Non-Crossovers that Should Be, or Plotbunnies Free to Good Home

[classicdrogn]

I'm not sure it counts as a bunny, but...

"A Master of Divination knows his enemies before they even act, knows their favorite tea, knows which package they will buy. He also knows how to foil divinations like Scrying, Foretelling, or Detect Poison, and how to circumvent such attempts. Oh, but I do blather on so, what were we talking about? The most useless School of magic? But you are looking a bit peaky old chap, perhaps we should call it ... finished"
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[The Wanderer]

There are various schools of thought about kagebunshin, about how the technique works and about why it's classified as a kinjutsu.

The most common explanation of how it works is that it evenly splits the user's chakra among all the copies. However, that doesn't seem to match very well with the way it's observed to be used, nor with Kakashi's ability (demonstrated during the Wave bridge fight) to create many more kagebunshin than Naruto with the same total amount of chakra, simply by being more efficient at applying it.

The most common explanations of why it's a kinjutsu are that it uses so much chakra (leading to chakra exhaustion or the like), and that the mental whiplash of regaining the memories of a popped or otherwise expired kagebunshin can be damaging, especially in extreme cases.

Let's consider a different model. Let's say that creating a kagebunshin does take a certain amount of chakra, and that you can waste more or less additional chakra in the process depending on your chakra control. Let's also say that rather than dividing your chakra evenly among the copies, or giving each copy its own limited supply, all of the copies remain connected to - and can draw on - the original's chakra pool, using it both to sustain their own existence and power any jutsu they may perform. (Which latter could be used to explain why it's a kinjutsu; without proper coordination between the copies, it would be all too easy to overdraw the chakra pool in a fairly major way. That's fairly weak, but no more so than some of the elements of the more common models.)

Now, with that model in mind, let's imagine that Naruto is out somewhere in a fight, using dozens of kagebunshin as usual. Let's say that something goes wrong, and the original Naruto gets fairly definitively killed - head pulped by a boulder, or the like; he certainly doesn't get up again. (Or alternately, he's out on his own, and manages to get killed in a landslide or the like with no witnesses.)

But his clones don't disappear; they remain as viable as ever, and manage to win the fight.

It develops afterward that they are all still connected to Naruto's chakra pool; they're all Naruto, after all, and it's theirs as much as it is the original's. They can perform any jutsu he could, including kagebunshin to create more copies.

And they can all draw on the Kyuubi, which is still imprisoned within the seal - the seal which is inscribed on all of them.

This means that except for aging (if they even do still age, being made of chakra), what they have here is effectively an immortality technique unlike any other, workable only for someone with an essentially endless pool of chakra. It's easy enough to take out one copy, but as long as there's still at least one more Naruto somewhere in the world and he has enough chakra, he can create more - and with the Kyuubi to draw on, running dry is an unlikely scenario at best.

It also means that the Kyuubi is pretty much never getting out. Akatsuki's bijuu-extraction plan is very likely screwed; even if extracting the Kyuubi from a single clone would work, the process appears to be traumatic enough that the clone would pop as soon as the extraction got started, leaving nothing to extract from and aborting the process.

The possibilities are especially interesting if he manages to hide the fact that the original Naruto is dead; everyone's used to seeing his clones around anyway, some people may be more used to seeing the clones than the original, and it might be a good long while before anyone realizes that nobody has seen a Naruto they can be certain was the original in quite some time. (I have a partial scene in mind in which someone finally does notice this, years later.)

For an alternate opener to a fic based on the same concept, which might take it in a rather different drection at least at first, imagine that he's not alone when he dies; he's out with a team, and dies in combat, at a point where he happens to not have any other clones involved in the fight.

His team members win the fight, and take his body back to Konoha (possibly somewhat confused about the fact that the Kyuubi doesn't seem to be emerging, if they know about it) - only to discover that all the clones he left doing things in town are still there, and may not even have noticed that the original isn't a going concern anymore.

[Tennie]

EDIT: Wrong thread.  I meant to post in the Crossovers That Should Be thread, but unintentionally posted it here instead.  Whoopsie-daisy on my part!

[Tennie]

Here's a Lyrical Nanoha plotbunny that's been brewing in my mind for some time now:

Basically, Nanoha Takamachi has managed to defeat a variety of villains through superior firepower.  However, this time around there's a villain who thinks (keyword: "thinks") (s)he's(1) found a way to actually defeat her in battle.  (S)He isn't anywhere near Nanoha in terms of raw power (perhaps somewhere around "A" rank, as opposed to Nanoha's "S+" rank), but (s)he has a potential trick up his/her sleeve.

