13 KiB
[RST][FF] Squiring the Phoenix, Chapter 1. Metafic of 'Following the Phoenix'
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Author: u/eaglejarl *
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Score: 28
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Created: 2015-03-12T03:37:58
Post:
Comments:
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+24] Godric Gryffindor (53 minutes later)
Great, now my pants are in Washington D.C. again.
u/adad64 [+9] Chaos Legion (3 hours later)
At least the moon is still there. We're not getting worse at least.
...I'm also not entirely sure how I feel that I caught and remembered that reference.
u/xamueljones [+3] My arch-enemy is entropy (3 hours later)
Can you explain the reference for the rest of us?
u/eaglejarl [+11] (6 hours later)
Apparently the lesson here is that if one ever asks Brienne to do something for you, the request needs to end with the words "...and do it your own damn self." :>
u/etarletons [+4] (14 hours later)
Am I EVER going to live that down?!
u/immute [+3] Secretly Awesome (4 hours later)
...ok. I don't get it.
u/eaglejarl [+3] (a day later)
u/eaglejarl [+1] (an hour later)
...blink
u/ishaan123 [+18] Sidebar Contestant (44 minutes later)
Let's see, we're now at...0, 1, 2, 3 levels of recursive fanfiction!
Edit: I wonder whether anyone's keeping track, and if some sort of record has just been set...
u/adad64 [+6] Chaos Legion (3 hours later)
Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons is a fanfic of a crossover and it has plenty of fanfiction. We'd need to go at least one level deeper.
u/DCarrier [+2] (14 hours later)
If you're counting all fanworks, I have a t-shirt I made using Project Horizons fanart.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+1] Godric Gryffindor (14 hours later)
FEPH is a fanfic of a fanfic of the originals. This is a fanfic of a fanfic of a fanfic of the original.
u/linkhyrule5 [+2] (15 hours later)
I think the point is that FEPH itself has fanfiction, which would make them (meta)x3-fanfiction like Squiring the Phoenix.
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (19 hours later)
Meta^(3)-fanfiction? That's a bad name for the fourth layer of recursive fanfic. Call it fan^(4)fiction instead.
We're apparently locked into the "1 million x 1 billion ≠ 1 trillion" situation now, but that's no excuse to go repeating the same mistake.
u/linkhyrule5 [+3] (20 hours later)
Zero indexing. The first layer is just fiction.
u/Chronophilia [+6] sci-fi ≠ futurology (20 hours later)
Precisely. Fiction is the base case, fanfiction is the first layer of recursion, fanfanfic is the second, etc.
If you count fiction as the first layer, then meta^(3)fanfic is the fifth, which is worse.
The point is that "fan^(n)fiction of fan^(m)fiction is fan^(n+m)fiction" holds for all positive integers n and m. This is a simple and obvious rule, and clearly it is the way things should be.
u/Jesin00 [+2] (16 hours later)
Level 0: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Fallout
Level 1: Fallout Equestria
Level 2: Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons
Level 3: Fanfiction of Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (20 hours later)
The real question is, where do HPMoR/Friendship is Magic crossovers go on the chart? Level 2 by one parent, level 1 by the other.
It's an HP fanfanfic, so it's a fanfanfic. Yet it's not a FiM fanfanfic. Interesting that something can be FiM and fan^(2)fic, but not fan^(2)fic of FiM. That seems like an important distinction for any classification scheme to make.
Hm. Talking about this - fanfics from the database engineering perspective - has made me picture a hierarchy of stories sorted by their mutual canon status. On top of fanfics and crossovers, some books appear as books in the background of films, other times characters from other stories will get walk-on parts that imply a shared universe. The potential has been noted for transfictional loops where the book of a story should appear in that story's universe, and several such loops have been found. Perhaps I'll automate that one day when I'm looking for a project.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (23 hours later)
I think you're probably going to want a graph database instead of a relational one. You can model DAGs in an RDBMS, but it's easier just to use one designed for the purpose.
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (a day later)
well that's no fun.
But probably the right approach yeah.
u/Bowbreaker [+1] Solitary Locust (20 hours later)
For putting up records of course the crossover fic with the most fan- prefixes is the one you count. Otherwise even a highly recursive (n*fan)fic could be brought down to n=1 with a single cameo character.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
The real question is, where do HPMoR/Friendship is Magic crossovers go on the chart?
Luckily, the only such known extent crossover is the time Eliezer brutally murdered Twilight Sparkle and Rarity despite their having no reason to appear in his story at all!
u/DCarrier [+1] (20 hours later)
If you think about it, Friendship is Magic is fanfiction of the earlier generations, and Fallout 3 is fanfiction of the earlier games. A sufficiently established franchise is indistinguishable from fanfiction.
u/eaglejarl [+4] (23 hours later)
If it's released by the original authors it is, by definition, not fanfiction.
u/DCarrier [+1] (23 hours later)
Lauren Faust was the producer of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. She was not the original author.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (a day later)
I was actually thinking of Fallout, but your point is well taken.
u/DCarrier [+1] (a day later)
Fallout 1 and 2 were produced by Interplay Entertainment. They then went bankrupt and were purchased by Bethesda Studios, who went on to produce Fallout 3.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (2 days later)
But if they were bought out, doesn't that make Bethesda the new canon authors? Meh. Whichever; I grant the point.
u/GreenGreenMan [+1] (19 hours later)
Protect the original release!
u/Cariyaga [+2] Kyubey did nothing wrong (15 hours later)
I'm fairly certain Homestuck has gone deeper.
u/camccann [+3] (16 hours later)
There's a character in Homestuck who writes self-insert Homestuck fanfic, not to mention how Homestuck includes the author himself as a character. And most if not all major plot threads are part of one or more closed causal time loops.
