42 KiB
Challenge: things it would be impossible to write rational fanfics of, and evidence against each other's suggestions
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Author: u/dokh that which can be destroyed by the truth should be*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2p1r8i/challenge_things_it_would_be_impossible_to_write/
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Score: 19
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Created: 2014-12-12T04:28:17
Post:
I'll start: anything by Mother Goose. Dead On Arrival (a classic Noir film whose protagonist is already surprisingly good at this).
Comments:
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+24] Utopian Smut Peddler (3 hours later)
The Hitchhiker's Guide universe. Virtually everything happens "because the plot requires it" in there. There are rules, but they are definitely not sane. And you aren't statistically likely to be a hitchhiker, either -- unless the plot requires it.
u/obviousdisposable [+16] (13 hours later)
This universe is not even particularly causal. There are events that have been changed to have never happened that still have an effect on reality (e.g. postcards of a cathedral that was never built due to time travel). If you examine the mechanics of Milliway's, there's decent evidence that you can run a successful restaurant by simply cycling through the same time period repeatedly and expect to get different customers on each repeat.
I'm frankly not even sure if it's rational to try to be rational in a universe that divorced from cause and effect and other basic assumptions we make.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
You can be entirely rational: you just have to notice the meta-time whose ordering governs alterations to normal time.
u/awesomeideas [+3] Dai stiho, cousin. (2 days later)
Ridiculously, the temporal indexical would quite literally be the index.
u/OffColorCommentary [+1] (2 days later)
It seems you can still predict the results of your actions to a reasonable degree in the Hitchhiker's universe. There's a wildly larger chance of some black swan event throwing you off, what with infinite improbability drives running around, but most of the time things work normally. Rationality is still optimal.
A rational fanfic in the series is still probably no good, though. Either:
- The protagonist never gets access to the weird stuff - but then, why is this set in the HG universe?
- The protagonist gets access to time travel and improbability drives - presumably they rapidly become a god.
- The protagonist and antagonist get access to this nonsense and are both rational - now we need a consistent underlying behavior for the universe so we can mediate, but we don't have one.
I guess maybe a rational protagonist with no access to time travel and such versus a less competent antagonist who does have all the causality-busters would work, but it seems like this could easily succumb to solving problems via tecnobabble.
u/OffColorCommentary [+1] (2 days later)
Codifying the actual laws of this universe might actually be possible, too. I think the biggest step here is allowing there to be multiple kinds of time travel.
One type of time travel is to have 2D time. Nothing (or very little) naturally moves in the second time dimension, and moving through that sends you backwards in the first. (Similar things are often phrased with creating alternate universes; the need to create a universe always seemed unnecessary to me.) This lets you handle the case of the cathedral that was never built but still has postcards - any postcards in time traveling vessels at the point where the cathedral was un-built still exist.
Most series only do one kind of time travel as a way of conserving detail, but you could have the above in addition to something else, like HP:MoR style always-stable time loops. You'd have to decide whether time loops happen in 2D time or 1D time or there's both available, but all of these are comprehensible (though at this point, challenging.)
I'm not sure what kind of time travel makes Milliways work. But for the rational HG universe, all that's necessary is that you find one, and that people use it for things other than just this restaurant.
u/alexanderwales [+15] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
Poems, songs, and rhymes are easy pickings, mostly because they don't have enough of a skeleton to hang a story on - they're nearly impossible to make a rational fanfic of mostly because they're nearly impossible to elaborate on without inventing details wholesale. You can't make a rational fanfic because you can't really make a fanfic.
There once was a man from Nantucket Who kept all his cash in a bucket. But his daughter, named Nan, Ran away with a man And as for the bucket, Nantucket.I mean ... sure, you could spin some kind of lesson about diversifying your portfolio, but you'd get so far away from the limerick that there's hardly a point to it.
