Plot-bunny: Atlas Shrugged
I've been reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time (just 400 more pages to go!) and it is an extremely thought-provoking read. As a political treatise, it's awful, but as a piece of literature, it draws you in and makes you think.
One such thought that I had led me to an actual plot-bunny, which I'm fairly sure is not going to be Joss'd in the next 400 pages, but is awesome enough that I want to read a fanfic for it.
So, in Atlas Shrugged, John Galt, AKA "The Destroyer," is going around finding the best and the brightest people and inviting them back to his secret enclave in order to live and work in bucolic delight. He only talks to a select few people, none of those people tell anyone else, and they all join him. He and a few of his closest followers (Francisco and Ragnar) are also working hard to destroy business and community out in the rest of the world, by variously stealing their shipments and running various con jobs to create worthless investments and business structures.
He's also the good guy. We are supposed to like him because he's saving the best and brightest from the dystopian world and the likes of Wesley Mouch, Oren Boyle, and Balph Eubanks.
But! what if Wesley Mouch, Oren Boyle, and Balph Eubanks are all doing the exact same thing as John Galt, Francisco, and Ragnar?
What if there are dozens of "Destroyers" who are all finding people to live in various secret utopian enclaves, then going out and intentionally acting against the world.
And they wander around, all sneering at each other because they each think the other is just incompetent, but really they are all trying to run various confidence schemes on each other, setting each other up to fail. They all want their public business ventures to fail spectacularly, in order to prove that failure is inevitable, but they all want to appear (to lesser minds) as though they are attempting to succeed.
Who figures out what's going on? Does one of the Destroyers finally catch on to what one of the others is doing? Except I think they're probably too sure of their own superiority to notice. Maybe there's some bright young thing who gets a recruitment speech from multiple Destroyers? Or maybe there's some nascent Destroyer who's just thinking that maybe this is the way to go when he realizes that there are other people already doing it?
Anyway, I kind of want to see a story in which there are dozens of secret organizations that wander around sneering at how no one else knows the Truth, except that everyone, everywhere is actually a member of one of these secret organizations, but no one knows that there is more than one.
I guess, upon reflection, I want a treatise on the hubris of feeling superior, but written with plot and characters and fun interactions.
One such thought that I had led me to an actual plot-bunny, which I'm fairly sure is not going to be Joss'd in the next 400 pages, but is awesome enough that I want to read a fanfic for it.
So, in Atlas Shrugged, John Galt, AKA "The Destroyer," is going around finding the best and the brightest people and inviting them back to his secret enclave in order to live and work in bucolic delight. He only talks to a select few people, none of those people tell anyone else, and they all join him. He and a few of his closest followers (Francisco and Ragnar) are also working hard to destroy business and community out in the rest of the world, by variously stealing their shipments and running various con jobs to create worthless investments and business structures.
He's also the good guy. We are supposed to like him because he's saving the best and brightest from the dystopian world and the likes of Wesley Mouch, Oren Boyle, and Balph Eubanks.
But! what if Wesley Mouch, Oren Boyle, and Balph Eubanks are all doing the exact same thing as John Galt, Francisco, and Ragnar?
What if there are dozens of "Destroyers" who are all finding people to live in various secret utopian enclaves, then going out and intentionally acting against the world.
And they wander around, all sneering at each other because they each think the other is just incompetent, but really they are all trying to run various confidence schemes on each other, setting each other up to fail. They all want their public business ventures to fail spectacularly, in order to prove that failure is inevitable, but they all want to appear (to lesser minds) as though they are attempting to succeed.
Who figures out what's going on? Does one of the Destroyers finally catch on to what one of the others is doing? Except I think they're probably too sure of their own superiority to notice. Maybe there's some bright young thing who gets a recruitment speech from multiple Destroyers? Or maybe there's some nascent Destroyer who's just thinking that maybe this is the way to go when he realizes that there are other people already doing it?
Anyway, I kind of want to see a story in which there are dozens of secret organizations that wander around sneering at how no one else knows the Truth, except that everyone, everywhere is actually a member of one of these secret organizations, but no one knows that there is more than one.
I guess, upon reflection, I want a treatise on the hubris of feeling superior, but written with plot and characters and fun interactions.