The villain's plan is relatively simple in its logic: Shrink Nanoha and co. down to no more than a few inches in height (more likely smaller), in the hopes that their relative firepower capabilities will be diminished accordingly; once that's done, proceed to defeat them in a battle that should now be mismatched in the villain's favor.

However, this is Nanoha "White Devil" Takamachi that we're talking about.  Knowing her, she'd at least attempt to demonstrate that she could still kick ass and take names even if she were smaller than a mouse.  In fact, that's basically what she needs to do if she is to survive, let alone return to her normal size.

So now the stage would be set for a battle like few others: An inch-tall Nanoha vs. a normal-sized but now quite dangerous criminal mage...

(1) I have yet to decide on what gender this villain would be, let alone anything else about said villain.

[Valles]

The year is 2214.
A hundred and thirty-four standard years ago, a conspiracy of pilots, engineers, and scientists, fearing that growing unrest on Earth would spread to and destroy the colonies springing up across the Solar System, destroyed the facilities that permitted the construction of Earth-based spacecraft, and ushered in the first stages of the Fall.
By 2114, ten billion of Earth's thirteen billion people would be dead. Killed by gunshot, killed by designer disease, killed by atom bomb, killed by famine. Killed by their neighbors and killed by the disintegration of the ecosystem that supported them. The colonies, overwhelmed by refugees, struggled and starved, each riding on the ragged edge of extinction with no margin for error.
Eventually, that margin increased. Eventually, civilization on Earth began to rebuild itself, growing from arcology city-states to modest nations.
And then, in 2157, near the south pole of Mars, mining prospectors from the authoritarian Martian Federation stumbled across an alien base, buried in the red planet's sands for fifty thousand years. Utilizing the new scientific principles learned from the alien technology, the Federation smashed the rival Free Republic and lifted the first crude modern battlewagons into Martian orbit, using their implicit and explicit threat to subjugate first Mercury, then the Orbitals of Earth's local system and Luna itself, and finally the three widely-spread states of the Jovian Confederation before shackling its subjects' people and economies into the last push - to reclaim Earth.
Now, the leaders of the Solar Federation dance on the insidious strings of Venusian money, and rebellion simmers under the boot heel on every world. An economic and cultural renaissance blossoms, fed by the flow of resources from extrasolar exploration and mining, and beneath the surface fear and rage balance on a knife edge.
Rage at repression, at lost families and friends, at foreign domination, and fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night...
And of whatever force smashed an interstellar civilization that encompassed thousands of worlds in the space of barely three years, only thirty years before.
Neither the naked eye nor the living ear would have detected any presence in the darkened corridor, save for the slowly deliquescing corpses slumped against the door the intruder had entered by. That wasn’t noteworthy; all of them had been there for more than a hundred of this world whiplash-fast years.
Neither the intruder’s enemies, nor the builders of the hidden bunker, had possessed passive sensors good enough to have known with certainty that the bastion’s security had failed. Infrared, ultraviolet, dark energy receptors - all would have perceived only modest irregularities, the sort that such sensitive instruments threw up as false positives by their very nature. Indeed, since the eezo core lodged at the heart of the intruder’s armor was left inert, the only tool that might have detected it was a simple pressure sensor, triggered by the weight of wearer and armor alike.
The intruder, of course, was aware of the possibility, and watched to detect such simple traps. As was often the case, the bunker’s builders, pressed for time in what had, most obviously, been a desperate war for survival against... whatever unknowable threat... had not been able to fully conceal their instruments.
As the cloaked form moved deeper and deeper into the bunker, however, its excitement - and the significance of the information it gathered for its superiors - grew.
Definitely Culture D, was the subvocalized note taken as the mind behind the opaque visor studied the sweeping curves of the main chamber. Blue everywhere, and the aesthetic isn’t abstract enough for A. Policy recommendation: in the future, treat viability confidence estimates over eighty percent as full finds. This is completely intact; if we had a carrier here we’d be able to come away with everything rather than just what I can scan and grab.
Speaking of which... the intruder stepped up to what previous experience with the Beta Culture Complex told it was the central control computer for the bunker and the enigmatic machinery occupying its center and let the nanofunction system in its armor’s gauntlet form the molecule-wide layer knife needed to slice away the housing and gain its documentation scanners access to the data-storage solids of the computer. For all that the Beta Complex’s languages were still undeciphered, for all that only a few clues to their programming languages had been found, for all that, despite having been a thriving civilization only forty years before, almost nothing remained of the Beta Complex’s entire existence, there was still the certainty that sufficiently detailed readings could be reconstructed into the data that had been stored, once the languages were inevitably cracked.
