17 KiB
Looking for rational fiction with major darkness and sadness.
-
Author: u/None *
-
URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/4pan4e/looking_for_rational_fiction_with_major_darkness/
-
Score: 18
-
Created: 2016-06-22T13:29:49
Post:
[removed]
Comments:
u/Roxolan [+10] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (an hour later)
It's not exactly obscure at this point, but A Song of Ice and Fire does qualify.
u/wtfbbc [+5] (2 hours later)
My thought as well. The books are far more rational than the show.
u/Rhamni [+2] Aspiring author (2 hours later)
I imagine that's mostly because they can't squeeze everything in there without making it too long.
u/Escapement [+5] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (12 hours later)
How about Unsong? With the Broadcast chapter, it undoubtedly qualifies.
(I am partially recommending it because it amuses me to have it recommended in both the with and without major darkness and sadness sections, based on a fatefully timed chapter release)
u/2BR02B [+2] Marxist-Lurianism (13 hours later)
Oh god. Seconded strongly. My skin is crawling right now.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
There was an Unsong update this Wednsday? I stopped checking because they were so rare.
And going from what /u/2BR02B said, this gonna be fun.
u/Magodo [+6] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (an hour later)
The first thing that comes to mind is The Metropolitan Man by alexanderwales although it's quite short.
Don't know if it's rational but The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is very dark and has great squicky violence.
u/tadrinth [+5] (10 hours later)
Sailor Nothing is a deconstruction of the magical girl genre.
u/None [+2] (14 hours later)
[removed]
u/Roxolan [+1] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (17 hours later)
Have you tried Saga of Soul? Enjoyable deconstruction without much darkness.
u/tadrinth [+1] (2 days later)
Totally forgot that existed! It's excellent. I don't think it's complete, though.
u/Rhamni [+3] Aspiring author (an hour later)
Berserk seems a nice fit. No stupidity, and the baddies are flawed in the normal ways that humans are flawed, albeit often dialled up.
It has very little angst. The main character, who receives more than most protagonists' share of darkness, responds by growing harder and colder. The world is also very rich in reasons to despair. It's got Lovecraftian levels of demonic entities that have the power to harm mankind, but unlike Lovecraft the demons of Berserk care very much indeed about humanity, and think we are delicious. The series is made all the better, I think, because it's not always dark. Something like 25% of it is pretty standard heartwarming comradery and positive character development and adventures as you grow to love the main cast. Then the darkness sets in, and you think to yourself, "they wouldn't actually go through with this," and then they do.
It's available in cheaply animated anime or in well drawn manga. I recommend the manga, but the anime has the advantage of not spoiling the end of the best arc before it even begins. Both are easily obtainable online.
u/greycoats [+2] (19 hours later)
If I remember correctly, someone mentioned to skip the first chapter in the manga to avoid the spoiler. Will that help to enjoy the manga?
u/Rhamni [+2] Aspiring author (20 hours later)
You'd have to start with the last chapter in volume three, but yes, this is what I would recommend. Just... go backwards from the end of the book, because I'm fairly sure the page right before the start of the Golden Age arc will tell you a giant spoiler in giant letters, even if you just glance at it. It's like if you opened up Lord of the Rings and there was a prologue with Frodo on the elven ship, talking with Gandalf about how Gollum fell into Mount Doom with the ring, and isn't it nice how Aragorn was able to reclaim his kingdom? Why would you put that there?
u/redrach [+1] (a day later)
Alternatively, you could watch the anime and then read the manga. It's what I did.
u/TennisMaster2 [+5] (10 hours later)
CORDYCEPS: Too clever for their own good isn't rational, but is a cautionary tale of some major points of reasoning failure. /u/Luminarium's To Board the Ark is pretty well-done rational horror. This is a My Little Pony fanfic you might like that was previously posted here.
u/Green0Photon [+1] Student in Cyoria, Minmay, and Ranvar (a day later)
CORDYCEPS is terrifying.
I'd say the characters try to be rational, but the world fucks them over for it. Thus, it's irrational fiction.
u/TennisMaster2 [+1] (a day later)
All but one, yeah. The viewpoint character who cares about epistemological purity I don't think is rational; too many biases.
u/confettibin [+4] (10 hours later)
If you're looking for a good FiO spinoff, Always Say No is one of my favorites. It deals with the concept in a less detached way than the original, and many of the implied consequences are directly addressed. Honestly, I think it's a more entertaining read overall.
