Subject: Hm... You and Dawn are giving me ideas...
Author:
Posted on: 2013-12-30 18:54:00 UTC
...for a mission I've got mostly done, but that I'm not happy with 'cause it drags towards the end. Maybe something like this...
Hm...
A puzzlement!
Sometimes it troubles me sometimes how easily writing missions could shade into bullying the writer. I don't want to do that, and I don't think anyone else here wants to do that, either; we've got nothing against beginners, and we've all got our own past horrible writing and Mary Sues to keep us humble. Still--I worry a little.
Without criticism, writers wouldn't have accountability. Parody is a push to keep quality high. Writing parodies puts the most pressure of all on the people writing the parodies--we become more aware of what mistakes people make and how to avoid them.
In the PPCverse, if Mary Sues are such a threat to the continua, there has to be a reason why the Mary Sue is targeted, rather than the author. Obviously, in the real world, it's because we're not going to verbally beat up some innocent person who happens to have written a really bad fic. In-world, though--why don't agents just go to the writer's house in World One, confiscate their writing implements, or just neuralyze them and tell them that they never want to write again?
Seems to me that the PPC isn't just protecting the continua; they're protecting the writers, too. Fan writers are a good thing. Goodfic strengthens the continuum. But people who write goodfic don't get there without writing some badfic first. In order to protect the continuum, you have to eliminate the damage done by badfic without also eliminating the author's potential to write goodfic.
It's a handy metaphor for what we're trying to do IRL. We're saying, "Hey, this is bad writing! Stoppit!" without also saying, "You suck; stop writing," because the only way to cure sucky writing is to *write more*.
I guess I just felt like I needed to remind people of that. Anyways, back to your regularly scheduled sporkings...
...for a mission I've got mostly done, but that I'm not happy with 'cause it drags towards the end. Maybe something like this...
Hm...
A puzzlement!
Since the PPC and the OFUS are at least somewhat linked, maybe retraining the authors is officially the OFUs' job, while eliminating the results of the early bad writing is the PPC's? This would also partly explain why the Department of Author Correspondence was shut down: as more OFUs were founded (in-universe; I think they've actually become less common since Miss Cam's heyday), the PPC's involvement in that side of the equation lessened until our assistance was no longer needed.
(I wonder what the OFUs think of the PPC in hS' alternate future, where the Efficient take over and a Department of Author Correction appears? Would the coordinators side with the Efficient and keep canon stable but unbolstered by goodfic, or side with the students and try to keep fan writing varied?)
Anyway, my missions so far seem to treat the "Sue" character more sympathetically the more like their author they (probably) are--not intentionally on my part, I'll admit; that's just the way the stories wrote themselves.
My first mission had an inexplicably fire-proof Sue who not only reaffirmed the viewpoint of Fahrenheit 451's villains, but also heavily trivialized orphanages. My agents assassinated her.
My second mission had a group of friends aspiring to become musicians. The lead singer falls through a portal (laziest plothole ever, perhaps) into 221B Baker Street, where she meets not-going-to-bother-finishing-this-sentence. While I was initially writing her as Sue, in the end, I was treating her like an author from the modern day era of the Holmes canon. (Obviously not true, but we're lookin in-universe here.) The story actually mistreated her friends and family far worse than the canon characters, which mage throwing the Sue back into her correct time zone a more satisfying ending than assassination. The benefit to doing that was that I could show her at the end readjusting to a more normal life, but with the band still aspiring to become professional. I think (I hope) this jives with what you're saying bout the badfic authors eventually moving on to other, better things (though not a written thing, in this case).
My third mission has actually been done for quite some time, but important threads like this keep going up that I don't want to push down, so I wait a couple weeks, and another important thread comes up, and I wait more . . . Maybe I'll finally put it up this week. Anyway, I don't want to spoil it much, but the main OCs again turned out to be somewhat equated with authorship by the end, and also do not get assassinated (the fic had mostly DTO-type problems anyway).
(My fourth mission will be a trollfic and I doubt anything uplifting is going to happen there.)
...that this should show up in some of the missions, that is, in conversation. Maybe an agent needs to be reminded of this; maybe a new agent just doesn't get it, and demands to know *why* they can't go yell at the authors. Maybe someone gets hit with a Random Exposition Ray or something and this is one of the things that comes out. But however it's done, I think this should come out in a variety of missions--in different departments, by different authors--because it's very important, and I think that at least a few of us, if not most or all of us, could use this reminder from time to time. Honestly, I think this should go on the wiki somewhere; it's a very good explanation, and a well-worded reminder. Perhaps it could become part of the FAQs or Guides?
Either way, I think this is very important, and thank you for writing it out so clearly. At the very least, it's an interesting insight; at the most, it's, well, very important, as I've already said.
~DF