But this time, unlike any of the few dozen working terminals previously found, there was what the intruder immediately recognized - a second too late - as an anti-tamper mechanism.
The heavy mechanical noise of releasing locks would have made a less disciplined, less controlled individual jump in surprise and horror; this intruder only looked up, watching as the central column’s armored surface cracked and began to slide smoothly apart, unfolding layer by layer to reveal...
Thermal readings told the tale - a cryogenic suspension chamber.
A working cryo chamber, hidden as thoroughly as its makers knew how, and obviously built to last... how many ages?
A time capsule...
For one of their own. A live representative - a first contact.
And she, looking up at that capsule and ready to be its owner’s first impression of her entire species, was wearing a combat exosuit, a half ton of composites and exotic materials, an obviously menacing presence that couldn’t be taken for anything but...
A mental command through the neural link peeled back her helmet and popped the main seals of the torso, letting her have just enough room to begin wriggling furiously out of the almost literally skin-tight confines of the suit, keeping up a subvocalized narrative of her conclusions, reasoning, and everything else her superiors might want to know.
Her luck being what it was, the last layer of protection between her and the Survivor lifted away before she could finish peeling herself out of the armor.
That Complex Beta had consisted of a species or multiple species with a physical size and conformation much like humanity’s had been known since the first discovery, six years after the attainment of interstellar flight. She had expected that.
She had not expected to meet someone whose differences from the human norm were far easier to note than her similarities. Legs, same length and joint structure as her own, check, hips, ditto, check. Waist, nicely fit, just narrow enough to be more ideal than real if she’d seen it on another human (slimmer than hers, dammit), check, hands, five fingers, appropriate proportions, arms likewise, check. Breasts (very nice ones), of all the absurd impossibilities, check , neck and shoulders perfectly matched, check, face (completely gorgeous), check...
Too many, an impossible number of similarities. The grooved, scale-like structures that went along her - referring to the alien as female was irresistible even if quite possibly wrong - scalp were almost a relief, especially given...
“Blue space babe,” she said out loud, aware of a corner of her mind noting that historians and proponents of human dignity would curse her name for all time, “what the hell?”
And then her hand slipped and she finished climbing out of her armor by falling the five feet flat onto her face.
Although momentarily deserted by her dignity and her usual trained coordination, the enhancements and modifications that had been made to her when she qualified for her current excessively-sensitive role told true and the impact harmed nothing but her dignity, and she started to pick herself up - then froze as she heard a footstep.
If the Survivor was hostile, she was probably dead; that was an acceptable risk for anything that could help keep this from going wrong in a way that would actually damage her country.
Carefully, she looked up, and met the other’s eyes from a distance of only a foot or so as she crouched down next to her. At this range, the fine silver wires running through the other’s skin like the finest filigree were easily visible, as well as the way they also ran through the irises of those jewel-blue and completely human eyes.
The wires vanished into a vividly fitted white bodysuit that clung nearly as tightly as her own dark undersuit, and a corner of her mind fought not to be distracted as one of those blue hands reached up to rest its (warm) fingertips gently against her temple, right next to the hairline.
“Um,” she started to say, and then the tip of the other hand’s index finger rested against her lips - they had the same gesture? - before moving up to the other temple.
The other said something that sounded sad, even apologetic, then leaned closer, and closer still until it almost seemed as though she would...
Her eyes turned solid black as their foreheads rested against each other, and she spoke two more words before Clara Shepard’s world went completely Klein-Bottle-Shaped.
===========

===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[classicdrogn]

As someone who's been kicking around ideas for a just-barely-post-Cycle Human entrance to space for a while...

This is relevant to my interests, I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

So did the Yahrgs get exterminated too, or with no space capability of their own are they still out there, like the jellyfish guys the Protheans had uplifted during the previous Cycle?
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Valles]

Probably the Yahg and the post-crash Drell were missed, yeah, along with other pre-space sophonts.