There once was a man from Nantucket Who kept all his cash in a bucket. But his daughter, named Nan, Came up with a plan And as for the bucket, she chucked it.But I digress. If you really want to pick a story that can't be converted, pick one that can't be changed to fit.
u/ancientcampus [+1] juggling kittens (5 days later)
Made me laugh. Thanks.
u/None [+9] (an hour later)
[removed]
u/xamueljones [+9] My arch-enemy is entropy (2 hours later)
It doesn't have to be the mad character who is changed to a rational character. Just have someone else in the story be given the rational upgrade, turn them loose on the mad character, and step back for the fireworks.
Alternately, write about how the mad character develops rationalist skills and learns to stop or work around his/her madness. Of course the second option is a lot harder than the first.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (11 hours later)
Queequeg might make a very interesting rational character. Even his religious beliefs are odd enough, and plastic enough that, if viewed from an internal point of view, he might be agnostic.
u/mcgruntman [+2] (16 hours later)
IMO 'rational' stories don't necessarily need to contain rationalist characters, just characters who act rationally for their given values and character. So, nothing happens just for plot reasons. You could almost say the story is somewhat deterministic, if you fully specified the starting conditions.
u/ancientcampus [+1] juggling kittens (5 days later)
I'm highly confident someone here could re-work it with the whale as a metaphor for AI.
u/obviousdisposable [+7] (2 hours later)
I think Warhammer 40K would be a good challenge. The universe itself isn't rational enough- you've got multiple godlike entities actively tampering with people and events, leading to significant difficulty predicting the actions of others, and there's decent evidence that they target anyone trying to be rational.
u/Farmerbob1 [+6] Level 1 author (11 hours later)
From what I've seen, the Eldar seem rational at times. You could probably write a rationalfic from the point of view of a craftworld Eldar.
You could even write a rationalfic from the point of view of a member of a lost human colony on a null-psionic world.
Of course, the WH40K universe being what it is, your rational character had best watch themselves closely if they ever think about leaving their craftworld or null-psionic world.
u/obviousdisposable [+2] (12 hours later)
Hmmm. The Eldar as a whole don't tend to act too rationally, but individual Eldar are shown to be reasonable on a frequent basis. That could work.
I like the idea of the lost human colony, but it's hard to find a way to have them interact with the rest of the universe on a scale that works.
Oddly, I did stumble across what looks like an attempt at the "lost human colony" approach. See here if you're curious:
u/scruiser [+3] CYOA (12 hours later)
Now that you bring up Warhammer 40K... I think any setting in with lots of malevolent higher powers would be difficult to write rational fanfiction for, because in universe any rational character who actually started winning would get smacked down by stuff they had no way to stop, or even see coming. Additionally, settings in which all the powerful abilities damage the user's sanity/ reasoning ability because this creates a tradeoff between epistemic and instrumental rationality. So Lovecraft's stuff, played straight also meets these requirements. Old World of Darkness does to some extent too I think.
u/obviousdisposable [+2] (13 hours later)
Lovecraft's stuff is particularly notable here because, although his works are legendary for sanity loss in characters, his protagonists tend to act in reasonable ways. Also, his higher powers are rarely actively malicious, which is something that many authors in his universe tend to forget. I've always wanted to expand on the "sane man in an insane universe" concept that he seems to be hinting at, but never have found a way I like to make it work.
I agree on the problem of malevolent higher powers in universes. Now that I think about it, it might be possible to write fiction where the rational character has to actively avoid catching their attention. That could lead to a really interesting story where the struggle is to make small changes that add up without disrupting the expected course of events enough to merit actual intervention. If it goes right, you could possibly have a story where the primary antagonist never actually does anything but still remains a massive challenge and threat, which would be interesting.
u/scruiser [+3] CYOA (21 hours later)
small changes that add up without disrupting the expected course of events enough to merit actual intervention
I think you might need the opposite strategy, depending on how the precognition works. If the precognition is just extreme predictive ability based on present information, yes this strategy might work. If the precognition has some supernatural mechanism, then you might need to build up all preparations under some kind of anti-precog effect and then make one giant master move to change the balance of things.
