Live Blogs Pannic Reads Stuff He Hates

Pannic2015-08-09 16:20:09

Hey, everyone! Before I continue with Memories, I thought I'd read something else. You see, I was on Fimfiction and I saw something on the feature box that I thought looked suspicious. Like it might be bad. So I decided I might look at that.

But when I went back and had a look at the Fimfiction front page, it was no longer in the featured box. It was an update, y'see, and those tend to get bumped out in fairly short order. So I had a look at the updated fics section. It was not there. The story in question was titled "A Thief On the Rise." I may return to it, but then I saw something else. "The Clown Prince of Equestria," by Joker the Hedgehog.

So I thought "Oh. Oh boy. It's another one of those dumb crossovers where we have a character from another thing appear in Equestria. You know, a crossover; the boring kind."

But then I looked a little closer and I found out that it wasn't that at all. It was something worse.

People still write these cosplayer stories? Ugh.

And it uses an Arkham Origins poster as its "cover," so to speak. Oh boy.

But hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this will be interesting. Maybe we'll actually have a character who's, like, got an interesting personality, or maybe there will be some kind of character development, or maybe we'll just have some nice prose.

Oh.

So our protagonist starts off with a rambling bit of paragraphs where he tells us about himself. Very little. He lives by himself and has a dog. Also that he's a fan of My Little Pony and Batman.

That is literally all we know about this character from this opening paragraph. And his dog probably isn't going to have anything to do with this story because our protagonist is gonna leave all of that behind when he gets "displaced."

So anyway

Nobody's wondering because these stories all follow the same formula. The protagonist is some nondescript nerd who goes to a convention or whatever dressed up as some video game or comic book or movie character and then something happens like they get hit by a car or something and they end up in Equestria apropos of nothing.

Why did you go with the Arkham Origins outfit? Wasn't that a game, that, like, people weren't particularly thrilled with? I recall being annoyed that Joker was in that game. People generally liked the Joker's appearance in Arkham City better. I mean, why specifically that game? What was it that made you decide to pick that costume over the other Jokers? What are the distinct features of the Arkham Origins outfit? Because there are some fairly distinct Joker looks. I actually went to Comic-Con this year and saw a bunch of them (Joker tends to be a popular outfit, obviously), and there were, like, a bunch of people dressed as Jack Nicholson's Joker from the Tim Burton Batman movie, and I think I saw one person as Heath Ledger's Joker from The Dark Knight (in the nurse costume. I was actually surprised I didn't see more Ledger Joker outfits). I might've even seen one Cesar Romero one, but my memory might be playing tricks on me.

But you know, what does the Arkham Origins Joker look like? The only details you give about the costume are the green hair, white makeup, and the lipstick. You know. Like every Joker depiction.

So anyway, this little opening tells us essentially nothing about our protagonist. It's just a block of narration to set up for the part the author actually cares about, and the actual prose part of the story begins with this bit that's more in media res.

He's remarkably coherent. Also, it only takes two sentences for him to instantly come to the conclusion that he has the Troy Baker Joker voice? Like, I just ran to Youtube to look up some stuff of Troy Baker's Joker voice. On a first listen it's actually not that different from how Mark Hamill does it - I'm led to the conclusion that Troy Baker heavily based his performance off of Mark Hamill. I guess Baker has a slightly lower voice, but really, is that something you'd pick up immediately based on two sentences just after waking up? You'd be a little groggy and your speech wouldn't be that clear. Baker having a lower voice wouldn't be immediately apparent, because voices tend to be a little lower in the morning after waking up.

So anyway, Jerome finds he has all of the Joker's weapons and they're fully-functional... he also has the TITAN dart gun from Arkham Asylum. Because the merchant sold that, what with it clearly being an iconic piece of Joker gear, what with it having shown up in one fucking game.

And you know, I get that "the mysterious booth that sells weird stuff at the convention" is something of the setup of these fics, but having gone to Comic-Con myself, the thing about these booths is that they're all laid out and mapped and they have assigned numbers and shit. I just have to wonder what the merchant's angle is. He pays money so he can have a booth at Comic-Con, and he sells not only realistic-ish Joker gear, but also pony merchandise? What kind of store is he running? Generally the booths that aren't part of the big companies or things that are related to specific artists (whether they be at Artist's Alley or something else) are generally associated with stores, and most of these stores will focus on different things. Some of the stores are gaming shops and will sell things like TCGs, or they'll be comic shops that are selling their stuff. I guess that this merchant's shop might just be like, some sort of eclectic nerd merchandise shop, but

Wait a minute, so the guy in the cloak just approaches the protagonist, out of all the people wearing Joker or Harley Quinn outfits (and there are a ton of people wearing those costumes) to sell him stuff? And did he leave his booth to do this? Was he running the booth alone or was someone else also managing it? And my immersion in the story is broken by the fact that I went to Comic-Con and heard nothing about someone vanishing into thin air on the Exhibit Hall. Have you ever been there? The Exhibit Hall is crowded as fuck.