Strictly speaking, this fragment is in the wrong thread - the human background is based on inserting the Mars Enclave into Dream Pod 9's lesser-known giant robot franchise, Jovian Chronicles - but the result is a very different society and situation.

I mean, Martian Federation as System Overlords? Who'd've predicted that? But the Enclave's canonical location is in their territory.

Clara is a native of the Jovian Confederation, which is, with Earth, one of the two superpowers of the canon JC setting. In the adapted one, of course, the JC is a subject nation - and is carrying out dangerous AI-based research programs to try and gain enough of a tech advantage to win its freedom. Secret stealthed exploration missions by super cyborg commandos would be part and parcel of that program.

Miss Asari Sleeper, of course, is Liara. Albeit a Liara who's been souped up by crazed desperate Mordin repurposing the Reaper Goo process to feed the biotic nodules of a group of Asari Matriarch volunteers into a chosen 'avatar' after watching her entire civilization die.
===========

===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[classicdrogn]

Well, the Yahg were on the verge of chemical rockets if I remember the lore correctly, and had enough contact to know that there had been other species out there, so they could go either way - but if not wiped out, they're probably expanding into the wreckage of the previous Cycle already, and are pretty much tailor made to be Mongol Hordes in Space between their aggressive attitudes and monstrous (to human sensibilities) appearance. Perfect to be second-arc antagonists, in other words. (Assuming first-arc is internal Human politics and dealing with first contact when the alien is a last-survivor blue space hottie who wants human mates to repopulate her species with, plus the minor matter of explaining about the giant space fleas that set up the Mass Effect tech tree to be found so they know what to expect when they sweep through the galaxy killing everyone every 50,000 years, like they just finished doing.)
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Valles]

Sounds about right. I'd been picturing this charming spy caper romance while Clara tries to get Liara someplace safe despite being hunted by the Solar Federation ("Attention all planets of the Solar Federation...") as the main plot, really, since Jovian Chronicles canon has massfield-free mass drivers, particle beam weapons, and working anti-ship lasers even without Element Zero, which'd really change things for the Reapers next time around...

...but your idea interests me in turn, and is actually a good setup for the Reapers checking their monitors in the Galaxy before they finish bedding down for the night.
===========

===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[classicdrogn]

Well, the opening of the third arc could be a giant mecha-battleship sweeping in and blowing the Yahg to space-dust, like a wave crashing across their beach to humanity's shore. Yay! We're saved, right?

Guys?

What do you mean, no?

Oh, not the blue space babe hoax again, we've thoroughly debunked that claim.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Black Aeronaut]

Okay, I know Kill la Kill hasn't even finished airing yet...

But I got an insatiable plotbunny kicking around in my head.

What if Satsuki had a slightly older brother... One that absolutely despised their mother... because she killed their father. And because the boy so openly despises mommy dearest, he's sent off to 'reform school'.

Later, soon after Ryuko arrives at the academy, the Brother is suddenly and mysteriously transferred over as well...

Interesting thing: he despises his mother, but he loves his sister to tears and he knows that there is good in her. (Though it's not blind adoration - he worries about her sometimes.) And he finds Ryuko to be absolutely breathtaking. (In more ways than one!)

Thoughts?

[drakensis]

It's not strictly a crossover, but it does take concepts from two anime: GuP and SAO:
In the near future, World of Tanks gets a Virtual Reality version... and one of the tech supports (for reasons that may include obsession to the point of insanity with World War II) traps them, Kayaba-fashion, in a scenario where all players and their tanks are in an uninhabited Europe, starting off more or less in Germany while 'factory sites' in Russia and France are spawning a steady but potentially overwhelming number of NPC tanks to hunt them down. Only by locating and destroying ALL these sites will players 'win' and be allowed to log-out.

Two years later, almost half the players are dead and most of the rest are crammed into a defensive position in the Alps under siege by overwhelming numbers of NPC tanks. On the other side, they're fairly sure only one factory site remains and a scratch brigade made up of anyone not trapped in the Alps is the last hope winning the game. All they have to do is get past the rather formidable army guarding it...
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.

[Black Aeronaut]

Whoof! Took me a while to find this damn thing....

Hey, Bob!? Can we sticky this blasted thread so it quits wandering off into the hidden depths on us?

Anyhow...

