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May 16th, 2017 | by Trae Dorn

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└ Tags: sarah p, Terrence

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mitamaking

May 16, 2017 at 12:13 am | # | Reply

It’s not really defended Terrance as saying Sarah is just as much if not more of an ass at times.

Having known “Sarahs” working cons, I really do not blame Terrance for wanting to just ignore her.
E. Bernhard Warg

May 16, 2017 at 1:16 am | # | Reply

Every time I think Sarah is being unfair to Terrence, he opens his mouth.
Shadow

May 16, 2017 at 4:00 am | # | Reply

I’m beginning to suspect the trouble between these two is going to come to a head at the expense of the Borkcon staff… In my experience, these little squabbles can very easily become surprise landmines.
Langland

May 16, 2017 at 5:40 am | # | Reply

Terrence just can’t learn to shut up and be nice apparently. I know I used to say offensive things but I’d at least not say this kind of crap.
- Abdiel
  
  May 17, 2017 at 8:26 am | # | Reply
  
  Err, neither can Sarah? See all the “Terrence/Sarah is just being a jerk.” stuff on this arc, when really all I can see is Terrence starting crap by being an idiot, and Sarah nurturing, watering, cuddling, and feeding the resulting grudge until it’s 50′ tall and taking over cities.
  Sure, Terrence is a socially retarded jackass, but Sarah is pretty much all about never, ever, EVER letting one single thing go. She also seems to assume malice long before the thought of lack of competence enters her mind.
  In short – they’re both being jackholes – just for different reasons. There’s no “this one’s wrong, that one’s right” here. They both own stock in gas stations and they’re chucking it all over the fire in alternately.
  
  * Sure, Sarah said something nice. If I were Terrence, I’d be suspicious as hell too! Considering that makes her about 1/250… yeah that doesn’t make it all cool.
  - Viktor
    
    May 17, 2017 at 9:31 am | # | Reply
    
    See, the problem there is that you’re putting “insults someone repeatedly and refer to them as ‘it’ within 5 minutes of meeting them” as on the same level as “don’t forgive someone for insulting you repeatedly”. Sarah opened by being friendly and had to be pushed into being rude, Terrance opened by being rude. Should Sarah have given him another chance earlier? Certainly. But she did give him another chance now, and Terrance still managed to be an ass in response.
    - Kat
      
      May 17, 2017 at 6:46 pm | # | Reply
      
      And the thing is, I can understand that Sarah wouldn’t be inclined to be friendly after he insulted her when they first met. Even if she wants to insult him, I can understand that, especially if he was rude continuously in subsequent interactions.
      But see, the issue HERE is, yes, Terrence was an ass in response to Sarah being nice now. BUT, recall that Sarah started out their interactions for the day with Sarah repeatedly telling him that she absolutely loathed him and hated the idea of working with him, and that pretty much after the day was over she was going to not make an effort to be civil with him. All while he repeatedly tried to deny any mutuality to the hatred and just wanted to get to work on the garage sale. So even if Sarah was trying to be nice NOW, in this particular case I think she sort of shot herself in the foot earlier with her grandiose declaration of hatred for him.
      Plus, as Scrappy was so kind to point out earlier, every conversation they have had since the ill-fated first meeting where it all began seems to have begun with Sarah referring to Terrence as garbage in some form. So I can sort of see Terrence having already begun his journey to this point beforehand.
      - Trae Dorn
        
        May 19, 2017 at 8:22 pm | #
        
        From Sarah’s point of view, she started the day trying to ask Terrence if they could be civil, and he told her she was unimportant,
        
        When the whole reason she’s mad is because he wouldn’t treat her like a person.
        
        Just something to consider.
Glenn

May 18, 2017 at 1:26 pm | # | Reply

If the question is, is Terrence or Sarah being a jerk, the answer is yes.
- Kat
  
  May 19, 2017 at 7:56 pm | # | Reply
  
  A very fair response to this whole situation, thank you.

