The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Sorry about the delay. I won't comment in too much depth, because I'm sort of limited to mobile at the moment. Briefly, though:

Permission granted!

My one criticism is that the PPC comes off more like a military establishment than a bureaucracy from hell in the first piece. I love the idea of Building Maintenance drubbing new recruits into digging ditches for them, especially if said recruits are already assigned as Floaters, but this line of Finola's soured it for me:

We get lectures, then we get drills, and sometimes they call us out to do grunt work.

That makes it sound like there's a rigorous standard training process. If I may bastardize an over-used meme, the PPC has no standardized training, and the PPC needs no standardized training. Especially not military-flavored training. Nothing against that flavor overall--it would be weird if two ex-military agents didn't see things in military terms--but the PPC is more like the CIA. Or, even more aptly, the TVA or any other fictional timeline-protection agency you care to name. {= )

So that's the one negative. The rest is positive. There's enough PPC-flavored bizarreness and humor that I'm sure you can do it. I even think it wouldn't be too hard to edit the first prompt to make it totally work, if you feel like it. I like the agents; they seem like good folk. I like seeing Floaters taking on non-Action roles (maintenance, character protection), like Ginger wrote them way back in the day. I like your interpretation of the "duty" prompt: both that you did interpret it and the direction you took. I like the homage to Mervin and Hyde, and that it was a restrained homage. {= ) (Too bad there are so many Snape Sues their totally over-the-top intervention didn't make a dent, apparently, eh?)

Nitpicks: I spotted a missing quotation mark and "agents" inconsistently capitalized once in the second prompt. Sorry I'm not telling you where; one blockquote on mobile is all I have the patience to do. Also, those things are hardly a big deal. {= )

Enjoy your shiny new Permission!

~Neshomeh

It’s Friday.

Do you still have time, or would it be okay if a different PG were to look at this?

—Ls

Hey, I might take the chance to suggest bleep yogurt, a new bleeproduct.

It's also used for salad dressings.

The character normally looks like this (first one on the list), and doesn't actually have a canonical overblot form. Just keep in mind that overblot forms are kinda nasty "dark" versions of the characters.

It can be found here.

—Ls, reaching for the neurosurgeon.

Also, not sure Inappropriate Nicknames can be adopted.

—Ls

This is pretty awesome! I like the concept, and some of those theoretical multiverses sound quite interesting...

...that dictionaries would constantly be in flux as words are discovered as having been Bad. ( “You can’t say ‘agent’, that implies that non-agents don’t have free will!” )

—Ls is glad he doesn’t live there.

New Multiverse from the Research Institute of Applied Sciences

Every multiverse has a mirror. We know about the eternal mirror and the plot that has been in it for years. But what makes it crystallize? What does the new multi-mirror look like?

After all, PPC is selfish. This could be a problem, but be careful. We are not a high paying broker, we don't get anything from the rules, we manage characters and so on. We take personal risks and protect the Multiverse without immediate gain. We do it for them, not for us.

Instead, EPC is self-interested. They work on many worlds to control it - to get it themselves. It doesn't matter if they do it to protect privacy - it's selfish to reflect on them.

Such a simple example is to place any mirror in the known multiverse. TCDA sailfish mirror, transom bed, etc. You can imagine how this could happen - but this theory assumes that no new face has been found, what are the chances?

Therefore, the most likely case is that each inverse pair has a different inverse multiverse sign and the other properties remain the same. Take TCDA for example, the steampunk multiverse is all about technology. The result is a multiverse centered on magic, or at least the denial of technology, but retains other aspects of reality, such as magnificent architecture and labors of love lurking on the fringes.

In this case, the multiverse looks like this: It can be called a fuzzy family, or a TCDA mirror.

According to the latest Multi-Planet Atlas, there are two theoretical mirrors. Varieties that cannot exist are marked with an asterisk.

Content of Multiverse | Mirror Multiverse-Original | Personal interests above.

Steampunk in the world | Untouchable family magic. As was mentioned.

Vandalism | * History of PPC is an ever-changing universe that changes over time. If the Fandomonium (theoretically including the Wild West) is constantly changing and changing every time a new code changes, then PPC's history (you need to insert Ye Old Line here) is the same as the scene. Rank PPC in the world.

Professional mathematics-I find emphasis that the Balkans is different. Shipverse is about emotions and math is about math and logic.