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (12 hours later)
I hope mine is starting to become worthy of the label "major." It's over 100,000 words and maybe like 40-60% finished. There is a non-negligible amount of major darkness and sadness.
u/None [+3] (14 hours later)
[removed]
u/None [+1] (a day later)
So many things here I've seen around but never looked into.
Do you think I can read RWBY vs the gamer without having watched RWBY, or should I just watch it first?
I'm pretty sure the antimemtics series is rational, it's written by the guy who wrote both Ra and Fine Structure.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
[removed]
u/Escapement [+1] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (a day later)
Fine Structure is really, really rough - it's got a lot of good stuff, but that good stuff is buried in a lot of stuff that is much less good.
It feels like the author was experimenting a lot with the story structure, and got decidedly mixed results - it's a lot less linear and straightforward than Ra was (and Ra itself was not exactly the most linearly written story of all time...). Also, the characters are even weaker than Ra's decidedly skeletal cast.
If you didn't find Ra compelling or interesting, I think it's probably unlikely you'll like Fine Strucuture either... unless your problems with Ra was that it was too character driven and too linear, I guess?
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Fine Structure is great. The first chapter isn't representative of the book, so skip it if you don't like the pseudo-psychedelic lyricism, but come back it after you finish, because then it'll make perfect sense.
Compared to Ra, I found it much more engrossing (i.e. I didn't pick it up/put it down every month or so out of sheer lack of sufficient interest). The synopsis on the page I linked isn't quite accurate, since it's a common complaint that the powers-of-two superhero plotline just sorta petered out in favor of real plot (which I can't describe because my memory is bad enough I couldn't tell if it'd be a spoiler or not).
I've heard it said that people usually don't know why they like/dislike things, so if you ask them they'll just make stuff up. I liked FS. I think it'll be one of greatest pieces of web fiction when qntm gets around to ironing out the kinks. I'd say give it shot.
u/NoYouTryAnother [+3] (a day later)
Prince of Thorns is gorgeously dark, set in a post-apocalyptic world in which Doomsday was the rendering of reality magical. It follows a precocious -(but not so much so as HPJEV, and with in-universe reason)- 13 yearold who initially seems to have psychopathy to rival HPMOR!Quirrel's apathy. Character's actions are always their own (or, if pawns, their unseen master's) and never the plot's, the amorality of the setting is altogether its own achievement, the protagonist wins only insofar as his resources merit (though sometimes these resources are hidden from the reader until after their relevance is revealed, and not every apparent win is real). I haven't seen the Rationalist community's take on it, but I think it fits the bill at least as well as any other non-Rationalist derived works and on top of that is, well, gorgeous.
Oh, and fun trivia: Its author, /u/MarkLawrence, has a background in pure mathematics (PhD in Several Complex Variables) and worked in AI. Come to think of it, I'm surprised I haven't seen his work mentioned here before.
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (13 hours later)
I've been told that I managed to inspire true despair in my readers during Deeprise, Sadly my hand is being forced on having to actually re-write that because the original site that holds the majority of the text of it went under without warning and has not come back in months.
I have all of the images and about a third of the original written text from the first half and the last quarter saved by a diligent archive trawling fan but ultimately it looks like it will not be available to read in it's entirety until I can go over that story and re-write it.
u/traverseda [+3] With dread but cautious optimism (14 hours later)
Is wayback machine missing anything?
Also, I could have sworn that I read something similar in loops? Multithreading? Was that you?
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (a day later)
That was blatant concept insert if you mean the MLP loops :)
u/traverseda [+2] With dread but cautious optimism (2 days later)
I do. I admit it stuck with me.
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (2 days later)
I almost think Deeprise as a story would be served better illustrated again and told from different points of view. More delving into the world, more meandering across the literal centuries of time the main plot traversed.
Simultaneously more focus and honing of the themes.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (a day later)
And that is including wayback machine trawling.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
I actually started (and stopped, unfortunately) reading Deeprise several months ago for exactly this reason! You mean it's gone? Damn.
