Subject: Deliberately Stupid Fics
Author:
Posted on: 2014-05-26 23:59:00 UTC
When I say deliberately stupid, I'm talking about stuff that has the same flavor of humor as PPC slice-of-life, but they are wrecking canon universes to do it. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1025334/1/LoK-Fluff I can't tell if it's bad enough to spork, but it has inserts using plotholes as hammerspace.
I hate to do this, but my old topic dropped off the front page.
Analog CAD:
I was wanting to use a strange set of CAD. Basically they would be a set of analog equipment that is difficult to read, but has easy-to-fix failure points. Basically most agents go after the digital devices because the risk of explosive failure is worth not having to do the math.
Disguises:
How complete are the disguises? Would being disguised as a lava dog from Disney's Atlantis make an agent become fireproof? Would disguising oneself as a wolf make an agent sensitive to onions and chocolate?
Do response centers lock from the outside? Sofar I have seen people ducking into the nearest RC, but it always seems abandoned or unclaimed. I've also seen an RC that should've been locked with Rowling magic from the inside.
Basically, I'm thinking of having the first agent of the RC settle in before her partner gets there, but she is away when he gets there. Would he have a key? Do RCs automatically know who is supposed to be able to get in, and only lets in strangers when it is dramatic or funny?
Sometimes when our viewpoint is inside, people will knock (or pound) on the door - but I don't recall actually encountering any locks.
No, wait, I take it back: in The Reorganisation, Nyx gets locked into an RC by the DIS. She specifically hears the lock click. That is, however, a very old RC (while Nyx gets the dates slightly wrong, it still has a portal - actually plothole - generator which dates back close to two decades). So they might not all have those.
Ultimately, your last suggestion is probably closest - as Neshomeh recently pointed out, the 'rules' of PPC HQ are 'whatever's funny'. Unless seeing people muck about with keys is wildly amusing, don't bother writing it. If a locked door is funny, use that; if an unlocked one is funnier, use that.
I will say that there's next to no precedent for locks, so spending a lot of time on it would probably get you some odd looks. But if you're just thinking 'Agent B has to camp out in the corridor until Agent A shows up', you could probably get away with it.
(In general, we treat RCs more like offices than living quarters. While my Real World office does have a lock, I don't tend to use it while I'm a) inside, or b) anywhere on-site. Bedrooms, for those agents who have them, are off the RC, and have their own doors)
hS
I just read a story that could easily be whitewashed into a publishable fic if it was any good. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2473356/10/Vi-the-Vamp
The original character bad guy decides to stop being evil at the end, and somehow hopes to atone for his deeds while being normal. I think he'd be perfect for Intel or a paperwork division.
What are the rules for recruiting original characters from bad fics? Either for yourself or putting them up for adoption?
If they're not too bad, recruit 'em, shove 'em in front of the Marquis de Sod, and send 'em off for what we laughingly call training.
hS
When my vampire goes into fics where she is forced to or prefers to wear a human disguise, would there be a problem with eating or drinking?
As in, does she need to fast or rely on blood in human form so that she doesn't have anything dangerous in her system at the end of a mission? I was thinking of having her eat something "dry" while in human disguise and then violently regurgitate it as a vampire.
As for preferring to wear a disguise even under a SEP field, she'd be trading weakened physical stats and slow healing for the ability to swim without dying.
If there is no issue with her eating while disguised, it might become a weird habit to steal nice food from settings.
They have the physical characteristics of what they turn into. Then when they go back to their normal state, things affect them, if it is still in effect. Although it can be used for more minor alterations of clothing, skin color, hair styles without changing species, which is what I do with my two humanoid agents, since they are mostly only cosmetically different from humans (on the outside).
Actually your idea might work, in the arrows-in-Ent-backs incident with Jay and Acacia, the only arrow injury that hurt when they got back was the one that still had an arrow lodged in it. So, if she didn't have food in her stomach when she dropped the disguise, then she'd be okay, right?
I'm thinking that she will have to get a Biochemical Substance Eliminator and have a personal protocol for length and type of mission.
I'm not sure how long a human could go without drinking water and still remain functional. (I've heard two days, but I wouldn't have her go more than 12 hours.) Since blood has a water content, I'm thinking that she might be able to survive on blood or plasma for short missions even when needing to be completely human, (or if she might need to leave in a hurry,) and then be able to dilute the water content in her stomach with blood on medium missions with the same constraints.
She'll be spending some time Avatar: TLA fics because that's what her partner knows. Good chance of encountering water and she's more flammable than a human. She will refuse to go more than two days without something solid.
It's good to know that there is a cosmetic setting. She would need ears, nails, and teeth blunted, as well as color correction for her skin and eyes at least.
If she was eating in the fic and had to go back to HQ too soon, maybe she could keep wearing the disguise until enough time had passed to keep her from getting sick.
