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It's technically a fanfiction of 'The Loud House', but it doesn't feel much like the cartoon. It's a superhero AU and reads more like a comic book in story form.

And by scripting, I mean doing it like how Zelda Queen does here.

P.S: What are you MST-ing? As a longtime Das Sporker, I'd like to know 😉

Because action scenes are a bit of a blur and nothing really funny happens then.

https://complaints.games-workshop.com/.

Please do not mention Alfa by name, that'd probably make it more likely the channel gets yanked.

As to why... there are a few reasons. I've heard some speculation from different places, but the big obvious reason is that GW wants to start producing video content and they want to charge us monthly to watch it.

Now, nevermind that this is... historically not a good idea (single-IP streaming services are by and large unsuccessful and the ever-increasing competition for the limited amount of money people have to spend monthly makes trying to enter the space without a fairly large value proposition in terms of content extremely ill-advised, especially for a company that already makes products marked up to premium prices that fans are frequently a little on edge about paying), it seems like GW has effectively decided thst fan content is competition and thus needs to be eliminated. It's hard to say whether this is actually their position, but the timing here is suspicious. Now, I would vehemently disagree with that stance, especially with something like TTS, but at the root of this, I think GW wants to make sure something like Astartes can never happen again—despite the glacial production schedule of multiple years of incremental release for a single 13-minute short, the fact is that Astartes was essentially professional-quality animation made by a fan. I'd argue that that doesn't really compete with any kind of official streaming platform anyways—the production time to actual frames of animation ratio on Astartes is so, so low, too low to compete with streaming content released on a regular, TV-production-ish schedule. And the thing is, the person who made Astartes got hired by GW to come help develop official content.

The other issue is... well, money. Fan animation, unlike fan fiction, can make money, and the instant money starts to change hands your fair use protections start to evaporate—it's much much easier to defend a work as fair use when nobody is financially gaining from it (and fair use is... honestly a lot less iron-clad then people tend to think. It can be very shaky, and its boundaries are largely decided by case law, so it's hard to know for sure if you're protected unless you win in court—by which point it is far, far too late). This is why patreons from people like Alfa, Something Witty Entertainment, Project Mouthwash, and LittleKuriboh are structured the way they are (abridgers are really the closest analogue to what Alfa does, although their heavy reliance on the original animation arguably makes their position more fraught)—if you sell access to content created with IPs that you don't own, it's dangerous. However, if you structure things so that it is a donation, not a purchase of some form of anything, and by donating you gain access to perks that aren't technically covered by the IP, it's harder to sue them (although many of these offer add-free download access to their content, which is... a little bit dangerous. Just less so than selling any and all access). And of course if you pay Alfa every month... That's money you're not using to buy warhammer models (although the fact that I continue consider giving Alfa money if I can spare any indicates that for at least a portion of the audience, that money really wouldn't go to them either way).

It's honestly easy to make a legal case against fan animation—moreso than any other fan content, because of the monetization and because it can more easily directly compete with official works then pretty much any other sort of content out there (although, again, I'd argue they fill different niches and really don't compete as directly as GW might think). I don't necessarily think, however, that commercial endeavors by fans always harm the rights holder—many rights holders actually allow it if they're in the loop and get some money for it, but I'm not even entirely convinced that's necessary. Hell, if GW straight-up said "yeah, you can accept donations and we won't try to sue you" (which... isn't actually illegal, just toeing right up against the line), there are actually opportunities that open up to them, some of which they can even take without looking like despicable human beings. They can provide publication for fan works or opportunities for creators who want to go official from inside of that space—you hired the Astartes creator, give other people who have proven themselves opportunities to official through hiring or contracting. People like Valve have been doing this for decades: it has proven profitable to varying degrees, and perilous to ignore, lest a friendlier company give your fans an offer—but if you close the door by making your works inhospitable to fan content, you won't get more hires, because those people won't be in your fandom anymore. Hell, if you okay donations, let people donate to fan creators who have reached a certain level of success and applied for it through your website, GW: you can take a cut analogous to patreon, you don't get access to actual content revenue streams like AdSense but also thus do not assume as much risk for fan content (you can't get sued as easily for profiting off of, say, references to Disney's IP if you only take a cut of donations...), and fan creators get the advertising of being on GW's website without actually taking a hit to the amount they get every month from an extra cut—nobody loses here.

