19 KiB
The two types of rational fanfic. [FF][D]
-
Author: u/forrestib Project Freelancer*
-
URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3e9tzs/the_two_types_of_rational_fanfic_ffd/
-
Score: 35
-
Created: 2015-07-23T01:54:31
Post:
We spend a lot of time here rationalizing established fiction. Most of the time, we take the MoR approach of altering the source to create an AU with as many elements in common as is realistically plausible. I'm going to call this Type 1 fiction rationalization. I'm gonna talk for a bit about what I'd like to see more of, which I'm going to call Type 2.
Type 2 is where you take the established fiction exactly as it is and work backwards to figure out how what's already there can make sense, instead of replacing it with something that already does. "A Bluer Shade of White" does this. At no point does it contradict existing Frozen Canon. It takes it exactly as is, and runs with it.
Type 2 is certainly more difficult. But I feel like it's also likely more satisfying when done well. With things like Game of Thrones, where not much lore is known for certain to begin with, it may even be the more appropriate method. I feel like it's often overlooked as a possibility though. And the hope is that this post will change that.
Comments:
u/None [+14] (2 hours later)
Personally I prefer character-oriented stories about smart people (or dumb people, honestly, but in the specific context of this sub) being all smart and emotionally isolated than a lot of worrying about how magic could really work so long as the rules are consistent in-universe.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (13 hours later)
I'm mostly the same, though I have no idea whether my writing reflects it.
u/None [+16] (2 hours later)
[deleted]
u/Solonarv [+8] Chaos Legion (4 hours later)
Isn't that just rational fiction? As I've heard it defined here, it only requires that the story/universe be rational, not the characters. If the characters are also rationalists, we call that rationalist fiction.
u/None [+3] (4 hours later)
[deleted]
u/None [+7] (16 hours later)
[deleted]
u/None [+4] (16 hours later)
[deleted]
u/poliphilo [+2] (17 hours later)
This is the agent provocateur tactic, isn't it? I.e. assist or encourage someone to commit a relatively low-harm crime which then justifies extensive retaliation.
It seems simpler and safer to do this kind of thing without firearms involved, but we know of at least one case ("ATF gunwalking") where something similar was tried with guns. Yes, it was probably a bad idea there, but that might be due to peculiarities of the Muggle world.
u/None [+3] (19 hours later)
Hahaha no. Not only did Dumbledore outscheme him, in the end he was just a schemer. Do not let your foolish ape-brain trick you into mistaking scheming abilities for actual rationality, intelligence, optimization power, or anything else.
u/philip1201 [+2] (7 hours later)
Probably true in an in-universe counterfactual, but in practice the characters and/or situation would be rewritten such that they still defeat Voldie. Ratfics are still subject to the laws of storytelling.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (2 days later)
There are stories in which the villain wins.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (9 hours later)
I like type 3, so long as they don't spend too much time throwing the idiot ball around.
u/DaystarEld [+8] Pokémon Professor (12 hours later)
In my experience and perspective, if you can exclusively do a Type 2 story then the story you're rationalizing wasn't really that irrational in the first place, or there weren't as many disconnected irrational elements.
HPMOR does a pretty good job of mixing both: it retcons what's blatantly incompatible with intelligent characters and a consistent world (like loving sacrifice being enough to block the killing curse), while rationalizing what is apparently true (the philosopher's stone's true effect rather than "gold and immortality").
Part of what makes rationalfic so interesting is the latter Type 2 rationalizing, but for longer or complex works it just isn't feasible all the time. Short stories that only explore a bit of the world, yes, because there simply isn't time or space to explore all the possible alternative problems or exploits that can come up with the new rules of reality. Even long stories where only one or two things are different from our world, yes, because there are less riddles there that need solving. But there are fictional worlds where Type 2 rationalizing at every junction and instance, if even possible, would quickly break everything apart in terms of world consistency, story structure or character decisions.
In other words, Type 1 rationalization vs Type 2 is more the consequence of the fiction being rationalized. Not always, of course: it's possible for someone to think a problem can only be solved by Type 1, and then have someone else think of a Type 2 solution to it. But when you're talking about a more complex world or longer story, the probability of being able to do it with each and every thing swiftly becomes unmanageable.
