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Many of my friends write rationalfic, in the vein of such works as Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality or Luminosity. As described on the r/rational sidebar, rationalfic features “thoughtful behaviour of people in honest pursuit of their goals,” “realistic intellectual agency,” and a “focus on intelligent characters solving problems through creative applications of their knowledge and resources.”
Rationalfic is really cool and I’ve enjoyed a lot of it (recommending people read Silmaril feels somewhat anti-social, because it will eat two months of your life, but Silmaril is so good). However, I personally am not interested in writing rationalfic. I write irrationalfic: fiction where careful attention is paid to the intricacies and subtleties of human irrationality.
Perhaps irrationalfic can be best summed up through a quote from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essay on writing Level 1 intelligent characters:
The movie version goes like this: The thirteen dwarves and Bilbo Baggins have just spent one and a half movies fighting their way to the place where Thorin, leader of the dwarves, expects to find a secret entrance into the lost dwarven kingdom of Erebor. This entrance can only be opened on a particular day of the year (Durin’s Day), and they have a decoded map saying, Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks, and the last light of Durin’s day will shine upon the keyhole.
And then the sun sets behind a mountain, and they still haven’t found the keyhole. So Thorin… I find this painful to write… Thorin throws down the key in disgust and all the dwarves start to head back down the mountain, leaving only Bilbo behind to stare at the stone wall. And so Bilbo is the only one who sees when the light of the setting moon suddenly reveals the keyhole.
(Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O34oOCB_7Kk.)
That thing where movie!Thorin throws down the key in disgust and walks away?
I wouldn’t have done that.
You wouldn’t have done that.
We’d wait at least an hour in case there was some beam of sunlight about to shoot through the side of the mountain, and then we’d come back tomorrow, just in case. And if that still failed we’d try again a year later. We wouldn’t drop the key. We wouldn’t wander off the instant something went wrong…
We could say that these strange creatures lack a certain sort of awareness. The scriptwriter wants us to be yelling at movie!Thorin, “No! You fool! Don’t do that!” but it does not occur to the scriptwriter that Thorin might yell this at himself, that Thorin might detect his own idiocy the way we see it plain upon the screen. Movie!Thorin has no little voice in his own head to yell these things at him, the way that you or I are the little voices in our own heads. We could call movie!Thorin a Hollywood Zombie, or H-Zombie for short.
The rationalfic solution to the problem of Thorin is to write a Level 1 intelligent character who doesn’t do extremely obviously stupid things. The irrationalfic solution to the problem of Thorin is to justify why he is so extremely obviously stupid.
Perhaps Thorin is an impatient person, someone who gives up easily, who doesn’t put in the extra effort. Perhaps this is established throughout the movie series: he gets bored before they’ve checked that all the ponies’ bags are secure; he gives up when Bilbo tries to show him how to make some hobbit food and he doesn’t get it immediately; he decides on the kill-Smaug plan because he gets frustrated listening to all the potential plans there could possibly be. Sometimes it works for his benefit: he demands that the other dwarves hurry up and stop being so careful and they manage to leave just before a monster is about to attack them. Sometimes it bites him in the ass: maybe they leave the map at the campsite because Thorin didn’t double-check that they had it; maybe Thorin was in charge of preparing something for a fight and he only half-did it and some orcs they could have defeated easily almost kill them.
Once you have established all of that, Thorin is not an H-Zombie. Thorin is a person, an impatient and easily frustrated person, similar to many people you have met over the course of your life. And you might yell “aaa! You fool! Don’t do that!” at the screen, but your suspension of disbelief is not going to snap.
Following Eliezer’s convention, we can declare that an irrational character whose irrationality is always justified in some satisfying way and is of a piece with her entire character development in a Level 1 irrational character. A Level 2 irrational character is one where the character’s irrationality actually makes sense to the reader as a thing the reader would have done in the character’s shoes, perhaps to the point that the reader does not see the character as irrational until the full consequences of their actions are revealed. A Level 3 irrational character is one where the reader realizes some aspect of their own irrationality due to seeing it play out in the character’s life.
What makes an irrationalfic?
