9.5 KiB
Blood and Chaos: Attempting to create a rational world
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Author: u/Ruljinn *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3t1ypp/blood_and_chaos_attempting_to_create_a_rational/
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Score: 24
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Created: 2015-11-16T19:07:31
Post:
I'm the author of Blood and Chaos: The Story of a [BTVS SI] Turned Vampire over on the spacebattles forums. One of my readers posted about having found the story by way of a link posted here a month or so back.
I'm curious if any of you have any thoughts or suggestions on my attempts to have the BTVS world behave in a way that makes a consistent sort of sense? I like to think my story qualifies for the [RT] tag... and possibly the [RST] one as well, even though Jack's version of SCIENCE! is really more akin to flinging spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks than any kind of rigorous process.
Comments:
u/None [+10] (7 hours later)
[deleted]
u/Ruljinn [+5] (7 hours later)
Hey.
I'm actually building towards that. I think?
WR&H reaching out to Jack is one of the earlier things to catch Jack off guard.
I see The Mayor as the top/central figure in the metaphorical:
I visualise it as a nigh-endless pile of horrors crawling over each other to reach to top and do something crazy. If you curbstomp the upper horrors to death, there's a new group ready to try and become king turd of shit mountain.
If Jack... er... When Jack... does something to mess with the Mayor's ability to keep order? All hell breaks loose.
Which isn't to say that Mayor is all powerful, just very good at politicking in supernatural circles.
Edit... Which makes me wonder if Jack is going to have to reluctantly declare HIMSELF king of 'shit mountain' to restore order.
... which then makes me wonder what would have to happen to make Jack: A) Notice the war was going on B) Give a single flying fuck at all. C) Decide it was his problem to solve
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+3] Roll the Dice on Fate (8 hours later)
... which then makes me wonder what would have to happen to make Jack: A) Notice the war was going on B) Give a single flying fuck at all. C) Decide it was his problem to solve
Well, he could always decide that the whole city was his and anyone killing his citizens and breaking his buildings without permission would face a serious talking to. Honestly though, that sounds exhausting. I suspect after the first few weeks or months he'd just hire demons or whatevers to do the job for him.
u/Ruljinn [+2] (19 hours later)
I could see that. He's already decided that apocalypses are not allowed because it's his world where he keeps his stuff that they'd be ending.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+7] Roll the Dice on Fate (22 hours later)
It always surprises me how close sufficiently enlightened self-interest comes to approximating actual morals once taken far enough along. Obviously it's not quite the same, but the similarities are striking.
u/ben_sphynx [+2] (2 days later)
I really like this comment; makes me think.
One wonders if other characters could also be persuaded to behave more rationally. Would love to read about a more rational mayor, for instance.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+3] Roll the Dice on Fate (2 days later)
Really, given his interests and desires he acts pretty rationally (Edit: or at least sensibly) from what I can remember. He's lasted more than 100 years so far after all. His main mistake is in not understanding which genre he is in, which is understandable given how grimdark the world itself might seem for anyone not watching the main characters.
u/GeeJo [+3] Custom Flair (2 days later)
Also, that he never got around to reading the Evil Overlord List. Specifically, Rule 34.
u/gabbalis [+4] (an hour later)
One of my readers
It was me!
DioGabbalis!I'm curious if any of you have any thoughts or suggestions on my attempts to have the BTVS world
The world eh? Anything in particular? I mean, we have the magic system of course, and then we have the 'geopolitical' situation, the motivations of the world's major players and such.
u/Ruljinn [+2] (2 hours later)
Well, I guess "geo"-political more than magic. Magic doing bizarre and unexpected things for no reason is why its magic not science.
But, do my characters and factions appear to be doing things that make sense for them rather than being driven by an arbitrary plot?
If they are, does anyone have suggestions on expanding that outwards to encompass the Watcher's Council interacting with various governments and other international entities like Wolfram&Hart.
If they aren't, what gives that impression?
u/gabbalis [+5] (3 hours later)
So. I'm no BTVS expert, so I can't be sure where the gaps in cannon that even need to be filled in lie. I only even watched the first three seasons. But I do have the wiki. I also believe you have said that you have watched both Buffy and Angel but didn't read any of the comics?
From my impression the Watchers do a lot more than just help the slayer. The Slayer is just their trump/wild card... that respawns.
They fight evil, they train new watchers in the watchers academy, and they send them after monsters. My educated guess would be that they are big into Intel (You know... Watching. Heh), exchanging Intel with governments, sending in their black ops team to get information in cases... And once they find something that needs to be dealt with. The watchers they send in? I'd expect them to fight dirty. Of course the Watchers Council would direct all this.
As for Wolfram and Hart? Well uh, actually having never watched Angel I'm having trouble determining what their interaction with the Watchers council is supposed to be, and I just read like, ten episode summaries. Wolfram is listed as an enemy of the watchers council though so I guess the council is supposed to know about them. I guess generally you have to explain why the two organizations don't just blow up each other's HQs. There's probably a canon reason though.
u/Ruljinn [+2] (3 hours later)
I suspect it's because they both like to pretend they're "normal" groups. Something like Harry Potter's statute of secrecy must be at play in the world for the supernatural to remain hidden... for the most part anyway. Sunnydale Syndrome only on a larger scale. Though I suppose that the various players could all be running independent clean up operations on supernatural leaks. If they started causing major explosions the national governments would take exception via the torch and pitchfork methods.
Which I suppose brings up the far more generalized question of how do you rationalize History playing out the same ways when magic is a thing that people have access to?
u/gabbalis [+3] (4 hours later)
You don't. You can't justify history turning out the same way with one air molecule being out of place, let alone magic existing. (only takes one microscopic difference in timing before entirely different people are being born.)
There is the: "You can't prove our real world hasn't been this fictional world all along" tactic that exists in worlds where the supernatural is secret. Some authors write magic into historical wars, claiming that was how they came to pass in the first place.
There is also the: "An infinite multiverse, finite possibilities" tactic to justify that the ridiculous coincidence of similarity might still happen somewhere. Though far more pseudo-buffyverses with a different history would exist.
But ultimately you have to rely on suspension of disbelief for this part.
Oh or did you mean within the context of your story? Jack is an SI after all so this is of particular concern to him. Yes I would use the second justification combined with the Gods explicitly choosing a universe he would know about for the sake of chaos.
u/traverseda [+2] With dread but cautious optimism (a day later)
In the comics, the masquerade gets broken. You get the feeling it was paper thin to begin with, harmony being outed as a vampire on a talk show isn't shown as super world changing.
Magic has always been just on the periphery, but most people don't acknowledge it or even realize it's going on.
I don't really have a clear understanding of how that's supposed to work. I could swear I thought the answer was important just a second ago...
u/rineSample [+2] (11 hours later)
Oh man, a rationalist Dio... The mind boggles at the possibilities.
u/GeeJo [+2] Custom Flair (2 days later)
Hey! I was one of those who followed the original link from here, and have been keeping up since.
Honestly you've been doing a pretty good job of keeping the plates spinning. I went into the fic knowing that it was largely a seat-of-the-pants writing project riffing on canon, so I'm not expecting a tightly-written plot-centric trip from A to B. Rambling and diversions are part of the charm.
A lot is excused in terms of things not having majorly butterflied their way away from canon yet in that Jack's scope remains fairly small and the big players are all intact - particularly the Mayor.