#rationalfic

New chapters will be published every Monday.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21487672

Today in missed storytelling opportunities - why the hell does Worm not have an Empire 88 arc? Not only were they hyped but it felt like it was being very carefully set up, in ways that would be unnecessary for a purely affective bait and switch.  It fills out a naturally escalating sequence of challenges from ABB-E88-Travellers-S9, not that most people appreciate shonen power crawls as personally as I do.  Not just generic and tonal “expectations” were being set, but the sort of structural/thematic ones usually placed a layer deeper than the ones you deliberately fuck with (such that a reader can on second or third read notice them and go, so that was the plan all along!).  Consider the following timeline, call it Worm Prime: >You Are Here: Buzz 7.12, Taylor has just figured out that Coil kidnapped Dinah and is considering quitting the Undersiders  >in the course of their argument, Bitch and Grue call her on her hypocrisy in pretending like there is ethical caping in late capitalism: specifically, that she was fine working within a structure that lets Empire 88 run a chunk of the city as a fascist ethnostate >(somewhere in the course of this, we learn a bit about what Empire 88 actually do - more on that later) >even though they were originally against it, the ensuing moral game of chicken goads the Undersiders into agreeing to take down Empire 88 >however, because Dinah’s odds were so shit, and because they don’t trust Coil any more, they decide to come up with their own plan entirely distinct from either iteration of Coil’s  >Taylor agrees to stay with the Undersiders long enough to pull off this one plan >Coil agrees to this (they tell him to avoid risk of his interference) when he sees their original plan is good and Dinah gives it a better probability rating >the Chekov’s gun about why Dinah predicted Coil’s intervention as lowering their chances still gets fired eventually, as their plan goes wrong on a fluke anyway and they have to get Coil to intervene to save themselves one time even though he makes things even more messy from there, in some fun rapidly escalating Xanatos speed chess bullshit >the arc ends with Taylor making her decision about the Undersiders and trying to change the world that she makes after the Leviathan fight, but this time built up to thematically over the course of the whole arc.  This thematically as well as structurally leads naturally into the Coil arc, which pits the Undersiders against another guy with a plan to change the world, and a more sympathetic team.  Which leaves the Undersiders ultimately unrivalled in Brockton Bay in time to face their first larger-than-Brockton Bay threat, the Slaughterhouse Nine, etc... The fact that I don’t really know (or care) where to put Leviathan in this will probably strike some as sufficient explanation for why it doesn’t play out like this - that it’s supposed to be “unpredictable”, either for entertainment or “realism” reasons.  While I don’t buy one of three Biblically symbolic “Endbringers” whose existence is predetermined directly by the cosmic backstory explaining the whole setting as an avatar of the modernist radical contingency of the Event, any more than I buy the ensuing Hobbesian survival horror cliché that doesn’t resemble any real world disaster recovery I’ve ever heard of; in either case, the contingent was timed to interrupt something, and cut short some logical developments, over others, and that’s still worth thinking about. Despite being one of the better researched and more plausible depictions of neo-Nazis in pop culture, Empire 88 is weirdly depoliticized.  The text goes out of its way to never look sympathetic to them - they’re all personally among the worst people in the setting, just all around sadists who are cruel to animals and threaten teenagers in parks and kill indiscriminately in the wake of Leviathan, as if that’s why they’re racist - and the thuggish ones get a lot more screen time than the “respectable” ones - but for all the shock beats they’re given you never even hear about anything actually racist they do.  A sizeable part of the city is their “territory”.  What does that entail?  Does the city make any accommodations for PoC fleeing that area (whose borders, as established in Buzz, are deliberately pushed and made unclear)?  Are there pogroms?  Lynchings?  We know from comments that Wildbow is smart enough to recognize rape as a not-apolitical form of realist grit; we also know that he thinks there are apolitical forms of realist grit, and the political ones should be avoided at least by people without the relevant “experience” (I disagree, but can’t blame him.  Of course, he didn’t have to make a neo-Nazi gang in the first place, or build them directly into the story’s thematic structure as the avatar of the political itself. Not that I want to make this into Woke Wolfenstein or some kind of heavy-handed progressive power fantasy.  Ideally this arc would have been written in 2012 like the original and dodged the bullet of EiffelArt avatars fingering themselves to it 24/7.  Actually, one thematic that would be interesting to weave into this would be the thing I saw one commenter mention about how E88 has more “heroic” coded powers than most of the villain teams (and “heroic” coded powers are mainly “military industrial complex” coded powers...), which would tie well into why Taylor doesn’t feel like she can be a hero or a villain, how the logic that “hero = system” is inherently fascistic, and the Undersiders or at least Taylor and E88 are caught in opposite instantiations of that dialectic (villains who overidentify with the system vs villains who oppose it in good faith, neither capable of identifying with the designation)... This might involve spending some time on their motives, maybe even an Interlude - and I understand the cynical pop-psych reasoning why dehumanization-depoliticization is a better pair than vice versa, but one thing we’ve seen in the last couple years is that this leaves you vulnerable to tactics as crude as a name change. If both this and my Star Wars headcanon read like progressive fix-it fics, I want to clarify that this really isn’t my intention.  While including neo-Nazis and depoliticizing them is kind of asking for it, I really don’t want to force my politics into everything I read.  These started as just attempts to fill plot holes or pacing whiplash, and yet they seem to make things more political of their own accord.  Why is that?   As someone who aestheticizes my own politics way too much not to feel conflicted about Benjamin’s famous motto, one of mine (which works pretty well as a summation of the project of rationalfic) used to be “Make Fiction More Like Reality/Make Reality More Like Fiction”.  If anything it’s the dialectical intimation of the possibility of the latter that’s missing in Worm.

I will probably post progress updates here just for personal accountability.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/17889389/chapters/45671038

I know for a fact that this fic has made many people cry, many times, but this is a new one. I feel like there should be some kind of achievement unlocked for writing something that makes people have intense feelings about AI risk.