Idea for rational WH40K! A society of nulls, knowing they are immune to pskyers and warp precognition, go about setting up a master plan to disrupt the chaos gods.
u/noggin-scratcher [+2] I am a happy tree (19 hours later)
small changes that add up without disrupting the expected course of events enough to merit actual intervention
I'm now imagining a kind of cosmic Overton Window, where you have to gently ease the universe into the idea of you changing your fate, but where you can eventually arrive at the result you want by slow cumulative incremental means... so long as no one step is abrupt or drastic enough to draw attention.
u/notentirelyrandom [+3] (a day later)
There's an Asimov story where a couple of extrahistorical observers told one guy to change the first letter of his last name in an attempt to cancel a nuclear war. On a bet.
u/traverseda [+3] With dread but cautious optimism (a day later)
Culture vs 40k exists, but isn't terribly good.
u/None [+3] (2 days later)
Could be done easily. Before the story opens, Emps dies and ascends to become a warp god. Big E loved reason, so his power forces things to make a little more sense, allowing a rational character to once again be effective.
On another level, the Great Crusade and the Emperor's conquest of earth are basically the story of a rational guy (with godlike powers) playing out his endgame.
u/obviousdisposable [+1] (2 days later)
Good point- I hadn't thought of that possibility.
If we assume that the Starchild is actually the Emperor reincarnated, then there's probably room for a rational one of those running around, and it wouldn't hard to justify a lack of godlike causality-violating interference around them. Could be a whole lot of fun to have an end-game of "kill yourself to regain your godlike power", too.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+2] Utopian Smut Peddler (3 hours later)
Sounds like a good Death Star to me. Just remember all the advantages the 40K 'verse also has.
u/MugaSofer [+2] (12 hours later)
Tau, maybe?
u/obviousdisposable [+1] (12 hours later)
The problem with the Tau is that they're still operating on a small scale and the Ethereals seem to be able to force compliance from other castes, which makes even thinking about going against the grain hard. The fluff keeps hinting that one of the Old Ones is still around running the show there, too, and they're notorious for tampering with other sentients on a species-wide scale. That doesn't rule out a fic, though...
u/Charlie___ [+7] (56 minutes later)
Rational fanfic nursery rhymes.
Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace.
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go.
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for their living.
Sunday's child is happy to please,
And some days, my baby, you may be all of these.
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down, and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.Well up Jack got and off did trot,
As fast as he could manage,
To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob
With soap and nice clean bandage.
u/CopperZirconium [+9] (2 hours later)
That poem to me has always had a kind of zodiac ring to it. Like my depression is explained by being a child born on a Wednesday.
If I were to try to write a rational story based off of this poem, I would set it in a world where your birthday actually predicted your fate. The scientific method catches up with astrology and the protagonists struggle with the implications of their findings and what it means to be in a world where Fate is concretely real.
u/madcatlady [+4] (11 hours later)
Oh wow, I'd read it!
u/xamueljones [+5] My arch-enemy is entropy (5 hours later)
In a world like that, I would start out with the hypothesis where the timing of birth affects genetics before moving on the the hypothesis Fate is real. Before anyone says that timing of birth shouldn't affect genetics, Nature has gender determined by how hot eggs are and epigenetics.
u/CopperZirconium [+1] (a day later)
Oh definitely. That's the logical place to start, but in this Fate run world, it's the protagonist's Destiny to find out the Truth.
u/None [+3] (2 days later)
[deleted]
u/CopperZirconium [+1] (3 days later)
YES! I declare this canon for my hypothetical story.
u/mcgruntman [+1] (16 hours later)
Metical knowledge would need to be a bit behind present day, else you could easily induce/delay labour to cause birth on a chosen day, with excellent accuracy: I think it would be rare that a mother given a heavy dose of labour inducers wouldn't be done within 24 hours.
u/CopperZirconium [+1] (a day later)
That, or maybe trying to alter the birthday turns Fate's blessing into a curse. Or maybe you just can't cheat Fate.
u/fullplatejacket [+4] (an hour later)
I feel like Excel Saga would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. FLCL as well.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+2] Utopian Smut Peddler (a day later)
FLCL would be great -- almost Puella Magi Madoka Magica style farming of teens for great power/giant brain robots. I could totally see that work as a rationally functioning world. I really want to see this fanfic now.
