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So after criticizing Plot Manipulation as a power for some months already, I guess it's time to make an actual thread as to why this power has been both useless and wank-ish for too long; and what to do with that.
Given how the vagueness of this ability has lead to each person having to make a bit of their own idea regarding it, I'll try to establish the basis of each part basing myself on what's written on our pages.
In the first part, I'll cover what our Plot Manipulation is with 3 points (covering its definition, "importance" and what grants it); and I'll explain what is the problem with all of it in second part; while giving the last problem + a solution in the third one.
"Plot Manipulation is the ability to control the plot itself. Examples include altering the plot, creating/destroying stories, changing speech bubbles, changing the setting, etc. It is a variation of Reality Warping."
Basically, Plot Manipulation is the power to, well, "manipulate the plot". There's no development of what qualifies as said plot, but the common agreement is that it means "manipulating the scenario of the work the characters are in" or "the events of an in-verse lower realm" (Umineko, Magi, etc...)
First problem is that while the former is (most of the time) meta in nature; the second is mere Fate Manipulation with R/F transcendence for the user. It's something I will come back later on.
The examples of this ability are altering the plot (which is the exact same as "control the plot"), creating/destroying stories (create/destroy something with a plot), changing speech bubbles (which is shared with Breaking the Fourth Wall) and changing the setting.
Overall, Plot Manipulation is basically defined by "manipulating something related to stories" (or compared to, as we'll see later).
To most people, what makes Plot Manipulation important and strong is that in a story, everything is inside of its plot; so manipulating the plot is manipulating the highest possible authority in a fictional setting.
If you can erase someone from the narrative, then it's stronger than the other EEs, since they don't erase the character from the story. Same with Plot and Fate Manipulation; changing a character's fate isn't changing the story (it's just a plot twist), so changing the story is much stronger than that.
As such, since what's inside a fictional world can't affect the "plot" (or 4th Wall, as you'll see later on), the plot of a story is deemed more fundamental than the other elements.
Instant Death: Some characters have an especially strong "fate value", which makes them favored by Fate and its whims. It has been compared to the characters being protagonists of their own movie.
Umineko no Naku Koro Ni: Meta Beings are on the side "that brings about fate", with the Witches who "create fate and play with it" manipulating "the side that gets tossed about by fate"/Human Domain. They see said domain as a mere gameboard.
Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou: The users can create worlds outside the main universe, which are fictional because someone created them.
The Unwritten: Everything comes from the world being Leviathan's dream, and that little guy dreams of the stories written by humanity, and whatever he dreams become true.
Homestuck: The concept of "Canon" is an in-verse concept strongly tied to relevance and a specific character's existence. Some characters can create "retcons" which change fate and rewrite causality (being outright compared to a causality-reset device in the latter case). Some other can manipulate/hijack "the narrative", which is mainly a matter of perspective and mind shitz.
Would have liked to include Marvel, SCP or DC, but I either would need to limit myself to one example or expand on the countless ones there is, which would be time-wasting.
So I would ask anyone who intends to make a constructed answer to read this post at least twice, since some of the section's names and what they talk about is usually considered to be a "cheap argument". However it is, in my opinion, the most accurate way to describe the thing with Plot Manipulation and its flaws.
The problem here comes from the fact that what qualifies as "the plot" is unspecified and extended to "anything that is compared to a story's plot/narrative".
What we're calling Plot Manipulation here is just an already-existing ability which has been compared to a fictional example or used in a work with a heavy fiction-based metaphorical theme; so it is already a problem to have an ability that isn't one.
It also works in Unwritten's case, where yes, there's a R/F hierarchy, but everything's based on the fact that they are manipulating a being's dream, not the comics' plot. Or in Homestuck, where anything can be attributed to other abilities we have.
However in most cases it is only Creation, and not an actual ability.
Toribot is shown "creating" the verse, but he doesn't control anyone and even meet his future self in the verse (who stopped writing and is homeless iirc). Andrew Hussie is a megalomaniac who was persuaded he would be able to kill Lord English but died despite having been shown to be Homestuck's writer. TOAA, while being the creator of everything, clearly has interactions with the 4 Fantastic and Spiderman in which the characters aren't controlled by his own actions. And in the Writer's case, it is just Fate Manipulation and stuff on different scales, and things happen regardless of their own writing.
They aren't writing the actual plot of their verse, but only displays some abilities (mainly Creation or Fate Manipulation) through their art/a 4th Wall Breaking (see below).
