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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 19, 2016 18:46:52 GMT -5
On other forums I frequent, I've mentioned Slyrr's work as a case study of the good and bad sides of Original Characters. They’re a tool that allows you to perform stories not possible by being completely canon adherent, and allows a writer to really use their creative wings to build a world further. Whether an OC is a red shirt goon, a random background character given a name to hint there’s a bigger world, to a full on major player, OCs are like any other authorial tool one that either works or doesn’t. It’s a question of skill and self-restraint. A while ago I thought 'you know, why not do a Let's Read of it?' since having reread one of his stories in more detail at a later date I noticed a lot of things I had missed my first time through, and that my case study may not have actually been wholly accurate in some of the smaller details. It's both something to give me a way to stay on track with reading it while also sharing thoughts and providing a discussion on the good and bad sides of Original Characters. Plus, it's a chance to tackle some of the issues of the KP setting since Slyrr goes after some of those as well or uses them. For the unaware, All Things Probable began as a small fic: the author wanted to play with the angle of ‘What if Team Possible faced a mirror of themselves?’ and it was more or less a self contained story. However it soon grew and became one of the more well known fics of the fandom, in part due to Slyrr’s talent as an artist which created art to accompany it and the fact that he took great pains to make them feel like actual KP episodes. He began to try to do more than just play with the idea, but to try and fill in some of the gaps in the canon that the series never resolved, and Team Probable provided a vehicle to do so. So far this series of fanfics consists of the following stories: All Things Probable - The initial story that started it all. The Return of Zorpox - After the events of the first story, Team Probable wants payback. Back to Kwitcherbeliakin - The point where Team Probable stops being just antagonists and Slyrr tries his hand at a story without the canon characters as a significant presence. A Friend in Darkness - the magnum opus of the series and a door stopper which really solidified the fanfic’s own lore as meshed into the KP setting. A Little K/R Fluff - Not technically part of it, but a small warm and fuzzy fic involving Kim and Ron. Graduation - Currently in progress and the intended finale, but it takes Slyrr’s efforts of filling in gaps of canon to it’s logical conclusion: what about the rest of the alien invasion? Now while I have already read these stories through, I did it in split up sittings to pass time during waits between events at Disney World for a competition and travelling to and from. In fact having reread some of the stories with more time to mull over, I found myself noticing things that I had missed. While this means that I know it, I will do my best not to discuss things coming later so that those reading this threat may experience it themselves, as well as having a chance to really stop and digest a lot of what the story is saying. As I learned with a let’s read of The Clone Wars: No Prisoners, you miss things often in the first readings or when you go through it at a high pace. When I did the Let's Read on the other sites, I included an overview of the KP series. It's not needed here, but I'll include it in case anyone's curious and doesn't want to hunt down the other forums. Although Slyrr has created his own cast as mirrors to them, they feature heavily in his fics and in some ways the first two stories are more about Kim than they are Team Probable. Early on Slyrr designed them more as antagonist OCs - they’re the villains, basically. It’s only later that they start to really become more than that and become peers. And reading this is perhaps why Slyrr’s fics are such a good case study of the great things you can do with Original Characters that you can’t accomplish with the canon ones alone, yet also some of the dangers. Introducing Slyrr's OCs is better done in the stories themselves, but to summarize them quickly: (Side note: this also applies to squadmate selection in the first Mass Effect game.) Grimm Probable is the only human male in the group, and he was designed to be Kim’s counterpart. Like Kim he leads the group and he’s a skilled fighter with kung fu, though he only knows one specific style - Monkey Kung Fu - and has neglected study in others in favor of achieving mastery. Unlike Kim he has more of a direct arc and has one alongside her in A Friend in Darkness. Rhonda Fatigable is the blonde girl and is Ron’s counterpart. Like him she’s initially more of a distraction and brings the team pet in her pocket. However like Ron she was competent in her own way and had the regimented training thanks to Grimm that Ron didn’t quite get. In some ways she gets her counterparts to Ron’s arcs compressed together into one, providing an alternative to how Ron might have gone, but that’s something to get into later and her focus doesn’t start until Back to Kwitcherbeliakin. Her pet is Rueful, a weasel and the only member of Team Probable who wasn’t gender flipped. Jade Omo-sa, visible on the robot’s screen, is the team’s hacker (particularly focused on wiping camera footage of the team’s activities), gadgeteer, and also handles the enormous amounts of money the team gets from their jobs. Like Wade she’s prone to staying in her room, but she does get out as well. There is a lot of detail that goes into them, and I could provide more of a summary here, but I think instead it would be best to go into the fics and explore them as they grew. And the first fic to do that? Where else to start than the start of the fics themselves? First uploaded on November 22nd, 2006, this took place before Season Four premiered but fortunately was written to be generic enough that the only thing you need is 'After So the Drama', which admittedly probably pushed it much further forward than Slyrr originally had in mind given the events of the fourth season, but I can't fault him for that anymore than I can Timothy Zahn for the picture he painted of the Clone Wars in the Thrawn Trilogy (esp. since he had notes given by Lucas that were eventually scrapped) I'll be posting some of the images as well, though I'll warn that I wrote my Let's Read more for the home forum (Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity) than a dedicated Kim Possible forum. I'll try to do some modification to be more appropriate to this one (though really given how long it's been since the series is on Disney it couldn't hurt to go over most of what I discuss), and on SB/SV I am trying to have the Let's Read be relatively spoiler free. Here I'm a little less worried about it, but I'll still try to stick to that. Links: Slyrr’s Fanfiction.net Page: Slyrr | FanFictionSlyrr’s DeviantART Profile: Slyrr on DeviantArtSlyrr’s Fanfiction Homepage: Kim Possible Fanfictions
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 19, 2016 18:52:44 GMT -5
Let’s start. Chapter 1: Waxing Poetic(Click the spoiler tags to open; chapters hidden within them for length) Ah Team Go. Always a classic group to use as an 'elsewhere' in KP. Now, Slyrr has his own grammar format, but I’m not going to hit it too much since for the most part it’s clear and it’s really a style choice. Plus, how many fanfic writers actually have editors to catch every little misspelling, especially on our first fics? I do disagree with how he identifies the Wego twins, but given their role that’s enough. I’d probably try to avoid having to specify which one; IE say one of the twins says something and then have the other answer, but it’s not really a big deal and it’s really a nitpick at this point. Ah, this freak. The “Dark Master of the Winged World” as Hego put it... Oh, and he shares a voice actor with Invader Zim. But he’s just as hammy as Hego or any old school supervillain, which fits the area pretty well... ‘Go Team Go’ was also the name of the episode these guys all first appeared in… well at least it wasn’t Go-Operation (AKA Teamwork… yeah even Ron found that stupid). Man, Go City is straight out of old school Marvel and DC. Though I have to ask what happened to his actual condor… So, someone just outsmarted Hego and his brothers. Not hard, admittedly (they themselves admit that the main reason they used to be so effective was having Shego to keep them on task), but still this isn’t something that any goons can pull off. Henchmen are even dumber than Hego is at his worst (like here). I probably don’t have to say who it is that did it, but it does give a taste of someone being quite good at it. The specification of the payment to contract despite their client trying to avoid paying them does give a clue to their method of operation. Anyways, we’ve had our teaser, now we should probably move on to our heroes… Ah, Ron Stoppable. To be fair I’ve had similar snark about history in my classes - I was usually just quiet about it. Though for those who don’t know, Nacos were something Ron in-series invented back in Season One. Basically take nachos, dump them into a taco, you’ve got it. Apparently it was very popular at Bueno Nacho… Like most Kim Possible episodes, Slyrr included a school subplot for All Things Probable. Generally the series format would have some plot on the home front that had similarities to her missions. Whether it’s dealing with someone who’s can’t believe she can pull something off while doing the same to Bonnie, somehow related to her getting shafted with the janitor for a career mentor, or a certain pillsbury blueboy using the prototype of Frozen’s big twist, the series usually tried to mix the two even though nominally they were separate plots. In this case, a progression of duality and a poem to do as we jump to the next scene. Ron, you’re probably still getting royalties from Bueno Nacho for the naco. Even if that was one that had built up from multiple iterations of royalty payments that weren’t collected, you got 99 million out of it… Mind you were also terribly irresponsible with it and walked around with it in your pants... Slyrr missed something in the recording. Hego and Aviarius’ exchange: “I think this bird is ready for his cage.” “Must you say that every time you capture me?” Not that it’s important, but still… This is generally Kim’s formula for new missions: talk to Wade (via her Kimmunicator - yeah it’s a pun name - or via the locker), talk to any other related contacts (in this case Hego), and then get the details. After which Kim either starts heading out, or Wade goes for more details and it goes to other plots for the moment. Anyways, next scene and last one for this chapter... Drakken’s had money problems before - Ron’s 99 million? Drakken was having money problems around that time. Ron ended up solving them… and Drakken proceeded to waste it. Also time wise this is approximately after Mad Dogs and Aliens since the fic can’t fit into canon before since Drakken was in jail between StD and then, and well, Drakken’s lair was a ruined mess when we saw it in MDaA. Ironically Drakken usually doesn’t have money problems in most of the series - while referred to as being cheap, he’s still able to retain henchmen (sometimes of decent quality like in Crush or Mind Games, other times terrible as seen in Ron the Man) and he manages to keep Shego on payroll when you’ve got guys like Senor Senior Sr. (aka one of the top five richest men in the world) or Gemini (whose got Not!HYDRA at his command) around. Remember what I said about Frozen’s twist? That’s Eric in a nutshell: the proto version of Hans. Eric, AKA Synthodrone #901, was probably Drakken at his most dangerous - including the time he slapped a mind control chip on Kim’s forehead and sicced her on Ron with it, his attempt to melt Wisconsin in magma, and the fact that he was happily self destructing his own time share lair to blow up Team Possible. Basically, Eric was a purpose built robot to hit all of Kim’s buttons and did so effectively - making her swoon quickly and managing to start dating her within days of arriving at Middleton High. Ironically, Eric was very much like Ron, just with more confidence. And while he didn’t play the role perfectly - he couldn’t break up Kim’s trust in Ron so when he came to warn Kim about Lil Diablo she still heard him out despite everyone thinking Ron was crazy. Synthodrones are something that was introduced in So the Drama as replacements for Drakken’s henchmen for combat purposes - he still used his normal ones in technician roles but for the movie synthodrones replaced them. The way the characters act imply that Drakken had used them before, but StD was the only time that they were employed in canon. Synthodrones were fairly tough against blunt impact, but were no more effective than henchmen and had a glaring problem: if they get a hole in them (such as say, a naked mole rat biting into the leg), they spill out their insides (‘synthogoo’) and melt into an inoperable state. Still, they are a good tool for fanfic authors who want to allow Kim or Ron to not need to worry about killing dudes... And that’s the end of the chapter. Shego learned from Senor Senior Junior - when she needed a target to test him on what she’s trained him in, he just searched “incredibly valuable” and “heavily guarded”... This is our intro to Team Probable’s website. The pitch is longer than Kim’s, but it is a pretty typical one. Blog now and we’ll throw in this Doomsday Decimator for free! Okay no, they don’t do that, but that’s the style it’s modeled after. And it also establishes the intended clientele - villains. I mean even if they got a few other odd jobs from it, that’s probably a limited line… As for Global Justice; in the series they’re not really much of a presence. They’re not!SHIELD or memetic XCOM without the casualties (it is Disney), and they’re usually background in the series at best. I generally figure they're Kim's eventual career path. It just syncs up well, and even if it means she's in a chain of command, well... that's growing up. Anyways, as a first chapter it’s pretty solid as an intro: gives us a view of the key part with poor Team Go’s defeat, shows what Kim and Ron are up to, and gives us the link to bring in Team Probable for the inevitable showdown. However we still don’t know much about them other than Grimm’s initials, the website, and the fact that they’re willing to nick their pay from their clients if they don’t follow through with paying.
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 19, 2016 18:55:18 GMT -5
All Things Probable - Chapter 2 - A Gin and a Snare A rather quick chapter with only two scenes, but they’re slightly beefier than the previous ones. I think I’m doing more commentary as it relates to the KP canon than the story itself so far, but that’s not a bad thing: get it out of the way now, right? Ah, the Naked Mole Rap. Essentially it took Rufus’ theme and made it a full blown song which acts as Rufus’ backstory as well. In universe it was Ron’s idea for American Starmaker (a lawyer-friendly version of American Idol) when Kim needed to stop Drakken from trying to use that to get his brainwashing shampoo to sell. Kim got entangled elsewhere, so Ron ended up doing it. The song had existed out of universe for quite a while prior, being used in the DVDs The Secret Files over the credits and a music video was attached to the DVD for A Sitch in Time. Ron’s actually good at improvisation, which is a consistent part of his distractions and he actually also penned Say the Word in universe, though that one was sung by Kim. Heh. Well, one thing that always dogged the series was the slang terms. You could tell that the writers hadn’t experienced much of what actual teens in 2002 said. Ironically a lot of these in the above scene were used by Drakken trying to do just that where he got a book in The Golden Years, and it does occasionally crop back up. Personally I’d say that the way Kim acted in this scene seems rather odd, feels more like Ron in Kim’s body again than her. Though it does show one effect of Kim’s missions that’s somewhat silent. Specifically, Bonnie. Despite most of what we see of her being a grade A cheerleader stereotype down to the witchiness, she still remains popular with most of the student body and has hangers-on as we saw above. One theory is that while Kim is respected by her peers, she just can’t forge many tight friendships simply because she is bouncing across the world all the time whereas Bonnie has plenty of time to practice being a Mean Girl. If Kim achieves stuff by pure charisma and renown, Bonnie plays a book of manipulation and head gaming to counter Kim. Thanks to this Bonnie is more than enough to give Kim trouble on the social front. It’s worth noting that she does this well aware of how much of a fighter Kim is, though she does it knowing that Kim also has some pretty serious self control and isn’t going to snap easily. Of course the one time Kim actually was serious enough that it looked like Kim was about to start unleashing that arsenal of kung fu, Bonnie broke down crying at the risk... As mentioned before, Kim is still a teenage girl despite being a veteran of numerous life-and-death scenarios that almost saw her blended, a pile of ash, a stain on the ground, or worse. And yes it does affect her social life even if she managed to remain an A grade student. There were several continuity errors in the names, though once pointed out Slyrr fixed them for the story. He's usually a lot more on the ball about it. IE, Celebrity Search -> American Starmaker or Banana Republic instead of Club Banana. As to the others - Teen Scene is a magazine that lurks but isn’t really focused on (in fact it’s main mention is Shego looking at the stuff Drakken has been researching in So the Drama), and Agony County is a soap opera with a stereotypical bad boy as a protagonist that’s occasionally mentioned. Supposedly the characters in that one dating would end the series…*glances at StD* Kim being called in as extra security - that’s actually relatively common in the series. While in most cases she’s called in after the break in or while it’s in progress, a few times she’s called in before hand. Usually it’s when there’s a pretty solid confirmation something’s going to happen. Kim’s ability to pull it off is probably heavily related to the series’ extremely rapid travel. Tokyo on a school night and back in time fast. Speaking of which, next scene… Actually Kim’s the only one who says it persistently - most others using it are doing it in something related to her (IE, her twin brothers managing to snare her while she’s under mind control). Along with ‘so not the drama’ and ‘what’s the sitch’, ‘no big’ is her equivalent of ‘I should go’. Despite the stuff she pulls, she tends to brush it off when people are fawning over it. Kim's rides are always something I liked; they hinted that what we see was just a taste of the full universe. Showed that what happened on screen wasn't the only events of the universe. Plus they're often genuinely hilarious and show how connected she is in the world. Even to the point of knowing Area 51's commanding officer and knowing it's broad secrets. Yes, Kim can be mean to Ron at times. Kim generally tends to parachute down when she takes an air ride - she does land sometimes but usually it’s a parachute drop. Whether it’s to land on a cheese covered building, meet a reclusive inventor of a super genius creating machine, get a perfect shot into the mall’s vents, or just coming home after a nighttime adventure in Japan, Kim tends to paradrop. It’s never explained why. I like this guy. He’s genre savvy enough to not take chances. Puts him above the guys developing battle armor that fits in a bracelet, self regenerates, and has quite an arsenal to boot. That got stolen by a mad (angry) Scottish golfer, and when Kim recovered it before it was sold on the black market the lab had closed for the weekend! And Kim only logged onto the Cuddle Buddies website because they’re a good investment. [/Sarcasm] Of course, Wade has hacked into Kim’s diary before and one of the old browser ‘games’ on the Disney Channel website had Wade handing the player the password for Kim’s diary, so… I dunno Ron, considering how many goons were guarding Doctor Cyrus Bortle’s facility and how easily Shego tore through the place like it’s wet tissue paper, I wouldn’t be so certain. Or all the lairs you guys have torn your way through... Of course there’s also the question of what weapons they’re developing. Hmmm, German scientist? Let’s see so far in the KP series we had seen weather control, plenty of (sometimes tower mounted) lasers, and time travel in a set of episodes… what’re we missing, tanks that look like trees? Anyways, a very brief chapter that sets up the sitch for Possible versus Probable and is mostly focused on the school plot. Honestly my main quibble was the slang thing in this chapter but otherwise it does nicely address that Kim is somewhat out of touch with her peers simply because of all the stuff she’s doing. Not terribly out of touch, just a bit desynced. Mind personally speaking I would have merged it with the chapter before. Next chapter though the two teams meet face to face and the length increases. Prepare your calcs!
