Subject: Before I read...
Author:
Posted on: 2014-02-03 20:14:00 UTC
...I just wanted to say that I utterly adore Gunnerkrigg Court (Thread was the most adorable chapter ever, admit it), and I am utterly horrified that such a badfic could reside in the fandom. Not surprised, merely horrified. I'll have something more gushy and constructive once I actually read your thing.
-Aila
Trigger warnings for rape and serious injuries, both inflicted on children.
I'd like to thank my betas; Neshomeh, Desdenelle, and Ekyl. Their families will be safe from the Great War of the Beast. =]
Anyway, here's the first installment of the Wobbles and Notary PPC Power Hour! (I'll get one of my musician friends to do a theme song at some point. [=)
Hope you like it as much as I enjoyed killing it.
--parp
In other news, though, let me just say: I love your agents. They're perfectly mismatched, and play off each other so well, and I think I can sense some character arcs in their futures, maybe?
The mission was wonderful, as well, and you have Coyote so very perfectly. My one quibble was that, since I haven't seen the badfic, and you didn't put many quotes in, I didn't really get a sense of some parts and it occasionally felt rushed. But really, I understand completely why you censored. I think I prefer it that way, actually.
All in all, amazing first mission!
-Aila
the personalities of your agents really shined through here, which was especially useful on this mission, since the necessity to censor the most problematic content left the agents' actions and dialogue to carry the story. For this first mission, you managed to both get across the basic characteristics of both agents, but also to show the types of situations that make their usual attitudes falter (Wobbles' overprotectiveness towards children, the Notary's inability to keep up her prim exterior around warped reality).
I would have liked a bit more description at the exorcism scene. Due to not knowing the canons, I had difficulty understanding who was getting exorcised first, and found it a little weird that the other canons seemed to be showing no reaction to the sudden appearance of the agents in the room, especially since one of those canons is later revealed to be a replacement.
Also, one spelling error:
“'Ah, Ysengrin. Feeling alright? Not too stressed, not too bitter?'”
"alright" should be "all right."
Alright has no logical reason to be incorrect; we already have merged words like, er, "already" or "altogether". As far as I'm concerned, that means it's okay to use over all right.
If we all ways spread it alover the internet, it will all so be an alround success!
'Already' has a completely separate meaning to 'all ready'. 'The ships are all ready' is accurate; 'the ships are already' makes no sense (and in fact, you'd need 'the ships are already ready'). 'I was already there', but not 'I was all ready there' (actually that /is/ a correct sentence - but has a different meaning). Yes, 'already' is derived ultimately from the two words, but it has a different meaning.
'Altogether' is closer in meaning, but still different. 'The ships are all together', 'It was altogether different'. The former suggests a collection, the latter suggests more a... totality? I don't know. I'm pretty sure you can't interchange them in most sentences.
Alright and all right, though? They mean the same thing (except in the grammatically dubious 'these gloves are all right [gloves]'). And, of course, 'alright' is already a word with its own distinct meaning: it's an Old English term meaning 'exactly', and apparently modifies 'so'. If you can make head or tail of 'Alrihtes swa alse þe wise teolie þenne he wule sawe nimeð ȝeme of twam þingen,' put up a translation and let us know.
(It also, in conjunction with in, means 'in compliance with the law', which is a fantastic turn of phrase: 'he married his wife in allright'.)
hS
PS: The OED says this:
'The form alright is frequent, although more widespread in non-literary printed sources (e.g. newspapers and journals) than in literary texts. Compare the standard spellings of already adj. and adv., altogether adj., n., and adv., always adv. Although these analogues exist, the form is strongly criticized in the vast majority of usage guides, but without cogent reasons. See further P. Peters Cambr. Guide Eng. Usage (2004) 31/2 and Webster's Dict. Eng. Usage (1989) 78/2. The criticism has occasionally even extended to questioning the legitimacy of solid and hyphenated spellings of the word; compare:
1926 H. W. Fowler Dict. Mod. Eng. Usage 16/1 The words [sc.all and right] should always be written separate; there are no such forms as all-right, allright, or alright, though even the last, if seldom allowed by the compositors to appear in print, is often seen..in MS.'
IN THIS CORNER, the Grammar Nazis, who insist that alright is wrong because their second grade teacher told them so, with such phrases as "Alright is never all right," and "Alright is Alwrong!" They hold that the rules of grammar are not arbitrary, and that the modern English language should never, ever, ever change.