If you think it doesn't have its place here, then you can consider it as part of the "Possible Rebuttals" part.
Unlike Fate or Luck, what exactly constitutes a "plot/narrative" is verse-dependent. As you can see with the examples above; they all have veery different reasonning as to what makes a plot/narrative/story/whatever.
To give an example of comparison, it would be like having a "Afterlife Manipulation" page. Everyone knows what a Afterlife is and every verse will have some common points between their Afterlives. However it would make no sense to make it an ability, because what an Afterlife exactly entails is entirely up to the verse. It's for similar reasons that abilities such as "Hellfire Manipulation" had been deleted.
There is no reason to keep Plot Manipulation as a power because it does not have some immutable basis like "water is wet in all of fiction unless proven otherwise"; in the same way you can't assume anything about the Afterlife of a piece of work prior to reading it.
And there's the last point that also question its utility as a whole, which is...
I'll skip the first part of the summary, which is just to explain what the 4th Wall is to begin with, and focus on the wiki-made part: "However, some fictions employ the literary technique of Breaking the Fourth Wall. This includes talking to the audience, affecting the "real world", rewriting speech bubbles, acknowledging that they are part of a fictional world, and even leaving the fictional work itself and entering the "real world" (represented, obviously, by a fictionalized version of the real world)."
First thing to note is that you litteraly find a common ability with Plot Manipulation here, which is to "rewrite speech bubbles". Why there is a distinction between the two abilities doing the exact same thing isn't explained anywhere.
However it is in fact perfectly logical, since there's virtually no difference but the treatment given to them: 4th Wall Breaking is constantly repeated to be something that shouldn't be considered as OP (which is right), while Plot Manipulation is always taken as something much greater than anything else without any real reason.
We even have an entire Reality-Fiction Interaction page meant to developp on how 4th Wall Breaking is a case-by-case thing in each instance; while also giving emphasize on the fact that it's obviously not truly interacting with IRL stuff or the actual story. Plot Manipulation is somehow not included in this despite dealing with the same ideas.
We basically have an entire power which is "Plot Manipulation but we acknowledge that it's just a funny and/or aesthetic thing", which is even explained to not be anything too fantastic. But Plot Manipulation just got where it was through some assumptions that just wandered across threads.
(Also some pages such as this one have the exact same feats used for both abilities. Wasn't part of my argument but might as well throw it here).
-What is defined as "the plot" is vague. While it is mainly considered to be "the verse's plot", some characters gets it from merely manipulating the fates of lower worlds.
-Most of the time the whole "story" bit is a comparison for another power; usually Fate Manipulation.
-What the "story/plot of the verse" exactly entails is a verse-by-verse basis. It's like how things such as the Afterlife, Hellfire, or Aether can be found in several verses, but you wouldn't be able to make an ability out of it because they are just things that are a mix of several abilities based on what the verse decides.
-4th Wall Breaking already covers Plot Manipulation by nature, and the only reason we're not acknowledging it properly is a difference in treatment which has no true basis.
-Plot Manipulation is overall a quirky way to portray some abilities.
I'll only take Discworld as example, since it's the most blatant one: it possesses "Narrativium"/Narrative Causality as an element, which ensures that things go as in stories.
However once you break it down properly, it is quite easy to see what power it actually corresponds to.
The equivalent of Discworld's Narrativium is Roundworld's (our Earth) law of physics. Roundworld's laws says that water can't catch fire, and Discworld's Narrativium says that the third boy will always succeed. It's all nothing but a set of rules (Law Manipulation), which just have some meta-reflection added to them.
I took this example because it's imo the most concrete and easier to explain. Not all narrative-related stuff are Law Manipulation, but they sure can be put under other abilities.
As to why we should just put them under other abilities, this has been answered in the "Equivalence" section. In the same way a character manipulating the Afterlife or Hellfire would need to have the properties of their verse's Afterlife or Hellfire listed, the same goes for story-related elements.
I would just say that we should remove the "their place in the narrative" and keep the other "fundamental aspect" I cut out from the sentence. If a character gets erased from a verse's narrative, then we should see how the verse treats it.
If the verse treats it as the verse getting erased across all of history, then sure, it qualifies. But it shouldn't be automatically assumed that one means the other.