So, I recently marathoned Log Horizon. (If you like Sword Art Online, you'll more than likely like this one.) And now, I kinda wonder... An MMORPG that successful in Japan (over 20 years running) would certainly have a huge following in North America... So, now I'm wondering what it would be like if we could see the story of a few Guilds in the USA, Canada, and Mexico.

Trouble is, this would certainly be one of those 'casts of thousands' stories with the potential for political intrigue up the wazoo, especially considering that there would be more than a few groups trying to establish their own forms of government to varying degrees of success.
This occured to me as I was watching the series and they started talking about building a steam ship...  I suddenly had the idea of a steam powered Spruce Goose suddenly touching down in their equivalent of Sagami Bay and a bunch of Americans popping out to go, "Yo!  Wassup?"
EDIT: For more plot/conundrum chewiness, may I suggest this scene, soon after the Americans arrive to trade and go adventuring...
"Shiroe... I believe that you are a man with whom a person can put a great deal of trust in how they handle... certain situations.  You see... this whole thing isn't just some dog and pony show.  That's just the facade.  The real deal is this.  These are two of my guild's best players... and their three month old daughter.  Look at her stats.  She has no class and no job... but she has an XP link to her parents.  She is already at Level Five and she's not showing any signs of slowing down soon."

[The Wanderer]

There are a fair number of stories out there which use the "Groundhog Day" time-loop idea; some of them are reasonably famous, and some of them are quite good indeed.

Most such stories assume that the loop will either repeat endlessly, or terminate when some particular conditions are fulfilled, but not before. That allows for considerable exploitation by whoever is trapped in the loop, but also limits the scope of character and plot progression to some considerable degree.

Some time ago, in a Xander-fic context, I came up with something which on closer examination is a variant of this same idea, but with different looping conditions. (It could be used with just about any character from just about any source, or even serve as the core of an original story.)

Basically, rather than looping endlessly, the focal character finds himself (using male pronouns for convenience, given the limitations of English) living each day three times in a row - no more, and no less.

If things go well on the first day, he can try to do the same things on the next time through in hopes of producing the same outcome, though there's no guarantee he'll be able to imitate himself that well; if things go badly, he can change things up, to try to get a better outcome.

But regardless of how well things may go on the first or the second time through each day, that all gets lost when the day resets - and regardless of how badly things may go on the third time through, that version of the day is the one that sticks.

It's still possible to exploit this to some considerable degree, but you'd have to go about it very differently from how someone in a traditional "endless time loop" story manages it, and the upper bounds are much more limited. There's also considerably more potential for messing up in ways that matter - especially in the early loops, when the focal character hasn't yet figured out the patterns.

(It's easy to envision some characters going through the second iteration of a day, figuring out that the day was a repeat of the first, waking up on the morning of the third iteration, concluding they're in a more traditional Groundhog Day-syle endless time loop, and throwing caution to the wind since there'll be no consequences anyway - and then wake up the next morning on the first iteration of the next day, with consequences after all. This could be played for either good or bad results.)

Technical details: The day ends (triggering a reset) as soon as the focal character is asleep after midnight of the currently-active day, or when the focal character dies, whichever comes first; it begins, for purposes of when to loop back to, when the focal character wakes up. (Or at the previous day's end-point, if the character is asleep for more than a day.) This does mean that it's possible to include multiple days in a single loop iteration, if the focal character can manage to stay awake long enough. And yes, if the character dies on the third pass through a day, that's permanent too.

[Necratoid]

(Log me in for ten minutes and then log me out the second I try and post?  What the hell, Yuki? Was the post so yummy you needed my log in for desert?)
When a Groundhog's day loop happen it means something has gone so wrong the universe/multiverse breaks in response.  Say Glory/Ben gets smart and calls in a army of mooks seeking the bounty on Buffy and Co, Which is near uncollectable as either they'll be facing a hell goddess in her own home world or existence will shatter making it moot.  Your 3 day cycle offers no reason for happening at all, no cause, no spell or artifact.  To that I suggest an artifact.
The Three Toed Sloth's paw, upon activation (say freezing up with indecision while carrying it and being to slow to effect events) it causes the threepeat loop.  First, the left digit curls up to activate its sinister power.  Second, the right digit curls up to let you try again with greater dexterity.  Lastly, it flips off the world/the user/Bill Nye for the entire third day.  The resets upon the sunrise of the forth day.
To keep it from being safely spammed, I suggest a karma warp bleed off system like with the dragonballs.  After each 3 day use it takes 27 (3^3) days to bleed off the feedback.  Layering activations (3 layered activation needed) causes cursed, magical Megatherium to spawn and their number and power upgrades with every extra layering.

