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Is it necessarily nicer to "fix" people than to kill them?

It feels like that's sort of worse...

As much as I like the idea of a heroic alt-universe, I feel like the CPP seems almost too nice? I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I feel a bit weird about how sorta perfect they are. Maybe it's that they seem a lot like the PPC, just nicer? I really like hearing all your ideas for it, and I hate to feel like I'm stomping on your cool new thing, but I feel a little strange about how it relates to the canon.

Do you try writing in them at the same day (for example, writing in a sci-fi story, then writing in a fantasy one) or do you write in one story in one day, then a different one on another day?

I've been doing the latter since I started and I'm worried about ending the day without getting writing done on my other projects.

~Ozzielot

In case you were wondering "Who is this?" when you accepted the friend buddy request.

Although logicking Sues might not be... nice, per se?

Like, they don't actually kill Sues. Not normally. They just fix them so they can be a normal OC... or at least try. That is always the first thing they do. They always try to convert the Sue into at least a hireable agent and, at most, a constructive OC. But I was planning (although this could be thrown out, since this is still very much in baby steps) on having a "fail" possibility where the Sue ceases to exist and, despite the Sunflower Mathematician (which, now that I'm thinking about it, is much nicer than the Sunflower Official) asking (not commanding) agents not to cry, they usually do.

And the reason why they have to shove logic code everywhere is because the Sue is now a good OC, but still exists, meaning the canon is still "broken" until it's fixed. Heck, in the guidebook (which I need to write lol.) it states that mind wiping tools are only a last resort and to not use them if they can logic the world to normal.

Heck, 1 and 2 ranking Sues don't actually bend the world that much, meaning they can, in fact, be hired. So, I suppose that it is, since it doesn't kill Sues, it just fixes them to have flaws.

If this were, as you said, a true "nice" universe (I'm not for sure if it is now... IDK) then the PPC could be seen as similar but opposite. Like an inverse but not necessarily a dark mirror verse. An inverse that logicks things to good and not kill people. Not try and be bad guys, just people that say "Okay, we need to fix this world a little bit, as the Sue did mess up the tree color equation enough for the generic material to be glitter, but not that much."

My mind had thought of CPP being a minor inverse of PPC, but, instead of working with the words and always killing Sues (well, almost always), they would work with numbers (which are kinda the opposite of words) and not kill Sues.

As for a mirror verse? Maybe they mess up the logic in the world instead of fixing them.

Heck, maybe a true mirror inverse of CPP is the Mirror!PPC and visa versa (the mirror inverse of PPC is Mirror!CPP).

Sorry if that sounds like gobbledygook. This actually makes me want to make the world more really now.

-Kittyauthor, who now wants to make this world more real now.

Is this... this sounds like an alternate-multiverse PPC which is actually nice instead of a bunch of sociopaths, and would view our PPC as the dark Mirror Multiverse version of their own. Is that correct?

Because that would be really cool and is actually not a concept that's been explored before! The known alternate multiverses are almost all Suvian-killers, so this would be an exciting, next-level development in Multiverse Theory! The only possible non-killer alt-PPC is the Solarpunk Guarden, which never got far enough to tell; if the CPP is what I've described, the Guardens would stand in the same position relative to them as the Steampunk TCDA do to us.

[Note: The Rose diagrams don't include the Jaycaciaverse/Badficverse, which may or may not exist; they also don't include the High School AUniverse, which I think exists only in an unpublished scribble. The latter could potentially be another CPP-alt, since High School AUs don't typically involve murder.]

Obviously it's still an if, but as a theoretical multiversal physicist, 'if's are my stock in trade. So: this could indicate that the Rose of the linked paper is actually only one of a string of Roses - a Multiversal Garden, if you will. But it seems difficult to come up with any other themes: you're either solving the fanfic problem destructively or constructively, there's not really other options. So perhaps it's more like a globe, with our PPC being the 'dark hemisphere' and the CPP and Guarden on the 'light side'.