4th Wall Breaking is the ability to break the Fourth Wall, that is, to interact with elements in a story which are considered out of reach by the characters of a fictional setting by convention; such as the awareness of their own fictionality, the elements of the medium the story is displayed on, or the "script" a work is supposedly meant to follow. Given the visual nature of the power, it is most of the time a portrayal of one or several abilities, such as Mind Reading, Creation or Fate Manipulation.
As a consequence, characters with Plot Manipulation should get it removed, and have their feats moved to their "4th Wall Breaking" part if they have one and do qualify for one (unlike the "manipulating lower worlds" case).
I think it's meaningless to have such a power, even more when we have been giving it way more credit than deserved.
Let's just make things easier for everyone, and just label the powers for what they are, which is some abilities + 4th Wall breaking in the case of actual meta-story; and most of the time just "some abilities".
Also since I know it obviously is a big deal to try to remove this ability from the wiki entirely, I put it in Staff Discussion and would appreciate if it doesn't get flooded.
And as I already asked earlier: if you're making any kind of big answers, please make sure to read each point you're adressing one at a time. I'm not saying that people can't read, but any misunderstanding that can be prevented will make debates easier.
Last thing: I didn't know where to put Beiloune despite being from such a good game, so let's put it as a bonus example of "I used my powers to emulate a story so people decided that it was a new ability entirely".
Given how the vagueness of this ability has lead to each person having to make a bit of their own idea regarding it, I'll try to establish the basis of each part basing myself on what's written on our pages.
In the first part, I'll cover what our Plot Manipulation is with 3 points (covering its definition, "importance" and what grants it); and I'll explain what is the problem with all of it in second part; while giving the last problem + a solution in the third one.
What is Plot Manipulation?
Our definition
I think most people here know about it, but let's use our page's (short) summary as a basis to explain it:"Plot Manipulation is the ability to control the plot itself. Examples include altering the plot, creating/destroying stories, changing speech bubbles, changing the setting, etc. It is a variation of Reality Warping."
Basically, Plot Manipulation is the power to, well, "manipulate the plot". There's no development of what qualifies as said plot, but the common agreement is that it means "manipulating the scenario of the work the characters are in" or "the events of an in-verse lower realm" (Umineko, Magi, etc...)
First problem is that while the former is (most of the time) meta in nature; the second is mere Fate Manipulation with R/F transcendence for the user. It's something I will come back later on.
The examples of this ability are altering the plot (which is the exact same as "control the plot"), creating/destroying stories (create/destroy something with a plot), changing speech bubbles (which is shared with Breaking the Fourth Wall) and changing the setting.
Overall, Plot Manipulation is basically defined by "manipulating something related to stories" (or compared to, as we'll see later).
What is it that makes Plot Manipulation important?
This one is sadly unwritten, so I'll just use the knowledge I have on it (which should still be pretty reliable, given how I would say I'm one of the most knowledgeable member on anything meta-related).To most people, what makes Plot Manipulation important and strong is that in a story, everything is inside of its plot; so manipulating the plot is manipulating the highest possible authority in a fictional setting.
If you can erase someone from the narrative, then it's stronger than the other EEs, since they don't erase the character from the story. Same with Plot and Fate Manipulation; changing a character's fate isn't changing the story (it's just a plot twist), so changing the story is much stronger than that.
As such, since what's inside a fictional world can't affect the "plot" (or 4th Wall, as you'll see later on), the plot of a story is deemed more fundamental than the other elements.
What feats give a character Plot Manipulation?
For this one, I just decided to pick 5 verses among the most known with this ability and will explain the reasonning for their characters' Plot Manipulation:Instant Death: Some characters have an especially strong "fate value", which makes them favored by Fate and its whims. It has been compared to the characters being protagonists of their own movie.
Umineko no Naku Koro Ni: Meta Beings are on the side "that brings about fate", with the Witches who "create fate and play with it" manipulating "the side that gets tossed about by fate"/Human Domain. They see said domain as a mere gameboard.
Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou: The users can create worlds outside the main universe, which are fictional because someone created them.
The Unwritten: Everything comes from the world being Leviathan's dream, and that little guy dreams of the stories written by humanity, and whatever he dreams become true.
Homestuck: The concept of "Canon" is an in-verse concept strongly tied to relevance and a specific character's existence. Some characters can create "retcons" which change fate and rewrite causality (being outright compared to a causality-reset device in the latter case). Some other can manipulate/hijack "the narrative", which is mainly a matter of perspective and mind shitz.
Would have liked to include Marvel, SCP or DC, but I either would need to limit myself to one example or expand on the countless ones there is, which would be time-wasting.