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (a day later)
I have all the art for it backed up, and I have a very good memory for the written forms, even the missing ones. There was actually a lot of plot messiness I would like to fix up to make everything flow better. But I'm currently doing another project.
But otherwise yeah, the text is missing about a third or so of the story.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
An author of rational fiction losing his story due to holding the Idiot Ball and not making backups? Sorry, that's hilarious.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (2 days later)
I don't really consider anything of value being lost, so not sure it's an idiot ball. The entire thing is at best a feverish first draft, I kept the data that felt irreplaceable. The images that evoke in me every utterance and word and crude aproximate translation.
Far as I'm concerned I have 80% of what I need to make the whole thing better the second go around.
It's mostly just annoying because I can't link the original... but the original was better as a living document, it's stilted and terrible as a crystalized thing.
u/Dustmaiden [+2] Here, too, virtue has its due reward (a day later)
If you're willing to read MLP beyond FiO, The Time Loop Trilogy is definitely worth reading. If that doesn't do it for you, you can probably skip to its extra-dark AU The Reign of Queen Twilight Sparkle.
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
I am quite fond of MLP fanfics actually; I mentioned liking Fallout Equestria and it's spinoffs in the OP.
And I loved the Hard Reset trilogy, thanks for the rec anyway. Also: I'd encourage anyone who also liked the trilogy to check out the (on hiatus) fan sequel Hard Reset 2: Reset Harder
u/tadrinth [+2] (2 days later)
Alicorn has a rationalfic of Twilight called Luminosity.
Her Elcenia stories are, if not dark, occasionally heartwrenching, if you're into that sort of thing.
u/IomKg [+1] (a day later)
Saya no Uta, it requires some benevolence to accept it as rational, but i think most of the main points of the story would work fairly similarly with some minor adjustments to make it rational.
u/b_sen [+1] (a day later)
I notice that neither you nor the commenters have mentioned HPMOR, so I'll mention it just in case. (It is very major as far as rational fiction goes.)
Plus not only is it 660k words itself, it's spawned enough fanfics that there's a whole tree of them.
u/Jiro_T [+1] (2 days later)
Why don't we just list all the rational fiction, then mark each one as either "with major darkness and sadness" or "without major darkness and sadness". You'll answer two questions in the same time as one, and it's a lot less likely you'll miss something just because it doesn't come to mind easily as a member of either category even though logically it has to belong in one.
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
Why don't we just list all the rational fiction, then mark each one as either "with major darkness and sadness" or "without major darkness and sadness".
For what purpose?
logically it has to belong in one
Statements of this form are generally false.
u/Jiro_T [+1] (2 days later)
"Rational fiction with major darkness and sadness" and "rational fiction without major darkness and sadness" are two mutually exclusive categories that together make up the entirety of rational fiction. All rational fiction falls into one of those two categories, by definition.
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
You are confusing the model with reality.
"For all Y: (Y is X) ^ (Y is not X)" is a tautology, in the model.
If the predicate 'major darkness and sadness' carved reality at the joints, then you'd be right to say everything either satifies it, or doesn't. But asserting that your language is isomorphic the ontological structure of reality itself is not at all trivial.
The heap problem -- one thing isn't a heap, neither is two, so at what point does some amount of thing become a heap -- is the most common example of this disconnect. 'Heap' is a map. "Amount of things" is also the map, but it's closer to the territory than the binary 'is a heap'/'is not'.
Please note: I am not making any object-level statements here. Maybe 'major darkness or sadness' is a predicate that cleanly slices the set of rational stories. Maybe it isn't. But the general form of your statement "I model objects of this class as having certain properties -- therefore all objects I'd recognise as a member of this class meaningfully instantiate those properties" is simple map/terrain confusion.
Think of the statement "Gravity drowned". Ask if it's true or false -- obviously false. But it's false in a different way than "the sky is green" is false. "The sky is green" could be true tomorrow. "Gravity drowned" is false and it could never be true, because gravity isn't the type of thing to drown. It's ontologically ridiculous -- a category error.
Generally speaking, everything is probably ontologically ridiculous, because language =/= ontology.
That's all I'm saying