#I like fanfiction because authors usually focus on mundane stuff

[alternativeminiatures]

Source @relithel

[yayninjabob]

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is Villain: Redux?

A: It is a work of Powerpuff Girls fanfiction that I’ve been writing since November 2019 and I have published on both Fanfiction.Net and Archive of Our Own.

Q: Are you the same author as the original Villain PpG fanfic?/Is VillainR really an official rewrite of this old story?

A: Yes and yes. :)

Q: When does the story take place/How old are the PpG in VillainR?

A: The longfic has 3 major arcs. Part One takes place roughly 7 years after the events of the original series (when the Puffs were still of Kindergartner age) and opens when the Puffs are celebrating their 13th birthday. Part Two takes place 3 years after that, at age 16, and Part Three skips about another year and half and leads up to their 18th birthday.

Q: Does this story involve characters/elements from the 2016 PpG/What is considered canon in the VillainR universe?

A: Because of certain contradictions in both the 2016 series and in later episodes featured in seasons 5/6 of the OG series, I have decided to consider really only seasons 1-4 of the OG series as well as the Powerpuff Girls Movie when the series creator, Craig McCracken, was still the heart of the show as canon, and this is what is considered “in universe” for my Villain world.

Q: So is this one of those Highschool PpG fics?

A: It’s “aged up” Puffs for sure, but I’ve actively tried my best to avoid the usual high school tropes such as the mundane school setting. I prefer describing the fic as a “coming of age story plus superpowers” over a “teen drama.”

Q: What are the ships/romantic pairings in Villain: Redux?

A: Villain: Redux is not a ship fic. There are some romantic subplots but romance is NOT the main focus. I emphasize that because I understand a lot of readers actively seek romance and I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up for this very long slowburn fic. The romance is minimal, but the ships/pairings that are included alongside the major story’s events are: Blossom x Robin Snyder and Buttercup/Joey/Jojo Jr x Princess Morbucks

Q: Why do you keep referring to Buttercup as Buttercup/Joey/Jojo?

A: If you read the story, I’m sure you’ll understand as you get into Part Two. But to those who haven’t and are wondering why the multiple names in reference to the green Puff: The character is genderqueer/trans and eventually adopts both “Joey” and “Jojo Junior” as new names. So since I’m unable to know exactly where in the story a reader may be with reading, in all my posts I tag with the multiple names for the character.

Q: Why all the LGBT stuff?

A: Because I’m queer and I enjoy writing queer characters and for queer audiences. Always have and always will. See this ask/answered for more on that.

Q: What are your pronouns/What do I call you, the author?

A: Thanks for asking! My preferred pronouns are They/Them or She/Her, but since I’ve gone by “Yay Ninja Bob” and “Bobby” within the fandom since childhood I’ve gotten used to the accidental he/hims and personally I’m good with ALL pronouns as long as they are used with respect. I identify as queer and nonbinary. Calling me “Yay Ninja Bob”, “Bobby” and “Bob” are all fine and welcome! That IS me, lol. Adopting a “B” name used to be a trend once upon a time in the PpG fandom. But in my everyday average life, I’m called Ris. :)

Q: Why did you decide to rewrite Villain anyways?

A: 1) I always said I’d rewrite it someday, so I’m fulfilling that finally.

2) It’s my personal favorite story I’ve ever come up with- fanfic or original- and I wanted to improve upon it

3) Powerpuff Girls FOREVERRR, babyyyy!!! Lol, no seriously: This show saved my life multiple times- without a doubt. I just OWE it, I dunno… something… and well, fanfiction is the best that I got. :p Also the OG Villain gained some popularity in the fandom somehow lol and I got SO much love for it, that also yeah, I felt like I OWED the fans/readers of the original something better too.

Q: Where are the Rowdyruff Boys in this story?

A: They exploded at the end of their debut episode, and in Villain: Redux they remain dead and deceased. While they are not actively present in the story, they are referenced multiple times. In fact, their death/destabilization is a plot point to the story, sooo leading into the next FAQ and unfortunately MOST FAQ….

Q: Do you hate the Rowdyruff Boys?

A: NO.

See rant.

[blueraith]

Some folks still need to learn how to constructively comment

Wish I could say that I’ve been writing Chapter... 12(? Legit, I don’t often remember the chapter numbers outside of the Google doc) since posting Chapter 11 (we’re just gonna assume I know where the fuck I’m at in my own story, okay? Give me this).

But that would be a bald faced lie.

