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Mina (description in article) is going as a badfic author (complete with I <3 Leggy T-shirt, and is on her computer), while Carlisle is just passed out on the couch taking a nap in his semiformal wear.

-Ls

Corolla might still rope her friends into doing it at home, and then sneak the picture to the Multiverse Monitor, so here we are:

Since Sergio (who has just turned 32) is now a racing car driver, little Keiko (4) has started stating she want to be a racing driver too! And, as such, both of them are wearing racing suits. Sergio's is supposedly an actual one (though the one featured is a prototype from the original canned version of the Cyber Circuits TWWA arc in which it was Sergio who raced for SUGO GIO Grand Prix), while Keiko's is most likely just a kid's costume. Nikki (29) is dressed in a "sailor fuku" Japanese school uniform. She went for a design similar to the one she used to wear in elementary school, but she's also a character replacement of Sakura Kinomoto from Cardcaptor Sakura so hers is more of a cosplay than a mundane Halloween costume... And Corolla (officially 13, but Unison Devices are ageless) is dressed as a lab scientist. Quite fitting, isn't it?

Oh, and for those wondering, yes. This time I made a proper "little Keiko" model instead of just resizing her regular one.

But i could be happy with just this? Of course not, so we have the The World Without Authors edition too!

I went mostly for characters of mine who actually have been PPC Agents, with one exception (Ami). And the result, as you can see, is... mixed.

On the forefront we have Corolla, who still jumped at the chance to dress as a proper lab scientist.

Then, in the main row, left to right, we have:

• Hajime is dressed as a girl scout (or, at least, my attempt to dress her like one) - in fact, being someone who likes outdoor activity and having been raised in the US she might've actually been one. It also means she's probably one of those who got closer to the "mundane Halloween" concept.
• Ami is cheating. She claims that, since maid cafés are a thing in Japan, she's dressed as a waiter dressed up as a catgirl maid for her workplace's theme. The truth is, she just wanted to wear the catgirl maid outfit anyway.
• Sergio just straight up didn't bother this time, since he's not really into dress-up parties. The "canon" version above, after all, is him wearing his actual racing suit to play with his daughter.
• Nikki went for the "Sakura cosplay" again, mostly as a joke to Sergio in this case. He isn't really impressed by the idea.
• Keiko, like her father, isn't really into dress-up, but she did a token effort and wore her (this time actual) racing suit. "Look, I'm a racecar driver. I hope you're happy now?"
• Arumi also didn't bother, but she has an excuse ready: she's an artificial intelligence housed in a car, and she's dressing up as an ordinary human! By the way, this is how she would appear in the Multiverse Monitor issue too - she is still around in 2023 HST, as proven by the article published in the other Monitor she wrote.
• Syaoron likely got roped in at the last minute, and did the first thing he could think off and wore a soccer player outfit. He might still be around in 2023 HST, but he would be around 35 years old by then so he would look a bit older.

Now, technically these aren't all of my agents, since there's Shiro, Saki and Emily, but Shiro would be basically Sergio again, I can't think of anything that would fit Saki, and I never really fleshed Emily out so I have no idea about what she would wear either.

So, for ~Multiverse Monitor~ purposes, I'd like to know: what sort of Mundane Halloween costumes would your agents wear?

Context: Mundane Halloween is a thing in Japan (and Taiwan) where people dress up as mundane, everyday things. Here is this year's collection. Here are some more examples from previous years.

Please comment here with your agents, links to Wiki pages or any other visual info, and the mundane thing they would dress up as. I'll be illustrating some of them for the Multiverse Monitor. Thanks!

I think it's fine and healthy to feel bad for characters even when they're horrible assholes, and in this case things can be dangerous for Rita, even though she's a shameless grifter and parrot for Gaunt!

Yeah, Harry's actually pretty good at solving these little yearly puzzles, even if it takes him a whole year to do it... :P

Actually, the "hairy heart" in the Black family legend is more of an explanation for the ancestor's "unfeeling coldness", that is, his lack of romantic/sexual attraction towards the woman he courted/married. I was sort of exploring the idea that Purityworld might have some older, ingrained prejudices towards aro/ace or low-empathy people.

I think in this 'verse Horcruxes do exist; it's just that Voldygaunt (due to a privileged single-dad upbringing + this 'verse's increased prominence of Pureblood privilege and supremacy giving him the keys to powerful/polite society because of the Gaunt bloodline) decided politics was a better avenue to immortality than Horcruxes. The canon Voldemort was an orphan during WW2 and literally got sent home every summer to bombed out London; it's really no surprise that he 1) was radicalised against Muggles, 2) hated Dippet and/or Dumbledore for sending him back to danger without any exceptions and 3) wanted to make sure he would never actually die even if his physical body was damaged. Whether or not JKR considered Tom Riddle's war trauma whilst she wrote him into a heartless unfeeling monster incapable of love is debatable, though...