Irrationalfic protagonists are flawed. And they don’t just have grand, noble, heroic flaws either. Irrationalfic protagonists have the normal range of human flaws. They’re petty and careless and thoughtlessly cruel. They make big plans and don’t follow through with them. They suck at communicating with people they’re dating. They have anxiety and guilt issues. They don’t like doing things that are boring or involve a lot of hard work. They deceive themselves; they maintain intricate webs of denial of all their personality flaws and all the problems in their lives. They sell out their principles for financial gain; they stick to their principles even when it will cost other people’s lives. They make bad decisions when they’re hungry or tired or horny. They’re biased and prejudiced and xenophobic. They’re basically good people who fail to outperform the society they were raised in; they’re basically good people who try to outperform the society they were raised in and end up going off in a terrible direction and making everything worse. Obviously, I don’t mean that any character should have every one of those traits (…although if you manage to do it I want a link), just that these are the sorts of flaws irrationalfic protagonists should have.
Irrationalfic protagonists’ flaws make sense. Horror-movie characters splitting up and being picked off by the monster one by one is not an irrationalfic, it is just people behaving irrationally. At all times, the audience should be thinking “I understand why this character is behaving this way, even though I want to shake them.” One of the best ways to do this is by making the character get some sort of benefit from their flaws. This is realistic; people don’t usually do things that only hurt them and don’t have any good aspects at all. Try thinking about in what circumstances the character’s flaws are adaptive. What situation makes the irrational choice a good decision? For example:
- A character who ignores her problems and binge-watches Netflix doesn’t have to think about things that are scary or upsetting.
- A character who doesn’t do important but dull tasks isn’t bored as often.
- A character who doesn’t talk about their needs or set boundaries may have an easier time surviving certain abusive relationships.
- A character who agrees with her society’s prejudices is less likely to anger other people or make them feel guilty about their own prejudiced behavior.
- A character who never follows through on her plans doesn’t have to worry about failing.
- A character who practices self-deception doesn’t have to face uncomfortable truths about herself.
- A character who sells out their principles for financial gain gets money which she can use to buy things that make her life better.
Another way to add plausibility is by laying out the character’s reasoning process. Don’t just have Thorin stomp off; make us feel his despair about ever finding the keyhole, his anger that he’s come all this way for nothing, his shame that he got fourteen people to spend a year of their lives on this quest and failed because he believed some stupid map. Don’t just have a character decide not to ask about some important and incorrect assumption she’s making about her love interest; make us understand that her love interest clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, and she wants to respect his preferences, and she’s sure he’ll open up in his own time, and anyway from all the information she has it’s really obvious what the explanation is.
Irrationalfic protagonists have virtues. A person who is nothing but flaw is not a very interesting character, and it limits the field on which their flaws can play out. As C S Lewis wrote, “To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue. What would Attila have been without his courage, or Shylock without self-denial as regards the flesh?” So give your character some redeeming qualities. Give her intelligence or compassion or a sincere and earnest desire to do good; make her witty or hard-working or good at people; make her brave or thoughtful.
Some virtues I think are particularly worth considering due to the interesting plot points they open up:
- Self-awareness. Most people who make bad decisions don’t know their decisions are bad. But scenes where the character goes “I recognize that this is a stupid decision and it is going to bite me in the ass” and then makes the decision anyway can be really interesting. Self-awareness can also allow the protagonist to explain why their decision is bad, which may be helpful for novice writers and increase the didactic potential of the story.
- A commitment to self-improvement. In irrationalfic, you basically don’t get a happy ending without this trait; I’ll talk about that more later in the post.
- Goals and agency. ‘Drifting through life without any particular intentions or plans’ is a perfectly cromulent flaw, but characters with goals make writing a lot easier. They spontaneously generate their own plots, whereas the other sort of character has to be forcibly dragged into a plot kicking and screaming. And there’s something particularly fun about watching a character destroy all the things they love and cherish because of their own poor coping mechanisms.
- Being a better person than she thinks she is. It’s true this is only on the list because it is one of my favorite tropes. But it is a really good trope! The character might identify as being selfish or cruel or mean, or she might share her society’s prejudices and flaws. But then she encounters a suffering person, or befriends someone from the oppressed group, or faces a problem that professionalism demands she solve… and suddenly, without really knowing what she’s doing, she finds herself rescuing slaves or hiding Jews from the Nazis or fighting the Big Bad. Maybe she thinks the good thing she’s doing is actually evil, maybe she’s baffled at her self-sacrifice for a cause, maybe she keeps thinking she’s going to quit but she never does. Anyway. It’s a good trope. There should be more of it.