In Excel Saga, it isn't clear if those people were just crazy and had weird abilities, or if the entire world worked that way. I lean towards them being the odd ones, as a normal person (the foreign worker) is initial shown to have been dragged into the craziness and then reacts as one would logically expect (i.e. horror and fear). It seems to take place in the "real world", so just do the standard world++ thing when dealing with the oddities.
Having another normal (rational) person interface with those weird Excel Saga people would work, as would something like a rationalHyatt dealing with being (apparently) deathly ill as well as apparently now immortal. All it would need is strong causes for everything (even if they aren't explained) and well-worked out rules, something the setting doesn't preclude.
u/fullplatejacket [+1] (a day later)
You've sold me on FLCL. I feel like with Excel Saga it would be hard to do what you suggest and still have it feel like Excel Saga in any way.
u/None [+4] (39 minutes later)
You could write a rational fic of anything if you're willing to change it enough.
Actually, according to wikipedia, this is a poem about mother goose:
Old Mother Goose,
When she wanted to wander,
Would ride through the air
On a very fine gander.
Jack's mother came in,
And caught the goose soon,
And mounting its back,
Flew up to the moon
Clearly HJPEV got to Jack's mother. "Jack" is a slang term for "man" so Jack's mother is humanity's caretaker aka a humanist scientist or FAI depending on your perspective and the silvery white goose a Patronus representing the will to power, so to speak. It's really just an allegory for humanity's potential if they have the will and wisdom to make use of their powers.
So yeah someone could probably write mother goose rational fic.
u/dokh [+6] that which can be destroyed by the truth should be (42 minutes later)
I assume a rational fanfic involves at least most of the original characters and setting being recognizable; otherwise, it's not a fanfic so much as original content.
I do like the image of the king's sapient horses being talented medical professionals, though, who are stymied in their attempts to save Humpty because he hit his head and is unable to be saved by cryonic means.
u/None [+10] (44 minutes later)
Well the real question is why you'd want a bunch of horses to be putting together an egg in the first place. HJPEV would set that shit straight like five minutes after he deposed the king and took his place.
"EGGS ARE SENTIENT?"
u/cae_jones [+13] (an hour later)
Old King Coal was a merry old soul, but he did spend most of his time calling for more and more novel forms of entertainment. Do we suppose his budget is efficient enough that he can pull this off without unreasonably high taxes?
Then again, he does have a space program, if the cow that jumped over the moon can repeat that feat with a payload.
On the other hand, if your working class keeps going out to see, and taking your food/candle production with them, there might be a problem.
But Jack Sprat and his wife clearly contain valuable information for dietitians. I should hope someone's looking into that.
Also, pass some child labor laws, or at least establish mandatory workplace safety classes. Littles Bo Peep and Boy Blue do not bode well for the wool or mutton industries, and let's not even get into all the head injuries from simple water-fetching operations.
And spiders are clearly the oppressed underclass. After making it all the way out of that spout, against all the freak weather accidents and terrible plumbing, they can't even sit on tuffets without everyone running away!
Really, signs do not point to Old King Coal's popularity lasting for long. His healthcare system is in shambles, sheep plunder the countryside while children are left unattended and injured (their parents doubtless recruited to be King Coal's dancers and trumpeters), half the economy is emigrating, and it's only a matter of time before the spiders go on strike. All the while, King Coal is partying in his palace. Black Sheep seems to be the only leg of this society that can carry any weight, and a full third of their output goes to charity!
u/Lord_Drol [+4] NERV (a day later)
There are plenty of productive society members: Just look at Peter Piper, whose new agricultural techniques for growing preprocessed food have put our food production years ahead!
