Disclaimer: Don't expect too much from me. I think I've proven that I can't be trusted to follow through on all my plans.
Hello everyone. You know how a bunch of authors on this site make Author's Notes in both their main stories, and in some cases in stand-alone stories of their own? Well Diablo Ex Machina is throwing his hat into the ring and making his own version of this cop-out.
Diablo Ex Machina Presents: DC Guidelines
Hello again loyal fans! I'm fresh off the wheel from my Marvel and Capcom Guidelines, and ready to get rolling on the next pile of guidelines. In case the headliner of this chapter didn't make it clear, today we'll be focusing on DC Comics and the various guidelines to factor into the equation when writing for them, be it in the professional or fan fiction capacity. As always these guidelines are only meant to serve as a helping hand nudging you onto the smartest path to use when dealing with the various odds and ends of the DC Universe and beyond, and not forcefully applied and unbending rules that must be adhered to. Even if you don't completely agree with my exact methods and borders to ensure an orderly DC story, I strongly encourage you to create and/or apply some set of rules to any DC stories you write.
DC Guideline 1: Superman, Yes or No - I'm gonna address the elephant in the room right away. Superman (and all derivatives thereof) are MAJOR selling points for anything they appear in, simply because he's just so damn iconic and powerful. This can be a good thing, or a bad thing, but it's always gonna be a thing. Before anything else about DC Comics, you have to decide whether or not you want the big blue boy scout to get involved. There are reasons to use Superman, as well as reasons to not use Superman. If you want a reason to use Superman, you'll find one on your own. This isn't me being lazy, it's just a simple fact. Superman is one of those characters that don't NEED a reason to appear in your DC Comics stories, he'll just be there for whatever and be awesome doing it. However, if done poorly (a very easy feat) Superman, as well as any other characters based off of him, or just from the planet Krypton in general, are capable of becoming what the internet refers to as "God Mode Sues". When creating a Superman story, or just a story with Superman in it, you have to give him some sort of limit to his powers, or weaknesses that many antagonistic parties have a relatively easy time getting. The comics version has become broken beyond all belief, with LITERALLY INFINITE POWER, whereas several old cartoons (looking fondly at you, DCAU) gave him a somewhat realistic upper limit to his strength and other powers, and did a good job of making him use his smarts just as much as he uses his muscle. Granted, the guy is no Batman, but who is besides Batman? Either way, deciding whether or not to use Superman, and Kryptonians and things derived from Krypton in general, is always gonna be the first of many judgement calls to be made with DC Comics Fan Fiction.
DC Guideline 2: No Time Travel - I mentioned this before in the first chapter, but it bares repeating here. Between Batman Beyond, Legion of Superheroes, Jonah Hex and the Rouge Bunch, Rip Hunter and the Legends of Tomorrow, Kamandi, and who knows how many others, DC relies on stories from different time periods far more than Marvel. True, it's not their entire library of material, but they are more reliant on them than most. Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly okay for you to write stories about these characters, teams, and other concepts that only exist in different time periods, but only so long as you focus ONLY on those time periods. It worked well enough in the Batman Beyond and Legion of Superheroes cartoons, it should work for anyone else who wants to do them.
DC Guideline 3: No Parallel Universes - Just like DC relies more on Time Travel/Other Time Periods than many other franchises, it also relies more on Parallel Universes than most. There are tons of different versions of many different characters in their central universe. Between the Mirrored Universes where heroes become villains and villains become heroes, the pocket dimension inhabited by anthropomorphic cartoon animals, and a universe filled with blatant parodies/rip-offs of Marvel characters, there's quite a lot of different universes going around, and these are just the ones I know off the top of my head. Granted, some universes might overlap well enough that there need not be any distinction to begin with. For instance, in light of the "Flashpoint" Event, we see that most of the Wildstorm Universe and a select few parts of the Vertigo Universe like Swamp-Man, Shade The Changing Man, and John Constantine manage to fit quite snugly with the rest of the main DC Universe, baring a few minor details here and there. Bottom line is, unless you specifically sort a fan fiction with DC characters and concepts into the crossover section with whatever other things you want to be part of the shared universe that isn't already part of said shared universe, it's best to keep the apples and oranges in separate bins.