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 19, 2016 18:58:19 GMT -5
Chapter 3 - Grimm Probable Welp, this is what we’ve been waiting for. Team Possible meets Team Probable and we’re properly introduced to the latter. Let’s see how their intro stacks them up. Same entrance as Team Possible, huh? Except they did it onto the building rather than just somewhere in the area. As for the KO gas it’s a tool that’s seen quite a few times. Primarily it’s used in Crush by Ron to knock out a bunch of henchmen (then Shego got a noseful as well), and in So the Drama to take care of a sumo ninja. Mind this stuff is rather quick - the stuff usually takes a few seconds before it kicks in during the series. And so we meet the man at last. Interesting that he’s compared to Josh Mankey - Kim’s first love interest in the first two seasons - I missed that the first time, but now that I actually picked up on it… yeah, there is a few faint resemblances but it’s probably only going to be notable if they’re shadowed. Of course, Grimm still looks a lot like Kim. Though his crack about Kim thinking it’d be cooler to jump him without the backup does ask the question of how Kim and Ron didn’t get gassed. Or if they even could have done anything - the gas attack is described as being extremely quick. Now of course, we need the reactions… Fake karate noises? Yeah, that’s Ron’s counterpart with no Y chromosome alright… Mind I’m not sure why Rhonda was waiting in the shadows. I could go on about Ron’s phobias with Camp Wannaweep, but I think that’s a discussion best done later when it’s directly described and not just something Rhonda shares with Ron. As for the rip off… well technically Grimm, Kim was there first. Of course Team Probable is basically ripping off the Team Possible characters with the gender flip, but then again that’s the point of this fic. At least Slyrr lampshaded it though. Yeah, the Teen Scene is definitely a Ron-like moment… Though Grimm certainly is bristling with confidence, and with how he blocked Kim’s opening strikes he probably has a reason to have some bravado. So far they’re not exactly anything special, but then again we’ve only just met them in the open. Let’s see how they dance. I think at this point I should discuss Ron, and by extension Rhonda’s, fighting or lack thereof. In the series Ron is usually presented as not being a fighter - he’s usually focused more on running away from the bad guys while Kim generally attacks. That’s not to say Ron never got physical, but generally he was much more… irregular about it. He always was shown to have some basic fighting skills, whether it was trying a flying kick against the cockpit of Drakken’s giant robot warrior in Crush to brawling with Gill in both Wannaweep episodes to even joining professional wrestlers Pain King and Steel Toe against Jackie the Jackal. Generally Ron’s skills grew as the series went on to the point where he was able to handle himself fairly well against monkey ninjas when Kim wasn’t around, though even then he more just held them back than outright won. This generally persists in the tie-in games if Ron is even playable: he’s almost always restricted to basic attacks whereas Kim usually gets a variety of special moves on top of the basics Ron has. To make up for it Ron either got MMP or combat-usable gadgets. That said slap fighting is something Ron has done - whether it was his fight with Drakken in Crush to Monkey Fist in Gorilla Fist - but as most foes go he usually wouldn’t want to try that simply because they’ll tear that apart (in fact Monkey Fist being involved in one is rather notable given the fact that old hairy feet is usually one of the more martial villains…) As to Rhonda’s “he’s not by boyfriend” - it’s worth noting that they didn’t consider each other dating. They went to school functions as friends, not love interests. That said towards the later seasons people did start to make snark like that and Ron did have one out-of-nowhere “she’s not my girlfriend” during the events of Overdue. You know, Grimm’s actually right there… mind Kim probably could’ve retorted with something along the lines of “I’m not losing that badly yet”, but in the spur of the moment I really can’t fault her for not having a rebuttal at the spur of the moment. Quoting Drakken now are we? Anyways, so far Kim… hasn’t been able to hit Grimm at all. Generally her opponents do keep her back to some degree but usually there’s at least one or two hits each way. Though it’s worth noting that Grimm hasn’t attacked Kim back yet, but so far… well, Grimm’s clearly a master of the defense and that’s definitely something that works, but all defense usually can’t do anything unless you can turn it into some kind of offense. Though of course if Kim’s an amatuer, that begs the question of where Grimm was trained to be able to non-hypocritically fling that accusation around… assuming it isn’t hypocrisy. Well, the sidekick’s aren’t resolving anything, but then again who was expecting that here? Still, Grimm’s mouth so far is on the edge. On one hand he is doing very well in keeping Kim back, but as the Welsh proverb goes it’s easy to be brave behind a castle wall. Or in this case, a timer. Now that’s a bold claim considering Kim’s resume of beaten villains - some of whom are specialists in that very same style *cough*MonkeyFist*cough*. That said she did have a very hard time fighting him during Monkey Fist Strikes, which was probably her first real encounter with a Monkey Kung Fu specialist and they both got in a few hits during that. Still now that she knows what she’s up against, maybe she’ll do a bit better. As for Grimm’s insults - honestly as a reader I do find them rather grating at this point since he hasn’t even beaten Kim yet. All he’s done is survive and make jibes. Survived very well, but still… unless insults is supposed to be his shtick? But so far we haven’t seen much to indicate if he’s just running off his mouth or if there’s some calculation behind it. … Okay I can’t really fault Grimm’s equal treatment rebuttal - that’s my line of thought too and he delivered it pretty well for a villain. That said, the flurry of blows described was probably slower than it was in StD since Kim’s not augmented with the Battle Suit this time. Still a rather impressive defensive feat, especially backed by Grimm’s counter. That said so far Grimm has been completely owning this battle. Usually we see that Kim has at least gotten a few hits back in - see her numerous fights with Shego who is absolutely a peer opponent of Kim’s. But so far Grimm has avoided all Kim has flung his way and his one hit back connected perfectly. I’m not quite sure exactly how we’re supposed to read Kim’s “so you’ve got no problem hitting girls” - the ‘darkly’ to me indicates that Kim’s being snarky considering that this is the only time, counting the canon and this fanfiction, that Kim’s gender even comes up in relation to her ability to fight. Her many male opponents certainly try to kill her often enough to no comment! More perfect counters from Grimm - and with a knife now? I don’t remember that from my first readthrough... well Kim has her own sharp pointy objects (such as pins capable of penetrating and triggering jetpacks on the backs of henchmen), but it’s still rather forward. Mind that does give a clue to Grimm’s background too. Rather fitting, considering that the origin of the Boy Scouts was from England when young boys really took to Lieutenant General Robert Baden-Powell’s writings and spread from there as a way to ready boys (and later girls) for keeping colonies in check… nicely contrasts from Kim’s far more civilian upbringing, but if the Boy Scouts produced commandos who can handle Kim (and by extension her enemies) I wanna know why Will Du wasn’t able to hold his own against a rogue scottish golfer… And now we get the tech support going at it. This oughta be interesting… Though funnily enough, Jade is the portmanteau for the Joss/Wade ship... You know things are bad when Wade pops a spike given this is after the team fought Team Impossible and his own system got spiked by them. He knows the pain. Then again, love ray… Still it’s interesting that Wade got Jade’s IP address given later set up, then again both were linked together into the security systems of the timer so that was probably the link. Not surprised Jade found Wade, given that Drakken has jammed Wade’s signal in the past (and, if you take the tie-in games as canon, outright kidnapped him once). Then again this was before Team Probable’s full mythology was fleshed out… Okay, so, I guess the score is Probable 1, Possible 0, Ties 2, and the last point as well as the ties heavily in Probable’s favor... I don’t think it was ever specified if it was just a mutual spike or if she had done something else. Then again given the JPEG, it probably wasn’t a spike… Welp, I guess it’s down to the squad leaders. Kick his ass Kim! Well, you can at least try to stop him from getting away with the goods since he’ll have to release you to grab them, right? Right? Wait, weren't they here for... Oh hey, more insult to injury. Though at least at this point Grimm has a good reason to be smug considering he took on Kim Possible and won with nary a scratch. Mind when he updated he had Grimm at least winded from the fight when he explained he didn't want it. Of course, Shego has beaten Kim before in combat and even after she made it extremely personal post StD she didn’t stop to gloat like that when she got away… the closest was doing a one-liner before trying to vaporize them with a doomsday laser or snarking while tying them to a lightning rod at Drakken’s orders. … so yeah. The first fight. Well… where to start? I guess the best place is the lack of bruises on Grimm and the fact that he didn’t just play the timer until it ran out but he actually beat Kim. To his credit, Slyrr is well aware that a lot of readers feel frustrated that Kim doesn’t beat Grimm since he, especially this early, isn’t supposed to be much more than any other villain other than his similarities to Kim. However before you start to think that this will be a “how dare an OC beat a canon character!”, let me immediately establish something: the series never portrayed Kim as unbeatable. While she always won the episode (or in the case of multi-parters the full story), she often lost along the way, including being captured by henchmen (albeit usually with Shego there as extra muscle or by zerg rushing her off screen in terrain unsuitable for her acrobatics). In fact in the very first episode Drakken escaped with a whole toy factory without even having Kim pinned down yet. The problem of course is that here, Grimm had Kim fully pinned and at his mercy - mercy enough that if he wanted to he could have put that second knife into the nape of Kim’s neck if he wanted and left her to die. While Kim has been beaten before even at the team’s biggest losses such as in A Sitch in Time, they always at least got some licks back. So when Killigan and Monkey Fist tag teamed in the museum, Kim had them fairly solidly beat until Shego managed to sneak an attack in that locked her in a sarcophagus she couldn’t open from the inside. And when the villains got away with the Tempus Simia, they still took a couple bruises on the way. That I think is what’s missing here - the hits back to show that Kim is not entirely outclassed and that she’s able to overcome Grimm. There’s curbstomps, absolutely, and often they’re painful to watch or read, especially when it’s the protagonists we’re rooting for on the receiving end. But even in the baddest beatdowns in fiction, there were hits back. When the Empire assaulted Hoth the Rebels got badly hurt, but they still took out several walkers on the way. Sure in the end the Imperial losses were really pennies compared to what they did to the Alliance, but it still at least showed that the losing side had a chance. Otherwise how are we supposed to believe that the losers could come back and win? I think Slyrr handled Ron and Rufus vs Rhonda and Rueful as well as Wade vs Jade just fine: Mutually Assured Destruction/Neutralization as mirror matches of each other and not having any time to prep counters. In fact if anything Rhonda and Jade had prep time and they still got gutted in the return fire which, at least for Wade, shows that he lives up to his boasts. And I can’t fault the fact that it favored Team Probable even if it was MAD, since their mission was just to buy time. The problem is that Grimm is well, really superior to Kim at this point. Mirror matches should be bloody like that - the whole point of them is you’re fighting someone who should be your absolute equal, and then have to figure out how your style breaks. That said giving Grimm his own style (admittedly just the style that Ron’s eventual powers are based on) does at least do something important: it sets up Grimm as more than just Kim with a Y chromosome and being on the other side of the law. And if you want to make your mirrors more than just that, that’s critical. You have to give them some key points that they’re different so that their similarities emphasize those. Still, it’s concerning how little Kim managed to do in retaliation considering that she has gotten some rather good hits in on Monkey Fist in canon and he uses the same style as Grimm, even if MF is a foe that Kim usually doesn’t defeat outright. And really that’s my only big complaint about this chapter. I don’t mind Kim losing. I mind Kim being curbstomped and rendered impotent in something that’s not exactly out of context for her besides the specific foe, and not having any clear signs of being able to win. Like if they had just fought to a standstill and the timer ran out, I think it would have been much better. Leaves it in the air who is actually better for the next two chapters to ask while still giving Grimm a very good introduction. We’ve still got two more chapters and both of them are at least as beefy as this one, so I wouldn’t write this off yet. Let’s see how Slyrr takes it forward in the rest of the story because sometimes a curbstomp is a good way to force characters to look at themselves and ask ‘what went wrong’.
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 19, 2016 19:01:51 GMT -5
Chapter 4 - Enemy Mine Well, Kim’s got a new set of bruises to both her body and her ego. Let’s see how she handles it…
Well they certainly had things go well for them. It’s worth noting that Drakken, while Kim’s most well known arch nemesis, is actually rather unfairly given a reputation of an ineffective and laughable villain considering that most of the villains who mocked him never got anywhere near as close as Drakken has to taking over the world. When he wants to be, Drakken is actually a very intimidating villain. Check out episodes like Bueno Nacho where he would’ve left Kim and Ron to be melted by magma (no elaborate death trap there), Mind Games where he made Shego desperately start flirting when he was angry at her over losing his body, and Hidden Talent where he knocks out Wade’s communications and slips into his place to make Kim do his dirty work against Dementor and then actually had a pretty damn good death trap built. And of course, So the Drama, where he brought his A+ game and did what no other villain had done before or done since: broke Kim’s will to fight. Sure, he lost in the end, but that’s a hell of a lot more than Professor Dementor or Monkey Fist can say. They might’ve nearly killed Kim, but they’ve never had her ready to give up. Of course as the series went on Drakken became more and more of a joke to the point where in Season Three his evilness is labelled as only being equivalent to a playground bully (Shego instantly maxed it out). Part of it is because he became the go-to villain rather than the original plan of a rotating villain cast, so overexposure lessened how much of a threat he is. Second is he did become a lot more whimsical - though he always had it to some degree, IE in Bueno Nacho with trying to get Kim to say ‘Drakkenville’ which he planned to rename Wisconsin after he melted it in magma. Still, Drakken probably would’ve taken over the world a few times over if he didn’t have the daughter of a guy he went to college with getting in his way...
If Grimm knows anything about Drakken he’ll know that he’s probably not going to get the fee he wanted. I mean this is the guy who outright stole from Jack Hench because he felt the man’s prices were insane. Now we’ve never seen how many Euros that Professor Dementor has been dumping into HenchCo to get his henchmen, but still… So yeah, ‘big risk’ is an understatement Grimm. While the episode came after this fic, Jack Hench did sum it up very well:
HenchCo is another matter, but basically they’re the arms dealer for just about every villain in henchmen as well as other products. And they’re apparently legal somehow given their rather extensive corporate facilities and Kim wasn’t even aware of him until he called her in to deal with the aforementioned theft that Drakken had Shego pull. Worth noting that Kim only helped him to keep the strength enhancers out of Drakken’s hands and she made it abundantly clear how much of a slimeball she thinks he is.
To be fair Shego, you’re a professional who doesn’t try to take pics of Kim when she’s covered in the batter you’re trying to blend her in. So Drakken usually doesn’t get to see the look on her face when she sees the giant beaters you’re trying to shred her with being lowered. I bet if you had a goon taking pics or scrapbooking the incident he’d be more happy. Given this was written before S4 we hadn’t seen how vicious Shego gets about remaining Drakken’s sidekick, but still she usually doesn’t take being replaced very well. No Cloning, after all...
So, the only reason Kim didn’t get a boy scout knife into the back of her neck was because Drakken didn’t hire Grimm to specifically finish her off? Admittedly this is Grimm all business mode to negotiate with Drakken, but still, it does bring back my problems with Kim being outright defeated rather than Grimm just playing out the timer. And it raises the question of just where Grimm draws a line, if he draws a line.
Welp, looks like there will be a round two. Still, the picture this paints of Grimm so far is a ruthless mercenary who plays to the contract strictly but otherwise is happy to work with it as long as he gets paid, and paid a lot. Then again given how many times Drakken has been foiled or chucked into jail, rebuilding seems to be something he’s gotten down pretty well. But then again if I had a guy who could take care of Kim fricken’ Possible I’d make sure to pay him to keep her down. And have a plan to neutralize him just in case he becomes a threat later, but if he isn’t well he can enjoy the cash and probably a few more jobs (maintaining an evil order is hard work afterall…) Anyways, now we need to see how Kim’s taking this defeat…
So yeah, not taking it very well… then again she didn’t even get a token lick in on him whereas usually she at least rescued the two factory workers or got a few good hits in on Shego before the bad guys got away. Now Kim usually doesn’t take losing well, but usually it’s just a sad look on her face and being bummed the next day. She never flat out started crying - the closest being StD and that was after finding out she had wanted to kiss a synthodrone, and the events of A Sitch in Time when the villains flat out escaped with the Tempus Simia, but she was just choking up not actually crying like this and she’s had at least as much time to process it in the second example. Grimm’s jibes ringing in her ears certainly is something that makes sense to get under her skin - here’s this gender bender lookalike punk she’s never even heard of (and considering she’s had four or five years of global experience at this point that usually means ‘new bad guy’) and he just wiped the floor with her while calling her an amatuer. There’s only two groups who have in show made comments about Kim being an amatuer in canon: Will Du, GJ’s top agent, and Team Impossible, a mercenary squad. Will Du she pretty clearly showed that she was more competent than him (causing a lot of the fandom cliche that GJ is useless). Team Impossible likewise considered her an amatuer, but an amatuer who cut into their profit margins. Interestingly enough they also cut Kim off from her support network and showed her up because she couldn’t even get to the mission locations in time because of Team Impossible’s sabotage. But when it came down to a fight between the two, Kim mopped the floor with them so badly only one member was still standing and he had also been on the ropes with Kim (who wasn’t even breaking a sweat) and the only reason the fight didn’t go to the finish was Wade showing up in person and locking them in their own McHenry Laser Grid (enabling Kim to prove she was better by repeating her first mission to save their asses). Grimm, OTOH, managed to beat her and actually have a point behind them. While Team Impossible and Will Du were just annoying about it but Kim knew she still had it, Grimm seems to have a genuine point behind it given the asskicking he had handed her. So yeah, I can perfectly see Kim taking it extremely personally and throwing herself into training to try and figure out what happened. As a side note, Kim usually never wears karate gi or anything like that, in part because we never see her training for combat. Usually it’s cheerleading. The closest to combat training we see her participating in is during The Golden Years sparring with her grandmother, and that was with casual clothes.
