Subject: Actually...
Author:
Posted on: 2014-02-18 15:27:00 UTC
This has reminded me that I told Herr I'd beta something for him last week, and completely forgot about it in the midst of the Tripod issue and then getting swept up in the Medieval Board AU, so I should really do that first. My apologies to both of you. >.
Based on what's here, though, I think the main issue for me is that you're going pretty far out of your way (and the Fictionary's) to work in a charge the agents don't need and aren't actually going to witness first-hand. My reading of TOS strongly suggests that agents must witness the charges, and things they don't witness cannot be charged for—there are multiple times when Jay or Acacia mentions something coming up in the fic and the other one goes "drat, now we have to go watch it so we don't miss any charges." This rule is what forces them to go on missions in the first place rather than just MSTing the badfic from the safety of their RC, so it's pretty important. But, aside from that, if you don't need that charge to make the mission work, it seems like a lot of trouble (and words) to spend on something ultimately insignificant.
As a workaround, I'd suggest that the agents can just as well gripe about the most-likely-uncanonical species without actually charging for them. It gets the same message across to the audience ("what's the point in tossing out names no one will recognize when there are already dozens of known canonical species available for name-dropping?") without having to make the Fictionary jump through hoops so it can be an actual charge.
~Neshomeh