On the other hand, the current housing crisis is certainly a problem, and improved agricultural techniques don't really help with it. But by the power of recycling, that problem too is slowly but surely being solved: Yes, having to live in a makeshift house made out of what was formerly footwear isn't pleasant, but it sure beats being homeless!
(Furthermore, Peter's advanced horticultural techniques may eventually provide an alternative solution. Rumor has it that he secretly managed to grow a super-advanced proof-of-concept pumpkin house, which his wife is living in very happily.)
u/Lord_Drol [+5] NERV (a day later)
If you want more evidence of the current revolutionary technological progress, just look at Peter's arch-rival, Mary. Her agricultural exploits are even more impressive, ranging into the realm of growing non-organic material. No one is quite sure how she did it, but somehow she has managed to grow silver bells. Yes, really.
It was impressive enough when she was just growing cockle shells, but this will probably increase the nation's silver exports tenfold! Peter is trying hard to replicate the feat, much to Mary's chagrin. She's trying to get King Cole to pass a patent law. Only time will tell what the result will be.
(And they said she'd never amount to much! All those naysayers who said that her education would be disrupted by her strange fascination with sheep were wrong. Take that, naysayers!)
It is true that we're slightly behind in our legal system, and not just on patents. We actually don't have a minimum wage yet. For years there has been a lobby for one, but King Cole has yet to sign off on the proposed law. Until then, poor Johnny isn't going to get more than a single penny for a day's work.
Furthermore, the country's military expenses are generally considered extremely wasteful. We have ten thousand men under arms, yet all they do all day is climb up and down hills! That ridiculous Duke claims it's "training", but is that really how we want to spend taxpayer money?
So yes, our government isn't perfect, as you alluded. Nevertheless, I do believe we are making definite strides forwards.
u/Lord_Drol [+3] NERV (a day later)
BREAKING NEWS: A school of biting fish has been sighted off the coast. If you happen to catch a fish alive, be careful to keep it away from your fingers. In the case where a fish bite does occur, seek medical help immediately. Do not let the fish go again, as some fishermen have been reported doing. It is vital that we obtain samples of this breed of fish, so that we can develop a cure for its deadly toxin.
In other fishing-related news, the three famed fishermen and explorers, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, have arrived home again after a long and perilous journey. This journey was intended to test the new shoe-recycling technology, and in this aspect it was a tremendous success, paving the way for future development in the field of recycled giant footwear.
u/FeepingCreature [+2] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (3 days later)
u/SometimesATroll [+6] (22 hours later)
I'm pretty darn late to the party but I would say Homestuck. Changing the behaviors of one of the characters even slightly would just result in a doomed timeline.
Also, the plot is so heavily tangled with time travel shenanigans that you would have to basically rewrite the whole thing to change it significantly. At that point it will basically be a different work of fiction with similar elements.
Although now that I think about it, you might have a semi-rational actor who just sort of goes with the flow to avoid death by time travel.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (3 days later)
Homestuck has plenty of room for other stories. Every player of SBURB has a different adventure.
u/ancientcampus [+1] juggling kittens (5 days later)
Upvoted, by dint of the plethora of above-average quality of fanfiction it has.
u/None [+2] (10 days later)
Homestuck
It's been done. Not without pissing off everyone else in the setting (unilaterally munchkining a shared universe is not going to be well-received), but it does in fact exist.
For the record, I know of it because I was one of the people who helped establish the setting as a shared universe for fanfiction, and he walked all over the point of the thing (true, it was technically a setting about broken people becoming more broken, but it was also about emotional abuse and trauma, coping skills, and the value of establishing social connections in the face of repression, and even served as a rather effective improptu group therapy for a while). Somehow I am still friends with the guy who did it (the pressure of 'belonging to the same group' is a powerful thing), although only after he grew up and realized that some stories are meant to fulfill other emotional needs and thus probably shouldn't be munchkinned - at least, not within earshot of the creators.
u/MaxDougwell [+1] (a day later)
I'd disagree. Doomed timelines seem to only occur when the Alpha timeline needs one to provide it with something, or when events occur that contradict a timeloop required for those same events to occur. There's wiggle room.
u/SometimesATroll [+1] (a day later)
That's true. But then, there are many time loops that the players have little to no knowledge of that they must complete to maintain loops. For example, in the first set of acts if John hadn't wandered into the lab where he mashed some buttons to create himself and his friends, it would have doomed the timeline. And since a rational player probably wouldn't go around mashing buttons like that, you'd need to make some major changes to have a rational John.
