Ideas Thread

[Brian]

That's a good approach, but it doesn't quite solve how to implement it in the idea we're looking at.  I mean, it does suggest an interesting Third Option, though:

Warper!Kyon and base!Kyon's worlds are somehow identical, and it's only the arrival of base!Kyon that lets them realize the truth of the matter.  That does raise the question of how they figure it out or it otherwise gets revealed, while also strengthening warper!Kyon's argument that base!Kyon is a warper, too.

It does, unfortunately, completely destroy most of the potential for a sympathetic, masquerade-weary Haruhi to have an interesting conversation with base!Kyon.

This approach also feels like enough focus is spent on warper!Kyon and his reality that we can imply the second half of the story rather than state it.

Hmm.

That might work.

[Muphrid]

Call it "The Razor of Haruhi Suzumiya": when faced with reality warpers, the theory that introduces the fewest new assumptions is no more likely than a more complicated one. Kyon being Kyon, once he's back in his reality, would he even want to know which theory applies there?

[Arakawa]

I'm guessing that we're not really going to see Kyoniism done in a satisfying manner until some writer comes up with an idea that jams several fics' worth of concept into one weird mess, and the problems cancel each other out, or something. Kind of hard to discuss.

It would end up being sort of like that fic which starts as a straightforward "revisiting Nagato's feelings about Endless Eight" and unexpectedly turns into a Doctor Who crossover. (Fic title divulged inside next spoiler tag, along with significant spoilers.)

Although in truth, I had a major beef with that fic

Spoiler: ShowHide

not so much because it suddenly threw a new fandom at me two-thirds of the way through, but because of the fact that a plot twist close to the end effectively nullifies the entirety of Yuki's character development at that point.

First Nagato complains that she's been traumatized by Endless Eight. But then we find out that via judicious application of time travel she was given a way to break the loop at the beginning, and spent most of Endless Eight making love to Kyon. So in the end the whole thing (I'm talking about the plot of 'The Alternate World of Nagato Yuki' by the way) is a thinly-disguised ploy by Nagato to get into Doctor!Kyon's pants. Or a closed timelike curve to that effect, actually.

At this point I lose a lot of sympathy for the characters because we effectively have Nagato feigning severe emotional trauma when there was no such thing. This originally very plausible Yuki is suddenly as far as possible from the original Nagato in personality...

After watching some Doctor Who, though, my annoyance decreased as I realized that this is still not as ridiculous as some of the stuff in the show itself. Why are all the closed timelike curves in the show convenient anyhow?

So, back to fic ideas. What would be very nice is a Doctor Who fic where the closed timelike curves serve as a problem, not as a solution. It would be a very cathartic read for me personally because the two-way DVD conversation in 'Blink' and the similarly plot-convenient Closed Timelike Curve in 'Forest of the Dead' had me wanting to bash my head through the computer monitor.

For instance,

Spoiler: ShowHide

the Doctor goes to the future version of a city where there's a Weeping Angel infestation. He or a companion picks up some paper money which they take back to the past and use to buy ice cream or something. He doesn't notice, however, that there's a Weeping Angel watermark on the bill, and that's what starts the infestation in the first place. Recall 'Time of Angels': whatever has an image of an Angel on it, is an Angel,

what's even worse

Spoiler: ShowHide

since these Weeping Angels originate out of a closed timelike curve, and aren't evolved from the same source as the original Angels, they can differ arbitrarily from canon weeping angels, and these differences end up presenting serious problems when the Doctor makes false assumptions about their powers.

Of course, being Doctor Who it all gets resolved with pseudo-scientific cleverness. The missing ingredient is some funky and satisfyingly complicated trick for breaking a closed timelike curve.

[Brian]

By and large, the Whoniverse suffers from too many writers.

[Arakawa]

By and large, Doctor Who is basically the ultimate in 'sequel-riffic' writing. Nearly everything unique about the show started as an attempt to use the constraints of the medium of a never-ending low-budget television series.

The TARDIS looks like a police box, and the controls are a cheap set made out of plywood, dismantled typewriters, toasters, and other miscellaneous scrapyard junk. That's not a bug, it's a feature!

Deserted planets always look suspiciously similar to a quarry on the outskirts of Cardiff.

The Doctor has 13 possible incarnations. So we get to swap in a new actor whenever it's convenient!

Time is wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, so it works in whatever way is most convenient to the plot at the moment. What, you want a better explanation? Well, you'll never get it, because you're not a Time Lord and only a Time Lord can have any sort of clue as to how time travel actually works.