Though that begs the question, what is the Mirror Multiverse? Since they are pro-Suvian, unlike the other PPCs, is there a pro-Suvian CPP version? Is there a Steampunk EPC and a Solarpunk... er, Suvian CPP? Are there in fact two globes, each with a light and a dark half, one anti-Suvian, the other pro-Suvian?

My head is spiralling wildly here. I should probably wait until I know whether the evidence for this model actually exists before diving any deeper. ^_^

hS

NaNo is fun when PoV is ignoring you in a Catch 22 kind of situation.

Anyhow, I should have the doc up for beta reading sometime this week, but I have two major tests and a math team thingy tomorrow, as well as an essay due tomorrow, so I can't promise tomorrow being the day of upload (Gotta love AP). I'll try for Wednesday.

Glad you think CPP is interesting though.

I missed reading your first mission, but I like this one a lot. You have a lightweight, punchy style of writing that I really enjoy.

Glad you liked it! It's really the least I can hope for when I write these things.

Also, CCP. Interesting concept, I'm curious where that's gonna go.

But anyways, thanks!

Now there is yet another dragon in PPC HQ :P

One of these days, I need to write a mission with dragon rescuing. Maybe I should look at the unclaimed list and find HTTYD fic that I wanna spork. Hmmm.

But, either way, nicely done! I loved the hinting at Charlie's past (which I may or may not have forgotten... oops) and the new recruit dragon helping with the mission. That rabbit though... Creepy.

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Now I wanna do some more world building with CPP and get that done so I can do my next mission. Spoilers for my PPC timeline. Maybe

Glad you like it! I was worried there'd be, like, a huge gaping plothole that'd suddenly show up right as I finally put it out there. Phew!

I might write Charlie's old D&D campaign at some point. Could be fun. If I ever get the time, that is.

As for Ocotillo, I might try writing her sometime again. And probably try to give her a more solid personality than what she had in the original fic. Y'know, former bit and all.

So hey, thanks!

I enjoyed the deadpan sense of humor in this quite a bit, especially from Charlie.

I have... 11k words? 11k+? Not for sure lol, but 500-600 of those words are words from research for fanfic. Might throw in a mission or two into the word count... I don't know yet lol.

But I have been busy. School being the major thing on my plate, with science throwing stuff at me nearly every day (which reminds me... I need to check google class.), so that's fun. I promise I'll try and get on. Not tonight, my Discord use tablet is charging, but maybe tomorrow. Let us see how long it takes me to write 1,667 words.

-Kittyauthor, who is tired and tired of science at this moment.

Meanwhile, spoilery events eventuating at the conclusion of my mission are making points known to me that would have been really handy to have pointed out back at the beginning. So, ironic thanks to my brain for that, but unironic thanks to said spoilery events, I suppose.

I also think I have a better grasp on what I have to do in revisions to make the whole thing work smoothly and be fun, so that's good.

Difficulties aside, there's a lot of Derik-Gall banter that I've really enjoyed writing in this one. I hope I get to share it soon.

~Neshomeh

Jiwon is a good nervous fopsbol and must be protecc.

Charlie’s as charismatic as always, and I like them for that enthusiasm they exude. And I agree with them in that shapeshifting spells can be pretty fun if used right. Also, I just gotta know what happened in their DnD adventure, because that part about bad memories sounds interesting.

Will you have Ocotillo appear in our server’s RPs? I don’t know, but they could help you develop her a bit more. Maybe she’ll get along with Cal’s dragons?

Whoo, it took way too long for me to finish up this mission. About six months, and half of it was trying to stop procrastinating for a few minutes and asking around for betas and polishing the writing. Then there was the whole matter of actually deciding to make the board post...

But hey, it’s ready now, so I might as well get it out there.

Here we go, mission two.

(Edit: Just a content warning that the fic/mission is NSF4M, NSFCal, and NSFSG. Sorry.)

Why, don't you remember the fantastic Darksaber from the old EU, where we travelled there and visited [checks] Echo Base, and met [checks] wampas [checks] led by the one Luke cut the hand off [checks] and then got stranded in the asteroid belt?

...

