Even on the misinterpreting-fiction website, I never see anyone misinterpret or miss the point of Platinum’s backstory. People always get exactly what it means, even if they don’t have the words to describe it.

To try to sum it up myself, there’s an idea Rationalists call Moloch. Imagine a society where everyone makes what seem to be rational decisions, but they combine into an overall situation that hurts everyone. Everyone would be better off if society changed, but nobody can coordinate well enough to change it. This society, intended by no one, is the same result you’d get if a demon intended to create a society where everyone suffered for his amusement, and Moloch is the name used for the metaphorical demon. Doing things that entrench this society even further is referred to as “serving Moloch.”

Platinum’s backstory is about her realizing that every level of power and influence in her society has been consumed by Moloch, from ordinary people up to the leaders. There is never a point where you climb high enough to be happy or safe, and both people like Platinum who serve Moloch and people like her bosses who initially seem to be Moloch are just cogs in the system.

There were these interviews with the scriptwriter for 12 Years a Slave where he talked about how horrifying it was that this intelligent, accomplished person could be enslaved. I saw one person react by saying he was putting a weird amount of emphasis on social status, as if it would be less messed-up to enslave a lower-class person.

I don’t expect people to know that several years prior, he argued that poor black people were only poor out of laziness. He never wrote anything like that again after the backlash. But it felt frustrating to see someone groping for the reasons why his other statements felt odd, knowing there was a missing piece that put it all together.

Sometimes people talked about how a certain rationalist blogger’s political statements seemed questionable at best and heartless at worst, and I remembered the time he told me genocide was a good thing. Or . . . I know some of you won’t be as offended by this as I was, but there was this one rationalist blogger who told me disabled people should be paid less for the same jobs as abled people, and in my worldview, that was the unforgivable statement that made all his other questionable statements make sense. I can’t have any reasonable expectation for people to know they said those things. It’s just frustrating sometimes.

Honestly, I think “too reluctant to dismiss racists as not worth listening to” is the biggest flaw of the Rationalist subculture.

My actual problem with the Rationalist community is that someone like Kontextmaschine or Voxette-VK gets reblogged all the time for their “insightful posts,” and then they post something abhorrent about how it’s right for some people to subjugate or exterminate other people, and then they keep getting reblogged and no one ever mentions it again. It’s like, am I the only one who remembers that they said that? Doesn’t anyone else think those comments give some insight into the real reasons behind their other opinions about things like government intervention or disability pay?

Weirdly, the one person who consistently gets held to task for awful posts is Scott Alexander, and I have no idea what makes him different. People complain about Eliezer Yudkowsky, but more in terms of finding him cringy than in terms of disliking his opinions. There’s also Communists who aren’t Rationalists, get called out once by Rationalists for the exact same awful takes as these Rationalist authoritarians, and then never get brought up again because Rationalists aren’t into Communism much.

For a game about “the power of the human heart,” it sure is taking a mechanistic approach to the whole thing. There’s a sense that if the characters get out of this alive and sane, they’ll do so not through affection or gumption, but through logic-ing out exactly how magic works and where the break points are.

Is this a Rationalist JRPG? Because I’m kind of into it.

I am surprised and impressed. I’ve always felt a little awkward about how both rationalists and multiples read my work, because I was afraid the rationalists were going to come in and start mocking the multiples for “faking” or “being crazy” or some shit.