Somewhere along the line, someone with a poorly-calibrated screen wrote "green" in Kain's description and half of the fandom uses "green" when describing him.
Is that a formal charge or an annoyance charge? Is it a judgement call depending on how bad the rest of it is?
Not at all familiar with the game, so I don't really understand the reference. Can you explain the effect that description has?
Fanon is kind of a grey area I think. Others might have a different take on it, but that's mine.
A popular fanon in the Marvel cinematic verse fanfics is that Phil Coulson and Clint Barton are in a relationship (or begin one, or any of the other shipping variations of stories). I really think they are never on-screen with each other. Coulson mentions Clint's name once during a phone conversation. It's not from historical comic sources, Coulson didn't exist in the comics until after he got popular in the movies. I haven't watched 100% of the Spiderman cartoons where he's a character, but I don't remember seeing Clint in them.
The only interaction I've actually seen between the two of them in canon (admittedly I am horribly behind on the Marvel Now series) is Coulson infecting Clint with mind controlling nano bots and setting him up to be tortured by bad guys and then killed by Nick Fury. The bullet Fury shot him with had repairing nano bots in it, so they fixed all the damage from the torture, then the ones Coulson infected him with erased the whole series of events from his mind.
Anyway, point is that there is this huge body of fanon that says they destined for one another. It is completely unsupported by the canon, in any form of the canon that I know of. A lot of the fanon is well-written (and vastly preferred reading over the Fury and Coulson in the comics that I want to kill slowly (in narrative form of course) based on that incident I talked about). Does that make fics based on that fanon charge worthy?
I don't think it does, but someone else might get very infested in that comic series and really hate that Coulson's character is derailed into someone who wouldn't do that to another human being, and be all for killing the story.
I have poked around the internet on the subject of Kain not being green. Apparently it is such a hot-button with some people that there is one thing that keeps the discussion civil. They pull out the quote from the time his concept artist got involved. http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?s=aed80b084091e882e189f28409ba922a&p=1399141#post1399141
Unfortunately I cannot find the writer's quote about Kain not being gay. I don't have any reason for my current crop of agents to mess with slash anyway. (It almost all happens in a canonical blind spot.)
... what you're looking at is a potential/possible AU (depending on whether you believe it's actually happening in the canon but just not shown, or actually contradicted by the canon). The PPC doesn't charge for AUs - because every single fanfic is an AU to one extent or another. We charge for implausible AUs. If Coulson acts in a way which is inconsistent with his canon portrayal - if, say (based purely on the films + 'Agents of SHIELD') he throws away his duty without a second thought in order to snuggle with Hawkeye, then that's a charge. If he acts in character, even if it's an AU - if, say, you had a story where he was given a situation where his canon-friendly decision would be to shoot all the Avengers and crash the moon into the Earth - then you don't charge for it.
Writing quality doesn't just count for a lot - it counts for everything, provided you define it broadly enough.
hS
(No, I don't know what would cause him to do that. I'd be interested to see someone come up with a logical chain of events that would lead to it, though)
I'm seeing some cases where canonically the spelling of something depends on which official source you are referencing.
I see Anacrothe vs Anarcrothe, Sarafan vs Seriphan, Mobius is acknowledged as a common mangling of Moebius.
Someone deliberately misspelled Usctenheim about four times in a sentence before admitting that they couldn't try to pronounce it without reference.
And as far as board-based minis... I don't care to look certain things up when I'm making a post rather than making a fic.
I'm not sure I am following what you are trying to say, overall.
As for Board minis, pointing those out are usually just kind of mild teasing over typos, since errors can't be edited on this Board.
I'm talking about if a "trusted source" spells something one way and an equally "trusted source" spells it differently.
It could be that half of the fan-sites spell it one way, half the other way, and the original material doesn't provide what is correct.
I could even be that a poster texture in the game spells something differently than the same word in the end credits.
I'm seeing that the developer's notes and game code say one thing and an official walkthrough says another.
I think you may have to take things individually. How could the original material not provide the spelling? Wouldn't the character be listed in the end credits at least?
With poster texture vs end credits, I'd probably give more weight to the end credits, especially if they were written in more standardized font.
Official walkthrough, as in a thing that is published by the game developer?
In any case, I'd probably try to get the closest as possible to original source material. End credits of a game, then publisher notes, then legitimately published books, then somewhere way below those things, fan sites.
When I say deliberately stupid, I'm talking about stuff that has the same flavor of humor as PPC slice-of-life, but they are wrecking canon universes to do it. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1025334/1/LoK-Fluff I can't tell if it's bad enough to spork, but it has inserts using plotholes as hammerspace.
You can PPC bad humorfics like anything else if they fail because the writing is objectively terrible. If you personally just don't find it funny, though, it's probably not worth it. We discourage sporking on the basis of personal taste alone. Your Kink Is Not My Kink, and that's okay.