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+6] (17 hours later)
I've found that a lot of ratficers (or at least the strawman ratficer I'm constructing in my head as I write this) pay insufficient attention to the fact that humans are very, very broken optimizing functions. "Why didn't the character do easy option xyz that would have seriously improved the situation?" Because he had five seconds to think of it, and didn't. "Why didn't the character put more effort into solving the mystery faster?" Because he was depressed and it wasn't entirely clear that the mystery was solvable anyway. "Why did the character take Option A when Option B was clearly a much better fulfillment of his values?" There was a value conflict and apparently your model of what value took precedence for the character was wrong. "Why is this entire civilization so inefficient?" You apparently need to study history and civics some more.
It's much more satisfying to see a hero use rationality to solve his problems, rather than brute force, but humans are necessarily flawed and those flaws are very important for interesting fiction.
u/FaceDeer [+6] (a day later)
This is one of the reasons why I've always loved the Tremors series of movies. The characters (and the monsters) often make mistakes but they are plausible mistakes. The sorts of mistakes that otherwise perfectly intelligent people make when they're scared, tired, and not perfectly educated about the situation they're in.
There's none of the "let's split up to explore the scary haunted house! Oh, it was just a cat, therefore there's nothing actually sneaking up behind me!" idiocy, that stuff's terrible. But when a character falls off the roof onto Graboid-infested soil and in a panic scrambles onto a spare tractor tire for "safety", yeah, it was a dumb move but it's a mistake that even a really smart person might make under the circumstances.
u/mhd-hbd [+3] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (3 hours later)
My fanfic The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake is pretty damn close to a Type 2.
Really it is a spectrum. Type 1 is more focused on preserving plot structure and overall flavor of the original work, while Type 2 preserves canon information as presented.
One is heavier in world building, the other on interpreting the facts. A story like Luminosity overall does little to deviate from canon world building but still wrecks canon by making the villains smart. What category does that belong to?
u/daydev [+3] (5 hours later)
u/None [+5] (2 hours later)
We spend a lot of time here rationalizing established fiction. Most of the time, we take the MoR approach of altering the source to create an AU with as many elements in common as is realistically plausible. I'm going to call this Type 1 fiction rationalization.
Just to make sure, by "rationalization" do you mean making something more rational? Since it also has another meaning: coming up with reasons for your existing beliefs or past actions like convincing yourself how a suboptimal purchase was actually worth it.
u/alexanderwales [+13] Time flies like an arrow (2 hours later)
The way I see it, it's sort of the same thing.
You're making the imagined universe "more rational" by coming up with reasons for existing canonical evidence or character actions. If there's a lingering question like "Why didn't character X do this?" then the answer is "There is hidden limit Y which places constraints on their magical power". This is taking a sub-optimal action and making it optimal through author fiat.
u/IomKg [+1] (9 hours later)
I think in the context of what he said rationalizing is not taking something that seems irrational and finding ways for it to be rational, but instead its taking something irrational and changing it to be rational, which is the opposite of rationalization.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (11 hours later)
rationalize: to attempt to explain or justify (one's own or another's behavior or attitude) with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate.
The only difference with fanfic is that you have authorial fiat to make your reasons true and appropriate. Either way, you're still making something irrational into something rational.
u/IomKg [+1] (a day later)
The point is that sometimes the process involves changing the occurence into something else entirely, which was the point of the distinction
If for example theres some magic in a story which is way too powerful, one approach would be to say that there is a special order which kills anyone that abuses it, whuch could count as "rationalization" under the definition you quoted, while i still think the nuances are a little different. Another approach would be to plainly remove the spell. That i dont think falls into even the broad definition you quoted.
u/IWantUsToMerge [+4] (3 hours later)
Yeah it really is rationalization in the derogatory sense. Reality, canon, gives you a data set you don't like and don't know how to explain. If you respond by inventing another reality where things are simpler and insist that this is how reality really is just because it makes more sense to you, are a godawful scientist. That is the definition of scientific bankruptcy. For a rational fiction author to do that, they need a damn good reason.
