So what is a Rational Fic, exactly?

Ages ago, I put Rational Fic on Tropes Needing TRS, and today I started a wick check. The laconic says it's for works that reward the reader's thinking, but most of the examples don't explain why. So far, I've found that it's used for several concepts:

• A work has a rationalist protagonist.
• A work has consistent internal logic that holds up to scrutiny.
• An Alternate Universe Fic where the canon characters are smarter.

The fanfiction examples are split between one-shots and multi-chapters like it's a Fanfic Recs page, including labelling which ones are complete. If it's a trope, then most of the on-page examples are zero-context; if it's a genre page, then the works don't need to be described. Another issue is that it's only in fanfic-related indexes, despite the concept being much broader.

My impression was that rational fic is actually a fairly specific concept about a particular way to write works of fiction, the one described here. It's more a writing-philosphical concept than a genre...

Definitely not exclusive to fanfics, then.

Part of the problem is that the general concept is so new, and there's actually two different philosophies that get mixed together.

One is "show the protagonist doing smart things" and the other is "model good thinking habits that the audience can replicate". The above link is describing the second, but plenty of the first are recommended because they're superficially similar.

You put it better than I could. Eventually I'll make a writeup in the TRS Queue, and I'll reference your comment.

Also, I listed a page in my wick check twice because it had two links to Rational Fic that I put into separate folders because one had slightly more context than the other. Is this bad practice?

Edited by NitroIndigo on Sep 16th 2022 at 4:34:13 PM

Discussion eight years ago, in the "new pages" rescue thread.

It was made without the launch pad? I'm definitely going to include that in my writeup.

I thought that there was a Harry Potter fanfic with the premise that Harry was acting rationally. This led to a bunch of other fanfics with the premise of "what if this character acted rationally?"

Fanfic.Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality ?

That reminds me, SoYouWantTo.Write The Next Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality has this... questionable paragraph:

Hooray for promoting fandom drama! This also rubs me the wrong way because it deals in absolutes; Friendship is Optimal is a pretty popular fic that's considered rational because it's about advanced theoretical computing and the author is a member of Less Wrong, but My Little Pony is a work of fiction within the story and the plot would still make sense if the MMO was about something else. So if someone wanted to write a Rational Fic actually set in Equestria, would the fandom police tell them they shalt not?

Probably, yes. This is LessWrong you're talking about. A "rational fic" is just a crossover fic between LessWrong's particular brand of transhumanism and one of the author's other, less-pretentious fandoms.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Sep 16th 2022 at 7:18:15 PM

Checking through the history, it was indeed made without TLP by Dalek Kan Noladti in 2014.

Yeah, this is actually something I was thinking as soon as I saw the thread title: to me personally, a self-identified "Rational Fic" is basically just an indicator that it was written by a particularly smug and self-righteous sort of fan; I'd almost call it an unwitting Take That!. Obviously that's not conductive to defining a trope, but it does sort of make me question whether the current definition is overly gushy.

Yeahhhh, I've always taken this sort of concept with a grain of salt because it seems more like the fic writer trying to be ultra-rational and smart rather than them actually knowing what "rational thought" means. I'm sure there's more to the genre than that but it's one of those things where if you have to self-label your own story as "rational" then maybe it's really not since if it is wouldn't that already be evident by the writing itself????

But that's more about the quality of the works than the intended use of the label, I guess. I figure that any story that could be considered about "rational thought" would qualify, since the genre is so new it's not really defined yet.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 16th 2022 at 2:36:27 PM

I mentioned the gushing in the Tropes Needing TRS entry; and when I brought the Rational Fic page up on a Discord server years ago, someone said the description was unclear because things like "consistent worldbuilding" and "characters who aren't uncharacteristically stupid" are just general good writing advice.

Edited by NitroIndigo on Sep 16th 2022 at 7:51:42 PM

Yes, the fic author bashing the canon author is not supposed to be part of the genre/philosophy, but it is generally part of the 90% that gets labeled as such.

