Subject: Fantastic!
Author:
Posted on: 2014-04-02 00:01:00 UTC
I love throwing the Sue back into the real world to experience mundaneness. Reminds me of what I did with the Holmes Sue from my second mission. And props on the not-heteronormative relationship there, too.
(It's called To Be or Not To Be by Ryan North and it's extremely tongue-in-cheek and awesome.)
I was wondering, since a couple years ago we were talking about different mission formats... what if I wrote a CYOA PPC Mission?
I'm going to give it a try with this Lemmings story. If there are any objections or ideas or advice that you guys can give me, I'll be glad to hear it.
Hmmm... how would you set up the choice, with links or something?
...and for people to scroll up and down to them, but I can see how that'd be a problem.
If I have the time I'd make it clickable. Or maybe someone else on here who's better at making clickable things can make it clickable for me.
It'll probably take a while to get it into good shape, but I'm sure it will be worth it in the long run. The best part is, you only need to have one canon ending (or a few, maybe), so you can play with all kinds of weird, this-never-really-happened madness in the other endings!
(Man, are Sues still doing that? Getting "killed" in world one and reappearing in Middle-earth and romancing Legolas? Aren't they, like . . . bored yet?)
One of her endings is:
The next day, you turn on the news to hear that Kate and Sean’s friend Jason died in a drunk driving accident. Sean was at the wheel, and he was heavily injured in the crash as well.
Kate and Jason’s families press charges. Sean is convicted of his DUI and vehicular manslaughter, and faces several years in prison as well as the revocation of his athletic scholarship to the University of Miami. You knew you shouldn’t have let him get into that car drunk, yet at the same time you can’t help but feel like you’ve escaped a greater fate. That suspicious sense that you’re being watched has dropped from your shoulders entirely.
Weighed down with the grief of what has happened, you visit his cell and return his promise ring. He cries a little, but you’ve figured out by now that sometimes your first love isn’t always going to be your true love. Besides, you’ve got great plans for your future, and you don’t want him stopping you.
You go up north to play soccer and study English at Penn State. You meet a very pretty girl with long blonde hair named Laurel Greenleaf, and the two of you move to Canada, get married, and live happily ever after*.
THE END.
(*Well, as happily ever after as it gets with bills to pay and a cat that keeps on hogging the broken radiator. But it’s much better than the fates you might’ve had in other lives, no?)
And there's going to be another one of hers that I'm going to use as the ending for just about every time you play as the Sue and make a decision that gives her character development.
Basically, I'm going to try and retell the Suefic with the Urple Choices (showing so many other things that the Sue could've done with her story that wouldn't have been as Canon-breaking), and the PPC Mission with the Sunflower Yellow Choices. Then everything else can be alternate.
I love throwing the Sue back into the real world to experience mundaneness. Reminds me of what I did with the Holmes Sue from my second mission. And props on the not-heteronormative relationship there, too.
I do recall reading an interview that revealed Ophelia was a genius scientist and one of the playable characters in it because North, and I quote, "wanted her to be rad". That does sound pretty rad. A Shakespearean lady scientist, or possibly even a lady-scientist, fighting off political intrigue or royal sabotage or assassins lacing poison in everyone's food. I never read Hamlet, so I have conflicting ideas on what it is about. Pop cultural osmosis is occasionally less than helpful.
Well, the majority of choose-your-own-adventure books I read in my childhood had at least one ending that came completely out of nowhere, like a baseball diamond being overtaken by carnivorous moss or the playable character being abducted by aliens(I wish I could remember the title of the moss one, so that I could look it up online and show you that I am in no way joking about that), and a single page in the middle of the book that you could only get to by not following any of the paths and just opening the book to that page. Internet choose-your-own-adventure stories usually have the equivalent to the latter buried somewhere in the table of contents, either with a random number if the chapters are numbered or with an unassuming title if they have titles. Any way, I think both would be fun. Plus, the choose-your-own-adventure style means only one path would follow the formula, or possibly two or three since the PPC has a looser idea of what deviation from normal looks like. We could easily end this with Eledhwen fighting the clone of her evil clone on Elrond's rooftop, or the DIA misinterpreting a radio message someone randomly decided to send and going in to rescue them prematurely, or the Marquis de Sod temporarily re-entering active duty for some off-the-wall reason.
