What is the appeal of Rationalist fics?

I think I have a confession make: I unintentionally made a Kingdom Hearts self insert rationalist fic. I went on making most OC characters fighting strategy who was an epic Take That! at most KH players playstyles: Attack! Attack! Attack! with using a Cure spell/Potion to keep their HP up. Instead of doing any of that bullshit, the self insert and his other friends instead exploit their lack of strategy, make the most of their training as some of the iconic Final Fantasy classes (Black Mage, White Mage, ect), generally being pragmatic assholes.

One question: Is it rationalist to realize that the universe that they're in runs on JRPG and Shonen anime tropes and also use it to pull off crazy awesome things?

No. Quite the opposite in fact. That would be a version of Genre Savvy.

Most rationalist fics are about taking all those JRPG and Animee tropes that rationalists think are stupid/idiotic and doing what would make sense in real life, which always works better. Figuring out those tropes work and make sense and invoking/exploiting them on the other hand, is usually the total opposite of what a rationalist fic is trying to do.

Never mind then.

What is wrong with making a rational fic in a world with magic? The methods of rationality don't stop working just because magic exist. You just figure out how things actually work and go on your very way.

I don't think rational fics are as simple as "the hero just figures out how things work and proceeds". They're sold that way, but they rarely are. To make a rational fanfic, you're calling the original irrational, implying some dislike towards it, and you're using the protagonist to commentate on all of the irrational parts. It's not just optimizing the hero, it's optimizing the story.

The first thing is that I don't see most worlds of magic don't lending themselves to the "rational" hero. Without specific revisions to the plot, the rationalist protagonist will often destroy the narrative. Imagine The Illiad/Odyssey with "rationalist!Odysseus". The second book wouldn't exist. Half of the story's adventure and thrill would be removed for the sake of mechanical accuracy and "logical" world description.

Second, I just think it's silly and a bit conceited to look at a world of magic and go, "I'm going to explain all of that!" . Does anyone use the term "magic" or "magical" in real-life to describe anything that makes perfect sense to them? These words are commonly attributed to the irrational, the inexplicable, perhaps even the invisible. Magic is commonly, if not definitively mysterious and supernatural. To sit down and "rationalize" it is contradictory. Magic isn't supposed to be rational. Magic A Is Magic A and Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, and a few other magic system tropes I scarcely remember seeing, is how I see worlds of magic being "made sense of", but that's to structure the setting, not to make a point about the narrative or the characters.

Third, it doesn't ever seem to be as simple as "oh, the hero just figures out how things actually work and proceed". It usually slips down into "hero is much better off because they conform to my perception of logic".

Fourth, the connotation of arrogance when "rationalizing" something. The rationality of the hero's actions are more important/valuable than the emotion/meaning/symbolism behind them - which I think is frequently a thing with most worlds of magic.

• "Oh hey man, I'm writing a rational version of the Lord of the Rings. [Remember how stupid and unreasonable the original was? I'm making it better!].
• "But dude, wasn't the point of the Lord of the Rings that the Ring literally made people irrational? The entire world didn't really make sense, like those trees that took hours to talk to each other."
• "No, no see, in my version, Frodo is a rational Hobbit philosopher/mathematician who questions whether the ring can control him, and he compares his own personality against those who Gandalf tells him have held the ring previously, and he uses all of that info to gauge how long a person like him can hold the ring! And you know what else, he even forces it off to the other Hobbits to "divvy up the corrupting effect of the Ring", because that makes more sense than holding onto it all the way to Mt Doom." [Frodo and Gandalf were stupid for not establishing a timetable for each Hobbit to hold the ring, and for not bringing more Hobbits who are apparently resistant to its effects]
  • "You see. If they'd just thought a little more in Lord of the Rings, a lot fewer people would've died, the journey to Mt Doom would've been shorter, and Sam and Frodo probably wouldn't be in Tolkien's version of Hell due to holding the ring." [Three books of adventure, sword fights, war between different races, horseback-riding, and Aragon is stupid when you can write one book where they speedrun Moria, the physics of the Balrog are explored, and Frodo and Gollum don't fight over The Ring.]

edited 15th Mar '15 3:29:24 PM by Soble

A rational fic is at is core just the characters not being dumb for the sake of the plot. Magic can be magic and you can still have rationalist fiction. I a world where magic really did exist we wouldn't just sit down and go "welp might as well not bother." It doesn't even need to be what the story is about.

I mean I like The Methods of Rationality more than the original Harry Potter series. The version without the idiot ball that a lot of stories have. Or the magical "intelligence" most fictional "genius" have.

I just disagree.