Yeah, Hoth is boring as sin.

hS

In my original 'fic Captain Theo is welcoming the newest member of his mercenary band onto the ship, with help from a healthy dose of exposition and background information.

In my Skyrim 'fic the Necromancer and the Dragonborn have successfully managed to leave Castle Volkihar without being turned into Vampires. Where they go now is still a mystery (well to them, I think I've got it figured out).

In my Dragon Age/Grim Dawn 'fic the Taken (hero of Grim Dawn) is about to realise they're not in Kansas anymore (so to speak). Meanwhile the Inquisitor does the Time Warp.

In my Star Wars/Star Wars 'fic a 'redeemed' Sith and a Jedi have just met Obi Wan and are realising that while Hoth is still as cold and boring as ever the rest of the galaxy might have changed a little bit since they were last out there.

And in my D&D 'fic Skaxire is about to head off on his first proper adventure. And realise that when your traveling companions are two Bugbears, a Goliath, a Yuan-ti and a Dragonborn a Tiefling might be the most approachable of the lot.

Hoping to hit just over 10k by the end of today.

Elizabeth of York, widow of the assassinated Henry VII of England, has created a lesbian spy network, and is currently working to prevent the takeover of Europe by Philip the Handsome, Duke of Burgundy. Also, as first person narrator, she flatly refuses to refer to either of the kings of England properly. Edward VI is at least 'Edward', but Richard IV is only ever 'Warbeck'.

Because he's an imposter claiming to be her brother, but still. It's not exactly convenient.

Given my outline, I only have another 6K words before the narration switches to Catherine of Aragon. I need to get through three years and two major rebellions in that time... it'll be fine, it's NaNo. :D

How's everyone else getting along?

hS

In the hour when slumber calls
And the cloak of Night dulls the air
I don’t see these stone-carven walls
For I know that you are still there.
~Finrod Felagund

For some time now, over on the Barrow-Downs, I've been one half of a project to translate and perform the Russian Silmarillion rock-opera Finrod-Zong ("Finrod's Zong"). Given that I don't speak a word of Russian, it's been an exciting adventure in Google Translate.

Chained by our oath we press on through the night on the path that our fate has wrought
And any who stand in our way will be cast at our side to the dark we court!
~Celegorm and Curufin

As this is a lyrical project, the 'number of text boxes' issue you describe is multiplied: we've needed to get both rhyme and rhythm accurate, while also translating the meaning well enough to do justice to the original. Sometimes that's pretty easy; sometimes it requires creative reinterpretation.

Feel, o my heart, you are flung open wide like a gate
Feel, o my heart, you are bruised like the bitterest fruit
And you're stunned by summer's late wine
~Finrod and Amarie

^That particular passage involved expanding the opening 'my heart', which is four syllables in Russian but two in English; figuring out what exactly 'stunned by late wine' means (and adding 'summer's' to clarify), and finding an alternative for the idiomatic Russian that Google renders 'My heart, dissolved with bitterness in bread'.

A single wave of royal hand
Has summoned Doom on your fair woodland
We are the hostages of fate
The hapless hostages of fate
And none on Arda can avert it.
~Melian

It's been a crazy ride of matching the speech styles of the rock opera characters (Thingol is insufferably pompous, the Sons of Feanor are almost Cockney-casual), figuring out which lines are Tolkien references that need preserving - adding more Tolkien references, naturally - and on one occasion rewriting half a song to make it actually fit its place in the story.

Birds without love can't sing their tune.
I no purpose have without you!
The dusk, the dawn, the earth, the sea 
Were but created and set free
So that for one brief moment Lúthien should be!
~Beren

We're still far from finished - the translation work is done, but we've only recorded six of the 22 songs - but it is at least shareable, and given that it's directly relevant:

Finrod-Zong: The English Libretto

And the videos:

The Russian stage play, with English Libretto subtitles

Galadriel's Lament - The Oath of Feanor - Doriath Duet - The Duel of Song - Captivity - Wind (sung by Kaitlyn!)

