This is a point by-point-reply, albiet looking something like an MST! There is a difference!

Take, for instance, the missions themselves. Every single day, perhaps less,

EBW: I thought HQ was timeless….

agents are forced to commit horrible acts, mercilessly killing just to stay alive.

EBW: I thought we were doing it because the ‘Sue’s are warping the canon, not because they’re trying to kill us…

The exorcists fare better on the morality scale due to not killing nearly as much,

EBW: And the crossover people. And the agents in whatever department the UC runs. And just about everyone who isn’t DMS or Floaters…

but there's still the fact that both are only treating the symptoms and not the problem itself (I'll let you interpret that line yourselves).

EBW: Please don’t. It’s actually needlessly vague. And if the ‘Sue’s are a disease in this analogy, why is it morally wrong to go in and slice them to bits?

And that's not even getting on an individual level. Think, just for a moment, how utterly terrifying it would be to actually be an agent.

EBW: Alright, you’ve got a point here…

First of all, you yourself would probably have little combat experience, be not exactly the most fit physically, and would rather be off doing something else.

EBW: The first one isn’t always true, but you’ve got a point here too...

Training is basically being handed a weapon, and being told to try not to die.
EBW: It seems to be working, though.

Your partner or partners, if they aren't as scared as you are, will probably be highly erratic, completely incapable of cheering you up due to lack of sympathy,

EBW: Where has that been in any way part of policy?

and insane to boot.

EBW: Alright, I’ll give you that one…

So, let's say you get that far without breaking down into a gibbering wreck of what was once a perfectly normal person, and you're about to go on your first mission with (Insert partner's name here).

EBW: Not an MST, not an MST, don’t comment on the grammar, don’t comment on the grammar…

If you're potentially lucky enough to get someone who has former experience in the work, you'll probably get instructed on how to use the technology, but if not, too bad for you, it'll be a goddarned miracle for you to even get halfway through the mission, yet alone complete it.

EBW: Don’t forget that we (the authors) are probably going to throw them a curveball just to give the mission dynamic.

Don't even think about free time afterwords, either, because the Ironic Over-Power is sure to smite you!

EBW: SMITÈD! Oh, and you misspelled ‘afterwards’.

Now. Let's say you've completed several missions, have got the hang of it and made friends with your partner. If you've made it this far, congratulations! You're now completely out of your mind, if not dead already!

EBW: We actually don’t die as much as you’d think.

If you somehow manage to reach retirement,

EBW: Since when has that been an option? Remember, we’re all basically wage slaves here.

nobody's going to accept you back home, or anywhere for that matter, they'll think you're absolutely nuts.

EBW: Provided your home is Earth, you aren’t an ex-Sue, and you haven’t heard of that PPC city thingy in…France, is it?

At this point, you might as well be the PPC's property, a tool for them to use and nothing more. For all they care, you're just going to keep doing your job in the name of a faceless goal that doesn't even seem to go anywhere. For all you know, it's just to amuse the higher-ups in some kind of sadistic show for them.

EBW: I didn’t want to drop this anvil, but…SUES ARE DESTROYING THE MULTIVERSE. WE ARE STOPPING THEM. Unless by ‘higher-ups’ you mean us, the writers and readers, the last point is off completely.

Oh, and before you say that I'm taking things too seriously, I haven't laughed once at anything PPC related.

EBW: Well…did you enjoy it, at least? I mean, was it interesting?

If it's so funny, where's the jokes? where's the hilarity and silliness that is so integral to the PPC's spirit?

EBW: Actually, I prefer MSTs. Missions are fun as hells to write, but if I want a laugh I look for an MST.

Am I blind to it? Do I sympathize with fictional characters far too much to see it?

EBW:...Yes?

Because all I see is this descent into madness and subsequent death/locking up, and there's nothing funny about that... I feel like I'm missing out on something...

EBW: *sigh* Well, maybe you haven’t considered all the bases. You could go into Bad Slash if you think they’re more morally right, or Crossovers. Hells, you could go into FicPsych, or write MST’s. You could become a lurker, or leave entirely, although I don’t suggest either. Or, and here’s an idea I’ve actually been toying with, you could change things up a little. Make missions dramatic, rather than funny. It could be really good to be original. I mean, we pride ourselves on our originality; it would be hypocritical to smother yours. I dunno. Maybe this whole reply was a bad idea. Maybe it all was a bad idea. I just don’t know…

The PPC is a pardoy; it always has been. Parodies never take things this too seriously. We waver a bit here and there, sometimes giving our missions as different tang, but the essence of the morality issue is - as has been said - that the Sues and other such characters (bits, wraiths, et cetera) are not people and never have been. They're characters, and if it were ethically wrong to kill a character, then there would be no such thing as entertainment drama.

