Dear aspiring Fanfiction writers of the Net:

I, Jareth Valentine, would hereby like to make the following points perfectly clear. Please pay attention.

1. The word 'chemistry' is not spelled with an 'a'. Misspelling words in the synopsis of your story is bad enough, but if you cannot spell the title right, no one will read your story. Especially if the title of your story is a third-grade spelling word.
Misspellings in titles are very rarely acceptable. If the premise of your story is that your protagonist cannot spell, is failing chemistry because of it, and winds up having a relationship with his tutor, fine. That makes it clever. Otherwise, fix it.

2. The body-switch Freaky Friday-esque walk-a-mile storyline is cliche, but arguably a classic, and if done well, or if skirting such tabboo topics such as gender reversal, CAN function as the premise of a good story. However, it does not work if the characters in question are identical twins. Identical twins could simply trade bedrooms and go about their own lives with no one the wiser, as they are IDENTICAL. Stop trying to write Olsen Twins or Zack and Cody stories using this premise.

3. Stories about the actors who portray characters of a particular show do not belong in that show's fandom. They belong in that actor's fandom. A Superman fan will probably not give a crap about Christopher Reeve. He'll want to read about Superman. Stop putting your Zac/Vanessa stories under the High School Musical category; High School Musical fans want to read Troy/Gabriella.
And yes, there IS a difference.

4. Not EVERYTHING should crossover. Seriously. Somethings just don't mix.  DeGrassi/South of Nowhere? Sure. Harry Potter/Peter Pan? Why not. Bambi/Tron? No. Use a little discretion, please.
(Gods. I just know somebody out there's going to write a Bambi/Tron story now...)

5. The people who read slash already believe that it's okay to be gay, or they wouldn't be reading slash. Stop using the characters in your slash stories as mouthpieces for your own pro-gay affirmation propaganda; you're preaching to the choir.

6. On that note, choir is spelled 'choir', not 'quire'. There's not a word processor made these days that doesn't have spell check. Please use it.

7. Stop putting up disclaimers. FF.net is a fanfiction site. Everything there, by definition, belongs to someone else. You don't need to tell us that it's not yours.

8. If you put something up in the wrong section, or rate it wrong, or if the synopsis is not an accurate representation of the story, or if you spring something controversial on your readers with no warning, do not be offended when you start to get bad reviews complaining about it. Contrariwise, if the story is right where it's supposed to be and the synopsis says, plain as day, what to expect, do not read the story and then leave reviews complaining about the content. You knew what you were getting into when you clicked the link. Don't like a particular pairing? Don't read that particular pairing. It's easy as that.

That's all for now. It's okay, I forgive you folks. everyone makes mistakes. Just...TRY to do better in the future, K? Thanks.

Gotta Catch 'Em All...

Today, boys and girls, we're going to talk a little about Pokemon.

For those of you who've been living with your head packed in ice for the last decade and are mentally underlining the word with a little red squiggle, Pokemon (That's POH-KAY-MON, by the way, a contraction of 'Pocket Monsters". There is not, and likely has never been, any such thing as 'Pokeyman".) is a Japanese franchise produced by Nintendo. There have been more spinoff products for Pokemon then there have been celebrities in rehab, including animes, card games, movies, action figures, stuffed animals, hats, clothes, alarm clocks, atom bombs, lawnmowers, mail-order brides, and toasters, but today we're going to discuss the video game that started the whole debacle.

In a nutshell, Pokemon is a role-playing game in which the player assumes the role of a ten-year-old child who, instead of going to school or anything silly like that, travels across the land, capturing a variety of mysterious magical monsters in specially designed monster-shrinking balls and training them to do battle against other mysterious magical monsters that other people have captured and trained to do the exact same thing. The whole thing is basically glorified cockfighting, but with a rock-paper-scissors twist. Each Pokemon, you see, can be categorized by one, or possibly two, of seventeen elemental 'types' that determine how much damage it will take from attacks of the same types. A Fire-type will take double damage from a Water-type attack, for example, while an Ice-type Pokemon will take double damage from fire-attacks. Their types also give resistances, as in the case of a Flying-type being immune to ground-attacks.

The premise is simple enough, as one might expect from a childrens' game (I surmise that this was originally intended to be marketed towards people of the same age group as the avatar), but there exists such a wide variety of monsters, moves, and items, that the sheer number of possible combinations and strategies for playing is absolutely mind-boggling. It is, literally, the most complex game that I have ever played...which is why I keep playing it, despite all its flaws.

And now we come to good part: expanding on those flaws.

First of all, the game suffers from Power Rangers Syndrome. The franchise has existed for well over a decade, but instead of adapting the material to suit the sensibilities of its aging demographic, the producers of the game expect new buyers to keep flowing in, keeping the game's style and content as juvenile as it ever was.
People, this is just plain stupid. If you have an established customer base of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF OBSESSED CHILDREN (and in its heyday, the game did), there is absolutely no reason to let them slip through your fingers, banking on a fresh generation to get hooked just like the last one. TRENDS CHANGE. I will never understand why anyone allows this sort of thing to happen.
And the dialogue, yes, IS juvenile. It's trite and simplistic and cutesy and, while this sort of thing is to be expected from the children you encounter in the game, even the adults talk like the cast of Sesame Street.

