The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

... my whole life? What? Ok, where can I find the originals and are they any good? I have never heard this. I always thought there was something about the fairytales I've read.

I love modernized fairytales, but that, uh... is an interesting take for sure. I wonder if in the planning stage no one took a step back and went "Wait a minute..." :D

My inspiration for my project came from various places, but one that really stuck with me was a quote I saw from Angela Carter where she talks about how a lot of fairytales of old were rooted in everyday experiences of the poor and the working class that were sometimes horrible (see Hansel and Gretel, although that story hits several Blacklist items so I won't go deeper into what she said). And then she goes into how those tales became sanitized and divorced from their roots once they started to spread and were adapted more widely. I already knew some of that, but it still was pretty eye-opening to see it put so concisely. I can count on one hand the genuinely good fairytale retellings I've read or seen, but I feel she's one of the authors who can do it right (although hers are borderline Gothic horror with some pretty twisted imagery, so check them out at your own discretion). And there's also the fact that the only queer fairytales I've managed to read were fairly awful, but that's a long and very salty story.

Also fun fact, I blame Sleeping Beauty for my obsession with Gothic stories. :P When I was a kid, I had an audiobook cassette of the tale with a cover where Sleeping Beauty was a dark-haired and very pale, scared-looking girl in a blue gown, being menaced by the evil fairy looming over her. Formative experience for itty-bitty Oculus, seeing imagery like that.

Midorikawa Hikaru, nicknamed by fans as Guririba (from "green river", literal translation of his last name) is one of the most prolific JP voice actors right now. You'll run into him in about 90% of anime, games and the like.

About the CAD giving voice actor info in many of my missions: it's either because the cast is a major selling point of the work (Onmyōji), the work doesn't make that big of a deal about the cast (this one, whose voice credits are given in official literature but not the game itself) and thus it's given to help the readers and myself remember, or because I just like to geek out about JP voice actors.

On Ina's fascination with Vil Schoenheit (CV: Aiba Hiroki): the guy is hot and pretty, I won't deny, but Ina likes him because of the character's life philosophy – Mr Fairest-One-of-All believes that a man who's not traditionally masculine is not less of a man, and being cute, pretty and delicate aren't weak traits.

P.S: True confessions: ever since starting twst, my portrayal of 'Guya is a weeee bit influenced by Vil. Sure, he's still a yamato nadeshiko, but he's written as doing makeup and other beauty-related things a bit more often. His counterpart in the Heian AU is partially meant to evoke the Evil Queen.

... is the school pantomime which was just shown to my daughter. It was a version of Sleeping Beauty, which began by time-travelling the audience back 118 years to the beginning of the story.

You know.

To 1904.

I don't think they realised that they were having Sleeping Beauty be born in the Belle Epoque, grow up during WWI, and fall asleep in the Roaring Twenties, but it's an absolutely hilarious concept. I'm busy trying to work out where she fits in the royal family trees of Europe at that time. A king's daughter born in 1904? Most of the kings at the time were way too old, even if you look at the sub-kings of Germany. If we give ourselves a year's wriggle-room she could be a daughter of Haakon VII of Norway; or she could be the eldest child of Alfonso XIII of Spain - or, somewhat distressingly, a child of Nicholas II of Russia, who ended up being put to sleep in the closing stages of the Russian Civil War. o.O

hS

Excited to share year two, too!

Voice actor, essentially.

Hm. You know, Inasuke likes cute and pretty things, like Strawberry Shortcake and Vil. And yet he keeps mocking Kaguya for being a "pretty boy" "easily mistaken for a woman." Are you sure he isn't jealous of Kaguya's relationship with Momoka? >.>

Oh, and a more actual question: what is the "(CV: Guririba Midorikawa Hikaru. I swear, this person is everywhere)" section of the CAD reading referencing? And what does "CV" stand for? I can't parse what it's saying there.

—doctorlit, a "bland boy" "easily mistaken for unshaped clay"

(throws cans of SPAM at spambots)

Found a couple reviews on my works which are some kind of weird code and a link - of course, if you see any of those Dont. Click. it.

They might be just ways to get traffic and revenue to sites paying for it, but they might also hide all kinds of scams and malware.

Will definitely be following the rest.

I have a working name for now that Akrinor helped derive from the region's geography, but I do like Wälderburg, so I might end up going with that and reusing the current name somewhere else. I tried to keep the premise of the story somewhat vague in my posts because I don't aim to publish any of it until it's done, but it's basically a darker, and queer, fairytale retelling, though I'm going out of my way to conceal the inspiration for this project because I want it to be its own thing. I'm drawing heavily from folklore, the brothers Grimm's original tales - by which I mean not the sanitized versions - and retellings in the vein of Angela Carter. I'm mostly telling you that so that you know roughly what kind of worldbuilding I'm aiming for, but you should know that I'm on my first draft, so most of the details aren't fine-tuned yet and even the plot outline is prone to change.

I do appreciate the help, though! As I said to Ak, I used to study German but I had to drop it in high school and have forgotten a lot since then. I aim to pick up my studies, but in the meantime I'm grateful for every bit of writing and naming help that comes my way. So thanks for the reply! :)

The bedrock of German village names seems to be the same as English ones - a lot of them are named after features of human geography. Oxford (a ford for oxen), Cambridge (a bridge over the river Cam), and Birmingham (the home - ham - of Beorma's people, the Beormings) are good examples of these.

