The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

That is what it is for, after all.

--Ls

Though I was going to ask who decides what a mini’s canon equivalent is so thank you for that.

Dunno if I'll watch, but it sounds like it could be good. We'll see.

--Ls

Our general rule is that new mini name choice goes to whoever writes the first OFU or mission to that continuum. We don't need to create new mini types just for kicks without a mission or OFU to use them in.

--Ls

Now that we have all these movies and video games and tabletop games and theater productions… why isn't there a ballet yet?

Not like anybody writes fanfics for them anyway 💀

Continuum: Tale of the Bamboo Cutter
Mini: Penglai Jewel Sprouts
Canon origin: A jewel branch from Mount Penglai is one of the items Lady Kaguya sends her suitors on impossible quests for.

Continuum: Momotarō
Mini: Mini-oni
Canon origin: Momotarō and his animal friends go on a quest to slay oni demons.

As you probably guessed from the title this game is all about creating concepts for minis for continuums that don’t have them, we aren’t actually creating them. (Unless spellcheck decides that you did) Just follow my example, not all parts of necessary but still.

Name: Mini spell punks Continuum: Skylanders Canon origin: Spell punks are a villainous species always specializing in some sort of magic, though they unleashed the darkness in the continuum most are easy to defeat, two stand out ones have been mild threats to the Skylanders, the type of small punk correlates to the element of the misspelled character, although dark element characters become mini spell punk librarians, light ones become mini Spellslamzer, and non-element characters become mini time spell punks. Diet: Magical items relating to their elements, mini time spell punks eat clocks

there aren't actual instances of misplaced Japanese culture in the movie. I've already cringed my face into oblivion with one geisha traipsing around M-E.

And a release date in December... I guess it is the official Middle-earth Movie Month. :D

Wikipedia is low-key bickering over whether it counts as anime, given that it's being made by an American studio, who've hired a Japanese studio (Sola) to do the animation. That's why the original voices aren't Japanese. But... given what's going on with Helm's daughter, it's certainly anime enough for me.

In terms of the plot, from the trailer it looks pretty faithful to the tale of Helm Hammerhand. It's also visually a prequel to the LotR movies - that's our Edoras and Hornburg, not some new version. The main difference I clocked are:

a) Mumakil. We knew from the announcement that they would be in there; goodness knows what Haradrim gigaphants are doing in Dunland.

b) Was that a Watcher fighting a Mumak???

and c) Hèra, the extremely anime daughter of Helm.

Hèra is a canon character; she's the unnamed daughter of Helm who sparks the whole story of the movie off. She is not noted (in the relevant three paragraphs of Appendix A) as being this... well, anime. She swordfights with wrist-veils! She wears multiple random belts! She has a Great White Eagle buddy! Her voice actress thinks she's written more like a Miyazaki/Ghibli character than a Tolkien one!

But... for all that it's written by Philippa Boyens with advice from Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, I think they've actually put a decent amount of thought into Hèra. Her name is actual Old English, and Wikipedia specifically discusses how they named her. It also says she was based on Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, who is a fantastic historical anomaly (a Saxon ruling queen who fought off the Vikings for seven years, and passed her realm to her daughter). So I'm cautiously optimistic that she might not be as jarring as the trailer wants her to look.

Oh! Also! Miranda Otto narrates in character as Eowyn, which is amazing, and also explains why Hèra stands out so much against the other characters. Because if Eowyn was going to have a favourite historical character, it would absolutely be a Shieldmaiden of Rohan.

hS

Trailer. The only issue is… where's the Japanese voice acting?

Deirdre might retire to her home continuum, or maybe she and Rebecca would return to Rebecca's version of 2020's Earth. Now that I'm thinking about it, I could see her retiring to a different sci-fi continuum and working as an engineer or cook or nameless redshirt on a spaceship.

Rebecca might go back to her version of Earth, but she might try living in Middle-earth or Star Trek or another universe she likes that she's read about or watched. If she went back to Earth, she would still lead an adventurous life. She might join a rock band or work for a historical reenactment group or something. She would probably go to college at some point. If she didn't find a partner or get married, she would be the awesome nerdy aunt to her siblings' kids.

Boadicea might go back to Terraria and deal with being a terrible person. She would definitely try to go to various different continua first. I could also see her settling down in one of the D&D worlds.