Irrationalfic protagonists cause many of their own problems. How much this is the case depends on the irrationalfic in question. For some stories, the primary conflict is external, but the protagonist makes their situation worse. For other stories, literally the entire story would be over in two pages if not for the protagonist constantly fucking things up all the time.
Regardless, the character’s flaws must fuck them over. None of this shit where a character is an alcoholic but as soon as the plot starts they mysteriously never take a drink. If a character is an alcoholic, they should be drunk during an important fight scene, and it means their aim is wildly off and they end up hitting a little girl instead of the person who took her hostage.
Think about the most obvious and boring ways that a character’s flaws would create problems for her. If she makes cutting, snarky remarks that make the reader laugh, her victims probably shouldn’t also laugh– a lot of the time, they should hate her. If she is chronically sleep-deprived because she superheroes at night and goes to school during the day, she should make bad impulsive decisions and fail to think through the implications of her actions. If she skips important meetings, decisions she doesn’t like should happen at those meetings.
If irrationalfic protagonists grow, it takes work. If you have an epiphany that causes your character to realize that they’ve made some horrible mistake, it should take place in chapter three, and the rest of the book should be devoted to the slow and switchbacky process of putting that epiphany into action. Ignored epiphanies [cw: tvtropes] are also allowed. But the point is that in irrationalfic it never ever ever happens that a character has a sudden epiphany and it completely changes everything about their lives forever. I don’t want to say that sudden epiphanies never happen in real life but they’re definitely overrepresented in fiction and irrationalfic should push back against that.
A character in irrationalfic may decide that they’re going to stop being irrational. If they do, they might start off with a burst of good intentions and then a month later fall back into old patterns. They might give into temptation at exactly the wrong moment. They might half-change. They might start doing the new thing and halfway through just… stop. They might trick themselves into believing they’ve changed when they haven’t. They might have to come up with strategies to get around their own irrationality: a Facebook blocker, the Pomodoro method, bribing themselves with chocolate, locking away a tempting object and giving someone else the key, avoiding people who make them angry, taking deep breaths and counting to ten. They might try strategies and they don’t work. They might take medication or go to therapy. Regardless, it will take a lot of work and they will spend a lot of time aware of their flaws, trying to improve on their flaws, and being flawed anyway.
Irrationalfic pays close attention to character. You may notice the first five points in my irrationalfic manifesto happen to do with what the protagonists are like. My irrationalfic definition is different from rationalfic definitions, which typically include non-character things such as thoughtful worldbuilding and the fact that the plots can be resolved through intelligent decision-making. This is not an accident.
Irrationalfic, as a genre, is marked by its concern for character. In Orson Scott Card’s MICE system, they’re character stories: they’re concerned with who the character is, what she does, and why she does it. That is not to say that there can’t be world-spanning plot events or rich and detailed societies, but ultimately an irrationalfic is about people.
For this reason, I’ve found romance is a particularly good genre for irrationalfic, since romance focuses intensely on specific characters and the ways they interact with each other, and the conflict in romance often springs from the characters’ personalities rather than from some external force.
Unreliable narrators. In general, when you’re writing an irrationalfic, your viewpoint character should not be 100% reliable. She might misremember a scene that happened earlier in the story. She might incorrectly report what other characters’ feelings are. She might describe herself in a way that contradicts her own behavior. She might mention offhandedly as part of a list of six things something that the reader recognizes as extremely important. She might report the incorrect beliefs of her society as if they are actually true. Using an unreliable narrator requires a certain level of trust in the reader’s ability to realize that the narrator is not a completely accurate and objective reporter of events, but I think making the reader do that interpretive labor adds a lot to their experience.
Dramatic irony. Dramatic irony goes along with unreliable narrators, but can also come from other sources. If you have a character who is not particularly self-aware– as most irrationalfic characters are not– there’s a lot of opportunity for the audience to know something the characters don’t.