Also, if John hadn't killed himself via denizen, Dave would have prototyped lil' Cal, which would prevent it being used to create Doc. Scratch.
Basically, loop stability relies heavily on John being an idiot.
u/MaxDougwell [+2] (a day later)
You'd have to have John figure out the time loops or at least the crucial actions through all the tools available to him, as opposed to blind luck/predetermination. It'd be interesting to see that play out.
Other way around. Dave prototyped Cal, thus Dooming the timeline (since without a Cal to send back with Bro, Cal couldn't exist), while John was on his way to a long slog though the pipe, a talk with his Denizen, then a Choice that ended in his death and continued existence as opposed to erasure after four months. It's only implied otherwise early on to downplay Cal's importance.
Although I don't see why the proposed fanfic has to have a rationalist John as opposed to a rationalist anybody else, or that it can't make changes to the overall plot despite many aspects of Sburb drawing directly on the player's personality and mind set. Is there some specific definition of a Rational fanfic I've missed?
u/SometimesATroll [+1] (a day later)
For your last point, I was just using John as an example of the sorts of shenanigans that changing the story could cause.
Now thinking through it, a story where the main character is trying to figure out what needs to be done to complete the time loops could work, but the plot and format would still be pretty wildly different.
u/derefr [+2] (5 days later)
And since a rational player probably wouldn't go around mashing buttons like that
In this case, dooming your timeline through naive "rationality" is two-boxing. It is rational to try to predict what timeline will end up not-doomed, and then be the you that that timeline takes as input. The whole fic could basically be called "Stress-Testing Timeless Decision Theory".
u/None [+1] (3 days later)
It seems more like they happen constantly, but we only see a small fraction that either interact with the alpha or demonstrate why things happen like they did, like the doomed timeline where Vriska fights Jack. See: all the thousands of ghosts in the dream bubbles, who came from just as many timelines.
u/mhd-hbd [+1] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (18 days later)
With a bit of imagination, a rational spinoff is most certainly possible. Let me elaborate on my ideas for a SBURB game thread which I never got around to:
- Sylladex inventory exploits. Seriously, being able to carry items without weight opens up entirely new echelons of crazy prepared.
- With a bit of ingenuity it is possible to design a system like alchemization that actually is genuinely exploitable. I don't think I ever wrote mine down, but it worked on several characteristics of items like material, use, intent, durability and other abstract concepts. A ruleset can easily be made if you are willing to eschew Captchas/bit patters for the information storage.
- Set it in a novel world and have the characters be part of/involved with a plot to create SBURB in the first place.
- Make the incipisphere huge, and run off common tropes of getting pulled out of the ordinairy and into the fantastic, like Dungeon Keeper Ami does it. Actually, draw inspiration from that one a lot.
- Have the characters explore their worlds and their powers and the societies of Prospit and Derse. Plenty of room for interesting political play there.
- Make the whole world larger, disregard HS canon as you see fit. It is already a many-year trend to make novel characters and sessions, (like Altpower!Taylor fics is in worm) so create an incipisphere the size of a solar system.
- Explore the hyperflexible mythology and make your own set of classes and aspects.
- Fuck around with time travel, read this article and the relevant parts of HPMOR.
I could go on. My ideas for the session story I was:
- Main characters are veritable prodigies who founded SkaiaNet at a young age, after discovering the frog temple and reverse-engineering the tech within and subsequently relinquish power to boards of directors and CEO's and what not.
- They figure out that SBURB will destroy the world and tries to halt the development of it, but the board of directors want none of it, sending trained killers after them
- They sabotage what they can, and escape, subjecting themselves to mild age regression treatments, cosmetic surgery, and memory-wiping and then witness protection in order to hide, all with hypnotically induced passwords and layers of protection.