The Girl's Universe of Poetry Wisdom-Search | Break Both stories have an elementary school setting, but in the scene where a magical girl goes to save the multidimensional world, the college students are like regular kids.

Surya Bank | Black Multiverse-Day | Night As the name suggests.

Frafus | * Graystone Mountains-Hunter | Wild Animal First is a world where players can transform into any animal. Second, they are all very evil dragons and will eat helpless kids if given the chance, I'm fine with that and shut up.

Post Anti-Idol * Len Broken Filter-You | Lack of equality. Some communities consider allegations of fraud to be good news. Another dislike of the aggressive multiverse. Not ideal at all.

Plant | * Deep Darkness-Rogue | This place causes pain. What are the many paradoxes of Suvi? There is not much in the world without the Soviet Union - it is bad not to have it. But unlike Sophian, who has had her wishes granted, Sophian is always violent. While PPC and the rules surrounding it continue to change, the misguided goal is to make life miserable, confusing and offensive for gullible customers. Apart from that there is no place for them.

Actually, I think I know the agent is leaving.

The author is too good at protecting the day.

((Yup, I put hS’ post through Google Translate.))

A new Multiverse Theory, by the Department of Analytical Science

To every Multiverse, there is a Mirror. We have known for years about the Mirror Multiverse, and the Enforcers of the Plot Continuum who reign there. But what is it that makes them a mirror? And what would the mirror of other Multiverses look like?

The PPC is, ultimately, selfless. That's likely to be a controversial statement, but think about it: we agents are not well-paid, we don't get to take anything from the canons, we don't get to make out with characters or whatever. We are saving the multiverse at personal risk, with no direct benefits. We're doing it for them, not us.

The EPC, in contrast, is selfish. They operate in their multiverse to control it - to take it for their own. The fact that they do so by encouraging Suvians is almost irrelevant - it is the selfishness that makes them our mirror.

A simple model, then, would be to posit a Selfish Mirror to each known multiverse. There would be a selfish Mirror TCDA, Mirror Shipverse, etc etc. We can imagine what these would be like - but this theory would mean that none of the other mirrors have ever been detected, and what are the chances of that?

More likely, then, is that each mirrored pair has the defining characteristic of the Multiverse mirrored, while other characteristics remain broadly similar. To take the TCDA as an example: the Steampunk Multiverse is all about technology. Therefore its Mirror would be a multiverse which is about magic, or at least the rejection of technology - while retaining other aspects of their reality, such as the giant buildings, and the Lovecraftian influences seeping in at the edges.

As it happens, just such a multiverse is known: the Unspeakable Verse, or as we could also call it, the Mirror TCDA.

Based on the latest Multiversal Atlas, here are the theorised Mirror Pairs. Multiverses not known to actually exist are marked with an asterisk:

Prime Multiverse | Mirror Multiverse - selfless | selfish. Discussed above.

Steampunk Multiverse | Unspeakable Verse - science | magic. Discussed above.

Fandemonium | *Historic PPCs - change over universes | change over time. Where the Fandemonium (theorised to include the Wild Wild Westverse) is in a constant state of flux, changing with each new canon, the Historic PPCs multiverse (here assumed to include Ye Olde Verse) consists of a string of PPCs in the same world, occurring in sequence.

Shipverse | Mathology - emotion | logic. The Vulcan dichotomy. The Shipverse is all about feelings, while the Mathology is maths and logic.

Magical Girl Verse | Universety - adventure | relaxation. Both verses have a high school element, but where the Magical Girls are out saving the multiverse, the students in the Universety seem to be just normal kids.

Solarpunk | Noir Multiverse - day | night. It's literally in the names.

Furryverse | *Greystone Mountain - animals | monsters. One is a world where agents can be any animal; the other is one where they are all monstrous dragons who are definitely evil and probably eat helpless children whenever they get a chance of course I don't have issues shut up.

Anti-Plot Continuum | *Uncensored Schism - respect | tolerance. One is a world where every claim of offence is taken as gospel. The other is a multiverse where not liking something is a vicious attack. Neither are terribly pleasant.

Sueniverse | *The Grim Darkness - scene stealers | scene sufferers. What is the opposite of a multiverse of Suvians? It's not a multiverse without Suvians - an absence is not a negative. Rather, the opposite of a Suvian who gets everything she wants is a Suvian who is eternally tortured. They still warp the PPC and the canons around them - but the goal of the warping is to make life for the Suvian agents as grim, angsty, and torment-filled as it can possibly be. Literally nothing goes right for them.

