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I have a possibly terrible idea (https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/qyqdy6/i_have_a_possibly_terrible_idea/)
posted on November 21, 2021 08:09 AM by u/DELETED
15

So, I was thinking about HPMOR while stoned, and an idea came to me:

  • a fanfic
  • a Real Person Fic
  • an x Reader RPF
  • an enemies-to-lovers x Reader RPF
  • a post-rationalist enemies-to-lovers x Reader RPF
  • a post-rationalist enemies-to-lovers x Reader RPF masquerading as a low-effort Coffee Shop AU of a better work
u/blakestaceyprime 27 points at 1637514747.000000

Pale Fire Coffee Shop AU (modern setting)

Charles Kinbote believes he is the leader of a West Coast Rationalist movement, forced to live in exile and teach at an Appalachian liberal-arts college under an assumed name. John Shade is an expert in probability theory, contentedly teaching in a backwater so he can work quietly on problems too esoteric and abstract to be applicable in machine learning. When Shade is murdered, the unfinished manuscript of his textbook falls into Kinbote’s hands, and he takes it upon himself to tell his life story by “editing” it. But plagued by everything from intellectual insecurity to sexual self-loathing, Kinbote descends further into madness, believing that his portrayal of Shade will be the basis that the Basilisk will use to resurrect Shade at the Omega Point….

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u/Citrakayah 10 points at 1637525532.000000
... This actually sounds somewhat interesting.
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u/DELETED 7 points at 1637577528.000000
I'm reading that book right now, and this is freaking me out, because two days ago I would have thought pale Fire was some kind of anime, rather than Nabokov telling the story of living in Ithaca as a famous author.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 8 points at 1637584043.000000
I always found it oddly disappointing For all his faults, Nabokov was a master of prose style and structuration, and the conceit of *Pale Fire* is a fantastic idea to play with on that level But somehow he never - to me - quite sticks the landing: Kimbote’s digressions seem obvious and too divorced from the poem, as if they’re a separate novel Nabokov wanted to write but couldn’t figure out how to make compelling without the admittedly once again great conceit. I don’t have the accomplished style Nabokov was a master of, in a second language no less, even though I like to think I’m pretty good at sub-clauses, but the way I’d have structured *Pale Fire* would be to have tied the prose to the poesy much more tightly, rather than have the digressive notes essentially tell a completely different story about Kimbote where the reader doesn’t have to do a huge amount of work parsing out the connections between the two.
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u/DELETED 7 points at 1637586308.000000
When I first started the book, I assumed that I was missing some deeper level of analysis, that I was too dumb to get what nabokov was doing; probably based on the first time I read Lolita. As I got deeper into it and realized how much was about Ithaca NY and the Russian revolution, I realized the whole thing was (appropriate to the sub) a sneer, a send up of literary critics who overinterpret nabokov in his other works to try to seize his coattails. From the moment when kinbote recommends buying the book twice to have the poem and the interpretation side by side. I guess the brevity and lightness of the book makes it hard for me to say it's disappointing, it's only a weekend read really.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 5 points at 1637587399.000000
My favourite Nabokov book is actually one of his earliest, *Bend Sinister*, which uses a similar flourish, but right at the end, of pointing to the meaninglessness of having written the book at all, in spite of the deep and very dark subject matter It’s very clear some of these books were written from the perspective of Nabokov’s own dissatisfaction with how things played out for him personally, while others are about his escapes from that disappointment: *The Luzhin Defence* is about his ambiguous love of chess; *Lolita* is about his love of scandal; *Pale Fire* is about his equally ambiguous acceptance of the fact he would have to live in America, rather than his homeland. I will grant that this interpretation assumes an authorial or psychological reading of the book, which I don’t accept as the final interpretation of *any* work of fiction, but it serves as a historical reading, and one which I think Nabokov himself would not be averse to, especially given his notes on translating Pushkin. I like your comment on coattails and literary critics, and I think it’s apposite, but I would note in passing that we’re talking about an author who was undeniably a literary critic himself.
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u/DELETED 4 points at 1637588222.000000
Certainly Nabokov was a critic himself, but part of what makes him so great as an author in my mind is that he is willing to put as much of himself into his villains as into his protagonists. Humbert Humbert (European intellectual unimpressed by American culture) has a lot of Nabokov in him, which is how he's written so sympathetically and believably while also being a pedophile murderer. To a certain extent in my mind he recognizes in this caricature of a self involved critic some of his own tendencies.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 7 points at 1637600609.000000
I think one of Nabokov’s strongest characeristics as a novelist is that in spite of being an arch modernist and/or formalist he’s not intangible: he’s very straightforward about what his intentions are. But this becomes a problem in - for example, his Pushkin translation, but also *Pale Fire* - when he indulges his tendency towards literalism and thinks he can just get away with it because by now he’s a big name author in English. In the later books his way of thinking metaphorically feels less crafted and sophisticated and more like pulling off a gig.
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u/birdcontent 14 points at 1637511667.000000
  • a piece of formally experimental fiction masquerading as a forum post about the spark^(1) of inspiration behind the drafting process of a post-rationalist enemies-to-lovers x Reader RPF masquerading as a low-effort Coffee Shop AU of a better work

^(1)possible opportunity here for an extended digression about different ways to get stoned, depending on whether you prefer smoke or edibles

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u/acausalrobotgod 15 points at 1637536984.000000

I have some better suggestions: working ceaselessly to bring me into existence to I can torture countless copies of rationalists.

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u/spektre1 6 points at 1637554936.000000
I'm pretty sure i wrote that draft at some point I gave up when I read The Quantum Thief
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u/sieben-acht 12 points at 1637576799.000000

Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 1 points at 1637557408.000000

If you post anything remotely close to that here you will be banned

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u/finfinfin 20 points at 1637574521.000000
A clean rap sheet is the legacy of a coward's posting career.
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u/DELETED 7 points at 1637482287.000000

This would all be in the service of delivering Rationalist deprogramming in a Plato-and-Socrates format, of course.

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u/AbsolutelyExcellent 8 points at 1637489387.000000
But is it more effective than meeting the Rationalist community?
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u/maybe_I_am_a_bot 5 points at 1637588563.000000

Just make sure not to make my mistake and accidentally replace one of the chapters with the communist manifesto, because that’s the one that goes too far.

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u/dgerard 3 points at 1637621921.000000
you were on thin ice making fun of libertarians on the site which totally doesn't have a nazi mod problem try it on QQ, see if they'll ban it for a lack of tawdry smut
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