Rationalist fiction discussion

Hmm. Well, she's intelligent and determined, but the story also specifically values emotions and makes the completely-true-and-factual-but-not-particularly-rationalist-flavored point that (entirely) removing emotions from decision-making doesn't actually get pure and perfect reasoning, but instead can and does cripple people, using a drug that does just that as part of an overall point about motivations, reasoning, emotions and so on.

But again, even though that's actually pretty evidently true, it's not very Rationalist aesthetic, I don't think?

How do you choose goals without emotions in the first place?

The rationalist-as-emotionless-Vulcan is not a trope that rationalists believe in.

Again can you give a couple examples of fics that actually have this 'aesthetic' you are talking about?

There were attempts to define it more formally, but they consistently run into issue of technically excluding HPMOR because its world-building is not actually particularly consistent or logical. Some of it is due to the author's failings (see the portrayal of bullies as spawnable monsters who are weirdly self-aware about their role as bullies), while some of it is actually deliberate: HPMOR loves pointing out inconsistencies in Rowling's world-building and how the magical Britain is "insane", but that does mean it has to preserve those inconsistencies to begin with.

Neither author failings nor deliberate inconsistencies, would be much of a problem for a "definition". A definition could e.g. easily say that it's about an author *attempting* to create a consistent world, or alternatively to lampshade its inconsistencies -- if we actually decided that "consistent/logical worldbuilding" is the common single element we crave in rational fiction.

But there's no consensus on this, and that's why there's no particular strict "formal definition" (beyond what was voted for the sidebar, I guess), because the aspects of HPMOR that we enjoyed and we wanted more of are a fuzzy set, and different people valued the elements of it differently.
 
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How do you choose goals without emotions in the first place?

The rationalist-as-emotionless-Vulcan is not a trope that rationalists believe in.

Again can you give a couple examples of fics that actually have this 'aesthetic' you are talking about?



Neither author failings nor deliberate inconsistencies, would be much of a problem for a "definition". A definition could e.g. easily say that it's about an author *attempting* to create a consistent world, or alternatively to lampshade its inconsistencies -- if we actually decided that "consistent/logical worldbuilding" is the common single element we crave in rational fiction.

But there's no consensus on this, and that's why there's no particular strict "formal definition" (beyond what was voted for the sidebar, I guess), because the aspects of HPMOR that we enjoyed and we wanted more of are a fuzzy set, and different people valued the elements of it differently.

Hmm, I admit it's kinda an impression, but a lot of the Rational Fic stuff I've read feels like someone turned the feelings volume almost all the way down. The problem is that this is hard to distinguish from just plain terrible writing, so I can't know whether I've just read some terrible stuff in general or not.

(As an example, the early bit of that Rational Naruto quest that made me stop reading it even out of idle 'this sounds terrible but what is it actually like' curiosity was when a death march through a hell swamp was written with all of the emotional intensity of someone reading out the results of a random encounter table, and followed up by characters reacting to it the same way they would to, I dunno, Kakashi showing up 30 minutes late.)

Combined with what bits of HPMOR I've seen and Mother of Learning (less turned down but still rather muted), I just kinda assumed it was part of the aesthetic.
 
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Oh no you mentioned The Quest. We're all going to die.

That story is interesting for several reasons, but you have to tweak your understanding of a lot of things Naruto to buy into the setting. I felt like it anyways after reading a few arcs. Not my jam but I can sort of appreciate the effort put into it all.

Also I read the first chapter of that Pokemon rational fic. I'm debating reading more but just...the rift between Red and Blue feels uncomfortable.
 
Oh no you mentioned The Quest. We're all going to die.

That story is interesting for several reasons, but you have to tweak your understanding of a lot of things Naruto to buy into the setting. I felt like it anyways after reading a few arcs. Not my jam but I can sort of appreciate the effort put into it all.

Also I read the first chapter of that Pokemon rational fic. I'm debating reading more but just...the rift between Red and Blue feels uncomfortable.

I mean, beyond that I found the worldbuilding absolutely terrible and unrealistic and a little silly from the get-go, and without, like, the "It's a shonen manga on a tight schedule relying on shonen-style worldbuilding" excuse that Naruto the manga has? Again, if it was just that I'd go, "Well, this is absolutely terrible" but I've seen the same muting and, like, de-emphasizing of emotional reactions in the several other pieces of media I've seen of the genre, including Mother of Learning [to whatever extent it's a Rat-Fic, eh?], which does *better* than that at conveying people who have emotions, but...
 