Regardless, I must object to PPC interludes being classified as "deliberately stupid." I'm pretty sure we're all striving for at least moderately clever here. {= P
~Neshomeh
When I tackle these types of fic, I could see that maybe my beta would say "just throw the whole thing out and jump to your next candidate."
The way I'd handle LOK fluff is to not have the agents confront the fully-powered author inserts, but just hijack one of their plotholes to send them to HQ (DIA or DMS?) and clean up the mess when they are done.
Am I correct in assuming that if a story was written before a new installment in the canon contradicts it, the fiction is judged based on what canon was when it was written?
Say for instance that someone wrote a fiction about the Star Trek Moriarty hologram between his creation and the episode where they encountered him again.
I might be wrong in thinking there was a time when no one but the creators of Metroid knew that Samus was a girl. If someone finds an early fic where they call her a guy, it might require looking at the date.
The second Moriarty one, that is. Crazy! Really makes you think about the nature of fictional characters and self-awareness, doesn't it?
But yeah, fics are judged based on the information that was available when the fic was written. It wouldn't be fair to hold a fanwriter accountable for facts that nobody but the creators could have known.
As far as Metroid is concerned, Phobos tells me it was revealed that Samus is a woman at the end of the first game, so the only excuse for not knowing that would be not playing through the whole thing. You may or may not consider that a good excuse—I'm told the early Metroid games were hellishly difficult, but still, the information would've been available.
~Neshomeh
There's a bit of a better excuse for not knowing Samus was a woman: English manuals for the original Metroid actually used male pronouns for her. The original Japanese used genderless pronouns.
Bear in mind, though, that that was 1986. There was no internet back then (at least not for the general public), and we're almost certainly not going to encounter any fanfic from when the excuses apply (1986-1991).
One of my favorite types of fics are the "Trapped in TV Land" where it's not the OC's fault and they aren't thrilled about it. Similar to the LOTR fic "Don't Panic."
If I can find enough wrong with it to spork it, is it appropriate to consider the Insert to be a victim and just untangle the mess without punishing her? (The recruits from mine actually have done enough to warrant at least a trip to FicPsych to talk to them about their Sue-like ambitions.)
The trouble is, most of the time, "OC" + "bad enough to spork" = "Mary Sue." The things that go wrong in an OC-centric story tend to go wrong because they have to in order for the OC to do what she's doing, which is basically what makes them into Sues. Plenty of them whine that they don't want this, they didn't ask for it, it's not their fault, they just want to go home, etc., but that's just to create momentary sympathy. They're not going to behave in a manner that would actually support those statements, because that would never end in joining the canon adventure, being awesome, and finding romance with a hot canon character, would it?
Not saying it's impossible, of course (someone I know is actually working with a similar concept right now), but due to the nature of the beast, I don't think good candidates will be very easy to come by.
~Neshomeh
I realize that it is not an easy challenge, but I did find this little coprolite to add to my personal list for later. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1822518/1/Unexpected-Trip I think it warrants simply screaming at the kids for unrelated teenager-stupidity and sending them back home.
I was thinking of https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2708359/1/Two-Princes but I finally found it and random-checked it right at a NSFW. She protests that she's married right before it happens, too.
https://www.fanfiction.net/u/263307/Ananke-Adrasteia is/was working on a fic where an accidental insert tried to commit suicide so she wouldn't interfere with the story. But yeah, that smells like a not badfic, especially if you know the other story where she self-marked it as a Mary Sue (different definition.)
For Urban Nosgothic, it might be funny to scream at the canon characters for ruining a perfectly good story about a battered woman.
My own two still need yelling at even though neither of them actually get canon adventure, awesomeness, and romance. Though one of them certainly tries, and I guess the other getting to be an adviser/therapist is somewhat awesome.
Is there a way to transfer a mission to another agent, or does it require hacking skills and severe consequences when found out?
Would a Despatch agent see that they are about to get a flood of overflow assignments that the hibernating Legacy of Kain agent can't handle? Or would that agent have to know somebody who is organizing the bounced missions and hear about it over drinks?
Basically I'd like an agent team to specifically be looking for someone to recruit that knows the canon. Maybe a Flower prodded this course?
Trojie and Pads once hacked other agents' consoles to get Discworld missions (link possibly NSFW). But that was because they were banned from the Discworld, not because the agents who got the missions weren't able to complete them or something.
Martin and Mira are out of commission, so they aren't getting any assignments in the first place. There's no need to steal LoK missions from them. O.o
Also, what does a team looking for a recruit have to do with a team stealing missions?
~Neshomeh
About half of the LOK missions I'm looking at are things that would get shunted to Despatch once Martin and Mira no longer run that department. My Despatch agents aren't looking to steal them, they're looking for someone else to pawn them off onto.