Actually I think I've known a few agents who might be from there.

Author redacted to protect the guilty.

Another classic early PPC story comes to an end, with the Obligatory Epilogue to Bast's Taken Far Too Literally. If you remember, the story didn't start out as a PPC spinoff, but from Chapter 9 Jay and Acacia appeared, with permission.

Two months ago, at the end of Chapter 10, Mary Sue (the protagonist's actual name) threw Gollum into the fires of Mount Doom, but was snagged by him and went over the edge herself. Bast asked her reviewers for feedback on how the story should conclude:

The Happy Ending—Mary Sue wakes up in Real Life with her kid

The Tragic, Emotional Ending-Mary Sue fries in Mt Doom.

Today, she revealed the readers' response:

Taken Far Too Literally: Obligatory Epilogue, Or, Does This S*&$ Never End?!?!?! by GreyLadyBast

(Next PPC+20 is just over two weeks away; apparently they all took a summer break or something.)

hS

Particularly since it's not centrally controlled - it's culturally controlled. It's not even Cancelling (which is rarely a real thing anyway), because that implies external pressure. These people crumple under any objection at all.

(All of which is the sort of extrapolation that isn't going into the Atlas, to avoid tying people's hands if they choose to write about it.)

hS

That is outright 1984-level control on media, and that is scary.

[Goes off to edit every story and Board post relating to said character, who is now and always has been called David Allen]

One thing the APC World One would have is editing capabilities on everything, because you always need to be able to change your statements to remove any possibility of offense. This probably even affects canons - it is routine for authors to update for new editions, and even for TV/movie producers to edit for each re-release. And then all previous editions are redacted - think Lucas refusing to sell the non-Special Editions of Star Wars, but for, like... everything.

Luckily, saying "you've ruined my childhood by changing this" was demonstrated to be problematic years ago, because it's an expression of First World privilege and an attack on anyone who didn't see the thing in question in their childhood. So there's no problem with just updating everything every time someone finds a new problem.

hS

The PPC being founded at a later point in time is a separate exercise than a different multiverse where Tumblr anti-shipping dogma is the baseline of engagement with media. The variant I thought of would be something more along the lines of the Ye Olde-verses, but a couple years in the future. But both are interesting to think about.

As for David Alien, has no one told him that being called "alien" is problematic bc it's othering himself? ;P

The premise of the Multiversal Atlas is that each multiverse was different from inception. The Anti-Plot Continuum isn't a world where the PPC was founded in the Tumblr era - it's a world where the mindset of the Tumblr era was always dominant. PPC scientists tend to go for a semi-fixed history model, probably because they work in canons - so despite Everything Being Different, a lot of things are still the same.

So J.R.R. Tolkien always writes an epic story about nine people clubbing together to destroy a Ring of Power. Sometimes they're only doing it because they can't agree who should claim it instead. Sometimes they're all in love. Sometimes half of them are female. And sometimes, as in the APC, the number of incidents they encounter along the way is significantly reduced, to avoid anything problematic coming up.

It is entirely possible to perceive the alternate multiverse another way. The question of what if the PPC was started in our world at a different time is a really interesting one (and there's a hypothetical multiverse devoted to that exact question). But it's not what the Atlas assumes.

In line with the Atlas' version, then, and using Linstar's translation algorithm, I present: Agents David Alien and Constance The Sims.

They are designed to be unproblematic. They are the same height, because someone said men being taller is misogynist, and someone else said women being taller is fetishisation. D. Alien has short hair, because someone said giving men long hair is offensive. His name isn't Dafydd, because that was called cultural appropriation. At one point he wore a shirt, but that was supporting wage-slavery; at another, she wore a v-neck t-shirt, but that was objectifying. Both are in grey, because someone once told the Board that a black uniform was glorifying slavery. You wouldn't believe how many ways the flame and cactus flash-patches were toxic, so now they just have acronyms (which will soon be phased out, because someone has just raised the point that Latin letters are anglocentric). And of course, the use of "Mary Sue" went out way back, so now they're the Department of Problematic O.Cs. (Also about to be changed, as soon as someone notices that "P.O.C." is also used for something else.)

