8.4 KiB
Wizard Kirby and the Methods of Rationality
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Author: u/Sailor_Vulcan Champion of Justice and Reason*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/5exrjl/wizard_kirby_and_the_methods_of_rationality/
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Score: 21
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Created: 2016-11-26T04:31:08
Post:
Kirby was a monster. He had an insatiable appetite, and almost everything tasted good to him, including stars and sapient beings. It was how his biology was designed to work. He had been created by the alien race of eldritch abominations known as Dark Matter, for the purposes of being used as a weapon of mass destruction. He didn't develop self awareness until he had eaten a lot of sapient creatures, and after that it was only thanks to a freak accident involving a penguin making him cry that he grew a conscience. After that he grew to be a loving peaceful creature. Or at least he tried to be. There were so many epistemic risks that he had to fight. Him personally. And oftentimes he ended up having to kill sapient beings that got in the way of his galaxy-saving endeavors. And unfortunately, the easiest and fastest way for him to do that was to suck them up and swallow them. Plus he often was able to copy some of the abilities of those he killed in this manner. He tried to avoid it when he could, but oftentimes it was unavoidable. He wanted a life of peace and sweet dreams. What he got instead was a life of nightmares and battle.
One day he was fighting another such existential risk that unfortunately wouldn't go away just by trying to kill it: a charismatic businessman who wanted to do something really evil and misguided involving imperialist exploitation of Kirby's home planet and an artificial intelligence. In the climactic final battle against this crazy CEO, one of his attacks trapped Kirby in a magitech computer simulation. Remembering the last time he had fought an artificial intelligence, this time he had come prepared with a preserved piece of the corpse of a reality warping monster, Dark Mind, which he had defeated in a parallel universe and which was also the reason his whole home universe hadn't been enslaved or killed by the first AI (don't ask). He had resolved only to use its copy ability in the most dire of circumstances, when it seemed that everything would be inevitably unretrievable lost. He inhaled the copy ability right as he was sucked into the simulation, and used it to escape at the last second before the artificial intelligence could go FOOM. Then he used it again to slow down time so that the artificial intelligence would take a lot longer to FOOM. And then Kirby used it a third time, in order to destroy the artificial intelligence. But while the artificial intelligence was slowed down, it was still learning. It deflected Kirby's copy ability back at him! Kirby was knocked back into a rip in the space time continuum.
When he woke up, he was falling. Down, down, down, into the deepest pits of the abyss. The darkness was eating away at his life, his memories and any happy thoughts he tried to have. And then a blazing silver light illuminated where he was. Kirby couldn't see his enemies, but he knew they were there. He tried to suck one of them up. This was a mistake.
"Game over. You tried to save the universe. You failed, dumbass. Star Dream won, and everyone you know and love is about to be gruesomely killed or enslaved by it."
Kirby wondered who was saying these awful things to him. And then he realized the words were coming from his own mouth.
"You cannot continue. Face it. You lost, and you never had a chance of winning. Just give up and die! Or better yet, end this miserable, pointless existence. Eat it all up, and then eat yourself, because there's no point for it to go on. No point to any of it..."
Kirby knew he didn't normally say things like this. He would never have even thought something like it before. Whatever he had just swallowed was messing with his mind. Fortunately, he had the inborn reflex to reject any abilities he had copied when he sustained too much mental or physical damage. The strange invisible monster's ability was rejected from his body and mind a few long seconds later, and Kirby snapped out of it.
Kirby shivered. He had to figure out where he was and how to get back home to defeat Star dream before it became too intelligent to stop...
POYOPOYOPOYOPOYOPOYOPOYOPOYOPOYO
Author's note: what do you think? Do you like it? There wasn't really much room for kirby's peaceful fun-loving side to be shown in this scene since he was fighting for his life and the fate of his home universe. Also, Kirby is older and smarter here than he was in the original games.
I literally have next to no idea for where to take this story after this. If anybody wants to continue it, please do. I'd love to see a full-fledged Kirby/HPMOR crossover come out of this, but I exhausted most of the ideas I had here in that regard. Basically after this I was thinking Kirby could swallow a wizard or witch that was attacking him or an innocent person, and in the process gain the ability to do magic. Or maybe he'd just swallow a wand. Or a spell. But I honestly don't have a plot in mind beyond "OMG Kirby accidentally gets transported to HPMOR-verse and goes to Hogwarts how cool would that be!!?"
Like really, I don't have any more plot than that. Somebody else write it please?
Comments:
u/Adekis [+16] (2 hours later)
I'm enjoying this uncommonly self-aware version of Kirby, but I don't know if I'd qualify him as rational just yet, and also I'm not seeing any Wizard People and frankly, don't really want to.
Consider the possibility of coming up with a Kirby fan fic rather than an un-fitting crossover. I particularly like the idea of reading in rather more detail about the misguided attempt to imperialistically exploit planet Popstar by a well-meaning but fundamentally wrong businessman.
Kirby's world is bizarre and strange and it'd interest me far more to see it given the "rational treatment" than to shunt Kirby off into Hogwarts.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+2] Champion of Justice and Reason (16 hours later)
That feels like a very big project. I don't think I have it in me to work on that right now. It occurs to me that the story above might work if Kirby got spliced or cloned partway through the story and the other Kirby alllied himself with Voldemort...
If you would like to try writing either of those story ideas go ahead. I have to admit nightmare and dreamland definitely has potential for rational retelling.
u/Adekis [+1] (19 hours later)
Thanks- I might give it a shot, but you're right to say it's a big project and I'm already trying to write some fairly expansive things, so who knows how far I'll get. On the other hand, "Rational" fan fiction is almost universally expansive, which is one reason I haven't tried my hand at it much. As a result, it kind of baffles my mind to think you'd want to write a Rational work about Voldemort and Hogwarts and Kirby and consider that not to be a big project. It might even have to be bigger than the one about Kirby's world in order to justify itself.
Good Kirby vs. Evil Kirby has limited potential. One facet of Rational fan fiction is that the hero is Right by virtue of their reasoning abilities. If Evil Kirby is initially the same person as Good Kirby (and just off the top of my head he should be to maximize dramatic tension) then the only reason he'd make different choices than Good Kirby would in a given situation would either be that Good Kirby only obtained his rationalist worldview (and thus, his Rightness, by the rules of this type of story) after they became two people, or if Evil Rational Kirby was actually Good Rational Kirby and knew something that Good Kirby (actually Misinformed Rational Kirby in this hypothetical) didn't. If it's just Good Kirby vs. Evil Kirby in a straightforward way, then I fail to see what makes them fight or indeed what makes them Rational beyond an uncommon self-awareness, which of course isn't the same thing...
Good luck on the project either way! :D
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (19 hours later)
i think you're misunderstanding me. those were just suggestions for if somebody else wanted to work on it. i honestly lost my inspiration for the story after writing the beginning above, since like i said most of my ideas for it were exhausted there.
u/Adekis [+2] (19 hours later)
Oh, okay. Well then... uh...
I hope you find a more enduring plot bunny? ^o^;