Subject: On crash dummies and assassinations.
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Posted on: 2014-06-21 19:23:00 UTC

Thinking further, I really like your agents’ reactions to the POV shifts, and the necessity to narrate the crash dummies actions when it adapts to the new POV would probably take away from this. I don’t urge you to rewrite everything with a crash dummy. Considering that every PPC story except TOS is fan fiction for TOS, you may actually claim that, since Jay and Acacia never mentioned a crash dummy or an agent sued by a First Person fic, these fanon things don’t need to exist in your spin-off.

But of course trying to keep all spin-offs consistent is more fun. Maybe you can just add an author’s note at the end, saying that Silver and Anna had to undergo exhaustive examinations by Medical, FicPsych, DoSAT and DMSE&R, but that it is still unknown whether there was something special in this badfic or whether they are generally immune against First Person effects. And then you have a story arc that may span several missions: Will they remember to use the crash dummy to be rather safe than sorry, or will they learn in a hilarious way that they actually aren’t immune?

Killing the ‘Sue is often cathartic, for the agents as well as for their author. But if you don’t feel like writing an extended killing scene, don’t drag it out just to please your beta readers. Your agents are floaters. It may be in character for them to see an assassination as just one of the many different jobs they do, not as an outlet for their anger like we would expect from specialized assassins in the DMS. So there’s no need to make a big fuzz about it in the mission report.

HG

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