Being totally honest here, that really reads as "we desperately need a pretentious tag to slap on something random to generate a sense of community and belonging" more than anything else. All four of the "rational" requirements are quite literally nothing more than the primary requirements for fiction in the first place. It's like saying "Framing, lighting, scripting, and pacing are the characteristics of a Cinematographic Movie"; it's technically true, insofar as it can be when you just make up a term for something, but it's utterly meaningless and reeks of pretension.

At least the second set is an actually meaningful set of determinators and give you a subset, so I've gotta give them that much at least.

 

The name choice wasn't given that much thought.

All those requirements are characteristics of good writing but they're explicit goals of rational fiction. Especially when it comes to writing fanfiction for stories that sometimes transgress those characteristics.

Like in Naruto, there are some world building inconsistencies. In part one Konoha seems to be a small village with maybe a couple hundred ninja, but in part two that number seems to be over ten thousand based on the size of the allied shinobi forces which was stated to be eighty thousand. In Fire Forged established pretty early on that it would be using the part two "big Konoha" interpretation and never waffled back and forth on that because more consistent world building was one of its goals.

This doesn't mean the author is pretentious and thinks they are better than Kishimoto, they just had different goals.

 

It kinda sounds pretentious when you imply the original author's work is irrational.

 

So... has anyone actually read any new, quality Naruto fics this year? Because the only ones I can remember are Eilfye's Monkey Business and Ser Serendipity's The Sword of Stone (Not Sick sidestory).

Which made me a little sad.

 

There was Sasuke Uchiha and the Power of Lies.
While it is quite cracky it is also quite good.

 

Two odd recommendations, but one's I really really love, are both The Battle Never Ends (Naruto/Metal Gear) & The Newest Challenger (Naruto/Street Fight) by the well-loved Kenchi618. If you like a story for the long haul these are for you. Links below!

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7037058/1/The-Battle-Never-Ends

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7609129/1/The-Newest-Challenger

Edit: I realize many don't like Kenchi, and while his writing isn't something to fawn over, both stories above are well in the realm of guilty pleasure I find enjoyable.

 

There is Wood, Paper, and Illusion. If it's a readable Naruto fic you're going for, this fits the bill. Full disclaimer, it is older-brother, Mokuton Naruto. The author also changes several canon facts in their premise, without any real reasoning.

But, it doesn't have 7 year old A rank neglected Naruto either. If you stick through the first 10 or so chapter, it starts to pick up in pace. The character relationships aren't bad, and it definitely has the most original Kakashi I think I've ever seen. It's worth a read through.

 

There's He Makes Me Laugh.
Summary: Temari was a harsh, clever woman, but she loved for simple reasons. [NaruTema]

It's romance (NaruTemari) and short (only 4 chapters) but fuck does it not have a solid and distinct voice for Temari that was completely engaging. I found it to be a nice little gem that I sure as hell wasn't expecting to find.

And also Protective Instincts.
Summary: Naruto is an Idiot with a capital I, and Sasuke feels the needs to help her for his own sanity. Fem Naruto x Sasuke

I can't really find the words to express how much I like this story. Genderbent Naruto (or Sasuke) fics are usually something of a hit or miss, but this story hit all the marks. It didn't try to be anything more than what it was which, incidentally enough, is mainly Sasuke struggling to deal with his feelings for an idiot. I thought it was sweet and written well enough. Sue me. It's a quick read with 12 short chapters (that read more like vignettes than a full linear story, but whatever).

 

The author is definitely able to tell a story - that much is clear from his writing. But whatever the fuck he's writing isn't one.

Half the story is meant to be a crackfic, but isn't funny. Most characters, as the author notes in one of AN's, are one-dimensional caricatures, "for comedic effect", without being funny either. I can't think of a single character that was actually likable; I can't think of a single character that was actually normal. Reading anything about Minato is like voluntary hitting yourself in the balls, and things don't really improve over time. There's excessive and pointless verbosity everywhere in this fic, and 'philosophic' meanderings from Naruto when he's five years old (with a side dish of thesaurus, possibly).

