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I'm Kittyauthor, they/them, also known as KitKat.

Here, have a glass frog. I have plenty.

It is very nice to me you!

28 is a pretty all right age to be. You're definitely not a kid, but you're not, like, 30 or something, either. Enjoy!

~Neshomeh

Hello! My name is DisguisedBacterium, and I write original fiction and fanfiction oneshots. I'm into arcade shoot-em-ups, and sometimes play Touhou fangames. I like William Gibson's books, and am currently about halfway through the Original Series.

I found the PPC on TV Tropes a few years ago, and decided to join after running into some badfic/Mary Sues recently. I'm from South Korea, and my native language is Korean, but I can also speak/write/read in English(I've also started learning Japanese a few months ago). My main fandoms right now are R-Type(which actually has some fanfiction, mostly in Japanese or Korean), DoDonPachi, Biomega, and BLAME!. But since these fandoms don't have a lot of content, I usually end up reading from any fandom that I find interesting. I hope I get along well with everyone...

You may remember me as Betelgeuse on the Discord server. I haven't been on here in a long time. None of that is my fault, I promise. In my absence, I transferred to a new school, did more studying, and got my mental health together.

And my country now has over a thousand cases of The Big C, so I'm back in lockdown. So much time, nothing to do, I'm considering writing another mission, this time in a video game continuum. Since I only play two games, my options are pretty limited. But Hollow Knight has a huge fanbase with NSFW tendencies, so I guess I'll have much more material than I bargained for.

Anyway, hi everyone, and I'm happy to be (sorta) back!

And may your next revolution about the sun be excellent.

... I read "marshmallows" as food curse when you consider that my mind has been replacing marshmallows for quite awhile with this word. This is getting a bit silly, Brain. So please stop, brain.)

Congrats on completing your 28th trip around the sun! Here's hoping for many more!

Why, that's twice as many as fourteen! I would even go so far as to say it's four times as many as seven! Congratulations on acquiring so divisible a number of numbers!

^_~ Happy birthday, Scape.

hS

Dr. Glocktopus is fantastic. I was enjoying the mission before then, but for some reason or another Dr. Glocktopus inspires untold joy within me.

Not in the literal sense, but in the sense that so much history was lost by the Ninth Pass. And it's not too surprising, considering the utter disaster that the loss of the "Oldtime" Weyrs would have represented for the people heading into the Long Interval. No one was allowed to say "Don't worry, everyone, they're going to the future to help out the people 450 years from now, everything will be fine." The reason for their disappearance had to be a complete mystery, with only a couple of cryptic clues seeded for Lessa to find so she could fulfill the predestination paradox. Back then? The world at large might well have felt it was the End Times and sunk into chaos.

Losing the five Weyrs means losing a sizeable chunk of Pern's store of knowledge, written and otherwise. After a few record-destroying earthquakes (Pern gets plenty of those) and maybe a couple other natural disasters to boot, boom, near-total loss of history, especially as pertains to the dragonriders. The only people who might creditably remember the truth about the Southern Continent, fire-lizards, timing it, and all the rest—Benden Weyr and the Harper Hall—lose as much as anyone, and they both eventually fall from grace, too. With only the Lords Holder remaining to represent leadership and security, they scramble to secure whatever control they have. The Holds become more insular; their leaders become more autocratic; they sink into the medieval-esque state in which we find them at the start of the Ninth Pass. The traditions that remain are clung to fiercely, with little to no understanding of the purposes they're meant to serve. It takes visionaries like Robinton, Fandarel, F'lar and Lessa, and the likes of Toric to begin drawing people out of the Dark Age and into Pernese Renaissance.

That's my attempt to headcanon that contradiction into making sense, anyway. {= )

That said, just because the franchise has dragged the present into the past before doesn't mean it always must. I understand the temptation to Do the All the Things, because the fans liked those things when Anne did them, so they must want them all the time, right? For my two cents, though, I don't think that's true. Back in my RP days, the bits everyone focused on were Search and Impression, fighting Thread, and mating flights. If a new adaptation takes us on a fun adventure with likeable characters and features those three things, I reckon it'll feel enough like Pern to work. If you want to focus on anything else, focus on the Harper Hall, and don't neglect the music. Scoring a film or TV adaptation well would be absolutely critical to making it feel like Pern, since we already have an idea how (some) Pernese music sounds thanks to the two albums.