The point here, and the point I think Lily's making, is that none of these comments are 100% wrong. All of them can be true, in some circumstances! But you have to apply thought to them. Neither avoiding offense nor being offensive are tick-box exercises: they depend almost entirely on context. But the APC ignores context: it is literally 'you said it's bad, so it's always bad in any circumstances'.

Like the Atlas says, it's a fairly quiet, peaceful world. If every multiverse has a mirror, then the mirror of the APC one where the rallying cry is "you can't say you don't like it - that's censorship!". Certain parts of the internet are living in that one right now.

hS

And I’ll say that the APC doesn’t seem like an actually fun place—but, the ridiculous, over-the-top holier-than-thou attitude can be funny.

—Ls is gonna try to write something APC too.

Old-school forum/LJ-based fandom focused on being "truer" to canon, and we see that in the DNA of the PPC as well -- canon is used in Bad Slash exorcisms, canon is the yardstick for which DMS charges are written, etc. That being said, there were still some people who said stuff like "Ronmione is abusive" -- I remember sixth-grade me comparing Harry/Ginny to Henry VIII and Anne Boelyn on a Fictionalley anti-shipping thread!

But! People said "x ship is abusive" back then without the corollary "so if you ship x ship, you also support abuse". As you said, I'm sure the idea of the corollary was there, but it wasn't really said out loud. People didn't involve each other's offline identities in their online behaviour as much. But now that places like Facebook are requiring people bring their offline identities online, there's a growing generation of internet users who don't think very much of using some variation of their wallet name + showing their face online. It's not surprising then that when the ship wars evolved, they brought our offline identities and beliefs into the fray with a good smattering of social justice language.

Granted, this is from my perspective of having been deeply involved in old and new fandom, and the internet is multifaceted enough that people can definitely have different experiences of this shift than I have had. I do agree with your observations, though!

On the idea that the APC wouldn't exist if the PPC hadn't been created during old-school fandom, I mean... you're not wrong, per se. The idea of writing something to spork bad fanfiction has largely fallen by the wayside in favour of brigading fics with harmful comments or attacking the writer on social media. I just wrote this as a thought experiment of what could've happened if I had, for example, taken my 2013-era missions into their logical extreme by adhering strictly to Tumblr anti-shipping dogma.

Maybe in that alternate multiverse Alvin and Xena decided that the gentler way to tackle all the ~problematic fic~ out there was not in sending hurtful messages directly to the writer, but to ~set an example~ by writing their very wholesome agents into those sinful, problematic fics to show them the light get rid of the problematic elements before they can happen and ruin the lives of those fictional characters who are actually Very Real People with Rights. It's coming from a place of condescending, holier-than-thou, hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner sort of mentality.

The normal PPC has had eras where that mentality was in play, but never to the extreme of implying that the agents sent Elrond into conversion therapy! We're now more along the lines of "there's just some fics that are so bad that it's funny and we just want to point that out and also develop our own OCs along the way".

I hope.

ETA I should also mention that canonicity is still a concern in New Fandom Shipping Wars, but in a... different way? Canon ships are evaluated for how healthy they are, or if the canon has yet to determine endgame shipping, the ship wars focus on swaying the opinions of the show creators (and, ofc, dogpiling them if they go in a different way). The Keith/Lance vs Keith/Shiro wars during the latest incarnation of Voltron are a good example. Another major one was John/Sherlock from BBC Sherlock, where a subset of the shippers created a conspiracy theory that John/Sherlock was endgame and the writers had been hinting at it throughout the series, even when they stated time and again that it wasn't going to happen. This ended up with them believing the first episode of a completely different series was going to be some "secret actually good episode" of BBC Sherlock after its disastrous season 4 finale.

(And for the record, I shipped John/Sherlock! Though granted, I was going off of the ACD stories as well as the BBC show, and when the BBC show made it pretty clear in season 3 that they didn't think Sherlock mattered that much to John, I dropped it like a hot potato.)

So it might mean (and this is directed at hS's Multiversal Atlas blurb) that the canons in APC's World One are much the same as they are here, but the Guardians of the Continuum only protect the canons they deem "worthy" of their protection. Tolkien scrapes by because obviously Frodo/Sam and Legolas/Gimli are endgame ;) Canons can absolutely lose GotC protection if they do something problematic in the storyline, or if the creator says something problematic elsewhere. This makes it different from the PPC where people will defend a canon from Suvians even if they personally disagree with it, like Twilight.