It is readable? Yes. But I don't know why would you want to read it.

 

I went through a phase of wanting to read Mokuton Naruto after finishing Teubor. Sadly, almost every single one had super, abused, "will get beat up sometime" Naruto.

Consider the story's original take on bloodlines-having to understand how the composition works- I found it interesting to read. Obviously, it'd be much better if the author decided whether he wanted to write serious or crack, but it had a few interesting ideas that kept me reading.

 

Dance of the Dog God was recommended in that other thread. I also liked Sunlight on Seawater by the same author, which doesn't seem to be going anywhere, but I liked it the same way I like reading meaningless fluff, except this was horror.

 

It’s actually this that is really the problem most have with “rational” fics. The supposition that the work is extremely intelligent and can only be read by those of intelligence.

Sounds pretentious, no?

 

Especially fics that feel like they can do a better job than JKR did with canon. Rather than shore up inconsistencies, they poke "holes" with this incredibly condescending tone

 

It seems as though more people have a problem with the attitude that authors of 'rational' writing have, rather than the thing itself.
From some authors, you get the vague feeling that they feel that they and the work they've produced is 'superior' because they've written it out more 'rationally.' And that's annoyingly pretentious.

But these aren't issues with the genre (if you can call it that) but with the people who subscribe to it.

 

The attitude is fully apparent in the writing though, so it is a problem with the genre. It's impossible to read one and not know that the author doesn't only think themselves rather clever, but holds a disdain for the original work and people in general.

 

The fic we were discussing here was In Fire Forged and I didn't get that impression at all from reading it. I don't see where you're getting those impressions from.

 

There are few things the people of this forum hate more than the author of 'HP and the Methods of Rationality'. Transference resulted in a general disdain for the genre he spawned. To be fair it is really douchy to label your story 'rational'. Imagine if there was a community writing 'creative' or 'moral' fics.

 

I think you are right that a lot of people who set out to write a rational fic do think themselves rather clever and believe that they're 'improving' upon the thing they're ripping off. Yudkowsky is a self-important, obnoxious fellow who's written a masturbatory little self-insert, and he's unfortunately given the 'genre' a bad reputation before it could even develop properly. Like strangling a baby in its cradle.

I think that if an author set out to develop realistic characters who do things that are consistent with their motivations and personalities (rather than merely to advance the plot), in a very consistent fantasy world (like many of Sanderson's), then the work they've produced can be termed rational, even if you don't have to label it as such. Perhaps this departs from what's conventionally thought, but I don't even think these characters should necessarily be 'intelligent' or rational; rationally speaking, no one behaves rationally a 100% of the time, or has rational motives. All that's really required is that the characters be consistent with their personality, even in their irrationality. I think that such an author doesn't have to have to be a faux-intellectual narcissist, and the work doesn't have to be obnoxious the way MoR was.

I guess you could argue that such a piece of work that satisfies these constraints are not 'rational' but merely well written, but there are plenty of well written fantasy worlds which are charmingly weird, wacky, whimsical and inconsistent like many of our familiar fairy tales that have been passed down the centuries, and what's been produced by authors like Pratchett and Gaiman, more recently.

Yeah, the perception is that it's super douchey to label a fic as 'rational,' but as someone said, that's because it's been labelled as such by douchey people. I actually do think that 'rational' fiction could have become a genre, maaaybe, if the style became trendy and there were a large group of people who called themselves 'rational' writers and who were dedicated to those characteristic set of constraints. 'Moral' fiction isn't a thing, but I can sort of imagine a genre whose main writers dedicate themselves to writing works whose main themes are ultra focused on the exploration of morality, ethical dilemmas, etc. Maybe I'm stretching it a bit.

I can't write to save my life, and I don't know much about literature as I've never really studied it so much as treated it as a source of mindless escapism. So it could be that I'm a bit ignorant.

 

To be fair, it wouldn't exactly be wrong to call basically everything written by Tolkien and CS Lewis "moral fiction", and there's not many people dumb enough to say they weren't masters of the craft.