There're a lot of good reasons though. Maybe there's a solid inconsistency in canon that you have no choice but to untangle. Maybe the possibility that there was some conspiracy to misrepresent the reality of the universe(unreliable narrator/explicators) would be genuinely probable and genuinely interesting enough to explore. Or maybe you're just tired of writing about sapient mind-reading daemons, or capricious gods, who run around behind the scenes making sure the universe's mind-projection mechanics(superficially simple but physically intractible magic) work.
u/GaBeRockKing [+2] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (9 hours later)
On the flip sides, some stories have genuine inconsistencies in how their magic systems work, that need to be consolidated by the author. Under those conditions, it's perfectly find to change things around a bit. Alternatively, I feel that, if you can rationalize a magic system with only minor changes, then it's still worth it, as audiences have more fun when they understand the magic involved better.
u/Uncaffeinated [+2] (13 hours later)
A lot of times, the authors just didn't care about consistency and the simplest possible explanation for the canon data points is that "this is a fictional work". What are you supposed to do then?
u/IWantUsToMerge [+2] (20 hours later)
Heh, personally, I rather enjoy writing characters who know they're characters in a work of fiction. For the author it's immersive and I like to think that for the audience it makes them seem more real. But there are usually other explanations for seemingly narrativium-driven worlds. Often Mind-Reading Daemon-related, but not always. When I was reading Worm I was nursing a theory that one could collapse the question of why Taylor got so lucky so many times to the question of "why this timeline rather than the many alternatives where she died?" The answer seemed obvious; we are reading a story told in the past tense, and in all of the timelines where Taylor didn't survive, worm.
u/Uncaffeinated [+1] (a day later)
I'm a bit surprised, since there's nothing surer to kill suspension of disbelief. Blatant fourth wall breaking like that can only really work in comedy.
u/IWantUsToMerge [+1] (a day later)
To put it another way.. I can't really get you to believe that a fictional character's thoughts, feelings, and story is completely real, especially not if it's written in a fantasy setting. OTOH, I might really be able to get you to believe that that there is a viral persona living in my head, fighting for mental clock cycles, plotting to depose my primary persona and make its egress into reality. Some might refer to it as a pathological tulpa. The self-aware mind-worm is in a sense more real as a character than the temporary fictional projection.
u/neshalchanderman [+2] (3 hours later)
Rationalising characters' actions in previously published work is a small but well-established literary genre. See Shylock .
u/ancientcampus [+2] juggling kittens (2 days later)
For that matter, there are definitely two shades of "Rationalist" stories: ones that attempt to teach cognitive theory, and ones that really should be called transhumanist or singulitarian stories.
u/neshalchanderman [+1] (3 hours later)
Reverse Mathematics...
Have a look, might provide inspiration.
u/HelperBot_ [+0] (3 hours later)
Non-Mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_mathematics&sa=U&ved=0CAsQFjAAahUKEwihy7PBxPDGAhWEthQKHXgMAIY&usg=AFQjCNFF9bbwxLzAoFdtNr1lz6z3DTr6VA
^HelperBot_® ^v1.0 ^I ^am ^a ^bot. ^Please ^message ^/u/swim1929 ^with ^any ^feedback ^and/or ^hate. ^Counter: ^1307
u/Zeikos [+2] Communist Transhumanism (15 hours later)
Nor rly Mr.Bot
FTFY , I was userfull! spare me robot overlords.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+1] Utopian Smut Peddler (4 hours later)
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (6 days later)
I can't comment on the fanfiction side of things because I don't write strictly rational fanfiction. My fanfiction does tend to be pseudo-rational. I try to have the characters do things that make sense, but keep the fictional world as close to canon as possible.
I can comment from the original fiction side of the road though - while writing original fiction, you have to do BOTH of these things to your own writing, constantly. The lead and all the literary elements have to react rationally, and the world they live in as well must respond rationally. Irrationality had better be a conflict point rather than something to be glossed over, or your readers will be irritated.
I'm writing a rational original fic, but it's hard compared to non-rational fiction. Rewarding in a different way, but I can understand why so few authors of original work try for strictly rational work. Especially rationalist work. It becomes as much science as story. There's nothing wrong with science, but it requires more care. More care requires more time. More care is more mental work. More care means that typical free-writing is less useful for idea generation. Recently I've had a hard time even getting started on chapters because I know I'm going to spend at least 24 hours of writing time to create 5-8k words. When writing irrational work, I can sometimes hit 1k words per hour, or more. If I were making money writing, well...
I will probably not be trying to write rational fic serially again, though I will probably write follow-up works to Set In Stone in a non-serial manner.