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Originally Posted by Kealym
I can't quote a specific source, but I think someone (possibly Lambda) mentioned, or maybe it was implied, that using the red truth in certain ways was "vulgar" or "unrefined", and thus looked down upon and avoided, like using it to predict the future. It sort of fits the whole author thing to the degree that "If you say something about the future of your series, you have to keep your word, and you might create a situation that's hard to write your way out of". Like, bad example, Miss Rowling had red truth'd early on Dumbledore will not die during the series. I mean, I guess you can, but why place that kind of arbitrary limitation on yourself, unless it's someting like the Decalogue, which serves to prove you're "playing fair" with your readers? [/COLOR]
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This is categorically possible; a Logic Error literally could not exist unless apparently contradictory red truth is permissible. Exactly why some things can't be said in red, even by a Game Master, is not something I'll get into right now (in no small part because I don't want to think about it). But it's clearly possible to create a scenario in which you, as the writer, state two things as absolute fact (essentially Word of God, to borrow the trope) which cannot be true.
For example, if I write a story about a man who lives alone on an alien planet, and then a woman appears before him and they get married and settle down. I declare the following things to be red truth:
- The man was the only human being living on the planet.
- No person ever landed on the planet while the man was there.
- The woman definitely became the man's wife.
This is obviously contradictory, and in the Erika fashion my reader could "move to declare" a Logic Error, on the basis that my story makes no sense
because of the things I as the author have assured the reader are true. The burden of escaping then falls on me. For example, I can say something like "
the woman who became his wife was a robot, so she wasn't a 'human being.'" It may salvage my story, but it might also turn the reader off from trusting me.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Kealym
Dlanor declared that certain things would NEVER exist, IIRC - they're just generally avoided as a rule, because they can make things awkward as the tale gets longer and more restricted by what came before.
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Her phrasing was more along the lines of "that doesn't exist in this story
and I will not allow it to exist in this story." That's not so much a prediction as a statement of her intent. Essentially she's saying "robots and teleporters and magic pills and aliens will not exist in this story as long as I have anything to say about it." Since her power seems to be the ability to violently and directly enforce the Decalogue, this is so.
However, if someone were somehow more powerful than her, her prediction would falter. Exactly what that means on a meta-fictional level is probably not worth worrying about, but as an example you have something like Asimov's robot stories, which feature a level of technology that can technically follow Knox's rules while also having things like starships and robots in them due to their setting.
A clever writer could "write around" Dlanor's objections with the right kind of story, not actually breaking Knox but essentially trivializing the rules by incorporation. Or an amazingly skilled writer could outright
break those rules intentionally to show off his or her mastery of the mystery genre. Some people have broken every convention of the mystery genre before (to varying success), so it's not unimaginable that on a meta-level those authors would have been able to "defeat" Dlanor even if she stood in opposition to them.