There are ways to make this work, is what I'm saying, if you're willing to expand beyond the view of "I OWN this, it is MINE, nobody else get something from MY work, whether it be money, acclaim, or popularity."

I said this in Alfa's comments section:

This series helped me get invested in the 40k universe. It made me interested to see where the official storyline will go, for comparison. I will never [frelling] understand why large companies feel so threatened by fanworks. Where's the data that says this hurts their bottom line?

I'm subscribed, the bell is rung, and I'm here to see what happens next. I enjoy your comedy even when I don't get the references. I'm sure I'll keep enjoying it.

Gotta feed that algorithm.

And I'm serious: where's the data? Does anyone have studies about this? I wanna see them. And if our instinct is right that fandom is good for companies, I have half a mind to go tell GW as much (very nicely, I promise).

~Neshomeh

(Warning, there may be some NSFW content in some links here)

I joined the PPC in... my sophomore year of highschool, wasn't it? Sophomore or Junior. It's hard to remember. This... starts before that.

It was the Freshman year of highschool. I didn't have many friends, back then. I don't make friends easily. And some Junior one table away was talking to me because I'd just sworn at my terrible school Chromebook, which had an overzealous webfilter (and would only get worse as the years went by...). But it turns out we had more in common then a mutual frustration over web filtering, and we bonded over a mutual love of fantasy, science fiction, and gaming. That junior happened to be 'Plith. You might have seen her around (under her full username)—she posts infrequently. 'Plith was the first friend I made in highschool, and she was the one who connected me to the other people who would help get me through the next four years.

We introduced each other to a lot of stuff. I dragged 'Plith in here, 'Plith pushed me into my first game of BattleTech (it was on paper, with one unit per player—I solemnly swore never to play BattleTech ever again and then absolutely broke that rule), I, in turn, introduced 'Plith to Gundam through the medium of episodes of Gundam Wing, and 'Plith currently knows more about Gundam than I've forgotten.

And 'Plith was the one who introduced me to Warhammer 40k. I was worn down over about a year on that, but eventually I caved. Warhammer is one of the things that held our modest group of friends together—we all had our own things we were into, and our own likes and dislikes, but 40k was something we could all talk about over lunch. However, my introduction to 40k wasn't a Horus Heresy novel, it wasn't an attempt to actually play the game, it wasn't Cain, or Gaunt's Ghosts, or any of that. The very first piece of 40k-related content I remember seeing was... well, this.

Yes, my entrance into the dizzying mess that is the world of 40k was... not an official work by Games Workshop. It was a surreal, meme-laden work of parody by Bruva Alfabusa and his merry band of collaborators (once, long ago, known as The Alfa Legion, when they were younger and less dignifed) known as If The Emperor Had A Text To Speech Device, or TTS. If you're a Warhammer fan, TTS... probably needs no introduction. Even if you're not, I've brought it up a lot. Inside of that fandom it's a genuine phenomenon, with new episodes (when they do release—the production schedule is legendarily glacial) scoring 1.5 to 2 million views and spinoff side content boasting respectable figures. I'm sure there are warhammer fans who don't care about TTS, but every time a new episode releases, every 40k fan I know jumps up in excitement. Back in highschool, on the rare occasions a new TTS episode dropped, we'd immediately want to talk about it, share our favorite jokes. Sometimes we'd play it over lunch to get other friends who hadn't had the time to see it yet caught up. Whenever a new episode drops now, it makes the rounds amongst every warhammer fan I know, and many I don't—/r/grimdank always springs into action to extract the best memes from the new episode so they can be overused into oblivion, like all the other memes.