Regular every-day recursion doesn't even compare to that kind of direct self-reference.
u/CopperZirconium [+3] (a day later)
I think it all culminated with the reveal of the fifth wall.
u/None [+6] (7 hours later)
Humor could be embodied as life; a hopeful message might be a species mastering fire. Dark humor would be a planet exploding and killing all of the (for the context) highly advanced beings thereon. If one wanted to add a soupÁon of hope to the darkness of the humor, perhaps the physical laws might be established in such a way that the resulting brain-state of one of those doomed creatures would induce him to send a single escape rocket to carry the last of his race into the void.
This sounds both morally appalling and inefficient for communication.
"Tell me a story, Daddy. A scary story!"
"A scary story, huh? Well, okay...I think you're old enough for this one. Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was something called 'death'...."
Fiiiine, I'm reading.
u/Psy-Kosh [+3] (11 hours later)
This sounds both morally appalling and inefficient for communication.
Seconded.
u/Someone-Else-Else [+2] Anti-Spiral (a day later)
They might kill all the beings there, but Death's something from long ago?
u/eaglejarl [+4] (a minute later)
A few weeks ago, I was challenged to write a fic that showed what happened after the end of Following the Phoenix. The original challenge was for 2,000 words but it has actually grown well beyond that and will be an ongoing thing. Here's the first chapter.
u/xamueljones [+5] My arch-enemy is entropy (3 hours later)
Here's my original challenge and my response message acknowledging my pay-up:
Wow! Thanks for that story, but if you look more carefully at my comment, you would see that I set the delivery date at 4/13/2015, or a month from now in April. I'm not complaining about you being early though and I'll pay you the two months of Reddit Gold on the 14th or 15th.
Thanks!
PS I also posted a link to 'Squiring the Phoenix' on r/hpmor.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (3 hours later)
Shiny; thanks.
I remembered the challenge as "before HPMOR finishes; nice to see I had some leeway!
u/None [+2] (6 hours later)
You know, I was really hoping to spend a lot of time today making the necessary corrections to my thesis manuscript, mailing things, and doing that one last chapter of studying in that one textbook.
Damn.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (8 hours later)
Awwwww. blush
u/None [+4] (11 hours later)
Wait... you've only released this one chapter?
WELL SHIT NOW I'VE GONE AND GOTTEN WORK DONE TODAY.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (11 hours later)
...erm....sorry to hear it? I think?
u/None [+1] (11 hours later)
Nah, that's actually a good thing. I want to get done with my thesis corrections and get out of here quickly.
u/linkhyrule5 [+2] (7 hours later)
While you're here - how does one subscribe to a thread on your forum? I'd like to subscribe to both this and Team Anko, and am not sure how to go about it.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (8 hours later)
Every option related to subscriptions is set to 'yes' and my normal user (an admin) has the 'subscribe' link, so I hadn't realized it wasn't normally there.
Like I said, everything that I can find is set to 'allow subscriptions' but it's obviously not working. I've got a trouble ticket in to Forumatic to find out what's going on. Once I get it straightened out there will be a small link at bottom right that says "subscribe forum" It is annoyingly non-obvious; I found it using Cmd+F "subscribe"
u/linkhyrule5 [+1] (14 hours later)
Ah, I've found it. (It may very well have been there before, but you're right, it's almost impossible to find on your own.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (21 hours later)
Bottom right?
u/linkhyrule5 [+1] (a day later)
Yup.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (a day later)
I just remembered that I have an external stylesheet for this page, and that stylesheet is under my control. :>
Check it now, tell me if it's a little more discoverable.
u/linkhyrule5 [+2] (a day later)
Much more functional, yes. In the spirit of disclosure it's ... ahem a little glaring, but better that than "unfindable", so on net it's definitely an improvement.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (a day later)
I wasn't going for subtle. :>
u/cowsruleusall [+3] (32 minutes later)
I cannot possibly upvote this enough.
u/Gurkenglas [+3] (an hour later)
Don't forget to have the world explode in a bright idea in Act III, when a few dozen to a few hundred people are in space.
u/Psy-Kosh [+3] (11 hours later)
but the miracles that Joel wanted involved riding fire in the sky and sailing on an ocean of light.
u/None [+2] (11 hours later)
Well that song really picked up.
u/Psy-Kosh [+1] (11 hours later)
*blinks* rephrase please?
u/None [+3] (11 hours later)
It started out sort of slow and campfire-y, and then moved on to become a driving anthem of aerospace engineers everywhere.
u/Psy-Kosh [+1] (12 hours later)
Ah yes. Speaking of space exploration related anthems, I've seen Hope Eyrie described as sort of the national anthem of fandom.
(There's an obvious problem with the third phrase in the start of that song, but just mentally insert a "for now")
u/eaglejarl [+1] (20 minutes later)
OffTopic:
In a recent thread, someone asked me for their bound copy of 'Pay Attention', and I can't remember who it was. Could you please PM me?