DC Guideline 4: No Outsourced Material - As a major comic book company, sometimes DC is called upon to make comics for characters and concepts originally created and owned by a third party. These companies typically give some of the comic book rights to DC in exchange for publishing their material. They've done this with MANY third-party companies; from Warner Brothers, to Hanna-Barbera, to Hasbro, to who knows what else. Comic Vine (my main source of comic book information) may say that DC owns the rights to about 16000 characters, but that number is including the likes of Bugs Bunny & Daffy Duck, or He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, or even Scooby-Doo, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and who knows what else from Hanna-Barbera! Without those characters, you can bet that there would be AT LEAST 1000 fewer characters filed away under DC Comics. Hell, they even write comics for Mortal Kombat! Just imagine how well the cast of THAT infamous fighting game would fit into a DC Universe! Oh wait, you don't have to, they already made a game out of that idea years ago! Now that I've either ruined or bettered your childhood forever, please proceed in an orderly manner to DC Guideline 5.
DC Guideline 5: Limit The Lanterns - Once there was just Green, then there was Pink, followed by Yellow, and now we've got an entire rainbow of Lantern Corps to deal with! I'm not saying that you need to get rid of ALL Lanterns, just limit what you're working with a bit. Between all nine different colored rings we've seen over 700 people wearing Lantern Rings, and that's WAY too much! Look, just drop the Black and White Lanterns from the list entirely, don't give rings to any characters who are already effective heroes/villains without rings, obviously subtract any members that are only known as "[So-and-So] of Sector [So-and-So]", and get rid of the whole thing where Living Entities embody the colors of the Spectrum, and you can easily knock that number down to 500 or less. Hell, if you keep the other guidelines in mind while you're doing this, then you might even get that number closer to 400 than 500.
DC Guideline 6: When In Doubt, Watch Cartoons - This Guideline isn't really a restriction, so much as it is a way to keep your inspiration going. Even if you ignore every other Guideline on this list, the one thing you can always count on for certain regarding DC is that the DCAU will ALWAYS be a prime source of inspiration for future writers. Between; Batman The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, Superman The Animated Series, Static Shock, Justice League, Justice League Unlimited, and even the lesser known Zeta Project, these shows in a singular shared universe had almost EVERYTHING you could ever want - and even some things you never knew you wanted, but greatly enjoyed nonetheless - in a DC Universe. Not the mention the Teen Titans cartoon (the original, not that thing which shall never, ever be spoken of), The Batman, Legion of Superheroes, Green Lantern The Animated Series, Beware The Batman, and the new Justice League Action are pretty damn impressive as well. While Marvel cartoons are mostly hit-and-miss, especially ever since Disney bought them out, DC has been consistently excelling at, and even exceeding our expectations in terms of cartoons pretty reliably for decades now. Yeah, they have a few lemons every now and again *cough*teentitansgo*cough* but when they get it right, they hit it clear out of the park! Hell, even Batman The Brave and the Bold was a damn good homage to the classic comics of the Golden and Silver Ages, not to mention their musical numbers are a guilty pleasure for many a fan. Seriously, just try to tell me that you didn't LOVE Neil Patrick Harris as The Music Meister, or Catwoman, Black Canary, and Huntress singing the single most innuendo laden song of all time. DC is consistently good all around - except for their pathetic attempts at copying the Cinematic Universe that serves as the only thing keeping Marvel alive right now - but when it comes to their TV Shows, whether it's live action or animated, they don't screw around! (with one disgusting, festering, putrid, ten ton pile of cow turds of an exception)
DC Guideline 7: No One-Shot Characters - I said it before in my Marvel Guidelines, so I won't go too much into detail. The long and short of it is that, according the Comic Vine, DC Comics have used about 16000 different characters in their material over the many decades they've been around. However, approximately 4000 of those characters were only ever used once in the comics, and therefor aren't interesting enough to warrant the time used to make them... with some exceptions. Those exceptions are characters that originated on the many highly popular cartoons and live action shows that DC has done over the years, but just never really took off in the comics. Likewise, characters that only showed up once in comics based in the same universe as the cartoons, even if they never showed up in the cartoons themselves, are also welcome. Not everybody reads comic books, but most people do watch TV, so make the most of it.
DC Guideline 8: Use The Best, Toss The Rest - Like DC Guideline 7, I touched upon this in my Marvel Guidelines, but it bares some reworking and repeating for DC Guidelines. As with any franchise that lasts long enough, DC characters and concepts have gone through many revisions, reimaginings, and retcons over time. If you're gonna make a Fan Fiction of these various characters and concepts, you should stick with what YOU think are the best versions of those characters, or at least the version best suited to YOUR story. Hell, you can even mix and match parts from multiple incarnations of them to make something semi-new! All that matters is that you stay true to something - some core element of some sort - that makes these characters so unique and memorable. Also, with massive-scale reboots being the DC word of the day, you really should take advantage of what you've got to work with.
