Here I quote:

"No. We're not doing either. We're writing these missions to be funny and interesting, because we are the goddamn PPC. That is the goddamn point of the entire organization, and we are missing it completely. In HQ, Rule of Funny is Word of God. Sometimes we need to be serious, but when we do we should beware of blowing this seriousness out of proportion. Angst should be kept to a minumum, and the same goes for plotline. The point of this is to have fun with the plots of badfic, not to create monolithic storylines and backstories for each individual agent. And the Grey Lady knows that we don't need a full-blown Emergency to write a decent fight scene."

A-men!

...To the oldbies, (especially Sedri) for bringing this topic up again, and to the newbies, for making them bicker like...something that bickers a great deal. I would also like to issue a personal apology to MAXinsanity, whom I appear to have accidently made the object of a positively itinerant hate-fest. Again. (I would also like to apologize to any and all grammarians who are shuddering at my horrible use of the word 'itinerant'. But, y'know, if they didn't want anybody to misuse it, they shouldn't have made the word sound so damn nice. Who 'they' are, I have no idea.)

Where was I...? Ah, yes. The whole cycle theory thing touched a nerve with me. I was so ticked off that I didn't bother to wonder if the article was a sarcastic one or not, or check when it was last updated to make sure that I wasn't beating a dead horse.

Overthinking things as usual, EBW

What you're describing is essentially the same issue as came up late last year, when there was a rather tense conflict on the Board and the oldbies collectively put their foot down on the entire Emergencies problem - it's also why I wrote the Guide To The PPC, which has an entire section on exactly this issue.

I really hope this debate doesn't start up again, because frankly, we've heard it before. In short, everyone's keeping an eye out for missions and other writings that are losing the PPC 'spirit' and becoming too powerful, particularly the PGs when they give Permission. We're being vigilant. Within the word world, most agents do not have access to these powerful tools anyway, and those who do and abuse the use of them tend to be singled out by the Flowers for brain-breaking assignments. It's now they keep order in HQ.

Also, I might point out that the Cycle Theory article hasn't been updated for almost a year, which is before all this began, so strictly speaking, it's out of 'date' with regards to this particular discussion. Let me also quote the editing note made when the page was first created:

"Because if there's one thing the PPC needs, it's another insane theory."

To me, that seems to imply that only the insane agents (in fact, only ONE agent - Sambar of Finance) who believe in said theory. I doubt it's therefore something that should be taken very seriously, let alone be the cause of a Board-wide dispute.

- Sedri, wearing her Boarder Hat


Also, I would ask you to kindly tone down your 'rant' next time something upsetting comes up. Calm down before you post and please present it as an argument for discussion rather than throwing around final statements like "it is _!" and "it wouldn't work", which leave no room for opinion and can hurt people's feelings.

- Sedri, wearing her Relative-Oldbie and Hopefully-Respect-Worthy-PG Hat

Have you been reading recent missions? It's evident that most people agree with you.

Recent agents don't have TARDISes; nor do they use Mass Neuralyzers; and it doesn't make sense that they should. Nobody else liked being overpowered, either.

Why? Simple: Glitter levels. An overly powerful PPC agent ends up Sued, and then their own partner (or the DIO, which doesn't exist) has to take them out. It's not fun, and while it's "never happened", we don't want it to ever happen. It's not necessarily even the way that most agents would want it; very few agents are actually sociopathic enough to want to go killing at random without checking first to see that their target is a personality-free, canon-destroying Sue. And that means they'd prefer that other agents not go on killing sprees, either.

The agents need to keep their distance from the canons, sure; but the SEP fields and the constant presence of a partner are usually enough to ensure that. Equally dangerous would be keeping too much distance from the canons--too much distance to care about the characters, understand the continuum, or notice the small details that can be crucial on a mission.

On the writer's side, we don't want our agents to be overly powerful, either, because it's no longer fun to write for them. It's like having Superman as your main character; only he lives in a world where the worst crimes are purse-snatchings and shoplifting and nobody ever thought of becoming a supervillain. In a word: Boring.

