6.6 KiB
Brainstorming for original fiction.
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Author: u/LeonCross *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3q80d8/brainstorming_for_original_fiction/
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Score: 3
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Created: 2015-10-26T01:25:05
Post:
I'm brainstorming for the world building of an original fiction piece I'm toying around with. The major background element is that at some point, around 14 years ago, for a short period of time (likely an hour) anyone that said "I wish _____" had it come true.
I'm not sure if it's going to play a major role in the story, but the point is to give myself an interesting playground to write in.
What I'm working on right now are just brainstorming some of the impacts this would have. Probably a few people miraculously healed, maybe a handful of people with various kinds of super powers, probably a couple of people with way too much power.
Then there's the less direct things, like people would probably be very careful and deliberate about even thinking "I wish ___", and I'd imagine that wishing harm on someone would be extremely taboo if not some sort of crime given wishes at one point verifiable came true.
So I thought I'd see what kind of world building elements the people around here would expect to crop up as a result of this divergence in history.
Comments:
u/None [+11] *
[deleted]
u/None [+4] *
[removed]
u/NotAHeroYet [+2] City of Angles Municipal Government*
I disagree with the "there are multiple presidents". Instead, there're a sudden rush of random people being placed in the position of company president. there are now four or five presidents of the USA. (most people say i wish i were president, not president of the USA. The difference is pretty big.) This wrecks even more chaos on the stock market, ofc.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est.*
This is a true genie, not a word-perverse one.
u/NotAHeroYet [+1] City of Angles Municipal Government*
Are you saying that giving them a smaller quantity of personal power is a less begin interpretation of the wish than a large quantity of power split over 300 ways, that'll probably be taken away once everyone realizes what happened? I assumed president was defined as the Single person with veto power who runs the executive branch of the government.
u/nicholaslaux [+1] *
People who say "I wish I was president" generally know which type of "president" they're talking about, and wishing for the title is more explicit than wishing for the power of being president, given that most people who wished for the power of the president would also likely get drastically less than they think they would as well, since the POTUS has nowhere near as much control over things as people think they do.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est.*
"True genie" should be "reality-perverse." "True" should probably be reserved for a Friendly genie, I'll concede.
I assumed president was defined as the Single person with veto power who runs the executive branch of the government. And there are still four or five people as US president?
u/NotAHeroYet [+1] City of Angles Municipal Government*
Yes. Apparently the nation splits into five nations- like in the civil war, only more fragmented. Unlike last time, though, this is quickly rectified with hasty negotiations. Still, you're probably right, it's a literal intent genie, not a literal wording genie. My mistake.
u/devDorito [+3] *
I wonder what kind of limits you would impose on this kind of thing? What if someone wished "I wish I was the only person who could speak" so that they were the only ones to be able to speak. If someone were plausible, and thought it out, then they could rationally conclude that speaking the i wish. This means that in the background, you'd need to place some kinds of limits on the wish, because some could be extremely dramatic and universe-level altering.
u/None [+1] *
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u/LeonCross [+3] *
I may lower the time frame. By the looks of Rick's post, I may have drastically underestimated the number of people that say outloud "I wish ____" in any given hour.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow*
Well, the bigger issue is that once someone has their wish come true, they'll immediately try a second wish. Other people who see this wish come true will try wishes of their own. So you're not really restricting it down to just "people who said 'I wish ...' within that hour", it rapidly expands to lots and lots of other people. This is true even if you're in the pre-internet era.
u/None [+4] *
[deleted]
u/LeonCross [+3] *
That's...a really good idea. Thanks! ^_^
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow*
Ah, that makes it a much different scenario from the one I was imagining.
u/SpeakKindly [+1] *
Some people still get a second wish. For instance, anyone who wished to go back in time to fix things, which seems like it might be a commonly expressed sentiment.
u/Brightlinger [+2] *
That could make a pretty interesting time-loop story.
u/Solonarv [+2] Chaos Legion*
If you like time loop stories and aren't averse to Naruto fanfiction, go read Time Braid.
u/gbear605 [+3] history’s greatest story*
I estimate I say that phrase at least once a week. That's 126 hours awake, so I had a 1 in 126 chance. That's over five million English speakers, assuming that it has to be that phrase in English. Of course, there must have been some kind of time delay, or the people who realized would have wished a million things. Frankly, there would probably have been many people who had wished themselves omnipotence, so game over.
u/LeonCross [+1] *
If that's typical of most people, dropping it down a 5 second time frame gives me about 1100 people if I didn't mess up my math. That seems like a more reasonable number to work with.
u/None [+2] *
[removed]
u/LeonCross [+3] *
Yeah. The idea is for it to have been short enough that none of the end results were deliberate. Otherwise I'm dealing with fallout that's much harder to work into an enjoyable story.
u/wendigo_days [+0] *
Don't write this, way too much to compute and no parameters.