[Here's the twitter thread.](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1170013810054184961)
> To put it more sharply: a mindset that cannot lower itself so far as to congratulate Taylor Hebert is perhaps also a mindset that cannot lower itself so far as to vote for Hillary Clinton. This is an empirical claim, and I think I'd bet at 2:1 odds on an ideal test of it.
so, like Watchmen
would explain the big-brain-nazi fanboys. I'm guessing they took some character who was supposed to be the opposite of a paragon of moral righteousness and proceeded to worship them for their deep clever thoughts and tendency to enact ultraviolence on everyone who crossed them.
How close am I? ;)
You're not on target but you're not totally out of the ballpark either.
I've read Worm. It's 1.6 million words long, so about 15-20 novels' worth of text. (Quality varies but overall it's good enough that it has a fan base among actual publishing folks -- except Wildbow self-pubbed it and nobody sane would try and publish a 5000 page novel.)
Bits of Worm are extremely grimdark, it ramps up to a multiverse-level species extinction event, *and* some of the characters in it are a community of alt-right/neonazis (who end up dying horribly and taking a bunch of other folks with them). The nazis aren't romanticized and anyone who reads it and thinks they are is way off the mark. *However* about 20% of the audience for any popular entertainment will completely misinterpret what they read, so this isn't really a surprising outcome.
(Source: am a novelist, I do this shit for a living, and curating a fan community can be ... tedious.)
Well, main character is basically as they described. With all the memes about escalation, I think its fairly clearly implied she is generally in the wrong, and the type of nazi fanboy that likes the nazi characters probably misses that point and thinks the MC is 100% justified in everything she did.
come on, half the nazi fans haven't read worm, only fanfic written by nazis who haven't read worm, with a light smattering of non-nazi fanfic written by non-nazis who haven't read worm, but they sure all have read a lot of worm fanfic.
You got a perfect head-shot.
Though there's also an explicitly nazi super-villain group and some super-villain serial killers that are somewhat inexplicably looked up to by some fans, despite being pretty unequivocally despicable, probably because they get one or two POV chapters that shows their internal monologue, and its the exact kind of dark-triad drivel you'd expect.
And, also like Watchmen (and V for Vendetta) the writer is cool, and calls out those people as the shitheads they are.
Kind of. There's an elaborate set of rules that justifies the existence of costumed heroes and villains battling one another in a 'real' world and the main character is really good at exploiting the physics of the superpowers to win fights, which attracted the rationalist fanbase. Later in the story the main character becomes increasingly 'rational' in morality as well as in problem-solving (IMO this is where the story gets ruined). It's portrayed as harmful to the character, but it's still presented as a 'greater good' that gets the job done.
Also there's an artificial intelligence subplot that caused the rationalists to insist that it followed their rules for AI and so they swarmed in and derailed everything into tedious arguments that had no relation to the story being told.
The same author wrote another story called Pact that has a similar 'rational morality moment' in the main character. A side character calls it out as a suicidal trauma response. >!We later discover this is because memory magic is a thing, and his brain has been scrambled before the story even starts Manchurian Candidate style.!<
Yeah definitely a shitpost.
…contessa?
A natural sneerer!
Time to burn a choice selection of The Sequences at my dark alter to Marx in thanks for this unexpected bounty.
he’ll never hear the end of this one lol.
don’t know what Worm is (big-brained nazis like it apparently? :/) but Yud’s voice is spot-on. absolutely brilliant