Every character’s actions make sense to that character. Expanding our focus beyond the protagonist, how do other characters in irrationalfic behave? Ideally, every character should be treated like the protagonist: they should have virtues, behave in a way that makes sense, and be someone the audience can understand and sympathize with, but they should have flaws that cause them to hurt themselves or others.
It is particularly important to pay attention to antagonists. Many stories will not have an antagonist: the protagonist is the cause of all their own problems, or the conflict is with some sympathetic person, such as a love interest. If you choose to have a villain, the villain should be characterized as carefully as the protagonist. In particular, since people don’t usually forget to give their villains huge flaws, it’s important to make sure that your villain is sympathetic and has redeeming qualities and that the audience can understand her point of view and why she’s making the mistakes she’s making. Give her the opportunity to speak for herself.
Irrationalfic characters have unhappy or ambiguous endings or earn their happy ending. This isn’t going to be true 100% of the time: sometimes, the most satisfying way for a story to work out is that the character gets the thing that they want, even though they do not deserve it at all. But if that happens in more than, say, one in twenty of your irrationalfic stories, I’d take it as a red flag that you should be meaner to your characters.
If the character is exactly as flawed at the end of the book as at the beginning of the book, then you have two options. You can write an all-out tragedy where their fatal flaws destroy them. (More books should be tragedies. I bet it would do great things for the prevalence of the just-world hypothesis.) But you can also write a story with an ambiguous ending: they get some of the things they want, but not all of them; they get the things they want, but at a high cost; they don’t get what they want, but they get something else that’s also okay; everything is terrible, but at least they’re alive, which was not a given at the climax.
If a character works hard on the process of personal growth and overcoming their flaws (even if they’re still imperfect), then they can earn a happy ending. However, you should strongly consider the possibility that the character should not earn their happy ending: even after a lot of hard work, the mistakes they made early in the story were large enough that they realistically should wind up with a tragic or ambiguous ending.
Careful attention to irrationality. Irrationalfic is, fundamentally, about human irrationality— about the ways that people come to have false beliefs or take actions that don’t advance their goals. Therefore, writing irrationalfic requires paying a lot of careful attention to the exact details of how irrationality works. The thought process must be plausible, the way that people making a particular mistake actually think. And a significant chunk of the story must be devoted to exploring the ways that characters are irrational, why they are irrational, and the consequences of their own irrationality. This point is the core of irrationalfic. If you have nothing else, but you have this, you have written an irrationalfic.
What are some good examples of irrationalfic? (My own writing is, sadly, too often unedited for me to in good conscience call it ‘good.’) Many tragedies are irrationalfic; so are many comedies. Many of the best characters in Amentumblr, such as healthesick and tidalwave-shiningsky, were excellent irrationalfic characters. A Song of Ice and Fire has some lovely irrationalfic moments, such as the death of Ned Stark and the fact that almost every character is ignoring the literal zombie apocalypse while they fight over who gets to sit on the Iron Throne. Amends by Eve Tushnet, a novel about an alcoholism treatment reality show, is a good earthfic example full of richly observed (and funny!) detail about alcoholics. I haven’t watched it personally, but from what I’ve read It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is a good example. Do other people have good examples?
anthropicprincipal said:
Worm? https://parahumans.wordpress.com/ (warning: long)
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Alejandro said:
Worm is close to rationalfic in the way Taylor munchkins every aspect of her power for its maximum worth, but closer to irrationalfic in the non-power-related strategic and moral decisions she makes
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Murphy said:
Re:strategic and moral decisions
To an extent she’s just reacting most of the time.
In the sense that rationalfic shouldn’t really be about the goals but rather how they’re achieved… I do find some rationalfic protagonists a bit OTT re: characters desperately wanting to help *everyone* as their main end goal.
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Taymon A. Beal said:
Most of this seems like basically the traditional conception of good writing in general.
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Tulip said:
It’s funny that you say that, because that’s a frequent comment that people make on rationalfic too. My suspicion is that neither of them is actually Good Writing per se; instead, they’re both gesturing at regions of writingspace whose members tend to be well-writen, but they’re pointing at different regions, and neither of them (and, I suspect, not the union of them either) gets at good writing in its entirety, only different subsets.