I’m not sure how I feel about this bit: on one hand Ron has had points where he’s pretty beat. On the other hand he brushes off a lot of abuse and keeps coming back for more. Given his more laid back attitude towards a lot of things I can see him having an easier time handling not beating Rhonda, but at the same time his fight was at least even, not being casually batted aside and then battered back as Kim had been. Now Ron does have a lot less to prove - he’s not held up to some high standard (often) and is okay with it. Kim is driven to excel, a perfectionist. So honestly I think Kim is just misinterpreting it - it’s not that Ron doesn’t get overwhelmed by hopelessness at times, it’s more he doesn’t hold himself to such a high standard that he can afford the odd failure and dust off for the next round. Kim drives herself hard, so her failures hit her that much harder.
So their location is hidden, but not their identification. Makes sense: you don’t want the government to track you down that easily and deploy a SWAT squad on you while you’re sleeping. Though considering Kamp Kwitcherbeliakin isn’t on the net (even some random forum witching about it) I really gotta wonder about… well, we’ll get there when we actually see the place.
Not too surprising. Usually they have a bit more when it’s time to start cracking Drakken’s plots. What made So the Drama unusual was that despite having more than a couple of the pieces Drakken was looking for known they couldn’t link them together. In this case they don’t even know what Drakken was after specifically and cash is such a universal resource it can be anything from making a Legion of Terror made up of henchmen, robots, mutants, or really anything to building doomsday devices to… well it’s mad science, the sky isn’t even a limit.
Yup, that’s Ron. Pulls Kim back when she’s letting her standards drift too high for what’s reasonable to ask of her, and he’s well aware of how to do it. Given that Ron is explicitly a gamer, that’s not surprising he’s probably had plenty of mirror matches in video games and he knows that in those you do have to figure out how to knock the odds into your favor. Whether it’s equipping a useless skill that hurts them and just not using it yourself to learning the pattern of the battle arena to let the environment do it, there’s all sorts of way to do a mirror match. Anyways, next scene, wrapping up the school plot:
When it’s not doing random funnies like “Procrastinator’s Club Meeting: Delayed”, the board tends to be quite appropriate to the plot at hand and almost seems to be omniscient...
Yup, Kim in a nutshell. She likes saving the world - she’s not one of those “I just want to be normal” types.
Worth noting that B- was what Ron got for the Naked Mole Rap when Barkin gave a similar assignment in Rappin’ Drakken. Still, I have to wonder how badly Barkin skews normal grades since he subs in a lot of classes. If a B- is the best he gives… or is he just talking about the specific project? *shrugs* Well, Barkin is supposed to be the overly harsh teacher.... I will say I did like the mixing of old school and modern - if Slyrr does one thing right, he manages to both convey ancient splendor yet also convey that it’s not just this thing on a pedestal but it’s also got personality beneath it that isn’t as grandiose. It’s not going to be really seen in full force until later, but it is nice to see it early. But it does bring the school plot to a solid conclusion: Bonnie is absolutely wrong. So what if Kim isn’t perfectly in sync with the specific slang of the week? Does that define who she is, or is that just a passing fad? It doesn’t define her. She makes her own path, and that’s in the end what anyone can do: make their own path. Sure, some people look down on her (in spite of saving all their ungrateful asses - looking at you Bon-Bon!) but in the end does it matter if some people think Kim’s a lout because she’s not following all the latest trends perfectly. And really with those kinds of people it won’t matter - when Kim’s mission outfit became the new hot style that everyone was bearing Bonnie told her that Kim couldn’t pull it off. It’s her look and Bonnie has the ovarian fortitude to say that to Kim’s face? You can’t please ‘em, so why change yourself to fit their ever changing whim? (Though speaking of that: unlike Ron’s 99 million from Nacos, Kim’s style was technically ripped by the fashionista Elsa Klieg, so she actually never got any payoff from it despite her name being used to sell it and being explicitly noted as the source...) Of course you shouldn’t totally ignore what others say, but you do need to ask if what they mean is worthwhile or not.
So as we move onto the next scene, is what Grimm says worth Kim considering, or is he just a snarky guy who got far too lucky? Well, next scene to see them moving on from the high school plot...
And thus she hits the downside of taking the defensive: you cede the initiative to your opponent. Just waiting for Grimm’s next move means he gets exclusive prep while you’re flat footed unless you know what’s coming. By taking the offensive, then if nothing else you at least have some prep too even if it’s still to his plan. And again we get to the big thing about facing a mirror of yourself: you ask how do you beat yourself. Mind Grimm’s not a perfect mirror of Kim so she can’t just ask “how would I beat myself?”, but still...
Now that’s cold blooded, but also fits Kim very well. She doesn’t take losing well, and really she can be pretty nasty when you’ve pushed her buttons. And well, it’s the point of a mirror match: “what works best against me?” Once Kim has a method to deal with the bad guys, she goes in full throttle. I will admit I find Slyrr’s use of ‘shipping’ amusing given it’s really a fandom term than one used for IRL… at least usually. Makes sense Kim wouldn’t know it given that she’s generally shown as not being much for the geek circles. Fortunately he drops it heavily later on and it’s only used as a euphemism; least as far as I remember. Overall with this chapter I think he got it right: after the beating Kim took she would take it very hard, but she does also retake the initiative a bit here and isn’t giving up; Grimm’s good, but not that good and I can’t really fault how Team Probable interacts with Drakken given that we actually still don’t know too much about them. They’re mirrors to Kim and Grimm’s got quite a mouth to him as well as Monkey Kung Fu. But we still don’t know them overmuch. Only one more chapter to go for this story: Closet Shippers. So who’s going to win now that our heroes aren’t totally blindsided by their counterparts’ abilities and are going in with a game plan?
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 19, 2016 19:04:56 GMT -5
And so we reach the final chapter of this story: Chapter 5 - Closet Shippers Least he’s not immune to being surprised. Even knowing Kim’s coming with a plan he isn’t playing cocky. Now we just need to see what the full plan is, she wants Grimm alone, but last time they went one to one he had the upper hand… As a side note, the “No on 65” in the pic above was also a sticker on Ron’s mirror in StD - supposedly it’s a nod to the limit of 65 episodes in Disney at the time and taken by some as a hint that they were happy to do more. I can’t really comment definitively either way though. Hmmm. Well we know Kim’s aiming to play emotions, so what, she’s going to sweet talk him? Grimm seems to be open to it enough… Testosterone... Rekt. Good to see Wade doing what he does best while Kim distracted Jade. And really it makes sense - Wade’s reactions to seeing Kim and Ron kiss were either a spit take that knocked him out of his chair or interrupting a kiss between them before Kim went off to fight Drakken in Mad Dogs and Aliens. Now what’re the sidekicks doing… “Jelling” is a term from the episode Gorilla Fist used by Monique (a character who hasn’t appeared in this fic) to describe Kim’s state of mind after Ron is taken onto a secret mission by Yori (more on her later). Welp, I think the plan’s pretty clear and would only work if they knew that they were dealing with mirrors. I also had asked Slyrr about the photo and he told me that it was supposed to be Wade getting a digital composite based on Kim and Ron’s descriptions since they hadn’t been able to get a picture of him elsewhere. It wouldn’t have held up under any serious inspection, but for dealing with a peeved off Rhonda who doesn’t have time to think? More than enough to get her to breathe in a whiff of knockout gas. When he updated the story, he made sure to note it explicitly. Welp, now it’s Kim against Grimm. Let’s see how she stacks up. It’s worth noting that Slyrr explicitly wanted Team Probable to not be the kind of villains who abandon each other - they aren’t trying to get ahead at cost of their friends, they’re in it as a team. Suppose that’s one mirror he could’ve played with, but given most KP villains are happy to abandon henchmen and even each other during a team up, I’d say it gives them a bit more flavor. Overall this is definitely a different pace from normal KP episodes - Kim rarely bothers with sweet talking the bad guys and usually opts to just slug them in the face if they don’t surrender. Most villains don’t try to flirt back either. Then again the majority of them are 20+... though given that Kim Possible in part parodied the spy genre, I think it’s a nice angle that you could only explore with fanfiction because it wouldn’t fly on Disney. Good old subterfuge “romance”. Don’t worry there’s nothing explicit - the fics rated K (equivalent to E for everybody for games), so no creepy scenes of Kim playing with Grimm’s hormones like a vamp. But Kim is very right about wondering if she’d find someone right - that was a big part of So the Drama’s plot: Kim trying to find a guy and not realizing she had Ron all along (admittedly they had the whole ‘just friends’ hurdle’ and the last time they were ‘dating’ it was under the influence of a mood inducing device…). As Kim put it, Plus the whole thing about being off to fight bad guys all the time; her dates with Josh Mankey were usually dogged by Drakken’s schemes (either directly as in Blush, or just making her late as in the second KP Gameboy Advance game). Ah that sweet, sweet moment of realization that you’ve just been played. Watching (well, reading) it happen in the bad guys? I live for that and after what happened in chapter three I really wanted to see Grimm get his karmic comeuppance. Yeah I’d say their estimate of Grimm’s feelings for Rhonda were accurate. And a reaction very befitting a mirror of Team Possible - they might have disagreements but they’re still a team and messing with one of them is usually a quick way to provoke the others to put aside whatever problem they had that day and deal with you. Some friendships you can only forge fighting evil. Better than fighting trolls at least… Grimm’s fighting is a lot worse here, but then again he’s also been caught massively flat footed by being hoodwinked, letting his guard down, and he’s being attacked by two people rather than just Kim. Even if his win last time wasn’t just a fluke (or at least a fluke in how one sided it was), it’s not like he suddenly got less competent since he’s still giving them a struggle and the whole point of the setup was to knock him off his game. [/Fist bump.] And that’s that. Jade’s been shut down, Rhonda and Rueful are passing Z’s from KO gas, and now Grimm’s been shocked into submission. No word on Drakken yet though… A much shorter fight this time around, but I think that given the style of it it makes sense. It was built more on subterfuge - if Grimm didn’t fall for it enough it would've turned into an extended slugging match. In some ways I’m actually disappointed it was this easy - after what Grimm pulled off you’d honestly expect more of a fight. Maybe show how Team Possible had planned ahead by having Rhonda locked up somewhere specific that could allow them to pin Grimm down. But the thrust of it was supposed to be Team Possible playing Team Probable’s heads by using what they knew of themselves to build a battle strategy as they had figured out that Team Probable was very much like them. And really it worked as it needed to - I’d argue it was less effective than Erik was with Kim, but that’s because Erik was a brand new guy and not seen as a threat, this time it’s two individuals who know each other as enemies. Besides, I don’t think we want to see Grimm getting to the point he wants to kiss Kim. Don’t worry man, there’s always synthodrones. Karma is a cheerleader. Though I bet the picture thing was a specific tweak/payback for Safford Base. This is also one of the times where Slyrr flips something across the genders - the way that Grimm had MMP just as Ron did, now Rhonda is having a defiance normally attributed to Kim. As Ron put it when Kim said ‘I got nothin’’ in StD, “That’s my line!”. Nicely contrasts the two though, I think; Kim’s more hot blooded and doesn’t give up, Grimm is more composed and understands when he’s beat. Now Drakken probably could be something to squeeze out another chapter, but really that’s not required for the story: really, Drakken was more of a plot device to pit Team Possible against Team Probable, he wasn’t the real threat here. Besides Kim’s busted the Pillsbury Blueboy hundreds of times, we don’t need it again if Drakken isn’t the big bad. ‘course, when Erik brutally electrocuted Kim and left her dull, when she came around with Ron she had a heart-to-heart with him and Team Probable isn’t being split into isolation… Oh boy. To be fair it was pretty clear given how he had played up the Possible/Probable parallels - this is something that crops up, he redoes some of the lines in canon. Now in fairness he does try to make them at least a bit changed to the situation and more try to keep the thrust of it rather than do it word for word, and he knows very well it’s a finite way to write the story (in fact that’s one reason why he hasn’t done an equivalent of A Sitch in Time for them despite having more than a few ideas). But then again this is the first time he’s done it and as the last chapter it very well have been the only time, so why not? I will say that I disagree with how easily Team Probable got away - I mean, remotely hacking the police wagon? I mean when Wade hacked Drakken’s giant robot in Crush, he at least used pre-existing tools we had seen priorly used against Ron. This time… yeah. It was also something Slyrr updated - Grimm managed to keep a lockpick hidden in his glove rather than Jade just hacking it, but otherwise the same. Anyways, one more scene. Team Possible won that knowing themselves… but did they consider everything in themselves? There’s probably a reason why I’ve never had a date… I’d probably be making snarky remarks about this kind of exchange. Least I’ve never taken a girl to a fancy restaurant with coupons for the kid’s menu as all I can afford and asking said girl to act like a little kid to make it work… yeah I can’t say I forgave the writers for having Ron be that stupid one time… Oh crap. But yes, it was a sequel hook. While Slyrr may or may not have intended to do more with them, he did get a very positive feedback for his fics and he did eventually write more of them. If it was only this one Team Probable wouldn’t have been such a great case study for OCs. And Ron’s right: like it or not, Team Possible just made Team Probable stronger. They strain hardened them and didn’t take them pass the Ultimate Strength, and while it’ll never go back to the way it was before it’s stronger for it. -- So now that we’ve come to an end, how can I sum up the overall story? Honestly? It’s a good read but it’s no The Lotus Bloom. In fact I think this is the only time outside of my readthrough of his whole series that I’ve come back to this. All Things Probable, as in this story, is like Star Wars: Battlefront (... the original one, not DICE’s). Good on it’s own, but ultimately not phenomenal other than what it introduced. Battlefront gave us fighting in the Star Wars universe in full fledged combat beyond what Galactic Battlegrounds or X-Wing could do, All Things Probable gave us Team Probable and the fics that followed. It’s an entryway to the series to give the rest of it the meaningfulness that the follow up stories would have lacked had we not had it or it been Team Probable’s introduction. And it does the job rather well: while it does not develop Team Probable it does introduce them and gives some hints to what makes them more than just mirrors. Grimm has hints of being very analyzing (which, while his insults to Kim were probably from this, was not clear until we had his POV-ish in this chapter) but also is established as a specialist. Rhonda has a different kind of fire than Ron does. Jade… Jade actually doesn’t have too much at this stage, but that was more because of the focus on Grimm. As to the fic itself - neglecting grammar (of which I noticed a number of minor errors, most of which do not detract but a few are glaring like the ‘Club Banana as Banana Republic’), it’s a rather solid stab at the OC Mirrors idea. I think if anything it’s biggest problem is that Grimm is a bit of a pendulum. He either won flawlessly, or he got utterly stomped and only did very token nicks back. Now in the latter case he had fallen hook line and sinker for a trap, but as the last note of the story told us he really came out of it smelling well. I think that while the concept worked, in execution it needed fine tuning and balance. I understand why Slyrr had Kim beaten so badly: Chapter 4 would have made no sense if Kim felt she had a chance against him and it was just another fight with her usual foes, but again I think as readers we needed a few more signs that Kim could win without relying on a one-off when dealing with Grimm. Personally if I wanted to keep Chapter 4 as it was I’d of had Kim get a hit in on Grimm when he tries to take the offense - you know, the token hit back to hint at the hero’s potential victory. Then when Grimm lost, make it clear he got at least one or two good hits in on Team Possible but was just being dogpiled and was thrown off his game. But that’s the main quibble, otherwise it’s a rather good fic. It’s forgettable on it’s own (the ‘good but overlooked’ category), but what it leads into is what makes it one worth reading if you want to read the rest of the series. So, what do you guys think? Feel free to leave commentary as to what you think of my analysis or the fic so far. -- The next fic of the series is The Return of Zorpox. For now, have a preview picture:
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 22, 2016 19:53:00 GMT -5