Second, and this, in my mind, is the game's biggest flaw: Despite the seemingly infinite options available to the player as to how to train (which monsters to use, which moves to teach them, what items to equip to them, etc.) the player has absolutely NO IMPACT on the single-player campaign's plot. It's an oversight I keep hoping will be ammended with subsequent versions, but no. Five generations of game console upgrades into the series' run, and the pattern is completely unchanged. The player is given absolutely no options. You can have literally no impact at all on events.
Perhaps this wouldn't bother me so much, but for all the game's moralizing. I realize that with a premise like this, there has to be SOME rationale as to why forcing wild animals to duel for their owners' fun and profit isn't considered inhumane, but you're not even allowed to take a stance on the issue. One is forced on you, with your avatar, a silent protagonist, simply walking from encounter to encounter, tacitly agreeing with whatever the arbitrarily 'good' guys are saying and making what is considered a 'heroic' stand against the 'bad' guys.
There's even one point in the very first game where your character is offered a chance to join the antagonist's team, AND YOU AUTOMATICALLY REFUSE. I can't help but get the impression that the game is preaching to me. I don't listen to preaching from people I actually care about; I'm certainly not going to take it from a game that I PAID FOR.
A really good game, in my opninion, tries to give the player as many options as possible. Team Whatever is trying to take over the world, releasing a titanic Supermonster with which to terrorize the populace? Great. Awesome plot device. My friends are pressuring me to stop them? Yeah, I'd expect that from them. Am I going to?
Ah, now THAT should be up to me. I should have the option of stopping them, joining them, beating them to it and capturing the Supermonster to take over the world myself, or just ignoring the whole stupid hornet's nest, finding myself an island somewhere, building a castle and raising a bunch of sea serpents to eat any unwary intruders who threaten to bring the plot anywhere near me.
The funny thing? So far, in each and every game that's had this premise, you CAN catch the Supermonster. You just can't use it for anything but more deuling. Taking over the world is never an option. Agreeing with the 'bad' guys is never an option. Disagreeing with the 'good' guys is never an option. THERE ARE NO OPTIONS. You get a million different ways to do it, but no say in what you do.

People, for all its amazing complexity and innovation, for all the clever puns and bizarre creativity that's gone into the different monsters, despite the inescapable fact that no matter how many shameless knockoffs people try to make to capitalize on the monster-trainer theme, there will never, ever be anything quite like it...Pokemon, despite being a great game, will never, EVER be a good RPG. Not until it gets over this.

And maybe it's not trying to be. I guess it really doesn't have any reason to. It's wildly successful, after all, just the way it is.

But that just goes to show. Successful? Not the same as good.

Valentine out.

It Never Happened Syndrome

Hello. I’m Jareth Valentine. And today, I’d like to talk to you about very serious issue that has plagued media for years. One that I, personally, find deeply offensive and can no longer stand idly by and allow.

            I am speaking, of course, about It Never Happened Syndrome.

            Look, I appreciate that we live in a world where intellectual property gets passed around from person to person like the fucking flu. And I certainly understand that we live in a world where a lot of horrible ideas somehow manage to sneak past quality control and become implemented, instead of being rightfully encased in cement cubes and fired into the sun.

            But people, when you get your Round Robin back and discover that at some point, a dyslexic three-year-old has used it to blow his nose, you can’t just pretend that it never happened. You have to run with it.

            And I’ll explain why. As anyone who’s actually READ The Neverending Story (and not just seen that piece of shit movie) knows, stories work because the reader vicariously takes part in the adventure. We all fought Voldemort alongside Harry Potter. We were all with Bilbo, escaping downriver from the Elf King’s dungeon. We all flew on dragonback fighting thread on Pern. Those are OUR experiences, and we’re better for them. Saying that they never happened is a kick in the face, and you, artists, owe us better than that. 

            Now, sometimes it’s okay to say It Never Happened. Take the Hulk movie, for example. You know the one. The one whose only saving grace was the presence of Jennifer Connelly, and even that wasn’t enough? Yeah. That one. It was okay to pretend that that never happened and try again. Not because it was bad (though it was), but because nothing else depended on it. It was no more intrinsic to anything greater than any Marvel adaptation. It stood alone, and when it failed, it failed alone. But when a long-running continuity has an awkward phase at some point down the line, that’s part of events. It can’t just be ignored.

            A good example of this is Venus de Milo, of Ninja Turtles: the Next Mutation. Was she important to the plot? Sort of. Was she a worthwhile character? Eh. Was she a good idea? Hell no. Adding a fifth turtle at that point was both superfluous and a bit of a stretch.

Okay, so the guys weren’t really sentient yet, so I can buy them not remembering that there was a fifth turtle in the bowl. And I can buy that one of the turtles, after getting drenched in radioactive macguffin goo, got swept to Chinatown by the sewer currents. I’ll even buy that Splinter knew about her the whole time and didn’t tell anybody. It’s exactly the sort of secretive, manipulative shit that wise mentor-types do all the time. I suspect they get off on it.