But what made TTS so special... wasn't really the fandom in-jokes, or the other jokes, or even the Jojo's references. It was the story, and it was watching that story become a story. TTS began its life as a series of... well, dumb edgy meme videos, poking fun at both the over the top grimness of the setting and the things fans happened to find distasteful about 40k at the time—the very first episode takes shots at Ultramarine favoritism, no surprises there. Those episodes were tiny, only five minutes or so. They were just... silly videos to make 40k fans laugh, and maybe nod along at some of the more meta criticisms. But as it continued, ambitions spiraled and the show just... rose and rose in quality. The characters, initially more or less just one-note gags, started to get a little more substance. The writing staff got more fastidious in knowing 40k lore, not just for the purpose of writing gags, but to write a comedic take on the setting that still made sense as a story in the context of what was already there. By the time I arrived on the scene, TTS was a genuine, character-driven comedy that could generally provide a humorous take, satirize 40k, provide at least a few hilariously memorable moments every episode, and still advance an actual, ongoing plot with interactions between a huge cast of characters all over the galaxy. And it's only risen to new heights as it's gone on, complete with epic battes, ambiguously diagetic musical diplomacy, YuGiOh, existentialism, dad jokes, the draining effects of self deprecating humor, the ill-advised booping of snoots, and an awful lot of Adorable. Spin-offs like Bro Trip and the TTScast have given the crew opportunities to stretch their creative legs with different characters and less animation-intensive formats, to hilarious results (the TTScast's well-deserved sporking of the notoriously awful first ever 40k novel, Inquisitor, was a particular highlight. And it was all done entirely in character.) They're even started a tabletop roleplay series, Warhams, which I hear is quite good, on top of the WHFRP special. And of course they've taken Paradox's money and gone off and made a Stellaris special too, which is also outstanding (Paradox has a uniquely strong instinct for knowing who exactly to sponsor for content based on their games). But through all of that, the best part was the story, and the characters. I was invested. And I still am.

But, thanks to Games Workshop's recent change in stance on fan content (namely, an explicit prohibition on fan animation)... it is not to be. Alfa has a family to provide for. He can't work under the sword of damocles, knowing at any minute it could all just... vanish.

So, as of today, TTS is officially on hiatus. Hiatus, because hopefully GW will see reason eventually, and also because... well, the team does want to see this through. If GW really genuinely will not back down, the team fully intends to provide fans with some kind of resolution as best the can. Think something along the lines of Epistle 3—ie, removing all the copyrighted parts of a blatant continuation of a story for legal reasons to give fans something, even if they'll never get something official. (...Right, yeah, that link has Half-Life spoilers. If you're not a Half-Life fan you might not know that). But for now, once TTS episode 30 parts 1 and 2 (of a total of three parts) release on youtube in a few days... that's it.

Alfa and co are off to find fandoms to work in that are more creator-friendly, and I wish them all the best—I'll certainly watch whatever they put out, because they've long since proven that their work deserves that. They're a talented crew.

Maybe it's not right to call this a memoriam. TTS will continue eventually, in some form. The people behind it will do more work, and are experimenting with neat new ideas. That's exciting. But... well, I wanted to do something. This is a series that has meant a lot to me over the years. More than most fan works. More than most works, period. It got me into a fandom. It connected me to the people around me. And... oh god. Technically, TTS introduced me to my warhammer faction. By extension, TTS gave me my username. I... literally wouldn't be "thoth" without it.

I want to be angry. That would be easier. But really I'm just... kind of sad.

I don't seem to have anything affected, but then I don't have a lot shared from Drive, and what there is is likely published.

I'm still concerned about docs with URLs that end in /edit and variations on that, and there are an awful lot of those from Iximaz, SkarmorySilver, Zingenmir, and others. I'd love to hear from you or anyone else with un-published docs about what Google has to say about your stuff.

Also, a request to all Docs users: Please credit yourself as the author by name somewhere in the doc. If it's published, there is otherwise absolutely no way to tell who it belongs to within the doc. I'm begging you, please please please do this.