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Again, if it was just that I'd go, "Well, this is absolutely terrible" but I've seen the same muting and, like, de-emphasizing of emotional reactions in the several other pieces of media I've seen of the genre, including Mother of Learning [to whatever extent it's a Rat-Fic, eh?], which does *better* than that at conveying people who have emotions, but...

I've not read the Naruto quest, and I didn't particularly enjoy Mother of Learning as I already said -- but just to give a counterexample, the protagonist in Color Psychology (fic is alas dead, but I greatly enjoyed it as long as it lasted) is a highly emotional (and also neurotically intelligent) Ruby.
 
Neither author failings nor deliberate inconsistencies, would be much of a problem for a "definition". A definition could e.g. easily say that it's about an author *attempting* to create a consistent world, or alternatively to lampshade its inconsistencies -- if we actually decided that "consistent/logical worldbuilding" is the common single element we crave in rational fiction.

But there's no consensus on this, and that's why there's no particular strict "formal definition" (beyond what was voted for the sidebar, I guess), because the aspects of HPMOR that we enjoyed and we wanted more of are a fuzzy set, and different people valued the elements of it differently.

Hence rational fiction being fiction rationalists like.

Hmm, I admit it's kinda an impression, but a lot of the Rational Fic stuff I've read feels like someone turned the feelings volume almost all the way down. The problem is that this is hard to distinguish from just plain terrible writing, so I can't know whether I've just read some terrible stuff in general or not.

I'm inclined to go with bad writing on this one. It's not that the emotions are not present in those stories or that they're less intense, it's more that those emotions are not reflected in the text itself but merely stated to be felt by the characters. The tone remain the same, sentence and paragraph structure doesn't change, etc.

I'd blame it on the prose being at best workmanlike and unambitious rather than a deliberate stylistic choice.

The preoccupation with explicitly describing the characters' thought process instead of trusting the audience to infer it from action and dialogue probably contributes to this as it lead to long-winded paragraphs detrimental to creating any sense of urgency, thus the emotions described by the text are not "felt" by the reader.
 
Does Breq from Ancillary Justice/The Imperial Radch trilogy count as a rationalist protagonist? Just a random thought I had.
Sure, why not?

She uses her smarts to manipulate the world around her to her own ends (mostly through social-fu). She is goal-oriented, logic-oriented, and determined to nigh-inhuman degrees (on account of being, you know, a ship AI piloting a human body) which can be compared to a number of "rational fic" protagonists.

She is very much driven by emotion (the entire first book is about the culmination of a years-long plan to, essentially, spit in Empress Mianaai's face even though she will certainly die doing it), but she comes across as very cold and detached (again, she's a ship AI) in the face of events such as a person (who also happens to be the representative of an alien empire that could probably wipe out humanity if they wanted) dying right in front of her.

(I also remember her inner voice coming across as fairly subdued, with a few notable exceptions. For the first book, she is driven by a burning desire to enact whatever petty revenge on Mianaai she can, but it doesn't really come across in her thoughts and actions until the critical moment. Again, resemblence to some classic "ratfic" protagonists.)

By the end of the story, she is operating on a pretty big scale, assisting in the liberation of two star systems from an oppressive interstellar empire even as said empire falls into civil war.

Also, the setting as a while is...quietly rationalist-adjacent, in that it has answers for the usual space opera genre conciets. Why are are there so many habitable planets in this setting? Because it's the very far future, taking place after thousands of years of terraforming efforts (which Anaander Mianaai is quietly taking advantage of). Why is there no transhumanism in this distant future? Because the empress of the dominant power in human space deliberately cultivates an abhorrance for transhumanism in "Imperial Radch" society and beliefs, but makes an exception for herself (she gets to be immortal and nigh impossible to kill, no one else does). There's a fascinating couple of paragraphs in the first few pages of Ancillary Justice which describes an anarcho-transhumanist society which, though very alien, is portrayed quite positively.

It also touches lightly on transhumanist themes - Breq and Mianaai casually consider near-perfect mental copies of themselves to be an extension of their own identity, even when their shared consciousness is fragmented along individual bodies. Mianaai in particular faces a particularly thorny version of the "is a copy of me also me" question given that she is in a civil war with a very slightly different version of herself, yet fragments a bit of her own personality from the shared network and into Lieutenant Tiswerwat. (This strikes me as very "real" because these characters are not struggling with the star trek teleporter problem that someone new to the technology would - they and their society came to a definitive answer on the conundrum centuries or millenia ago, and more or less stuck with it.)