(Mostly because of my sister’s graduation and all the family visiting and the concurrent back injury I was suffering. Really kills the writing mood when you can’t sit up properly to type.)

This is going under a read more, because this incident Vexed Me To The Max(TM) and triggered a Rant of Epic Proportions(TM).

But graduation has been over, and my back has been feeling great. What really kept me a bit down since all that was over and done with is that very morning I’m feeling better, I see that I have two comments on the 100 fic I’ve put on indefinite hiatus. Yeah, it’s not an active story, but I still care about it, and I’ve been thinking about it recently. So, in short. I still care about it a hell of a lot. Hell, I care about everything that I write. I’ve written fanfiction at what’s nearing 10 years now, but nothing has erased the fact that putting yourself out there in the public eye takes a hell of a lot of effort and, sure, a smidgen of courage and confidence.

Well, this lovely commenter told me that my word count was way too high, that I was slowing my story down, and that they skipped to the last chapter (from Chapter 2, they skipped 6 chapters of ongoing character development, an ensemble cast, Ark politics, and canon fix-its) “40k words and [Clarke’s] still not on the ground yet??”

This is me paraphrasing both comments. I deleted them with extreme prejudice from the fic because I wasn’t leaving that kind of useless bullshit on my work after it effectively ruined my mood for, like, four days.

Why was it bullshit? Well, for one thing taking the average word count per chapter, it’s only a little over 5k words per chapter. Look. I balance out my word counts very carefully for each story that I write. This fic has a longer than average word count compared to my more recent stuff (which is around 4k per chapter) because of all the fuckin shit I was pulling off in this particular fic. Reworking canon to better explain why the Arkers were resistent to the radiation on the ground while having the superior blood that the Mountain Men wanted without putting them up in their shitty space station for thousand of years that evolution would have actually required them to have gone through to be remotely realistic.

Jake’s alive in this fic because I don’t like dead characters shaping character development on a pre-canon basis. Personally, I dislike orphan/parental loss storylines before the specific original work has even started. I get that orphans exist in real life. But YA media has a disproportionate amount of dead parents. Eh. I wanted to do something different. So, this means there’s an entire extra character in the story that I have to write and develop.

Diana Allers actually matters in day to day Ark life instead of just showing up and nearly murdering everyone because she’s a selfish bitch for little to no reason other than to make Abby’s already pretty damn full storyline even more packed than it already was. (Seriously, why didn’t they develop Allers more? She’s lazily implemented in canon, and I hate it. Lord only knows I enjoyed Abby and Raven’s plotlines far more in several places of Season 1 rather than Bellamy’s Manpain Adventures Lite Before He Turns Into A Complete And Utter Psychopath Later On In The Series).

Jaha is far more competent and slimey than he is in the show, rather than being a foolish man who is barely toddering along in the plot towards something useful.

Abby and Jake are at odds because Jake technically betrays Clarke and allows her to get arrested in the beginning of the story. They adopt Raven in the interim and they’re all awkwardly trying to free Clarke while pretending that Jake and Abby aren’t having marital problems. Well, Jake and Abby are pretending, Raven is as blunt as she usually is and just calls shit like she sees it.

Ensemble cast. There’s literally a tag on this story that tells you all that “This Story Is Literally About Everyone.”

So.

Yeah.

Clarke’s not on the fucking ground yet. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Having skipped past 6 chapters.

Is 5k really that long? I wouldn’t know, personally when I read a longfic, I go into it knowing that the chapters might be long as fuck because I know that I’m reading a fic that could literally take me through several days and I read pretty damn fast. Not that 40k words is really all that much when you’re rewriting a TV show using all the characters who already exist in canon and then getting into their thoughts and motivations because that is literally what books do, this isn’t a screenplay, I wouldn’t be caught dead writing one because I despise them. Sorry, but you’re getting the full range of thoughts and emotions of everyone involved. I know, that’s just awful, getting hours and hours of content for free, but god forbid the plot doesn’t run on your timetable.

But that’s really the crux of this rant, isn’t it? NEVER complain about word counts, people. Too short? Who the fuck cares? The author could be just beginning their writing careers, so to speak. Word counts of any significance takes practice, first of all. So, not only could they might or might not have the required experience to write longer chapters, they may not even want to. And that’s fine. Because they do this FOR FREE.

Same thing with longer chapters. Are you really going to come at me, nearly a year after I’ve written and posted this work, complaining about word count, as though there’s even a remote chance that I’m going to go back and edit down all of that time and effort I put into that work to satisfy your fragile reading stamina?