I'm not sure how I feel about a whole PCU—in my thoughts about an Eight Pass film, it was a stand-alone supplement to the existing book franchise, not the foundation of a new cinematic universe—but I do know that I wouldn't appreciate seeing Menolly get the boot in favor of Kindan. You're already ruining my childhood! {; P

TL;DR, there's no need to reinvent the Ninth-Pass wheel or gild the dragons-and-riders lily.

~Neshomeh might have more thoughts later; these were strung together at work. Hope they make sense!

... is that every time Pern does it, it ends up dragging in all the stuff from the present as well.

The Ninth Pass stories established very firmly that such things as timing it, fire lizards, and the Southern Continent were effectively unknown prior to the Pass. But is there a single past period which doesn't wind up pulling in at least two of those? By my count, Anne explored the First, Second, Sixth, and Ninth Passes, while Todd focussed on the Third. Add in this game in the Seventh - and yes, the wiki confirms it includes all three - and it's starting to sound like AIVAS woke up in the Eighth Pass and implemented a mass mind-wipe on the population of the planet!

Mind you, I reckon "Oldtimers" would be a great entry in the Pern Cinematic Universe. But if you did it first, the audience would be annoyed that nobody they actually like from the books showed up; while if you did it later, you'd have to find something useful to do with it rather than just writing a movie/series-length flashback.

... okay, now I'm imagining a PCU done in the same manner as the MCU - just tearing apart the original stories and scavenging them for parts. O'course, the reaction to the Discworld "Watch" series suggests that might be a losing gamble when it comes to book fandoms.

...

Okay so what you do is combine the Third and Ninth Passes.

1. Dragonriders of Pern - The dragon-centric bits of Masterharper

2. Masterharper - Politicking with Robinton and the rise of Fax

3. Untitled Crom Film - Kindan and Nuella (blind protagonist for the win!) mucking about in Crom, with industrialisation and Whers.

4. Lord of Seven Holds - Fax, down to his abrupt death.

5. Weyrwoman - Lessa and Ramoth grow into their power, probably including the time travel shenanigans with F'nor.

6. Untitled Harper Film - Kindan at Harper Hall, but also Fandarel doing technological stuff with the Crom lot.

7. Fall - Crash it all together, doing the Hold rebellion and the first Fall, F'lar's desperation - and end with Lessa going off on her suicide mission.

8. Oldtimers - 2/3 of a film about the end of the Eighth Pass, and then Lessa appears and drags them all away for:

9. Dragonflight - Pure dragon movie set at the start of the Pass, focussing on the Oldtimers' rebellion and its consequences. Jaxom, Southern, all of it.

The flashback movie conceit means we can drop in the Third Pass plague (with Moreta flashback - stuff Windblossom, Moreta gets the time-speaking healer gig), the Harper Hall trilogy (I admit I can't think of a plot-relevant Red Star Rising/Dragonseye flashback point), and of course AIVAS (Dragonsdawn flashback) across the next couple of phases. You end with the climax of All the Weyrs of Pern, because a) who cares about dolphins and trundlebugs, and b) who wants to watch a Pern series after Robinton died?

My read of the "The Watch" conversation - and the Star Wars EU dump - is that people are quite forgiving of changing the storyline, so long as you get the characters right. So I think this stands a chance! ^^ ^^ ^_^

hS

Because that's when the Oldtimers come from. I don't know how many of the ones Lessa brings forward would have been active at the beginning of the Pass, but heck, pick whatever point during those fifty years at which T'ron and that lot are the rising stars. Show them becoming the heroes of their time, because for all their flaws (and show those, too), they were heroes in their own time. Done right, it would let us see their inability to integrate and their sharp decline 400 years later for the tragedy it was.

That could also be very relevant. Times change. Old ways get left behind when they no longer serve. It can be hard to let go, and the sense of loss and uncertainty deserves our sympathy—but letting fear of what is new and different overrule you, trying to hold the world back from necessary progress, and selfishly hoarding privileges you had under the old ways, isn't right. At best, you lose your dignity; at worst, you become a villain.

... So my guess would be that the game is set in the Seventh Pass, then. Either way, shame it doesn't play well enough to make good on it.

~Neshomeh

I have been known to enjoy a good NSFW fic from time to to time. But my guide to quality assessment for any sort of spork is more or less as follows:

• Is it going to be fun to spork? It really, really doesn't matter how bad a piece of NSFW fic is if the resultant mission wouldn't be entertaining to read. Personally, I think that pure squick usually goes beyond the point at which missioning is entertaining. The flaws have to be something you can make enjoyable to mission.