The Return of Zorpox - Chapter 1 Published on March 23rd, 2007, The Return of Zorpox is the second story in Slyrr’s series of fics. At this point Season Four of Kim Possible was underway having gone through about half of it’s episodes and the change of Kim’s new mission clothes. However time wise this fic takes place prior to that with Kim still using her iconic gear and the Battle Suit, but after a number of S4 episodes. In his FF.net summary, Slyrr describes this story as having Grimm employ the most dangerous weapon against Kim: “The Truth”. Well, I could spoil the story and specify what it is, or delve into the story and see the argument being made. I prefer the latter. So let’s start with the first chapter: There and Back Again(A cheerleader’s tale ) Looks like Dementor was trying to put the NSA and all the other three letter organizations out of a job… Dementor's not too relevant to the story, but here's the commentary I did for other boards for those less familiar with the series. Professor Dementor, voiced by Patton Oswalt, began in-series as something of a joke: an unseen villain to be referred to, usually in context of Drakken being mistaken for him or the fact that he and Drakken share a Timeshare Lair between Kim foiling their schemes. Short, stocky, sporting a German accent, and boasting a Napoleon complex, Dementor is nominally more competent than Drakken and his goons almost certainly are in part thanks to Dementor shelling out the money to get good stuff from HenchCo. Dementor’s appearances are rather infrequent and he was a lesser known villain, making his role all the more memorable with Patton Oswalt’s healthy heapings of ham as he turns on the caps lock as if it is the CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL! However Dementor, like Duff Killigan, was usually a supporting villain. Unlike the mad Scottish golfer however as the series went on he got more and more independent episodes, with Bonding being the first time he was on his own and it was revealed that he was an utter technophile, whereas Drakken is far more broad and treats it as a means to an end. Dementor sees technology as an end unto itself, and his schemes focus on it. He also provided the writers and out of the corner they had written themselves into when Season Four came. Namely, Kim’s Battle Suit. Powerful enough that Shego was barely keeping up while it was powered, the Battle Suit made Kim fairly overpowered and the first episode of Season Four, Ill Suited, basically began as a love letter to how powerful it is. Dementor was also the main antagonist here, and he became obsessed with it after Kim foils his attempted break-in with it. Dementor managed to scan it during a subsequent fight, though he was unable to replicate it. Instead he managed to get a magnetic controller to use against Kim, and (un?)fortunately at the time Ron was wearing it, so Dementor made Ron attack Kim with it as Ron couldn’t control it. As to why Ron had the suit… that’s something for later, but the end result was that Dementor’s tampering allowed them to justify not having the Battle Suit used in every mission and throughout Season Four it had numerous problems. Wade fixed it for Mad Dogs and Aliens, but it was shelved again and the last episode before this fic was published, Clothes Minded, had it’s stealth mode glitching in and out. Dementor got the penultimate episode, Larry’s Birthday, where again he tried to steal the (now mostly functional) Battle Suit. Dementor would also get the last scene of the series, the epilogue at a villain’s cafe with Drakken discussing the events of Graduation over unspecified hot beverages and asking why Drakken had blue skin. All we got was that it was on a Tuesday. Anyways, back to the story... At least this time Ron didn’t blow the henchmen away with a giant laser drill…But yeah, Ron’s antics sometimes hurt Team Possible, but just as often Ron manages to actually do quite a bit of damage to the bad guys as was seen here. This is what Global Justice called the ‘Ron Factor’ and some fans took it too far. Of course said Ron Factor was deemed bunk in the episode, so it’s probably more sheer dumb luck. To modify a Bismarck quote: “God takes care of children, fools, and Ron Stoppable.”(the original is ‘The United States of America’ instead of Ron) ‘course this does show Dementor’s relative competence: Hemming Kim into areas where she can’t maneuver is the best way to deal with her, and spamming shot like that is a good way to do that as long as you do it in patterns since it acts as major area denial. Unfortunately they didn’t think to make sure Ron didn’t come back in Well that escalated quickly. And what about the crews on them? Then again no one said that the risk of death isn’t implied… I mean they talk about destroying Kim often enough… they’re just not good enough to pull it off usually. When Ron’s out of play, Rufus comes out of his pocket as the backup Deus Ex. Though amusingly enough the video games often just cut out Ron entirely and, if they’re feeling up for it, come up with some BS excuse for Ron not being around (such as being on a mission for Global Justice in Norway). Though whenever Ron’s playable, Rufus is always one of his default “gadgets”. Then again Rufus has been playable more times than Ron discounting when Rufus is a ‘gadget’... But yeah, a quick mission to lead us in for Kim. ‘course, Ron’s still hanging, right? You know, I still can't believe that they managed to make a fifteen second montage of Ron losing his pants for Clean Slate, and it wasn’t even a comprehensive display! Though it was something that happened more often in later episodes; earlier on it was a lot more rarer. Anyways, scene change to school: What, were you expecting something explicit? The fic is only rated K on FF.net and the series itself was PG at worst…. “Tweebs”, the slang term Kim uses for them, a portmanteau of ‘Twin Dweebs’. Sums up her opinion of them early on very well since they do stuff like hack into Kim’s diary to post online, tried to embarrass her in a date with Josh Mankey (unfortunately they weren’t alerted to the fact that Kim was presently suffering from one of Drakken’s doomsday devices that would cause her to fade into nothingness as she got more and more embarrassed…), and other shenanigans. Stuff like that is what they do. In their first real focus episode, The Twin Factor, they surprise Kim late at night while she’s got a lot of moisturizer on her face and upload it on the internet to everyone in Middleton. Bonnie and Wade both got an image and talked to Kim about it, much to her annoyance. But the episode did show their technical skills: borrowing the batteries from the Kimmunicator, they were able to miniaturize a mind control breaking Silicon Phase Disruptor which the guy who made said mind control being in disbelief at being able to make it portable. And by Season Four they also became the ones who heavily engineered Kim’s car and are responsible for a lot of it’s tricks like being able to go underwater, turbocharging it, and more. Still, Team Probable is still around…. That gives us a time frame at least. Bit odd that it took weeks to tell Grimm’s parents that they were dating, but maybe they wanted to see if it was something that could last first? This is also the first view of Grimm’s home, but it’s not a very detailed one and details like who his mother is aren’t shared here. Both feature heavily in A Friend in Darkness, however. This is also the beginning of Grimm’s grudge match with Kim, more personal than before. Like Kim, he doesn’t take losing well. Especially losing that badly since Kim didn’t outfight him like he probably expected any loss against her to be, but got into his head rather than the other way around. This persists throughout the whole series of fanfics. So, looks like Grimm’s plan is mind rape Ron onto their side. Welp, now that it’s been introduced and we’re at the end of a scene, I think it’s time to talk about the Attitudinator. Be warned, this is going to be lengthy but given that it's directly tied to the main plot I feel it's relevant to discuss it's history. The device first appeared in the episode Bad Boy, one of the ones from Season Three. By happenstance this was also the first Kim Possible episode that I saw new on the Disney Channel (my parents finally got cable) but it is one that certainly left an impact on the fandom. The basic premise of the episode is that Ron and Drakken were switched - specifically, they got an alignment flip with Drakken losing his evilness and Ron getting it instead. Originally, the Attitudinator was developed by HenchCo to bolster bad guys who were losing their edge from being beaten by heroes all the time. Drakken bought a chance to use it as after Kim foiled his last scheme. Unfortunately, this occurred at the Annual Villain Shindig at the Tri-City Convention Center (the Tri-City being Middleton, Upperton, and Lowerton), and both Kim and Ron were present in disguise. (Sidenote: Kim found out about it because apparently she was on the mailing list… Ron had signed her up for something thinking it’d be a chance for her to win a tank. Like she needs one, but hey free intel is free intel... Their disguises were actually ripped from in-universe comics (short notice, so Wade didn’t have time to make good ones). Kim got a leopard suit as ‘Shelia of the leopard people’, while Ron got the outfit of ‘Zorpox the Conqueror’. Neither of them were impressed and Shego saw right through it. In the resulting battle, one of Shego’s plasma blasts sent Ron tumbling into Drakken and caused quite a bit of damage to the convention, and broke the Attitudinator. Kim salvaged it and the two bolted before every villain in the setting came down on them. The principle function of the Attitudinator as advertised is that it removes both good and evil energies, then inserts only the evil energy. However when the above happened the good stuff went back to Drakken, and Ron got the evil. What happens to the ‘good’ is never specified, though Wade believed that it was supposed to keep it on hand. However, Ron was also in the middle of an (attempted) Bad Boy phase to try and get a date (long story involving a family wedding), and the first signs was Ron genuinely going for actual damage rather than just looking the part… and no longer trying to get a date out of it. Worried, Kim and Wade tracked Ron with a microchip that had been in him since before S1 thanks to Wade, and eventually Ron crashes the wedding with a plasma catapult (cannon really, but who’s counting?). At this time Shego had figured out that Drakken had gone all good and crashes it to get her claws on Ron. However she ditched the now-good Drakken for Ron as she realized he was much better at it. Shego quickly learned that was a bad idea as Ron showed confidence Drakken would rarely show and also a competence to put the fear of him into her. Kim brought Drakken to the lair Wade tracks them to and after repairing the Attitudinator and a fight, Kim distracts Ron long enough for the device to be slapped back on and the process reversed and returned them to normal. The Attitudinator was later used in the episode on Ron’s cousin Shawn, who was a really vile little kid that, among other things, tried to feed Rufus to his pet iguana and Ron’s parents (oblivious as always) just said ‘but Shawnie is littler than you’. This knocked the jerk out of Shawn, and he’s never been seen since and Kim didn’t make much of a comment about it. The Attitudinator is a bit divisive within the fandom because of the morality, or lack thereof, it involves. It takes what could be very closely held beliefs and makes them irrelevant, turning morality into whichever faction color you’re wearing. The specific metaphysics are debated, but the results can’t be argued. Of course, the morality of using it on someone is never discussed in the show since this is some seriously heavy stuff, but then again morality is surprisingly flexible for what is on the surface a simple good against evil show. Fortunately, it also provided a plausible ‘evil Ron’ explanation that didn’t need to destroy his character as bashing and left a very clear redemption arc - just have it be in-universe mind muckery plus evil Ron was extremely popular as a villain. But there is one other thing to note: Zorpox is never used in-show as a way of identifying Ron under the influence. He merely adopted the costume for reasons left unspecified. Still, Zorpox is a name used in the fandom to specify ‘evil Ron’ of that nature and is extremely popular as a villain choice thanks to being one of the most competent villains in the show (almost Spacebattles Competent at getting schemes together), a very personal connection with Kim, and of course his evil laugh which is one of the best in the shows. Anyways, history done, let’s get the rest of this chapter. Generally speaking the Middleton High Cheer Squad’s rivalries are limited to Kim and Bonnie. The others are usually just trying to stay away from it and from appearances get along well. It’s just those two have it out for each other and everyone knows it with Bonnie trying to take top spot from Kim. Bonnie has a few basic points - IE, Kim having ditched more than once to go save the world - but generally the squad seems to prefer Kim or if they don’t like the missions they don’t say much. Bonnie did have a brief character development in the episode Bonding (same one that gave Dementor his own scheme for the first time), but it was more of an understanding the two had and giving Bonnie a Freudian excuse for her witchiness (her two older sisters are worse). Following So the Drama however it rolled back and Bonnie now spent time trying to get Kim to dump Ron and get a more socially acceptable date now that she was a senior in high school. This demand prompted the events that led to Ron donning the Battle Suit to get onto the football team, mostly because Ron misinterpreted a conversation between Kim and Monique that he only heard part of. ‘course, unlike when Kim lied about where she was going for a Halloween party where she was grounded for a month, Ron got off of cheating in a full Varsity game with only twenty laps of crab walking and being reduced to running back - though that was a role he could earn legitimately… As I said, the show’s morality can be very weird. Last scene of the chapter: And that’s the end of the chapter. This scene is also the start of a trend - Kim is exposed and open to attack, Grimm is secretive and thus ‘safe’. Jade fishing around Wade’s files without anyone knowing is something that irks me given that the last time they went head to head it was a mutual kill, but then again Wade isn’t paying direct attention here so just like the time Wade snuck in on her, she had the initiative. Probably helped by the two using similar set ups or something (they are mirrors, after all) so they have an idea of what to look for as far as traps go. The show rarely delves into the risk of Kim’s family and friends being attacked, in part because for the most part villains are content not to attack her family and friends unless they are somehow related to their scheme. Other than that they seem content to focus on trying to off Kim alone, if they are going after her outside of their schemes. Off the top of my head the only time Kim’s family have been intentionally abducted was Drakken going for his old college friends (of which Kim’s dad was one of them, but Drakken didn’t know their relation at the time), and Drakken trying to capture Kim’s dad for the cybertronic tech that he had developed and that was only after he knew that Mr. Dr. Possible was the only one with it. Gill is the one exception, but he only catches the Middleton High Cheer Squad as collateral, and to him even Kim is collateral since he’s usually after Ron. Overall, this was a very meaty chapter and the trend continues. From here on out, Slyrr goes for larger chapters. However he also started to do author’s notes from here on out. I’ll leave them here for you to read for yourself: The only three points I’d like to comment on with this. First is the villains not trying to kill Kim - it’s less a lack of trying and more that Kim doesn’t let them connect very well and of course they’re not allowed to do “Why don’t you just shoot her?”, they leave Kim to die in various grisly and horrible ways often enough. And tied to this is number two - the show is perfectly fine with hitting girls, which is part of why Kim bringing it up in the last fic was rather odd. Again it’s just a matter that most guys aren’t able to land a hit on Kim, but those who can will (IE, Monkey Fist). Plus Grimm hit back plenty of times… The last point is psychological - this I think is where Slyrr deviates the most from the show, and that’s what makes his work such a change of pace that makes it stand out. Most people, myself included, like to focus on the physical threat. Personally I prefer for heroes to have their own self-doubts, but just as Commander Shepard plays psychologist to his or her squad Grimm does it in the opposite way in trying to create said problems. And given that Kim seems to breeze past quite a bit, an OC is a good tool for doing that and doing something different and it’s an angle that is very hard to tackle in the visual medium: you don’t get much insight into a character’s thoughts. This fic is where Team Probable starts to take off more, but they’re still primarily in the antagonist role to Kim. So, how do they stack up as the instigators of Zorpox’s return? Either way, the next chapter is ‘Small and Simple Things’
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 22, 2016 20:01:20 GMT -5
Chapter 2 - Small and Simple Things Seems Grimm isn’t above being mean to Rhonda either, considering the last story: Though considering how Grimm is supposed to be, in the author’s words, more behind the scene I do find it amusing that he more or less copies Kim directly. Of course, unlike Kim Grimm is probably better able to flat out pay for his transport and being a merc he could probably include it in his fee. But it’s really just a brief intro to establish that Team Probable is in Middleton now. I still don’t get why the Tweebs don’t get into more trouble for messing with Kim’s stuff: I mean it’s not just the harmless fiddling with it, they usually end up using it in consumable stuff like making homemade rockets (usually prone to crashing). And video games? Merely parts. Though specifying Kim having an iPod is odd. Most fanfics have Kim having the Kimmunicator fill the role with it constantly being tweaked appropriately. Actually most of the time they use lawyer friendly cameos of stuff (IE, Timothy North instead of Adam West, though the VA was Adam West…) Kim’s parents are hilariously open minded about her adventurers, as long as she still keeps up her home life. The fact that her missions are more of a ‘hobby’ is probably a factor in it, but still… their response to Kim needing to babysit the Tweebs in The Twin Factor was basically “If you have to go take them with you”. However this is an echo of one episode, Queen Bebe, where Kim’s busy social life was the ‘school’ plot with her juggling just about everything in Middleton High along with missions and she outright notes that missions tend to set her back here. Kim’s one of the busy-body types, which admittedly is probably how she’s managed to keep her home life intact despite jumping across the world. It’s a fairly common thread in other fanfics that Kim’s extremely busy, and usually something where Ron’s trying to tell Kim to ease off a bit. Gotta wonder if Grimm has a similar problem. Speaking of him… Damn, Wade must have a serious firewall failure if he hasn’t picked up on all this snooping. As to Club Banana - basically the go-to fashion retailer in the series. Amusingly a lot of their products are also sold at Smarty Mart, which is owned by the same company. The difference is the brand stuck onto them and using fancier names. No one said customers were smart Kim’s mission outfit was specified to be off-the-rack for most of the series. It’s only in Season Four that the items were discontinued, though for whatever reason Ron was still able to get his outfits despite more or less just being the guy’s version of Kim’s stuff. That’s probably a discussion for the next fic which takes place after that episode, though. As for MMP… well, now is as good of a time to discuss it as any. MMP, fan acronym for Mystical Monkey Power, is the show’s go-to magic - helped a lot by the fact that most of Team Possible’s mystical adventures involve Monkey Fist who’s all about this. It was introduced along with MF in the episode Monkey Fist Strikes, where Kim was hired by Montgomery Fiske (Monkey Fist before he revealed himself as a villain) to retrieve the last of four jade idols tied to this. Disguising himself as a ninja the night after, Fiske stole it from the camp to make the trail go cold. Wade did some more digging and they realized that MF wasn’t telling them everything. Amusingly this also ties into the above about Kim’s family - at the time she had a family get together with her really nerdy cousin Larry (as in, nerdy enough that as a nerd his portrayal is actually slightly insulting, though I know where he’s coming from). Unfortunately, Wade had a ‘holo-Kim’ to try out (though we never see the emitters) and he wanted to try it enough he tricked Ron into thinking that Kim had agreed to let him put it in her place at her family get together. While there, Fiske presumed that they actually knew about it and had come to fight him, inadvertently revealing that he had all four idols and had insane genetic experiments done to give himself monkey hands and feet (later revealed to be the work of the series’ biogenetics villainess DNAmy). And with all four idols prepared and a fight on his hands, he used them which imbued him with MMP itself, which was combined with his mastery of the normal martial art. Attempting to make sure Team Possible took the secret to their graves, he attacked ‘Kim’ and found she was a hologram, but now Ron was stuck alone against Monkey Fist and mixed with Ron’s phobia of monkeys (bad experiences with a chimp at Camp Wannaweep, which was also the local mascot), well, Ron wasn’t looking like he was liable to get out of that one and the best Kim could do was use the holo-Kim to brief Ron and give him one suggestion. Fortunately, Larry was there at the time and realizing that this basically was one of the ‘stupid video games’ (in her words), she let Larry talk to Ron and he gave him advice based on a level in the game Fortress (never shown and extremely vague), which basically translated into ‘Juice yourself up with MMP’, which both Ron and Rufus did before fighting Monkey Fist. The end result was Monkey Fist had the upper hand against Ron, but Rufus was free to attack the idols. Monkey Fist caught all four before they were destroyed, though a follow up attack from Ron destroyed all four and as far as the episode was concerned, MMP faded with the idols and Monkey Fist had to look to other power. This wasn’t to be the case, though the direct connection was not established until the Season Two episode Exchange (more on that later this fic) and since then MMP has become a thing lingering in Ron’s background. Unfortunately, it also shadowed Ron’s good actions since it had imparted on him a (partial, comes-and-goes) understanding of Monkey Kung Fu and because of that Ron’s inconsistency left a question: was Ron’s best moments in the series a factor of his own success, or was it just MMP coming in? This dogged Ron’s character development in many ways, especially in Season Four when the continuity was made much sharper. Eventually, MMP became a culmination in the series finale Graduation, where Ron got full power. It also more or less made him go Super Saiyan, and unlike the Battle Suit where Kim was not totally invincible… well, Ron was utterly invincible in direct combat given he flung two ten foot tall aliens with the Hulk’s skin color and muscle into low orbit hard enough that an alien cruiser exploded from the impact (also killed them in the process, though