Jumpchain

So, I’ve known it existed for a long time, but have only recently begun to examine the phenomenon known as “Jumpchain”, a kind of internet choose-your-own-adventure story. This post on a jumpchain blog explains it far better than I could.

Being so focused on using and taking advantage of various setting powers, it’s no surprise that jumpchains are popular on Spacebattles. I’ll admit I was reminded of the Infinite Loops, in that both combined fantasy with rules.

On one hand, viewed as an actual story vehicle, it has everything from power creep (the original “victory condition” of the endjump and planeswalker spark went from being an epic struggle with an epic reward to a readily munchkin-able condition that gives something the jumper will likely already have, for one) to (for not all, but too many jumpchain writers) making the actual adventures themselves play second fiddle to describing and arguing about the builds.

But as a munchkin fantasy? I can feel the guilty pleasure, and the weaknesses described above are totally understandable. So I just can’t bring myself to dislike jumpchain.

It’s not Worm

So, there’s a dirty little secret about Worm fanfiction, the kind that has taken SB/V by storm so much the mods had to make separate boards. I didn’t realize this secret because I (wisely) stayed even farther away from the fanfic scene than I did from the original story, but then I found out once I discovered more.

It’s not based on Wildbow’s original story.

It isn’t. A lot of Worm fanfic writers admit to having never read the original. Now, under normal circumstances, I would denounce that. And I still do. But even if it’s hard to defend, I can at least understand why people wouldn’t want to slog through a story that’s about as long as War and Peace and In Search of Lost Time put together. And has terrible pacing and other fundamentals.

And going for more fanfics makes it more flexible, since there’s nothing in the way. This explained everything when I came to that conclusion in one of the many Worm discussions. It explains why Wildbow’s later stories, including Worms own sequel, have generated basically nothing in terms of Spacebattles fanfics. It explains why everything is so divergent and why certain elements are latched on to beyond the usual “fanon” misunderstandings.

Wildbow writes, long dark, fantasy stories. The Worm fanfic writers write in a superhero sandbox, and the original work might as well have been an RPG sourcebook that was never meant to be treated as anything more than a vague guideline for the GM to fill in the blanks.

Now I’d be honestly interested to see what the main stories were that sparked this “fanon Worm”, the critical mass of early fanfics. Because it’s them and not the main story that are the real source material.

I was so foolish-an online history

One website has left a bad impression on me, because I was a mark in it. It set back my writing talent by a noticeable amount. Now it’s apparently reaping what it has sown.

So, that site was the Project A.F.T.E.R. Forum [EDITED TO REMOVE DEAD LINK]. It mocked fanfiction. It mocked a lot of fanfiction, and a lot of bad fiction. I like mocking bad fiction. I found it with a detailed mock of the infamous Salvation War[1]. I fit in. What could go wrong?

A lot. They had a blanket dislike of all fanfiction[2], a dislike of nearly everything popular. Maybe the writing should have been on the wall when I checked out something they were mocking and unironically enjoyed it. But I was younger and busier. I kept my ideas in my head because I had this (paranoid and unwarranted, but still present) fear of – “Oh no, they’ll find that Coiler’s writing fanfiction. ”

I grew past it. It got more mean-spirited, the most aggressive members broke off to form a new endeavor, and then the rest of the site just went down. Not literally, but figuratively. If one registered user is on, it’s amazing.

(Update: And now it’s literally dead as well.)

Now, looking back at it, I realized that Stardestroyer.net collapsed in an almost identical fashion. I’d washed my hands of that site when its true decline started so I didn’t have a front-row seat like PA, but could see it.

• Snipe at easy targets. In SDN’s case, it was creationists and overrwrought Star Trek fans. In PA’s case, it was the legitimately awful fanfiction.
• Get a huge sense of superiority from your mocking of said easy targets. Keep a ‘nerd attitude’, for lack of a better term, but have zero empathy. “My nerd stuff is good, yours isn’t”-I think you can see that.
• Then, after the bitterness increases, you inevitably turn on each other. Either partisans of the losing side or just normal observers inevitably leave, and the whole place falls apart.

