I know what you mean about blowing up CADs. My view is that they should only explode when faced with a really extreme case - which this story didn't include.

I'm in two minds about the "..." thing. On the one hand, you're sort of right. ^-~ On the other... I think I'm using them to semi-trick the reader. They go in places where you expect speech - but there isn't any forthcoming. To look at the second example:

“Was she an elf too?”

“…” My jaw actually dropped.

The "..." is strictly redundant there; the jaw-dropping covers it perfectly. But I think it adds something anyway, though I admit I'm not clear what. (Or were you also talking about the "... I say this"-type examples, where it indicates initial silence? I'm unclear)

Italicisation fixed. For some reason uploading to GDocs straightened 2/3 of my italics. I thought I'd gotten them all back in, but missed that one.

SIELU! My plan if I ever do anything with them is to expand that 'Elven' into all types of elf - so they'll have experts in Drow and the Eldar Lexicon as well as Quenya and Sindarin. I don't think they'd expand beyond 'Elven' - but there might be other SILUs with similar remits.

(Idea: maybe they all have the same acronym! You'd have the Special Interdepartmental Earth Languages Unit, the Special Interdepartmental Extraterrestrial Linguistic Unit, the Special Interdepartmental Extradimensional Linguistic Unit... and since they're all 'SIELU', they keep getting calls for each other)

Anyway: thanks for the review!

hS

I know what you mean about blowing up CADs. My view is that they should only explode when faced with a really extreme case - which this story didn't include.

I'm in two minds about the "..." thing. On the one hand, you're sort of right. ^-~ On the other... I think I'm using them to semi-trick the reader. They go in places where you expect speech - but there isn't any forthcoming. To look at the second example:

“Was she an elf too?”

“…” My jaw actually dropped.

The "..." is strictly redundant there; the jaw-dropping covers it perfectly. But I think it adds something anyway, though I admit I'm not clear what. (Or were you also talking about the "... I say this"-type examples, where it indicates initial silence? I'm unclear)

Italicisation fixed. For some reason uploading to GDocs straightened 2/3 of my italics. I thought I'd gotten them all back in, but missed that one.

SIELU! My plan if I ever do anything with them is to expand that 'Elven' into all types of elf - so they'll have experts in Drow and the Eldar Lexicon as well as Quenya and Sindarin. I don't think they'd expand beyond 'Elven' - but there might be other SILUs with similar remits.

(Idea: maybe they all have the same acronym! You'd have the Special Interdepartmental Earth Languages Unit, the Special Interdepartmental Extraterrestrial Linguistic Unit, the Special Interdepartmental Extradimensional Linguistic Unit... and since they're all 'SIELU', they keep getting calls for each other)

Anyway: thanks for the review!

hS

Mini-Boarder remerged with her original; 'Dunedain' shipped off to Cassie. (For the record, the accents count, but I often skip them, since they're a pain in the asterisk to put in. In't old days, accents and capitalisation didn't make minis; times have changed). And whingy is a great word. ;)

Thank you for your review! I really liked writing Agent Kaitlyn; she turned out to be more and more fun as she went along. I think it stems from what you're talking about - rather than, like with all my other agents, focussing on nitpicking the details, her focus can be boiled down to one thing: hobbits are awesome! So everything else becomes peripheral to that. Really interesting to write. (And for my next mission: Agent Sambar, from Finance)

I found the lost stories through the Livejournals of their authors. I'm pretty sure there's no more for Artemis or Kaitlyn, and a lot of other LJs from that time have been deleted. If you want to find a lot of stuff to archive, you can... oh, ppc-hq's been deleted. Greeeeeat. So you'll have to try and make connections between the various agent LJs by hand. Dafydd's friend list should be a good place to start. But be aware that it's a... very big job.

... oh, stars. So (Allie and) Chelsea is the same person as (Kaitlyn and) Chelsea. And she has a journal. Kaitlyn's wiki page is not going to be the simple job I expected...