IN THIS CORNER, the Alright users, who say that there is a clear difference between Alright and All Right. They say that language changes over time, and the phrase that once had two different definitions will now have one clear definition. 'Alright' is for OK, acceptable, fine; where All Right is to be used for 'collectively correct.' Consider these sentences:
The speech was all right. Did the speaker state all facts correctly, or was the presentation acceptable?
The students were all right. Are the students unharmed, or did they all pass a test with flying colors?
More importantly, there are times one is appropriate, where the other is not. For example, using examples from somebody else on a voting poll debating this issue (alright is ahead with 53% of the votes):
A) What did you think of the movie?
B) It was all right.
A) How did you do on the quiz?
B) I got it alright.
In the first example, it seems more suitable, in my opinion, to use "alright", while the second example feels completely wrong.
There is a clear difference and distinction. I, myself, will continue to use alright where appropriate. As it is unlikely to appear in formal writing for the context I use it in, I should have no fear of being reprimanded by a professor.
Alright? Alright.
PS. hS, that example of alday was silly. I see what you were trying to show, but it is just purposefully insulting. There is never any way the phrase 'all day' could ever mean anything then 'a collective period of time lasting around 24 hours.' However, as I have pointed out, alright and all right do have different uses. Good day.
Given that I didn't actually make a statement on either side of the debate - and closed with a quote from the OED which says that there is no justification for arguing against 'alright' - I don't think you can really say I was being 'purposefully insulting'. The comment in question - since it extended into the line 'If we all ways spread it alover the internet, it will all so be an alround success!' - was (I think pretty clearly) intended to be humorous.
hS
I thought you were being needlessly sarcastic to prove a point of how silly the word was in your opinion. To be fair, that was partially because I saw similar arguments from other folks who were completely serious about their comments. So, my apologies for seeing innocent humor as sarcastic attack.
And to expand a point I don't think I actually made...
There are two types of 'al-' words.
-The first, exemplified by 'altogether', have a very close meaning to the decompounded form. 'The soldiers were, all together, evil' is pretty close to 'The army was altogether evil' - not identical, but close.
-The second is where the 'al-' has seemingly no connection to 'all '. Look at 'already'. Where does 'completely prepared' turn into 'at a previous time'?
Well, according to the OED, way long ago. As an example I can understand:
c1380 Sir Ferumbras (1879) l. 1117 Wanne þay come to þe castel ȝate..þe porter alredi was þer-ate.
'When they come to the castle gate, the porter already was there-at'. Which, actually, spans the two meanings - the porter was there before them, and he was all prepared there.
By the time of Chaucer, the two meanings have genuinely split:
c1400 (▸1391) Chaucer Treat. Astrolabe (Cambr. Dd.3.53) (1872) ii. §11. 22 The howres of the clokke ben departid by 15 degrees al-redy.
'The hours of the clock were departed by 15 degrees already'. You can't make that a use of the 'prepared' version.
Actually, the OED points out that 'all prepared' is an adjective, while 'previously' is an adverb. That may be significant.
With 'alright', you seem to be suggesting taking an even stronger version of the first type - the two terms aren't just connected, they're synonyms - and, through a secondary meaning of the 'all ' version, making them into the second type. That is, in fact, roughly what happened to 'already'.
The main difference is that, it appears, 'all ready' kept the original meaning (all prepared), while a new or secondary sense was attached to the contraction. Your suggestion seems to be the other way round - at least, I'm moderately sure that 'all right' as in either dexter or correct is less common than 'all right' as in 'all okay'.
Interestingly, 'all right' itself seems to be a fairly modern coining: the original 'alright' ('exactly') is ancient and obsolete (by around 1500), while 'all right' only appears in the mid-1600s to 1700s, and only really took off in the 1800s. The 'all accurate' and 'all dexter' versions, not being isolated phrases, don't have OED entries, but I guess go back as far as the word 'right'.
I dunno. Personally I think 'alright' is ugly, and so use 'all right'; but there's probably a lot of words I do that with (on the inverse side, I prefer 'okay' to 'OK', despite it being the newer form).
Final quotes:
'All right' can be attached as an interrogative, in the assumption of agreement. The OED's first example of this?
'1929 E. Wilson Diary in L. Edel Twenties (1975) 514 O.K., all right?'
And the oldest use of 'all right' the OED could find? It's Chaucer again, used as an intensifier at the end of a sentence (as in, 'Oh, we hate badfics, all right'):
'a1413 Chaucer Troilus & Criseyde (Pierpont Morgan) (1881) i. l. 99 Criseyde was þis lady name al right.'
hS & the OED
That isn't really an error. It's more of a stylistic choice than anything else. "Alright" is a word, and both "all" and "right" are words. You can't use "alright" in all situations where "all right" would be possible("We need to find some left gloves!" "You can't, Horace! They're all right!"), but it can be used here.