You know what would be fun? Completely running with that, and having the opportunity to do something crazy on every page. You could stick to the plan and take charges, you could sneak off to go pick up some new hats that the Sue spawned through poor use of a metaphor, ooor you could steal the Sue's car and drive it into a swimming pool just to see how the words would react when the Sue has to drive it next.
The Sue "Rossania the Yellow Istari" has advanced further into Rivendell. What do you do?
* Follow her
* See if you can nick some of those peanut butter sandwiches from Lindir before the canon removes them
* Tackle the Sue's ex-bodyguard
* Seduce Lindir
* Recruit the Sue's ex-bodyguard
* Tackle Lindir
That is probably too many options. The mission would take forever to write if there were more than four per page.
What were some of the other mission format ideas?
-lesser-known Canon character being temporarily recruited to work with an Agent in a continuum that isn't their own.
-mission as detective noir piece (I'm considering doing that, for a Sherlock mission)
...I can't really remember anything else, but there were several that were thrown around. It was definitely compiled somewhere and possibly even voted on at one point.
I could tell by the use of 'Seduce Lindir.' For those who have never read Brony Hero of Equestria, a reoccurring joke within the story is that you can (try to) seduce anypony you meet. They end with...Interesting results.
Actually, if it were me, I would not have the main characters be any established agents. If they were previously established, then as a reader, I feel the need to use what I know of the character to influence my actions, rather then what I would do/be funny. Rather, I would have the agent be one of a few things.
1. A recruited bit character. This way, jokes could be made on how the agent has no personality, and so can do anything the reader wants. A literal blank slate.
2. A Crash Dummy that came to life. This would allow for heavy lamp shading, as a living You crash dummy is supposed to act as the character in a second-person fic. Now a CYOA story makes more sense, as a living You dummy has to have a narrative involving second person surrounding it.
3. Both. After all, agents need a partner. In this case, it would make sense for the living You dummy to be the main character, while the bit character is your partner. Occasionally, a prompt can occur that says "Be The Other Guy," and you can take the role of the partner for a little bit. You can even show this switch further by having the partner's sections in first person instead of second."
Oh, I have an idea for the agent's names! The sentient dummy is, obviously, You. The bit character is Mia. Probably pronounced me-a.
Funny as it can be, you need to have some non-insane options for a few pages. Sure, what happens can be insane, but you need a bit of buildup before you can start licking Lindir's face. Just saying.
Also, that "You can only get hear by cheating" page? I don't like it, but if it does exist, there had better be jokes about plotholes and some serious fourth-wall breaking.
my own Agents. Because we all know they'd only do certain things and that'd influence the choices.
Back to the drawing board! Can I steal You (Yue? because heck knows my Chinese name gets mispronounced all the time) and Mia?
Yue. It's pronounced a bit more like the solfege note "re", but with a but of a "oo" sound in between.
However, according to my sources in ATLA it's pronounced "you-ay", and a lot of people in my childhood have pronounced it "you". So yeah.
I suggested them for your use anyway. Do with them as you wish.
Now that I have a few minutes to think, I can see how having too many branches and wild actions might either throw people off or derail proper story progression. So, maybe only have the crazier choices available at certain junctions or when they would be funniest or tell the most interesting story. Then, restrict the choice selections a little more than usual during crucial decisions so that it won't start getting more than the prescribed one or two off-the-wall endings. It's a choose-your-own-adventure, not a tabletop game. There will have to be limits on individual input, or nothing will make sense after a while.
I would recommend that you make sure you check up on how, exactly, to write a CYOA. It's way, WAY harder then it looks. When done right, it's hilarious. When done wrong, it makes people beyond frustrated. I find these series of reviews for a CYOA fanfic extraordinarily helpful as a check for how people will receive the story. Now, the fanfic is based on My Little Pony, but the reviews are more based on CYOA as a genre, so it should still be helpful.
Also, speaking of reviews. You all may have noticed a lack of review on the PPC:TOS from me. Well, as I said, things have been a little hectic recently. I'm hoping to get it out soon, but I am not going to give any form of time frame. At all. Let's just say, some time before I quit the PPC forever.
Here it is. Sorry about that.