Disclaimer: This is not another thread about LessWrong. We just had one of those. By my calculations, it's not okay to make another thread dedicated to bitching about Yudkowsky until after 6 full moons have passed.

What this thread is about is LessWrong's proposed first law of fanfiction. Here's what he says on his user profile on FF.Net:

This has bugged me for a while, so I thought I'd see what you guys think of it. Do you agree with this principle?

Personally, I don't think it's all that great. It reminds me of stories like The Awakening of a Magus where the whole Harry Potter magic system and atmosphere is raped by everyone suddenly getting all these uber special abilities. The fact that Voldemort also got a load of them didn't make that okay for me. Same with the (in)famous A Second Chance at Life. All these incredibly powerful characters were added. The fact that the author "balanced" them with a load of powerful demons really didn't make me feel that everything was fine and dandy.

Of course, you want a story to have conflict. But I'm just not convinced that creating conflict by going around balancing the power-level scales is a good way to go about it.

In addition to the "ad hoc" problem that I just mentioned, I think it misunderstands good conflict. Think back over the Harry Potter series. Which conflict was the best out of all the books? Harry vs. Voldemort? A clichéd fated affair straight out of the fantasy cookbook. Harry vs. Snape? More interesting, especially as the books went on, but still not the best. No, in my opinion, the best conflict - the one that made the reader the most angry and got us emotionally involved - was Harry vs. Umbridge.

God, how we all hated that woman. Especially in the immediate aftermath of OotP. There were stories upon stories where she met very ugly ends.

And yet, Umbridge is clearly not part of this First Law of Fanfiction. We all knew, all along, that Dumbledore could stomp on her. Hell, Harry might have been able to beat her in a duel, even though he was only a 5th year. And even if he couldn't, we never really felt that she was any kind of serious danger to Harry - not with so many people around him willing to protect him. But nevertheless, her presence created a deliciously rage-inducing conflict. Not because she balanced Harry or Dumbledore out in the power scales, but because she had them over the barrel legally. The source of the conflict was precisely her lack of real power - the lack of the balancing act. We were angry because we felt that Harry and Dumbledore were being screwed over by their inferiors. We were angry because of the feeling of helplessness we shared with Harry - that he could, if he wanted, shout at her and rage at her and curse her, but he knew that it would just make things worse for him. Despite their lack of magical power, Fudge and Umbridge were formidable antagonists.

It is this element of conflict that I think that LessWrong's First Law misunderstands. Conflict isn't a mathematical equation that has to be the same on both sides. Truly enjoyable conflict comes from all the little ways in which people creatively fuck each other over. Conflict isn't a function of power. Some of the best antagonists are relatively weak. Rather, conflict is a result of human interaction and intent.

Thoughts?

 

A lot of characters could be made stronger without the antagonists becoming stronger, but a lot of people fuck this up and make protagonist stupidly powerful.

 

I think you're taking it too literally.

It doesn't say in the Law that he's only talking about combat abilities.

In the Umbridge example it would mean that stories in which Harry is some kind of Lord and uses his Wizengamot powers to squash Umbridge the first time she annoys him, or he's the heir of Hogwarts and uses that, will fail. You'd need to increase Umbridges power in those scenarios to keep the conflict. That doesn't mean magical power, just political leverage or a willingness to use his friends against him could be enough.

 

Even in that case, it still only addresses my second criticism. It still doesn't address the first problem - that of changing elements of the HP world in an ad hoc way, just to keep things balanced.

As you know, I have no problem with significant AUs. AUs are some of my favourite stories. But there is a big difference, I think, between something like A Second Chance of Life and The Skitterleap (or, indeed, Lords of Magic).

The difference is not balance. ASCAL has powerful demon antagonists, Skitterleap has too many powerful antagonists to count, and Lords of Magic has the titular Lords of Magic, who exist in a kind of Cold War-esque MAD.

The difference is elegance. Like physics, simplicity is valuable in fiction. The fewer arbitrary things you have to postulate, the more elegant the story is. Skitterleap has pretty much a single major divergence (Grindelwald won). Lords of Magic has a single divergence too (Human Transfiguration can keep you forever youthful), though I take more liberties with the bits of the Harry Potter world left blank. A Second Chance at Life, however, makes a load of changes here, there and everywhere. Many of these changes are completely unconnected. Many of them are made mid-way through the story and feel tacked-on.

And that's the problem with the First Law. Balance may be necessary for good conflict (if we take balance broadly, as you say), but it is not sufficient for a good conflict.