SDN has, as of this post, only eight registered human users online. Spacebattles has over two thousand, and even its spin-offs have many, many more. I think its effect on my writing might have been overstated, but it was there, and I feel bad for it.

[1]It was here [EDITED TO REMOVE DEAD LINK] for what it’s worth. Ironically, googling “M2 Bradley” brought me to SDN, and then to Spacebattles (long story).

[2]I don’t hold that against them. Nor do I wish even the abrasive ones any ill will-I still listen to some of their podcasts some of the time.

Note: The board was phased out, but seems to have collapsed before its intended end-date. As such, I’ve removed now-dead links. As for PA failing, well, I could see it coming. It wasn’t exactly a surprise.

 

 

The Generals Repelled The Fandom Attack

I’ve spent years, almost since I started both playing the game and expanding my military reading material, trying to come up with a more “grounded” take on the game Command and Conquer Generals.

Constantly rolling a boulder up a hill would be more pleasant.

The game is nothing then an early 2000s pop culture view of the military. That’s why F-117s are more stealthy in-game than F-22s (they’re distinctive looking, ok?), the ramshackle terrorist force is made with just enough leeway to avoid a backlash while still meeting the villain of the week quotient, and Iowa battleships fight alongside beam cannons. China is the second faction because Russia was still picking itself up, and you get the idea.

Ok, so the real conflicts in Syria and Libya have featured conventional wars with ramshackle technical contraptions, so in hindsight it’s slightly better. Fair enough. But battles ranging from the pyramids to the Pacific, with the US able to traipse around as it pleases in Iran and even Russia (!), and geography being a dubious afterthought. Yeah, it still has some way to go.

The cancelled Generals sequel, to its credit, did try to turn the GLA into a more diverse and less blatant world populist uprising, but that still leaves everything else.

Sometimes settings just aren’t salvageable, and aren’t even fun to try and salvage. Generals is another setting with no foundation.

My really terrible fanfiction confessions

Ok, so I’ve done a few bad fanfiction things in days gone by. Thankfully, little of this remains saved.

Until now. Oops!

-In terms of pure weirdness, I made a fic where Helga, the final boss of the ridiculous tie-in game Revolution X, killed the Kool-Aid Man. (All I can remember of the plot is her being brought by a MacGuffin Man, the Kool Aid Man appearing, and her turning his pitcher-body into a colander).

-In terms of technical inaccuracy, I had modern warships powered by burning coal.

-And of course, I’ve done “shipping”. Both rammed-together character ships that have no evidence and are likely contradictory, to bad canon character/OC ships. Although a lot of the crazier pairings aren’t really that serious. One was even designed to be the craziest pairing I could think of.

 

 

Shipping

The fandom term “relationshipping” was turned into just plain “shipping”, leading to gigantic internet arguments about who was the best romantic pairing for characters. These “Shipping Wars” are rather-furious.

Some naive authors attempt to answer the shipping by making a canon couple. This does not work, to put it mildly.

The Settings With No Foundation

The urge to make so-called “Fixfics” is strong among many fanfiction authors. They range from well thought-out trimming of the excesses to destroying the themes of the canon work in favor of cheap wish fulfillment. Take a guess which is more common.

That being said, I’ve both seen and hoped to write multiple fixfics. It’s tough, and depends a lot on the setting. One of the reasons why people gravitated to the Familiar of Zero setting is that it had a unique concept and strong foundation (fantasy set in a Renaissance setting, detailed enough background) and squandered it on silly antics. That was a good setting for a fixfic. There are bad ones too.

Some settings aren’t just adverse to fanfics overall, but especially to fixfics. Exactly what clicked when I was struggling to come up with a plausible fixfic of the infamous The Big One, remembered I was having similar struggles with the equally infamous Gate anime, and saw how oddly similar the settings were for a technothrilller with only one awkward supernatural element and a fantasy.

Both are horrifically nationalist works. Both go a step farther than the common patriotic thriller and work extra-hard to keep their nations from facing the slightest actual threat. And, most crucially, both have horrible worldbuilding that’s either uninspired, in the service of said “prevent conflict ASAP”, or both.

