Subject: What's interesting...
Author:
Posted on: 2010-03-17 13:24:00 UTC
... is that three people have given equally fervent responses to question 1. But all three are different.
hS
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Questions. by
on 2010-03-16 19:02:00 UTC
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I'm sure this will be the last of my question threads, now that I have the time to ask all of the unanswered ones...
1. Why is the PPC so protective of World One? Is it just their duty, or is it simply "special" in some way that makes it of high importance?
2. People fall into HQ from World One through plotholes, right? Plotholes obviously aren't very stable, so can things happen to the people in transport, like changing species, personality, and so on?
...Gaaah. Can't ask them all right now, I'll get the rest up shortly... -
Re: Questions. by
on 2010-03-17 08:26:00 UTC
Reply
- Only if there is a well thought out plot related reason for it.
1. Because... ... You know, I haven't words for this. You do *know* our MO, right? Protect the canon from the Suefluence, etc? World One is the canon of canons; it's reality. It's the canon within which all other canons are formed. It's the canon most agents come from. It's the canon that has, like, biology and physics and shit that, er, works. We abandon it at our peril, because to abandon World One is to abandon logic and sanity and maths and physics and biology and pretty much everything that gives one a basis by which to judge a deviation from canon.
If you have to ask this, I feel you may be missing something. Rereading is in order.
- Only if there is a well thought out plot related reason for it.
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What's interesting... by
on 2010-03-17 13:24:00 UTC
Reply
... is that three people have given equally fervent responses to question 1. But all three are different.
hS -
Re: What's interesting... by
on 2010-03-17 13:39:00 UTC
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Ah, the joys of a collaborative writing effort. We all get to be right, too.
*goes back to read results of last night's belligerent drunkenness*
One of these days I'll learn to only come here sober, I swear... -
Alternate answers by
on 2010-03-16 23:01:00 UTC
Reply
- Part of the reason is that the Flowers -- or rather, their non-sentient ancestors -- came from World One. This implies that their homeworld of Origin is/was in the same universe as World One. Another is that... well, I'll move onto the second question.
2. Another response to question 1 is that Agents tend to fall through plotholes from World One a lot more often than from elsewhere. Agents from, say, Middle-earth tend to have been recruited directly. I don't know why that is.
As to plotholes changing people -- I suppose they could. In my conception of the Way Of Things, there's a whole bunch of different types of plotholes -- a geographical-abberation plothole would bring you to HQ, say, while a genderbending plothole would turn you into a girl/boy, depending. Since Mary-Sues create and to an extent use plotholes, having a plothole which does both would need you to identify a source -- a canon where there's a lot of fics involving simultaneous relocation and transportation. Lots of Sues are dragged from one world to another. Lots of Sues force canons to physically change. Not many do both at once, so they can't be too common.
(And, since I'm here...)
3. No-one in the entire history of recorded missions has been forced into the PPC. Some have been given pretty leading choices -- "We have to kill you unless you join" is basically what Jay and Acacia said to Ranger -- but never actually forced.
4. Ah, but are they?
Seriously. Fanfics are made up of words, or at least heavily shaped by them -- the DTE tends to run into showers of punctuation and entities like Lady Contrivance, and we know Agents can actually read the Words from inside the world. But has anyone ever tried in uncorrupted canon? It may well be that the Words are an alien intrusion which bends a preexisting world to match someone else's shape. Since the PPC doesn't destroy original fiction (ie, since even really bad canon characters don't create dangerous plotholes, which is the reason Sues are killed, at least in my version), that would mean that each original work of fiction is essentially a channelling by a World One author of an alternate, real world in another dimension.
Not that only World One authors can create universes. The Musee de Universes Perdu in New Caledonia contains, as I recall, fiction from Gallifrey before its fall. The reason we don't see mission reports on those is that we wouldn't know what was going on.
(Hey, anyone want to write a PPC mission set in The Grasshopper Lies Heavy?)
hS
- Part of the reason is that the Flowers -- or rather, their non-sentient ancestors -- came from World One. This implies that their homeworld of Origin is/was in the same universe as World One. Another is that... well, I'll move onto the second question.
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Ah, point four... by
on 2010-03-17 02:54:00 UTC
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It's a fascinating little question.
Presumably, agents don't vanish into nothingness in between missions, yet those are not points at which we Boarders are writing them, so that could be evidence that they are more autonomous than pure word-only creations.
I think, though, that in terms of various canons, I lean towards the notion that they are alternate-ish universes which aren't supposed to interact with our World One (except through the harmless transmission of their greatest stories by the honoured natives we call authors), except that they have, hence the tangled mess we call the Multiverse. It seems to make the most sense in terms of the world we play in at the moment. -
More Questions. by
on 2010-03-16 22:00:00 UTC
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Here's some more of the questions.
3. Are there any specific circumstances that one can be "forced" into the PPC? (I expect not, but worth asking.)
4. As all the continua (Except maybe World One) are "created" by authors and the like as Word Worlds, doesn't this technically mean that the people inside them (And by extension, everything created in a Real Person Fic)are made of words, too? I'm talking in-universe, here.
Only two more really major questions. I'll get them up later, too. -
Re: More Questions. by
on 2010-03-17 08:38:00 UTC
Reply
- No.
4. You run the risk of getting dangerously philosophical. Are we not all made simply of words? For the purposes of this shared universe: the words make reality, here. We are all words, yet all we are is words, and so shall we be, whether within or without fic. We write in a collaborative written community; every world is made of words. Real people in World One are just as much merely words as any agent; we are all, and we all write, mere words.
What matters is the weight you attribute to those words.
(Or: every continua is written. That's kind of half the point.)
- No.
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More ansswers by
on 2010-03-16 22:17:00 UTC
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1) No, people are not forced to join the PPC. Even Nursery children raised in HQ don't *have* to be Agents.
2) Sort of. But when we say a Word World is made from/by writing, we don't literally mean hammered together out of, y'know, letters and punctuation. It's more like it's easily affected by words.
Hope that helps
- Trojie, the periodically around -
Answers. by
on 2010-03-16 19:17:00 UTC
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- It isn't. In fact, if anything, World One gets less protection than other continua, considering the fact that we-the-writers generally prefer to avoid dealing with Real Person fic, Bible fic, and other such Real World-based stories. Don't know where you got that idea.
2. People fall into HQ from lots of places through plotholes. I suppose something like that could happen, though I don't believe it ever has. But, if you want a character with a certain species and personality, there's no reason not to simply write them that way in the first place, without the deus ex machina and shenanigans.
~Neshomeh
- It isn't. In fact, if anything, World One gets less protection than other continua, considering the fact that we-the-writers generally prefer to avoid dealing with Real Person fic, Bible fic, and other such Real World-based stories. Don't know where you got that idea.