Talk:You are the Absurd Hero (short story)

Rename

On Obverse's website for the anthology the story's title is written as the page is currently. Are there any other sources that suggest the the should be lower case? --Tangerineduel / talk 14:36, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

Just got my copy. "Are" and "the" are lowercase. Najawin ☎ 08:25, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Validity

So we all agree that according to the current wiki rules this should be invalid, right? You're a character in the narrative and it's a branching path story. At the very least invalid until forums come back and we discuss it there, yes? (Also, dammit, it's similar enough in execution to a story I thought about writing that I'm not sure if I want to do that now. Ugh.) Najawin ☎ 08:19, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Not necessarily so; there is the Flip-Flop precedent to consider. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 05:48, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Which doesn't include you as a character. (Speaking of which, that's another thread we should have, discussing where the line between Flip Flop and branching path stories is. I agree with the change you made to T:VALID, I think the branching path decision was stupid in the first place, but it was never fully examined.) Again, fully willing to have a larger discussion when the forums are back. But prima facie it seems invalid. Najawin ☎ 05:54, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

I've just a thought I'd like to highlight. While branching narratives are defacto invalid (barring Flip-Flop as this was an exception, and I don't agree with branching narratives being flat out invalid), I do not believe the "reader" is literally in this story. This sort of mindset of "here's a blank slate character for you to project yourself into" equalling "this is literally the DWU equivalent of every single person who has ever read this story simulataneously" is absurd. While us as readers can "insert" ourselves, no information about us is actually present within the narrative; T:NO RW even goes as far as to say...

"And don't go further than what the DWU source actually tells you."T:NO RW

...so while this source may be invalid due to the branching narrative, the idea that "you" are the character thus making the story unreliable makes no sense in policy. And while in this instance, we may not have a source like Companions and Allies to give us some juicy Wikifiable information, I would like to guide everyone here to look at Human (Attack of the Graske) for how an avatar-style character in a branching narrative can be handled on the Wiki.

Epsilon📯 📂

08:33, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

You mean the invalid story? I'm not trying to defend the wiki policy here, heaven forbid. Again, part of the reason I'd be so open to having an inclusion debate when the boards are up is to change it. But when it comes to "interactive stories" T:VALID explicitly calls out

Additionally, some of them will cast "you", the player, as a character, instead of having you play as an actual DWU characters.

It seems to me that the only thing this story has going for it is the fact that Flip-Flop is valid and Scrooge edited T:VALID to specifically include it when you were thinking about making a thread arguing that because of its validity we were being too quick to dismiss nonlinear stories generally. Hell, it doesn't even have a bionicle reference and that's just cardinal. (I mean, arguably it also has that it clearly doesn't violate rule 4 which the table says these stories do, but honestly I don't know why that was put into the table, it's far from clear that past interactive stories violate rule 4.)

IMO this is a story that should be invalid until proven otherwise and the forum to do that in doesn't currently exist. I just want to make sure we all agree to that before I put the invalid tag on it. Similar to Doctor Who Comes to MINECRAFT! (webcast). Najawin ☎ 17:53, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm still not sold, though I'd bow to a consensus against me. It just seems to me that "CYOA game" are a genre, and we have decided to exclude that genre, while still allowing in things from valid genres (e.g. short stories or Big Finish audio plays) that pastiche the style as a gimmick. Obverse didn't publish this as a CYOA game; they published it as a short story, in a short story collection. I think it would be unnecessarily pedantic of us to exclude it. (Compare Book of the War pastiching a reference book, or even a RPG sourcebook, but actually being in-universe and being marketed by Mad Norwegian as a novel!) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:10, 12 September 2022 (UTC)