It's just that the Imperial Radch trilogy is content to be subtle about it, as opposed to, say Methods of Rationality, in which the entire first few chapters are about the author-insert showing off how smart he is by pointing at the Harry Potter world and shouting "THIS SHOULD NOT WORK."

All in all, I'd say that the Ancillary series could fit right in with the "Rationalist" book club. I have a funny feeling that the subreddit seldom ever mentions it, though. :V

(Sorry for the slightly rambly post. I usually try to be more structured, but I'm a bit tired right now.)
 
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I mean, beyond that I found the worldbuilding absolutely terrible and unrealistic and a little silly from the get-go, and without, like, the "It's a shonen manga on a tight schedule relying on shonen-style worldbuilding" excuse that Naruto the manga has? Again, if it was just that I'd go, "Well, this is absolutely terrible" but I've seen the same muting and, like, de-emphasizing of emotional reactions in the several other pieces of media I've seen of the genre, including Mother of Learning [to whatever extent it's a Rat-Fic, eh?], which does *better* than that at conveying people who have emotions, but...
Well to clarify, I don't think it's like...good either and there are too many things I think are goofy in Marked for Death, but I honestly do admire the committment (especially when it comes to wrangling everything together in story) and the attempts at consistency. And the out of story community is interesting to follow in the thread, but that's not about story quality so kind of a tangent.

The first few sections are definitely rough to get over if you want to actually like the quest. If you continue after that like I did, you probably won't connect with most of the characters at all which makes the emotional elements end up flat and etc etc. It starts off on a bad leg, and it was recommended by quite a few people in another thread as an example of "good ratfic" so I hope nobody takes offense to this short critique of it (since aside from being on quest front page that was how I started following it).

Hence rational fiction being fiction rationalists like.
Yeah but we're having a discussion and giving people a chance to elaborate on why it's not just a nerd book club :V
 
Rational characters/narrators don't so much lack emotion as they lack emotional awareness. Which is fine, but becomes really jarring for some readers when the entire setting demonstrates the same blindspots. As an example, I don't have trouble with Harry Potter-Etc-Etc seeing his meltdowns as signs of his mysterious and awe-inspiring "dark side." But in the world as I've experienced it, the way most people react to somebody else's emotional meltdown is with contempt, possibly mixed with a bit of fear. In HPMOR, a boarding school supposedly full of bullies treats an 11 year old throwing a tantrum like that makes him some kind of bad-ass. That I can't buy.
 
There are a bunch of things I disliked about Marked for Death. But the one that most grinds my gears was how there was a lot of stuff the MC should have known about the players didn't. Obviously in such an au setting the players aren't going to be familiar with the background, but the way the QM chose to resolve the problem (rather than, say, curating votes) was by having the mentor character call the MC stupid a lot when the players proposed something that they didn't know couldn't work.

That and the ludicrously over-the-top reactions to small mistakes in votes, anyway.
 
There are a bunch of things I disliked about Marked for Death. But the one that most grinds my gears was how there was a lot of stuff the MC should have known about the players didn't. Obviously in such an au setting the players aren't going to be familiar with the background, but the way the QM chose to resolve the problem (rather than, say, curating votes) was by having the mentor character call the MC stupid a lot when the players proposed something that they didn't know couldn't work.

That and the ludicrously over-the-top reactions to small mistakes in votes, anyway.

I've heard some about how that influenced the, like, vote-crafting dynamics of the Quest. It's enough to make a QM shudder.
 
I've heard some about how that influenced the, like, vote-crafting dynamics of the Quest. It's enough to make a QM shudder.
Yeah, it was extremely toxic, especially since the QM was also super fond of interpreting votes uncharitably. The worst example I can think of was probably the Jumpsuit Incident, when a joke vote to buy one of Gai's jumpsuits won accidentally and the QM a) interpreted the vote as voting to have a psychotic break and b) refused to roll back the vote for several days.

I quit in disgust a little later when, at the climax of an arc dedicated to joining Konoha, an extra line in the vote resulted in the entire party getting thrown out of the village.
 
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That and the ludicrously over-the-top reactions to small mistakes in votes, anyway.
I dunno if those are unreasonable in a quest that's labeled as a death world where literally plants will jump out of nowhere and murder you. And I guess the simulation aspect where you and everything you love can get deleted in moments.

The voters are very attached to the quest.

The worst example I can think of was probably the Jumpsuit Incident
That was pretty horrific yeah. But there was also a team killing incident as well that caused a lot of havoc as well. And the killbox. And recently almost threatening the Hokage with a possible coup/murder.

