Ideas Thread

[Dracos]

Purge.  Purge.

[Brian]

I don't even see the first idea as having any merit whatsoever.  It's revenge fantasy no matter how you spin it.

The second....  So, wait, what?  Haruhi beats up the author of The Riddle of Kyon, isn't terribly impressed with the rest of us, is mostly annoyed at us all being _so far from Nishinomiya_?  ...I can't see it having any value except as metafiction....

[Arakawa]

Okay, let me make the case for dance in the vicinity of the second idea for the sheer intellectual exercise of defending the indefensible. Certainly, not because I feel any particular enthusiasm for either of these ideas...

The second....  So, wait, what?  Haruhi beats up the author of The Riddle of Kyon, isn't terribly impressed with the rest of us, is mostly annoyed at us all being _so far from Nishinomiya_?  ...I can't see it having any value except as metafiction....

I guess Sleeping With the Girls works because there's one OC who is fictionalized enough not to have the problems of a typical SI, instead being given development which is sufficiently solid that the story can be tolerated to revolve around him. Here there are a bunch of OCs who are not even central to the story. To make this an idea, there would also have to be some conception of what's causing Haruhi to jump / what kind of partial progress she would be making towards figuring out the cause. It's had to say what all that could be, except that it would have to make use of the fact that the story is structured as (some version of) Haruhi repeatedly faced with people who assume they know her, but in reality have all sorts of assumptions and misconceptions ranging from incredibly blatant to extremely subtle. Some of them are going to be helpful, and some extremely fearful and manipulative. (I think there's an assumption you're making in that Haruhi would be aware right off the bat that she's confronting writers knowing that they see her as a fictional character / the writers would immediately break the masquerade for her. Would you do that? Now pretend that she's seen Yudkowsky and Henry Cobb beforehand, and they've both done their best to keep her in the dark.)

(Personally I would spend so much time dithering internally over whether to tell her / not tell her / whether to drop half a hint / how to phrase it that she'd be gone before I made a decision.)

Mechanism ideas: it transpires that the whole thing is happening in the collective unconscious of this universe's Internet users and Haruhi has been drawn into a war between Internet memes? Haruhi has been displaced from her home universe by someone's flanderized!Haruhi and eventually she has to figure out who wrote the fic responsible? O_o;; I dunno.

EDIT: Orthogonal, and arguably far important question: would Haruhi really have anything to learn from what fanfiction writers think of her?

Really, the most insurmountable problem isn't coming up with a story in this framework, it's that some of the writers whom it might be interesting to see faced with Haruhi happen to be the ones who couldn't ever be trusted to get her character right themselves. (The ones who've decided she's a living incarnation of Azathoth or whatnot.) Writing fictionalized versions of them runs into mad ethical problems and justified accusations of author bashing.

I think the thing with this idea is that I could imagine it being developed into a complete outline, it may be interesting to read depending on the author/authors, but I cringe internally to contemplate the things that could go wrong in the execution.

The first idea can't ever begin to work, I agree, because... you inevitably have a self-insert who's a deranged monster. Either unacknowledged -- juvenile revenge fantasy -- or acknowledged -- creepy deconstruction of the darkest parts of the author's psyche as they try to figure out precisely how they might be tempted into playing Kira. What's the opposite of Author Appeal?

Man, what lame ideas these be. I'm just having one of those days, I guess ._.

Purge.  Purge.

Yeah, that.

[Arakawa]

How about this: I look at these lame ideas to get rid of some annoyingly persistent delusions, and remind myself that the fic ideas I'm actually invested in and working on are hopefully not as lame...

That's really the most positive upshot I can come up with.

[Jason_Miao]

I see some viability in these ideas.

The first, if YOU are the person who has been noted, and you have only a very short time to live.  What would you do?  (my answer: Grab notebook, write in cause of death as death by exhaustion when having sex).  Obviously, the concept is only good for vignette style pieces, but nothing wrong with that.  As an aside, this sounds like a fairly fun writing challenge.

The second, why not?  Inserting a character into our universe, who has the power to change reality at her unconscious whim.  There are plenty of terrible things you can do to yourself.  So long as you don't take it seriously and don't actually write droll detail about your real life (because face it, Mr. Prolific-Facebook-Guy, no one cares about your life), it could be fun.  e.g, do you like basketball?  Well, Haruhi was reading basketball manga and wants to see an NBA game, which ends up overly melodramatic as are most sports manga.  Do you program?  Your company has decided to write and publish a space battle game (like chapter whatever in the novels), even though you worked for a software company that contracts to financial institutions.  etc.

Even better would be a twist on "cursed wish" stories, where the writer attempts to manipulate Haruhi's powers to better themselves, and where it comes back to cause misery.  e.g, Skysaber held to his own standards (but of course, if you ever wrote that, you'd be sued by his oft cited yet never named older brother who works for a major law firm and sues people for fun.  'cause that's what people with law degrees do, sue people when they're not being paid for it.)