"Alright" is not a word. It's a slang contraction, like "ain't." And while it's understandable to use "ain't" in dialogue, as it sounds different from "isn't," and a character might just talk that way, "alright" and "all right" sound identical (to anyone who isn't a PPC agent). There's no argument that the character is using a slang expression; the phrase has just been spelled wrong.
(And yes, "The gloves are all right," could mean either, "The gloves all go on right hands," or "The gloves are okay.")
I have never even heard of this canon, so I had some problems to imagine what was going on, but I do understand that this is for my best. You did a good job making this clear.
Alas, I have to do my usual nitpicking:
Wobbles just curled up in a ball and continuing her doodle of a happy kitten, which was now almost a still life.
I’ll just accept that wobbles is able to doodle while she is curled up in a ball, but I feel this should either be continued or maybe the and should be dropped? But I’m not a native speaker and my grammar may be wrong.
I became confused by the following section:
Wobbles turned to face her, letting Annie slump to the ground. “Notary, shut up. I only want to know one thing. That thing would be that you got the canon to a nurse, and if I find out that you belittled her or were short with her then I swear to God I’ll kill you.”
“Ha. Ha. Haaaaa.” (Is this the Notary laughing about Wobbles empty threads? Or a third person / the wraith?)
“I - this is important, you stupid clown—” (This cannot be Wobbles insulting the Notary, right?)
“I’m not stupid!” Wobbles screamed. “And don’t you dare laugh at me!”
Also, there seem to be too many words here:
The Notary ignored her, instead digging through her robe’s pockets a out again and pulling out a long, black device with an array of old-fashioned dials on the front.
HG
...I just wanted to say that I utterly adore Gunnerkrigg Court (Thread was the most adorable chapter ever, admit it), and I am utterly horrified that such a badfic could reside in the fandom. Not surprised, merely horrified. I'll have something more gushy and constructive once I actually read your thing.
-Aila
By the standards of the PPC, of course, which means "create maximum shennanigans within the confines of the job."
I think there may be something wrong with this sentence, however: "The Bad Things that tended to happen to agents in the field (of which, according to the ) could get a hell of a lot worse if a wraith wasn’t properly exorcised from the canon it was possessing."
I have no idea what's going on in the parenthases, and there is no object to that parenthetical aside... maybe it got deleted?
The Notary is actually pretty scary if you stay in one place for long enough... Though, this one is comedy gold.
"It reminded the Notary of her old job on Gallifrey, and Wobbles of the Notary."
Of course, little is scarier than Coyote if you hold still long enough...
There never was a parenthetical aside.
We have always been at war with Eurasia...
What does the Notary look like? I don't think you've ever described her, or perchance I missed the piece.
(I typed this post while holding a Petit-beurre in my mouth. Heh heh.)
It's still mostly accurate. =]
Her expression here has defaulted to what Tumblr calls "43583549843598% done".
The description of her on the wiki page is also really neat, too. However, you might want to pay a bit more attention to equalising descriptions and stuff in future stories; we got a really good picture of Wobbles through this mission but like Des I had no clue what the Notary looked like until now. Of course, this mission seemed to be largely from her POV, so comes with the territory I guess.
So the Librarian could also point at her and laugh about her ridiculous clothes, were he the type to point and laugh.
Over Wobbles, that is, not the fic.
Which is to say, I almost feel sorry for her over Wobbles, but don't, because I know her too well. I do feel sorry for her over the fic.
I thought you kept your characters, er, in-character very well, and I liked some of the nuances - the idea that the Notary does paperwork to calm her nerves, for instance. You also got Coyote scarily in-character, so that's... good? I guess? I'm not sure I'd want to be able to write Coyote, but...
Ehm, probably the only negative, which isn't really a negative, is that killing a 'fic which is that squicky makes it hard to actually show what's going on. I glanced over the original before reading, so I'm not sure how well people who haven't will know what the fic is doing. Maybe someone will say.
Also: you left Coyote with knowledge of the PPC. That's... scary, again. If the Notary's doing paperwork, she miiiight want to send a message to Building Maintenance and get them to isolate any sections of HQ in the GC universe; that's one PPC-aware canon you don't want to share a 'verse with.
hS
I mean, my GC knowledge is largely limited to the fact I binge-read the entire thing a couple weeks back, but the vibe I got from him is that for the most part he'd find it more amusing to let us do our thing than to do much to get in the way.
