Twilight anti-fan-fiction: Luminosity, by Alicorn · 3:33pm Mar 28th, 2015
I don't call it "fan-fiction", because the premise of Luminosity is, "How might the story of Twilight have gone if Bella Swan weren't an idiot, but were an individual?" [1] In a way analogous to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, it looks at what a rational [2] person might do if she discovered there were vampires, werewolves, and immortality. Unfortunately, the vampires of Twilight are not as easily exploited collaborated with as the wizards and witches of Hogwarts.
I also don't call this fan-fiction because the website doesn't let you make comments. To me, a thing you can't make comments on isn't fan-fiction. I'm abusing the term, but the category of "stories that let you interact with the author and other readers" is much more interesting to me than the category "stories based on other stories".
(ADDED: Okay, okay, I'm abusing the term. Sorry. Gimme a new term, then.)
Also like HPMoR, It comes out of the incestuous meme-pool of LessWrong, so expect to run into the usual suspects if you track it down elsewhere.
[1] Is that double 'were' right? It sounds wrong, but it's consistent.
[2] Or, as some would have it, "evil".
I would have gone with wasn't/was.
"if Bella Swan weren't an idiot," sounds okay, but "but were an individual?" seems like it should clearly be "was an individual." And in that case, "wasn't an idiot" keeps things consistent.
...if Bella Swan weren't an idiot, but an individual?
is how I would do it.
"She weren't an idiot" sounds weird. Use was.
2918587 2918514 But "If she wasn't" is WROOONG! "If she was an idiot" is obviously wrong; how could "If she wasn't an idiot" be right?
What I learned today: My readers care more about grammar than content.
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The internet is made up of two kinds of people: Those who ignore the content and look at the pictures, and those who ignore the content and nitpick the grammar.
HPMoR is on my list of things to get to at some point. A work friend was a big fan, and that's moved it up a bit. I may need to consider this as well, but given how much less I care about Twilight than even Harry Potter, plus I suppose their shared provenance, it'd probably be conditional upon enjoying HPMoR.
And now for what really matters: grammar! I likewise think the double were reads as inelegant or off. Honeycomb's solution is a good one, and probably about as good as you can get without rewriting the whole sentence. A parenthetical might work, along the lines of "How might the story of Twilight have gone if Bella Swan were, rather than an idiot, an individual?" Or the simpler "How might the story of Twilight have gone if Bella Swan were an individual rather than an idiot?" In my opinion the last case loses some rhetorical weight by putting the improved alternative before the accusation, though.
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HPMOR is fundamentally a self-insert fanfic where "rationality" and knowledge of science basically gives you superpowers. If that sort of power fantasy appeals to you, it will probably be something that you deeply enjoy; if you don't, or if condescending superiority bothers you, then it will likely not be something you enjoy.
I mostly enjoyed it, personally, but it certainly isn't for everyone.
You can leave reviews on the FanFiction.net version of it here.
That gets kind of silly, though, since it would classify a bunch of original internet works as 'fan-fiction'.
No, what you need is a new term for this category you find more interesting, not reassigning an old one.
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This raises a point that seems like it might be up your alley: would this stylistic aside have received more or less attention if it had been included in the body of the post in parentheses instead of as a footnote? I would expect that as an in-paragraph parenthetical, it would get more eyeballs. Working against that is how making it a footnote means that anyone who does read it has invested extra effort: at minimum, scanning over the screen to find the footnote, and possibly even putting in some clicks or swipes on a smaller screen. That extra investment could cause people to be more likely to comment on the content of the aside, in addition to the way that there could be some self-selection in more engaged readers who go to read the footnote being more likely to comment generally.
Interesting, but I think not having read the original would make this less enjoyable for me. Maybe I can put the movie on in the background while I do other things, to give me a bit of a clue. I don't think I could actually stand to pay close attention to it.
Re: [2] 'Cause emotional reaction and/or blind adherence to dogma produces much better results.
Characters are never as complex as real people since they are only made of the parts of people that the author can rationalize.
Real people are never as rational as characters might have you believe because most people do not try to rationalize their own choices to the degree that characters do.
The truth is that, regardless of how bad a story is or how unrelatable a character, a fully rational character is predictable, easily manipulated, a victim of circumstance rather than poor decisions, and ultimately serves poorly as a protagonist.
These stories are not made better by the "Rationality Treatment". Their characters are just made OOC...
"How might the story of Twilight have gone if Bella Swan was an individual instead of an idiot?"
"How might the story of Twilight have gone if Bella Swan wasn't an idiot, but an individual?"
Unless your original sentence was trying to imply that she was both an idiot and an individual, and was challenging some kind of assumption that taking her idiocy would take her individuality too. Or something.
I couldn't get too far into Methods of Rationality. It read too little like a story, and more like a series of blogposts into how the magic systems of Harry Potter could be exploited.
The most glaring problem with this sentence is the comma. "Were an individual" is not an independent clause and should not be preceded by a comma. "Were" is correct, though. The subjunctive (hypothetical) mood requires it, plurality be damned. A simpler phrasing is "if Bella Swan were an individual rather than an idiot".
My inclination would be to go with "How might the story of Twilight have gone if Bella Swan weren't an idiot, but were rather an individual?" Probably not perfect, but at least in my opinion it sounds more natural than most of the restructures people have suggested thus far.
WERES ARE INDIVIDUALS!!! 1! You hatmongers.
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True. But "interactive fiction" and "hypertext" are already taken. Any other suggestions?
Darnit, you made me go read chunks out of that. The opening is stuplifying, but if you skip in a couple of chapters, it gets a lot better, even to the point where I would say it's twice as good as Twilight. (insert obligitory multiply by zero gag here)
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"Feedback Fiction". Alliteration makes it catchy.
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Do what I did and read "The Sporking of Twilight" blog reviews instead. It's a much more tolerable way to become intimately familiar with the series that I used when Twilight was at it's peak popularity to at least be familiar with the cultural phenomena.
Considering fan fiction got its start in fanzines in the '60s and '70s, and at that time the only internet comment section in the world was called "ARPANET", I don't think that's a very apt qualification for fan fiction.
2925993 No, it isn't. I need another word for it.
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Crowdsourced copyright-ambiguous fictional expansion?