Missioning nonstandard fanworks (comics, films, and so on)

Subject: Missioning nonstandard fanworks (comics, films, and so on)
Author: LonelyStar
Posted on: 2015-05-03 06:17:00 UTC

Fanfic makes up the great majority of fanworks, but it isn't all of it. There are a such thing as fancomics, fan movies, and other such nonstandard fan-ishness. Some of these qualify as badfic.

So, what alternations would be needed for a mission to fit into that medium? Has it been done before? How would the agents fit in? Would it even work?

I have a few ideas, but I'd like some input for a more cohesive set of rules.

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Missioning nonstandard fanworks (comics, films, and so on) by LonelyStar on 2015-05-03 06:17:00 UTC

I have a little experience here, actually. by ratbrainbasher on 2015-05-04 00:32:00 UTC Reply

I don't know if anyone else here plays Star Trek Online (usually just called STO) but I've seen some really bad foundry missions. The foundry is basically a thing that allows you to make your own missions. A... startlingly high amount of them are good, but that just means the bad ones stand out more. It might be possible to make a foundry mission that parodies another really bad mission, but without railroading, I'm not completely sure how this would work. I'm sure it could, but it would take some effort. Who knows, when I ask for Permission, I might try this out.

And fan comics would be easy enough, if you can match the art style of the badcomic author. Fan films aren't worth your time. Most of them are just really short flash animations drawn by a five-year-old. The big, long films tend to either be really good, or never completed. But I do encourage you to explore these mediums. It might end up as something wonderful. Or awful. Hopefully the former.

That actually sounds really cool! by KandleKItty on 2015-05-05 14:04:00 UTC Reply

I think that would be an amazing (although time consuming )idea!
And I just think it would be utterly fabulous if Agents had panel-ladders for comics that they can lay across the page and crawl up, skipping a few panels and maybe cover more distance? Or maybe the spaces between panels could be wormhole-like and send them to another panel. Oh gosh there are so many possibilities- *Fangirls*

Panel-Ladders by LonelyStar on 2015-05-08 04:21:00 UTC Reply

I am so stealing this idea if I ever mission HIBY.

comics could be dangerous by Seychelles on 2015-05-03 23:35:00 UTC Reply

Your agents could possibly be pulled into what's commonly refereed to as a boobs-and-butt pose, where there spines twist and impossible angles to show both their boobs and butts to the camera. It really hurts.
This is one of those things... by Neshomeh on 2015-05-03 18:51:00 UTC Reply

...that pops up every couple of years or so. Unfortunately, it never goes anywhere due to the sheer amount of work involved. I'm not saying you shouldn't try, just that the success rate is pretty miserable. You should know what you're getting into.

Also, re. the Sonichu discussion, best just to leave it alone. Seems to me no good can come of messing with it.

~Neshomeh
"How I Became Yours", anyone? by Iximaz on 2015-05-03 17:15:00 UTC Reply

(For those not in the know, this is what I'm talking about.)

That is definitely mission-worthy, but I don't know how you'd have agents going about in a comic medium, especially if you want to match the art 'style' of the fan comic you're sparking; not everyone has the artistic ability to do that.

Wow. by KittyEden on 2015-05-05 12:09:00 UTC Reply

You've got to give credit to the person who drew it, though. They wrote it badly, but they drew it with style.

Except for... by LonelyStar on 2015-05-06 01:57:00 UTC Reply

The backgrounds, which are mostly photographs,
The facial expressions, which are traced, really freaky, or repetitive (see Toph),
The bodies (just take a look at Azula, the first time we actually see her full body),
The proportions (Aang is horrifically stretched out),

And, last but not least,

Actually making the protagonists look like living people instead of cardboard cutouts.
Not really, no. by Iximaz on 2015-05-05 13:29:00 UTC Reply

They traced most of their work and the characters reuse the same four facial expressions through the whole thing. You can really tell the parts that weren't traced because they reach Uncanny Valley.

Just a thought by Superfluity on 2015-05-04 23:35:00 UTC Reply

The thing with the comic is that the art is really just the same views of all of the characters copy and pasted over and over. It would actually be pretty easy to fake it and add in agents. The jarring factor of the comic already exists.
Another way to distinguish the agents, in this comic in particular, would be to draw them in black and white or have some sort of "plot hole" within the story that they could be looking in and out of.
The entire mission could be told in comic format, with the style of the agents established early on and carried through the comic. I know that this is kind of different than how written missions work but maybe comic works call for different protocols.
Wow. I REALLY want to see someone take this on. by Darkotas on 2015-05-03 17:41:00 UTC Reply

I'd say the best way to go about would be to go in comic form, but as you stated, it would take a different type of artistic talent. I suppose one could take the actual panels and edit agents and events into them, but I have a feeling it would be more trouble than its worth. It would likely be awkward at best, and actively jarring at worst.

My ideas by LonelyStar on 2015-05-03 21:07:00 UTC Reply

Well, I was thinking of just using a lot of screencaps in a regular PPC story, but with the added caveat that they could not appear in the actual art, because then they'd be noticed. They could mingle with background crowds, hide behind trees, and so on, but they couldn't be in the shot, nor do anything that would affect it (speaking loudly enough that they would get speech bubbles, for example) until it was time to kill/exorcise the Sue, at which point they'd use something like Peruvian Instant Darkness powder to conceal their actions from the audience.

It doesn't count if it's a character point of view (for example, a character looks directly at the metaphorical camera, and the (disguised) PPC agents are behind that viewpoint), unless the character would react strongly to their presence (say, if they were in orc disguise in a Lord of the Rings comic).

