I noticed this a long time ago and tried to write a ratfic that didn’t have this dynamic; I didn’t get particularly far, mostly because I don’t think I’m that great of a fiction writer.
I think a large part of this is which settings ratfic writers choose to write fanfic in. It is very easy to take JK Rowling’s Harry Potter setting and put ratfic in it, because it’s about as screwed up as the real world, and that calls for making major changes / doesn’t naturally call for fitting into the system.
I was writing a MLP fanfic, and the My Little Pony setting is way less screwed up; the protagonist, rather than being a frustrated genius who isn’t taken seriously by his parents or teachers, is a pampered prodigy who great things are expected of and whose education is being carefully attended to accordingly. If Twilight goes to Celestia with some complaint about how society is arranged, Celestia encourages her to write a memo to the relevant minister and then get into a policy debate which considers all of the relevant factors.
[Separately I tried writing Warhammer ratfic, which mostly turned into a meditation on how much it sucks to be in an epistemically hostile environment, and the Empire was already doing a mostly-optimal strategy given the existence of the ruinous powers. But that’s, like, a short story’s worth of content.]
I think another part of it is… lack of comfort with responsibility? In the narrow, local sense which I think makes for a good minister or romantic partner but is not the heroic responsibility of the CEO or God-Emperor or whatever.
I think another part of it is… lack of comfort with responsibility? In the narrow, local sense which I think makes for a good minister or romantic partner but is not the heroic responsibility of the CEO or God-Emperor or whatever.
Yeah I’m probably trying to pack too many things in together. To expand on it:
I think there’s something that one can get from, for example, taking care of a garden, or a tank of shrimp, or whatever. Rationality helps a lot with it; you need to notice things, you often need to sweep away your preconceptions, you often need to rearrange how you orient to the world.
Harry really doesn’t demonstrate much of that; he couldn’t
keep alive a pet rock, after all.
And I think as you go thru the list of ratfic heroes, most of them also don’t have these sorts of responsibilities, or have them in a way that advances the plot instead of being the plot. (Miles Vorkosigan makes a lot of his feudal duties, but I think would very much not seem like a hero to a feudal audience, instead of something more like a tribal trickster deity.)
Part of this also is that it’s an ongoing relationship. You don’t get your pet to a good state and then declare mission accomplished; you instead have it occupying a bit of your attention, adjusting it as necessary. There’s a way it’s larger than what fits into your models in a way that is often breaking and expanding them, rather than being something that you can fit into your models and brilliant path your way around. (If Ender can, thru flexibility of mind, defeat the battle school, this is, in some sense, evidence that battle school was not a strong enough enemy for Ender.)
[Maybe another take on this is: ‘something to protect’ as the plot instead of the character’s motivation for getting good at punching is a pretty different type of story!]
Ratfic typically thinks of improving the world as a selection problem. Selecting a better world from the space of possible worlds is neat and elegant and lets you solve all problems at once. The only issue is that you need to gain absolute power first in order to be able to select the future you want.
Whereas you can also think about improving the world as a control problem, where you’re gradually nudging the world towards being better. This is less narratively satisfying when you’re a highly systematizing thinker, because you want to be able to identify the single root problem and take it out in one fell swoop (the same style of thinking that the communists were doing). But it’s much more robust when you’re in a world full of other people all of whom are also trying to exert influence.
IIRC none of Harry in HPMoR, Aaron in Unsong or Naruto in Waves Arisen actually meaningfully improved the world before taking it over—if anything, they mostly made it worse.
(Harder to evaluate this for the r!Animorphs or Keltham, because they were operating in such adversarial environments. And I don’t remember Worth the Candle well enough to say one way or the other.)
I noticed this a long time ago and tried to write a ratfic that didn’t have this dynamic; I didn’t get particularly far, mostly because I don’t think I’m that great of a fiction writer.
I think a large part of this is which settings ratfic writers choose to write fanfic in. It is very easy to take JK Rowling’s Harry Potter setting and put ratfic in it, because it’s about as screwed up as the real world, and that calls for making major changes / doesn’t naturally call for fitting into the system.
I was writing a MLP fanfic, and the My Little Pony setting is way less screwed up; the protagonist, rather than being a frustrated genius who isn’t taken seriously by his parents or teachers, is a pampered prodigy who great things are expected of and whose education is being carefully attended to accordingly. If Twilight goes to Celestia with some complaint about how society is arranged, Celestia encourages her to write a memo to the relevant minister and then get into a policy debate which considers all of the relevant factors.
[Separately I tried writing Warhammer ratfic, which mostly turned into a meditation on how much it sucks to be in an epistemically hostile environment, and the Empire was already doing a mostly-optimal strategy given the existence of the ruinous powers. But that’s, like, a short story’s worth of content.]
I think another part of it is… lack of comfort with responsibility? In the narrow, local sense which I think makes for a good minister or romantic partner but is not the heroic responsibility of the CEO or God-Emperor or whatever.
I don’t quite get this bit.
Yeah I’m probably trying to pack too many things in together. To expand on it:
I think there’s something that one can get from, for example, taking care of a garden, or a tank of shrimp, or whatever. Rationality helps a lot with it; you need to notice things, you often need to sweep away your preconceptions, you often need to rearrange how you orient to the world.
Harry really doesn’t demonstrate much of that; he couldn’t
keep alive a pet rock, after all.
And I think as you go thru the list of ratfic heroes, most of them also don’t have these sorts of responsibilities, or have them in a way that advances the plot instead of being the plot. (Miles Vorkosigan makes a lot of his feudal duties, but I think would very much not seem like a hero to a feudal audience, instead of something more like a tribal trickster deity.)
Part of this also is that it’s an ongoing relationship. You don’t get your pet to a good state and then declare mission accomplished; you instead have it occupying a bit of your attention, adjusting it as necessary. There’s a way it’s larger than what fits into your models in a way that is often breaking and expanding them, rather than being something that you can fit into your models and brilliant path your way around. (If Ender can, thru flexibility of mind, defeat the battle school, this is, in some sense, evidence that battle school was not a strong enough enemy for Ender.)
[Maybe another take on this is: ‘something to protect’ as the plot instead of the character’s motivation for getting good at punching is a pretty different type of story!]
Another way of putting this is in terms of the distinction between two types of optimization: selection and control.
Ratfic typically thinks of improving the world as a selection problem. Selecting a better world from the space of possible worlds is neat and elegant and lets you solve all problems at once. The only issue is that you need to gain absolute power first in order to be able to select the future you want.
Whereas you can also think about improving the world as a control problem, where you’re gradually nudging the world towards being better. This is less narratively satisfying when you’re a highly systematizing thinker, because you want to be able to identify the single root problem and take it out in one fell swoop (the same style of thinking that the communists were doing). But it’s much more robust when you’re in a world full of other people all of whom are also trying to exert influence.
IIRC none of Harry in HPMoR, Aaron in Unsong or Naruto in Waves Arisen actually meaningfully improved the world before taking it over—if anything, they mostly made it worse.
(Harder to evaluate this for the r!Animorphs or Keltham, because they were operating in such adversarial environments. And I don’t remember Worth the Candle well enough to say one way or the other.)
I think it’s… more like a wash? A lot of this depends on what you think about Anglecynn / its internal politics.