6.5 KiB
World ripe for abuse: Fosters home for imaginary friends
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Author: u/nervix709 *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/8pvdo9/world_ripe_for_abuse_fosters_home_for_imaginary/
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Score: 37
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Created: 2018-06-09T19:50:40
Post:
Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends is an old Cartoon Network show, where children can make imaginary friends, that become real. That means that if, for example, a child makes an imaginary friend of a blue blob, a blue blob materializes next to them, as a living thinking being. Examples of other beings imagined include super heroes with powers, giant monsters with mechanical weaponry, and household appliances like ovens.
So, how can this universe be abused?
Comments:
u/PM_ME_CUTE_FOXES [+63] (3 hours later)
It's not "how can this universe be abused" so much as "the universe is already an utter dumpster fire when we enter because the first person to imagine a god almost certainly didn't bother to, you know, align their fucking AI"
u/earzo7 [+22] (6 hours later)
One important detail is that you grant your friend their form, but they seem to develop their personality on their own. We see this in cases like Red not being a violent monster like he was supposed to, Eduardo being a wimp when he was supposed to defend against bullies, the bowling pin being bad at bowling, etc.
u/None [+29] (an hour later)
Shit... damn teenagers and their hormones... there goes rule 34! No wonder there were no teenagers in that show... or at least not often
u/Tommy2255 [+30] (3 hours later)
There were teenagers' imaginary friends on the show. But they were psychotically violent and had to be kept locked up.
u/Ardvarkeating101 [+31] Father of Learning (6 hours later)
Yeah, that's totally why they're locked up.
u/Tinac4 [+16] (2 hours later)
It depends on the limits of the imaginary friends you can create. For example, I can imagine a perfectly friendly omnipotent AI/god/genie who's willing to make the world a better place, and capable of instantly deleting any other imaginary friends people create that would interfere with this goal.
Creating any imaginary friend is such an open-ended power that it's hard to think of ways in which it couldn't be abused. It might be a little tricky to get a kid to think of the above concept, but I'm sure there are plenty of pre-teens out there who can imagine it.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+5] Champion of Justice and Reason (8 hours later)
What limits could be placed on this power which could make the setting self-consistent enough for a rational fic? Bonus points if the limits you come up with thematically fit the setting well.
u/None [+8] (12 hours later)
Limitations:
the imaginary friend stays around (I'm not sure if Imaginary Friends vanish if no human is their friend)
personality grows on there own (observation from u/earzo7 ) and maybe influenced by the personality of the creator?
only children can make new ones (and maybe only one?)
they still need calories in form of food (and maybe have to pay the creation cost later or start with a weight of zero)
just good old laws of nature like entropy
it needs time to make a new friend (and enough interactions and belief from the child)
there are limits to size, strength, intelligence and complexity
maybe they are made of imaginary atoms that vanish after a time (so they need to replace them with real food). That just has the midi-chlorians feeling of ugh.
Who knows maybe some god grants each Imaginary Friend their existence. So the god prevents anything from abusing the system too much. And the god just doesn't want kids to be lonely or grow up into horrible adults. (and isn't smart about it)
u/ArmokGoB [+5] (18 hours later)
In line with "take time", a good source for process and dynamics might be the modern interpretation of Tulpas. So, only the physical body actually is created in defiance of physics, the mind of the friend is part of the same brain as the child, just a mostly isolated sub network that somehow got a remote projection. If it becomes more real and replaces it with actual atoms, that might cause the neurons to teleport over gradually with the child actually losing each one the friend gains, and no information being added.
Possibly, the existence of a mind without a body is what causes the projection as well, and in this universe this is a consistent law causing stuff like brain damage that causes locked in syndrome leads to the brain creating and teleporting over to a new body after a few days.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a day later)
The imaginary friends are not actually separate beings at all, but children have the ability to create psychic illusions and multiple personalities?
u/ArmokGoB [+2] (a day later)
"Separate being" is not a useful categorization in this case. It's blurry in real life, and would be even blurier in my proposed scenario. But yea, you could see it that way, or at least as it starting that way and them becoming gradually more real and independent over many years, until at some point they could be unaffected by the death of the original host.
u/vakusdrake [+6] (an hour later)
I mean for one imagine a FAI in a body of grey goo
u/thrasherfect92 [+5] (an hour later)
What happens when you imagine yourself? The person we picture in our heads as ourselves is often different from the original.
u/sicutumbo [+11] (2 hours later)
I vaguely remember a fan theory that the orange haired teenager is actually the imaginary friend of the grandmother person, and that she is made in the grandmother's self image from when she was that young.
u/Ardvarkeating101 [+10] Father of Learning (6 hours later)
The old woman (Ms. Foster) was very much a "child who never grew up" role model for the protagonist. She just really wanted someone who could help out around the house now that she was too old to.
u/CoolandAverageGuy [+1] (3 months later)
You have to remember, it takes place it in the same world where kids use gadgets made out of garbage to fight adult tyranny, professors accidentally make little girls with superpowers, old people depend on their dog to save them from monsters, abused children can build elevators to the moon and eat the sun but can't get 25 cents, and the grim reaper is now the slave of two little kids.