[The Wanderer]

A loop like that doesn't necessarily mean that; there's no indication that it meant any such thing - nor any apparent indication of a cause, aside from maybe vague handwavy about "karma and/or fate in action" - in the original Groundhog's Day, after all.

Authors are free to (try to) do what they want, of course, but I don't think any of what you suggest or any of the modifications you propose are necessary for the idea to work and work well as a story element.

[classicdrogn]

I don't care where or how, but The Three Toed Sloth's Paw simply must be used in a story somewhere. That is sheer gold.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Necratoid]

Story idea for the Three Toed Sloth's paw: Its on display at a local museum and a field trip from some school and the large group of people who can not pick a boy/girl or a harem causes the paw to go off a cluster of times at once... cue the Megatherium apocalypse from nowhere.  Mostly as it gets confused and decides they are all so alike in uselessness at decision making.  Okay, that is omake territory, but having someone going around poking indecisive people with it for fun amuses me.
---
Why isn't anything I suggested necessary for things to work in a story?  The movie had no thought (on screen) given to finding the cause.. it doesn't even mean their weren't literally thousands of people looping globally.  It doesn't mean the mad scientist causing the loops didn't randomly turn on the TV that loop and seeing Bill Murray's character all cheery and being a good person didn't make him do a spit take and fry the machine.  Possibly the machine was gene linked and seeing his {expletive deleted] Cousin that way freaked him out.  His whole family was looping and he just never bothered to use the phone.
The thing is in Groundhog's day it doesn't matter the cause as the focus was on Billy Murray's character and his development.  Its about him getting over himself.  They gave no indication he ever killed anyone, but himself.  Its also a movie and didn't have the time to delve into that feature.  For all we know the looping didn't end because he reached the positive karma goal... it basically be the equivalent of the biblical story of Job.  Only the bet wasn't on how long it'd take before Job called noxious, bovine,  biological goo on the overgod, instead its about mankind being inherently evil and how long it would take that grumpy reporter to go axe crazy.  Basically, the intern forced to bet on a good end (thus paying all the rest of them off and being broke and enslaved forever) made a fortune when they finally gave up... which basically happened to an IIken piece of furniture once.
The thing is Groundhog day is a movie.  Its already completed.  Your taking about fanfiction.  Fanfiction gets feedback mid process.. reviewers are going to ask why 3 day loops?  Answering 'no reason' isn't happy fan time.  Its also really lazy and lame (IMNSHO).
Three day loops for one person (which can kill them off for real), are much more personal that a grand cosmic thing like forever and a week long loops.  That kind of thing is targeted.  A cosmic horror is doing it.  An artifact of power is doing it.  A spell is doing it.  Someone passing a test by folding all the sheets of paper into a giant origami giraffe breaking the flow of time as the fabric of existence stutters in raw confusion is doing it.  There must be a cause for something that specific... If you as the writer won't do it the fan base will.  If its good enough to generate a fan base.
The very fact your suggesting this happens often enough to have known rules and cycle through characters as they die off for real means something must be causing it.  Even if they never find out in the story there must be a reason.  If you as a writer refuse to do it, a forum talking about your story will do it for you... possibly causing mass flame wars.

[The Wanderer]

The fact that none of the things you suggested are necessary for this to work in a story is demonstrated by the fact that the original Groundhog's Day worked as a story even though it didn't include any of them.

Not everything necessarily needs to be explained - and even if the author does decide to come up with an explanation (I certainly admit that if done well it can help a lot), there's no reason why that explanation needs to have anything at all in common with any of what you suggested. Using a different explanation, or even having no explanation at all, would simply result in a different - and not necessarily worse - story.

Understand: I'd have little or no problem with your suggestions if presented as "here's something else, more specific, you could do along with that" or as "here's something I thought of off of that idea". The problem I have is that you seem to have presented them as necessary things, as essential "missing components" of the original idea, without which that original idea cannot work. I'm pretty sure I've seen you do things like that repeatedly.

You stated "When a Groundhog's day loop happen it means something has gone so wrong the universe/multiverse breaks in response.". That does not have to always be true in every case; there's no particular sign that it was true in Groundhog's Day, it wasn't true in Time Braid, at the very least, and there are plenty of other possible explanations for such a phenomenon that do not involve this underlying assumption. (I think your "Three-Toed Sloth's Paw" itself is another such explanation.) And yet you presented it not as an idea or as a suggestion, as "one way of doing things" or as "how about this", but as a statement of fact.

