This is a thread for discussing my luminous!Twilight fic, Luminosity (inferior mirror here), its sequel Radiance (inferior mirror), and related topics.
PDFs, to be updated as the fic updates, are available of Luminosity (other version) and Radiance. (PDFs courtesy of anyareine). Zack M Davis has created a mobi file of Radiance.
Initial discussion of the fic under a Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality thread is here. The first dedicated threads: Part 1, Part 2. See also the luminosity sequence which contains some of the concepts that the Luminosity fic is intended to illustrate. (Disclaimer: in the fic, the needs of the story take precedence over the needs for didactic value where the two are in tension.)
Spoilers are OK to post without ROT-13 for canon, all of Book 1, and Radiance up to the current chapter. Note which chapter (let's all use the numbering on my own webspace, rather than fanfiction.net, for consistency) you're about to spoil in your comment if it's big. People who know extra stuff (my betas and people who have requested specific spoilers) should keep mum about unpublished information they have. If you wish to join the ranks of the betas or the spoiled, contact me individually.
Miscellaneous links: TV Tropes page (I really really like it when new stuff appears there) and thread. Automatic Livejournal feed.
Personally I like it at least as well as MoR. Harry is perilously close to a Gary Stu; he dominates each of the canon characters in turn, forcing them to explicitly acknowledge Harry's moral and mental superiority. It's kind of tiresome and it's surprisingly naive fanfic writing. At this point I'm a lot more interested in Draco, who is a genuinely nuanced character and whose point of view is often very funny.
By contrast none of the characters in Radiance feel like Mary Sues (even though Elspeth has exceedingly Sueish hair). But she's got depth to her personality, and flaws that are realistic given her background--I'm specifically thinking of her tendency to passivity. She has an interesting and flexible power, and a couple of lucky "gimmes" (like being Jake's imprint), but she's not set up as someone who's going to easily and utterly dominate everything around her. To me, that makes her story a lot more interesting.
Agreed.
Though that's been the price of admission for HP:MoR from almost the very beginning... it isn't about the characters, still less about their relationships, and it becomes less and less so over time.
Quite the contrary: a lot of what is being explicitly discarded from canon has to do with relationships (though at least Harry is starting to look to actual peers to have imaginary relationships with, rather than entirely hypothetical ones, which I guess is progress of a sort).
Agreed about Draco. Then again, he always intrigued me in the originals as wel... (read more)