Nah, I'd do it textually. by Scapegrace on 2015-05-04 18:01:00 UTC Reply

For one thing, you could mock its shameless attitude to content creation by having them literally stitched onto a crappy bargain-bin background. For another, you can draw parallels to Time Lord art if you've got an agent familiar with Doctor Who. For a third, screw this thing up the hole it uses to micturate with an angry ferret covered in razor wire.

One could theoretically do it in literature form by [EvilAI]UBEROverlord on 2015-05-03 19:22:00 UTC Reply

It would probably take a bit more description than might be typical, but it is theoretically possible

Fancomics should be relatively easy... by domirossi on 2015-05-03 12:46:00 UTC Reply

... For someone who can at least decently draw. Making a mission in comic form would be pretty cool, IMO. You could have the pre- and post-mission in text, with the medium changing when the agents enter the badcomic. They could even complain about being badly drawn, if you can/want to (at least temporarily) draw them in roughly the same style as the badcomic. (There could even be a CAD setting for fixing that, as with tense shifts)
(I'm not gonna do that, though. I can't even draw a stickman properly.)
As for fan movies... Yeah, missioning them in the same medium would be much harder. Which is a pity, because some of this stuff definitely is mission material. (*cough* Dusk's Dawn *cough*)
No idea by Hieronymus Graubart on 2015-05-03 11:53:00 UTC Reply

To me, great parts of a mission’s appeal are the hilarious scenes the agents experience when the world interprets words that are ambiguous or just incomprehensible or don’t mean what the suethor believes them to mean. You obviously can’t do this in a visual medium. Can agents missioning a fanfilm read the words? Probably not, unless the sporker actually has access to the script, so there’s no reading ahead. In a comic, it may be fun to watch the agents stumble from panel to panel, but the inherent discontinuity is not a problem specific to badcomics.

I don’t know how to make it work; I only see problems there.

HG

I would beg to differ on that last point. by AdmiralSakai on 2015-05-03 15:58:00 UTC Reply

Not so much for live-action work (although there could be crappy visual effects), but for comics, art, most games, and animated fanfilms I'd say there's potential for badly-drawn things (especially those rendered symbolically) to cause problems, either because they are so badly-drawn it is impossible to figure out what they are, or because they retain their wonky shapes/colors/whatever when Agents manipulate them or move them into another environment or perspective.

Since somebody else already mentioned it, take Dusk's Dawn as an example: the Agents could wind up physically bumping into those floating evil Dusk heads, or the way the stretcher doesn't change position at all when dropped could cause the entire thing to actually manifest as a rigid object.

In general, distorted perspective could actually make things huge/tiny/lopsided, characters could keep their mutant proportions when seen from a different angle in assassination/otherwise-non-in-work scenes, etc. I remember from by aborted Sonichu 'fic that I planned to have this car brought out of the comic and become a three-dimensional object, whereupon it would constantly drift left (http://www.sonichu.com/w/images/6/60/Son-ChuVehicle.jpg).

A Sonichu mission... Oh, gods. by domirossi on 2015-05-03 16:54:00 UTC Reply

That's either a really good or a really bad idea. I mean, aside from the fact that the author is autistic, his self-insert Stu character is so overpowered that taking him down would be almost impossible...
But it's just so bad! And a really good opportunity to try a mission in comic form. I mean, you don't even really need to be able to draw here, since matching the art style is achievable by a five-year-old.

(That being said, "Nuke the 'verse and run" being pretty much the only way to deal with... That... I'm not sure if it's exactly mission material.)

Just a reminder about Suvian power... by Neshomeh on 2015-05-03 23:02:00 UTC Reply

Sues and Stus are only as powerful as their stories are well-written, which is generally "not very." If their alleged power is a result of the author conveniently pushing the canon's rules and all potential story conflict out of the way, it's not real power at all. Never, ever feel that it's necessary to take a Suvian at their word.

Unless it's funny. Then go right ahead.

~Neshomeh
I don't know if that would be a good idea... by Darkotas on 2015-05-03 17:46:00 UTC Reply

Considering how infamous that series and the saga of events around it was, I have a feeling that attempting to mission it would be a can of worms waiting to happen. It's... it's like the Cthulhu of badfic or fancomics - just gazing at it causes you to lose sanity by the second.
Hooo boy... by AdmiralSakai on 2015-05-03 17:11:00 UTC Reply

I recall that my original reservations towards missioning Sonichu had less to do with how the author would react (I doubted he would ever even know about it) but more because the content of the comic was so objectionable in places (Issue 8, anyone?) that I was reluctant to even deal with the issues it raised.

Content by LonelyStar on 2015-05-03 21:20:00 UTC Reply

Yeah, a mission to Sonichu would pretty much have to consist of the agents covering only the very general ideas (all the Gary Stus, the plagiarism, the protagonist-centered morality, the bigotry, the science and history fail, and the general terribleness of the everything) before portaling in a black hole and spaghettifying everything (I do have a suitable black hole in mind for the job if it ever comes to that).

Otherwise, not only would we be there for months and probably mishandle a lot of things (he deals with a lot of things that people have very strong opinions on), but the agents would go insane from prolonged exposure to horrific writing without some soothing destruction. Also, we'd discover if it was possible to die from bleeprin overdose, because I'm pretty sure whichever unlucky agents were assigned to the job would be trying for that.

This is how I think OD-ing on bleeprin works: by OrangeYoshi99 on 2015-05-07 00:36:00 UTC Reply

1) memory loss
2) total amnesia
3)inability to create new memories
4) becoming a living vegetable ^.^
5) DEATH.
Looking back over it.... by AdmiralSakai on 2015-05-05 16:56:00 UTC Reply

Looks like most of the really objectionable/divisive content is located later in the comic's run. I think it would actually be possible to do a mission that skipped most of it provided that the world died some time around Issue 7.