Similarly, you present the lack of any explanation for why the loops happen as a problem that any story using the idea would necessarily have to overcome, when the original story which inspired the concept did not include any such explanation and does not appear to have exhibited any signs that this was a problem.

The movie had no thought (on screen) given to finding the cause.. it doesn't even mean their weren't literally thousands of people looping globally.

And it doesn't mean there were, either.

This is why I dislike (and hence try to avoid) getting into discussions where you are involved. From what I've seen, you seem to regularly pull in non sequiturs and ideas of your own invention as if they were part of the topic already under discussion (rather than as "something I thought of because of this") and/or as established facts, and go off on tangents based on the same - derailing the original discussion in the process, and making it harder for anything constructive that doesn't involve your tangents to get done. I'm sorry to say this, but it's gotten to the point where I sometimes literally cringe when I see that you've replied to something.

The very fact your suggesting this happens often enough to have known rules and cycle through characters as they die off for real means something must be causing it.

I'm not suggesting any such thing.

I did suggest that the "focal character" might mistakenly recognize the repeating events as a Groundhog's Day-style time loop, but that would be on the presumption that the character either is familiar with the concept of time loops in general, or has in fact actually seen Groundhog's Day. If the "three-day loop" pattern were common enough to be recognizable, presumably the character would recognize the loop as that instead, which would spoil the result I described.

The "technical details" I provided at the end, which I'm guessing is the "known rules" you referred to, are my meta-thoughts about how some crucial mechanics of the whole thing would work, on a pseudo-authorial level; they aren't something presumed to be known within the world, much less anything like common knowledge.

I don't see where you're getting "cycle through characters as they die off" from at all. Yes, I noted that if the character dies on the third day, that sticks - but I said nothing to indicate that the loop would pass on to focus on another character. It could if the author wanted it to, but in my original conception, the loops would just end at that point. (At least as far as anyone can tell, since the only one known to be capable of noticing that a loop has occurred is the one inside it... but there probably wouldn't be much room for practical consequences of that, in any case, unless the story follows the character into an afterlife.) That was intended as part of a way to subvert the "unlimited trial and error" nature of the original Groundhog's Day time loops.

And last but not least, even if something is causing it, there's no reason we have to know (much less to present in-story) an explanation of what that something is. Omitting that, as I said, merely results in a different kind of story.

[classicdrogn]

Necratoid writes in the active voice, is all. It's good for actual prose works and so on, but can be a bit jarring in a discussion like this where most of the rest of us write in passive voice with "could be, maybe, something like."
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Bob Schroeck]

Just for the title -- I have no idea what the content might be:

Aviator: The Last Airman
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Bluemage]

Bob Schroeck wrote:

---

Just for the title -- I have no idea what the content might be:
Aviator: The Last Airman

Some sort of military-fetishist anime about the last member of some post-apocalyptic nation's Air Force, on the run from the remnants of the Navy, Infantry, and the tyrannical Armored Cav?

---

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

[classicdrogn]

I was thinking more like the last airship cruise operator in a world that's moved on to heavier-than-air craft, and the trials and tribulations of (sunglasses) keeping a business aloft, when the first thing anyone thinks of when you say "airship" is a spectacularly fatal accident.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Bluemage]

ClassicDrogn wrote:

---

I was thinking more like the last airship cruise operator in a world that's moved on to heavier-than-air craft, and the trials and tribulations of (sunglasses) keeping a business aloft, when the first thing anyone thinks of when you say "airship" is a spectacularly fatal accident.

Or maybe the protagonist is the last pilot in a world that's banned air travel for some reason... only for a BBEG to show up in a flying castle.

---

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

[classicdrogn]

It occurred to me just now, reading A Place to Call Home, that the HP prophecy would make a lot more sense if Sibyl's nature as a drama queen and Dumbledore's desperate hope for some clue to a victory made him misinterpret the actual words spoken - "Neither can leave while the other survives." Harry can't just pack up and leave for greener pastures, because Voldie can't stand to allow someone to have defeated him even temporarily to pass, and Harry would be compelled to chase after Voldishorts if he left Britain alone to build his power base elsewhere.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows