scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/9dqn37.md

## I wish Mother of Learning had more "bad endings".

* Author: u/SnowGN *
* URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/9dqn37/i_wish_mother_of_learning_had_more_bad_endings/
* Score: 19

* Created: 2018-09-07T04:02:37

### Post:

Bad endings: One of the greatest things about visual novels. The chapters where you get to see what happens when shit just goes profoundly wrong.

Steins;Gate, Re:Zero, Fate/Stay Night, all of these franchises were brought to the next level by showing the bad endings in all their horrific detail. Kurisu dying, Re:Zero episode 15, Emiya Shirou being turned into a bodyless head-puppet... this is great, great stuff.

It would just be nice if Zorian and Zach were less 'in control.' They're so powerful and emotionally stable now that the torturous moments we see in other franchises simply don't happen any more; they never even did, really. 

### Comments:

> **u/causalchain** [+37]  (9 hours later)
> 
> They did; The Cyorian aranea colony got 'soulkilled' and Zorian was sent into hiding. Later on we find they were only ejected from the loop, but at the time, the threat was real. The way I see it: He did everything flawlessly, Stopping the invasion and QI in one of the most badass moments of the book. Even so, right afterwards he gets royally screwed over.  
> 
> I agree with you though, that the time loop is a great place to give Zorian lots of bad endings, and the author could've put in more 'safe but painful' failures in, say, a wasted month. At this point, it would be unreasonable to put in, since we're at the climax and failures here would be looked down upon.

> **u/Dragfie** [+21]  (5 hours later)
> 
> If that was how MoL was done i wouldn't be reading it.

> **u/Gr_Cheese** [+21]  (20 hours later)
> 
> I wish Mother of Learning had more dialogue.
> 
> It's hard to get into characters when the author's writing diary-style in 3rd person: "Just like that, another five restarts had passed."
> 
> Don't get me wrong here, I enjoy the series, but it is what it is. Z & Z were in hard mode from the get-go with Red Robe active and Zorian's paranoia in full swing; but because of the mechanics of their time-loop existence, it wasn't really logically possible to escalate to a Bad End after RR escaped. They had the drop on everyone, they had the choice to engage, and the author chose to gloss over the emotional consequences of their choices in that diary-style kind of way.
> 
> Rational protagonists can suffer emotional consequences to their actions. Humans are fallible. You can do everything right and still end up in the wrong. And that can fuck a person up; and when a person's fucked up, irrationality can be a rational outcome for their character.
> 
> It wouldn't have been a reach for Zorian to suffer emotionally after the Aranea were 'soulkilled', or at a bunch of other climactic points in the series, but the author chose to gloss over it.  We're never really **in the moment** with Zorian the way we might be in a 1st person narrative like The Practical Guide to Evil, because a paragraph or two down we always get a  - Break - with a time-skip and a new scene.
> 
> So tl;dr, I agree with you in spirit, but I attribute it to the author's writing style.

> **u/Ardvarkeating101** [+27]  *Father of Learning* (16 minutes later)
> 
> I thought the point of rational fiction was that the people involved don't act like idiots?  Or at least, beyond common IRL idiocy.  They've had literal years to deal with this by now and while Zach may have had a breakdown early on we didn't see.... why would Zorian panic more than the 8 months he took at the start?  He didn't particularly care about anyone, and magic was an actual physical real thing so it wasn't like his worldview was shattered.
> 
> I can understand Zorian failing and wanting to see that, but it's either QI slaughtering the city and the primordial not being unleashed or the primordial murdering most of the continent.  That's not quite worthy of another 3 week long delay in my opinion...

>> **u/Morghus** [+25]  (3 hours later)
>> 
>> The author set it up like that as well. That they had a lot of fun in the beginning, some serious issues with various problems, and now they're basically jaded as \*\*\*\* because they've seen everything gradually. The human mind becomes jaded to most things, and that's one of the reasons why this is such a great story. He took Zorian, a workaholic, and showed what a guy like that could do when he had tons of restarts to a month, as well as a friend that is basically a jock that worked himself slowly up from zero to hero. To me it makes perfect sense, and I suspect it's one of the themes of the story. A slow build, seeing how they work their butts off to get to the point where they're powerful, but not yet overpowered. It'll be interesting to see how they'll handle entering the real world again where they can suddenly die

>> **u/ZeCatox** [+12]  (3 hours later)
>> 
>> > I thought the point of rational fiction was that the people involved don't act like idiots?
>> 
>> I prefer seeing rational *fictions* as being more about avoiding the *story* not making sense than the *characters* not acting like idiots.
>> 
>> I find the latter too much unforgiving of simple human mistakes that are perfectly reasonable if you're not, well, HJPEV :)

>>> **u/crivtox** [+13]  *Closed Time Loop Enthusiast* (5 hours later)
>>> 
>>> Tbf even hjpev is  an idiot  lots of times  , to the point of >!almost accidentally destroying  the world.!<

> **u/ArgentStonecutter** [+13]  *Emergency Mustelid Hologram* (5 hours later)
> 
> They have plenty of bad endings. They have one every month.
> 
> They're in a time loop. They get killed regularly. It doesn't matter because it's a time loop and nothing that happens to them is comparable to the reality of the situation they and everyone else in the pocket universe are in.
> 
> A little more "To hell with you, Zorian, could you next time NOT tell me I'm going to die in... 23 days please" might be nice, but damn, how much existential horror do you want?

> **u/TheIssac** [+3]  (2 days later)
> 
> To be honest we have seen these things in the first few months, but the thing in MOL is that they grow with each restart and actually have some form of control now. They actually took great risk in giving a temporary marker to so many, and silverlake is the worst possible result so it kinda goes that way. And also this is not a jap. style light/visual novel like those you mention. Not to degrade them , but they are mostly shounen / wish fullfillment tropes and dont necessary have a hard focus on world building like MOL. The style of writing is also completly different, and that is great.

>> **u/SnowGN** [+1]  (2 days later)
>> 
>> Fate/Stay Night's focus on worldbuilding is just as good as or better than MoL's, *despite* having a large romantic focus. And it's bad endings put the main character through insane levels of emotional pressure/unexpected death, which hasn't happened to Zorian in ages. His level of emotional detachment most certainly takes away from the story.

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