 

Or to keep the conflict you could flame the author for writing a terrible and cliche story. Derp

 

I agree with that. Introducing ever more powerful levels above canon-Dumbledore/Voldemort just to have somewhere to go gets boring very fast.
(Sorry Joe. )

But the basic form of the law still stands: If you make the protagonist stronger, you should also increase his challenges.
So if you make Harry extremely talented and give him some common sense, you can't keep the challenges the same as in canon, because he'll breeze through them. You have to either make the antagonists stronger/more intelligent, or give him different challenges.

 

I really don't think it's possible for this forum to have a discussion about anything related to LessWrong without it devolving into the last thread, which I suspect is in the "Hall of Shame" at least as much for our own retardedness as for Yudkowsky's and his sock puppets'.

That said, the "Law" you quote is necessary but not sufficient for good storytelling, as all of the cases you've described support. Without an attempt at balance (cough, Bobmin), it makes for boring storytelling and I suspect this is what LessWrong meant. You have to have make the stakes high enough to matter or else it's like watching penny-ante poker.

Oh, and for the record, while Umbridge may not have had much magical skill (though she apparently could cast a Cruciatus, which is better than canon 5th year Harry could manage), she most definitely had power. Power comes in a variety of forms and political power and leverage can be one of the most insidious.

 

Random tangent: I'd love to see a story which showcases a more competent Harry - say, at the magical level of James Potter - who then completely fails in everything canon Harry succeeded at.

Why? Because luck/deus ex-machinas are needed to get through those challenges. They're so far above the level of even competent wizards that if you tried to take on those challenges on their own terms then you're going to fail.

E.g. in a fair duel between a resurrected Voldemort and 15 year old Harry Potter, Harry would lose. This would be the case even if Harry was a magical prodigy on the same level as Dumbledore and Voldemort.

P.S. Jon, stop fucking around with the thread title >_<

 

I love how the thread title keeps changing

 

See what you did? You made the challenges far harder by making Quirrell not stupid enough to touch Harry after he already burned his hands, or not giving him Fawkes in the Chamber of Secrets.

 

I'm not so much saying that Quirrel avoided Harry so much as I'm saying "imagine if Harry chose not to peruse that line of attack, but instead tried to use his first year knowledge to fight a fair duel".

But that aside -

I'm not saying that balanced conflict isn't needed. That much is obvious, so long as we take "balanced" to be broad and include all types of action.

But the First Law of Fanfiction, as stated above, goes further than saying that balanced conflict is required. It recommends a particular method of arriving at balanced conflict - that is, through arbitrarily balancing things out. Turn Frodo into a Jedi, give Sauron the Death Star.

What I'm saying is that following this methodology will actively lead to bad stories like Awakening of a Magus. If you will allow me a small amount of technical language, it is a teleological law - it is a law determined by goals. You have the goal of balanced conflict, and you change anything to reach that goal. Following such a law will lead to a very muddled world.

 

Aren't you taking the example too serious right now?

If you just look at it without the example:

you don't see a method proposed to do that.

Maybe the example was intended as a straight up guide how to do it, but I thought it was more of a joke.

Maybe you should ask him.

 

Then what is:

That seems like an instruction to me. Change X, then change Y to balance the change in X.

The example, while absurd, demonstrates the general formula.

 

I think you're taking the example too literally (I basically read it as a tongue in cheek, not all challenges are power-level ones), and that his law doesn't necessarily only solve problems by giving the other team a big hammer as well.

To use your Harry v Umbridge example, if Harry got political allies that railroaded Fudge + Umbridge's attempts to discredit Harry & Dumbledore, then Fudge and co would need some sort of strengthening in that arena to make up for it.

That follows the if X is different then Y needs to be changed too to make up for X, but it isn't just giving Fudge the deathstick because Harry got a few allies.

 

I guess what I'm saying is "don't give Harry those allies in the first place if it's going to unbalance things in a way that requires another change to correct".

What I'm saying the story has to be balanced from the start, and that it has to be balanced in a rational, understandable way. It can't be balanced because you want it to be balanced. Everything in a story should be justifiable for in-world reasons. You can't justify a change for an out-world reason (i.e. to make the story have more conflict). If a story is to be balanced, it has to be balanced because it makes sense for things to be the way they are - not because it makes it an exciting story.

 

As best I can tell, Taure's interpretation of the principle is something like "arbitrary increases to the strength of the protagonist can be made good by arbitrary increases to the strength of the challenges."

If this interpretation is correct, I'd agree that the principle is rubbish.

However, except for the example, the principle says little about the nature of the changes; only that one is making things easier and the other is making things harder. As I understand it, it doesn't say that any worsening of the challenges is enough to make the conflict good, just that failing to do so will guarantee the conflict being flat. Similarly, it doesn't say that any arbitrary strengthening of the protagonist is a good idea in the first place....

 

But of course, IMHO, a balanced story tends to be an exciting story.

 

Srsly, bro?

 

I'm not a 'bro', but thank you anyway. And yes, I'm serious.