My interpretation of LessWrong's Law was that you can't just power up the protagonists of stories like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. The stories are about them triumphing in the face of insurmountable odds and powering them up ruins that if they're suddenly much more powerful than their enemies. Half the attraction of Dresden Files is that Dresden is weaker then pretty much everyone he comes up against but constantly prevails. People like reading about how the underdog wins.

 

From what I understood from Less Wrong's first law, all it's trying to say is that conflict is integral to every story, no matter which form it takes. In the broadest sense (because "power" can take many forms), I think that the law should be followed by a majority of people who write, and especially novice writers.

However, I think that we should stop using the term law to describe this, but rather the term principle. Just as "Show, don't tell" is a maxim that many novice authors should follow, this does not mean that it has to be followed 100% of the time. As has been said before, arbitrarily introducing story elements is the mark of a bad story, whether you're trying to follow the principle or not. In that case, trying to follow the principle to the letter is just as bad as throwing any other Deus Ex Machina into the story.

Taure, I agree with most of what you say. The only problem I have with that is:

Since stories are just creations of the author, the author is the one ultimately in control of where the story goes. Most of the time, if an author wants to write a story that starts with the premise of "I want Harry to be a lot smarter", they'll do that, without checking whether the story becomes unbalanced. A good author will find reasonable, in-universe justifications to balance out the story as a result of that change. It really comes down to the skill of the author to make these changes and whether these changes logical and well thought out. For authors who aren't as skilled and often misunderstand this idea of balance in the story, this maxim serves as a good piece of advice to them to help them rein in their imaginations a little bit, take a step back, and see whether their story would be enjoyable to the majority of readers.

EDIT: goddamn it, I swear I don't usually spell like that

 

Still serious?

(If the answer to that is yes, let me spell it out for you. Taure never said that balanced stories are less exciting, but that they should not be balanced just for the sake of that excitement and instead for the fact it it makes some motherfukin' sense)

Also, what Jon said.

 

Stories should not be competitively balanced if everything you add means crap anyways since the author is going to make characters win based off of who they want to win, not who is stronger. Bit like those godawful DBZ to anything crossover stories. Most of the time whatever gets crossed over gets some random powerup so they can fight in this epic confrontations but I know it means nothing as everything is written with a set outcome in mind.

Fact is, I find it more interesting when authors don't attempt to balance out everything. That tends to have more interesting stories since the lack of balance tends to mean that the authors can't write action every damn'ed second and they are forced to write things with character.

 

Rein. Fucking REIN means to limit. Reign is to rule.

Mother of god, people. This is almost as bad as assholes who don't use their indicators while driving.

Sorry, ninjacom, I don't hope for you to get wrapped around a telephone pole, but standards must be maintained!

OT: While it's possible everyone here is right in their broad interpretation of the 'law', given the style of writing we've come to expect from lesswrong, I'm on Taure's side. I think the way it's written he's being literal: it's only okay to raise power levels if you raise everyone's levels... Which I don't think is necessarily true.

Power comes in many forms. A crippled man with spectacular wealth can stand against a superman if he applies that power correctly. But a street urchin with no power, money, friends or deus ex machina wouldn't stand a chance

 

I've always thought lesswrong was just trying to reach this point:

or at least, that's always seemed like the most important part or the Law that I came away with.

While the language used to write the Law might make it come across another way, what (I think) he's trying to get at is that every change we make to the protagonist needs a counter, be it a strengthening of his opposition, a weakening of his allies, or a handicap of some kind applied to the protagonist directly.

His own story applies the rule in an way best described by lesswrong himself:

While MoR!Harry himself is much more(?) intelligent then canon, so are all the characters important to the story and, as in canon where Harry isn't the most powerful magically, MoR!Harry himself isn't the most intelligent character.

Spoiler

That title seems to be going to Quirlemort

Edit: Combine part of the first Potter Law with lesswrong's Law and we have something that best describes the kind of story I love.

...and seriously, we have a thread about something involving lesswrong that hasn't become an example of idiocy and trolling. DLP, you get a cookie.

 

Some of his characters are definitely holding the idiot ball.

Spoiler

The bullies

That said, I agree with the gist of your post.

 

Without balance, there is no conflict. However, balance is not achieved by giving arbitrary power-ups to the antagonist just because you gave the protagonist certain new powers. Balance is achieved by giving the antagonist the ability to negate the protagonist's new powers.

The protagonist must be able to lose, and therefore, we can cheer him or her on as they prevail.

The balance in Harry Potter is that Voldemort is so powerful that instead Harry requires luck and other dei ex machina.

Of course, one could talk about how Rowling may very well have intended Calvinist predestination to underpin the HP Universe. Of course nothing Harry does can help him triumph over Voldemort. If Rowling intended the series to be a vaguely Christian allegory, then Harry won by "God's Grace" and not by anything he could possibly do: Men are saved via Christ's death and resurrection, not by any number of good works they might do.