EDIT: Nearly every Western TV series with more than 300 episodes suffers from too many writers.

[thepanda]

"Time is wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, so it works in whatever way is most convenient to the plot at the moment. What, you want a better explanation? Well, you'll never get it, because you're not a Time Lord and only a Time Lord can have any sort of clue as to how time travel actually works."

I really hate this aspect of the show. At one point someone is like 'Why don't we just go back and fix mistake x?' and he's all 'You can't go back to the same place in time' or something but when Rose wants to go back and see her father get killed because she wasn't paying attention the first time they do just that. (And Rose almost gets humanity wiped out of existence, but the doctor doesn't kick her out of the freaking tardis when it gets fixed even though he just kicked someone else out for doing the same thing less blatantly the previous episode! Hatehatehate Rose.)

[Jon]

Babylon 5 didn't suffer from that! It suffered from plenty of other things, but not that!

(JMS wrote 92 out of 110 episodes, including the entirety of the third and fourth season.)

((Yes, I realize 110 is less than 300. But when I started writing this reply, I totally thought B5 was long-running enough to qualify.))


Adam was trying to meddle with time to make a profit. Rose was being an idiot because she just saw her dad die. Given the PTSD that Nine was suffering from at the time, I'm not surprised he chose to forgive. (Plus, he never liked Adam in the first place.)

Also, Father's Day was probably the best episode of that season. (Curse you, RTD!)

[thepanda]

It was a good episode, wasn't it.

But the point was that they did a thing he later points out that you cannot do.

[Jon]

Well, maybe he meant "you can't do it unless you want to very likely destroy the entire universe"?

He also jumps around quite a bit during the Pandorica two-parter, and says something about how it would normally be a very bad idea, but the universe is in such a bad way that it can't really make things any worse.

[thepanda]

Well, maybe he meant "you can't do it unless you want to very likely destroy the entire universe"?

Maybe. It sounded more like "This thing cannot be done because the universe doesn't work that way" rather than "Its a really bad idea." I think that was the second to last episode of the ninth doctor's run.

[sarsaparilla]

Getting back to the warper!Kyon fic, here's an approach that might work:

The base and AU worlds are identical except for one crucial difference: the AU!Haruhi has discovered on her own that AU!Kyon is something special (but she doesn't know exactly what), by first becoming aware of some (not all) of her powers and then finding out that unlike everybody else AU!Kyon has some specific immunity against them.

The main focus of the AU part of the story would then be how base!Kyon and AU!Haruhi (and to a lesser degree the rest of the SOS Brigade) find out what AU!Kyon actually is.

When base!Kyon gets back to his own world, he can break the masquerade for base!Haruhi because he has already seen in the AU universe that it won't cause a sudden end of the world event. He then asks base!Haruhi to make a similar experiment that tells whether base!Kyon has the same kind of immunity against base!Haruhi's power.

I think that it could still work with the author avatar angle as well if one sees it as a story about the characters of a play becoming self-aware of their status. I don't see any obvious unfortunate implications in this scenario, at least on a cursory examination.

Edit: an afterthought. If one wants to reinforce the play/actors metaphor, then the AU characters might deviate slightly from their base counterparts in physical appearance, just as in a play a particular character is identifiable regardless of the actor who plays the role. So, base!Kyon's epiphany would be akin to a character that stumbles upon a stage where other people are acting out the same story as the character had been living through without realizing that it's a play. Well, that might be going a bit meta but Koizumi's class did choose Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for the culture festival, and minor changes in outward appearance (to underline the independence of the AU characters) would open some interesting options for the plot.

[Brian]

Interesting.  Actually, the Kyoniism discussion spun back around to an older fic I had started, and I'm now working on that again. >.>;

The author!Kyon vs. base!Kyon with the play/actor metaphor you envision is an entirely different direction than what I originally had in mind.  That's the great part about discussion, though; I'm curious to see if someone else writes it. :)

[sarsaparilla]

Other than the author/actor idea, here are some other random things that I've been considering but won't probably write (so they're up for grabs if somebody finds any value in them):