Know: love fills my heart with thirst for life
Know: love gives me strength if I must die
And even then, in shadowed hall
I'll face the mightiest of all
And I will take what is and always has been mine!
~Luthien Tinuviel

hS

((2024 edit: I've removed the link to the Downs, because the site is getting massively IP-spammed and that thread appears to be the centre of it.))

Mate, this is great. Do you mind if I use it? It makes a wonderful base for my future PhD paper.

I agree with basically all of this. It really frustrates me when people are hard on an official translation of something without really considering why it made the changes that it did or if those changes actually work.

Seriously, localization is really important! Concepts or jokes that work in one language don't always work in another, and I can think of at least one instance where a character probably wouldn't have been received nearly as well if the localization had been truer-to-the-text. Not to mention that localization also helps to make things more accessible to audiences who aren't super knowledgeable about the original culture a work comes from, and good localization can even help you learn things (like the Ace Attorney Rakugo example).

Another example of the change-nearly-everything kind of translation you mentioned is actually Kid Icarus: Uprising, which originally had a lot of humor dependent on Japanese culture and language. Nintendo of America was basically given free reign to do whatever they wanted with the localization so long as the resulting product was fun to read and natural to listen to, and the result is one of the best written games on the 3DS. As an aside, it's worth it to know that professional translators sometimes get translation notes on the thing they're working on that aren't public, and that those notes are typically meant to help translators fully capture the original tone of something.

When it comes to translating games specifically, space can sometimes be an issue, too. The number of textboxes in a game typically isn't alterable, and professional translators have to work with what they're given. That can make things harder when translating to English from a language like Japanese, where the written form of it can potentially carry more information in less space. I vaguely recall reading something about that being a problem in older games when cartridge/disc/whatever space was way more limited, but I can't remember where.

Also I'm seconding that Legends of Localization rec. It's a super cool blog.

"Pfft. Where's everyone going? Bingo?"
--Leon S. Kennedy, Resident Evil 4

I suffered through Fate Stay/Night's interminably poor pacing (a common issue with Visual Novels: I loved it, but it was a struggle to get through), but Fate/Zero was really where the series caught my attention.

I promise, I have a point here, and it's not a point about Fate. Give me just a moment.

The superb animation from Studio Ufotable was a big draw, but the larger and more interesting cast and tighter writing kept me coming back. And the best of all in my eyes were Waver Velvet and his servant, Iskandar, who I like for... a lot of reasons... but they're also a perfect double act. Waver in particular has a really fun arc and a lot of character development over the course of the series.

So naturally when I found out that there was a spinoff entirely dedicated to following an adult Waver as he solved magical mysteries in London with a Saber-lookalike (of course) Watson by his side, I wanted to read it immediately, and there was no way in hell I was waiting for an anime adaptation that might or might not ever come (we did eventually get that anime. It was... fine, but it kinda fell apart in the final ending. At least it pulled it together for a strong ending scene...), so I sought out a fan translation of the first few books.

And it was absolutely awful. I mean unreadably bad. I suffered through it, but the prose was stiff and difficult to read, the whole thing was interspersed with Japanese and literal translations of Japanese phrases with the equivalent English inserted as parenthesized notes. It's clumsy, and while I did manage to read it, it wasn't easy, and it wasn't terribly enjoyable. I won't link it here or read out passages, because I think it's in poor taste to point and laugh at something someone did for free as a service to the community (there would be no way to read these novels at all in english if it wasn't for these efforts) but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, under any circumstances.

Here's the thing, though: For a very vocal minority of fans, this is the standard for what a translation should be, in that it's perfectly, 100%, utterly accurate. It's a literal, direct translation of what the Japanese text is, a perfect rendition of the author's vision. Sure, most would rather have it cleaned up a little bit so it's not so clunky and hard to read, but this is the kind of translation they want. For these people, and for a lot of people who don't know any better, a translation's quality is linked to its "accuracy" to the original work: how well the sentences match up, how little was changed.