...Of course, this is a sinister trickster god, so what he finds interesting today might not be what he likes tomorrow.
Up until he decides it'd be funny to turn all the walls into Slorp or something.
That's my point: Coyote isn't malevolent, he's unpredictable. And having HQ open to something that powerful and that random sounds like a very bad idea.
hS
...It would probably be a bad idea for me to have Discord know about us. Good to know...
(Right, so, that changes how Unicornicopia is going down... Dangit...)
It might be a good thing that you decided against that, then, depending on the details you'd have used in the execution and the version of Discord you would have brought in. If you give him a whole alternate universe to play with as he likes, he's not going to want to leave, and certainly isn't going to want to destroy it. Hollow it out and fill the core with red-hot marshmallow paste, maybe, but not remove it utterly. He'd play with the aberration on canon until Canterlot come. Crystal Empire come? Dang it, human idioms don't translate well into the My Little Pony universe. He'd be there until Appelox consumes the deviation from the Heart World, then. Roundabout, but to the point.
For curiosity's sake, what would the specifics have been? Perhaps I was entirely wrong in my assumption.
In the abomination known as My Little Unicorn, the evil sorcerer Titan finds himself trapped in the Space Between Spaces. Somehow, this allows him enough power to bring Discord out of imprisonment (ths was written about mid season 2), into a pocket universe and transform him into an 'eviler' version, with red and black scales and everything. I would get mad at how badly Mykan butchers Discord, but his idea of what makes a good villain is so corny, so uninspired, that it just becomes silly. Because, clearly, an intelegent being of chaos who sees reality as his personal plaything is so much worse of a villain then a red and black mindless monster whos only motivation is to destroy everything. Honestly, read the MST by fan/fic/ theater 3000 (have I promoted them enough on the board yet? Because I think the last 10 times were not enough) as it is the only way to read this thing without hurting yourself. Anyway, I'm getting off topic. So Stu!Discord destroys Unicornicopia, Equestria is left in ruins by Night Mare Moon (and yes, I do know it's spelled Nightmare Moon. Mykan, however, does not.) and all hope is lost for the Equestrians and the freaky anthro alicorns. So, with no other choice, Celestia and the Grand Ruler make a hybrid world of the two. There, the canon is beyond recognition, and the first fic ends.
Marvin and Printworthy would be killing it long before that could happen. How I saw Discord helping was this: Titan would free Discord, going through his little monologue before transforming the Spirit of Chaos. In the middle of the speach, Marvin and Printworthy burst in, charge Titan, and kill him before he can mutate Discord. Discord reveals that he knows about the PPC and Unicornicopia, and he would be more then happy to destroy that world for them. The three go in, wrap up charges, and let Discord have some fun.
I have not worked out all too well how this mission is going to go down, but I do know that I will be turning the fic against itself. I even have an idea to use Nyx from Past Sins in killing it.
Oops. Spoilers.
Introducing characters from other places in the MLP multiverse would more likely than not either end up confusing people or seeming unduly shoehorned in. Dealing with a single badfic all the way through, only for a character from another more respected fic to come in at the end to solve the problem would require some background explanation in-universe, probably with some sort of previous setup involving that character. Otherwise, it would just come out of nowhere, akin to an Agent pair in Star Wars saying "Hey, super-Sith Sue! You're too powerful for us, but not too powerful for Yoda! Ger her, Jedi Master!"
One of the reasons canon characters don't know about the PPC, from a meta-fictional standpoint, is to prevent the Agents from delegating their tasks to someone else, or from having pre-existing allies that they know beforehand can help stop the badfics, both of which run the risk of unduly increased speshulness. Going out to enlist the help of a well-known fanfic character runs into a similar problem, with the added issue of the reader possibly not having heard of or read said character's fic of origin. Nyx would need to be established primarily through the Agents' back-and-forth, to make sure that everyone is up to speed, and frankly, she sounds very Suvian when going by her description alone, which would be problematic regarding the perception of the readers.
Not by any means. More, I was thinking that, since they need some of the fic to continue on before they can nab particular characters, but don't want to see Equestria actually become enslaved to Night Mare Moon, they think of an alternate solution. Since Nyx is supposed to be the rebirth of Nightmare Moon, but much more reasonable, Marvin would think of replacing the replacement with her. Nyx would 'perform' what the Words told her in the lightest sense possible, and immediately have her Children of the Nightmare fix whatever she was told to do. There, rather then Celestia being tortured in the original story, Marvin and Printworthy would have time to plan how Unicornicopia will ultimately fall, as well as having less to clean up later.