            It worked, barely, but it was still a terrible idea, and I’m not sure what the creators were trying to accomplish, apart from having another action figure to sell. But (and I hope you’re reading this, Peter Laird) the fact that it was a bad idea to bring her into the story does not change the fact that she IS part of the story. If you want her gone, fine. Get rid of her. But don’t just pretend she never existed.

            I mean, you could easily have just killed her off. These people are fucking ninjas. They engage in fiery climactic battles to the death before breakfast every morning. All you needed to do was have her, you know, lose.

            Don’t want to kill her? Too gory fore you? Can’t imagine how, I mean, again, NINJAS, but fine. We can work around that. This is the TMNT universe, after all. It’s a world of super-science and sorcery. Turn her to stone. Send her to another dimension. Dust off that ridiculous eggtimer-on-a-stick and go back so you can step on her while she’s still three inches long.  There are a million billion perfectly legitimate ways you could have handled this, Laird. Clever, creative ways that could have made for perfectly good story arcs. But you let us down.

            TMNT:TNM was a direct continuation of the first three live-action movies. As soon as it was produced, aired, and submitted to the public, it became cannon. Saying it never happened is, literally, saying that the entire continuity never happened, and refusing to carry on from where TNM left off is LETTING THE ENTIRE SERIES DIE. And you can make as many revamps of the series as you want, but you’ll never convince me that they follow on from the same story. Not until you address this. I don’t care that the story went in a direction you never intended, or that it diverged from your original artistic vision. You sold it, you licensed it, you gave it to a marketing team, and they did what they did with it, for better or worse. It is what it is and you don’t get to change it just because you ‘own the rights’ again. We experienced it, and it’s ours now.

            Mario suffers from a slightly different strain of INHS, in that the ‘bad’ idea that was unhappened out of existence is one that was there from the series’ inception. We all know Mario. Mario was a plumber from Brooklyn who found a secret warp zone while unclogging a bathroom drain and was sucked, along with his brother, into a parallel dimension, where he quickly rose to a position of prominence due to the fact that everyone else was a midget in a silly hat. He was a fearless hero with a New York accent, a heart of gold, and a passion for pasta. And we happily joined in his adventures for about fifteen years.

            Then suddenly…Wait. Who the hell is that guy? That’s not Mario Mario. I know Mario Mario. He and I have been through a lot together. This is not the man with whom I went shopping for Frog Suits and Tanooki Tails. This is not the man with whom I rejoiced everytime I found a hidden Warp Whistle. This is not the man with whom I fought and toiled through carnivorous mushrooms, fire-breathing plants, and pits of boiling lava through 8 different worlds only to sob and punch things in increasing frustration every time we discovered, together, that the princess was in YET another castle. Who are you, dude, and why are you wearing Mario’s clothes? What have you done with my friend? Hello? Anyone? Am I the only one who notices the pod person masquerading as our hero? Is Bowser responsible for this? Did he create an evil clone? Has Mario just finally smashed his head into one too many floating bricks? Can I get a gods-damned explanation, please?

            And yes, I get that they were trying to bring the franchise more into parity with the original Japanese version. But when you adapt something so heavily that it effectively takes on its own identity apart from the original source material, and it becomes FIFTEEN YEARS WORTH OF ESTABLISHED, you really need to have an in-story explanation of why things changed. Otherwise, you have no right to call it the same name.

            People, doing shit like this is like letting someone read through the first three Harry Potter books, and then handing him the fourth Percy Jackson book and trying to convince him it’s the same series.

            And, re-reading that, that’s a much more apt analogy than I intended. While you might find yourself suddenly reading a perfectly good story, maybe even a much BETTER story, and while the plots may be somewhat similar and while it might take next to no effort to see that these are sort of the same characters, the fact remains that this is NOT WHAT I WAS FUCKING READING. If you want to turn Harry Potter into Percy Jackson halfway through and vastly improve the quality of the story overall, fine. Wonderful, even. But you MUST TRANSITION. Do SOMETHING to make it the same story. Just because Harry Potter was comparatively shitty doesn’t mean I don’t want to know how it ends, and just because Venus de Milo was a bad idea doesn’t mean I don’t want to know what happened to her. You’re changing the channel on us and trying to convince us that we’re watching the same show, and that. Isn’t. Right.

            Well. I think I’ve made my point. But, for those of you who were as pissed off by these particularly egregious examples of INHS as I was, I’ll go ahead and explain them away, since the creators couldn’t be bothered.

            Mario, during one of his quests to save the princess, accidentally ate a mushroom that was slightly the wrong shade of red, and instead of making him double in size, it altered his DNA, bringing into prominence the speech patterns of his Italian ancestors. Unfortunately, it also significantly altered his brain chemistry, effectively erasing his memory and drastically altering his personality. After a brief, unsuccessful attempt to rehabilitate him, the Mushroom Kingdom Secret Service programmed him to serve as an operative, specializing in Turtle Assassination.

            Which also explains what happened to Venus.

            Thank you, and good night.