Subject: A Question About Suefics
Author:
Posted on: 2014-05-14 16:09:00 UTC
So, during my hiatus, I managed to get a lot of research done. However, I haven't been able to find very many "failed missions". I found several missions where things went wrong, like when Agent X had to go save Agent Manx, but the Mary Sue still died.
Could someone point me in the right direction, or, if what I'm looking for doesn't exist yet, could you please tell me so?
... the most obvious way for a mission to fail is for something bad to happen to one or both agents, and that's something most writers don't want to do to, y'know, the characters they plan on using again. Heck, I have two missions of my own which resulted in serious injury or worse, plus one which knocked two agents unconscious partway through. But none of those failed, because PPC agents finish the job.
Heck, take a look at the ending of this one. The Sue put herself way out of reasonable reach - and we brought half the PPC in and exorcised an entire planet to be sure of getting her. Agents of the PPC don't give up on a mission. They do get their target.
hS
... if an agent pair were to fail a mission due to something bad happening to both of them, how would we know? If they don't survive to make their report, then we probably aren't going to be reading about it.
The Wiki notes that the DMS 'has a fairly high turnover rate, mostly due to the inherent risks of bad writing and in confronting beings that, due to their speshulness, are often far more powerful than the agents themselves.', and yet it's very rare to hear about any deaths occurring in missions - that sort of thing was much more common in Emergencies.
My own personal headcanon is that all of the agents that had a couple of missions and then haven't been heard of for a few years are listed as MIA, presumed KIA. Agents do fail missions, it's just that when they do, they don't tend to be able to tell their stories. I'm not saying that agents fail missions all the time (if they did then the staffing shortage would probably be an even bigger problem), but it probably does happen.
A less dramatic possibility for a 'failure' would be to have the agents only be partially successful - maybe a pair of Assassins succeed in capturing a Sue and charging her, but then she breaks loose and escapes via a plothole. Her influence is gone from that particular story, so the agents succeeded in part, but the Sue could still cause damage elsewhere (and now has experience dealing with the PPC), so it could've gone better. That could be a way of setting up a bit more of a story arc if an author had used the same self-insert/character in multiple stories.
Tiny thing: in that last link, there's a typo just before Alumia merges with Middle-Earth:
"The vampire lifted her arms, her eyes blazing with red flame, and a bolt of lighting struck the tree."
"Lighting" should be "lightning".
Actually, there are quite a lot of words missing single letters throughout. You want me to go through and make a list, or does it not matter that much?
We're the PPC, aren't we? I may not be able to squash all the typos at the time of writing (I just found another one in there somewhere), but I'm not going to turn down someone offering to find them for me.
hS
Let's see, then:
"...an elf-like girl with dead white skin, hair growing all the way along her spine, and emerald green eyes."
This ought to be "emerald-green". Though that error might be from within the 'fic; I'm not certain.
"Shortly after leaving Rivendell...or where Selene should be."
"Should be" should be "should have been", I think. Switching tenses mid-sentence is a charge! :-p
"Selene shook her head. "Come one, we'd better catch up with the Fellowship.""
"Come on" is intended here, I think.
""The author's a non-Native speaker..."
Does "Native" need the capital N? This is another one where I'm not sure whether it's an error or a stylistic choice.
"...they leapt through Dafydd's hastily opened portal to the next chapter."
"hastily-opened", please. Missing hyphens are a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
""Well, onto the next chapter.""
This should be "on to", unless Dafydd is climbing on top of the next chapter.
"...being reduced to a small blackened crater..."
Again, this ought to be past continuous, not present continuous. "Having been" for "being", that is.
""It could actually be a coincidence." maintained Selene." Comma at the end of speech.
"...five hundred years worth of self-preservation instinct."
"years" needs an apostrophe at the end.
"...not into the next chapter..."
You can't tell here, but the ot of "not" are italic in the story, while the n isn't.
"...who were sitting amidst the rubble smoking."
Needs a comma between "rubble" and "smoking".
"Climbing painfully to his feet, Dafydd, looked around..."
Comma after "Dafydd" is unneeded.
"Dafydd nodded, and then glanced at the word."
I assume this is meant to be "Words".
"...watching the 'Sue having a rather a random moment of Angst."
"having rather" - no "a".
"All that they're going to is walk the Paths of the Dead..."
Missing word: ought to be "going to do".
"...between Gondor and Mordor when he composure started to leave her..."
"her", not "he".
"As soon as she saw the weapon, Alumia had dived for the nearest tree and merged with it."