Well, those are all the Guidelines for DC Comics based Fan Fiction that you really need to know. Yeah, Marvel had 10 Guidelines in the previous chapter, but that's because there's two fundamental differences between Marvel and DC Comics. The first is that DC Comics just have far fewer characters than Marvel, and trimming down the amount of usable characters is the primary reason for the Marvel and DC Guidelines. There are other reasons, like establishing borders in morality, but this is the main one. Seriously, Comic Vine may claim that Marvel only has about 1000 more characters than DC at the time of writing this, but the difference is more vast than the first impression would imply. One-Shot Characters aside, DC just has more third-party franchises to work with than Marvel. Also, they rely more heavily on alternate versions of their characters, to the point where many have their own pages on Comic Vine. This leads directly to a greater percentage of characters being trimmed away with each Guideline, which, again, is the main point of the Marvel and DC Guidelines.
Second, Marvel is the daring and adventurous company, with major risk taking in their stories all around! They always try to outdo their previous performances, but they don't always succeed. They live fast and loose with their ideas, gambling their artistic integrity and profit margins in a very high stakes game! When they win, they make it BIG, like their Cash Cow MCU Franchise! When they lose however, they REALLY lose, like their ENTIRE COMIC BOOK LINEUP SINCE 2000, AND THEIR DISNEY CARTOON LINEUP.
Meanwhile, DC Comics like to play it smarter. They maintain a steady pacing of above average quality, let other companies take the big risks first, and then decide whether or not they should try their hand at these new ideas based on fan response. When something is proven to work, whether it's at their own creative hand, or those of another company, they tend to make the smart decision and put more time, effort, and money into it like with the DCAU. Sure, they take risks from time to time as well, but those risks tend to be smaller and more forgivable when they're bad, and more timeless, memorable, and nostalgic down the road when they're good. DC Comics made their biggest mistakes with their Copycat Cinematic Universe, Teen Titans Go, and I think that period in the comics from October 2011 to July 2015(?). I don't know, I just heard through the grapevine that those three-and-a-half years were a major slump for DC Comics before they picked themselves back up and started doing things right again. Something about the period between the Flashpoint and Convergence Events being poorly received or something.
Anyway, my point is that Marvel, despite its similarly long and rightly celebrated history, fucks up WAY more than DC, and at least DC has the decency to KIND OF apologize for their blunders, while Marvel has become a huge, unapologetic asshole, at least with Joe Quesada and Issac Perlmutter running things. Marvel may be a trailblazer, but when they blaze a trail that NO ONE likes, they blame everyone but themselves, while expecting to be praised for everything they churn out, whether it's gold (increasingly rare) or a turd (increasingly common). Meanwhile, with the exception of the blatantly ill-advised/poorly executed DC Cinematic Universe and Teen Titans Go, DC Comics at least TRIES to always do right by their fans, and quickly recognizes when they've made a mistake while taking steps to fix it.
Hell, they even managed to take the flawed idea of a super hero Civil War and made it kinda, sorta believable when they did Justice League vs Suicide Squad. I've never read the series myself, but the premise is at least more believable than Marvel's attempts at Hero vs Hero conflicts. After all, the Justice League are a NGO superpower with some of the most powerful and noble heroes on the planet, while the Suicide Squad is a bunch of super villains drafted and blackmailed by the government specifically to provide both plausible deniability in dangerous covert missions, further the sometimes benign, but often twisted interests of the government, and a defense against the Justice League. The latter was literally MADE to oppose the former, and even though their members only technically qualify as anti-heroes in the loosest sense, it's still a more believable concept from the get go than something as STUPID as Hero Registration.
Ever since the year 2000, Marvel has only been concerned with their profits, often making decisions that are to the detriment of both their fan base and the very profit margins they so desperately cling to like starved and rabid animals. While DC Comics started showing some real promise again once they rebooted their entire library into something that feels like more effort, love, and positive character development into it. Marvel COULD easily do the same by rebooting all of their stuff as well, and I would readily welcome and celebrate that! They used to have a lot of genuinely good material, and even the stuff they have now has the potential to be fixed ever since Joe Quesada got kicked off his high horse and replaced. I don't WANT to hate Marvel, I want to love it again. Sadly, until EVERYTHING that happened under the tyranny of Joe "The Schmo" Quesada gets some SERIOUS retcon as some backwards nightmare dimension or something, I cannot love Marvel. I can love fan fictions of it, but Marvel itself will be nothing but garbage. But enough about my personal rants about Marvel vs DC.