[Arakawa]

Thank heavens that I don't have a Facebook account, and that Skysaber doesn't write Haruhi fanfiction.

That said, I ultimately agree that any Sleeping With The Girls reversed will not be able to take itself seriously, and would work more as a 'pile crack setup on crack setup to cause massive havoc'. That's... personally I already have an idea in that general category, somewhat more developed, and that's all moot since it's not really the focus of this forum.

The idea would also require as an author someone who can turn real (boring) people, into interesting fictionalized characters, i.e. not me. The Sleeping With The Girls guy managed to do it, so mad props to him.

I don't know, it would be fun to read a fic where, say, Yudkowsky is trying to mislead Haruhi into doing X or Y and other fic writers are trying to prevent that. (Yudkowsky is more likely than Skysaber to have a real lawyer, but is also more likely than Skysaber to have a healthy sense of humour and proportion.) I'm not sure how that would work in reality. And really these aren't ideas I'm going to be able to write competently. I could write a more well-thought-out and engaging fic about the MTA Lost Property Office in New York, for that matter, than "Haruhi teleports at random to various fanfiction writers."

[Grahf]

If I may:

Do-Over: Kyon is sent back to the beginning, when he first met Haruhi, with a chance to do everything over. However, he doesn't want this, and is happy with the way everything turned out the first time. So Kyon must try and find a way to get back to his own time, while simultaneously trying to keep everything else going according to Canon in case going back isn't an option.

This sounds like something that could be really good out of the gate, mostly because two of the three factions surrounding Haruhi are going to completely (for lack of a better term) flip their shit about what just happened, especially if neither faction immediately realizes this to have actually happened. The Entity will attempt to confirm with its interfaces, and you can imagine the sheer panic the time travellers might get into when they confirm that Kyon is right about how certain events play out.

I know from what you've described that Kyon tries to do things the way that he remembers them, but how well he succeeds is really up for debate. How well would he take walking into that classroom and nearly getting killed by Asakura again? Sure he knows that Yuki is going to save him, but what if something happens this time? Does he tell Yuki to keep a close eye on her subordinate?

[Oroboro]

If I may:

Quote

    Do-Over: Kyon is sent back to the beginning, when he first met Haruhi, with a chance to do everything over. However, he doesn't want this, and is happy with the way everything turned out the first time. So Kyon must try and find a way to get back to his own time, while simultaneously trying to keep everything else going according to Canon in case going back isn't an option.


This sounds like something that could be really good out of the gate, mostly because two of the three factions surrounding Haruhi are going to completely (for lack of a better term) flip their shit about what just happened, especially if neither faction immediately realizes this to have actually happened. The Entity will attempt to confirm with its interfaces, and you can imagine the sheer panic the time travellers might get into when they confirm that Kyon is right about how certain events play out.

I know from what you've described that Kyon tries to do things the way that he remembers them, but how well he succeeds is really up for debate. How well would he take walking into that classroom and nearly getting killed by Asakura again? Sure he knows that Yuki is going to save him, but what if something happens this time? Does he tell Yuki to keep a close eye on her subordinate?

Huh. Threw that idea on there a few months ago during some random midnight inspiration, and kind of forgot about it.

I suppose it's supposed to be a bit of a play on the "Peggy Sue Fic", where the protagonist goes back to re-do things: Except Kyon really doesn't want to. Trying to juggle living a normal life exactly the way you did before, trying to get back to his 'home' reality. worrying about "For Want of a Nail", like you said, would he really risk getting stabbed again?

In any case, I'm busy with adapting a Visual Novel of the Big Damn variety, so if anyone else wants to take a closer look at it, by all means.

[alethiophile]

Re: the Death Note thing: It could be amusing as a one-shot where there's an obvious lead-up to a standard revenge-fic-type SI-kills-everyone thing, but the reaction of the SI on getting hold of it is instead "GAH! Get that thing away from me!"

Vaguely related: last year one member of the (small) people-who-pay-attention-to-anime group at my school came up to the rest of us with a prop Death Note, and asked jokingly "Anyone know any threats to society I can write in this?" Immediate answer from pretty much everyone: "Anyone with one of those things!"

Actually relevant to the thread topic: I have this persistent bug in my head that flares every few months or so and gets in the way of my writing proper stuff. Fuse Naruto with Little Red Riding Hood; Hinata is Little Red, Naruto as some sort of were-creature is the wolf. I know it's terrible, and I can't get it out of my head.

[Jason_Miao]

(Yudkowsky is more likely than Skysaber to have a real lawyer, but is also more likely than Skysaber to have a healthy sense of humour and proportion.)

I ought to explain.  I wasn't being serious about the lawyer bit. 

Years ago, Skysaber responded to being caught plagiarizing one SR member (I think it was Shade?  Hard to recall) by threatening him with his "lawyer brother" if he didn't back off.  There are plenty of people who do stupid things on the internet, but Skysaber is poster-child of arrogant idiocy on SR for a number of reasons (creating several people in #fanfic to support his own arguments, insisting that he knew more about division than his math teachers because he knew how to divide by zero, etc).  If any of us mention Skysaber in some context, it's usually going to be in the manner of an in-joke.