It is part of that "smart characters doing smart things" description, like having characters "munchkin" solutions that the reader is incapable of puzzling out on their own. HJPEV's ability to partial transfigure is "smart munchkin". Describing the Halo effect, then revealing why the Philosopher's Stone actually does fit those stories without it, is supposed to be what makes the genre fun.

Is that necessarily a fic genre though? I can see the exact same "here's a neat scientific thing that Harry Potter totally did" coming from an informative YouTube video and not a fanfic format.

I think that's part of why a lot of the perception revolves around the whole "smarter than canon / not like other fics" stuff... because it's at least a stereotype unique to fanfic.

The munchkin stuff? No, I don't think it counts as a genre. It has been awhile since I've read Luminosity, but I don't see it or Friendship is Optimal as good examples of what the LessWrong link describes. They're transhumanist fiction, but they don't advise a method of approaching a problem/idea which the audience can replicate.

Despite that, L and FiO are common examples of the "well-written ratfic". They don't share "munchkin smart" ideas, just the transhumanism and characters generally trying to achieve their goals, which.... Is redundant with "good fiction " anyway.

Edited by crazysamaritan on Sep 16th 2022 at 3:07:26 PM

Well, more about your "Halo Effect and how Philosopher's Stone fits it" because that entire premise seems less like a fanfic concept and more of part of an informative work that ties things to pop-culture. (And let me be clear I barely even know what "munchkin" means and at this point it's just sounding like a meaningless nonsense word soooo I couldn't tell you if it fits as a fanfic idea or not lol)

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 16th 2022 at 3:09:56 PM

Isn't the point of Friendship is Optimal that transhumanism is a bad thing? Also, you put into words why I don't think it feels like a Rational Fic better than I could.

Anyway, I just finished the wick check. Feel free to reorder any examples in it if you think they belong better in a different folder.

Edited by NitroIndigo on Sep 16th 2022 at 8:13:06 PM

Munchkin, to me, means "annoying as shit gremlin that hyperfocuses on 'winning' at the expense of everyone else" just like it does on the trope page, and I don't know if that's what this kind of fic is really trying to go for.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Sep 16th 2022 at 2:12:59 PM

No, treating it as a morality fable would be a mistake.

I'm sorry for being unclear. You're thinking of Fiction Science, which was a common theme of the Because Science (& spin-off Kyle Hill) video channel.

No, it was about the danger of almost Friendly GAI. Transhumanism gone wrong was just an easy way to express it; a symptom of the overall problem. Plenty of people would perceive the upload as a perfectly acceptable outcome, but having the pony element typically makes it clear even to those who share that philosophy.

Edited by crazysamaritan on Sep 16th 2022 at 3:37:50 PM

So... here's my first draft of a writeup for the TRS Queue.

Issue: Unclear Description

The laconic of Rational Fic says it's "a work of fiction designed to encourage logical thinking," and the page quote is from an article about how to write stories that model good thinking habits the readers can replicate. However, my wick check found that almost none of the examples matched this description. The most common use was in the opening sentences of work pages, but besides that...

• 4 of the wicks described works with rationalist protagonists.
• 9 were about Alternate Universe Fics where characters are more competent, which is similar to Fix Fic.
• 2 seemed more like Deconstruction Fics based on the information provided.
• 2 described works with internal logic that holds up to scrutiny.
• 5 were gushing.

The main description doesn't help, since it mainly consists of gushing about how smart these works are with a paragraph about how Tropes Are Not Good tacked on at the end. There have been concerns about gushing since it was launched (without TLP) in 2014.

Also, the page can't seem to decide if it's a fanfic-exclusive genre or not (if it's even a genre at all; Septimus Heap said it's more like a philosophy about how to write a story). It's only in two indexes — Fanfic and Fanfic Tropes — and the majority of examples are fanfics, which are soft-split into "multi-chapter" and "oneshot" folders like it's a Fanfic Recs page. The description says the title uses "fic" because the concept was popularised by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and Rational Fiction and Rationalist Fiction are both redirects.

Edited by NitroIndigo on Sep 17th 2022 at 8:34:42 PM

I'd also throw in a potential disambiguating with Fix Fic, which is a similar tack.