6.5 KiB
Found a writing prompt in need of a rational short story!
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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/6crst9/found_a_writing_prompt_in_need_of_a_rational/
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Score: 6
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Created: 2017-05-23T02:10:13
Post:
I'd be curious to see a rational take on this:
Comments:
u/cthulhuraejepsen [+21] Fruit flies like a banana (5 hours later)
The Denier of Love, 2200 words
(I think this needs an unbelievable amount of worldbuilding if you want to do it properly, and you need a whole bunch of rules for the many, many corner cases. It's also one of those things where I want to just write a bullet point list of facts/ideas more than I want to write a story, but I must grudgingly concede that stories are better than bullet points.)
u/ShiranaiWakaranai [+8] (13 hours later)
That was uniquely horrifying, that moment when he met his soulmate was like brainwashing. "suddenly, nothing mattered" is literally the catchphrase for people who have been hypnotized.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+4] Champion of Justice and Reason (12 hours later)
Oh no. What a tragic ending! Maybe he should have spent more time trying to find a cure for aging lol.
u/OutOfNiceUsernames [+3] fear of last pages (18 hours later)
I was thinking he would [...]
u/vakusdrake [+8] (22 hours later)
I know I was really rooting for him to somehow manage to kill his soulmate out of self defence, because this setting is one where getting bonded with them is a fate worse than death.
u/TheLegendofFredDurst [+7] (3 minutes later)
Is this not literally just the plot of Hancock, that horrible Will Smith movie?
u/trekie140 [+5] (45 minutes later)
Only in the last third, which I thought was the worst part of the whole story. I didn't exactly like the rest of the film, there were some really stupid plot points and painful dialogue, but it was at least thematically consistent up until that twist came out of nowhere.
The movie suddenly went from being about a depressed asshole Superman finding meaning in his life by paying his debts to society and becoming a superhero to Hancock discovering his publicist's wife is coincidentally his long lost mate who saps his powers.
u/TheLegendofFredDurst [+2] (8 hours later)
Yes, perhaps I should have used "basically" instead.
Such a piece of literature would almost definitely have to be a character study and it would have to work a bit to avoid any generalizations of Hancock's final plotthread, though.
u/ZeroNihilist [+5] (4 hours later)
There's a few interesting potential stories in the idea of a "soulmate" (some of them compatible options):
1a. It refers to somebody who is the best romantic fit for you right now. This implies that it isn't one consistent person throughout your whole life, as people continually change in the qualities they desire and offer.
1b. Alternatively, the person is "fixed" at some particular time (e.g. 00:00 1/1/XXXX, where XXXX is the year you turn 30). If it's going to be symmetric, the time would have to be limited by age somehow (e.g. only two people born in 1988 could become soulmates next NYE). It doesn't have to be symmetric (one person's soulmate-assignment could force the reciprocal relation).
2. A soulmate is a remaining-lifespan-happiness maximiser. In other words, if you ended up in a relationship with the person, the rest of your lives would be the happiest of any possible pairing. This is more or less a prophecy, unless you're instead using one of the above (changing it moment-to-moment, fixing it at some arbitrary point). Note that it doesn't mean that finding your soulmate would be happier than it going unrequited.
3. Soulmates are chosen with a method unrelated to compatibility. The concept of a soulmate tends to be bundled up with a "star-crossed lovers" deal, which means that you might end up with somebody who would be a terrible match until the soulmate effect is accounted for. As a story seed, this could get really dark (consider a victim of abuse being forced to feel maximum love for their abuser, and having to overcome that emotion to find happiness).
4. It isn't a bijective mapping. In other words, there are some people who have no soulmate, or some people who have multiple.
5. Soulmates are plucked from the future as well as the present (again, essentially prophecy). The prompt character's match could have just been born, after millennia unmatched. Could get creepy (see Lolita, Twilight), but you can work around that by saying they're destined to not meet until the younger one is at least ~1k years old (or you could run with it, have your 11.7k year old protagonist romance a 30 year old; matching age bodily, not mentally).
6. Soulmates are (somehow) perfect matches, which means that people who don't want to die get matched with like-minded people. Thus they never meet, and fate never attempts to push them together.
7. People can feel their soulmate on an intuitive level, some rushing together and some steering apart.
8. People know absolutely nothing about their soulmate, not even when they meet; it's only when they start to age that they realise they've met "the one".
The story idea I just came up with is the protagonist being interviewed by police after being a witness at a crime scene. They ask them for their name and soulmate, which they refuse to provide (because why would you tell anyone else if you didn't want to become mortal?). Eventually the police find it out (maybe based on ancient manuscripts or artefacts). They go to search their records, but the soulmate "doesn't exist". Turns out that they're equally old and reluctant to die, staying "off grid" to ensure their survival.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+2] Champion of Justice and Reason (11 hours later)
Does it count as mortality inducing if you meet them online instead of in person?
u/ZeroNihilist [+2] (12 hours later)
That opens up a whole other can of worms. Once we've worked out what "find their soulmate" means we can tackle "immortal". I think a human that has the weak, non-aging version immortality surviving for 11.7k years is almost worthy of a story on its own.