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Trae's Blog

The Challenges of Writing in a Shared Fictional Universe With a Long Running Story ( February 27th 2018 )

So earlier this week, the first "plot installment" for No Brand Con 2018 went live. For those unaware, for most of its seventeen year history, No Brand Con has kept an ongoing storyline with a revolving cast of mascot characters. The story starts online before the con, and then concludes with live performers during the event.

For the first couple of years the con did this, it was produced almost like an Alternate Reality Game through the forums, but starting around year six shifted to telling the stories through what is effectively a web series. For seventeen cons (including the upcoming one this year), the con has told (with varying levels of complexity) twelve stories, ten of which were done in the format of the web series. I was involved in the production of eight of these web series, but only really wrote or co-wrote six of them. While that means I'm probably the dominant voice in the fiction, I only really had control over the continuity for half of these stories.

On quite a few occasions, I was working within the restrictions of writers who came before me. Like there was a major plot hole in No Brand Con 2005's "BrandCorp" storyline where a major character (Wilson Oakes) disappeared between Opening Ceremonies and the Cosplay Contest intermission at the con. Since the other significant villain from that story (Executron) kept appearing, we just told people Wilson Oakes had been killed off during the con, and made jokes about it. When we revisited BrandCorp again in 2011, I made one of those jokes canon in a video that recapped the earlier story to close the plot-hole.

In other cases, later writers made changes which will complicate future storylines. Like, Duct Tape Boy flies a No Brand Hero owned spaceship for the No Brand Con 2009 storyline (which I co-wrote). Yet in the No Brand Con 2016 storyline (which I was not involved in), Duct Tape Boy can't drive a car and needs someone else to do it for him. Starting this year, I'm back to writing the thing and we haven't resolved it in-fiction yet. I'm going to probably have to puzzle that out eventually.

I'll probably make a joke about Duct Tape Boy having a "Class S" license which only lets him drive Spaceships and Commercial Vehicles over 26,000 pounds or something.

Finally, there's just the complication of doing a zero-budget web series over a period of time this long. Getting consistent performers is hard. The one reason the Gardening Ninja shows up so much in the web episodes is, frankly, because I play him. Besides the six years I helped come up with the story, I helped edit and produce another two. I was just around. To lift the curtain a bit, some characters like Duct Tape Boy can be recast. While there have only been a small number of "main" Duct Tape Boys, I think like eight different people have played the character in some capacity at this point?

Most characters have visible faces though, so recasting isn't an option. Often we just write around this (including only the available cast in the plot). Other times it introduces plot issues. The second incarnation of Greenboy, for example, was initially played by Conner Vail. I can't remember why, but for some reason Conner wasn't going to be available to play the character anymore. Knowing this ahead of time though, we wrote into the No Brand Con 2011 plot that he was captured by BrandCorp and physically transformed ala-Captain America (or as I usually reference, Bo Abobo from the Double Dragon movie) in that year's third episode. David "Mousse" Janacek took over the character for a few years, and all was well.

Except then Mousse wasn't available anymore.

A few stories just had Greenboy off screen, but this year the story would have felt weird not to use him. Frankly, with the plot being based around Duct Tape Boy's disappearance, not having Greenboy would mean the Gardening Ninja was returning to zero familiar faces. Greenboy needed to be there, and Mousse was not an option... but Conner was. So we introduced the plot element that at some point Greenboy was de-transformed. We don't know how yet, and maybe we'll never explain the events that lead to it.

But hey, it's in the story now.

I mean, I guess it helps that the rules to our world are a little absurdist. I mean, ostensibly it's a cast of C-list superheroes who (in canon) help run an Anime convention while fighting off Egyptian Space Mummies and an evil, tiny robot. Some other writers (*cough*STAN*cough*) have gone a little bit too absurdist, but overall it kind of works.

It's just a massive pain to figure out what the heck actually happened sometimes though.

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The Challenges of Writing in a Shared Fictional Universe With a Long Running Story ( February 27th 2018 )

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