Anyway, don't worry about lawyers acting as fanfic police overly much.

[thepanda]

Actually relevant to the thread topic: I have this persistent bug in my head that flares every few months or so and gets in the way of my writing proper stuff. Fuse Naruto with Little Red Riding Hood; Hinata is Little Red, Naruto as some sort of were-creature is the wolf. I know it's terrible, and I can't get it out of my head.

She's delivering delicious raman to granny Tsunade's house? The Big Bad Fox keeps trying to steal it but his 'clever' plans keep going awry as Hinata meets various cameos of other Naruto characters as people from other fairy tales. Kind of Warner Brothers-y?

[alethiophile]

I...really wasn't ever sure why she was in the woods, just that she was. And it was going for a darker theme, kind of playing up the 'demon' association with Naruto. I had no idea where it was going from there, or what any of the other characters would be.

[Arakawa]

Anyway, don't worry about lawyers acting as fanfic police overly much.

Not worried in the first place. It is true that Yudkowsky is infinitely more likely to actually have a lawyer at his disposal, and infinitely less likely to flip out and threaten to file a lawsuit over some fanfiction.

Thanks for the reassurance, though...

[Jason_Miao]

This idea randomly popped in my head when chatting with DarkAlpha two nights ago:


<Jason_Miao> So, you know how Japanese anime/manga seems to have a fairly large genre of someone having to hide their gender by cross-dressing, for whatever reason?
<darkalpha> Yeah
<Jason_Miao> Same situation.  Girl infiltrates an boys school, falls in love, but can't show it because then she'd be exposed, etc.  However, *every* student in that school is a girl who has done the same thing.
<darkalpha> Huh
<darkalpha> Interesting
<Jason_Miao> So, pretty much, just an excuse to put people in weird situations of escalating misunderstandings.  I'd pretty much need a shoujo-mindset to be able to pull it off, and I don't really have one of those, but...
<Jason_Miao> And maybe you could have ONE boy, who found out that ONE of his classmates is a girl, so typical romance.  Except everyone thinks they're gay.  Which, given that they're all highschool girls, gets them all excited, and wishing to be with the particular boy (who is really a girl, of course) they're in love with.
<Jason_Miao> I don't generally read crossdressing manga, so not sure what other twists could be done, but given Japan seems to pump out a ton of these series, I'm sure there's more ways to mess with the basic premise.
<darkalpha> Heh, interesting twist. Though the premise would be pretty hard to pull off
<Jason_Miao> I think it could be done.  The trick is juggling events and relationships so that in-story observers continually misunderstand what is going on.  But some people write soap operas for a living, so it is clearly doable.

Basic setting could be (for example) an ultra-elite school, where graduating guarantees you upper-level government/corporate positions.  It is, of course, boys only - there is no equivalent girls school, because the society is chauvinistic, so only men are expected to have such positions.  An ambitious girl has to infiltrate the school if she's to pave the way for her goals.

Other scenes:
* two guys (who are girls) scoping out girls, when they are really lusting over the other boy (who is a girl).
* gym locker-room scene where everyone is trying to sneak around everyone else to be able to shower alone.
* Annual school dance, which is coordinated with an all-girls school.
* End - Everyone discovering that everyone else in the classroom (including the person they've been lusting after) is really a girl.  It is quickly discovered that, actually, the majority of the school is female.  And the resultant scandal reveals that most of anyone who has actually graduated from this school is female - in fact, pretty much the leaders of every political party, the vast majority of upper-level government, and political stars of all parties are actually female.  It's just that they were ambitious enough to keep it a secret because society is chauvinistic and it's easier to succeed in politics by pretending to conform to society than to change it.

Problem: I actively dislike reading most transvestite-themed manga, so I'm not really sure what are the "typical" situations that can be exacerbated.

The other way to play this is that every person is blackmailing one other person, and is being blackmailed by one other person, who realizes her "secret".   That has the potential of introducing too many characters to keep track of or care about (i.e Negima).  On the other hand, it's easier to plot - it's basically a game of 'assassin' that no-one realizes that they're playing.  Essentially, the protagonist is forced to do things by her blackmailer, and gets the person she has the information on to cover whatever it is she has to do- she eventually traces down the chain of blackmail until she realizes that it covers the entire class and leads right back to her.

For this idea to work, one would really need to find the sort of Ouborous-style plot, so that when the big reveal comes, everyone realizes that everything they've tried to make the person they've blackmailed do is the source of all the grief they've had to go through.

[Brian]

Should anyone want to make a genuine story out of the scraps I've written of Precious Moments, they should feel free to, as I cannot.

Edit: To stave off any questions, what I've written is now officially offered under the wtfpl, so don't PM or ask me for permission or advice -- if you want it, just take it.