Guh. So anyway, moving away from how the fundamental premise of these stories makes absolutely no sense and is poorly explained, after finding the Titan dart gun the protagonist goes through the following thought process.

I'm sorry, what?

Oh, look, what a shocking twist that we already knew from the description paragraph.

Here's the thing about storytelling: you need clarity. The best barometer for whether a story works is how many questions the audience is asking about the fundamental premise of your story. The better you are at communicating your story and making it plausible, the fewer questions the audience asks. If the audience is left confused and is asking questions all the time, like "Why is Harley Quinn here?", "Why does he just immediately jump to thinking it's like the season premiere of season 2?", "Why doesn't he just say 'it's like the season premiere of season 2' instead of what he does say?", then that may be a sign that your story has significant problems. Now, some stories run a bit more on imagination and concept than on logic, so some things that don't make sense are okay (to an extent, and it's definitely a YMMV thing), but... this isn't a particularly original story, is it?

Why is all of Harley Quinn's dialogue in italics? See? There's another question I'm asking, which indicates the author's poor communication of basic ideas.

So... you mean that this is a verse in which Equestria is swarmed by these dipshit cosplayers. You also misspelled "vendor."

And this explanation just raises more questions. Who is the Void? Why does the Void do this? Stories can't just be a List of Things That Happen. There needs to be some kind of logic, even if it's story logic, that ties things together and helps it to make sense.

Wait. So where did Harley come from? Why was she here? What was all that about? Did the author just stick her there to deliver exposition without any kind of in-story justification?

Also, huh? I thought that the way the Joker BANG! gun worked was that the second pull fired the flag (i.e. in that "Return of the Joker" movie). I mean, it'd be pretty stupid for the thing to try to fire a bullet through the flag. I mean, that was a think in that MK vs. DC thing, right? Joker's fatality involved the BANG! flag gun, but he didn't kill the opponent with that gun - he pulled a different gun.

And nice touch about how the Titan gun rifills every night. That makes it a lot more convenient for the protagonist, and by extension more boring for the reader.

I'm so confused.

And Harley's block of exposition raises another question: you've established that this, like every other fucking Displaced cosplayer story, follows the same formula. What is it about this Displaced story that makes it interesting? It isn't our protagonist, because he has literally no character traits outside of being a Batman/Joker and MLP fan.

So why is he acting like this? Has his personality been supplanted by the Joker? Is this just him? Does the idea of picking around as the Joker just appeal to him? I don't know. The author doesn't care.

Scene change.

Why are they anthro?

Because as we know, all◊ rocks◊ are◊ the◊ exact◊ same◊ shade of gray◊.

Anyway, apart from being inexplicably anthro, the ponies essentially just reenact the events of the show. This means that I can't really make fun of the dialogue, because it's actually relatively funny (or at least it was in the episode. Now I'm just annoyed). I can, however, make fun of the prose.

She was usually wearing a black dress and blue heels, but right now she was wearing a blue dress and black heels. Or maybe

Wait. Let's have a look at that whole paragraph.

This was one sentence? What the fuck is the mat

So anyway let's just skip down to where our boring protagonist jumps in to force himself onto a plot that he has nothing to do with and no reason to be part of.

We find? What's the narrative voice here? Are we going with storybook narrator? Omniscient third-person? Limited third-person?

Whatever. So we're at the library with Spike. Jerome/Joker shows up, joy buzzers him into unconsciousness

And with that, we end with an author's note.

Uhhh, generally speaking (again, it's not a one-size-fits-all thing) the audience shouldn't be wondering about why the protagonist is doing shit. I have no idea what is going through your protagonist's head, what his motivations are, or even what his personality is apart from unfunnily aping the Joker.

I just find myself wondering what the point of this is. We have a bland self-insert barging in on the plot of an episode, which is apparently exactly the same as in canon except the ponies are anthros now for no explained reason (Joker doesn't ask why Spike looks different than he does in canon) except now he's dressed as a fictional character.

I seriously don't understand why these stories still happen.

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