I don't think any rationalist "fanfic" out there meets this definition.

You're right, if magic existed, we wouldn't just not bother try and understand it. But if magic makes sense, then it's not really magic anymore, is it? Magic ceases to be inexplicable. Once it's understood, it becomes a science.

If a fictional world is designed to be magical, why are you making it scientific? This doesn't work the other way round, no one takes a science-fiction story and puts unicorns into it... except for Fallout Equestria I suppose.

edited 16th Mar '15 12:47:00 AM by Soble

Because science is awesome?

It feels weird to complain about fictional characters doing the same kind of thing we would do just because it defeats the "point" of the story. Who told them that they're not real people and that they aren't allowed to do stuff just because it's not amusing?

Of course there are unrealistic constraints just by the nature of fictional medium (in the real world, the bad guys often win, things happen for no apparent reason, and there isn't a whole lot of action in the average person's life) but part of the art of an author is mastering that and hiding it, not being so upfront about it.

edited 15th Mar '15 4:12:48 PM by storyyeller

I'm not sure what you mean with the bottom, but defeating the point of a story seems a reasonable complaint.

Well, for crack fics, for the purpose of humor, fine.

What if Fullmetal Alchemist/God Of War/Once Upon A Time etc etc obeyed the scientific method, or were analyzed through the lens of real-physics? These settings are heavy on the magic, but FMA at least pretends to make some sort of sense.

edited 15th Mar '15 4:49:47 PM by Soble

Soble: have you never heard of Magic A Is Magic A or Sufficiently Analyzed Magic?

logic and rationality can be applied to pretty much anything that has internal consistency.

Yes, I referenced the first one and was looking for something equivalent to the second.

There are several works I could list where pushing "logic/rationality/rationalist-thinking" into the core theme would make them significantly less enjoyable.

Just because you can apply rationalist narrative/views/themes into someone else's story doesn't mean you should.

and just because you can't think of a good way to apply it to some universe doesn't mean nobody else can.

I don't see how that invalidates anything I've said thus far.

It doesn't mean anyone else will, either.

There's a huge difference between being "rational" in rationalist fics, and having a "rational" approach to world-building. The "rational" in rationalist fics has more to do with not having an Idiot Plot and making sure all the main characters never hold the Idiot Ball then it does with reacting to the world-building in a rational manner.

Now I'm really tempted to write a character introduced to the world of magic that makes a ton of seemingly plausible deductions based on looking at things but they turn out to be wrong because real world physics based priors aren't worth much when you've thrown physics out the window to begin with.

There's also a lot of potential in an alien rationalist who has completely different values and assumptions but is still trying to figure out how things work.

edited 16th Mar '15 8:26:19 PM by storyyeller

To let stupid, elitist nerds think they're smart.

I can't help but feel that was somehow aimed at me.

edited 19th Mar '15 5:19:15 PM by Soble

I don't see how.

@Soble I think you reading to much negativity into the writer's motives. Most fanfics aren't suppose to be better than canon, only fun alternatives.

A rationalist fic writer doesn't need to think their smarter than the original author, and they definitely don't need to think their better.

Rowling wasn't trying to make everything make sense, so you hardly need to think that your smarter than her to think you can make the story make more sense.

Well, Yudkowsky's just finished the last installment of his story, and from what I can tell, HPATMOR isnt really a "Rationalist Fic", at least not as that has been defined in this thread. "Methods" seems at heart a morality tale about the limits of rationality, in a manner consistent with certain essays EY has previously written, rather than a "recruiting tool" or an "introductory manual". The real magic, of course, turned out to be the power of human love.

Given that word of god explicitly said it was intended as a recruiting tool, I'd have to say you misinterpreted things.

edited 20th Mar '15 6:18:45 PM by storyyeller

I'm judging by the end result, not the initial intentions of the author. God knows I've been surprised by how my own fiction has turned out.

That seems reasonable. The final conflict was between an adult with centuries of experience (by proxy) and decades of becoming the best rationalist possible, against a boy who learned most of his tricks from the adult, but wanted to protect something more important than himself.

The author prefers stories where the protagonist gains a power by having a responsibility, instead of the other way around, and some of the articles the author has written were about rationality as a tool, not a goal. As a goal, you cannot tell success from failure. As a tool, you can know success and failure when you see your goal pass or fail. The protagonist used rationality as their tool, not their goal.

Having just finished Luminosity, I'd call that one the better story. Rationality fades into the background much more, and is used in different ways by different characters, instead of being used the same way by characters with different goals. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality makes teaching rationality methods explicit, making it more effective as a teaching tool that ends as a morality tale.