As for why we make light of 'dark and sinister' issues in the frist place - it'ss probably the same reason that people make jokes about serial killers and dead animals, or why many fanfic writers get a kick out of writing about their favourite characters being tortured - or both. There seems to be some fascination with taking something serious and making light of it; black humour. The story of Sweeney Todd is about an insane serial killer, but you don't see the critics condemning it as morally correupt, do you?

There's also the point that the PPC was born of frustration with badly written stories we can do nothing about. How often, in daily life, do you head people say "Oh, I'm going to kill you", or "This is killing me"? They don't mean it literally, byt Jay and Acacia connected the notions into a silly idea and ran with it. Then we picked it up and ran with it again, and again. For fun.

Also, from an in-world perspective, the agents aren't exactly real people; they don't react quite the same way as we in the real world do. That's just the nature of the stories, because it wouldn't be a parody if our protagonists took things seriously.

Does that answer your question?

Your Mileage May Vary on this answer, but I feel that while yes, there are some rather dark elements lurking in the shadows, as it were, of the stories, there's also the fact that without those elements there wouldn't be any engaging stories. Take any of Terry Pratchett's works, for example. They are widely known for their humor and satirical natures, but there's also an underlying current of darkness there as well. In Witches Abroad, for example, there're the ever-familiar elements of fairy tales (Cinderella, The Frog Prince, etc) written into the story, but there's also the underlying theme of how ultimate and unlimited power corrupts people, as well as the danger of twisting stories to suit one's needs.

That, as a matter of fact, is ultimately what the PPC is here to prevent: the twisting of beloved stories and/or fictional universes so beyond the norm that they're unrecognizable. Imagine if someone with the power to change everything you hold dear into an unrecognizable and warped reflection of itself came to your world (town, city, whatever), and began changing things. How would you react, especially if you knew you had the power to stop this soulless being from ever doing it again? Yes, you would have to resort to assassination, but if you're doing it for the greater good of your world, wouldn't that be at least some justification for the act itself?

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that while yes, there are some things about the PPC that aren't pretty out in the light of day, it's essentially just a way to enjoy oneself and have fun gently poking fun at the bad stories in this world. I for one get a kick out of it, but I suppose it's because I'm just weird like that.

Oh, and if you want to see an organization like the PPC- they kill Mary Sues and plot bunnies (the evil ones, mind you)- go check out Bitemetechie's Anti-Plot Bunny Association stories. Here's a link to the first in the series; they're funny as hell, though the series is on a bit of a hiatus at the moment.

Enjoy, and I hope that helps some.

Pretzel

1) Sues are not people. That's really integral to what makes it funny. Sues and their companions the bit-characters are not sentient, thinking beings in any way that we understand them. To drag in theology, they don't have souls. That's the key thing, really.

2) Agents are not conscripts. Most agents, especially agents from World One, chose this. And like it.

3) In terms of everything against you - very true. But on the other hand, the Word World is protecting you on a mission. That does a lot.

4) Despite all the "no retirement EVER" jokes... retirement is totally possible. And you can go home again. Look at Boarder!Laburnum's characters. I could be misinterpreting but it seems to me that Foxglove stays in contact with her family all the time; Agent!Laburnum was re-establishing contact with her family. And if you don't want to go home, you have ever piece of fiction ever created to escape to. Look at Acacia from the original series, isn't she off happy in some Roman continuum? If a really desperate agent wanted, they could go settle in the Hundred Acre Wood or Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. Horrendous fate!

5. It is possible to live a happy, if incredibly bizarre, life at HQ. I'm gonna cite Pads's and Trojie's Ten Years Hence here - in that future, at least, they're living in HQ and have a, uhm, nontraditional, but very happy family that they could never have had anywhere else. Life is nice.

6. As to funny... I don't know. There is, in fact, an element of black comedy here. I'm curious as to what you read, and why you kept reading if you didn't think it was funny or enjoyable. I'm curious as to why Things I Am Not Allowed To Do At The PPC, Agent Lux being Lux, and spontaneous water fights aren't funny. I guess this is kind of a matter of perspective, though, and a personal thing.