it was not confirmed in show). Needless to say, Kim being reduced to damsel status for the last episode of the series and Ron’s gains at her expense did not go over well with the fandom and personally I feel the ball was dropped extremely hard. However, MMP is something often cropping up in fanfiction, either in relation to Ron getting better or him overtaking Kim with it, a theme that fanfiction addressed long before he went full power with it. Rhonda’s powers when they get developed have this problem less, though that’s probably in part due to circumstances I’ll discuss when the time comes. Anyways, back to Kim for the next scene. Monique was a character introduced early in the show and became the main ‘friend’ character at Middleton High. A transfer student in, Monique seemed to be one of the few who wasn’t intimidated by Kim’s reputation and was able to become a close friend. She’s also Kim’s go-to for a lot of things related to her civilian life that isn’t adversational. Her role in this story is minor, though, but she does get a bigger role later. But it is worth noting that unlike most of Kim’s other civilian friends who get involved in her missions from time to time, Monique is actually rather notable for not being very good, though she’s at least able to take care of herself and not die in two seconds. Though with twenty years of training.... Likewise, Season Four had Kim and Ron both take up jobs. In part this was in response to one of the stupidest scenes in the show (fancy resteraunt, Kim all dolled up for a fancy date, and Ron bringing kid’s menu coupons…) and Kim took the job at Club Banana (which she was a frequent patron to anyways) in part to inspire Ron to get a part-time of his own. Ron ended up going at Smarty Mart (in part thanks to saving the company’s owner from Shego, albeit totally by accident), and the jobs persisted throughout the fourth season. Oddly enough unlike Bueno Nacho they didn’t have any problems with the missions. There’s one time when they were late and by the reactions it was only by a few minutes tops and it didn’t factor into the episode. Slyrr actually addressed this in a forum post on the topic of ‘What if Kim just quit’ and pointed out that they shouldn’t be able to sustain a job if KP was at all vaguely realistic with travel time. So, what’s got Ron here? Don’t say it don’t say it don’t... Always amusing to see Kim flip some things - IE, Ron calling her ‘KP’ a lot, now Kim tries it with his initials. Doesn’t roll off the tongue very well. Still, if I hadn’t read this before I’d probably have a guess where this was going. I mean, we need Zorpox, right? Next scene… Considering that Bueno Nacho is usually rather… blatant, you’d think it would scream bad road since Ron is extremely familiar with it. IT’S A TRAP! But yeah, Rufus is usually more attentive than Ron about matters. Case in point, the assistant manager at the usual Bueno Nacho tries to tip Ron off to the fact that the entire franchise was hijacked by Drakken, Ron completely misses it and he pays more attention to the lack of bendy straws.... What is it with guys named Ron and thinking about food all the time? Serious question. ‘course, I can’t really say this is some great feat of Team Probable’s. I mean, Ron’s been suckered by less and we did see that they were doing preparations (IE, Jade doing her hacking). ‘course, there’s the question of how they’re going to keep Ron hidden. He’s been chipped… I don’t think Wade’s that scathing, but then again he does make a lot of remarks about the two dating or interrupting their kisses, so… maybe. Of course, Ron’s parents are notably oblivious. Let me put it this way: “Why didn’t you tell me?” “This is our way of telling you.” But I can’t fault Kim here: she’s busy, she knows Ron tends to make like a pig when you put an all-you-can-eat in front of him, and as far as she knows there isn’t a villain operating in the area or presently after them. Ah, this is the start of one of Grimm’s persistent head game points: how he’s honest with his team and Ron far more so than Kim is with him. It’s a persistent point, not only in this story but future ones and one of Grimm’s go-to fingers to point at Kim when trying to prove she isn’t the heroine she says she is or how they’re not that different. ‘course, Ron’s response to being captured by a villain usually does include some remark about the last time they met. In this case, the magnetic cuffs. So… Ron knows. This really gets into one of the things where the series itself brushes it off, but Slyrr tackles it full force. Specifically, Ron being chipped by Wade and Kim not mentioning it. It’s understandable why it can be taken as such a violation of trust: Wade somehow shoved something into Ron that could track his locations and neither he or Kim showed much distaste in using it. They did have some implications, but… well, I’ll quote the scenes. Generally this is treated as one of the biggest dick moves that have been done to Ron, even though most of the time the chip is only used when he’s gone missing or has gone full supervillain. I’ve always suspected that Wade had Kim chipped too and we mostly never saw it because when she gets in trouble Wade usually knows where she is (and when Kim knows where Ron is, she usually doesn’t bother with it). Interestingly, this is also another inconsistency. In A Very Possible Christmas, Wade fed Kim escape pod coordinates rather than using the chip. My guess is that they had an unspoken agreement to use it if it was the only tool, and in the episode they had other ways to track him down. Personally? While I think not telling Ron about it was wrong… he needs it. He gets captured a lot and he’s also a McGuffin enough times that a chip is… actually a good idea. For the whole team, not just Ron, since they’ve been captured enough times before. ‘couse I could see the secrecy being a case of them having back ups in case that happens since well, you react differently knowing rescue is on the way and having no escape. It’s definitely one thing you can legitimately use to stain Kim’s shining reputation, but on the other hand I have a hard time mustering up the ‘how dare she’ reaction that Grimm wants because… well, it’s Grimm, so far he hasn’t really shown much that he is any better. Then again, mind games… “This is sick and wrong!” is a common call Ron used to describe some of the very messed up things. When they found DNAmy having gene modded herself into part gorrilla to try and date Monkey Fist, wrong-sick came out. Though again, Ron knows exactly what the Attitudinator is, but I think Grimm seems to have miscalculated. Ron literally moved past it by calling them boring. I don’t think that’s going to do very much to prime him for it, especially since he didn’t need any priming. I will note a minor error - specifying the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as just being drained. That was the original Attitudinator’s design: drain out both, just put back the bad. Though the detachable pods is new, and I suppose making it only take one part would be a major improvement. Less chance of an accident. Behold the end of the chapter, where Grimm Probable has Ron Stoppable deliberately mind raped. So, having gone through two chapters… honestly it makes my opinion of Team Probable dip given that after Grimm gives a moralizing speech, he proceeds to go mess Ron up with Ron pointing out why that’s a bad idea - not even touching the morality just because Zorpox is scary. I know, Grimm was probably doing it to try and prime Ron to it, but I have to say that didn’t work out very well given Ron didn’t accept it at all. But the story is still young, and let’s be fair this is one of those successes that have to happen. We wouldn’t have a plot if the villains didn’t succeed in stage one! And well, let’s be honest the chip is a legitimate point to hammer Kim about. It’s almost certainly going to come up later, and well… if Grimm’s greatest weapon is the truth, it does have some bite. The question of course is how much bite. So, thoughts? Does Grimm have a point to make, or is it just him BS’ing with mind games trying to prep Ron to go full bad guy again?
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 22, 2016 20:06:03 GMT -5
Chapter 3 - Looking for my Missing Peace So, when this left off Ron’s being transformed back to evil, Team Probable’s revenge is underway, and Kim is still unaware. But let’s be fair, Kim’s not going to miss Ron being missing for long… Give Kim something resembling a mission, she locks down pretty well and focuses on the task at hand. Contrast Ron, who usually needs to be reminded about things like being quiet while infiltrating. Heh. That’s Ron’s line usually, first used in the episode Sink or Swim and most famously him making Drakken admit that he does know Ron’s name at the end of So the Drama. No, Kim probably wouldn’t actually slug him across the face. And no Slyrr doesn’t bring this up later; it’s the figure of speech. Plus Ron was genuinely in danger, so… Though oddly, at this point Kim has her own car so she could drive herself or more likely be the one picking up Ron. I’m just going to take a guess that her car’s in with the Tweebs for repairs or upgrades. Plus Kim's aware of the chips ethics as noted, but again in the show it's only used when she's worried about his safety, which given their line of work is probably something they've had to worry about plenty of times. Anyways, next scene…. You know, if Grimm’s supposed to have school as Kim does, wouldn’t this make him late for it? Admittedly this is prior to the full fleshing of Team Probable’s homes, but still… you’d think their teachers would notice that two of their students regularly vanish on unspecified actions. At least Kim can point to where she was when she’s late (whether it’s saving some ambassador in Dubai or Ron using her printer for cheat codes and then Rufus getting caught in it when printing her actual report, forcing her to reprint…) Though I’m wondering why Ron’s skin is blue - last time at least it could be attributed to Drakken’s evilness and we never got an answer on Drakken’s skin condition other than being on a Tuesday. The other episode with evil Ron, Stop Team Go, had no blue skin but then again it took time the first time for it to hit Ron, while StG was over very quickly. Ron as Zorpox is a very different persona than his normal self. Much more demanding, ego goes through the roof… actually that part is very much Ron. The ‘naco’ is, well… it’s basically a taco with a bunch of nachos dumped in. Turned out to be pretty popular and Taco Bell’s Beefy Nacho Burrito or the even closer resembling Grilled Stuffed Nacho probably had nothing to do with it. The former was very popular though… Anyways, in Bad Boy, Ron built two doomsday devices in a very short time (as in, Shego thought Ron was just doing evil laughs). The first one was a quake generator but Kim took care of it, though it was only a decoy. At this point he revealed that with his Megaweather Generator he wanted the world’s supply of nacos… much to Shego’s frustration, annoyance, and face palming. Even as Zorpox the Conqueror, Ron still has quite a bit of personal investment in the naco and stuff he feels is his. Grimm’s claim that Bueno Nacho only gave Ron one royalty check is techncially true as we only saw them give Ron one. On the other hand, in the episode it happened in ( Ron Millionaire), Wade makes a remark that Ron was ‘spending it faster than usual’. I’m going to write this off as Grimm either having incomplete information or deliberately lying to keep in Ron’s good (evil?) graces. After all, why do villains need to always tell the truth? (Plus I don’t really want to fault Slyrr with missing that detail since it’s extremely brief and really that’s being nitpicky) This was written before Homecoming Upset, but you more or less see that for all the crap Bonnie gives Kim, if Kim gets serious Bonnie knows to back down immediately because Kim does know sixteen styles of kung fu and getting in the way when Ron is missing… not a cheer squad career lengthening move. It was never specified why evil Ron liked the Zorpox outfit, but he did change into it on his own before crashing his cousin’s wedding with a vehicle built into a plasma cannon, so it’s not like it’s something forced. Plus Ron in that teal shirt with blue skin would probably look pretty dorky even by KP standards. At least this way it matches the bad guy appearance. Of course, Grimm’s very accurate about their lack of assets. I mean Drakken being cocky can at least be attributed to overestimating his doomdsay devices (though even then they tend to be pretty darn well up to the job), Zorpox? Not so much. It’s actually rather telling I think that he goes right for world ending stuff in his threat (mega storms and earthquakes) than smaller stuff. And cut to flashback. Why do I feel that jitsu thing was ripped from Naruto or something stupid like that? Anyways, as for Yamanouchi, Sensei, and Yori… the location and the two characters named are from the Season 2 episode Exchange, which was the one that really solidified that yes Ron has MMP still. Sensei, voiced by George Takei, is the stereotypical old master while Yori is the normal demure but lethal Japanese warrior women type of character. Both make jokes about Ron’s “American-style jokes” and overall it plays like a parody of the kung fu movies. Of course, Kung fu is Chinese, not Japanese. The theory I subscribe to is that the Yamanouchi Ninja School’s founder either learned it from the Chinese and brought it over, or was Chinese himself but for whatever reason emigrated to Japan and adopted its culture (IE, to the point where his statue shows him as a samurai). Okay, that was something that surprised me when I reread this and checked dates. Now, the original story went up before Stop Team Go premiered, and Electronique was the main villainess there. However, some KP episodes went up in the UK first before the US (a few jokes about the UK having a time machine were involved on one KP fan forum I was on at the time), and they were up on YouTube as well. I don’t remember specific dates, but giving Slyrr the benefit of the doubt he probably decided to cameo Electronique here since the end result schemes have similarities. Heh heh. Poor Grimm, he can’t use the weapon he thought he could and went through all that effort to nick it. I’m te… I fe…. no, sorry, I can’t. HAHAHAHA did not do your research much did you? You’d think that if he knew what the Lotus Blade could do, he would’ve been aware of the ability to use it or not. Still, even if it’s a nice blade you need more than a sword to take on the world, especially one you can’t use to full potential. Oh, and end flashback. I know I usually go into detail about lore on stuff like the Lotus Blade, but it’s explained later in the chapter so I’ll fill in any gaps once done. The ‘last season’ comment is a remark that Ron made in Gorilla Fist, where Sensei and Yori returned to the show, and he referred to the Lotus Blade as being old school when Kim remarks that Yamanouchi being a ninja school explained the magic sword. I will also note that Gorilla Fist has Kim indicate her awareness that Ron had MMP, however given it’s generally dormant status this is the latest that Kim is in the dark about MMP being active after the Jade Statues and the events of Monkey Fist Strikes. Also wow: Grimm looks damn devious in that image. Rhonda's uneasy reaction is interesting as well, though, but yeah... Speaking of Kim... So not much, then again I fired up Gorilla Fist (it’s a bonus episode on the DVD for So the Drama, so easy access…), before Wade’s explanation apparently he wasn’t able to find Yori going to any known schools, so he hacked into the unknown…. Kim’s reaction? “And I thought I could do anything.” I dunno, I found that rather amusing in this context since it highlights Wade’s capabilities. Of course, Grimm is actively prepared for Wade this time whereas Yamanouchi probably didn’t think there’d be a hacker who could get into the unknown. That or the show’s writers decided ‘You know what? Let’s just play this implausibility for laughs so we can do our refresher course on Yamanouchi and get Kim briefed on it’. I mean the MMP arc episodes were the tighter ones in referring to prior events than most of the series, but still… plus at least there’s a way for Grimm to find out about Yamanouchi, right? Anyways, back to Zorpox and his sidekicks, and an explanation of the Lotus Blade from the monsters themselves. Trying to find you little guy, trying to find you… Anyways, so yeah, the Lotus Blade’s main shtick is that if used by someone with MMP, it can adopt any shape. It’s not limited to weapons - Ron actually manages to make it warp into various odd things like a Swiss Army Knife and some sort of weird propeller thing. In Exchange, Monkey Fist intended to use it to make like Alexander the Great and personally lead his monkey ninjas to conquer the world. The Lotus Blade is powerful, no doubt about it, but I really doubt that it’d be enough to do that. I mean, 120mm of ‘murrican smoothbore forged in the flames of FREEDOM! cares little for the flesh of the wielder of glorious nippon steel… Within the fandom, the Lotus Blade is often a weapon given to Ron in continuation stories, premiered most notably in Captainkodak1’s The Lotus Bloom which was the trope maker for a lot of Kim Possible fanficion ideas and an insperation that really set the fandom off - including Slyrr’s work. I originally considered doing a Let’s Read of that, and I might do so after. So yeah, this chapter wasn’t as thick as I figured, more of covering the time passing and establishing Zorpox is back and working, with Team Possible looking for their missing squadmates. Regardless, this story is only nine chapters long and taking a look ahead the conflict is soon afoot. Next Chapter: Old Friends who Just Met
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 22, 2016 20:10:11 GMT -5
Chapter 4 - Old Friends Who Just Met Zorpox has been unleashed, now it’s time to see how evil Ron works. Why am I having a flashback to Shego asking Drakken why he used the term ‘nano’ for his nano-tick bomb in Tick-Tick-Tick… But yeah, with the Lotus Blade and the series generally having Command and Conquer esque build times for stuff, it’s not too surprising that Ron was able to whip… something up. Well this isn’t scary at all. Still it does indicate that Ron knows that Kim would be concerned. Kim is aggressive, and her reaction when Drakken had Eric in So the Drama was to suit up in power armor and go after him despite Drakken’s very clear threat that something would happen to Eric if she interfered. Of course Drakken’s plot was different that time, but with the room for the initiative she goes on the offensive in hostage situations. Of course this time she doesn’t have the initiative and the kidnapper is there personally. Plus the last time she went head to head with Grimm when he had the initiative didn’t end well, and getting her family hurt in this kind of scuffle isn’t her MO. Still, that speaks a lot of her self control that she isn’t going on the offensive yet. Yeah, Grimm’s enjoying this way too much, but it is the point of this whole thing. Grimm wanted Kim to suffer for his defeat, and having Ron be the tool doing it is one hell of a way to do that. Plus it also is ironic - Kim had defeated Grimm by knocking him off his game with Rhonda hostage or otherwise incapacitated, Grimm is using Ron to get back at Kim. Much more enjoyable vengeance, sort of like taking something the bad guys were using to hurt you and then beating the crap out of them with it. As a bad guy, Ron hams it up and makes his control clearly established. And a call back to Bay Boy too. I think this makes an important point. Ron is not himself here. He’s been heavily mind raped, and I’m pretty sure that means he can’t give consent given the external imbalancing and mind muckery. The law is pretty vague (okay, non-existent) in KP in regards to how it deals with stuff like mind control. But I can’t really fault Kim for not addressing Ron in this situation because, well, it isn’t Ron. At least not naturally; it’s Ron, but it’s Ron after artificial adjustment. Plus, Grimm is the one who had him changed... The KP series was usually aware of the cliches of the hero genre - in fact the Seniors followed the tropes to the T because of tradition and there’s an underlying layer of awareness of how silly some are. But then again without them where would the story be? Plus, conquering the world is boring if you just park in the middle of nowhere and deploy something to deplete the atmosphere of oxygen with no opposition. And in Zorpox’s case, I think it really highlights some of Ron’s serious ego and arrogance in a different context. When given his ten minutes of fame, Ron is very prone to big headedness and ego. Give him instant muscles he goes on about being manly now. Say that he’s the source of the ‘Ron Factor’ and “key” to Kim’s success, he starts bragging about it even to Kim’s face. Give him 99 million? He’s going to be calling himself The Ron. And as Zorpox, he doesn’t just want to win: he wants to be seen winning and with Kim beaten as his feet with the scheme underway. He wants parades, the rolled out red carpet, his letter symbol plastered on a building… Well, yeah. Basically if he wanted to he could have his plan go off entirely