scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/4vik6y.md

## Rationally Writing, Episode 4 - Fanfiction

* Author: u/DaystarEld  *Pokémon Professor**
* URL: http://www.daystareld.com/podcast/rationally-writing-4/
* Score: 26

* Created: 2016-07-31T19:22:00

### Post:

[Link to content](http://www.daystareld.com/podcast/rationally-writing-4/)

### Comments:

> **u/DaystarEld** [+8]  *Pokémon Professor* (a minute later)
> 
> Hey everyone, welcome back! Starting next week, we're going to probably start paying to upgrade our Soundcloud account so we can upload more episodes, and so you all can download more than the current limit of 100. I hope you're all enjoying it so far, and any feedback is more than welcome!
> 
> **Timestamps**:
> 
> 0:40 The Three Types of Fanfiction
> 
> 3:13 Examples, and where Rational Fiction falls
> 
> 5:27 What are the pros of writing Fanfiction?
> 
> 7:38 How do Daystar and Alexander find it useful?
> 
> 9:25 Con 1: Limited Audience
> 
> 12:18 Con 2: Expectations from Canon
> 
> 14:39 Con 3: Lack of Profit
> 
> 16:18 Genres that are easy and hard to rationalize.
> 
> 19:55 Genre Ghettos
> 
> 21:15 Daystar rants about Magical Realism
> 
> 24:44Fanfiction Ghetto
> 
> 26:47 Best stories to rationalize
> 
> 32:44 Finding new solutions, creating new problems
> 
> 35:53 Bridging the gap between Fanfiction and Original
> Fiction

> **u/trekie140** [+4]  (3 hours later)
> 
> This is an odd episode for me because I liked what you said even though I disagreed with a lot of it. I would've liked The Metropolitan Man more if it had gone the Irredeemable route and replaced the characters with expys, but I also liked A Bluer Shade of White even though it also ignored what I liked about Frozen. I also REALLY like magical realism, but I can't deny any of your criticisms of it so...shrug?
> 
> If you like what Irredeemable did with expy characters you'd probably like the comic book Astro City, which is all about exploring the world and people's lives in a superhero setting without focusing on heroic adventures. It's not very rational, but it does a lot of the kind of analysis and reimagining you often see in rational fiction so at worst it's a gold mine of ideas. [Here is the start of my favorite story arc.](http://www.hellocomic.to/astro-city/c7/p1)

>> **u/DaystarEld** [+2]  *Pokémon Professor* (4 hours later)
>> 
>> I've heard good things about Astro City :) I'll have to check it out when I get through my current reading list.

> **u/None** [+1]  (an hour later)
> 
> Is rational fic harder to write than irrational fic?
> 
> The simplest thought process is thinking about the "consequence" of X.
> 
> Let take an example from a recent rational fic:
> 
> A portal opened up in Canada linking them to a new world called Remnant(where the death monsters don't attack immediately because they're repelled by the portal). 
> 
> What happens?
> 
> * It gets reported to the police by not-stupid teenagers who happens to be hiking near the portal, which after some inspection, gets reported to the higher-ups. 
> * Article five gets invoked by the Canadians. The Canadian military gets mobilized, and so do the rest of NATO.
> * The militaries of other nations start mobilizing.
> * President Obama talks to Putin to ensure that the nuclear apocalypse won't go up.
> * News crew flood the vicinity of the portal, held back by the military and policemen. Social media traffic spike. 
> * Some government officials start sending radio waves for Remnans to hear as to start first contact.
> 
> In a non-rational fic, you got some stupid teenagers who simply waltz in and get killed by soulless monsters on the other side, or something like that.

>> **u/ZeroNihilist** [+3]  (14 hours later)
>> 
>> In a non-rational fic, you'd get some stupid teenagers who simply waltz in and somehow become powerful ninja wizards capable of fighting the soulless monsters where no-one else can.
>> 
>> Remember, a non-rational fic isn't just a rational fic with non-rational characters. In non-rational fics, characters that consistently do stupid things can still end up saving the day, because it's operating on a very different set of rules to reality (e.g. "a group of plucky young kids can overcome their dysfunction to become true heroes").