The problem with all this
Alright, here's the complicated part. Now that we have all this, it's time to point out the problems. And since the world isn't that simple, it'll definitely be controversial and people will write big stuff.So I would ask anyone who intends to make a constructed answer to read this post at least twice, since some of the section's names and what they talk about is usually considered to be a "cheap argument". However it is, in my opinion, the most accurate way to describe the thing with Plot Manipulation and its flaws.
Metaphors and Comparisons
The first problem can be found in both Instant Death and Umineko: what stands for Plot Manipulation is actually Fate Manipulation, which happens to have a comparison/metaphor based on fiction. The same thing can be found in many other works we have here, such as Magi or Shinza Banshô.The problem here comes from the fact that what qualifies as "the plot" is unspecified and extended to "anything that is compared to a story's plot/narrative".
What we're calling Plot Manipulation here is just an already-existing ability which has been compared to a fictional example or used in a work with a heavy fiction-based metaphorical theme; so it is already a problem to have an ability that isn't one.
It also works in Unwritten's case, where yes, there's a R/F hierarchy, but everything's based on the fact that they are manipulating a being's dream, not the comics' plot. Or in Homestuck, where anything can be attributed to other abilities we have.
Writing the World
One of the most famous showing of Plot Manipulation; which I didn't include previously, is the author creating/writing their verse. With author avatars being legion, such as Toribot, Andrew Hussie, The One Above All, The Writer, etc...However in most cases it is only Creation, and not an actual ability.
Toribot is shown "creating" the verse, but he doesn't control anyone and even meet his future self in the verse (who stopped writing and is homeless iirc). Andrew Hussie is a megalomaniac who was persuaded he would be able to kill Lord English but died despite having been shown to be Homestuck's writer. TOAA, while being the creator of everything, clearly has interactions with the 4 Fantastic and Spiderman in which the characters aren't controlled by his own actions. And in the Writer's case, it is just Fate Manipulation and stuff on different scales, and things happen regardless of their own writing.
They aren't writing the actual plot of their verse, but only displays some abilities (mainly Creation or Fate Manipulation) through their art/a 4th Wall Breaking (see below).
If you think it doesn't have its place here, then you can consider it as part of the "Possible Rebuttals" part.
Equivalence
This one might be the hardest to properly explain yet is pretty important as to why I'm asking a complete removal of the ability:Unlike Fate or Luck, what exactly constitutes a "plot/narrative" is verse-dependent. As you can see with the examples above; they all have veery different reasonning as to what makes a plot/narrative/story/whatever.
To give an example of comparison, it would be like having a "Afterlife Manipulation" page. Everyone knows what a Afterlife is and every verse will have some common points between their Afterlives. However it would make no sense to make it an ability, because what an Afterlife exactly entails is entirely up to the verse. It's for similar reasons that abilities such as "Hellfire Manipulation" had been deleted.
There is no reason to keep Plot Manipulation as a power because it does not have some immutable basis like "water is wet in all of fiction unless proven otherwise"; in the same way you can't assume anything about the Afterlife of a piece of work prior to reading it.
And there's the last point that also question its utility as a whole, which is...
4th Wall Breaking
...Breaking the 4th Wall (btw I propose to rename it "4th Wall Breaking", which is better).I'll skip the first part of the summary, which is just to explain what the 4th Wall is to begin with, and focus on the wiki-made part: "However, some fictions employ the literary technique of Breaking the Fourth Wall. This includes talking to the audience, affecting the "real world", rewriting speech bubbles, acknowledging that they are part of a fictional world, and even leaving the fictional work itself and entering the "real world" (represented, obviously, by a fictionalized version of the real world)."
First thing to note is that you litteraly find a common ability with Plot Manipulation here, which is to "rewrite speech bubbles". Why there is a distinction between the two abilities doing the exact same thing isn't explained anywhere.
However it is in fact perfectly logical, since there's virtually no difference but the treatment given to them: 4th Wall Breaking is constantly repeated to be something that shouldn't be considered as OP (which is right), while Plot Manipulation is always taken as something much greater than anything else without any real reason.
We even have an entire Reality-Fiction Interaction page meant to developp on how 4th Wall Breaking is a case-by-case thing in each instance; while also giving emphasize on the fact that it's obviously not truly interacting with IRL stuff or the actual story. Plot Manipulation is somehow not included in this despite dealing with the same ideas.
