RogerBW's Blog

2010 contemporary fantasy, a "re-imagining" of the Twilight series. Bella Swan is a "rational self-knowledge junkie", so when she meets vampires, she starts thinking about them rather than blindly falling in love.

Fanfic, of course, and admittedly inspired by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality; but it's rather less preachy than that story sometimes tended to be (even though Alicorn's a Less Wrong poster, not a group known for their lack of preachiness). Most of the characters may have started out nominally the same as the ones in the original series, which I haven't read but have read a certain amount about, but they rapidly change into much more interesting people.

That's really the core of it: what if Bella were an interesting person, able to think about things in a sensible way that no canonical character in the books does? She has no additional magical powers, but a thoroughly different mindset.

I decided that it would be useful to develop a taste for wet weather, and pulled out my notebook du jour to note that if I saw a way to do that, I should.

Enemies are killed or turned into friends rather than left to stalk the good guys and gain power, minor friends are promoted to major character status, and generally things go well. Except when they don't, and the ending leaves things in quite a dark place. But broadly, there's less blind acceptance of situations than in the original, and more in the way of attempts to think things through and come up with better solutions.

The writing style is mostly pretty good, and while it's perhaps a bit over-long (I felt it could have used trimming, but it may be that there were things in the original books that needed to be altered) it's still easy to read quickly. There's the same panicky fear of death and willingness to jump on any alternative to it that HPMoR exhibited, perhaps a standard LW-poster trait.

Surprisingly enjoyable, in all, and freely available online. Followed by Radiance.