>> **u/DaystarEld** [+1]  *Pokémon Professor* (2 hours later)
>> 
>> There might be some metrics I'm not thinking of at the moment, but for now my answer is unequivocally yes. 
>> 
>> To go off at least one purely objective metric, the more in depth you have to think about something, or the wider the scope of the story, the more elements come into play, and the more data you need to have as a writer to write the story. 
>> 
>> So while research isn't necessarily the only metric for how "hard" it is to write a story, a rational fiction will pretty much always be harder in that respect than the same story told irrationally. Knowing about Article Five, researching police and military and government protocols, exploring how radio waves work, things like that.
>> 
>> It's all stuff that wouldn't need to be done in an irrational story where the teenagers just walk in and die and give no warning for Canada or the rest of the world to be able to respond before shit hits the fan.

>>> **u/None** [+1]  (2 hours later)
>>> 
>>> *It's all stuff that wouldn't need to be done in an irrational story where the teenagers just walk in and die and give no warning for Canada or the rest of the world to be able to respond before shit hits the fan.*
>>> 
>>> On second thought, some complicated chain of events would still happen if the teenagers never bother to give any warning to Canada on the account of being dead because they were stupid.
>>> 
>>> It would still be a military sci-fi story, just in a worse situation.
>>> 
>>> In an irrational story however, what we might see is a lack of communication, people doing stupid things for stupid reason, and unrealistic responses like in Gates, another portal fic, in which nations other than Japan acts like buffoons.

>>>> **u/DaystarEld** [+2]  *Pokémon Professor* (2 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> Yep, and it's inherently easier to write people doing stupid things or reacting to bad situations than preparing for them. It allows for more mistakes and poorer judgement, and lets the camera focus only on "immediate" issues, rather than calling for a full review of the options and response.

> **u/Mabus101** [+1]  (3 days later)
> 
> A question: most rational fic seems to be focused on characters who are moderately intelligent in the source material already--Harry Potter, for instance.  Is there no interest in people of lesser intelligence bootstrapping themselves higher?  Is it more difficult to write? Or is there another reason I'm not thinking of?

>> **u/DaystarEld** [+1]  *Pokémon Professor* (3 days later)
>> 
>> Are you talking about starting a rationalfic off with an unintelligent main character who becomes more rational, or rationalfic *based* on stories with unintelligent characters?

>>> **u/Mabus101** [+1]  (3 days later)
>>> 
>>> The former.
>>> 
>>> As an experimental move in that direction, I'm attempting a rational!Harmony POV in an existing ensemble fic.

>>>> **u/DaystarEld** [+1]  *Pokémon Professor* (3 days later)
>>>> 
>>>> Gotcha. My guess is the main problem with it is it requires modelling an unintelligent person well, which can be difficult, and doubly so when you need to model them as unintelligent but still interested, motivated, and capable of making themselves smarter, which begs the question of what made them unintelligent in the first place.
>>>> 
>>>> "Smart but ignorant" leveling themselves up is understandable, as is "dumb but educated," but "dumb and ignorant" is a kind of black-hole of personality that rarely has the ability to recognize or care about boosting their rationality if portrayed realistically.

>>>>> **u/Mabus101** [+1]  (3 days later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> I think we can plausibly posit that Harmony suffers primarily from internalized bias against blonde women, possibly with a minor learning disability as an early catalyst. (As a vampire she's also hampered by a lack of empathy.)
>>>>> 
>>>>> The running joke is that Harmony survives incidents that would kill any "extra" on the show.  While she frequently makes poor decisions, she seems aware of her shortcomings and is consistently shown studying self-help books.  Late in Angel s5 she's abandoned the traditional vampire lifestyle to work at a high-power law firm and even does the research on the cultural differences of demon clients.  I'd call her a plausible candidate for bootstrapping.

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