We basically have an entire power which is "Plot Manipulation but we acknowledge that it's just a funny and/or aesthetic thing", which is even explained to not be anything too fantastic. But Plot Manipulation just got where it was through some assumptions that just wandered across threads.
(Also some pages such as this one have the exact same feats used for both abilities. Wasn't part of my argument but might as well throw it here).
Quick Summary
To sum it up, Plot Manipulation should, in my opinion, be deleted for the following reasons:-What is defined as "the plot" is vague. While it is mainly considered to be "the verse's plot", some characters gets it from merely manipulating the fates of lower worlds.
-Most of the time the whole "story" bit is a comparison for another power; usually Fate Manipulation.
-What the "story/plot of the verse" exactly entails is a verse-by-verse basis. It's like how things such as the Afterlife, Hellfire, or Aether can be found in several verses, but you wouldn't be able to make an ability out of it because they are just things that are a mix of several abilities based on what the verse decides.
-4th Wall Breaking already covers Plot Manipulation by nature, and the only reason we're not acknowledging it properly is a difference in treatment which has no true basis.
-Plot Manipulation is overall a quirky way to portray some abilities.
Possible Rebuttals
Some verses treat "narrative" or "story" as its own element, what about them?
Excluding the ones I previously mentionned + those that would be answered by the other points I made, there are verses where narrative-related stuff are a fundamental part of the verse.I'll only take Discworld as example, since it's the most blatant one: it possesses "Narrativium"/Narrative Causality as an element, which ensures that things go as in stories.
However once you break it down properly, it is quite easy to see what power it actually corresponds to.
The equivalent of Discworld's Narrativium is Roundworld's (our Earth) law of physics. Roundworld's laws says that water can't catch fire, and Discworld's Narrativium says that the third boy will always succeed. It's all nothing but a set of rules (Law Manipulation), which just have some meta-reflection added to them.
I took this example because it's imo the most concrete and easier to explain. Not all narrative-related stuff are Law Manipulation, but they sure can be put under other abilities.
As to why we should just put them under other abilities, this has been answered in the "Equivalence" section. In the same way a character manipulating the Afterlife or Hellfire would need to have the properties of their verse's Afterlife or Hellfire listed, the same goes for story-related elements.
Our Regeneration page treats being erased from the narrative as one of the deepest kind of erasure possible, what about it?
Our current Highly-Godly justification says that to qualify, a character has to show "The ability to regenerate after the erasure of body, mind, and soul, along with at least one even more fundamental aspect of a character's existence, such as their place in the narrative [...]"I would just say that we should remove the "their place in the narrative" and keep the other "fundamental aspect" I cut out from the sentence. If a character gets erased from a verse's narrative, then we should see how the verse treats it.
If the verse treats it as the verse getting erased across all of history, then sure, it qualifies. But it shouldn't be automatically assumed that one means the other.
My Proposal
My proposal's simple: remove Plot Manipulation from existence, and improve the current Breaking the Fourth Wall page (which should be renamed 4th Wall Breaking) with this new summary:4th Wall Breaking is the ability to break the Fourth Wall, that is, to interact with elements in a story which are considered out of reach by the characters of a fictional setting by convention; such as the awareness of their own fictionality, the elements of the medium the story is displayed on, or the "script" a work is supposedly meant to follow. Given the visual nature of the power, it is most of the time a portrayal of one or several abilities, such as Mind Reading, Creation or Fate Manipulation.
As a consequence, characters with Plot Manipulation should get it removed, and have their feats moved to their "4th Wall Breaking" part if they have one and do qualify for one (unlike the "manipulating lower worlds" case).
Conclusion
Overall, you can sum up our current Plot Manipulation as "powers that have been compared to stories or follow rules based on stories".I think it's meaningless to have such a power, even more when we have been giving it way more credit than deserved.
Let's just make things easier for everyone, and just label the powers for what they are, which is some abilities + 4th Wall breaking in the case of actual meta-story; and most of the time just "some abilities".
Also since I know it obviously is a big deal to try to remove this ability from the wiki entirely, I put it in Staff Discussion and would appreciate if it doesn't get flooded.
And as I already asked earlier: if you're making any kind of big answers, please make sure to read each point you're adressing one at a time. I'm not saying that people can't read, but any misunderstanding that can be prevented will make debates easier.
Last thing: I didn't know where to put Beiloune despite being from such a good game, so let's put it as a bonus example of "I used my powers to emulate a story so people decided that it was a new ability entirely".
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