-- and my name. It's four syllables, and the H is pronounced. In Quenya, the second-to-last syllable is stressed. So either 'hween-ey-SOR-on' or 'HWEEN-ey-SOR-on' works. I'll also accept 'HWEEN-ey-sor-on', since it might be easier to pronounce. But the first version is most accurate.

(Which means, apart from your breaking the dipthong in the first syllable, your 'Elvish' version was correct)

But generally, I avoid saying it. ;)

hS

This one says it uses some Primitive Quendian, does that count? I don't know if you meant a fic that is 100% in Primitive Quendian, which probably really would be unfindable.

http://www.storiesofarda.com/chapterview.asp?sid=5793&cid=26449

http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Cuivi%C3%A9nen%20fic

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10161260/1/A-Borrowed-Voice

"A young man survives a car crash that should have killed him… but when he wakes from his coma, he no longer understands English. He speaks gibberish... or so the doctors think; they don't know Old Quenya after all. When he meets Maka Smith, speech therapist and oath-bound kinslayer, an unlikely mission from the Valar forces them to work together… whether they like it or not."

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9349250/1/The-Last-Vanya

"Before the Elves left their Waters of Awakening and Endor for a new world far to the west under the protection of the Valar, a darkness had already fallen upon them and some of their number were lost to them, never to be seen again. This is the tale of one of those Elves and her fate far from the light of the stars, deep in the bowels of Utumno and of Angband. Strong adult themes"

Seems to fit b) okay, and looks dubious, though I'm not 100% if we count it as "bad" just yet because I only just found it.

There seems to be a recent trend for Elf Mary Sues to be called Erulissë. (e.g. See here and here.)

Leaving aside the question of why any Elf would be blasphemous enough to use "Eru" in someone's name, or why an Elf outside Aman would be using a Quenya name, how did this Suvian trend for Erulissë start in the first place?

Half the boarders are probably wondering whether to write a badfic that meets that description, and post it under a false name so that Râmwê can spork it. (Maybe doing things like writing speech in Esperanto as a translation convention to represent Primitive Quendian, just to really annoy him!)

I've found three stories that fit my b) requirement (still hoping for one that actually uses the language!), but I'm not sure if they're, well, bad. So can someones offer opinions?

1/ Of old Fires

Set, according to the A/N, before the Awakening at Cuivienen. Finwë has a brother, named Nárwe, who has a sword (which he shouldn't), and... dies, for some reason. I'm not really sure what happens in this story.

2/ Legends and Crazy Elves

Set at Cuivienen. The word mellon is derived from melons. Since this actually discusses language, I'd love to throw Râmwê at it - but since it butchers language and culture alike, I'm unable to see past that to decide if it's actually funny (since it /is/ supposed to be humour). Someone with less investment in the Silm than me - what do you think?

3/ More Today Than Yesterday

Starts at Cuivienen, and then falls into Modern Earth. It completely lacks in plot, and has... well, this:

"Elwe seems to have met some elf friend of his from Cuivienen. They're crying and hugging and kissing and talking in their other language - "

"Excuse me, kissing?"

"It sure looks dangerous, but we did have that talk before. My point is, Elwe might not come home without the kid."

So yeah. My main issue here is that they're explicitly speaking English after Chapter 1, so I don't think there's anything for Râmwê to do. It also lacks anything I could bully into being a Geographical Aberration. Aaaaaand, yeah, the main charge is 'author appears to be a Christian fundamentalist', which a) isn't a charge (since we don't comment on the authors!), and b) we don't touch religious fic anyway.

I'm kind of hoping #2 is deemed bad, honestly. It has a 'woodland village' for Huinesoron to burn down, and rampant abuse of language. I'm just worried it might be funny... ;)

hS

if somebody manages it, I have a suggestion for a story.

A flower mission from before humans came along. Probably would be better if we could find some older badfic, perhaps one published in a fanzine. Back then, the Flowers were more concerned with plothole stabilization, rather then canon purity, which would require some humor beyond the usual "Oh god, it's so bad, I bash my head into the wall." Besides, since hS has written the most about the past, he seems the most qualified to write this kind of story. Bonus points for a lack of technology/terminology that we are used to today.

Anyway, just a thought.