Bringing in the big guns isn't necessary unless it's absolutely warranted. That's one of the reasons why I think the PPC should continue to maintain, and train pilots for, Sun Crushers. There will always be sci-fi continua in which the fangirls will write extracanonical solar systems; and there has to be a way to deal with them. But Sun Crushers are no good for any other purpose. With a few hundred agents (give or take a few thousand) who are all dedicated to protecting their favorite continua, there's absolutely no way the PPC will go back to just blowing up any planet with a Sue on it. Would you like it if they blew up Middle-earth because it was such a Sue magnet? Do I hear the phrase "over my dead body"? Thought so.

The Mass Neuralyzer, however, seems to be something that probably isn't a good idea. Yes, it's efficient; but it's impersonal, and you're likely enough to accidentally neuralyze someone hiding outside the radius of your vision. Consider the scenario: You're in Rivendell and you've just neuralyzed the entire Fellowship with a Mass Neuralyzer. Your neuralyzer flash was seen through the window by five Random Elves and Bilbo Baggins. They now all think they are part of the Fellowship. Is this good for canon? Nope.

What I do disagree with, though, is the idea that we shouldn't be writing stories that flesh out our agents' personalities, or writing stories that have a plot beyond just "See badfic, see Sue, kill Sue". Plot and characterization are both good. The PPC is not MSTing; if you want to just spork badfic, plot-free, you should be writing an MST. Your characters should be realistic people, and the reader should care what happens to them. That doesn't mean you have to pile on the melodrama. When I say "plot", I'm talking about things like someone getting hurt, or the Sufficiently Advanced Technology frizting out, or the Warrior!Sue turning out to be a little too Warrior-y for the agents' taste. Things should happen other than just sporking the plot of the badfic. Large-scale emergencies? No. But bringing in another agent pair for backup, or having a food fight in the Cafeteria, or RPing a romance with another agent? Not Emergency material.

I can see your points, and they're quite valid...

... And I kind of agree with you on them. Some of the things we're putting into our PPC stories aren't funny and/or interesting, they're downright stupid, lazy and cheap. It's almost like we've started defiling our own writing, our own canon, our own characters just to protect the things we love. It's disgusting in my opinion, and this is coming from the guy who can't write humor for his life!

I haven't been here in this community for long, and I already see that we're losing what our whole point was originally. We've became kind of divided, with some people still in it mostly for fun and laughs, just trying to have a good time more than anything else, but with others taking this more seriously and trying to explain and expand the fictional universe of the PPC because it means something personal to them somehow. (I'm one of the latter, mostly because I've ended up becoming attached to my agents despite not even getting permission yet, but also because I don't really write humor to begin with). There isn't anything wrong with either in moderation, but it seems that there's a lot more of the second group now than the first one than there used to be.

What we need to find is balance. Not too serious, but not too funny either. What we are is lost, incapable of realizing that we're tearing our whole beloved fictional world apart because we're trying to resist change a bit too much to be healthy. We're attempting to enforce both canon and quality, but we've leaked into enforcing what we think is bad a little as well. This is kind of visible on the wiki, as well. A (possibly somewhat bad) example is on the Pokemon page. Look under the "Sue types" section and you'll see that pokemorphs are for some reason grouped up in there despite there actually being some good 'morph characters out there if you look hard enough. Yes, 90 percent of them are canon defiling, biology defying wrecks that deserve to die by (insert hilarious method of execution here), but just because someone writes an idea that's been done horribly over and over and over doesn't mean that the character is immediately a sue. There's using an overused idea poorly, and there's using it right despite everyone else expecting something horrible just because everyone else is using it badly. Kind of getting a little off topic here, though, so I'm gonna stop ranting.

...Or maybe I'm just rambling on again because I see another wall of text, and my brain wants to make another wall. I dunno, it's kind of hard to tell. Hopefully I wrote all this to get a valid point across, because I can't tell any more.

I believe drawing attention to all of that was the point of the article, actually. In my opinion, it's satire at its finest. {= )

But rest easy--we're not moving in that direction as much as you may think. If you look at the bulk of recently-released missions, I think you'll find they're all nicely low-tech and amusing to some degree, and no emergencies. {= )

~Neshomeh