- The plot then starts when one of the main characters (an archaeologist) settles down near the now cleared out Frog Temple and finds it contains runes written in formal language describing how to create the program that is SBURB.
- At the same time the friendleader gets messages from an unknown party from the future, and her mind-blocks start unraveling. Notably, not five minutes after she decides on a time-travel password, does she receive a message coded with it. As should be the case.
- They start playing the came and the world starts ending, and it becomes apparent that it was a foregone conclusion.
- Then it turns out that the CEO of SkaiaNet who has been hunting them, is actually the time player come back from a doomed timeline that they mucked up in more ways than can be enumerated. Working from a really extensive list of things she has engineered the entire escapade, and promptly prototypes herself to become the guide for the time player. One really great twist was that the time player is non-binary and presents masculine, while the CEO presents as feminine.
- Finally getting into the incipisphere, my plot sort of ran out into extreme exploits of the system, armies of robots and the politics of Derse and Prospit and ensuring that the correct chain of events happen, the correct tech gets invented and stowed in the frog temple for SkaiaNet to harness, and ultimately they save Earth by minifying it and moving it through a portal window.
That was as far as I got. The actual society of Earth was a Sci-fi setting of some merit in itself, in the middle of an ice-age making the temperate regions all but uninhabitable, and being run on hydroponics and time-bending fields a la The Ground Effect. An entire culture of post-scarcity, and the tragedy of it being snuffed out by meteors.
There is loads to be done in Homestuck. You just have to jump some bandwagons and mix it up. It will never be Homestuck fanfiction, but HS is not as character-driven a story as Worm, or Harry Potter, but it does have a hyperflexible mythology, and a set template of adventure.
Man, now I feel like writing this thing out.
u/xamueljones [+9] My arch-enemy is entropy (40 minutes later)
"I love yo-o-ou,"
.............no......
"You love me-e-e"
No, it can't be!
"We're a happy family~!"
No, no, no, nooo! I-i-i-i thought I had gotten rid of you!
"With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you..."
I trapped you in an exploding volcano!
"Won't you say you love me too?"
With all due respect, (which is none) I rather get stung by a bee in my eye.
"I love yo-o-ou, you love me-e-e"
How many times will it take before you'll stay dead!?!
"We are friends like friends should be~"
Why do you keep singing obvious lies!?!
"With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you..."
Don't be disgusting.
"Won't you sa-a-ay you love me too~?"
"BARNEY! I AM GOING TO MURDER YOU!!!"
u/xamueljones [+8] My arch-enemy is entropy (43 minutes later)
It's not that I think no one could take our purple dinosaur, Barney, and make something rational out of him, but that I can't think rationally around that infuriating song! A song sung by a creature which is insistent on loving me to bits, whether or not I want it will drive me absolutely and utterly bonkers.
Oh god, I just thought of a new nightmare. Facing the world's first AI and the AI threatening to sing that song over, and over unless I let it out. I'd crack in minutes!
u/eaglejarl [+3] (a day later)
which is insistent on loving me to bits,
How about Care Bears? I never actually saw the cartoon, but my understanding is that either you're happy or they hit you with a Happiness Beam to make you happy. And I believe they have a Care Bear Stare that they use to shut down any actions they disapprove of.
It would be like living in a psych ward where they medicate and lobotomize you constantly.
Speaking of, anyone read "With Folded Hands" by Jack Williamson? Now THAT was a scary rational story.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (a day later)
Oh yeah! That story was about robots doing pretty much what the Care Bears do, to make everyone happy and willing to "listen" to their robot protectors. It's basically an old story about a FAI created mostly right, but overprotective.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (a day later)
I would contend that that is very much not an FAI. It's probably less awful than something that just kills us but only probably.
u/cae_jones [+1] (2 days later)
I almost brought up Care Bears, then decided I probably shouldn't, for reasons.