Mostly though, I wanted to have it so we have a scene where Marvin and Printworthy promise Nyx protection from Sue hunters, in return for help with killing this beast. After all, Nyx is (in my opinion) a Sue, and although her story is far from being spork worthy by any means, she may still fear the legendary PPC coming after her. After gaining reassurances that, no matter how much she forces Twilight to carry the Idiot Ball, or is so much better then everypony else, or makes her story end in the cutest (and stupidest) possible way, she need never fear the assassin's blade. That is, of course, if she does one little favor...
(It may sound like I hate Past Sins. I don't. I find some of its story elements rather Sueish, and I dislike some of the ways Pen Stroke desides to take it, but on the whole it's a good fic. Probably the best Suefic I have ever read! But Nyx is such a Sue, I mean, come on!)
However, that said, I see your point. At the moment, my mind is just trying to see how this thing can be done. I go through a lot of bad ideas that I think are amazing at the time, then realize how bad it really is, and change the story accordingly. I don't think even my beta readers understand how much Death and Resurrection changed over the course of the sporking. In one of my early drafts, Marvin and Printworthy had several pages dedicated to them bumming around Canterlot for absolutely no reason. Griffon was causing chaos in the capitol (this was when I thought Griffon was a mini), and the agents managed to get a good night's rest before casually waking up, doing some light shopping, and eventually bothering to portal ahead to 'three days later.' It was long, stupid, and did nothing to showcase my characters or the badfic. Yeah. So, thank you for voicing your concerns. You probably spared me a re-write and a lot of thinking. Probably. Though I still want to see that contract being made... I'll think about it.
Whenever I'm planning something, I always think it will be shorter than it actually is, and then have to plan scenes to bridge the exchange of dialogue in one scene with the action sequence in another to the exposition in another, and everything ends up in the wrong order. It's one of the reasons I've not gotten my Permission piece out yet. That and the fact that I've got three other things I need to do before I can focus on it with any sort of decency, and homework keeps coming up and getting in the way of anything productive. I'd almost relish knowing that I could cut a scene without affecting the plot in any way, because I could dissect it and use the bits of description or dialogue I liked to fit other scenes together.
That premise, now that you've laid it out, has two other major issues: for one, the plan hinges on Nyx having known about the PPC beforehand. If Marvin and Printworthy explain the PPC to her, in the same conversation that they ask for her help, it will sound ridiculous and unconvincing from her perspective, since her world would never have been visited by the PPC before, as shown by the fact that a high-grade Sue like herself still has all of her blood in its original place. Just on principle, though; I'm not claiming that the Agents would both be unable to tell the truth accurately and accessibly. For the other, how would Marvin and Printworthy get rid of the Night Mare Moon so that Nyx could take her place? You aren't exactly going to be able to lock an alicorn-level Replacement Sue in a cabinet under the stairs until Nyx shows up and usurps her.
However, I can see a bit of Interlude potential in Nyx, or possibly a Nyx, since Past Sins is apparently popular enough to spawn fanfic-fanfiction at this point, discovering the existence of other worlds, perhaps after a rogue Agent or extradimensional threat targets her unexpectedly, but I don't know what sort of story purpose that would serve in the long run. It could be setup for some later crisis, but I'm hard-pressed to think of anything that a Nyx could do that three or four magic-wielding Agents couldn't do just as well.
After all, he didn't exactly promise not to give the PPC any trouble, he just seemed fairly agreeable in a creepy way. I think I lost track of the point I was making here...
(Side note: I didn't know you were into GC! It seems to be pretty big around here, and online in general.)
This is mostly because he wouldn't do what he does in this fic; he's a trickster god with incredible power and what TV Tropes describes as Blue And Orange Morality, but he wouldn't ever do something that could hurt Annie like this. I left him with knowledge of the PPC because, well, do you want to try and neuralyse something like him? Remember that while Wobbles is braver than she looks, the Notary's the only one who can reliably use a neuralyser and she's, well...
She's someone who stole a blockade runner from the war effort and ran away purely to save her own skin.
Heh. Antimony Carver is a teenaged part-fire elemental with a special gift for befriending gods and demons, and she's still a better protagonist than you'll find in most fiction. Tom Siddell writes the characters Suethors think they're writing. 'S'kinda why I took this fic on in the first place; GKC deserves better. =]