Subject: I found a bad, bad thing.
Author:
Posted on: 2014-03-24 18:44:00 UTC
There is a piece of writing in which Sabrina The Teenage Witch (live-action canon, not animated canon) ends up on the bridge of the USS Voyager and uses magical powers to fend off a Borg attack. This is a thing that exists. In our world. Where we live.
The worst part?
We can't PPC it.
Thoughts?
You can still spork it. That's to say, a dramatic reading, a MST, a complete ripping-apart-of-the-story like Kippur's Eragon sporkings.
I'm tempted to do it. Anyone got a pdf?
I mean, I'm not going to claim I know anything about Sabrina the Teenage Witch(though judging by Iximaz's comment below, she is not very likable), but the very presence of a crossover between two unrelated works does not necessarily mean that said crossover will be bad. It all depends on the execution. If Sabrina's magic drastically overpowers anything Voyager is capable of, then it's Sueish at worst and renders the Star Trek elements unnecessary at best. If she does nothing while on the Voyager, she's inconsequential and doesn't need to be in the story. But there are plenty of ways a story could be executed that wouldn't involve either of those two options. Just saying "Look! A crossover! These shows have nothing to do with each other!" doesn't tell anyone anything. What is the story about? What happens in it? Do you know?
If you did, then you'd know that it isn't a straight Sabrina/Voyager crossover. Here's the synopsis from Amazon:
"A misfired spell sends Sabrina into TV shows, movies, even books. Now she's handjiving with Travolta in Grease, storming the castle with Mel Gibson's Braveheart troops, and awaiting analysis by Dr. Frasier Crane. How can Sabrina pop into real life?"
As we've both mentioned, whether a 'fic is good or bad depends not as much on the premise as it does on the execution.
If she immediately fits in in the new settings, that could pose some problem, but from the summaries and reviews, it looks as though not only does she not stay around long enough to affect much in the fictional worlds themselves, the skipping between worlds is presented as the conflict rather than the setup for a conflict. There could be a number of good stories told with that setup. I've seen a few television shows that had an episode with a similar premise, and they usually tend to turn out relatively well, whether they're playing it for laughs, trying to prevent some sort of metafictional crisis, or in one particularly memorable case, trying to keep a fiction-hopping Tom Sawyer from using stolen magic to infiltrate a physics textbook and alter the fundamental laws of the universe.
That last example sounds really stupid, but dang was it a fun episode. Hey, there's execution-over-premise again!
Even if you just give a name of the show, I would be interested. After all, I'm rather invested in stories involving characters traveling into fictional worlds. If I can see what made those stories work or not work, I can alter my character(s) and stories to work better.
I remember the Teen Titans animated series did an episode with the concept, and the Tom Sawyer one was an episode of the Fairly Oddparents, before its post-cancellation revival and subsequent downturn in quality. I remember seeing the idea enough times that TVTropes probably has a page on it, if you don't mind my linking, since you said you'd be fine with only titles.
After a few minutes of searching, while I can't find an exact match, this seems to cover the rough idea.
I would very much like to read that, now. I liked watching Sabrina when I was younger.
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-
Oh gods... This is a piece of Sabrina the Teenage B**ch canon? Kill me now...
WHYYYYYYYYY D:
The way you put it makes it seem like a Suefi...il one clicks on the link. Unless there's a reason to make me believe that the work you are actually talking about is nonetheless badfic (think: Twilight), I see no reason to balk at the fact that any particular story is out of the PPC's jurisdiction.
Does this thing have a wonky censoring program? The two words that were separated by the ellipsis are "Suefic" and "until"!
*clicks "Preview Message"*
They're both there? Good!
I tried a few phrasing attachments and rearrangements of the words, and as it turns out, there is a swear word there. Take the last letter of the first of the two affected words and couple it with the first three letters of the second word. ...Yeah. No idea why it's censored even when the letters are separated by a space, but that word and any word containing the letters of the f-bomb will be replaced with an ellipsis in the site's censoring system. Maybe some other swears, too, but I didn't want to type in every offensive term I could think of to see whether the filter replaces them, because in doing so I would run the risk of accidentally missing "Preview Message" and hitting "Post Message" with a bunch of words I was testing still prominent and uncensored, and nobody wants that.
but thanks for confirming it.
Please tell me if I am sounding pushy/stalkerish, but I have not received a reply from you yet. Are you still thinking about how you want to work on Chapter 9, or are you still fleshing out those story ideas that you mentioned in the e-mail? Or has RL eaten up your time again?
I responded to your Google Docs-related e-mail a while ago, so feel free to send your Chapter 9 e-mail.
I've been holding off on the other one because I'd like to get those narrative ideas to a point where they can fill out a story, work well both on their own and as a component of the larger picture, and don't contradict one another. I don't want to propose anything half-baked.
The posting on the Board to check on e-mail status does seem a little pushy, but I understand why you're doing it: you're concerned for your story's progress, and you want to be sure that my end is progressing properly. I don't see it as stalkerish, though; don't worry about that.
Since it is past midnight at this point, expect my email to come much later today.