The thing there, though, is that they're consistent in their inconsistency, if that makes any sense. They don't adhere to reality, and the rules may shift, but it's still consistent within its own frame of reference. For example, Discworld explicitly operates on Narrativium, and while it can seem nonsensical and arbitrary from a RL lens, it's actually perfectly cogent from the perspective of drama.

That's really the rub here. If a work isn't consistent, if it just arbitrarily changes at random, then it's one of two things: 1) a pile of horse shit, or 2) written by a masterful author as an examination of insanity or somesuch (and also probably horseshit as a work of fiction/entertainment). So it seems more than a bit ridiculous to label a story that's consistent within its own frame of reference as "Rational", because that literally means nothing more than "well written".

 

I think the problem there was that people (or at least I) weren't really willing to put In Fire Forged into the rational category to begin with, rather than seeing it as a competent example of rational writing.

Now I' was curious, since I did read In Fire Forged, even if it was a while ago, and I couldn't remember if the author ever did refer or classify that story as rational. It really doesn't say anything like this in the summary or in the A/N at the beginning, but maybe later on? However, their ff.net profile bio does say this:

So, I guess there's that. The author believes their story is "somewhat" rational, although it is debatable whether they truly mean rational in the rational writing sense or if they merely wanted to ground the Naruto world in a way that made it easier for them to tell the kind of story they wanted.

I certainly never had the impression while reading this story that the author believed Kishi to be an idiot for the choices he made when writing Naruto, that it was dumb for the ages of the genin graduates to be 12 instead of an older age, disregarding the fact that Kishimoto was writing a shonen battle series and that part of the series core is the fact that those 12 years olds grow up over the course of the story to teenagers and with Boruto even become adults (although it is of course debatable whether Boruto itself was ever planned to be a thing per se by Kishi, since as far as I know, he doesn't really have much to do with that).

OmgImPwned, so it seems to me, didn't resent Kishi for starting his story with 12 year olds, nor is the age 15 the rational age to graduate to become an official soldier. It is better than 12, sure, but is it the most rational age to start being a soldier? Well, that's a different question, isn't it?

Sure, the potshot at the ANBU is a bit judgemental but then again, it's kinda the widespread fan-opinion that the ANBU portrayal had been disappointing to some degree.

Shezza's Life in Konoha's ANBU also does its best to make the ANBU more epic and competent, does this also make it a rational fic?

So yeah, I honestly have some difficulty to file this story under the rational category, if only for the fact that it really just seems to be an AU where the author put a lot of thought to mold the Naruto verse into some different enough to tell the story they imagined while still keeping the elements that make it inherently Naruto, which is really just what writing fanfiction is, really. Excellent fanfiction, at that.

I mean, Dreaming of Sunshine also does a similar thing. While it doesn't change canon, it fills in all the gaps with explanations and world-building that is very intuitive and compelling, which also serves to ground the Naruto world in a tangible way. That Konoha and its shinobi system, as both the administrative and social parts flow way better by actually shining a light on them and making them function as coherent systems. So, I'm 99% sure the author there doesn't see her story as rational, but the story is doing the "rational thing" by making motivations, characters and the systems of the world make sense and be consistent.

Which is why I agree with Agayek. The rational label is rather easily applied to any fanfic that takes its world-building and characters (the story it wants to tell, basically) seriously.

And while I understand the distinction that a true rational fic would never, ever sacrifice the rationality of its story, it doesn't really seem to work that way, right? There will always be some flaws, there's always something to nitpick. And it doesn't change the fact that the great works of fiction do that. As mentioned, Discworld operates under its own rules. Those rules may be bizarre for an outside unfamiliar with the Discworld but within the story itself, every character and action obeys the rules that determine the way the Disc functions. Vimes will always behave like Vimes, same with Rincewind, Death, Nanny Ogg and so on.

I'm sure someone could find an inconsistency or two somewhere but I that doesn't really take away the skill and work that went into this. Shine a bright enough light on any piece of fantasy with magic and you'll always find something that doesn't quite make sense, so the 100% rational requirement seems unrealistic and 99% is just good story telling that doesn't need an extra label.

Does that make sense?