That being said, the twist/reinterpretation of the Beedle story did factor into the decision to mention the Black ancestor as owning a "hairy heart", and the Black family has traditionally had their stories appropriated into more common fairytales. It's similar to how "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot" is sort of a reference to the Potter family.

But yes, the foreshadowing with the Lockhart books is intentional, tee hee.

If you go to Tokyo, you can actually go eat at a HP-themed cafe and buy HP merch at the Mahou Dokoro store. So it is sorta canon. :P

I'll try to do that. Also, thanks for being polite; it's always nice seeing a polite person online. :)

First, I suspect I might've delivered some of the criticism you're talking about, so please believe me when I say I don't mean to be discouraging! Quite the opposite, in fact. I think I speak for many of us when I say there's no point in critiquing a work that never had any hope whatsoever, so the fact that someone took the time to point out things that didn't work so well is a sign that there is something worth improving—if not in the present story, then in the next one.

Second, it's worth keeping in mind that the first step to getting good at something is being bad at it. {= ) As someone who grew up in a culture of perfectionism, it's something I don't find it easy to internalize myself, but it's true. Anytime you try something new, unless you are very lucky, you have to be willing to suck at it for a while in order to learn how to stop sucking. Even people with natural talent at writing won't improve without practice. Remember not to compare yourself, a new writer, to writers who've been practicing for a long time and have had the benefit of lots more critiques. {= )

Third, it's also worth keeping in mind that all critique is basically someone's opinion. They may represent a well-informed or widely held viewpoint, but then again, they may not. It's important to learn when to heed other people's advice and when to keep your own counsel, and that comes with experience.

Try to think of negative critique as just another tool in your toolbox. It might be something you can use for the current piece of writing, or it might be something you can use later, or it might be something that doesn't work for you at all. It might take you some time to figure out which it is, so be sure not to throw it out just because you're not sure what to do with it right away.

~Neshomeh

So, I feel a bit discouraged when people give me negative criticism when I try to do the writing prompts. It's not that I can't take criticism; when people criticise me for my stories in a non-PPC context, I take it well. The difference here is that I hope someday to get Permission, so when people say something negative about my PPC writing, part of me thinks that that's never gonna happen. How do I deal with that?

A few things before you start giving advice:

1. I don't get anxious, angry, or tearful, so don't suggest things like taking deep breaths.

2. It's not a serious feeling, so don't go around thinking I have low self esteem.

Yessssss, yessssssssssssss! I like reading me a little smart Harry! Hermione will always be my favorite of the three, but it’s nice seeing Harry manage to flex the brain parts a bit! He’s well on his way, as long as the adults in the room have to sense to listen and follow the trail. He’s even starting to notice that damn beetle, that damn beetle, that damn beetle! DON’T TRUST THE BEETLE HARRY, DENY THE BEETEL, STEP ON THE No, I suppose Skeeter doesn’t deserve that. (Not to express sympathy for two very nasty characters, but there must be a lot of fear involved in using one’s Animagus form when that form is a beetle or a rat. People already pay bugs and rodents a lot of negative attention, and I would be worried about anyone reaching for a shovel or shoe or something without me noticing, and not being able to defend myself with a spell . . . In Skeeter’s case, even an accidental misstep would be fatal!)

I had assumed that Beedle’s tales were old enough to be unchanged in this timeline, but wow, that is almost a complete morality flip of the original “Hairy Heart” story! I see your version only uses “a hairy heart” in its metaphorical form, possibly because of the association between hair and magical power/talent? It also eliminates the Horcrux metaphor from the original, which makes me wonder if Horcruxes even exist in Purityworld . . . clearly, even Gaunt hasn’t indulged, since he still looks fully human! I like how you tied one of the Beedle stories into the family history of some of the main characters; while I dislike the general concept of people being born cursed because a wand got pointed at some ancient ancestor, I know it’s canon to the universe, and it ties in with Astoria’s situation, too! (Also, I just popped back to “Pureblood Panopticon” to double check I wasn’t mixing up the Greengrass sisters’ names, and caught this line from Lockhart: “But unfortunately this time, when Lord Hydrus Privett finds out his beloved Heiress Dracaena Merrington was one of the haircutter’s victims, he’ll completely lose his mind with grief…” That’s some wild foreshadowing, Lily! But of course, with Lockhart being a story thief, he would be aware of the hairy heart story, and its ties to the Malfoy family, as well!)

Loved seeing the name correction with Mahoudokoro, too! I’ll try to memorize that as the proper spelling. I think Hamelin Books will be headcanon for me, as well!

—doctorlit still needs to sit down and watch A Very Potter Musical all the way through

In which a shootout in a mall (with a bomb placed there just to not miss anything) turns out to not be the plot of a new Detective Conan movie but much worse as Nikki finds herself having to cross blades with the mysterious (and highly dangerous) Tenno.