Again, changing tense mid-sentence. "had seen" for "saw" is better.
"... but to Selene's disappointment, was seemingly uninjured."
Either "but, to Selene's disappointment, was..." or "but t Selene's disappointment was..." Either bracket the inset with commas or use none.
I'll stop here, because I have to head home. More will come on Monday. And I hope I haven't come across too harshly/rudely. I really enjoy your work; I'm just a little bit of a grammar Nazi. At least you use British spelling.
Oh, and there are a whole lot of places where you've put a comma where I'd use a semicolon, but I let them go because it's fairly subjective.
The nice thing is (for me, at least) that I know at least half of those weren't written by me, but by my one-time cowriter. A fair number are still mine, of course, but a lot aren't. So that's encouraging! Or... something.
Anyway, thank you! I've edited them all out of existence.
hS
Hey, it's all good. I just wish I could get paid to do this sort of thing.
Anyway:
"She grabbed the RA, on the pretence of dropping off at DoSAT..."
Needs an "it" after "dropping".
"...searching through the corridors for an undeterminable period of time..."
Now, I'm not certain, but I don't like the look of that 'word' "undeterminable". And the spell-check doesn't like it, so that probably ought to be "indeterminate".
"...a stocky, brown haired girl..."
"brown-haired" here.
"The whole planet?..."
I assume the agent isn't vocalising the italics tags. I don't know much html, so I can't correct it. EDIT: apparently the posting board changes that to italics, but google docs (or whatever you're using to host the story) actually shows the tags.
"Takua recognized them as friends of Darkling."
Seeing you're British, I have no qualms about saying: "recognised", not "recognized".
"Please use it do I can have my department back as soon as possible."
I think you've got "do" for "so" here.
"...why don't the have Pepsi, everyone should have Pepsi..."
"they", not "the".
"Why she wondered, do I have to put up with this?"
Needs a comma after "Why".
"Every time she moved into the girl's line of sight, she merely moved her head and watched another."
This has ambiguous use of "she". I had to read it twice to sort it out properly. Not sure how to fix it, though, and it's not necessarily wrong, just slightly confusing.
Plus, during the bit in HQ where Takua's getting reinforcements, nearly every instance of "'fic" is rendered "fic".
One last thing: in most places that I've seen the term "Mary Sue", it's rendered like that; no hyphen. So, technically, "'Sue" shouldn't have an apostrophe. I've checked the Original Series, and they spelled it with a space, too. Just a heads-up.
The entire Takua section was written by Rath, her creator. Explains the different punctuation of 'fic (and the massive overuse of it), and the American spelling. And 'undeterminable', actually.
As for Mary-Sue - it's a stylistic choice. I use the hyphen-and-apostrophe method, other people don't. I just prefer it. ;) I'm trying to think up an analogous situation - a technical term which is two separate words, neither of which is a modifier (so not, for instance 'Wild Rose' - 'wild' is clearly a modifier on 'Rose'). Anyway, can't come up with one. I still prefer the hyphe-nation.
Regardless of that sidetrack: thank you! All fixed now. (I wish I knew who Agent Darkling belonged to, though...)
hS
Wait... "interminable"? That means something like "unending". The word I suggested was "indeterminate", which is the actual word meaning what was intended by "undeterminable". What you've put is not wrong; it's just changed the meaning of the sentence.
As for Mary Sue... Thinking about it, I do prefer "'Sue" as the contraction, because it clarifies that it's part of a larger term. So that's all good. :-)
And I'm happy to help. I might do a couple of other stories, if you want, though the Board is perhaps not the best place to put that sort of thing.
Yeah, they do seem to almost always get their targets, eventually.
Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.
...The typical agent seems pretty good at what they do, at least enough so they keep surviving missions, so mission failures probably only seldom happen. If it looks likely to happen they're probably allowed to call in reinforcements (like what happened with Alumia; helping agents who've found themselves in over their heads is also one of the duties of the DIA's Special Response Division, as well as Floaters' Special Operations Division according to the wiki), and should a mission go completely belly-up I imagine the Flowers just send more agents into the fi...il someone manages to kill it.
That's what I was thinking, too. The wiki does indeed say that.
That should of course be "fic etc." (the other deleted word of course being "until")
I've had experience with that issue on other websites. They're sometimes very funny censors.
I don't think there are much any. The only failed mission I've heard of was Subjugation, and I think I heard on the board that that failed because one of the authors doing it had to abandon the project in the middle, and agreed to represent that in universe by saying that the mission failed, ending where they had last gotten to.
I see. So, very few failed missions... Very interesting.