You've got a castle and a forest. I could easily form *Waldburg (forest-fort) from that - but Waldburg is an actual city, and a county of the Holy Roman Empire to boot! How about Wälderburg? I've simply used the plural for "forests", which appears in a couple of place-names, but the actual compound doesn't seem to exist. -burg actually means "fortified place", so this would imply the castle was the original settlement, with the village growing up afterwards.

Failing that: how was your village founded, 700 years before the story takes place? Is it a river crossing? Was it a farm with a specific animal or crop? Was it a deliberate resettlement? If your nobles are particularly obnoxious, they might have renamed it after themselves (there's a lot of "King's X" towns dotted around England that suffered this fate). I can probably put something together, but I need something to work from. :)

hS

of a PPC AU centered around music, which I call "The Bandverse". In which, rather than using conventional PPC tech, agents use musical instruments or singing to carry out missions.

The thing is that I had a specific made-up geography in mind, and I'd feel weird putting invented castles of nonexistent noble families and weird eldritch forests next to a real-life place. I know I'd raise an eyebrow if, say, someone from Florida wrote a fantasy story about my little home village and made up a bunch of stuff, to say nothing about how all the Transylvanian misrepresentation in Dracula makes me want to yeet the book ('course, I'll admit that has to do partially with the impact it had on horror and fantasy with the 'backwards monster country' trope). Obviously I can still change things around if they don't quite fit together or my eventual beta reader(s) tell me they sound awkward, but when I write a historical setting I'm usually more comfortable making up a place than modifying an existing one.

I'll keep what you said in mind, though. :)

We've never taken a hard line that any deviation from canon is always bad all the time. One of the fanworks most celebrated in the PPC is The Official Fanfiction University of Middle-earth, which takes Lord of the Rings characters wildly out of character for the sake of comedy. Jay and Acacia even use OFUM's "Elrond out of character" as an assassination method in their sixteenth mission.

The reason OFUM can write all the characters OOC and still be considered good is that it knows exactly what it's doing and why. It was written with full knowledge and respect for the canon in mind, but respect doesn't mean strict adherence. There is always room for a writer's unique perspective in fanfiction. That is, indeed, the point of it. If we weren't open to that, we wouldn't read fanfiction at all.

And it has always been the firm stance of the PPC that anything can be written well. That includes non-canon slash pairings. What we take exception to is bad writing, especially when performed in willful ignorance with no respect for the original.

We are also well aware that subjectively enjoying something that is objectively garbage is a thing, and we don't shame people for it.

That you seem not to know any of this means you are quite far from being in a place where you'd be granted Permission, so perhaps worry less about that and more about actually learning who we are and what we're about?

Also: "swore to destroy"? Dude. It's just fanfiction. We're here to have fun. Calm down, aye?

~Neshomeh

there is no black and white when it comes to this issue. There's a difference between an interpretation of canonical character or element that might not be 100% accurate, and flat-out getting it wrong. See example about Gandalf randomly marrying a girl he comes across.

To use a musical analogy, you don't always have to play a piece exactly as the composer wrote it. You can change the key, the tempo, arrange it for a different instrument or style, or occasionally play a note differently … and all of that is quite different from mashing random keys on the piano and turning the piece into unrecognizable cacophony.

have I become the very thing I swore to destroy when I joined the PPC?

Nope! I got into M/M when I started watching Hetalia waaaaay way back, and since then I've been into a lot of M/M ships in other fandoms, canon or non-canon.

Getting into non-canon ships is fun! Writing fics to enable non-canon ships is very fun! But that's why at the PPC it's the Department of Bad Slash and Het, not just slash or "non-canon pairings". Characters should retain some amount of their original personality regardless of who they're dating.

So no, you're not going against some unspoken PPC rule for liking non-canon pairings. I might adore Bilbo/Thorin and Legolas/Gimli (and believe you me I did not ship Legolas/Gimli when I was younger), but not everyone here likes those ships as anything other than platonic. That's fine, as long as we respect one another.

So, I've been getting deeper into fandom stuff on Twitter and Tumblr, and I have found myself being an unapologetic fan of two M/M ships I used to despise for being "non-canon". Now, I've been realizing that the whole "stick to canon characterizations" thing goes a bit against one point of fanfiction: to see how your own interpretations of your favorite characters' personalities would play out.

And that's when I feared: have I become the very thing I swore to destroy when I joined the PPC? I really like writing my own interpretations of characters and don't want to be told off because "it's not canon", but also my first Boardiversery is coming up and I'm eagerly awaiting the day that I can finally write for the PPC.

I don't necessarily accept all OOCness (turning characters into mouthpieces to bash something you don't like is not okay in my book), but I feel that it can be fun to write.

I don't know what to do. Help!

It was cool to get inside Ina’s head again. Though I seriously doubt that was the worst mission ever.

—Ls

A debrief with Dumbledore, and going home.

Next up is year two: Lord Harry Potter and the Pureblood Panopticon! Stay tuned :)

AW was totally being a God-pusher in that article.

(See, that's what comparing AW to a drug-dealer looks like. And it's a joke. It has been made with zero ill will toward religion generally or AW personally. Chill.)

~Neshomeh believes the dose makes the poison, really.