without a hitch, but he intentionally brought Kim in for ego and to prove superiority. Some feel that Zorpox is a manifestation of Ron’s inferiority trying to prove that he’s not inferior, particularly towards Kim. I’m… uncertain, but I imagine that any such feelings would be magnified while evil. Now that’s something that I’d love to see... Ron’s got one of the best evil laughs in fiction, hands down. I’ll admit, I do have a problem with how the Lotus Blade was used. I dunno, I’ve never been a fan of those ‘snake after the hero and keep twisting, never running out of arm’ things. Always felt like you either need to knock out the guy using it or you lose. Admittedly it does help the Lotus Blade live up to the feats Monkey Fist planned on attributing to it, but still… Though at least this time we’ve got Kim not wanting to hurt Ron too badly as a limiter, plus the Lotus Blade is a massive outside context for her since all she knows about it is that it’s magic, no specifics. ‘course, she does have a line to Yamanouchi if she needs it... Gotta respect Kim’s ability to put her emotional baggage aside to get to the plot - she knows that under the Attitudinator Ron’s capable of doing some of the most effective evil schemes. It’s just that this time they’re presently dating… then again they’ve known each other since pre-K. Still, I’m wondering why Wade seems to have only just felt this was something worth mentioning. And if Wade knew his network was getting ghosted, why hadn’t he acted? Last time a villain kidnapped her boyfriend, Kim suited up in power armor. And Zorpox is a threat that absolutely would justify pulling it out even if the battle suit gave her radiation sickness or was still glitching. Still, what exactly is the bracelet for? I’ll admit, I’ve always felt that evil Ron is a bit too good at the whole ‘throwing things together’ since he had built two major doomsday devices while Shego through he was just doing repeated evil laughs, plus there’s what he’s about to do… But again, KP has C&C style construction time and travel enough going to go from London to a (not-so-secret) Alsakan base in the time for a single level on a platformer… or taking a ship from said base to Tokyo in the same timeframe... Team Probable getting upgraded is... actually kinda sensible for Evil Ron to do. He knows Kim's now active, and last time he wasn't able to keep her sufficiently restrained or stop Drakken from sneaking in. Having his sidekicks be fully lethal but lethal using tools that he could insert countermeasures into is a smart move. So, what to make of this chapter? I’ll admit I do think Ron beat Kim a bit too easily, but considering the Lotus Blade and Kim only knowing it vaguely I can’t really fault it, plus Kim was basically flat footed. That said I do find it interesting that evil!Ron seems to buy into the idea that Kim pushes Ron around. I previously mentioned Ron having something of an inferiority complex that some theories attribute to Zorpox’s behavior. I think attributing Kim to being willing to take him by force is mostly the mind rape talking, but Kim did used to be extremely bossy towards him and in early seasons tried to change him pretty blatantly such as forcing him to get a haircut to try and help fix his social image. Yet at the same time she did support him when he went for being the mascot (admittedly this was after some hesitation, but she outright points out that ‘become a mad mask wearing supervillain if she says no’ is a bad reason to say yes, but being his friend is a good reason too). But we’re underway. The doomsday device is active, the mad science is at work, and what follows is something even Slyrr admits that, while certainly good, probably didn’t quite mesh with the later mythology and is something he’s been actively trying to avoid having to deal with in his present writing. Next Chapter: Ying Yang Yonder.
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 22, 2016 20:17:07 GMT -5
Chapter 5 - Ying Yang YonderThe scheme is underway and we're getting to the good stuff, so what does the doomsday device do? Kim’s family are mostly separated from guys like Drakken or Dementor by morality (even if they claim they’re skilled in science, not mad science), but it’s still rather terrifying seeing them talking about evil schemes of their own. They did something like this in So the Drama too with rockets. It wasn’t intentional - they weren’t aiming for Kim. That time she used a frying pan to whack them out. Given they're evil now and the explosions, dodging is probably more appropriate for the sake of the pan. And her hand. Yep, that’s Ron. Plus, having the villain’s big demand get the wind taken out from under it is a pretty common thing in the KP setting. Usually it’s self-inflicted like Drakken using a puppet (he was in the body of a random army private at the time), but sometimes others cause it (IE, Shego snarking at Drakken). But even with the comic moment in Ron’s warning, I think what he’s doing is even more terrifying. He’s just had the world mind raped the same way Grimm had it happen to Ron. Now, a lot of humans are assholes anyways, but there’s still a lot of decent people in positions of power and authority. You’ve now removed all that and any caring for the rules while leaving the power, and they’ll all be out for their own too. To give a short list, what’s to stop government officials from selling state secrets, revealing the identities of secret agents they dislike, destroying vital infrastructure/sabotaging it, using nuclear warheads if they have the launch abilities, and who knows what else? In fairness the setting does seem to treat good and evil as something of a faction color that can be switched - the Attitudinator takes this to extremes - but even then most villains would go for mind controlling people to their will. Sure, that’s just as bad if not worse than this, but at least it’s a bit more logical and less prone to random destruction. Welp, the story’s taking the collateral damage as happening. The series itself generally ignores the collateral damage that occurs - and I don’t just mean “wreck buildings and nary a comment”. Most of the time it’s not too bad, in fact KP is rather notable for a lack of collateral in most episodes. Lairs may explode regularly, but generally the damage to civilian structures is limited or plot related. Contrast things like Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes where it’s not uncommon to see buildings getting wrecked without a comment. In KP that’s usually rare and most of the damage is localized or limited to one or two structures, and usually not even the whole thing. But there have been times where massive damage has been shown - So the Drama, where we see Lil Diablos dropping skyscrapers with their plasma weaponry, and Graduation where the Lorwardian walkers wreck most urban areas and it’s all but stated that they’ve been wiping out conventional military forces (with a cut so we don’t see the results of high powered energy weapons on tanks, but the implication is quite clear). Here… well, it’s hard to ignore just how much damage is going to happen as a result when this is supposed to be about Grimm’s revenge on Kim, a very personal revenge. Is Grimm really willing to let this slide? Now I’ll withhold judgment until we see his reaction, but given he has at least some standards… well, yeah. As Kim notes, the longer that the world is flipped to villainy the more damage is going to happen. And considering that we’ve got organizations like Global Justice who have global deployment range… Yeesh, that’s a scary thought. Imagine GDI suddenly turning into exactly what Nod propaganda claimed. GJ (probably) doesn’t have House Sized Masses, but still... and what about the global economy? The show at this point is approximately set in 2007 and all the stuff going on probably changed the circumstances massively, but the economy can be a fragile thing and we’re worried about the North Koreans dumping enough shells on Seoul or the Straits of Homurz being mined as something that could trainwreck the global economy. And then there’s the fact that there’s people in charge of nuclear warheads and who knows what other doomsday devices nations have developed themselves. This is… probably all of that happening at the same time. Normally I wouldn’t try to bring in reality in something like this, but Slyrr tends to take a more ‘realistic’ approach to the KP ‘verse, particularly in A Friend in Darkness. Despite the problems they may give her, Kim still loves her family. Sure, she might want to punch one of them out occasionally (mostly the Tweebs), but they’re a good one. Though it’s not a surprise she easily restrained them - Kim’s the fighter in her family. They might be nasty in their own ways when it’s a pinch, but if you dropped them into a sudden brawl Kim’s going to be the one standing on top. On the upside Kim, at least it isn’t canned villain threats over loudspeaker. Yet. Welp, that more or less confirms how far the device goes. Kim’s allies are out of the fight, she’s on her own. Which is probably what Grimm wanted to do since that’s how she got him - she isolated him from his allies first. I’ll note that Wade’s scheme is actually pretty reasonable given that Everlot, an MMO in the series that only appeared in Vir-tu-Ron as a standard WoW or Guild Wars type setting, but an EVE Online level of freedom to shape the world - and room for players to dick each other over. In fact, Wade’s more or less just emulating the villain of that episode with this scheme. Monique, on the other hand, I have no idea what her goal is. CB is definitely global (along with Smarty Mart since both are owned by the same company), but Monique has never been established as being able to do mad science. The closest is a proficiency with tools, and in A Sitch in Time it was made clear combat is not her forte and it was reinforced in Fashion Victim where while she managed to use the assorted fashion production machines of the Fashion Underground to deal with her opponents, she was still losing. Admittedly the FU were more stylists than fighters, though they were able to at least hold their ground against Kim so it’s not like Monique won against pushovers. Then again we’ve never seen her evil, so… And no, Monique is utterly unrelated to Electronique from two chapters prior, though there was some heavy speculation towards that end before Stop Team Go was aired. This, I think, is probably one of the fic’s best images. It’s one of the most emotionally evocative ones and gets the point across: Middleton burns, and that’s happening across the world. It’s a simple image - Kim on the steps of her home crying as there’s fire in the city in the background. Yet it really hammered home to me the sheer scale of Grimm’s evil, hit me in a way that I think doesn’t quite come across just from the text - particularly since the text only mentions sirens, not fires. TBH I think those should have been mentioned - it reinforces just how bad things are with the Mega Synaptic Transducer active. Now Kim crying actually feels appropriate for the situation. Kim has been close to crying before in the series, but off the top of my head I can’t name a time when she actually did of her own free will - I’m discounting Emotion Sickness since that was mad science induced. But I don’t think this is making Kim weak - what just happened has struck close to her and has isolated her from her life in a sudden and vicious fashion. Kim is more than capable of operating alone despite what some people insist with the ‘Ron Factor’ or Kim’s saying that she couldn’t save the world without him in ASiT (which was more of her trying to reassure Ron about him moving to Norway). But at the same time, standing with her friends is also what helps make her as effective as she was and helps her project past her personal limits, and while I think Grimm overdid it, he wasn’t wrong in the first story saying that Kim didn’t have her friends to carry the water for her when they were neutralized in a MAD scenario. In some ways, Kim is actually a rather lonely character as referenced in how she dug into Grimm’s mindset in the last story. Despite being considered one of the most popular individuals at Middleton High, her world renown, and all the people she’s helped who remember her fondly and happily return the favor, she has very few close friends. Even the Middleton Cheer Squad is at least somewhat distant from her, or at the very least we don’t see her interacting with them the way she does with Ron or Monique. She spends a lot more time with Ron (which might be part of it given his reputation as a social outcast/loser), and Monique was really the first persistent friend she had in the series unrelated to missions. Part of this is likely a result of the fact that Kim is a lot harder to relate to than the average popular girl - her nights are full of crazy actions stories, most people instead have whining on the internet or watching a TV show. Which, I think, is what highlight Grimm’s skill in psychological warfare. He’s studied up on Kim’s history, so he knows that if he wants to make Kim feel pain, he needs to isolate her from those she considers close friends and do so in a way to twist the knife. And Ron would know this too, which would lead to the Mega-Synaptic Inducer in some part. But if Grimm wanted his revenge, he’s probably done a very good job so far. (Also as a side note, Slyrr pointed out a detail I missed utterly in the pic above: Look at the shape of the stars) Well, I guess that’s one upside that might stop the collateral. The bad guys are now the good guys. Still, they’re going to be of limited numbers compared to the now global villain population since Ron himself outright notes that there were only a few villains overall. … I know that this would have taken place in 2007, but holy hell now imagine that this scheme happened today in 2015 2016. I mean, let’s consider who would now be humanity’s best heroes while this device remained intact for a minute… probably for the best that the closest the KP ‘verse seems to have is not!HYDRA that’s more about stealing candy from babies than anything and black marketeers. Though, I find it interesting how the cheer squad is planning on using their moves to take over the world. After all, most of Kim’s skills were adapted from cheerleading… then again none of them have shown the same level of combat and the closest is Bonnie working alongside Kim in Bonding. Though Barkin being a villain now is very fitting - harsh as he is, he genuinely cares for his students, even Ron despite seeming to have it out for him. He’s just tough but fair. As a quick note, in Bonding Bonnie underwent some character development that gave a Freudian excuse to her behavior (her sisters are even worse given that the supposed smartest of the three Rockwaller siblings calls France a city!), but in So the Drama it snapped back to normal. Now part of this was to avoid a continuity lockout, StD was written to cap off to the first season just in case, but also I think looking at the events going on would justify the snapback that continued into Season Four: at the end of StD, Bonnie tried to mock Kim and Ron for finally coming to terms with their relationship. Everyone present cheered for the two, which was probably a slap in the face for Bonnie. Anyways, we’ve seen Kim’s discovery, but what about the monsters themselves? I know it probably wasn’t meant that way, but citing the Lotus Blade in his twitch makes it read creepier than it should be for some reason. Don’t know why. Still, given later things Grimm’s lack of response (this is a whole ‘scene’ quoted) about the whole world being flipped and the police joining in on looting is rather worrisome. I mean, this isn’t Earth Queen Hou-Ting’s guards doing so after the witch Queen of Ba Sing Se was asphyxiated. This is your normal everyday fellows doing it at the flip of a switch. Admittedly, this is more of a result of later fics, but there’s a few more bits of this chapter that should be read first before I go into why this is exactly the thing Slyrr is trying to avoid having to deal with in his later stories. I will say that using Dementor’s scheme is actually a very adherent to the nature of the series - in more than a few episodes they will use another villain and Kim foiling a scheme as a lead in or just doing something utterly unrelated (such as Kim saving a baby eagle that was stranded in the opening of Monkey Fist Strikes) as an opener, but in others it ties in very closely. For example in Homecoming Upset the man they rescue from Duff Killigan in the opener is plot important later as Senor Senior Jr. kidnaps him later, with this acting as the introduction to the plot important one-shot guy. And in this case, Dementor’s tech for satellite usage being used to transmit Ron’s Tower of Opposite Alignment to the whole world. Makes sense. Kim’s first instinct is to engage these random mobs, but she suppresses it from experience and understanding that they aren’t doing this of their own direct free will, they’ve been mind raped into this kind of thought. Plus all that crap cons grey to her, no XP. But going to Bueno Nacho first shows that Kim does know Ron. She’s going through his line of thought as best she could, which is what she should be doing as even as Zorpox the Conqueror in Bad Boy his style was still beneath the surface. Though the sheer number of doomsday devices is interesting. Middleton seems to have a glut of mad scientists - besides having their own space center (where Kim’s dad works at), they’ve got an Institute of Technology with a weather control device, numerous tech labs that Drakken raided in the events of Clothes Minded for parts, and for named individuals you’ve got Kim’s family, Justine Flanner who built a dimensional portal, Felix Renton and his mother Doctor Renton (who also works at the Space Center) who’s cyber-robotics made a wheelchair that let Felix more or less be the ace in the episodes he appeared in, and another Space Center scientist Vivian Porter who designed a self-thinking AI for a long range space mission, oh, and underneath Middleton there’s a Robot Rumble where a bunch of people, even Ned (see next segment of story) went to have robots battling each other. Kim’s cousin Larry, who is otherwise just a nerd, is present and known there. So yeah, Middleton people trying to put together doomsday devices is probably a lot scarier than it would be if it was the average person doing it. Man, if this was ever turned into KP episodes you’d probably get a lot of mileage out of adding caps to screenshots of Kim having to attack various people in her normal everyday life while suited up in the battle suit. Kim’s cousin Joss refers to Wade as the one who runs the whole operation, and yeah Wade is Kim’s go-to source of information because he’s got the internet at his fingertips and on top of that is a super-genius. Now it’s not that Kim relies on him to feed her the solution - often it’s a dialogue that leads to it - but Wade often does give Kim instructions on what to do and provides her with the mission briefings. Cutting Kim off from that does undeniably reduce her effectiveness. Though while it didn’t yield anything, I do think that Kim’s instinct was right. It’s just Zorpox was no where near Bueno Nacho and Grimm probably chose that random warehouse deliberately to be out of the way and unconnected to Ron. If evil Ron wanted to go more connected, then it would’ve been a calculated move rather than just being there where Kim and a full SWAT or GJ assault squad might show up at any time with knowledge to operate on rather than vague “Ron is Missing”. So Jade didn’t get one sent to her while Kim did? Alright, that just raises more questions like why Grimm didn’t ask about Jade earlier. Admittedly, he didn’t know what it did until it activated, but afterwards you’d think he’d ask if he really cared about his team so much. Not asking why she didn’t get a bracelet when they got I can easily write off as ‘Jade’s safe at home’, but after seeing that it was global in effect you’d think he’d be wondering. Also, now that we’ve got it, I think it’s time to do that discussion of Grimm’s lack of reaction here and why it’s a lot worse than ‘villainous freelancer stands idle as the world is alignment flipped’. Spoilers for the later stories below, but I really need to talk about it here and I really can’t hold off on it. But if you want to go on, this will not touch anything you need for the rest of the stories before we get to it naturally. Team Probable Backstory; Spoilers for A Friend in Darkness and Graduation Now, to give a quick version, in A Friend in Darkness we are introduced to Riddleton where Grimm and his friends hail from. Riddleton is a government black ops town - think along the lines of the Manhattan Project, except it’s more permanent because it’s supposed to house all sorts of important dignitaries and their families. As in, there was almost a black ops hit squad sent on Kim and Doctor Director was playing the ‘do you want to expose innocents to sniper attacks and kidnappings trying to take down Grimm’ card to get her to stop trying to get a signal out from there. Grimm’s father is a General within the DoD and apparently considers Doctor Director to be his liaison. His mother is an Ambassador for the US State Department. Now, when introduced General Probable gives Kim a whole routine