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Taymon A. Beal said:
I think this post hews closer to what’s traditionally thought of as good writing, as opposed to rationalfic which is more trying to do something novel. Certainly I found it reminiscent of the principles of Greek tragedy as explained in high school English class (though who knows how similar that explanation was to anything that the ancient Greeks actually believed).
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ozymandias said:
Greek tragedy was definitely something I had in mind as an influence while I was writing this (as were musicals). But something can be irrationalfic without following the conventions of tragedy, such as unity of time and place or having an unhappy ending. And I think there’s a lot of good writing that doesn’t follow the conventions I listed– including a lot of rationalfic!– and many of the things I wrote about are undersupplied in modern writing.
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benquo said:
An alternative framing: cognitive and life-strategy *specialization*. Then, interesting things happen when a character has a wildly wrong life strategy for the plot they’re in.
Someone once suggested imagining what would happen if you switched Macbeth and Hamlet. There just wouldn’t be much of a story in either case, because they’d have the right strategy for their environment. More recently, the plot of The Unwilling Warlord has someone with character class Cowardly Lucky Rogue virtues abducted to serve as the hereditary king of a tiny failing kingdom. He spends the first half of the book desperately trying to escape from the plot, and the second half blatantly cheating to win, and then cheating again to clean up the mess he caused.
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Taymon A. Beal said:
I suspect you might be thinking thinking of Othello, rather than Macbeth. (Though now I’m wondering how switching Macbeth and Hamlet would work.)
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benquo said:
Hamlet thinks hard about prophecy and risk-reward tradeoffs, stays out of trouble, prophecy is fulfilled some other way, he’s king. MacBeth immediately murders Uncle Murder, is unconflicted about it and therefore doesn’t self-sabotage afterwards, because his story paints him as the good guy this time.
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ozymandias said:
The original comic is definitely Othello and Hamlet but I think Hamlet and Macbeth also works.
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benquo said:
I wasn’t thinking about a comic. Seems like it’s a common idea.
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ozymandias said:
I think this is interesting but irrationalfic as a genre should definitely include characters who have shitty life strategies for any conceivable plotline!
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benquo said:
Sure, but thinking about this gets more precise if you don’t model badness of strategy (“irrationality”) as a thing separate from the actual strategy and situation.
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leftrationalist said:
Wait, isn’t what benquo said basically what you said in “Irrationalfic protagonists’ flaws make sense” ?
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Neb said:
It doesn’t exactly meet the thing, but this totally makes me think of Aleksander from Transformation by Carol Berg. He’s not the main character or narrator, though he’s definitely a deutragonist, and doesn’t hit all the points but I think may share some features.
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Doug S. said:
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the graphic novel series, is definitely Irrationalfic of the type you describe. (The movie less so.)
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leftrationalist said:
Ozy, aren’t you just reinventing Romanticism ? It will mess you up !
More seriously, I think Back to the Future (especially II and III) may be considered irrationalfic.
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Michael Blume said:
Specifically because Marty has the Berserk Button when someone calls him chicken, or for some other reason?
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leftrationalist said:
Yes. George’s cowardice (which can be considered the reverse of Marty’s flaw, which is recklessness, channeling golden mean virtue ethics) in the first movie too, but less so.
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Michael Blume said:
Now that I think about it this is sort of weird. In the first movie it seems like cowardice is the besetting flaw of all the McFly men — the principal tells Marty “no McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley”, and when Jennifer suggests that Marty send his audition tape to a record label he says exactly the same thing his father says about asking out his mother — “I just don’t think I could take that kind of rejection”. Marty helps his father overcome his own cowardice and I think the implication is that this gives him a new perspective on his own.
Then in the *sequels* suddenly Marty’s primary flaw is not wanting to be called chicken, this comes up again and again when it never came up once in the first movie, and then finally Marty learns to control it and avoid disaster at the end of the third.
It seems like an odd pivot from the first movie and now that you’ve pointed it out I’m kind of confused by it.
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leftrationalist said:
This is a common explanation given by fans (often with a flavor of this being due to being raised by more supportive parents in the Lone Pines Hall timeline). However I don’t find it very convincing considering his great-great-granduncle shared the same flaw of recklessness while his son seem to have been closer to 1955!George than Marty (no problem with grammatical tense, 2015 is in the past now). Another explanation is that nobody ever called Marty a chicken (or a yellow) in the first movie, although it’s not clear either why Strickland calling him a slacker didn’t trigger him.