(I'm looking for that team to get tired of Despatch, and maybe going through Floaters before getting transferred to a non-action department.)
Love me some tech questions.
Analog CAD: I love the idea of forcing agents to squint at a tiny, illegible set of dials and having to do mental math to get a result but I have to admit that I don't quite understand the nature of this proposed CAD. Are the internal components radically different from the digital-readout CADs or is it just the display that's different? The way you worded this seems to indicate the former but I just want to be sure.
I'd just like to point out one thing: having a CAD fail spectacularly is a PPC staple. Missions wouldn't feel the same way if the tech worked properly...
Disguises: it's a full conversion. The agent effectively becomes the target and shares all properties of that body.
I was thinking that since the analog CAD is cheaper, it still has failures. It's just that it's more likely to snap a spring or have a wire burn out before the entire device catches on fire... usually. Part of their beauty is that not running on magic smoke and not exploding makes them easier to repair.
Another disadvantage is that the way you tell a character rupture from a character replacement is to watch the OOC dial and pay attention to just how the spring underneath the dial snaps and how hot the case gets. Or carry the strips as backup.
"So, that new CAD is supposed to be safer, right?"
"Yep, just have to work a little harder. No pain no gain."
"How much safer is it supposed to be, exactly?"
"The way I hear it, they almost never malfunction."
"That's pretty impressive."
"Oh yeah, old school stuff is pretty nice."
"No, it's impressive because yours just caught fire anyway."
Have you seen litmus strips?
And in this mission, Jay and Acacia demonstrate conclusively how the physical changes work.
Is judging an Original Character done strictly through observation? Knowing the canon enough to pick out a new character, then watching them for Sue-traits?
Ooookay, just did some more reading, still confused.
Is it appropriate to put a bolder note:
Character Analysis Device: for use on original characters
Canon Analysis Device: for use on canon characters
Would litmus strips work on OC's?
The difference between the two devices seems that one explodes and the other doesn't. That and a calibration difference.
Though I think I've seen people use one or the other for examining the surroundings?
I never specified, but always intended it that my All-Purpose Department agents carried a combined CAD, due to the sheer amount of equipment they have to carry to be prepared for anything in any given mission.
An original character (OC) is any non-canon character in a fanfic (i.e., made up by the fanfic's author for the story). Mary Sues and self-inserts are types of OC.
The Character Analysis Device is mainly used to evaluate original characters for Sueness. So are litmus strips.
The Canon Analysis Device evaluates canon characters for how out-of-character they are.
The CADs are supplements to an agent's own knowledge of the canon and observational skills. Observation alone can be misleading—for instance, in one of my missions, Agent Ilraen was certain there was a character replacement, so he charged and killed the character, but it was really a possession, and it took time travel to fix things. Also, CADs (theoretically) provide nice empirical data for the agents' mission reports. For experienced agents who know their canon very well, taking a CAD reading is more a formality than a necessity.
They can both explode if overtaxed, but I guess it is usually the Canon Analysis Device, isn't it? I can't recall seeing a Character Analysis Device overheating at a Mary Sue's extreme Sueness or something. It could happen, though.
I have no idea what a "bolder note" is or where you want to put it, so...?
~Neshomeh
Some of the Wiki articles are hard for me to understand, so I ask questions.
I'm hoping that there is someone that I can beg to make edits if I think of an improvement; I'm uncomfortable about messing with the Wiki and the article might be fine for everyone else.
Now to go hunting for that fic, it sounds like a good story.
The "CAD" article currently says this:
---
CAD can refer to either of two devices:
* The Canon Analysis Device, used to analyze canon characters and determine their OOC level, and to detect possession and Character Replacements.
* The Character Analysis Device, used to analyze original characters and detect Mary Sues.
---
I think that's pretty much what I said here, but how would you make it more clear?
There are also articles for each device, which discuss them in more detail. Did you see those?
Also, by the way, is English not your first language? I sometimes have trouble understanding you, too, to be honest. It's weird, because all the words are right, but it's like there's context missing. Or... something. And other times it's perfectly fine.
Re. editing the wiki, if you don't want to mess with a page directly, you can suggest changes on the article's Talk page or bug an editor on their Talk page. Just check out Wiki Activity to see who's around.
The mission I mentioned is this one. It's best to read any spin-off in order, but I think this one stands up all right on its own.
~Neshomeh
Ah, I was reading the individual pages for each device. I'll start logging Wiki articles that confuse me. Since there is a badge system that I don't care about, someone else can have those too.
English is my first language, but I can't explain what is going on with my ability to communicate. I might just be getting sidetracked while I am typing. (I am at my mother's house and she does keep interrupting me.)
You are the one with the dragon-related stories, right? I think I can figure out the context enough.