And to cheer you up after such a tense chapter, let's have a look at how much weirder things could be in an alternate timeline in which the "half twins" Keiko and Hajime discover they're, in fact, half-triplets.

... the rosebud loses a petal.

Nobody has yet been unlucky enough to see what happens when they lose them all.

hS

Given that roses are kind of an important plot point of BatB, and would work for all of the story's incarnations. For Aladdin I'll go with mini-genies, thanks!

Mini-living silverware?

-Ls

All the characters are human, except for I think some wolves, and there are far too many wolf minis already.

For Aladdin... would mini-genies be too much to suggest? The TV series apparently establishes that they're effectively a species, so it's not a specific mini-character. I'm picturing pocket-sized oil lamps (I would say "or rings" but I think the animated Aladdin is specifically lamps) which produce a knee-high colourful spirit which will grant you three very small wishes.

Or mini-Caves of Wonder. They lurk in corners muttering ominous proclamations to themselves, and can disappear themselves into the floor at will.

hS

I'm planning to mission a fic that contains canon-term misspellings related to Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Any suggestion for minis for that universe?

P.S: Oh great, it misspells Aladdin stuff too. Suggestions for that one too, please?

The Quartet celebrate Draco's birthday and puzzle some things out. Warning for depiction of a PTSD episode.

so I don't know how effective the wizard Hague will be :P

I'm glad you picked up on all of those things. I thought it was important to finally show what happened in the Lord Slytherin Scandal, since there were so many questions before about what happened and how it led to Gaunt losing power the first time. It and the passage of the Muggleborn Protection Act all lay the groundwork for the differences between the wizarding world that Harry enters and the wizarding world that the older characters once inhabited. Some readers have been surprised that the Wizengamot would go so far as to pass the Muggleborn Protection Act, so I think this serves as an explanation for that! Dumbledore is, once again, acting For The Greater Good, even if he pretty much threw Sirius and the Longbottoms under the bus.

The fate of the Chamber Pensieve... will be uncovered in a later year! I think year 6 at latest?

Agent!Sergio, as he was originally my Gary Stu self-insert, was supposed to look like me and dresses similarly - black trousers with big pockets and red jackets or hoodies are one of my favourite outfits. I may have no fashion sense at all. I'm fine with that.

So, yeah, I basically end up almost cosplaying him on a regular basis just by being, well, myself. Funnily enough, it is during his time at the PPC that he diverged the most - I always imagine him with a simple, thin black jacket of a type I don't actually own.

[The story was very well thought out, a PPC badfic turned on its head into an actually very developed (but still silly and self-aware) story!

47 minutes long, too? That must've required many, many hours!]

Lily: PLEASE read the warnings
doctorlit: does not read the warnings
. . .
doctorlit: The Knights of Camelot need to be tried by the Hague . . . the Wizard Hague

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the extent of the Knights’ crimes; they are Death Eaters transplanted into a more conservative and controlling culture with a dash of religious extremism, after all! But yeah, they were busy little terrorists, and they have an absolutely monstrous rap sheet there! I love how you used the Pensieve memories to string together both the narrative of the Crouches’ relationship, but also to explain what happened to Neville’s parents. It’s great hearing about Alice and Frank going hardcore superspies on the Knights’s front shop, and managing to completely expose it and halt the operation! I also like how Dumbledore’s mercy towards Bellatrix seemingly led to the Muggleborn Protection Act squeaking through later on; very Bilbo’s-first-act-after-wearing-the-Ring-was-sparing-Gollum’s-life-granting-him longer-resistance-against-the-Ring’s-influence vibes. (Though his faith in Bella staying true to her exile is clearly a bit of a blind spot, not that anyone could know about her sneaking back in for parties without the other Pureblood freaks talking about it.)

Hm. Bagman attacked Cedric and grabbed Crouch Sr.? Although Crouch Jr. would have had plenty of opportunities to get hair from Bagman at this point . . .

—doctorlit is sure the unexplained absence of the Chamber of Secrets Pensieve is definitely not dreadful foreshadowing at all

the only dumb i did was watch ur definitely terrible movie thing. Btw, how did u do it? for a friend

AND MY NAME IS USUCKKITTYKING NOW SO TAKE THATTT!!!!!!!!!

(-Ls)

at least i can laugh abt ur dumb comments

the one smart thing you did was put lol in ur name xD

This is set right after the end of the Blank Sprite Incident - basically the first "calm" moment aftet Sergio and Nikki became a couple (again). She's in overhappy hyper celebrating mode!

To celebrate one year of riffing, we at the Asylum are voting on the worst fics of the year. Feel free to give your two cents here!

Votes will be open for one week.

-Ls