...and seeing if it's among them? I searched "recent French song releases" and got a Spotify playlist, for example (which I can't play due to lack of Spotify account, it turns out). Apart from that, if you can catch a sentence's worth of words next time you hear it, that's often enough to find the full song, as I suspect you already know. I've definitely found a couple songs by searching a few words to a sentence before - one I remember was playing in a store and I think I found it using a few words from the chorus.

Good luck!

~Z

That was (intentionally, I can tell) weird. I'm... not sure what to make of it, honestly. I liked the way it was written, as always, but it was quite trippy.

And of course it wasn't hell at the beginning, there was nowhere near enough paint for that.

--Ls

(Stupid me, pressing enter before I was done.)

--Ls

I plan to review the mission above, so I will probably post up there. Will try for mid-week when I have a little more time between cat care drop-ins.

~Neshomeh

Yeah, this was the first mission for those two, and I'm glad it went well.

As to the steam engine bit, my best recollection was that I was pointing out that they'd put a compartment on the engine specifically - that is, not in any of the train cars, hence the bolded calling out of the weirdness.

“Perchance to Dream”
The dream imagery starting right out the gate, inside the RC, is such a good idea, because it removes any question for the reader whether the mission is just an unusual story. And the imagery itself is perfect, a slightly distorted “offness” without degenerating into lolrandom or a mess of unreadable surreality. The mission scenes in particular feel like the sorts of scenes a PPC agent’s mind might “construct” during a dream. (It was a bit weird for me, too, because I’m reading a book where the characters were hiding in a church, and after I read “Perchance,” I hit a chapter where the church burned down. So hitting another story with both a church and inferno around the same time by coincidence is a little spooky!)

That early assurance that the whole story is clearly a dream makes the ending more unexpected and startling! Did they just have a shared dream, were they actually in a reality warping mission, did Bill Cipher actually do something to cause this? Spooky!

“Alopecoid”
Yeah, that’s a new word for me, perhaps embarrassingly, but we don’t tend to use the Latin or other fancy names much in conversation at the zoo . . . It was a fun idea to explore a continuation of Makes-Things’s scene with Drake, and play more into his Korean roots; at the same time, it’s a bit sad to see him being a bit on the prejudiced side, although I suppose it is a logical conclusion from his jumpy, mistrustful nature. Still, it feels like he ought to know that any species can be written as good or bad; he ought to read Yoon Ha Lee’s Dragon Pearl series at some point! Here’s to hoping his locker of “monster cancellers” serves an actual good use stopping a trespassing Suvian at some point, rather than being used against agents!

Hm. A mummified Makes-Things? Is that a joke about his “death” way back, or is he building a lookalike dummy for some reason? Weird!

The space is missing between the paragraphs that start with, “’But why?’ Charlie asked” and “’Believe me, if I”

—doctorlit doesn’t eat liver, either

(I don't think I'll repeat thoughts on the mission since I did the beta-ing)

That was a nice interlude and a good look at DoSAT, and it flowed well.

Charlie's "just keep nodding until the conversation's over" thing is relatable.

Also, in minor comments, you have “Nah, so do I. in the are-Suvians-people chat and that threw me a bit given how many negatives were going on. Maybe you wanted "Nah, I do too. or something like that?

Here we go, let's review Tomash's 'The Heir of the Phoenix'! Kind of. It's been a while, I'm very rusty on this whole reviewing thing.

I have no idea whether this is the first work Peregrin and Taq ever showed up in, but I got a handle on their general characters soon enough even without prior knowledge or long descriptions. Taq is also comprehensible despite his accent, something I wish was more common in writing with phonetic accents. The spork is fine for a first mission - good notes on the fic's flaws, it actually affects the agents, and it also notes where it does decently. It was somewhat light on humor, personally, but again, this was a first mission, and it's not like it actively takes away from the mission quality. It's easier to go through a read light on humor rather than one that tries for it frequently but with half the jokes being agonizingly bad, at least for me. So yeah, solid stuff.

Small question:

Around this time, the fic began and left the agents standing on top of the locomotive for the Hogwarts Express thanks to Hermione’s compartment being on the large red steam engine. Nearby, a bread roll in a straw hat walked past the train on one leg and one arm.

Right after this, Peregrin makes a comment on how many typos there are. Did autocorrect fix the typos in this passage while transcripting the fic, or am I just missing something?