Pfffffffffft.

I mean, this is funny to me in some regard because I’m over here wondering just what would be a good length for this person. Part of the reason my chapters tend to be at least 4k words long is because that’s generally where I can get a comfortable amount of character interaction, introspective thought, and plot moving forward. All three of those things matter to me when writing chapters. I hate reading too short works (and no, I don’t tell these authors this. I read what they give me and just deal with it because they’re entertaining me for free) and it’s little more than characters just trading dialogue with each other. I want to know what they are thinking about as well. I want a bit of narration. I’m reading something from a specific character’s point of view, and I want that chapter to ooze the personality of that character.

These are all the things I keep in mind when I write to my word count goals, personally. Doing it in less than 3k words might be possible, but it would sure as hell be annoying.

But most of all, it just irritated the fuck out of me. Like I’ve said multiple times in this rant. I do this for free. I don’t expect you guys to know this, but in order to get these substantial updates when I can manage to actually feel well enough to write and get them published, it takes me EIGHT TO TWELVE HOURS of sitting in front of a computer screen to have a chapter finished. On a good day. Yes. Most of the chapters I put out are done in one day, in one block, and I’m often up until 5 AM finishing something up. I have severe ADHD. Sometimes it is a chore to get shit put on a page because I can’t sit down and focus my thoughts enough to sound even coherent. Sometimes I have issues keeping up with what the beginning of a long sentence was about and I have to constantly keep up with what the fuck I’m even talking about in any given thought.

So, you have an author with a severe executive function disorder attempting to concentrate hard enough to get her own thoughts in character for each and every character that is featured in any given story while attempting to resist even the most mundane distractions while desperately hoping she’s going to hit a period of hyperfocus long enough to get substantial work down, but if that happens she’ll probably forget to eat because she’s on a writing binge that goes on with actual significant work for a period of several hours.

I love writing, despite the challenges I have to deal with in order just to get it done. I love most of the comments that I receive. I’m coming off a period of extreme depression from some family issues I was dealing with. My skin is rather thin at the moment and that irritated the fuck out of me, but those two comments knocked more wind out of my sails that I really wanted them to, and that bugs me even more.

But I am more experienced in fic writing than probably your average person. This commenter pissed me the fuck off, but I’ve moved past this, it’s hardly shattered my motivation to write forever.

But a careless commenter could easily do that to someone just getting into fanfiction. And it makes me wonder just how often this happens everyday, every hour, when entitled, spoiled people who think their needs are more important than the author doing this FOR FREE decide to voice their terrible opinions on their works. I love my readers, I don’t hold myself beholden to them, but they are extraordinarily important to me. Plot, pacing, and character development are all my own when I write because first and foremost, I write for myself. It’s a hobby that I clearly have to work very hard at to even be remotely successful at, and taking anyone else’s standards into account is never going to happen when I have to live up to my own already very high expectations. But I do keep y’all in mind when I’m devoting my time, energy, and effort in. The chapter lengths I have partly exist to make up for the wait times I inevitably have between each release. I very much know that I am sporadic and inconsistent when updating. So, when I do, I want to have something that isn’t just a whisper in the wind when it finally cycles to the top of the AO3 listing.

I know there are inevitably readers who didn’t like my content, or do think my stuff is too long. That’s fine. But don’t come into my space and give me two comments that were effectively “TL;DR” and expect that not to be a slap in the face. Because it is. I have wonder if the fandom kids today even know the kind of slap backs this sort of thing would have gotten in LiveJournal.

But, never mind that. I’m a big girl, I took some petty revenge in deleting that bullshit from my boards and then setting the fic to moderated mode, but what I would like anyone who decides to read through what is actually a long winded post (all my rants are, admittedly) to learn is that you are not reading professional work. You are not reading work that has been paid for. You are not reading work that has been professionally edited. I’m not saying that you can’t have standards for fic, lord knows I have many, but I don’t go into an author’s work and leave shitty comments. Never. Constructive criticism on fanfiction keeps the author’s time in mind, their skill level over what they’re actually capable of, and whether or not they’re even open to criticism. Some authors don’t even want your advice. They just want to know that you liked it. And if you don’t, just don’t say anything. I’m not quite that fragile personally, when someone is giving me useful criticism that can be used to actually improve my quality of writing, but I will freely admit that clearly I have a sore spot about comments addressing word counts.

Get out of here with that shit.

In short. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.