treating her as a bleeding heart for being aghast that he tolerates Grimm’s actions and is the biggest proponent of Grimm’s defense that he isn’t a criminal because he supplies information to the US Military about all the weapons and genetics tech that gets made since he has a ‘unique access’ that others don’t have. And then has the audacity to say Kim ignores international and local law and should shut up about Grimm’s actions because of this - after the events of this fic. And thanks to this, Grimm has Uncle Sam and diplomatic immunity going for him. Oh, and one of the examples of intel Grimm provides? The villain shin-dig from Bad Boy that I discussed in chapter one of this story - AKA the one Kim found out about via the mailing list and was completely in the open. Furthermore Riddleton is paranoid as all hell about security - again, the aforementioned black ops? Perfectly willing to follow Grimm and Jade’s orders in cleaning up after they brought Team Possible to Riddleton due to the circumstances. Now admittedly this is probably amazing professionalism on the part of the black ops considering I bet a lot of them loathe having to cover the tracks of the people enabling so many evil schemes in the first place and continued to aid and abet someone who had seen them turned into bad guys, but still... Let me remind you that in the previous story, Grimm broke into a German Weapons Facility that was working on the same kind of weapons that Grimm’s dad claims Grimm is getting access to, and then when Grimm breaks into a United States research facility that’s working on tech for battle suits - you know, the power armor Kim’s wearing presently in this story - and gives the material to Professor Dementor, all his dad says is ‘if your name comes up it’s your hide’ and otherwise ignores it. So basically… in his quest for revenge, Grimm is completely and utterly willing to have all that get put on the line, with a scheme that mind rapes everyone - including his own family and friends - and all the people who are running interference for his ass so he doesn’t end up in jail for basically completing step one of a lot of what, IRL, would probably be treated as attempted terrorism. And remember that bit about Slyrr generally being a bit more looking towards reality in the KP ‘verse? This gets into it; being the ones behind this scheme should have landed them on a lot of crap lists by guys like the CIA who wouldn’t care about the niceties of the law that allows Grimm’s lawyer to head off attempts at incarcerating them through legal means. Now as I mentioned before, Slyrr had not fleshed out Grimm’s history much at this point so I’m willing to forgive it not coming up here, but I still find it horrifically concerning that none of the team expressed concerns about their families - even if it was vague and ill defined - being warped by the scheme. Especially since this whole thing is about petty revenge for one defeat that in the long run wasn’t even that painful - it’s not like Kim killed one of their number or some other massive insult that demanded satisfaction. They just lost… once. In a world where despite having been trounced hundreds of times Drakken can still muster up enough to have a very capable go at taking over the world. A bit of a rant, but I had to get it off my chest. This was a global catastrophe that Grimm had no way of guaranteeing he could stop if the genie was let out of the bottle too much. The fact it hasn’t come up later is probably the biggest black mark on these fics, especially given the crap Kim takes for her activities during A Friend in Darkness and here. Anyways, back to Jade now being Kim’s new EVA unit/Voice with an Internet Connection/Scribe/Executor… “Where did Kim Possible learn to hijack a scooter?” “Drakanada. And we’re borrowing it, not stealing.” Though at least it was a free test drive and not hotwiring it, but still… rather amusing. I’m going to assume that Kim chose not to use the Sloth for the same reason she resisted calling Wade - all the tech that’s gone into it probably means Wade or the Tweebs (if they got free) could use it against her. Plus she has no idea if the roads are good or not, and a scooter is much smaller and easier to maneuver if she has to get around destroyed infrastructure. Now given I’ve described Evil Ron as extremely competent as a villain, why is he letting Kim operate freely? Generally, villains follow certain flaws knowingly - Senor Senior Senior in particular is the biggest offender but he at least has the justification of doing it more or less to relieve his boredom and generally being one of the most polite villains. But also because, well, as I said before as a villain Ron wants his enemies to know he’s won, he wants them beat, he wants parades and recognition and a building with his Z plastered onto it… and well, ego is a flaw of many villains. Pride comes before the fall. So with that chapter sorted, Kim’s got her objective and we’ve seen what Grimm’s scheme has unleashed. The genie is out of the bottle; but now can Kim get it back in, and if it really starts to go down the sewers is Grimm going to be able to stop what he’s unleashed before the whole world finds out what canned sunshine tastes like? Next chapter: We Do Ron-Ron
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 22, 2016 20:25:56 GMT -5
Chapter 6 - We Do Ron-Ron The world’s undergoing the effects of a global Tower of Opposite Alignment, and right now Kim is the only normal good guy still with her faculties proper and most of the other villains will be far from Middleton. Can Kim live up to that promise to beat Ron, Grimm, and Rhonda alone if that was what it took? … wait a second. Is Evil!Ron telling Grimm to destroy his good side if that’s what it takes? And Grimm’s considering it? Okay, this is supposed to be a canon-compliant fic and there’s still more stuff in the series to go, but still… Grimm’s doing this for revenge and this could go very dark very fast. Especially since the world’s already risking instant sunshine getting uncanned. Still, I do like that the villains actually ignored Kim. Even if they recognized her, most probably would rather her not be her bingo book if they’re evil villains. And since they’re not henchmen, they’ve got no reason to try and oppose her like henchmen do in the video games where they attack Kim and try to run interference to prevent her from reaching her objective. Plus, even Evil Ron can make mistakes. Slyrr originally planned on having a few subplots of Kim fighting her way through - dealing with villainous Wade, Monique, and Barkin - but cut it as being fluff and unneeded. Much as it was a missed opportunity, I think it might’ve been a good idea. Now maybe he could’ve done one of them to set the tone and gloss over the rest with a brief mention of a ‘highlight’, sort of like a montage, but the real core here is Kim, Evil Ron, and Team Probable. Also, unfortunately there was never a picture of it, but Ron using Rufus like a cat is a rather amusing mental image. Honestly I’m not sure what to make of this. On one hand, if Kim got the shot right from the get go it’d take off a lot of the time pressure she’s on and would probably result in her getting backup from Global Justice and the police. On the other, she knows that this is Evil Ron and that taking the shot might put him on alert if he isn’t already. And from what she’d know, Grimm probably would’ve advocated more security given he was wise enough to disrupt the chip. ‘course, if Ron intends for Kim to come face him, Kim has no reason to not try the shot because if Ron left a gap he didn’t fix it’d help and then she wouldn’t be walking into the trap as badly as she would be otherwise. An oft-asked question by the fandom too. Then again, the Battle Suit was originally just a prototype that got yanked out in desperation and in the fourth season it was never meant to be used so the writers had no need to modify its color scheme. Especially since they already were going to give Kim a new outfit anyways. ‘course, the battle suit should have a stealth mode presently where it uses optical cloaking, at which point it’s color flaws should be irrelevant. … okay, I know Grimm’s supposed to be a professional, but he’s now well aware that evil Ron doesn’t care for making sure his friends/family are set. Even if he isn’t someone you want to cross, if Grimm’s supposed to care for his team you’d think that by now he’d have a bit more of a reaction than needing to tell Jade “Hey sorry about the time I let your morality get reversed without consent on a personal mission, but hey presents!” And yeah, Grimm’s got his own battle suit now, courtesy of Evil Ron. When I first read through this, I completely missed Ron being the one who made Grimm’s suit, or by the time of A Friend in Darkness I had forgotten it. Personally I’m not sure of what to make of evil Ron making a new battle suit quickly, especially given that later on fixing it is a plot point and something that Wade has been struggling with. Admittedly, Kim’s suit mostly started malfunctioning after Dementor’s tampering, but still… if it was easy as making a new one you’d think Wade would have done that from the get go if it could be effectively thrown together. I mean, we don’t repair tanks or airplanes that have been busted up to the point where it’s cheaper to just buy a new one, we salvage what we can and make a new one in that case. Your repair when you either can’t get a new one, or it’s cheaper than getting a new one. Or Evil Ron isn’t just flipping morality, but gives him +20 Intelligence. (Which, given that the Attitudinator was sold to improve villainy, might actually be a feature of it!) ‘course, why is Grimm going to step aside if he outright said that you don’t want to cross Ron when he’s evil? Oh crap. … well if you want Kim to suffer, that’s one hell of a way to do it. And considering this is petty revenge, one of the most morally bankrupt and despicable ways to do it, proving that yes, Grimm is a villain. Okay that’s it, gank Grimm Probable with the business end of a shock staff. It’s not suggested in story, but if it was me I’d probably use Grimm’s good to fix Ron since even Drakken and Shego had some. After all, he happily destroyed Ron’s, he was willing to destroy a key part of someone… might as well be him who has to lose his to fix it. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind… but sometimes justice needs a certain sense of irony. Of course he could be lying - he’s a villain - but at this point… why would he lie? He’s shown no standards that would show that he would consider this kind of thing to be morally wrong, or if he does embrace evil openly like most villains we haven’t seen where he draws a line. He wants Kim to suffer, and to make people suffer sometimes the truth is the most effective weapon - it’s the the fic’s summary FFS. Sure, there’s the fact of needing to be canon compliant so at this point Ron needs to be restored at some point, but it’s still open ended enough that for all we know Grimm is going to ambush some random person because he needs to put the genie back in the bottle before his third wish kills him. And Grimm has shown nothing indicating he’s unwilling to do it to people he doesn’t care much about - he didn’t care much about Ron save as a way to get back at Kim, I can perfectly see him mugging some random person to fix Ron quietly before he finds out he’s lost all his freedom to the overlord he unleashed. Given this, Grimm’s got a lot of gall to claim Kim never cared for Ron considering that she dropped everything to try and save the good part of him ripped out forcibly by the Attitudinator - which she previously did not know was in Grimm’s possession I might add and he only reveals it after she moves on after he doesn’t answer about what the catch is… hard to view him sympathetically after this. Which is actually a good thing because this makes him very effective as a villain - unlike most from Kim Possible, Grimm has now managed to make himself hateable and for the right reasons. Drakken, Shego, Dementor, Monkey Fist, DNAmy, the Seniors, even Adrena Lynn or Gemini… they were all bad guys and of course the viewers want them to lose, but they were never hated for their evil. If anything they were more the Kane style of villain, evil but liked despite (or because of) that. Their evil was often comedic and enjoyable to watch. Grimm? As of now, he’s become the villain that’s hated not because he’s a bad character or he’s got a stupid costume or anything like that, but because he. Is. EVIL. In many ways, I’d dare say more so than Shego who topped of a bad guy test in one touch. He’s not just wearing the evil faction colors at this point, he’s doing serious damage, doing acts of incredible moral depravation, and those acts ruin a rather sympathetic and likable character and may cause another to have to make a hard decision that’s similarly amoral and damaging if we want that likeable buffoon back. Really, Grimm here is the Arcturus Mengsk to the other villains’ UED, to compare to StarCraft: Brood War. The UED weren’t really unlikable given things like introducing Medics and also smacking down guys like Arcturus Mengsk who… screwed over his own (very likable) allies for little gain and also left a bunch of loyal troops to die, and on top of that had basically betrayed the player and then proceeded to lord it over everyone else. He’s reviled because he’s scum, not just ‘oh he’s the bad guy, take him on’. Which, IMO, goes back to Slyrr’s point about none of the established villains having a psychological impact and not wanting to just escalate them to the point where they would kill Kim since most of them rely on physical threats. While something like this is befitting Season One’s portrayal of Drakken, at the same time it’s also an aspect that Drakken hasn’t been able to grasp since So the Drama and it’s a vastly different angle than Eric as well. Grimm, however, is a character that is designed to fill that needed psychological opponent void to make this work, and as an original character he’s not limited by the canon in how vile he can be. Slyrr is free to have Grimm be an utter monster without having to worry about tying in the other appearances of the villain later, which also makes Grimm uniquely suited to unleashing the sealed evil that Zorpox the Conqueror is. So, now that Grimm’s stabbed a red headed heroine in the back, how’s it going to go from here? Unfortunately, Siege Tanks are not an option... “My name is Kim Possible. You have destroyed part of my boyfriend’s personality and endangered the whole world. Prepare to get wrecked.” Um, yes? Kim is angry, but it’s a righteous fury at Grimm’s crimes. In the heat of battle of course you’re going to look furious. Ron is… presently not even himself. Is this what I finally think it is? BOOYAH! Been waiting to see that. So much I can see it again. About damn time Kim got the upper hand against Grimm in her area of expertise. Man that’s gotta freaking hurt - he’s not wearing a helmet and he probably took that manhole cover with the back of his head. Wait, what? I mean, the suit tear is one thing, but Grimm being calm about being blown through a steel manhole and getting his cheese shredded? OH COME THE crap ON SLYRR! You go into that whole thing about Kim learning, gaining a decisive upper hand, and now you throw it all away as Grimm letting it happen? And Slyrr wonders why reviewers have said Grimm wins too often... Admittedly the word used is ‘looking’, and given that Ron probably planned for it he could’ve just had knowledge of the contingency so he was able to remain smug despite getting blown through a manhole. But the way it’s written it really comes off as Grimm let her win to set this up. I mean seriously, it’s not like this part of the plot called for Grimm to have not broken a sweat and not being damaged at all by his fight with Kim. She went in assuming he was weakened and it was Ron who struck her with the manacle, not Grimm. I really don’t see why Kim couldn’t have at least had that small victory without it being turned into Grimm letting it happen and her playing into his scheme. Plus considering how quickly people tend to get back up after getting knocked down in KP, it’s not like this would really knock him down for the count. I mean, Shego was back up in what, half a minute when Eric revealed himself to laugh as Ron blacked out from getting clotheslined in So the Drama? I actually asked Slyrr which song he was referring to since Kim referred to the tune as familiar - Ron has, in the show, penned two songs as priorly mentioned, Say the Word and The Naked Mole Rap. In the former during Hidden Talent, Kim missed Ron covering for her absence due to a mission in the talent show, which at this point is about two years ago. More recently in Rappin’ Drakken, Ron did the Naked Mole Rap where Kim missed it until the very end due to getting attacked by Shego while checking to see if Drakken had slipped his brainwashing shampoo into the judge. The song below is actually based on ' Da Do Run Run', a 63 song by the Crystals, and unrelated to the series. So Kim probably just heard it on the radio or something. Also, was that an implication that they had rehearsed it? … man Grimm will go far for revenge. Yeah. Originally I thought it was based on the Naked Mole Rap; it certainly has a similar vibe in what it tells. I will say, reading it after Grimm’s actions earlier in the chapter is a bit of a slap in the face, it’s a good one. It’s mood whiplash, and as serious as the KP setting could get at times it always had some comedy. Take Oh No! Yono!, which is easily the darkest of the KP episodes considering liberal usage of an eldritch abomination and numerous characters getting turned to stone. Ron’s adopted baby sister happens to be another chosen one, and what’s playing in the background? A kid’s song equivalent of something like the Wiggles (or whatever that kid Disney stuff was) because that’s what Ron’s been trying to use with her to get her moving on her own. That said, I think this worked better because the traumatic event is separate and it’s more used as a showcase of Ron as a hammy villain than how the bad guy loses. It’s hard to take an eldritch abomination seriously, even after it’s done all sorts of terrifying things, when it’s losing to a baby dancing to that kind of stuff. Okay losing to a baby is also hard to take seriously but at least it had been set up as another ancient weapon kind of deal. And that’s the end of this chapter. So, given the events what can I make of it? Well as I iterated above, Grimm just made himself utterly unsympathetic. Rhonda is interestingly enough rather backseatish in this whole ordeal. Grimm is a bit too and he’s more of an antagonist in the way than really developing himself, but he’s still developing into one nasty bad guy and he’s had some scenes to focus himself as a creep. My real big problem is how Kim’s loss here is written. It’s set up like Kim gets a victory but walks into a trap because Ron had a contingency in place. But it reads like Grimm allowed Kim that victory purely to use that trap when it easily could’ve been Kim won it legitimately but the trap was a contingency. With all the stuff Grimm has done, a small amount of comeuppance seems appropriate, especially given that he could easily be back on his feet without really standing out considering how fast everyone does in the series anyways. Especially since it doesn’t need to happen for the plot. In All Things Probable, Kim needed that painful defeat to have Chapter Four make sense. Here… what does Kim getting a legitimate victory spoil, if it wasn’t meant to be her getting a small win but walking into the trap? I just don’t see the need other than leaving Kim utterly helpless for the random Disney song out of nowhere, which was all Ron anyways. Grimm could’ve been stunned and Kim hesitates to do the last blow fearing she might kill him or something long enough for Ron to slap the Mega Feedback Modulator onto her leg. A good comparison here would be the other time Kim used the battle suit against a foe of her equal caliber in hand-to-hand, in So the Drama. Drakken had a similar mental gameplan in place against Kim, and when Kim attacks he has Shego try to defeat her. Kim defeats Shego, but is electrocuted by Eric. The difference here, at least how I read it, is Kim’s agency in the matter. In StD, she legitimately beats Shego by her own combat skills (as she had done many times prior) and using her battle suit which was a risk she was taking because of its experimental nature. Here, it comes off as Grimm allowing Kim to get the upper hand rather than her overcoming his defense by learning from her past defeats. That I think is the real problem - the story sets it up as Kim overcoming a prior failing, then yanks it out from under her. That said, I think this chapter cements Grimm’s style as a villain, and that’s important to make him more than a replacement Shego for Evil Ron to order around and a way to make things happen. We’ve gotten a view of him here, of how far he goes to get revenge, but the question now is how much farther. And of course, how is Ron going to get restored to normal? Anyways, three more chapters remain. Next up: Sensei and Sensibility
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Post by neosaiyanangel on Mar 22, 2016 20:31:15 GMT -5
You might want to start spoilering for length...
