll be dicing the fingers up and putting them into all the orifices after we get her filled up with some lovely gravy we'll be making from her feet, Sue toe lint gives it something extra....
The second can be funny. But it's torture, sadistic, and just way out there. But with what you're saying, from what I understand, it passes because it's funny, even though it's on the sadistic and horrible side.
is less of a literal take on 'if it's funny, it's OK' and more of 'if it's in the spirit of the PPC's humor, it's OK.'
The PPC's spirit is to not step on it's own toes, and to practice what it preaches: no trivializing things, as an example. If we would cry out, 'yeah, the wording is kind of silly but doesn't this author realize that the literal image of that is anything but funny, why are characters treating this behavior as OK?!' when we find it in writing, it's probably a really bad thing to include it in a mission.
Besides, whenever anybody goes out of one's way to horribly torture a person (in published writing, not as passing unserious giggles in a chat room where everyone understands the context) in an attempt at humor rather than as a very scary plot point I get the idea that this person might have weird issues. It's unsettling to me to read torture-as-humor, not funny. Makes me wonder what else the person who wrote such a thing considers funny, or even just.
TL;DR-- It's in the spirit of the PPC to be Mad, not be a real psychopath, and things that are 'too much for PPC missions' probably should fall under a we-practice-what-we-preach header. If we wouldn't like to see horrible torture trivialized, we probably shouldn't include it in our own missions... no matter how superficially funny the wording is. The same way that we consider trivialized rape is bad, we don't (or should not!) offer rape-as-humor, we probably should not offer torture-as-humor in our published material...
It's just not 'funny' by the PPC standards of practicing what we preach.
Whoops, that was a long TL;DR. I guess it's a TL;TL.
This reply makes no sense as one to what I said. (And for that matter it doesn't seem long enough to require an attempt at a TL;DR summary.) Did something get chopped off at the beginning or something?
Let me clarify--
What I gathered from your post:
" Your point of 'if it is funny, it is good for the PPC' is not a good point because it's possible to portray horribly cruel things in a funny way. "
My reply, condensed:
" The PPC (as a collective entity) probably doesn't think anything that goes against its ideas of anti-trivialization is that funny at all. If we get mad when a badfic tortures people for fun, we shouldn't find it that funny to torture people for fun, either. So I am not sure if your funny example would be 'funny' at all under our own scrutiny..."
I am not sure what you didn't get in my previous post...? *tilts head sideways*
You're both arguing around in circles. It's not going to lead anywhere except to more bickering about a point that both basically seem to agree with.
Here's the basic rundown: no torture, no trivialization. Thank you and goodnight.
With no fighting and minimal arguing and bad feelings, even.
And now, I run for my life.
That said, I did compare her to simple dog.
Clearly, I am the genuine article, the real McCoy.
Aster's '*tilts head sideways*' has permanently made me mentally picture simple dog from now on when I think of her, for better or worse.
Thus the image.
Because 1) it's hard to take me seriously when I am pictured as the simple dog,
and 2) the AGENT Aster Corbett is me at 16, who pretty much IS the simple dog in many ways, save for perhaps articulating herself in speech.. Most of my agents interactions go this way:
Lore: Do the thing that makes sense. :<br>Aster: (thinking) □▲☼green☺♥MarySueBADBADBAD♫????
Lore: :\
;p All in good humour, of course.
I'm not certain such a thing exists when you're talking about Sues.
Several forbidden and frowned-upon methods of assassination that have not been brought up yet should be touched upon, however. They are:
--anything involving rape (ex. the Reapers from Firefly, the Darkspawn from Dragon Age)
--anything that trivializes a historical atrocity (ex. the Holocaust)
--anything from the Forbidden Substances page (http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Forbidden_substances)
Handing her over to the 456 from Torchwood. That can only be done with prepubescent children anyway, so it will rarely be an option.
Pushing a Sue into the Sarlacc Pit also strikes me as a little over the top.
And everything the Doctor did to The Family of Blood.
Admittedly, all of those are also in part, because I don't think a Sue should ever be left alive, no matter how impossible escape seems.
The Doctor took revenge on the Family. They wanted to live forever, so he gave them forever. What we want is the Sue to be dead, not to remain in the canon forever.
I find any punishment that keeps the Sue alive indefinitely, rather than killing her, to be too harsh, but also problematic, because she might escape.
Of course, in my very first mission my agents handed the Sue over to Aragog, with the expressed purpose of letting it kill all her incarnations one by one, which just goes to show that I don't mind a reasonable amount of cruelty and prolonged suffering.
I think the SO covers that when Jay and Acacia hand a Sue over to the Discworld Elves. Never leave a Sue alive, especially in a foreign canon.
. . . I consulted with my brothers (both ex-USMC) about likely fates for the Sue, who was an overpowered bully in a military setting and disregarded rank, chain of command, or anything else in her quest to be Big Woman on Base. They gave me several ideas, which I unfortunately couldn't use because they might have technically run afoul of the torture clause. The two I remember are:
1) The ironing board treatment. Take the offender outside, place a common ironing board on top of them, and start piling the board with the heaviest things you can find. Has been known to happen to servicemen that screw others over (the way the Sue was doing), but it smacked too much of the old crush-a-witch-slowly thing.
2) Suicide watch. This one's psychological torture. If you hate someone, and the whole unit is focused on making that person's life miserable, one of the worst things you can do is have that person put on suicide watch. Now, in addition to being loathed by everyone around them, the hated person is never allowed to be alone and gets woken up once an hour every night. Ostensibly it's to make sure they don't kill themselves, but it's really just to drive them insane and make them suffer sleep deprivation. Again, it was too close to torture, and I had to shelve that one.
Moral of the story: don't consult with vengeful military guys when trying to dispose of a military Sue. Anything they propose is likely going to cross the line.
Torture is out. Full stop.
If it qualifies as torture, even if you squint, you probably shouldn't use it in a mission. That is to say, so long as it's a clean kill, it's not overkill in my opinion, at least.
For example, let's put it this way. Say you decide to kill a Sue with fire. There're two ways you can go about this.
1) Setting her on fire, or;
2) Carefully burning her bit by bit and keeping her alive and awake through it until she's entirely burnt up.
It boils down to the same thing, (Sue Flambé, anyone?) but the execution is entirely different. With the second, you're willingly and consciously prolonging the pain and misery caused, and forcing the Sue to be conscious and aware of what's going on.
The first is a painful death too, yeah, but you aren't making the conscious choice to make it more painful or terrible than it is by default.
That said, I don't think there's anything wrong with scaring the crap out of the Sue before you actually get to the causing of bodily harm portion. (Like, say, waking the Sue up in the dreaded Room 101 and telling her.)
Being forced to read The Eye Of Argon immediately springs to mind...
Or C*l*br**n.