LNH/META: Villains!

[Martin Phipps]

On Nov 2, 11:07 pm, Tom Russell <joltc... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 3, 12:35 am, Martin Phipps <martinphip... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >  And
> > let's not forget that Tom upset a lot of people when he first came on
> > RACC
>
> I did indeed.  I've gotten better, both as a writer and a person,
> specifically because of the people on RACC.  In many important ways,
> RACC is where I grew up, and where I learned to act like a decent
> human being, and to respect other people's toys.
>
> That's why I weighed so strongly recently with Dave & Rob on the issue
> of characters who are in that fuzzy gray area; I think unless a
> character has been specifically given to the public domain,
> specifically entrusted to another creator (like Limp-Asparagus Lad was
> to Saxon), or unless permission has been specifically obtained from
> their creator, should they still be on the internet-- I believe that
> we should let them go, both in any reboot/threeboot/ultimatization and
> (I know this is radical) in the mainstream LNH continuity.
>
> I understand the point of view of writing someone else's characters is
> a show of respect for that creator and their creation.  I even agree
> with it, and have been touched by the way, for example, people have
> latched onto WikiBoy.  But here's the thing: I was there when it
> happened, and I put him in the public domain for people to use.
> Whereas when I came back to RACC and found out that such-and-such had
> happened to some of my old Teenfactor characters at the hands of Mr.
> Wiley, I was a bit miffed.  What he did to them, against my explicit
> permission, while I was on RACC is a whole 'nother story.
>
> Now, it could be, there's a lot of creators, who were there in '92,
> created their character as a .sig and never came back, never bothered
> to dream that a character with a backstory had evolved from that.  And
> there's creators who wrote stories, and left, and probably couldn't
> care less about their LNH characters because, Jesus, it's been 15+
> years, that's a whole 'nother lifetime.  I think, though, it's time to
> let those characters go, or to make a concerted, but not at all
> creepy, effort to locate a valid e-mail address for those creators and
> ask them to let the character go into the public domain.  I'm more and
> more convinced that that is just plain the right thing to do.
>
> The LNH is going to be twenty years old.  I think we should start the
> next twenty years the right way: by getting explicit permission for
> each character, or letting that character fade away.  I mean, it's not
> like the LNH is suffering from a dearth of explicitly public domain
> characters, or characters created by active authors.
>
> The "not reserved" category basically amounts to, "go ahead and use
> the character, but don't maim them", which is I think how we should
> treat public domain characters anyway.  I don't think there's a need
> for it in 2011.  I think public domain and reserved are all the
> categories we need; I think when we write a story with someone else's
> character that's not public domain, we *should* send it to them first,
> and if it takes them a week to read it and get back to us, it takes
> them a week.
>
> That's my two cents, anyway.  I know it might not be the most popular
> sentiment in the world.  I don't think however that I'm overthinking
> it, or taking it too seriously-- I mean, c'mon, the LNH has been
> around for two decades.  It's something that can and should and will
> last, and it's worth taking our custodianship-- and really, that's
> what the various writers who preface their posts with [LNH] or LNH:
> (psst, the later shows up better on Google Groups!) are, custodians of
> this big, crazy, wonderful universe that someday is going to be
> written by people who weren't even alive in 1992-- seriously.
>
> I think it's time to let the old ways go.  Again, just my two cents.
> At least, as I prepare for a return in the near future to RACC and the
> universe that drew me to it, that is how I will be going forward.
>
> > And yet I never had any
> > problem with him, not until much later when he was reviewing
> > everybody's stories except mine and I asked him why by e-mail and he
> > admitted he was angry with me and then when he did start reviewing my
> > stories they were harsh critiques and not the sort of reviews you
> > would write if you still wanted to be friends with someone.  That
> > hurt.
>
> Well, here's the thing about that: I didn't write reviews to make
> friends, nor to unmake them.  They were my honest opinion.  I liked
> some of your stories; others I didn't like, as they weren't to my
> taste.  I tried to articulate what my taste was, especially with
> regards to the police procedural genre.  You have a very different set
> of values, and several reviews resulted in unpleasantness between us.
>
> At a certain point, I said something to the effect that I was no
> longer going to review your stories, specifically to avoid those sort
> of arguments.  And that caused an even bigger argument, the one that
> put that final wedge between us.  And I wish that hadn't happened.
>
> Because we were friends, Martin.  I remember asking you for advice in
> my ninth or tenth grade science class.  That was over ten years ago.
> I remember the very Phippsian story you wrote as an addition to my
> NHOP Chatillon storyline.  I remember working on the Pigs in Time
> miniseries with you-- or, rather, I remember discussing it, working on
> one issue, and discovering that in that time you had written the
> remainder. :-)
>
> I'm not saying that my reviews were wrong-- they were, and remain, my
> honest opinion.  I felt somewhat trapped-- you were upset if I didn't
> write a review, and upset if I did.  Now, I'm not laying the implosion
> of our friendship solely at your footsteps; I had a nasty temper with
> a short fuse for a long time.  I wouldn't, and couldn't, give a good
> review when I felt a bad one was merited, but I perhaps could have
> chosen my negative words more diplomatically.  I wish I had, and I'm
> sorry about that.
>
> Our disagreements in aesthetic values, personal philosophy, and many
> other things were legion, and I do not remember those 30-plus article
> threads of circular arguments with much fondness at all.  But I do,
> from time to time, remember with fondness the good times, and I do
> miss our friendship.

Fair enough.

So now if you want to use Master Blaster, go ahead... except you
should find a valid e-mail address for Robert Ramirez and ask him if
it's okay.

Heh. :)

Martin