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 22, 2016 20:33:35 GMT -5
Chapter 7 - Sensei and Sensibility Kim’s been captured, Grimm has (as far as can be told) destroyed Ron’s good side extracted by the Attitudinator, and now the ninjas are here. Let the fight resume.
While Wade proved that science can trump magic in The Full Monkey, the reverse is also true. Plus it is a good thing to show that the Transducer has its limits.
Heh, the Lotus may bloom… not a reference at all. Hmmm. I guess now would be a good time to discuss Ron being a ‘Chosen One’. The first real indication of it was the episode Monkey Ninjas in Space, where after Monkey Fist’s plan was foiled the source of the prophecy he was following in that episode made a correction.
Ron got rid of the Monkey Ninjas who followed him afterwards at some point, how was unspecified but then again continuity by accident. However, this idea would persist into the second season during Exchange and onwards where Sensei had Ron transferred via an exchange student program for about a week. From this point onwards this was Ron’s supposed destiny, if only referenced in episodes relating to the Yamanouchi school (and by extension Monkey Fist, since he was the antagonist as he sought similar status), and eventually culminated in Graduation where Ron went super saiyan with MMP. Initially it was merely Ron’s destiny being tied to that of the Lotus Blade, but by Season 4 it had expanded considerably. Because this was one of the few persistent plot threads in the series - as I’ve said Kim Possible had continuity by accident and small references - it started to really get attention. Particularly since you could weld in a couple other episodes as part of Ron’s metaplot here like The Ron Factor where GJ has a similar idea about Ron being the key to Kim’s success. Some of this can be attributed to getting a new director, Steve Loter, who shifted quite a bit of the focus away from Kim and towards the others. Ron’s little chosen one status was kinda-sorta secondary; after Exchange the main reference to it was Gorilla Fist which was less about that and more Sensei being kidnapped. But as I said, Season 4 expanded it considerably and brought it back into full force. Slyrr also makes use of it in his fics, though here it’s not too intense. Personally? I honestly never cared for it. I’ve never been a fan of ‘chosen one’ stuff, at least when it’s specified to a specific person. I mean, foreseeing someone doing it, sure that works, but foreseeing exactly the details? That’s a little hard to buy. Then again I’m not a fan of predestination, so… *shrugs* Plus, Kim never got a meta arc to match. Even if So the Drama was supposed to be the culmination of Kim’s arc (leaving behind a lot of the peer pressure vulnerabilities and maturing quite a bit), I still think that Kim should’ve gotten a meta arc to match Ron’s, even if it was more compact. Let them both culminate the arcs together as a team, not Ron stealing the spotlight. Anyways, back to the Return of Zorpox.
Correction - you mutilated his mind, Grimm. But wait a minute, Grimm being one of Sensei’s students?
My first reaction is ‘bullcrap’ on Grimm being equal by the time he was cast out, especially since Grimm is still growing up and I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say he is not one of those ‘trained from birth’ types. And it’s not going to be ‘vigor of youth, frailty of age’ since Sensei has kicked that in the balls quite thoroughly. Now, Slyrr says that Sensei didn’t do all of his training - eventually he went to Monkey Fist and did a lot of the grunt work in his own time (whereas Kim had a bunch of extracurriculars at her school), but I still find the idea that Grimm could equal Sensei without complete training to be odd. Now? Yeah, I’d be willing to say it. But not back then. Still, at least Sensei saw through it before it got too bad. Admittedly, this does nicely justify how Grimm would know about the Lotus Blade and Yamanouchi besides Jade hacking into the unknown like Wade does. Mind, Grimm is wrong in one thing: not attacking has one disadvantage. Initiative. If you defend, you cede to your opponent the ability to choose where to strike. Now sometimes defending is the right move, but here I’m not sure if it is. Plus defending only goes so long, eventually the advantage becomes nullified in the back-and-forth.
Not a bad rebuttal, but let’s take a look at Grimm’s philosophy here. Yin-Yang is, as Grimm explains, the idea of good and evil both existing. The reason for the black dot in the white part (Yang) and the white dot in the black (Yin) is that both have some of the other in there. It’s all about balance, and in Taoist philosophy that balance is also important for the world to keep going. Too much of one, and the world either stagnates or goes out of control. And he also indicates that overall, the glass is half full with the light drowning it out. But for those who have it the other way, they’re ‘special’, and he considers that to be extraordinary. Probably something he figured to feed into his own darkness and justify it in his mind since well… seriously, I want to know how he sleeps at night considering that all his contracts could end up with someone taking over the world and putting him under that guy’s bootheel. Applying this to the KP setting… actually works because both Ron and Team Go had a very widely seen dark side in the series, while Shego and Drakken had a good side. And for Kim, there’s some very dark places she goes on her own sometimes. The implication that both exist in everyone really fits how the setting approaches it, and in some ways how the villains are always there trying to take over the world no matter how many times they go. Amusingly, Kim and Grimm flip the usual dynamic. In Chinese philosophy, Yin is usually female and Yang is usually male. This also happened in The Legend of Korra with Raava and Vaatu (though those two are closer more towards Zoroastrian philosophy than Yin-Yang, particularly given that they’re not supposed to be in balance)
Yeah, Kim’s not going to sit it out, but Ron’s also noticing it and making preparations. ‘bout time Rhonda got a chance to act though besides just manning a register.
Well, at least Sensei got some good hits in so far. Grimm isn’t beaten yet, but it’s a start.
Considering they’re dating and Ron’s presently evil, that last line comes across wrong. Almost as wrong as the Wego twins dogpiling Kim and pinning her down on the ground as she struggled…
I think this is an important point to make - Kim knows that this isn’t Ron’s fault, so she doesn’t want to hurt him. Makes sense, even if they’ve sparred together they would’ve sparred with either limited contact or the usual safeties. And she’s probably right - if Sensei can handle Grimm, then Ron’s the big opponent. As far as she knows the ninjas can handle Rhonda - particularly Yori who’s quite skilled herself - so if she gets rid of Ron as a player, then she can help take down Grimm or Rhonda, and then everyone piles in on whoever’s still standing.
Yup, he’s cuckoo. Another important thing to note: although Kim has faced Monkey Fist before, by all indications his MMP was offline or not really usable in an obvious manner. And as has been noted in previous commentary, Kim’s knowledge of Ron’s MMP being active is at the very least timed around Gorilla Fist. She knew Ron had it, but as far as she knew it had faded with the statues that had granted it in the first place.
Specific outside context is going to be a bastard again, isn’t it?
Ron’s foot stop - his most well known move with MMP to the point where when it was implemented in the third GBA game it’s the only thing he does with it - mostly to insta-gib non-boss enemies (similar to Kim doing a handspring kick which has a similar effect) as well as knocking down breakable walls (which Kim would do with sonic mines). He used it during Exchange, and this was MMP’s main feat for a while that couldn’t be mixed up with Ron having normal combat skills as well. Still, I do like that it’s a relatively fair fight so far. Admittedly Kim wore herself out fighting the laser net first, but still... Anyways, Rhonda’s turn to shine:
Yeouch. That’s a rather sharp jab given that Yori did seem to have feelings for Ron and actually gave him a kiss on the cheek at the end of Gorilla Fist. Kim has to explain it to him when he misses the implication. ‘course, Rhonda’s last showing with Yori more or less involved her making a fool of herself and getting whacked in the chest. Rhonda better have something more than ninja-nip if she’s going to survive...
Okay, ‘Yuri’ is a typo, but considering all the mind shenanigans going on and it preceding an order it’s rather amusing. But at least it’s only once; better than almost having “Nihlus Kryik” as “Nihlus Arterius” multiple times in the same chapter before catching it prior to publishing. That would’ve been embarrassing... Rhonda’s espousing the same philosophy as Grimm, though. Still, seems so far she’s had less of the character development.
Ouch. Rhonda really likes using that barb, doesn’t she? Still, reminds me of this exchange from So the Drama between Ron and Eric (then merely just a new student.
Nice to see some of the subtler similarities in play.
Given that the first ones are usually super prototypes, I’m curious how 1.1, 1.2, 1.5, 2.0, and so on will function. Then again, impractically powerful things are a villain classic...
… where did Ron find all the time and materials to make all these evil machines. I mean, sure, they weren’t just using scrap and the Lotus Blade is a powerful tool most villains don’t have, but... Eh, where does Drakken keep finding henchmen and doomsday devices. *shrugs* Still, if one could fight Yori to a rough standstill for a couple minutes, why didn’t Rhonda spam the lot of them at first, unless there’s a manufactory stamping them out beneath the warehouse and these are the only ones presently ready? Admittedly that’s probably nitpicking... Anyways, back to Kim.
I like the contrast. It’s a battle of Skill against Brawn, essentially. Kim has skill that Ron lacks in hand-to-hand fighting. Grimm has the battle suit to make up for his deficiencies in comparison to Sensei’s decades of mastery. And in each way they’re both winning - Ron’s brawn of MMP boosting himself is enough to shrug off Kim’s skilled attacks (particularly given she probably doesn’t want to hurt him too badly), Sensei’s skill is overcoming the bolstering that the battle suit gives Grimm. Still, Kim never pushing Ron to use MMP strikes me more as Kim not knowing about it still being active, then not forcing him too since she probably assumed he had what he could get out of it after training at Yamanouchi. Plus, how would Kim train Ron in a style she knows nothing about? She’d be learning just as much as he was in those sessions. Now could she train him in conventional Monkey Kung Fu? Probably. But the magic component she’d need to either help Ron experiment with and learn via a lot of intense trial and error, or they’d need Sensei to do it. Still, Kim does have a target: Ron’s been made evil by the Transducer, so it can affect him. And if I could spitball on what’s been seen so far, maybe a chip that could be inserted into Ron to permanently project the effect on him to restore the balance artificially. It’s not ideal, but it’s something that would probably completely get Kim out of the moral hazard of having to get someone else’s good.
Well, that’s one way to do it. Rather surprising that Sensei didn’t avoid the other one since that still had to go around his wrist. I mean, if you had homing manacles why not open with those? Unless he needed one on first to provide a target? Eh, probably overthinking it; the idea was that Grimm couldn’t beat Sensei until he had tied an arm and a leg behind him with a brief opening. At least Sensei did manage to hold him off for a while, even if a lot was glossed over. Bet Grimm enjoys using them - half bet that he wanted to use them on Kim first rather than the Mega Feedback Modulator but Ron overrode it or they suspected the battle suit might counteract it (after all, if it blew off all of Ron’s clothes worn over it during Ill Suited…)
I can’t really fault Yori’s loss here - she got beat by attrition and had the misfortune of being knocked into a trap. Rhonda’s braggy, but then again that perfectly fits the idea of her being Ron’s opposite. Plus given all the fear she had earlier of facing them I’d probably be cocky too.
Okay, this is too easy. Even if she’s taking a beating, evil Ron isn’t this stupid. Then again, he got blindsided by Drakken suddenly popping in with the Attitudinator again and slapping it on his head. I mean, arrogance and pride before the fall or not...
Called it. But the problem here is that Kim’s reinforcements are gone and it was down to that line, so… now what?
Looks like we’re about to see if Kim can live up to that promise since it’s just her and now Grimm’s attacking.
Short, but foreshadowy… only two people have used ‘coco moo’ in the show. Both of whom are allies. And Sensei’s smile… Mind the image utterly gives it away if you ask me, but then again if you catch the reference to the coco moo that gives it away too.
You know, at least this time Kim was simply flat out dogpiled rather than losing in a one-on-one fight. And she actually did some damage back taking out one of the Mega-bots.
Like the image of Kim on her porch, I think this image really sells that as far as Kim knows, the bad guys have won. She’s alone, she’s outnumbered by individuals roughly on par with her, and she’s been worn out from all the fighting. And it really gets across Grimm and Rhonda as evil with how they’re sauntering in. Well, one more paragraph in this chapter...
Considering that’s a one liner to finish off the hero… yikes. Certainly a cliffhanger to leave the story hanging on. So… this chapter. Well… I guess what I can say is that the victories were, for the most part, believable. I mean, sudden warbots out of nowhere is a little eye roll inducing, but it’s not too far out of the norm for the series (“Suits me! Suits of armor, that is!” [cue knight-like robots]) at least it provided a sensible explanation for Yori going down to Rhonda when the last time Rhonda fought Yori all the evil sidekick could do was make noise and get hit in the chest. Though really, at this point I’m actually ready to start calling evil Ron a villain sue - I mean between MMP making him able to have the upper hand over Kim in the bloody Battle Suit which should have made it a much more even fight. After all, that’s why Kim suited up in it: evil Ron - to say nothing of him commanding Team Probable - was a firepower discrepancy that she needed to address, and the suit provides said firepower. Which does go towards my problems with Ron’s MMP in the series, particularly Graduation (though that hadn’t premiered yet by this point of writing): it’s an utter setting breaking and makes Kim seem to be redundant. I’ve got no problems with some being stronger than Kim, my problem is how she’s being made redundant. Now, when I had reviewed A Friend in Darkness Slyrr made a comparison to Venom with Grimm, and how it was frustrating that Spider Man couldn’t get a hit on him. Having not read that storyline I can’t comment, but as I’ve said before the problem is how solidly Grimm is winning and doesn’t seem to be touchable by Kim without him willing it, even being able to overcome Sensei (after all, he had to get the magnet on him). Now as a villain that’s somewhat needed to make him a good threat, but he’s also competing with evil Ron here. Really, in some ways Grimm’s the villain more than Ron, and that’s not because he dropped to throwing out the capsule in the last chapter or instigating all of it, but focus. This is Grimm’s revenge in the end, he unleashed Zorpox the Conqueror as a stepping stone to that. But when Zorpox is around, he definitely takes quite the focus too. One thing that’s lingering though is the fact that Grimm doesn’t seem to really care about the fact that Jade was warped by the Transducer. I mean, he’s supposed to care for his team, right? Admittedly he hasn’t had much of a chance to talk to him about it, but you’d think that it would’ve come up at some point when victory is at hand. Still, it’s basically a darkest hour chapter with the heroes losing. Fortunately, Slyrr foreshadowed the cavalry quite well. Speaking of which, next chapter: Hail Hail, The Gang’s All Here
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Post by Luke Danger on Mar 22, 2016 20:34:31 GMT -5
You might want to start spoilering for length... Yeah, might be a good idea. Any suggestions on specifically how? IE, spoiler the scenes, not the commentary?... or I guess I could spoiler the whole thing... actually yeah, think I'll do that once I get RoZ up.
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