(My apologies if I misrepresented anyone's work, by the way.)

And, as a former writer of angst myself, I can understand where you're coming from. (I say former because I've become lazy in recent times and don't have the mental energy to devote to writing proper, realistic angst.) Angst is fun. At least, I consider it fun. Then again, I am a fairly twisted writer who likes to see her characters suffer, but that's a different story.

On the other hand, I think all the craziness is just a coping method. Yes, being an agent, especially a newbie, would be terrifying. Not only to have to go into a badfic (scary in itself), but to have to dispose of a person (who may not be a 'person,' as such, but dangit, when you're looking at her, I expect she might feel like one, at least a little), and to have to do so with a complete stranger is scary. (And yes, I rate the last as the scariest. I have a... warped value scale. Yay for being antisocial...) There are two ways to cope with that kind of thing: you crack, at which point you're taken to FicPsych and probably sent home, or you take it all as absurd but necessary. It's those who take the second track who stay as agents and actually do all the work.

I say this, of course, even as I'm sitting here wondering if my characters are reacting enough to the horrors of the 'fic in which they are currently stuck. Angst is a hard habit to break. -grins-

So yeah, I understand where you're coming from, and I sympathize with you. I find PPC stuff funny, but I also see the darker side, and I want to work with that. As people said, you need a balance, and all silliness is just as bad as all angst.

--anamia

You see what you want to see in a work of fiction. Much like the stereotypical monster in the closet, what is reasonable and prudent to one person is most definitely not believable to another. I think that at least in the most part, your perspective differs from mine enough that the implications you see and the ones I do are definitely two different things.

Take, for instance, the missions themselves. It has been stated (in TOS) that we can't hurt badfic authors, as they have rights. This implies that their creations do not have rights, and thus are not alive - therefore, ending them isn't as horrible an act as it might seem. They're just words, after all, and we're re-writing them to be something else. (Namely, not continuing to distort the canon.)

A lot of the PPC's humor comes from the workplace - management that seems out of tune with reality itself, to say nothing of the employees, is a classical example.

The Ironic Overpower is another entity borrowed from the workplace, especially customer service positions. I do A/V for money, as I'm sure many of you know. Now, the vast majority of my events run smoothly, professionally, and so on. It's the ones that don't run smoothly that would make it onto my blog if I felt like blogging, and especially the ones where multiple things fail for humorous effect. For example, the event this morning. I was scheduled to start (and did start) an hour and a half before an event to set up a single mic for a presenter. When the presenter arrived, they didn't even notice that the mic existed, stood in front of the stage, and talked to the people unamplified. Meh, big deal. However, the thing that has me shaking my fist at the Ironic Overpower is the fact that I started at 6 AM on a Saturday.

The Ironic Overpower is not a force that keeps Agents busy all the time - it's a semi-anthropomorphization of the odd way that when things go wrong, there tend to be multiple things that go wrong, and all at the best possible time to make things entertaining and amusing. I suppose I could sit down and do the statistics and work out how often it actually happens, but in my work, at least, it seems to happen far more than it should. (Then again, the times it does are the ones people tend to remember.)

And no, I do not believe that it would be terrifying to be an Agent. We're going on adventures in far-off and magical places to save the world - not dramatically, not through magic speshul powers, but by stabbing words in the face. Are big-game hunters terrified by what they hunt?

As far as not being able to go home, see Pads's missions - she goes into that a lot more than I ever have.

As with any storytelling, the PPC stories are exaggerations for comic effect. There was quite a bit more to training here where I work than "here's a sound board, go run the state Supreme Court", but that's what it seems like at times, and if I was telling it for humorous effect, that's exactly how I'd tell it.

No, the PPC isn't a descent into madness. For every potential trauma-inducing moment, there are hours of running around in Middle-Earth, seeing the scenery, laughing at people's stupidity, and so on. No, it's not a safe office job, but the ancient chinese proverb that "may your life be interesting" is a curse is complete and utter bunk. The PPC is an adventure.

Also, from a very machinistic perspective, we don't write Lovecraftian spiral-into-madness fics because we don't want to read them. This is fiction. We tell the stories we want to tell, and that is not where we want the PPC to go. We want to read about a flake with a camera and a slightly bloodthirsty card-game aficionado saving Middle-Earth one badfic at a time. We want to read about hospital drama where the patients could be from any world imaginable. We want fun and adventures and completely ridiculous superheroes saving the multiverse, so that's what we write.