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christianhendriks said:
This is definitely not a reinvention of Romanticism, though it has similarities. Romanticism valorized the non-rational; Ozy is analyzing the irrational. This is different in both treatment (valorize/analyze) and subject matter (non-rational/irrational).
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Neb said:
Another possibly relevant concept I was reminded of – the concept/label of disaster![character] in fandom/fanfic.
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Anna said:
Youve probably already read this, but the Reciprocity series by osprey_archer is an incrediblely compelling example of this. Really great example of characters perspectives making more sense as the story goes on, and changing the readers perspective until you feel as confused and slight paranoid as the characters.
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fish said:
I think the Harry Potter AU created by Lightning on the Wave fits into this category https://www.fanfiction.net/u/895946/Lightning-on-the-Wave
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christianhendriks said:
The Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency Netflix show is, I think, very close to what you are describing: self-destructive characters, some of whom try to be better (but often failing) with ambiguous endings. The only things might be that it is more Event than Character in Card’s scheme, though a person could quarrel with that assessment; that Dirk himself seems too opaque to me to be what you call a Level 1 irrational character; and that some of the villains are cartoonishly bad people. I do not know about the novel it is based on.
Two interesting things:
a) Elijah Wood’s character’s epiphany happens before the first episode of the first season (though we only learn about it in episode 6 or something); the switchbacking path to improvement is where we meet him,
b) One of the season 2 villains often talks like a self-help book, or like someone whose friend reads self-help books and she picked up some of the language and themes vicariously without understanding anything about the general structure in which that language and those themes make sense. It’s like self-improvement gone maximally wrong.
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LeeEsq said:
Elmer Leonard once remarked that he likes to write about criminals because they tend to be stupid, so that makes them easier to write. Irrational characters might be the same. It is easier to write about people who do thing wrong rather than who act rationally. A character acting rationally might really shorten the story or movie.
Sometimes irrationality bothers me and other times it does not. When I watched Shaun of the Dead, I remember getting angry with many of the character for not quire getting what was going on. Shaun’s mother was particularly bothersome in this regard for some reason. Other times I can deal with irrationality as a necessity for the story.
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AS said:
I would suggest The Good Place as a contender for this.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky said:
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is irrationalfic, it’s just irrationalfic set in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s mental universe where characters can have a much higher level of assumed background skills as the default.
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leftrationalist said:
What is specifically irrationalfic about it ?
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Eliezer Yudkowsky said:
It’s the story of age-reverted Tom Riddle fighting his lingering hatred and contempt, plus his youthful inexperience and impetuosity and having a mostly 11-year-old brain to start with (though he gets better access to older mind patterns after going in front of the Dementor and reliving Voldemort’s last moments). It’s just that this story happens to take place inside a perspective on minds where being youthful and impetuous and having Voldemort’s mind patterns doesn’t imply you don’t know how to use Bayes’s Theorem. Maybe you’re secretly Tom Riddle and you’ve got more than a few screws loose, but you’ve still read a lot of cognitive science papers. It doesn’t make the story not be irrationalfic as Ozy defines it, any more than a story you wrote couldn’t be irrationalfic because the protagonist can read and write. The story is still about Harry learning to stop being Tom Riddle and really begin his journey down the Way instead of having just read a bunch of Kahneman.
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Murphy said:
Ya, it sort of stands out to me in the early chapters. There’s little rational about intentionally offending people and being nasty for the sake of being nasty. Rational people culture good social relationships if only for the sake of an easier life…. yet Harry jumps to being a git to Ron within a few sentences.
Sure, EY likely wanted to have the story focus on Harry/Hermione relationship but it’s still needless irrational behavior from harry that has some moderate bad results later in the story because, surprise surprise, some people don’t like him as a result and make his life harder.
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Sophia Kovaleva said:
I see the point, but it also sure feels like a “sorting hat was trans” moment.
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wfenza said:
I love this post! I’m working on a novel now that I think fits this description. The protagonist is based on me as a teenager, so makes terrible decisions, doesn’t understand people at all, and learns lessons, but doesn’t get what she wants. This post is really helpful in structuring the development of the character.
