Subject: Answers that hopeful won't bug you
Author:
Posted on: 2010-09-10 17:13:00 UTC
- Your agent is an arachnophobe, and you're even thinking of not taking advantage of the possible hilarity?! No! Don't change the mini! Of course, your agent doesn't have to adopt one, nor do you have to describe the mini anywhere past "a Mini-Aragog", nor do you even have to state that a mini has been generated... but this is potentially a cool thing. Your agent has to face her fears--does she turn into a little quivering ball, does she get violent and take it out on the badfic, does she hide behind her partner, does she eventually figure out that, "Yeah, I hate the creepy little things, but there are worse things in the world"? You have an opportunity for character development here. Don't waste it! (Also don't magically cure the phobia the first time she sees a mini-Aragog. That's just cheap.)
2. Each continuum has its own rules. If insubordination is relatively normal in that continuum, it's not a charge. Similarly, having unusually colored hair in many anime continua wouldn't be a Sue trait, because so many characters do. But if it's over-the-top for the Sue's position or the situation, it can still be a charge.
3. I hadn't thought of that. The way we have it now with quarantined continua, the characters from the quarantined continuum could only be character replacements, because the author can't access the true version of the quarantined continuum; so in this case it's not really an Implausible Crossovers fic at all. The idea of quarantine is there because we need an "excuse" not to PPC stories set in banned worlds (i.e., the author has banned all fanfic, so his continuum doesn't need protection). I would say that, to preserve that reasoning, the best way to resolve it would probably be, "When a fanfic author attempts to access a quarantined continuum for any reason, he is blocked and must create his own continuum. All characters within this continuum are essentially original characters, though heavily plagiarized."