I expect salt in any quest that runs that long with that many words, but uh...yeah.

I think the quest is a lot of things at once and while it has something for everyone, it also makes it kind of hard to manage on the backend. One of the things I question is de-modernizing everything, both scientifically and socially. Obviously that changes the entire quest and the characters within, but I can't help but think some things would be more easily managed if you just allowed people to have radios and messenger birds at the same time or something idk.
 
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As a player, my thoughts are that Marked for Death is definitely a unique quest. I've had a lot of fun playing in it, but a lot of that is, well, cultivating a bit of detachment from the results. The amount of effort put in by players to it is genuinely fun to be a part of, and is wildly divergent from even other quests with extreme planning like PMAS was back when I was up to date with that. Like, just counting the ones that already fulfilled their purpose and are thus defunct, I've been in 5 cabals. On the other hand, there are things like, yes, the youthsuit incident, where I think that if I let myself get too attached to the characters I would probably have instead dropped the quest.
 
It's kinda bizarre. It's one of the longest (as in, page count) Quests, and yet its actual influence on the Quest Culture of SV is notably understated, compared to other big Quests that spawned entire genres and all.
I noticed that. Looking through the Naruto quests I saw that there wasn't much trying to emulate it in style or setting. Part of that I suspect is because of the nature of the series, part because there aren't typically 2-3 writers per quest, and then the rational slant is niche; most writers are unsubtle about complaining about how "dumb" the original series is and just declaring their world the "better version" or whatever.

Definitely an outlier as you say. The amount of work and rework needed, the voting structure and character control...it seems like too much on a good day. It probably is too much.
 
Hmm, I admit it's kinda an impression, but a lot of the Rational Fic stuff I've read feels like someone turned the feelings volume almost all the way down. The problem is that this is hard to distinguish from just plain terrible writing, so I can't know whether I've just read some terrible stuff in general or not.

(As an example, the early bit of that Rational Naruto quest that made me stop reading it even out of idle 'this sounds terrible but what is it actually like' curiosity was when a death march through a hell swamp was written with all of the emotional intensity of someone reading out the results of a random encounter table, and followed up by characters reacting to it the same way they would to, I dunno, Kakashi showing up 30 minutes late.)

Combined with what bits of HPMOR I've seen and Mother of Learning (less turned down but still rather muted), I just kinda assumed it was part of the aesthetic.

That's an interesting impression, actually!

I'd probably agree with you on Mother of Learning re: emotional intensity, and the same could probably be said for other key works in the """genre""" (e.g. Luminosity, Ra & Fine Structure), but HPMOR and Marked for Death were always very poignant and emotionally affective to me. I wonder why I walked away with that experience, lol
 
It's kinda bizarre. It's one of the longest (as in, page count) Quests, and yet its actual influence on the Quest Culture of SV is notably understated, compared to other big Quests that spawned entire genres and all.
I think that quests spawning genres might be more the exception rather than the rule. Like, there aren't many imitators of Forge of Destiny or A Sword Without A Hilt or to Boldly Go, either.
 
I think that quests spawning genres might be more the exception rather than the rule. Like, there aren't many imitators of Forge of Destiny or A Sword Without A Hilt or to Boldly Go, either.

I do feel like Boldly Go is more known to a wider SV audience, though again that might just be an impression? And I'm going to be honest, there aren't imitations of A Sword Without A Hilt because it's absolutely terrible. Which I know is a pretty harsh judgement, but.
 
I do feel like Boldly Go is more known to a wider SV audience, though again that might just be an impression? And I'm going to be honest, there aren't imitations of A Sword Without A Hilt because it's absolutely terrible. Which I know is a pretty harsh judgement, but.
Yeah, Marked for Death main crowd is pretty much only in Marked for Death, relatively speaking. Like, looking at the top 20 posters, 13 of them have over 80% of their posts in Marked for Death, and another 3 have more than 50% of them in MfD.
 
I do feel like Boldly Go is more known to a wider SV audience, though again that might just be an impression? And I'm going to be honest, there aren't imitations of A Sword Without A Hilt because it's absolutely terrible. Which I know is a pretty harsh judgement, but.
Can't really argue with you there, lol. I still love it anyway, though.
 
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Yeah, Marked for Death main crowd is pretty much only in Marked for Death, relatively speaking. Like, looking at the top 20 posters, 13 of them have over 80% of their posts in Marked for Death, and another 3 have more than 50% of them in MfD.
I'd post more in other places, but that would require effort. Lurkers unite :V
 
Yeah, Marked for Death main crowd is pretty much only in Marked for Death, relatively speaking. Like, looking at the top 20 posters, 13 of them have over 80% of their posts in Marked for Death, and another 3 have more than 50% of them in MfD.