~Neshomeh

Deborah J. Natelson here. :) Although not all Thinklings authors are PPCers (only Catherine Butzen and I are), both Katherine Vick and Remy Apepp (book forthcoming) are well-known fanfiction authors -- I know them especially from Harry Potter and Death Note -- and Sarah Awa has written some for Bleach. So even though they weren't in the PPC, they were, shall we say, upholding writing values in the fanfiction world.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but I've actually now begun writing a PPCish story on Amazon's new web novel platform. Short summary is that genres are infesting the world and twisting little pockets of influence to fit their tropes. Agents enter the world to defeat the "Heart" of the scenario, to release the victims who've been pulled into it. Clear influence there. :) The first Assignment + report is free: https://www.amazon.com/Surviving-in-Horror/dp/B0933KWH9J/

One of my protagonists in an older novel is named after a certain thorn tree. Just, you know. Because I could.

Thinking about it, I should dedicate the series, "Surviving in Horror," to the PPC. It's been a massive influence on my life and writing.

In the meantime -- well, I already own all of Butzen's book, so I'm going to go check out some of the other things on this list!

I do have a few books out in paperback, but since this one's serialized, it's not yet at that state. In part because I'm hoping to get readers so I can convince a big publisher to take it up, and in part because I only have about 40,000 words pre-written. But hopefully, one day -- !

In any case, thank you for the link. It's hard to dig through and find them, so I'll go browse over in that area. :)

Google is now telling me which files will be affected, and it's a pretty small collection. On my main Drive, there's only 16 in total (and I have a lot on there). It looks like they're mostly images, plus a few PDFs and a couple of archived HTML files. No Docs, Sheets, or anything else standard.

My PPC account is even better: there's only four files in danger, all of them images. I don't know what Google's selection criteria are, but I think we're pretty safe.

hS

I liked the description of a literal language barrier and how The Food™ was described.

I also liked Ekwy's character with her counter-arguments in defense of the Sue and how she preferred her life at World One to show she wasn't the same Ekwy as before.

--Ozzielot

Oh, thank you! It looks very adorable. ^^

The mission was funny, the initial introductory bit was nice, and I enjoyed how you were both pointing out the good and less-good parts of the fic. The language barrier was a nice touch.The "no birds" bit made me laugh as well.

Have a mini snek! They come with hats!

Glad you enjoyed it! My return to the PPC had more to do with rediscovering my love of fanfiction and post things I've written instead of just letting them metaphorically gather dust on my desktop, and then I stumbled across it being an actual tag on Ao3. It tumbled me down a bit of a rabbit hole where all the encouragement I needed to stop by was some assurance from Neshomeh that I'd be more than welcome, and so I posted on the Board not really thinking I'd be more than an oldie lurker. Then that whole thread spiralled into a beautiful tangle of nostalgia and I knew I'd end up writing missions again. It's way too much fun not to! =)

It is not entirely necessary to recognise these characters or know where they come from (Agent Ekwy was, unsurprisingly, my character back in the day and Blank hails from the PPC Musical I wrote; they have not been partners on assignment before) and there are references to other things I wrote. The feather knife is one of them, so I am curious if anyone will catch it. (Anyone's free to ask about it if they're curious.) This is proooobably Agent Ekwy's last real mission, but she might have cameos if I feel like dragging her back into the insanity. She is offically retired.

As Neshomeh pointed out, Moira's feelings about being recruited are not elaborated upon because this is not the story about Moira's feelings. This is the story of how Moira was recruited from the point of view of the agent that recruited her. It's true I could have made the scene of her recruitment longer, maybe have a bit more of back-and-forth, but I felt the story was winding down and it might have dragged a bit. But I will dive into Moira more when she gets the chance to tell her point of view. I don't think I'll be heavy on the angst; I tend to lean more towards comedy overall, but if that's not your thing then that's cool!

Thank you for reading!

/Ekwy

I still prefer lots of character psychology, but I can appreciate this for what it is.

Thank you for the encouragements, it's what I ultimately hope, to do well and leave a little mark!

For responding to your question, it's because my previous main pseudonym on Internet became too much tied with things that hurted me greatly, I fell into a depression and I realized I became a parody of myself, so I needed a new identity who would be more "me". And so, "The Pighead".