A Sasaki/Kyon short story

It's the end of the school year and Sasaki and Kyon are preparing for entrance exams when Sasaki suddenly asks Kyon out for a not-really-but-sort-of-date and Kyon obliges out of curiosity. During the not-date Sasaki talks about how their relationship is not going anywhere and at some point Kyon is forced to agree, as he hasn't been too forthcoming on the issue and Sasaki never wanted to push him. During the discussion Sasaki does some things that seem nonsensical to Kyon, like asking him to write down a particular sentence and putting it into an envelope. Sasaki then proceeds to the exposition part and tells Kyon that she has discovered that she can change reality at will, except that she can't directly change Kyon (and the things that she just did prove her point even to Kyon). She finds this epiphany very disturbing. She doesn't want the powers and infers that somehow Kyon must be behind them. Around this point it is revealed that they are not preparing for the high school entrance exams but those of a university, as they are already at high school. Sasaki tells Kyon that he has made a mistake and she isn't the person Kyon really needs, but that she remembers somebody else from her elementary school whose personality she used to admire and who could be the right one for Kyon. Kyon tries to turn Sasaki's head but she apologizes for having wasted his time, then proceeds to rewind time back to the beginning of high school and the story converges to the beginning of book 1, making it obvious that Sasaki rewrote the world into the canon continuum.

Thus, a prequel of sorts, and one possible theory on what actually happened. I realize that there is an undercurrent of melancholy in it but it doesn't have to drown in wangst if Sasaki's motives and reasoning are presented adequately.

Another, even weirder idea

Sasaki and Haruhi both create closed space (which can even interact as in book 11), are close to Kyon, and now we are told that they have a common history all the way back to elementary school. What if ... they are two halves of a split personality (rational/orderly/introvert and imaginative/chaotic/extrovert), and in order to restore balance Kyon must eventually 'unsplit' them (with the added bonus that he eventually gets the girl who is both of them in the same package)? Too squicky? Too cracky?

[Halbarad]

A Sasaki/Kyon short story

Couple of issues I see here. First, assuming that Sasaki hasn't interacted with Haruhi past elementary school, why would she arbitrarily decide to give her power to Haruhi? She's intensely logical, and I don't really see her deciding that giving this power (which has the potential to go radically, drastically wrong) to someone she barely remembers from more than 5 years ago; it's not stated outright in the novels, but it seems to be implied (at least to me) that Sasaki didn't really know Haruhi at that point, just shared a class with her.

If anything, she might give up the power entirely, back to the point where she determined she got it in the first place, and Haruhi happens to be the one to take it up. In doing so, she rewrites events to spin off a new timeline - what we know as Melancholy. You wouldn't necessarily need to destroy the original, they'd just be divergent timelines at the point where the power was first picked up and used - once by Sasaki, once by Haruhi.

Another, even weirder idea

Bit on the squicky side for this one. If it wasn't something that had existed for 3+ years it might have some mileage, but at this point you're now talking about two separate girls that have developed in different ways, both with their own families, etc. Unless Kyon's somehow going back to the point of the original split and trying to take care of it before things develop too much, which could be interesting in its own way - getting to see Sasaki and Haruhi in elementary school, presumably before they go through a lot of the stuff that develops their separate personalities to the point they've reached in the novels.

Of course then you bring in the accusations of loliKyon, but that could be played for humor too.

[sarsaparilla]

assuming that Sasaki hasn't interacted with Haruhi past elementary school, why would she arbitrarily decide to give her power to Haruhi?

You're right, that's a weak point that should be worked around, as in your suggestion.

If anything, she might give up the power entirely, back to the point where she determined she got it in the first place, and Haruhi happens to be the one to take it up. In doing so, she rewrites events to spin off a new timeline - what we know as Melancholy. You wouldn't necessarily need to destroy the original, they'd just be divergent timelines at the point where the power was first picked up and used - once by Sasaki, once by Haruhi.

That sounds like a good idea.

Bit on the squicky side for this one. If it wasn't something that had existed for 3+ years it might have some mileage, but at this point you're now talking about two separate girls that have developed in different ways, both with their own families, etc. Unless Kyon's somehow going back to the point of the original split and trying to take care of it before things develop too much, which could be interesting in its own way - getting to see Sasaki and Haruhi in elementary school, presumably before they go through a lot of the stuff that develops their separate personalities to the point they've reached in the novels.

I hadn't crafted any coherent scenario around that idea because it was one of the loonier ones anyway, but I kind of assumed that the re-joining would happen in present time, and all memories would be conserved (as happens to Kyon(s) in book 11).

In any case, I think that there's more to Sasaki than we've been told at this point, so any speculation about her significance to the greater scheme of things is interesting. The reason why I'm putting up these kind of crazy ideas is actually to de-incentivize myself from working on them because I'm trying to set a more ambitious, 'serious' project in motion (more about that once I have something to show).