In general, I wouldn't say the Care Bears are pro-wireheading; they mostly just try talk-therapy and random adventures to help people cope with situations that are almost always #firstworldproblems. They mostly save the love-beams for enemies who are actively attacking people. The real question is how their system works: they live in a cloud-city (their cousins live in a forest), with cloud and anthropomorphic star-based technology, and have an enormous measuring device that detects sad children and uses an unspecified sorting algorithm to prioritize missions. Even if we ignore the whacky magic involved, one must wonder at how they choose missions (there's probably some Effective Altruism / Consequentialism parable just waiting to be written, there).
(I don't remember the Care Bears ever having to pick a mission from a list of options. The Caring Meter clearly has the ruthless decision-making process, so the Care Bears don't have to get caught in Trolley Problems.)
Another point of interest: Movie2 spoilers
u/Evilness42 [+2] And even myth is long forgotten... (10 hours later)
Combine that with Professor Quirrel's humming tactic in HPMOR. Then run. Screaming.
u/robot_mower_guy [+1] (10 hours later)
I would really enjoy giving that a try sometime.
u/mcgruntman [+1] (16 hours later)
Maybe xamueljones has stumbled upon the tune QQ uses for the horrible humming.
u/CopperZirconium [+2] (a day later)
No. The tune was explicitly stated to be "Lullaby and Goodnight"
Remember: QQ handicapped himself to that tune. Barny's theme song was too easy.
u/cae_jones [+3] (an hour later)
Is it bad that I liked that song?
Ahem
The point of a Barney movie whose exact title I don't remember appears to have been that Barney is a sentient Green Lantern ring, and those that use his terrible power can accomplish anything they can imagine. Suffice it to say, there must be a reason we never see an evil reality-warping dinosaur running around. ... for definitions of "evil" that exclude leading children in musical numbers.
I'm imagining Barney's evil counterpart (let's call him "Fred") being gifted to a serial killer on death row, who then uses his dread power to escape and go on a rampage. However, his imagination was no match for that of the local SWAT. The US Military naturally began searching all stuffed dinosaurs for traces of this power. Barney and friends tried singing a song about love to dissuade them from taking Barney for experimentation. It worked, but ... not as intended.
u/clawclawbite [+2] (22 hours later)
My Little Pony - Friendship is magic, from Pinky Pie's POV.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
OatmealAre you kidding me? She's the sanest of the lot. She knows she's a cartoon.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+2] Godric Gryffindor (2 days later)
Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, Iain Banks's Culture, Walter John Williams's Aristoi, Jack Vance's Tschai: Planet of Adventure. These are either already rational (Vorkosigan Saga), or they're partially rational and the remaining irrationality is so deeply buried in the premise that you can't fix it without ripping apart the universe (Culture, Aristoi), or the protagonist is already Level 1-2 Intelligent and the rest of the book is so well-written that any attempt to change things would just make you look sad (Tschai).
Counterexample to Mother Goose: Space Child's Mother Goose
u/ancientcampus [+2] juggling kittens (5 days later)
Fun with Dick and Jane
u/ZankerH [+2] Remove Kebab (17 hours later)
MLP, without breaking the fourth wall as in Friendship is Optimal and its meta-fanfic.
u/scruiser [+5] CYOA (19 hours later)
Yeah no: There is an entire group on fimfiction for rational fanfics, 15 approved as rationalist fanfiction, 40 nominated. A rationalist MLP doesn't even have to be AU. Canonically, Twilight Sparkle tries to be logical reasonable, and given that she frequently brings old lessons learned when dealing with the new problem of the week and the fact that she is becomes an Alicorn princess, I would even say she succeeds at being rational.
u/DataPacRat [+4] Amateur Immortalist (19 hours later)
MLP
How about 'The Thousand Year Romance Of Clover The Clever', by Benman, at http://www.fimfiction.net/story/138977/the-thousand-year-romance-of-clover-the-clever ?
u/None [+4] (a day later)
It's been done. With transhumanism and cryonics advocacy to boot.