La pasticherie de Petra

The other day, I posted If you wanna know if he loves you so, a 150-word story about a boy meeting his soulmate(s)(?).

I included discussion questions in the first comment because I had recently had a Tumblr conversation with teland where I linked her to someone floating the possibility of discussion questions on fanfiction with the implication that the questions, and responses, would be AI slop.

She responded by writing discussion questions for her seminal DC Comics identity porn story, A clarification of range, written before we called it "identity porn" and long before the term got diluted into "X doesn't know Y's secret identity... yet!" which is more properly, if less catchily, (if I do say so myself) anagnorisis.

If you have any knowledge or inquisitiveness whatsoever about DC Comics, run, do not walk, to read or reread that story. I still laugh about it regularly, and I have to remind myself it's not canon. I read it before I read any of Young Justice or the relevant Teen Titans, and it built foundational parts of my characterization.

Here are teland's questions:

Have you lied about who you are if you've never known who that is?

Has anyone on any of the Earths spoken to Tim about consent? (Earth-3 does NOT count, Jervis!) Further: What are the implications of this for his future career as a vigilante?

Has Tim been canceled for the 'Jamal' incident, or has he given Kon-El (even more) terribly problematic kinks? (Do not ever show your work.)

My response was:

Tonight’s homework: Read Whither Kelvin Trillion, Wither the Republic (Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Explicit, the one in which one character writes filthy limericks about everyone else in canon worth boinking and a few who aren’t.)

Pre-reading: Given your knowledge of the author, speculate on the pairings.

Discussion Questions – Remember, you may skip one (1) of these at your discretion, but you are responsible for all the material.

1. Compare “Trillian 'Tricia’ McMillan,” “Calvin Trillin,” “Kelvin Trillion,” and “KT.” Estimate the number of jokes that can be embedded in two words. Show your work.

2. Pick a poem and perform scansion analysis. How does the poem in front of you differ from the traditional scansion of a limerick, if it does? To what extent does this differentiation result from the fictional poet’s well-documented disdain for rules, despite his dogged adherence to tradition?

3. How do the rhyme schemes of the poems reflect spoken Basic? Defend your thesis, including an analysis of the spoken accents used for the fictional poet in the canons in which he appears.

4. In one poem, a sex partner is described as “crass / But poetic.” Provide an example line of dialogue that illustrates this apparent contradiction in terms, either from an extant work or of your own devising.

5. Return to the pre-reading question. How accurate were your guesses? What do they reveal about you?

Té and I had a good laugh about it.

Then we got talking about soulmates as a trope, and I wrote the story linked at the top with discussion questions.

sanguinity's comment threw me bodily to the floor, convulsed with giggles of joy. It's considerably longer than the drabble-and-a-half I wrote and shows an attention to detail I cannot but applaud.

I may have broken kayfabe in my response. Can you blame me?

See, sometimes a good grade in commenting is normal to want and possible to achieve. I definitely got a good grade on the story and questions, so it's only fair.

But it's not a perfect grade, due sanguinity having good enough taste not to have watched the Star Wars prequels. Gotta deduct points for not reading the deeply silly text.