Subject: [Sidles among the bushes]
Author:
Posted on: 2019-10-03 10:13:00 UTC

I agree with S.M.F. - this sort of thread is great fun. ^_^

Thoth - I was alive but not around. I know we got a computer before we moved house in 1997, but I only really got online around 2000. I have run into some of the Google Group Usenet archives before - they're fascinating stuff!

So! It looks like (allowing for the vagaries of timelines), our PPC sprang up at the same time as the first online fanfic, through the BBSes. The Mysterious Somebody took over about the time Usenet came in, and left when things transitioned to websites.

One overlooked fact about the Reorganisation is that it coincides with the launch of Fanfiction.net, which the various histories peg as the end of the Great Schism and the first giant archive. Does this mean the MS and his League of Mary-Sue Factories had a hand in the massive growth of FFn? I couldn't possibly comment. ;) But I can imagine it led to some changes around HQ.

In fact... I'm wondering if the BBS/Usenet/Schism era had low enough fanfic throughput that the old three agent teams were usually the only team in their division. So Anya, Josie, and Suzie were the DBS: Star Wars team. The fact that there were three of them meant that they didn't all have to go out together - one could be ill, or on holiday, or pinched for addressing a crossover.

They would have had their own dedicated Intelligence support, who would have trawled the 'net (in whatever form it took at the time) for stories to send them. Everything would have been contained, so that different teams barely had to talk to each other.

Then FFn arose, and the Fanfic Explosion hit, and there was no time for that personal touch. Intel created the Sorting Room purely to sift through FFn, the divisions expanded, agents started working outside their single canons... it was an exciting and infuriating time.

The last vestige of the Personal Touch would have been the DCPS, founded by ex-Tolkien agent Tween to try and get back to the ultra-specialised feel. Since its full absorption by the PPC, the Board have been doing their level best to tone that element down, usually by giving Caseworkers other jobs as well.




So! On further consideration, I don't think the TCDA, PPA, &c&c can be just a time machine away. They all reference modern fandoms (suitably modified), and make use of stuff which they really shouldn't - fandom in the late Victorian era was not Steampunk.

So, new idea: they form alternate timelines where the 'PPC' never changed, just adopted new ideas as they came through. The Steampunk PPC started in the Victorian era, and picked up technology from the 30s-50s era (suitably modified to fit its theme). The Noir PPC started with Sherlock Holmes - so detective fiction - and changed the style of the detective stuff when Noir came around. The Volatile 'Multiverse' is actually the Fanzine PPC, extended down to the Internet age and fractured by the variety.

The Mirror Multiverse remains separate, and would have its own equivalents of all these things. The Lovecraftian 'verse is an obvious candidate, being a mirror of the Steampunk PPC - it just took off in a different direction. This gives us a map that looks something like this:



Each 'alternate multiverse' is thus revealed as simply an old PPC running past its time. I've put Solarpunk and the Shipverse on the same branch because I'm not sure which of them it should be: does Solarpunk arise from the Scifi PPC adopting Star Trek utopianism, or does the Shipverse arise from it adopting Hippy Free Love? There's obviously a certain amount of shuffling available.

One interesting claim I've made is that the pre-Reorganisation PPC is actually a separate organisation entirely. If it hadn't been reorganised as above, the Fanfic Explosion (and specifically the Anime Explosion) could have reshaped it into the Magical Girl 'verse. So these 'breakpoints' don't necessarily mean one organisation vanishing and another independently forming; they could just be a change in the one that was already there.

(My guess is that the 1890s was such a change, as was the 1960s, but that the shift from fanfic of Victorian material to the scifi magazines was a full on switch to a new organisation, just like the 1980s and the launch of our PPC with the Internet).

One thing I like about this is that it reestablishes the Mirror Multiverse as something special - it's the only true Other Multiverse.

hS

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