• What's the intent of the fic? You need to understand where a fic is coming from to do a mission properly. "This fic has a really terrible plot" is perfectly reasonable criticism of a fic with aspirations to telling a meaningful story, less so if the intent is just to have some NSFW fun. On the flip side, if the sex elements are the focus, it's a more important to get them right then it would be if the fic's elements there were more token.

• The most important question: Do I buy it? An NSFW fic could be perfectly technically executed, but it will all fall flat if I am unconvinced by the events thst are occurring. If I don't believe that these characters would act this way, that is, to my mind, the ultimate failure. A fic like that would be ill-suited to missioning unless you had a really strong approach, but it's usually a strong factor in my assessment of any fic. Fanfiction is about existing characters, and if you're trying to tell me that a character is Harry Potter when it blatantly isn't... well, I'm not exactly buying into your fiction.

This is a big failure in a lot of AU fic, which tends to tack the character names and descriptions of onto the same set of tired archetypes and spit out a bland generic story of the sort that could be found in a bargain bin somewhere. It's not so much giving us a new take on the characters as it is steamrolling everything that makes those characters themselves out of them.

Which brings us to ABO, something I deeply and truly loathe with the burning passion of a thousand sons. Fighting Space Wolves. Shockingly, good (or at least decent) ABO is possible, but the concept is deeply and fundamentally flawed, and it is painful to watch characters I like stuffed into 50s gender role nonsense except it's gay now so that's fine.

Sorry, had to get that out. The point is, good NSFW fic is well-written, believable, and accomplishes whatever it sets out to do, like all good fiction. Bad NSFW fic does... like, the opposite of that.

(as a sidenote I only used code for quotes because I didn't realize there was a blockquote. I thought > quoting would work, as it does in a lot of markdown. But it does not.)

This game takes your advice. It's set in the seventh or eighth pass (I forget which) with a by and large new cast... But of course, everything else is terrible.

I do agree though. Moreta film ASAP.

Y'know, I was thinking about the various attempts over the years to make a DroP movie, or TV series, or whatever. It occurs to me that what they should absolutely not do is try to center on the Ninth Pass. There's so much history that isn't already occupied with stories! The smart thing would be to do what Todd McCaffrey did and choose a different era to play in. A lot of trouble could be avoided that way.

Or, actually, I think Moreta's Ride would make a great film. It's self-contained. There's intrigue, drama, a ticking clock, plenty of action for the third act... it would work.

I'd say "let's explore the future," too, except that would require either coming up with a new adversary to pit against the dragonriders or doing what the fanbase has done a million times before and contriving a way for Thread to return. Either runs a high risk of coming off as an ill-thought out excuse to cash in.

Moreta, though—Moreta would be timely, too. A kick-ass lady hero saving the world from a deadly plague. We need this. Hollywood, get on this immediately!

~Neshomeh

I don't want to step on your toes; just to add that the wiki also covers this question in more detail in various relevant articles. Specifically, I'd start with the YKINMK article and the Slash-Sporking Guide (even if you don't intend to spork slash).

I also want to highlight Trojie's fifth ground rule:

5. Try to avoid sporking something you wouldn't read if it were written well. This is a rule I've come up with only in the last few years, and for one reason: if you don't like the subject matter, why are you so upset it's been done wrong? In fact, if you aren't a habitual reader of similar things, how do you even know it has been done wrong? I tell myself this so as to avoid sporking things because of any internal prejudices or biases I might have.

In this case, I think "don't like, don't read" may justly apply. If you're not into stories about romance and/or sex, that's okay! There's no reason to force yourself to read things that hold zero appeal for you. Granted, it's hard to find fic with zero romance—and believe me, this annoyed the heck out of me as a younger ace person, so I sympathize—but you can still avoid things that are rated R, M, NSFW, lemon, or anything else suggesting that there will be actual sex.

For myself, my feelings have mellowed and transformed to the point where I can enjoy well-written sex scenes (and enjoy laughing at badly written ones), but that's not to say yours will, or should. There's no reason to force it.

~Neshomeh

P.S. Devs, if you're reading, can we make the blockquote style less in-your-face? The bold and large font is a bit much, which is why I copied Thoth and styled the quote this way instead.

P.P.S. Edited to fix a link.

Thank you so much for the advice!