In 2011, someone by the name of coke released a translation of Kara No Kyoukai, the predecessor to both Fate and Tsukihime, and a key cornerstone of the shared universe of both. I can't speak to the translation's quality, but I can say that it outraged these sorts of fans. Reddit user savepoints summarized the position here when explaining to a newcomer why they shouldn't read the translation. Below is an excerpt:

I'd kindly invite you to read and compare a section from the original Japanese text to coke's translation, or to ask someone who did read it in Japanese, because anyone who did will tell you that it's not a good translation.

It's not just the weird naming, it's the fact that coke himself literally said that he added his own stuff and removed some other things, to "make it flow better". And that's not referring to weird sentence structures or adjectives or anything, we're talking about complete sentences which were removed or added for no proper reason.

It's really only ok for getting the general gist of the story, but why wouldn't you just watch the movies for that instead of a translation project that's more akin to a fanfic?

So... yeah. Accuracy, by which I mean exact trueness to the original script, is what matters. Be accurate. Always be exactly 100% accurate.

This is a terrible way to translate a work, and it's not how professional translators do their jobs. Allow me to explain.

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"Enough expository banter! Now, we fight like men! And ladies! And ladies who dress like men!"
--Gilgamesh, Final Fantasy 5 Advance

I'm not going to spend too much effort distinguishing between Translation and Localization here, but sometimes it will matter. So here's a quick rundown: Translation is the process of changing the language of a game, localization is the process of adapting it to another culture. Not all translations are localized, and some are localized more heavily than others. However, given the inherent changes necessary to make a work readable in another language (translating idioms that don't make sense in the target language, for example), the line between a strict translation and a localization can be blurry sometimes. Localization changes are frequently looked down on by diehard fans as "censorship", or "attempts to hide that the game came from Japan", but it's not that simple, and strong localization choices, even subtle and minor ones (like changing a reference to an obscure, no-longer-manufactured Japanese soda to be a reference to Crystal Pepsi, which has the same connotations) can go miles in making a work comprehensible and accessible to a broader audience.

In my opinion, there are two ways to make a translation and localization great: The first is to make it as utterly unnoticeable as possible, and simply be quiet and careful about preserving the identity of the game while bringing it between countries while also trying to find good equivalents or explanations so that the target audience can understand what's going on. The above "crystal pepsi" example comes from one such localization job, specifically for the classic anime FLCL ("fooly cooly"), which is still blatantly set in Japan and uses Japanese honorifics for its characters in English. You might not even think any translation changes were made at all in the dub if you never watched a subtitled version of the anime, but across the board there were a lot of small, clever changes designed to make the show make more sense to westerners across the board (well, as much sense as it made to the Japanese... FLCL is a weird show...). The other approach to translation and localization is to go all out, radically changing aspects of the work you're translating to make it work better in its destination country and preserve the soul of the work. But while the latter often gets a bad name, neither approach is wrong, invalid, or "bad", and both approaches mean making changes to the work. Even translating a work inherently changes it, and localization does so more. If you want to make a good translation or localization, you need to accept that, and you can't be afraid of making the changes that need to be made.

The most famous example of a localization that changes everything but still works (and I know I've talked about this before) is Ace Attorney. Janet Hsu of Capcom took point on the localization for most of the series (as well as Shu Takumi's extremely underrated non-Ace Attorney adventure game, Ghost Trick), and in my opinion is an absolute hero. The work she and her team did on Ace Attorney was crucial to making the games successful in the west, and a lot of what the Ace Attorney fandom thinks of when they think Ace Attorney was put in by her team. It was her team that did the work of changing the entire game's setting to be a future America rather than Japan, changing all the puns and pop culture references to their english equivalents, and even changing entire character personalities as required (for example, turning Simon from an overly serious prosecutor into a full-blown weeaboo, which was probably helpful for finding a convenient way to explain Rakugo to American players). And while it probably wasn't required to make the setting a weirdly Japanese version of California (or Japanifornia, as it's known to fans), without these changes and translations, a huge element of Ace Attorney's quirky, goofy, comedic identity just wouldn't have connected with western fans. You shouldn't have to know that "Naruhodo" means "correct" or "I see" in Japanese in order to appreciate the humor of a funny game about wacky lawyers, and could you really call a translation that was truer to the dialogue of the original but was unable to convey its tone or appeal "better" or "more accurate"? I don't think so. But if you're unconvinced, take a look at the anime dub, which is extremely faithful to the Japanese script for the Ace Attorney anime (based on the first game). Sure, maybe you're happy that it's a more faithful translation, but it feels flat. Lifeless. The characters don't have the same spark and animation to them. You can see the Ace Attorney that you might know from the games there, but it feels like it's been chained up, trapped under a blanket of cultural differences and language-specific jokes that haven't been changed. Something's been lost in translation.