 

Taken literally, LessWrong's "law" seems to just be saying that you can't power-up your protagonist to the point where readers wonder why he doesn't just unleash a can of whup-ass on whoever is opposing him. You either need to make the antagonist powerful enough to oppose him, or there has to be a solid, non-contrived reason why unleashing a can of whup-ass won't solve his problems.

Shorter version: don't create Gary Stus to show off their awesomeness.

But there are all kinds of ways to challenge a protagonist besides presenting him with opponents he can't physically beat up.

Fan fiction isn't different from any other fiction in this respect. If you make Frodo a Jedi, then you can give Sauron a Death Star. Or you can make Sauron his father whom he wants to save rather than killing him. Or something. (No, really, I'm not going to spend too much time coming up with reasonable plot devices involving Frodo the Jedi.)

Umbridge was a good example. Her "threat" was not in her magical potency, but in the power she had over the school. Harry could probably have taken her in a duel, just like many real-life 15-year-olds could probably beat up their vice principal, but that wasn't an option.

 

LessWrong's way of putting it does open it up to finding contrary cases, IMO - it's sort of a subset of what should be done, and it's not hard to find examples of good stories that are outside that subset. In other words, it's not "wrong," but it's not the entirety of what's right.

In any serious fic - that is, a fic that isn't crack, parody, young childrens' fare, etc. - your antagonists should be pliant when faced with the efforts of the protagonists. They should be able to offer meaningful resistance, and they should be able to bounce back from a defeat, at least partially. They should be able to push back. This isn't to say that they should match every move with an equally potent move, but they've got to be able to do something.

An enemy that can adapt to setbacks and changing circumstances is an enemy worthy of respect. And you want an enemy worthy of respect, because it's that much more gratifying to see them defeated in the end.

On the other hand, if your story is all "give" and no "give and take," you're left with something that isn't necessarily bad, but probably not what you were going for. Certain types of comedies work like that. Or certain episodic cartoons like Inspector Gadget and many of the Looney Tunes. The shallowest wish fulfillment stories work like that. Ditto for some stories that aren't about the entertainment, but forcing a message down the readers' throats.

If that's what you want, then fine. Otherwise, give us villains with teeth. :awesome

 

I think that the only reason LessWrong believes this to be the first law of fanfiction, and I would tend to agree with him, is that fanfiction is inherently about making some change to the canon material. That change, then, must, before anything else can proceed, be balanced by an equal an opposite, corresponding change in the antagonist such that conflict can still be maintained.

He makes a good point when he says that we are often times tempted to solve the protagonists problems by giving them the magical "I win" widget. While this might make for some temporarily cathartic relief of our frustrations over the character's suffering at the hands of the antagonist in canon, most of us quickly discover that this makes for the most incredibly boring fanfiction. These precisely are the stories that prompt us to click the big-red-ex, so why, unless we're just piss poor writers, would we expect anyone else to do any different when they read our super powered protagonist slaughtering the opposition without breaking a sweat right from the start?

This, I think, is what makes Umbridge such a great villain: big badass Albus Dumbledore, veritable god given his magical potency, is reduced to fleeing the school by this magically impotent and sniveling sycophant.

Of course, we might say that he ought to have put her in her place with a few deft flicks of his wand and shown her just how much of a squib she is in comparison to him . . . oh wait, that's exactly what Voldemort would have done, and more. It's why Voldemort is the series's villain and Albus Dumbledore is not.

 

I do think it's a valid point that the fight has to be fair, or that our hero should be the underdog.

That's no excuse for adding pretentious crap to your story, mind. I do hope nobody reminds of that in the future. xD

 

Eh... as far as Rule of Thumbs go, it's not a bad way to explain to a fourteen year-old writing their first really shitty attempt at an epic fan fiction that stories revolve around tension and conflict. It will probably take their abysmal first attempt, and turn it into something merely mediocre. I do find it amusing that the term "Originality" comes up at all in a discussion about derivative works.

 

Potter Law V, bro.

 

Not saying we didn't come up with a better way of putting it, or that we didn't do it first- just pointing out that it is a feasible way of explaining it to inexperienced writers.

 

Fact of nature: Stories without conflict are utterly and completely boring and have no value. Its what makes LessWrong's story so boring. Its not about the conflict, its about his pandering to an insatible ego, his own or otherwise.

Beyond that, however, its more or less right. If you have no conflict, you have no story. It can be of a political (Umbridge), physical (Voldemort), or Emtional (Death of Sirius, etc...) nature, but a conflict must be present that is beyond your ability to deal with, or you have no value as a hero.

Your younger brother only looks up to you when you stomp the fuck out of the bully because he cant and it seems hero-ish. If it didnt, he'd ignore the fuck out of you.

 

Honestly, you can't just slap on power on anyone. It's the character that has the right to demand his/her strength. I know that sounds really strange, but look at Wastelands. Harry is uber-powerful. But Harry in the fic demanded the right to be that powerful. It made sense.

That's what is most important. As long as it's not power for the sake of power, it's fine. If one is just adding more power to all the characters to make the fights more "epic", that's just stupid because it doesn't change a damn thing in the story that couldn't be achieved without the extra power.