Let all our works be accessible to as much of the world as possible.
The 15 rules of the Black Pearl Crew are the parameters I set myself to write parodies within. These were developed based on my trial and error with the Comic Five parodies, as it was through those early works that I determined what did not work for me. Most of these rules are ones I suggest other parodists follow as well.
Comic Five parodies often went gross or violent places that could certainly have been avoided. They launched into disgusting descriptions when they could be describing the pirate lifestyle, had people screaming when they could have had rain putting a cannon out, and insulted mutants when they could be singing about their ship being out and alone. More information can be found on the Problem Parody Types, under Non improvements.
I direct you to the Comic Five page, where the killing sprees are explained at the beginning of their history. It is cumbersome to explain multiple times. For this and many other reasons, the Crew forbid that subject.
Another rule to help prevent needlessly unpleasant parodies. The Crew may refer to their enemies as nasty things, but only if it suits the song. They do not go out of their way to do it. They never call Disney names, either, knowing that would not fly with most of the world, even me.
The Comic Five had their own names for Davy Jones and his crew. I need not tell you what those were on this page for you to see the problem. All those did was make it so you had to know the parodist to know what the parody was about. They also believed they were dealing with a separate race of fish-people and were known to use the terms Homo sapiens and species
to make differentiations between the humans and mutants. This also did not fit the official canon or suit the old-fashioned setting.
I have a few good reasons to avoid writing fan fiction in a song parody. First and foremost, parodies rely on the audience already knowing what they are about to be funny. If your readers recognize the character names but not the events, they will not laugh, only be confused. Second, the restrictions on words can make writing fan fiction to the tune of an existing song awkward - better to write fan fiction in a format where the only thing that limits you is your imagination. Finally, if you have to make things up about existing characters to make them suit the song, it means you should not be making that particular song about them to begin with.
Example of a point: If you write a song parody to appear in a comic strip and it mentions being in a comic strip, then you will never be able to share it in any other medium, such as pure text or an audio recording. Basically, this rule is to not make reductions in the flexibility of your parody like that.
A major philosophy of the Crew is that anything that reduces how many people can understand your work or increases how much context it needs to be understood is a sacrifice that must be justified. This notion was one of the major reasons I decided the Five were no further help, as they simply wrote a parody to be read as a strip by certain people I knew in the context of the time and could not have cared less about how much less sense the parody would make if any of those variables were different. Consequently, their parodies were full of personally topical thoughts and material, such as the aforementioned fan names, recent events in the strip, and (this is the main reason for the existence of the rule I am currently discussing) stuff about the cartoonist.
These things are all inexcusable in the eyes of the Crew, who would call them limiting the parody for no reason.
Pretty self explanatory. Notes on how to do this are found in my advice on how to come up with rhymes.
Again, pretty well speaking for itself.
Basically, this means that when they work on a song, they always pair it with whatever is relevant to them that has the most in common with the original lyrics.
The problem with this gets explaining on my list of parody problems, under Nonsense parody.
Under Black Pearl Crew philosophy, if you are going off of a movie franchise for material, specifically basing your creations on the LEGO video game tie-in to that franchise is considered a poor plan, since it has much less to work with and a much smaller audience compared to the source material and does not give many things that are unique to it in return.
This gives the Crew enough to frown upon, but also calls attention to the fact that I have had to deal with lyrics like To smash the silence with the brick of self control
and Do you wanna watch the world fall to pieces? Are you broken, like I’m broken?
There were painfully obvious LEGO-related things to do with such lyrics, which made me glad I had this rule to stop me from succumbing to that temptation to sacrifice accessibility and flexibility. Besides, where is the fun in obvious?
This is just a matter of personal preference, and is therefore the one rule I do not recommend other parodists follow (even I made an exception with Old War
). But like all my rules, it has a good reason for existence. It can help me narrow down what to make a song about, as well as preventing super obvious parodies anyone could come up with (e.g. Lord of the Rings
for Lords of the Ring).
This is the only rule the Crew are not unequivocally following. Exceptions were made during the concept albums by Styx, and of course in the parodies telling the evil side of the story.
The problem is that the Comic Five had a habit of randomly deciding which of them was singing the song, which could make understanding it difficult if you could not see who that was. This was even worse in the Sunday strips, which had many panels and therefore could easily show different characters singing different parts - and have that affect the lyrics - because it could.
Therefore, having anyone in particular singing a parody is generally discouraged by the Crew, as it just reduces the flexibility of the parody if not done well. Ever since taking to writing parody albums in advance, I have only specified a viewpoint if the song gave me a good reason to, which is rare due to the fact that almost all popular songs are written from anonymous perspectives.
This is why my parodies link to web pages someone else wrote to explain themselves - if they need to be explained at all. If I have to write the explanation myself, I have decided, the creation is best left unpublished.
The parodies are supposed to be about something that is already known. My own imagination can contribute, coming up with lines like Maybe temperature high or swelling made sensations overwhelming,
but that is enough guesswork to have in a parody. Also, the phrase has to be constructed correctly - Temperature high and swelling made sensations overwhelming
would break the rule about no fan fictions.