This makes fixfics tough. An author has to change a lot to make it more plausible/interesting, but that begs the question of why they wouldn’t just go the full length and write an original story unencumbered by all the baggage the existing setting has?

 

Weird Wrestling

So, I have a new bizarre diversion-that strange diversion being Video Game Championship Wrestling.

Last night, I saw a VCGW stream in its entirety for the first time. And it is hilarious. Using WWE 2K14’s “create-a-wrestler” mode to make impressions of various fictional characters, and then leaving them to the game’s questionable AI, the result is one of those goofy diversions that keeps you diverted-

-And that’s without the plot. Yes, there’s a plot, and the plot itself is a work of skill. This is because unlike in actual professional wrestling, the match outcomes are not predetermined, so the storyline has to be made up on a week-by-week basis.

So, take a look at the show archives and see everything from the names the announcer programming can’t manage to the sight of cartoon goofballs and guys in bad costumes fighting it out.

Very enjoyable.

Examining the Loops, Part 2

So, what would I do to improve the loop-threads?

This is legitimately tough. A part of me just wants to go “Ok, I’d criticize them, but let them be as long as they don’t have inappropriate content.” Another part of me just wants to impose better rules.

Rules like the Familiar of Zero ones, designed to turn a previously spammy fandom substantive. The problem is that FoZ is a specific setting, and the Loops aren’t.

So, if I was in charge of policing the Loops on Spacebattles, here’s what I’d do.

-Inactive loop threads are unceremoniously closed. For active ones, I’d give the authors a short time to write a finish, and then close them as well.

-Canon is flushed-the entire Yggdrasil excuse setup is gone. 

-Snippets have to be very long.

-No one-liners, no dare/suggestions.

-The writer should ideally set out an endstate.

This is an disproportionately large burden, but the loops are disproportionately vulnerable to the worst excesses of goofy fandom. I’d feel reluctant in some ways, but consider it necessary in others.

What Difference A Protagonist Change Makes

For a long time in one of my fanfic-writing goals, I was stuck-stuck beyond the usual lack of energy. What I wanted and what the setting was just didn’t fit together. Then I found, in a somewhat unusual source, something that identified the problem.

I looked at a video talking about Pokemon Reburst, a manga that attempted to “maturify” the well-known series. The series, despite a decent-sized run, seemed to slide down once it wrapped up (the reviewer had trouble finding information on it in Japanese, much less English), and once he got the gist of the plot, it wasn’t hard to see why.

The problem was simple-it was just a second-rate shounen story with a bit of Pokemon window dressing. Despite the vastly different genres, I saw the parallels between my own struggles at writing a long Pokemon fanfiction and what was identified as the problem in ReBurst. Namely, my outline was just a secret agent story with a bit of monster window dressing.

It would center around the League’s Special Intelligence and Investigation department, a combined intelligence service and “intervention” force. SII, in addition to its ‘normal’ duties, takes the job of securing the multiverse (yes, dimensional travel is a thing) from extranormal Pokemon and the artifacts related to them.

Sounds good enough. But there was just one problem-the image I had of SII doesn’t fit into the setting. Not just that they’re too dark. Rather, it’s a combination of their image-semi-realistic agents backed by camo-clad commandos patterned off the infamous Spetsnaz are more suited to Counter Strike: GO than Pokemon Go-and something even worse.

The Pokemon setting, even in its darker fandom interpretations is centered around a fair fight, or at least an individual-on-individual battle. The SII agent does everything possible to avoid that. It just-doesn’t really fit the theme far beyond any appropriate tone.

Thankfully, I’ve found an alternative-make the protagonist a trainer, and keep SII, especially their ERUs (Emergency Response Unit, although the name is intentionally reminiscent of something else) as a supporting cast. I’ve found a plot setup that enables me to do it.
The setup is very simple: Don’t make the main character an SII agent. Make them a normal trainer. This has also solved a lot of other problems with the fic as well-it gives me an anchor, and lets me do things that Secret Agent Super Dragonite or his army of polite masked backflip-hatchet tossers could never do. Never underestimate the power of limiting scope.