"New Dogs, New Tricks" prologue commentary & notes

REFERENCES: 

N/A

GENERAL:

- It's very important to me to set up and establish the more important fan characters here, instead of just tossing them in and acting like they were always around. Granted, you could find a few stories written by their original creators featuring said characters here and there, but finding bios or intro stories that actually answer the vital questions of who they are and where they come from was hard. Heck, these days, even harder because so many of the websites that hosted them have been down for years and years by this point. The fics/or the author's site has been lost to the sands of time. That's a major reason why I went "Well, I can just put an AU spin on these characters and go 'this is what they're like in my world.'" Makes things easier.

Now, the old school RR fandom (as in the fans who were around way back in the beginning) was very different from modern fandom in several ways, including the fact that people were completely free to use OCs that didn't belong to them as long as they credited the creators in the fic itself. Nowadays? People crash out if you use anybody else's character because they believe you're trying to steal them. Yes, I'm speaking from experience. It's why I put the credits in the very first chapter. Granted, I always credit other writers, but this time I just made sure to put it up front in bolded lettering. Now, what thief does that?  

Personally, I have a very strong suspicion that these kinds of people actually want their OCs stolen. 

"Huh?" I hear you say. "Why the heck would anybody want to have their OCs stolen?" Well, here's why I think that:

- What better way to get eyes on them as well as sympathy then by spinning a scary story about a big bad character thief lurking about on deviantART? 

- The accusers not only feel they're morally superior and righteous compared to the "thief", but get to portray themselves as being such in the public eye as well. A friend of mine's pointed out that none of them ever showed an interest in other people's characters, unless they could connect them with their own works. This tracks, because a couple of them don't even like OCs, but make an exception for their friends' character/or characters made by popular fans. Back when I was posting an old, now deleted fanfic, one of them expressed relief that said fic centered around the canon characters, because they didn't want to read or learn about my OCs. 

Okay. There are people some folks in fandoms (in general, not exclusively RR) who are primarily interested in just reading about the canons. Not my thing personally, but I can respect other people having preferences. But that particular person was so rude about it that I was automatically annoyed. It's hypocritical as well, because this RR fan would also constantly talk about their OC (that I honestly found disturbing)/or their buddies' equally weird OCs, and acted like I was supposed to be super familiar with all these characters. I think the strangest instance was this same person offhandedly mentioning some OC named Rammer to me. I searched their art gallery and journal, didn't see anything about this OC, and was like "Who even is that?" Didn't get a reply. I guess they were salty that I had no clue who Rammer was even supposed to be. Darn psychic powers, I guess they were on the fritz that day. 😄

But seriously, fans like that are exactly why I put that author's note at the beginning of the FF.net New Dogs.

- In the late 90s/early 2000s, the fandom liked to do this thing where they would single out somebody for the smallest, most trivial thing and publicly jump all over them for it. Very much scapegoating/mobbing behavior. I'm quite embarrassed to say that I participated in it. I was dumb and very much swept up in groupthink back then.

As an extension of the above, the fandom in it's current state is inactive and doesn't have anything going on. Rallying together against a perceived outside threat is probably the most excitement these people get out of their lives.

- Believing someone is desperate to steal their characters reinforces in their imaginations that their OCs are indeed the best thing since sliced bread. Doesn't matter that said OCs are so banal/or off-putting that I (or a number of other fans still hanging around who aren't in the orbit of those people, apparently) have zero interest in using them. The characters I'm "stealing" have a lot more potential/or actual interesting stuff going on with them.

So these accusations of theft (especially public ones) aren't done with genuine concern in mind for the person who's supposedly being stolen from. They're done just because these fans enjoy dogpiling other people and bossing them around. 

- So most of the villains we see here in the prologue belong to George Aguirre, with the exception of Dread and Death, who are EW's. He either knew Aguirre or was friends with people who knew him. Aguirre's site was already gone when I entered the fandom. The the only thing EW and I know about most of these characters was their species, and in the case of one particular OC, his appearance. So we "AU-ified" these guys for usage in our own stories because we think they're interesting. 

"You  should've asked George's permission!" Most of the people who left the fandom do not want to be bothered about it (see: Greywolf Lupous). Once again, believe me when I say I speak from personal experience. I don't know where they are now. I cannot pull an email address out of my butt, or from thin air. In fact, I think the people who scream about character theft are fully aware of all this. They just don't care because they treat it as ammo they can use against you. 

"Haha, since you can't contact them, that means you can't ask them, so you shouldn't be using their OCs in the first place!"

"Well, I know a guy who used to hang with that same crew, and he never once told me that they were upset by the idea of their characters being used by other people. I think if it that wasn't the case it would've come up in our conversations, so reverse UNO card."

 - The Court of Twilight is a name I came up with myself for my AU, since I didn't wanna constantly refer to them as "Zaygos and his henchmen". The name's based around the fact that they're all animal species that are active during the evening. For all intents and purposes, they're to the Rovers what Apocalypse is to the X-Men, or the villains from the PreCure franchise are to that series' particular group of heroes. I was also influenced by Darkseid's Elite and Thanos and his Black Order (although personally I think Darkseid's crew was more distinctive and noteworthy in DC's cartoons then the Black Order was in the MCU). 

I'm not sure how much info I should give out about these guys, because I think some stuff should be saved for the sake of future stories, but if you're curious as to my thought process for my reimaginings:

Zaygos Design-wise, the STARS-verse interpretation takes inspiration from King Sombra from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and King Magnifico from Wish. I chose his coloration (which is an actual color variation red foxes can have called "fire and ice") in order to make him stand out instead of being the same old boring red/orange color that fox characters often are. I might give him a mustache too.

Lustfox: He was very much influenced by DC villain Glorious Godfrey. His being a fox really works with this idea, given that a ton of people are highly obsessed with them.

Kaymat: Neither I nor EW know anything about this character other than her being female. However, whenever she did show up, she was always with Zaygos and co, so it just felt wrong to exclude her. We made her a cat, though mine's is a mix-breed cat and ended up going down a different path than his version did. 

Alornso: My approach to him is "take no prisoners tormented badass".

Vile Darkness: This guy was the toughest to reimagine. EW initially had him as a sorcerer who could create and animate small animals. This can be an interesting and even scary power, but I found that it really didn't work for the character per my setting. In terms of power levels, the characters in my setting are a lot stronger than in other people's fics, so he needed to be appropriately buffed up. A rule of thumb for writing fiction is that if your heroes are going to be strong, then your villains need to be stronger in order to provide an interesting challenge. I toyed around with making Vile a tall, lanky, stereotypically ghoulish-looking dark sorcerer, then, a metamorph like Mahito from Jujutsu Kaisen. 

His final form came about because I thought to myself "These guys need somebody to craft and forge weapons for them", and that became his role. So no more skinny goth wizard. He can do some other stuff as well, some of which we'll get to see in later chapters. Since he's someone whose job requires him to be hands-on, I envisioned him as having a rough, unsophisticated way of speaking -- he's basically a country bumpkin.

Death and Dread are basically the same characters EW always presented them as. I did change up the circumstances of how they and the Court of Twilight connect however, again just to simplify things and avoid plotholes.

The Court of Twilight's wardrobe was designed with their roles and personalities in mind. I will say that all these guys are a lot more serious in my stories than what they were typically depicted as being. IMO, it makes them feel more threatening.

FUN FACTS:

- Lustfox mistakenly calling Lady Dread "Lady Dream" was originally a typo in the early draft, but then I thought that him messing up her name and not really caring did a good job of showing what type of person he is.