Subject: Real persons and Legal
Author:
Posted on: 2014-07-23 12:42:00 UTC
Since the "Tales from Despatch" were published twelve years ago, there have been many discussions about what the PPC does and shouldn’t do. I’ve been here for less than a year, so I don’t know all this from first hand, but apparently highly valued members of the community left because they felt no longer comfortable when the PPC as a whole was accused to destroy the hopes and lives of aspiring young authors. Thus, nowadays we try to be very clear about these facts:
We are not evil, that’s our dark allies, the OFUs.
We don’t want to hurt real people.
We certainly don’t want to discourage authors who fail in their attempt to write good fiction.
The OFUs (pretend to) abduct badfic writers and torture them to teach them better writing. This is unethically cruel, illegal under most jurisdictions, and fun to read or write. It’s acceptable because these "authors" are clearly fictional and the real persons they may be based on voluntarily submitted their overblown avatars to be victims of these procedures.
The PPC deals with real badfics, whose authors, unlike the author avatars at the OFUs, are really real persons who can be hurt, like you and me. Sometimes we spork our own stories, and in very rare cases, authors submit their shameful past to the PPC, but most authors don’t volunteer for this treatment. This is the reason why I despise the use of the terms "real person" and "author" on the wiki page. It’s the author’s self-insert, not the author, and it is not more a "real person" than any fictional character who is not said to be "unreal" in-story is a real person in the context of the fic. Why would Despatchers bother to take snatched characters back to their home if these characters weren’t real anyway?
The OFUs’ methods don’t really work. People learn from experience, and the best way to learn writing is to write. (I’m not saying that every writing exercise should be published, but to get concrit you need to show it to somebody.) We may want to arrest or even destroy the trans-dimensional hopper who inserts himself into LotR and Startrek and MLP – FiM and twenty other continua. But for the author of these stories, we can only hope that someday he will get it right and will contribute to the total amount of good fiction that helps to out-weight the bad fiction. Callista may have expressed this better than I can do.
This said, I would really like to see more Despatch missions. I wish, someday the wiki’s Despatch page could be based on References (6) – (10), saying that "In the early days, some agents didn’t get all their Department’s premises right, like Reference (2) confusing a snatcher and the snatchfic’s author. But the Hydrangea called all agents in to a meeting and set things straight."
(Someday, the Uncanonical Department of Inaccuracies may try to enter "Sleepover!!! – A Girl Called Bob" and change every occurrence of "author" to "snatcher" to see whether the mission still works just as well. But since this happens behind the creativity shield, it doesn’t affect PPC’s continuity.)
May it be appropriate to joke about all the other agents thinking of Legal as "sooo mysterious" when Despatchers are in regular contact with Legal’s "Fictional Law Enforcement Division"? May it be appropriate to joke about "Fictional Law Enforcement" now being dysfunctional, because the Legal Department wanted to be more mysterious? If Legal’s work wasn’t delegated to somebody else (who might this be?), Despatch may just warn the self-inserts that this time, they got away with a forceful decontamination, but next time, they might be forcefully enrolled into the appropriate OFU or, if they act too sueish, the assassins might come after them.
Reading this first Despatch mission, I now see where you got the idea that a human Despatcher looks human in the fics version of the real world and the disguise only kicks in when the agent enters Middle-Earth or Equestria. I may have to say something more about this, but, you know, there is work to do.
HG