feotakahari

Stealing a post from Spacebattles, because it’s fascinating and I want to spread this knowledge. Grey Rook was complaining about how Planetary Annihilation fanfic always gave the MC powers he didn’t canonically have. SparraNova’s response:

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There was only one fic that actually did this straight. And that was the ur-Commander SI, which was just called Commander for some reason. That one did this premise ramrod straight, and got popular doing it because of course it did. People picked up on it because, I assume, beyond the massive mountain of wank, the idea of power growth modeled through an R&D system was a pretty novel and neat idea, and it tickles the brain of a particular type of nerd. Here's the thing that makes the OPness so egregious though: most of the people who picked up on the idea and made their own PA SIs seemingly never actually played the game, and if they did didn't really pay attention to what was and wasn't possible, and as a result just copy-pasted the wack-ass wanked-out version without really thinking about it…
Only to realize that their protagonists were too powerful to tell the stories they wanted to tell. Cue all sorts of shit being done to try to nerf the overpowered munchkins (none of which worked because they did things like go 'no canon units you have to design everything yourself!' instead of actually tracing the root of the problem), and even the authors themselves bemoaning how difficult it was to work around something so overpowered.

Planetary Annihilation wank was so obnoxious that the people who were writing it got sick of it ruining their stories and started trying to work around it.

And I think that's truly a monument to wankery like no other.

... Except maybe Fate/Stay Night