Before we end things off here today, I can tell that a lot of you have been pretty anxious to see something extra in this chapter ever since you read DC Guideline 4. Discontinued stories aside, I don't like to disappoint my loyal readers. So here it is, the moment you've all been waiting for...
Diablo Ex Machina Presents: Mortal Kombat Guidelines
Yes folks, just like how I went over guidelines for Capcom in the same chapter as Marvel due to their popular crossover games, I'm doing the same thing with DC Comics and Mortal Kombat due to their own crossovers, and their recent (as of 2017) fighting games being made by the same company. Before I get started with these guidelines however, I just want you to know that most of these guidelines are being written for Mortal Kombat Fan Fiction as standalone stories, but some of them have more crossover implications. Namely, crossovers with the DC Comics universe, given the growing connection between their companies and games. Enough of all that worry for now, let's get on with the guidelines!
Mortal Kombat Guideline 1: Death is Merely a Suggestion - Let's be honest here, in a fighting game franchise that prides itself on allowing you to mercilessly and messily beat, break, brutalize, and outright execute your defeated opponents in the most gory and disturbingly creative ways, it's gonna be hard to keep track of who's alive, who's dead, and who's been resurrected about a bajillion times. Don't get me wrong, I still hate the idea of "Death is Cheap", but at the very, despite whatever may be the current case in canon, least YOUR stories should begin with whatever characters YOU want to be alive as alive, or dead as dead. Resurrections should still be avoided like the plague, or at least reserved for bad guys who have reviving an even bigger bad guy as their evil goal, but the living/dead status of the characters at the beginning of the stories should be up to you.
Mortal Kombat Guideline 2: No Guest Characters - Between the DC Comics characters that appeared in Mortal Kombat vs DC, horror movie monsters like Freddy Kruger, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, Alien, and Predator, and even the God of War Kratos, Mortal Kombat has had a lot of Guest Fighters in their games. Don't get me wrong, it's okay to use this stuff if you specifically create your story as a crossover, but a purely Mortal Kombat story should have purely Mortal Kombat characters, and the same applies to any other fan fictions anyone ever makes. Honestly, I'd really love to see a good Mortal Kombat/DC Comics crossover story sometime, but just make sure it's appropriately labeled, okay?
Mortal Kombat Guideline 3: Heroes vs Anti-Heroes - This is one of those guidelines that I mentioned would apply to crossovers more than anything else. Specifically, the Mortal Kombat/DC Comics crossovers I mentioned I wanted to see. Now we all know that most heroes in the DC universe have a No-Kill Code, no matter how bad the villains get. This clearly isn't gonna fly with the anti-heroes of the Mortal Kombat universe, who would sooner rip off the Joker's head and post selfies with it than let serious repeat offenders go back to their cardboard prisons. Obviously this would be a serious point of tension between Mortal Kombat and DC characters, so it would be nice to see their contrasting methods causing at least a little friction between them. Maybe not to the point of outright Civil War (still hate you, but DC does more logical Hero vs Hero conflicts - like Justice League vs Suicide Squad - than Marvel) but there's definitely gonna be some tension if they're ever forced to work together.
Follow all of these guidelines for Mortal Kombat, and your roster of Mortal Kombat characters should never rise above 200 at most. Hell, if you avoid the REALLY obscure Mortal Kombat characters like the ones that only appeared in the questionably canon/outright non-canon cartoon, live action series, movies, novels, and certain comics, then the number should ALWAYS be less than 150, if that. Even if you do a crossover with DC Comics (which has TONS of characters, even if you follow the DC guidelines) it's gonna be good to know that at least the Mortal Kombat half of things will be easier to manage.
Thank you all for coming to see my work in making Guidelines for Fan Fictions of all sorts. Please join me next time where I plan to go over a few story suggestions I have for all of you out there reading my stuff. Just you wait, I have plans for tons of stories that I just can't wait to share with you all! In fact, go look on my profile for a sneak peak at some of my story ideas/suggestions/requests if YOU can't wait. Until then, have a wonderful day!
