Really, all stories, narratives, etc. are a kind of masturbation. Some will be more or less successful at scratching certain people’s aesthetics or identities, or at offending others; there’s no objective good or bad there. This one is the most effective thing I’ve found for hitting the transhumanist-munchkiny-social justice aesthetic, though.

I never really understood how SFP was ‘rationalfic’. I never heard of the writers being rationalists, it just seemed like it popped up on the subreddit with the label imposed upon it.

I think the most you can say about the content being rational is that it examines superpowers in a realistic context and how kinda dumb the idea of solving the worlds problems by punching them are. Which is an old idea that predates rationalism as a concept by, oh I don’t know, how many decades it’s been since Watchmen came out? The other thing is that it’s lightly sympathetic towards trans humanism.

[Spoiler] (/s “Also from what I can tell from checking up on it the super smart manipulative ex-supervillain who owns his own company who in any other context would be the badass idealized protagonist of a rationalfic is revealed to be a sadboi from living a traumatized life of arrested development and no emotional connections in his life. Which is kinda ouch lol.”)

It’s pretty good besides though I stopped actively following it a while ago because the story felt like it was going in a direction that didn’t really interest me. But it deserves attention and deserves more than ‘rationalfic’ as a label.