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rose said:
gone with the wind (at least the book, never seen the movie)
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aristides11 said:
Another good example is Steins; Gate.
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Benjamin Buckley said:
If I may plug myself here, this sounds almost like what I was trying to do with “Daily Comics by Ben”.
I had a few people tell me they sometimes wanted to smack Ishmael for getting in his own way so often. But it seems to me that, in order to get a character to the point where you want to smack them, they must seem to have *some* degree of sentience. (With Thorin, I didn’t want to smack him. I just thought, “Oh, this isn’t a real person, this is just a flat character in a movie.”)
https://www.facebook.com/comicsbyben/
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sansdomino said:
“fiction where careful attention is paid to the intricacies and subtleties of human irrationality (…) Irrationalfic protagonists have the normal range of human flaws”
Just noting, but this definition is kind of at odds with your initial example of an irrational character being Thorin Oakenshield, who is quite literally not human, and could very well possess also some entirely novel and inhuman psychological traits. (But, to be sure, I’d also like the example scene more if the films had earlier spent time on establishing rather than minimizing this fact.)
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LeeEsq said:
I don’t know if this is an irrational fic or rational fic but one thing that I always thought would make for an interesting plot for a fantasy novel would be how does a nation-state deal with the problems typical to a stereotypical fantasy universe. So instead of getting a bunch of heroes to slaughter your always evil monster race, the state will send in the fantasy equivalent of social workers to reform them into being productive citizens. Another plot would be an industrial revolution fueled by magic rather than technology or a conflict between a stereotypical fantasy outlook and a more modern one.
The latter Disc World novels come close to this but do not quite get there because of the needs for comedy and identifiable protagonists. I want to read about a magical Andrew Carnegie.
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AG said:
Log Horizon might be up your alley, then. It’s unevenly paced, but the climax of each arc is generally a good uplift payoff to world-building.
Maoyuu has this overtly as a premise, but I haven’t watched it, and it has mixed reviews, so watch at your own risk.
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charm quark said:
I think Pride and Prejudice is the arch-example of what you’re talking about here–Austen pays extremely careful attention to the flaws and consistency of all the characters in that book, especially Lizzie and Darcy, and shows the ways they bounce off of each other in incredible psychological detail.
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AG said:
Rather than rational vs. irrational fic, I think that actual divide in what kinds of fiction people want to read is “Competence porn: Y/N”?
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sdsfdfdf said:
Flannery O’Connor
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AG said:
I’ve been highly enjoying the “Kaguya-sama: Love is War” anime, which gently lampoons conflict theory in the romance setting. One of the things I really enjoy about it is that the characters are all demonstrably intelligent. They can carry out mind games and such competently, predicting each others’ strategies and adjusting in smart ways.
They are also god-damned idiots in the best way, navigating social situations while they are neck deep in feelings denial, which creates hilarity, but they also stumble their way towards a real relationship.
So it seems to me that the core of irrationalfic is: people doing rational actions in order to achieve irrational goals. It’s the old wants/needs trick, where the character knows what they want, and intelligently do things to achieve that want, but they want the wrong thing, it’s not what they need.
The idiot ball that people don’t like is when there is no longer a justification for a characters’ actions. “Character does thing counter-productive to their goal because they chase the wrong sub-goal or because they don’t realize that their actions will be counter-productive but the narrative knows it” is fine. “Narrative pretends that character is a competent agent even while they’re doing counter-productive things” is not.
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rohinmshah said:
A Song for Two Voices is the best example of this genre I’ve seen. It has a rationality theme from the beginning, and also gets an effective altruism theme by the second/third book. But most importantly, there is a *ton* of attention to detail for the characters. It feels like I can take any major character, posit some situation, and say how they will respond. But more importantly, many of the main characters explicitly think about how they could have avoided the mistakes they made, come to a conclusion — and then continue the bad pattern anyway, because *it is hard to overcome irrationality, and just knowing about it isn’t enough*. They definitely make progress, but it takes time, even in plot-time (i.e. it doesn’t just say “and then he trained for five years and became an expert in the art of rationality”).
I don’t want to give specific examples, because the plot is also excellent, and pretty much all of the best examples of irrationality would be spoilers (really, that’s why they are the best examples — they actually *matter*).
https://archiveofourown.org/series/936480
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