But there are plenty of other examples of this kind of scorched-earth translation. I quoted Resident Evil 4 at the top of this post for a reason: In the west, the definitive campy action horror game just wouldn't be the same without protagonist Leon S. Kennedy's cheesy action hero shtick. Leon is like James Bond if James Bond was thoroughly uncool. He tries to hit on the ladies, but the ladies aren't interested, his one-liners are lame, and his greatest talent speech-wise is annoying his enemies with distinctly lame comebacks that are somewhere between playground fodder and dad jokes ("you're (sic.) right hand comes off?"). But in Japan, he's not like that at all: He's a dead serious, objective-focused special agent. This is a radical change, but it's a change for the better: RE4 is b-movie horror about a special-ops agent sent to rescue the president's daughter from cultists, including a 20-year-old with the face of an old man and the body of a child dressed like Napoleon. No matter what aspirations it may have, it's not a game you can really take seriously, especially when you buy your guns off a merchant who shows up in the weirdest places possible and talks like a pirate. So the localization team didn't try, instead drawing on the same action and horror movie tropes that were already present to rebuild the protagonist as someone who fits the game.

Every translator, even dead-serious ones translating important historical artifacts, leaves a mark on the works that they translate. That's not a flaw, it's a key part of being a translator. Steven Mitchell's Gilgamesh: A New English Version has an opening that's probably longer than the poem itself that talks about his analysis of the poem and the reason why he made the choices he made in translating it. And the summation of all the choices he made is something that works: Mitchell's translation is the de-facto standard, and having owned a few copies in my time, I can say that it's by far the most readable and enjoyable I've seen, making one of the oldest poems we know of feel fresh and new again. Seamus Heaney's Beowulf is similarly loved, for a lot of the same reasons.

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"What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk... Have at you!"
---Dracula, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

In short, what makes a translation good is not how well it sticks to the original. It's how well it conveys the spirit of the work, how well it feels like it fits into the target language, and just straight-up how enjoyable it is. And it frustrates me that a lot of fans don't recognize this, and attack translators and localization teams for doing their job, out of some kind of misguided belief that by not sticking exactly to the "original vision", they've given the fans an inferior version of the work. I started this post with a quote from a complaint about a fan translation that moved stuff and added and removed things to make the work flow better. But I hope I've conveyed that in the grand scheme of things, those changes are relatively small, and also that making those changes is a translator's job. You cannot translate a work without altering it. The goal of a translator is to alter it in a way that conveys the intent and meaning to their audience, not to keep everything exactly the same, or to try and defer choices onto the reader by being as literal as possible and littering their work with enormous translation notes ("Just according to keikaku! (TN: Keikaku means plan)").

And to their credit, some fans do understand it. The Ace Attorney fandom has made heroic efforts to do what Capcom won't and bring Ace Attorney's untranslated spinoff games to the west, and they've kept the same philosophy that the official translation teams do: translating cultural references and jokes to make sense in English, and trying to strike a balance between being faithful and comprehensible. But every time I read a stiff, awkward translation by fans who take pride in how well their work reflects the "original vision", I'm reminded of just how far away we are from people understanding and respecting the work that real, official translation and localization teams do. Sure, not every change they make is necessary, and sometimes the end result can actually be inferior or straight-up bad. But shockingly often, they succeed in ways that you never even notice.

In short, please, respect translators. They are the unsung heroes that make the games you love what they are. And if you want to hear more about this sort of think, check out Legends of Localization, which was invaluable to me in finding examples for this article.