Well, I mean, given how radically different it is, I'm not entirely surprised because the kind of person who'll stick with it isn't going to hit many other quests. Marked For Death is a competitive event between the QM and the players; traditionally in tabletop RPGs this is regarded as a failure mode because it reliably destroys campaigns. People who thrive on it probably don't have much to do to with people who enjoy other quests that don't work that way.
 
Sure, why not?

She uses her smarts to manipulate the world around her to her own ends (mostly through social-fu). She is goal-oriented, logic-oriented, and determined to nigh-inhuman degrees (on account of being, you know, a ship AI piloting a human body) which can be compared to a number of "rational fic" protagonists.

She is very much driven by emotion (the entire first book is about the culmination of a years-long plan to, essentially, spit in Empress Mianaai's face even though she will certainly die doing it), but she comes across as very cold and detached (again, she's a ship AI) in the face of events such as a person (who also happens to be the representative of an alien empire that could probably wipe out humanity if they wanted) dying right in front of her.

(I also remember her inner voice coming across as fairly subdued, with a few notable exceptions. For the first book, she is driven by a burning desire to enact whatever petty revenge on Mianaai she can, but it doesn't really come across in her thoughts and actions until the critical moment. Again, resemblence to some classic "ratfic" protagonists.)

By the end of the story, she is operating on a pretty big scale, assisting in the liberation of two star systems from an oppressive interstellar empire even as said empire falls into civil war.

Also, the setting as a while is...quietly rationalist-adjacent, in that it has answers for the usual space opera genre conciets. Why are are there so many habitable planets in this setting? Because it's the very far future, taking place after thousands of years of terraforming efforts (which Anaander Mianaai is quietly taking advantage of). Why is there no transhumanism in this distant future? Because the empress of the dominant power in human space deliberately cultivates an abhorrance for transhumanism in "Imperial Radch" society and beliefs, but makes an exception for herself (she gets to be immortal and nigh impossible to kill, no one else does). There's a fascinating couple of paragraphs in the first few pages of Ancillary Justice which describes an anarcho-transhumanist society which, though very alien, is portrayed quite positively.

It also touches lightly on transhumanist themes - Breq and Mianaai casually consider near-perfect mental copies of themselves to be an extension of their own identity, even when their shared consciousness is fragmented along individual bodies. Mianaai in particular faces a particularly thorny version of the "is a copy of me also me" question given that she is in a civil war with a very slightly different version of herself, yet fragments a bit of her own personality from the shared network and into Lieutenant Tiswerwat. (This strikes me as very "real" because these characters are not struggling with the star trek teleporter problem that someone new to the technology would - they and their society came to a definitive answer on the conundrum centuries or millenia ago, and more or less stuck with it.

It's just that the Imperial Radch trilogy is content to be subtle about it, as opposed to, say Methods of Rationality, in which the entire first few chapters are about the author-insert showing off how smart he is by pointing at the Harry Potter world and shouting "THIS SHOULD NOT WORK."

All in all, I'd say that the Ancillary series could fit right in with the "Rationalist" book club. I have a funny feeling that the subreddit seldom ever mentions it, though. :V

(Sorry for the slightly rambly post. I usually try to be more structured, but I'm a bit tired right now.)

Honestly my two favorite bits of character building/establishment for Breq are one:

Her saying "Emotions and emotional attachments are stupid and AI shouldn't have them" and then going into her two decade long quest to enact petty, spiteful revenge on Anaander Mianaai that she knows won't change anything but she does anyway because she is just that angry and hurt about the loss of her self and the loss of her favorite lieutenant.

Two: the fact that she says collecting music is silly and a waste of time but then she collects music anyway.

Bonus points for getting attached to Seivarden and Tisarwat despite telling herself she isn't multiple times.
 
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Honestly my two favorite bits of character building/establishment for Breq are one:

Her saying "Emotions and emotional attachments are stupid and AI shouldn't have them" and then going into her two decade long quest to enact petty, spiteful revenge on Anaander Mianaai that she knows won't change anything but she does anyway because she is just that angry and hurt about the loss of her self and the loss of her favorite lieutenant.

The second is the fact that she says collecting music is silly and a waste of time but then she collects music anyway.

And then she manages to change everything. :V

(Even by the end, she doesn't quite seem to realize just how much she's done.)
 
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