As someone who has occasionally pondered how a Captain Planet Rationalfic might work (I even had a dream that tried to munchkin powers and villain plots, but it was riddled with dream-generated rules), I’m guessing “less than I’d like, dangit.” It’d certainly be a fun topic for /r/rational, IMO.
For a start the villain who is powered by nuclear waste should be used in a cooperative fashion to do waste disposal. Then he doesn’t need to keep attacking reactors.
Yes, absolutely! There was even one episode where he and Dr. Blight held Captain Planet hostage so the Planeteers would bring him a lifetime supply of nuclear waste, when he could have just spent a weekend in France.
I imagine a rational Planeteer would try to determine precisely what does and doesn’t qualify as “polluted” for purposes of their powers. Oil spills are bad for marine life, but would it be sensible for “too high a concentration of hydrocarbons x, y and z” to count as polluted? Then again, their powers aren’t particularly reductionist: “earth” is a category of materials, hydrokinesis that cares about water content would need to contend with salinity and plankton, and “heart” is an incredibly high-level interface for emotions and neural processes, even across species with very different brains. (Wind suffers the same problems as water, but fire can get away with being a thermal energy hack.)
The goat with a thousand bunny rabbit young may itself be an idiot but the behavior of the bunnies constitutes a hive intelligence that has refined tastes that extend to counterfactual television, in which they view what we call real life, and life on Earth will be ended when they change the channel?
Deep beneath Mr. McGregor’s radish garden, a Great Old One sleeps fitfully, feeding upon the psychic energies of a tortoise in a waistcoat, who, to win the forbidden love of a robotic hedgehog, has gone meta enough to faintly reflect the Old One’s psychic energies. Ry’leh’s infinite depths plumb but one degree of madness, and there are infinitely many more…
You hit the three continuities, but I’m not seeing the rationalist connection. For that matter, I don’t see it in mine either, except in that it’s a simulationist setup, which is weirdness-exercise but not directly rationalist.
I think the big problem is the “filing the serial numbers off” part of it. I never read “Masters of the Universe”, but it seems to me that it didn’t actually involve all that much in the way of vampires or werewolves. Whereas if you had a fic about time traveling robots, a human resistance from the future, and UFAI, it would be really hard to get people to believe that it wasn’t Terminator. Or if you had a story about a superhero who works as a reporter and his evil genius nemesis, people are going to see that it’s Superman unless you file the story away so hard that you’d be better off rewriting it from scratch.
The best way to go about it seems to be to just start with a story that doesn’t rely too heavily on whatever canon you’re working with, so that once you have the readership, you can make the jump without having to refactor too terribly much.
I wrote what could best be described as a proto-rationalist Sailor Moon fanfic. Bear in mind that it’s really old—I last worked on it around 2000 and it predates even HPMOR. It doesn’t try to sell rationalism, but it has Sailor Moon do things that make sense. I never finished it but I got to the Doom Tree story.
http://www.rahul.net/arromdee/fanfic.html
This seems highly exploitable.
Anyone here want to try to use these bogus numbers to get a publisher to market their own fanfiction?
I’m interested, but who reads Captain Planet fanfiction these days?
As someone who has occasionally pondered how a Captain Planet Rationalfic might work (I even had a dream that tried to munchkin powers and villain plots, but it was riddled with dream-generated rules), I’m guessing “less than I’d like, dangit.” It’d certainly be a fun topic for /r/rational, IMO.
For a start the villain who is powered by nuclear waste should be used in a cooperative fashion to do waste disposal. Then he doesn’t need to keep attacking reactors.
Yes, absolutely! There was even one episode where he and Dr. Blight held Captain Planet hostage so the Planeteers would bring him a lifetime supply of nuclear waste, when he could have just spent a weekend in France.
I imagine a rational Planeteer would try to determine precisely what does and doesn’t qualify as “polluted” for purposes of their powers. Oil spills are bad for marine life, but would it be sensible for “too high a concentration of hydrocarbons x, y and z” to count as polluted? Then again, their powers aren’t particularly reductionist: “earth” is a category of materials, hydrokinesis that cares about water content would need to contend with salinity and plankton, and “heart” is an incredibly high-level interface for emotions and neural processes, even across species with very different brains. (Wind suffers the same problems as water, but fire can get away with being a thermal energy hack.)
What would you do about MAL, the very unfriendly AI?
Yes. What’s the market for a Transformers / GI Joe / MASK / Robotech / G-Force / Star Blazers crossover?
I’m still waiting for the Gurren Lagaan / Warhammer 40k / HPMOR crossover
I thought it was just Rationalist!Gurren Lagann/Warhammer 40k.
So it was.
I’d also like to see a Rationalist! Godel Escher Bach / Call of Cthulhu / Beatrix Potter slash crossover.
The goat with a thousand bunny rabbit young may itself be an idiot but the behavior of the bunnies constitutes a hive intelligence that has refined tastes that extend to counterfactual television, in which they view what we call real life, and life on Earth will be ended when they change the channel?
Deep beneath Mr. McGregor’s radish garden, a Great Old One sleeps fitfully, feeding upon the psychic energies of a tortoise in a waistcoat, who, to win the forbidden love of a robotic hedgehog, has gone meta enough to faintly reflect the Old One’s psychic energies. Ry’leh’s infinite depths plumb but one degree of madness, and there are infinitely many more…
You hit the three continuities, but I’m not seeing the rationalist connection. For that matter, I don’t see it in mine either, except in that it’s a simulationist setup, which is weirdness-exercise but not directly rationalist.
I think the big problem is the “filing the serial numbers off” part of it. I never read “Masters of the Universe”, but it seems to me that it didn’t actually involve all that much in the way of vampires or werewolves. Whereas if you had a fic about time traveling robots, a human resistance from the future, and UFAI, it would be really hard to get people to believe that it wasn’t Terminator. Or if you had a story about a superhero who works as a reporter and his evil genius nemesis, people are going to see that it’s Superman unless you file the story away so hard that you’d be better off rewriting it from scratch.
The best way to go about it seems to be to just start with a story that doesn’t rely too heavily on whatever canon you’re working with, so that once you have the readership, you can make the jump without having to refactor too terribly much.
I wrote what could best be described as a proto-rationalist Sailor Moon fanfic. Bear in mind that it’s really old—I last worked on it around 2000 and it predates even HPMOR. It doesn’t try to sell rationalism, but it has Sailor Moon do things that make sense. I never finished it but I got to the Doom Tree story. http://www.rahul.net/arromdee/fanfic.html
You could even tell the publisher how your fanfiction has as much readers as 50 Shades of Gray had before it was “found”.