= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Hero With A Thousand Chances - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (156)
I'm surprised - I hadn't expected that you consulted, then disregarded, the Random Number God.
It's your story, of course - but I note that Charles Stross got away with having multiple female characters and virtually no male characters (other than love interests and cardboard authority figures) in the first few Merchant Princes novels, and inversely for innumerable other authors. Of course, Stross could distinguish his characters by referring to this one or that one as an assassin princess (there are several of those, but the main character is not).
Also, I'm surprised that there have been so many other comments about Aerhien's gender, but not about the hero's - the "perfect eyelashes" line jumped out at me, but not as much as the fact that the "smart guy who figures out what's going on" was a guy.
It's also worth noting that the nameless hero started out male, and Aerhien as female, on account of those having been the applicable genders in the dream - this is a dream-inspired story, my first. I consulted the RNG to try and reassign the hero's gender but discovered almost immediately that it would have been awkward.
The dream originally occurred from the hero's perspective, btw, but from a writer's standpoint it was obvious that the main character couldn't be the hero.
At least, not without changing the tone of the story to something resembling StarkRavingMad's Boatmurdered updates.