***Warning: self-indulgent ranting ahead. If you just don't care, please don't waste your time here, and do skip ahead to the next message.***
About half (Correction: In all honesty, more than half) of this is me going "*grumblegrumblegrumble* Why couldn't we leave this as original fic anyway? *grumblegrumblegrumble*" combined with the further annoyance as the last shreds of pretense are eradicated.
I still don't see that it adds much, and feel like turning it into fanfiction gratuitously detracts, but I've spoken all of my rational arguments already. At length. On the emotional side, all I've got is that I really just don't care about Melancholy at all, even a little, and would rather be contributing to a new original work than to a fanfic based on a series that means nothing to me. Realistically, though, we're geeks here. Emotional arguments aren't really worth much (nor should they be, in this case) (...which would be why I didn't bring it up before.)
for the remainder, what I was meaning about "speculative fiction" was, in essnce, "What if the world was like it is, and then this thing happened?" - and the difference here is that that's just not what we're dealing with. We're dealing with the question, at this point, of "What if the world was like it is except that this set of characters was real rather than fictional, and they decided to do these things?"
It means that Handwavium isn't just goop that functions like it does because of strange, essentially incomprehensible scientific principles. Handwavium is goop that functions like it does because Haruhi wants it to. It means that it really is plausible to argue that things are going fast because she's excited about things going fast - that the Star Patrol (or whatever) will see tons of development because that's what she cares about. It stops being a story about handwavium (and how it affects people) and starts being a story about Haruhi (and her handwavium (and how they affect people)). It means that people pick up biomods not out of pure random chance and hitting the stuff with radiation rather than heat, but because that's what's hidden in their subconscious. I dunno. I guess I just find the story about normal people trying to get a grip on dealing with, living with, and using a strange, unpredictable, essentially impersonal force to be a far more interesting one than the story about people finally learning how to express their innate ability to work their Will on the world through the medium of a semianimate plot device. In my personal cosmology, it turns handwavium from a fascinating tool to study into a crutch to let people do what they really ought to know how to do already.
...but it is always the way, in every system like this that is grown by many different people from the start, without an initially established set of laws of reality, that you will find disagreement on how the world is *really* shaped, and arguing does nothing but break the entire system in bad ways (which is why I've been careful in these posts to either talk about myself or present rational, objective databits to consider). Also, I'm venting, and I'm going to stop now.
***Self-indulgent rant ends here. You was warned, folks.***
About half (Correction: In all honesty, more than half) of this is me going "*grumblegrumblegrumble* Why couldn't we leave this as original fic anyway? *grumblegrumblegrumble*" combined with the further annoyance as the last shreds of pretense are eradicated.
I still don't see that it adds much, and feel like turning it into fanfiction gratuitously detracts, but I've spoken all of my rational arguments already. At length. On the emotional side, all I've got is that I really just don't care about Melancholy at all, even a little, and would rather be contributing to a new original work than to a fanfic based on a series that means nothing to me. Realistically, though, we're geeks here. Emotional arguments aren't really worth much (nor should they be, in this case) (...which would be why I didn't bring it up before.)
for the remainder, what I was meaning about "speculative fiction" was, in essnce, "What if the world was like it is, and then this thing happened?" - and the difference here is that that's just not what we're dealing with. We're dealing with the question, at this point, of "What if the world was like it is except that this set of characters was real rather than fictional, and they decided to do these things?"
It means that Handwavium isn't just goop that functions like it does because of strange, essentially incomprehensible scientific principles. Handwavium is goop that functions like it does because Haruhi wants it to. It means that it really is plausible to argue that things are going fast because she's excited about things going fast - that the Star Patrol (or whatever) will see tons of development because that's what she cares about. It stops being a story about handwavium (and how it affects people) and starts being a story about Haruhi (and her handwavium (and how they affect people)). It means that people pick up biomods not out of pure random chance and hitting the stuff with radiation rather than heat, but because that's what's hidden in their subconscious. I dunno. I guess I just find the story about normal people trying to get a grip on dealing with, living with, and using a strange, unpredictable, essentially impersonal force to be a far more interesting one than the story about people finally learning how to express their innate ability to work their Will on the world through the medium of a semianimate plot device. In my personal cosmology, it turns handwavium from a fascinating tool to study into a crutch to let people do what they really ought to know how to do already.
...but it is always the way, in every system like this that is grown by many different people from the start, without an initially established set of laws of reality, that you will find disagreement on how the world is *really* shaped, and arguing does nothing but break the entire system in bad ways (which is why I've been careful in these posts to either talk about myself or present rational, objective databits to consider). Also, I'm venting, and I'm going to stop now.
***Self-indulgent rant ends here. You was warned, folks.***