I second everything Calista said and so am not going to repeat it, but would just like to add in addition . . .

One important thing to remember is that, for the most part (with rare exceptions such as in Suedom) Mary Sues aren't real people. Not even in fiction. I mean, a well-designed 3D character in a story might be construed as "real" within the context of a story, but Mary Sues are one-dimensional (at most) wish fulfilments. They are, in other words, soulless. The is no more evil in killing them than in killing a pencil drawing of a stick figure.

One last thing: people adapt. I mean, people adapt all the time, swiftly, and necessarily to new situations. They are changed, but seldom broken. While reading your question-thing, I tried to put myself in the place of my agent, and my reaction was:

At first, it would be difficult, but I'd adapt. And it wouldn't drive me insane. It wouldn't be fun, but it would be necessary. And I could do it, if I had to. To protect worlds and lives, I could do it.

Killing 'Sues isn't a matter of "let's be bloodthirsty because we're sociopathic." (Well, mostly it isn't. Some agents are a bit... okay, a lot... sociopathic.) It's more like the lesser of two evils: If the Sue is allowed to stay in the continuum, she will literally destroy the continuum, along with all the characters living in it. Recruiting a full-blown Sue is also out: Since the PPC itself is a continuum, a Mary Sue in the PPC may not just begin to unravel HQ, but will have access to almost every continuum out there. The implications are obvious--take them out or the multiverse dies.

What happens if Sues get free rein: http://nath-ppc.livejournal.com/544.html

Most Sues employ mind control and brainwashing to control canon characters, so it's not like they're innocent. They're more like the personification of canon distortion than anything else, though they're sometimes portrayed as being a little like a viral infection (think zombies or vampires), as they can occasionally turn non-Sues into Sues by sheer influence.

Some PPC fics have explored the reality of having to kill Sues. Not every agent is a gung-ho 'Sue killer.

Kitty Callahan, for example, only managed to kill the Sue in question because her partner was in danger: http://wizkit.livejournal.com/524.html

And from the perspective of the 'Sues: http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Suedom

Yes. It is terrifying to be a PPC agent. Why do you think they develop such a sarcastic sense of humor? For the most part, though, it's only about as terrifying as being a soldier going to war (which is extremely terrifying, but something that people do every day, so you can't say it's unrealistic)--and done for about the same reason: Love of canon worlds. Hating to see them torn apart.

Almost universally, PPC agents are volunteers. They're hardly paid, so it's not like there's economic pressure to stay; they could probably, if they liked, just stay in the next continuum they were sent to visit. Overwhelmingly, they've made the choice to risk it, take their average life/sanity expectancy of one year, and actually make a difference.

Think about it: If all this were real; if all the books and movies you loved were real worlds; if there were billions and trillions of sentient creatures that needed protecting from the reality-warping powers of what might as well be eldritch abominations in the shape of ridiculously beautiful teenage girls--well, would it really be so highly illogical to set out to risk it and make a year's worth of difference? In general--and as weird as it sounds--PPC agents are probably happy with their jobs, when they aren't shoveling down Bleepka or fighting for their lives.

The Flowers do have an ulterior motive. It's called "stopping the multiverse from turning inside out and becoming utterly uninhabitable". It's a matter of common goals: The Flowers want to have a habitable universe; the PPC agents want to protect their favorite worlds. When you have a common goal, you might as well team up.

Um, and yes. You are taking things way too seriously. The PPC is meant to be humor. It has a dark side; but the dark side, I think, makes the humor all the better. If you've got a near-100% chance of going nuts or dying, it makes quite a lot of sense to say screw it and laugh in the face of everything you encounter. It's just a matter of perspective. Once you know your days are numbered, you set out to enjoy every second--including the crazy hilarity of things like fangirls who accidentally cause Legolas's eyeballs to acquire sentience of their own and fly around the room...

Your idea is that if you're in a bad situation, the only logical response is to go angst and say "Oh, woe is me! All is lost!"... but why? It's just as logical to acknowledge that your bad situation sucks, and either set out to solve the problem, or else make the best possible life you can regardless.

We're all in the same situation, you know. We're all going to die, and some of us will go nuts beforehand, temporarily or for good. Whether it's a matter of one year or seventy, that's the universal human problem. How we deal with it can define our lives... But I'm getting existential. Let's go back to herding Mini-Balrogs and exorcising badslash demons, shall we?