Subject: Reality shifting fics?
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Posted on: 2021-06-08 06:11:04 UTC

Heya, Boardfolk! The topic of covering reality shifting journals as badfic has come up a couple times on Discord, and I thought it might be helpful to bring it up on the Board. My best summary of reality shifting fics: based on a new, often characterized as cultlike belief on the internet that through sheer force of will, it's possible to project into a parallel reality which corresponds to any fictional universe, or any idealized version of the universe. They have a sort of mantra defining their abilities and status within the world, and also have an app making them capable of godmodding.

The questions being raised on the discord were mainly if it could be done within PPC ethics, since it's supposed to be very explicitly from the author's viewpoint, and if a reality shifter should be treated differently from a normal Sue.

I personally think since it is still heavily fictionalized and the godmodding characters in a "shifter journal" presumably behave to some extent more boldly than their authors and have fictional backstories fitting them into the alternate reality, they can be treated as characters that just so happen to be self-inserts. As for potential treatment, I'm a bit torn. It might make some sense to treat a different type of fiction differently in missions, but I worry treating them too much as author avatars could be bringing the author into things too much, and I worry that getting too invested in the metafiction could lead to either being sort of cruel to a small subculture, or on the flipside I'd feel weird about seeming to legitimize this belief about being able to escape reality.

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