And no, it don't really sound that great in French, whether you say "Pighead" with a French accent or "Tête de Cochon" (while I'm at it, I want to debunk this: no, the way we talk is not sexy at all. It's the complete opposite.)

Oh, excellent, that is what I needed! In case I end up with this blood in my blood, call Legendbringer. Or... really, everyone who did a Fix Fic of this. They will be able to do an exorcism, fo'sure!

I think you'll do well here. ^_^ Have a bumper sticker!

May I ask why "The Pighead"? And does it sound better in French?

~Neshomeh

Or maybe a first opinion, since I beta'd the story? Eh, either way.

SPOILERS BELOW

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I disagree about Moira's recruitment scene for one simple reason: contrary to what the typical Sue might think, it's not all about her. {= ) This is Agent Ekwy's story, and we're experiencing events from her perspective. We're not in Moira's head, so it wouldn't make sense for the narrative to suddenly take a deep dive into her feelings when Ekwy is busy dealing with Blank's reaction to her decision to recruit their target. Also, we shouldn't need it spelled out for us to imagine that plenty goes through Moira's head while the agents argue, and that whatever she thinks during that time leads her to go along with the plan. I would guess something along the lines of "Well, at least this doesn't involve me getting stabbed while I'm weakened from de-Orcing that Orc," and also "Ooooh, that portal is shiny..." {= )

That said, this is definitely more of a TOS-style piece, so you're not wrong that it's lighter on the character psychology than, say, one of my stories. But for my two cents, that's a good thing. We can't all be hopeless addicts to angst. ^_~

~Neshomeh

I'm Damian Thorne, resident master of the Two-Day Special Interest. Here, have a vial of sparkly blood lifted right from the veins of Starfleet Magic's Grand Ruler Celesto! Please do not drink, inhale, smoke, inject, sniff, use as eyedrops, use as nosedrops, or otherwise take in this blood. If you do, you will end up as a brutal dictator who kills all who dare criticize you – that is, if you don't die pulling off a poorly-planned military coup.

To be honest, I didn't really "feel" it as much as I wanted to, but that could just as easily be a product of my emotional state and incredibly high standards. I could appreciate the humor and absurdity, but those jokes don't work on me as well as they used to.

So, deprived of my ability to enjoy humor, I must look to your characters. And what characters they are! I haven't read anything else featuring these two, but you telegraphed what was going on well enough for me even if I don't know the exact significance of that raven knife. It's also a very interesting take on the PPC – what happens if you do successfully retire? Thoth mentioned the meta-narrative, but since "meta-narrative" is extremely vague I'd like to specify the meta-narrative I saw: Agent Ekwy, after fifteen years away from HQ, is called back to her past life to do One Last Job with her old friends. It mirrors how you, after fifteen years' absence from the PPC, returned to the Board after hearing about the move (I think it was the move that brought you back? Am I right?) and write One Last Mission with your old friends. And I really hope that it's not One Last Mission because I think I'll like what you have in stock. The idea of the PPC as fallible and capable of making misjudgements isn't something one normally considers when writing a hit piece on, say, Starfleet Magic or any of the myriad terribly bad fics, but it's worth considering if you can see the effort put into it, and it's something you show well here through the conflict between Ekwy and Blank.

I have two major criticisms. The first is the recruitment scene: That segment doesn't pack one-fifth of the emotional punch it should. You just say "Moira looked ready to cry" and then she just. Goes along with what the agents are saying? This is supposed to be a super-emotional turning point for her, and it's just not given enough development for me to care. I feel that, in a lesser form, that extends to the whole thing. There's this... feeling throughout it all that it's not enough, that the characters' emotions are mentioned and moved on from too quickly. It feels flat. You should get a second opinion on this, as it could be my maze of complexes acting up again. The Moira scene is non-negotiable, though. >:(

Overall, pretty good mission that explored a new story idea! Would love to see more like this in the future.

Oooooooh, that's super neat! Thank you, very nice to meet all of y'all!

"Tasty" is the only thing I can say.