Book Review: Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus
Book Review: Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus
Eliezer Yudkowsky returns with the most mainstream-appealing glowfic ever written, which as you'll find out doesn't actually mean much
When I read my previous reviews, there’s always the nagging thought that I’m pandering to too many people. Game Boy Color card games, Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfics… what’s next, Despacito?
To hell with the mainstream. Time to review something with an actual total worldwide audience of seventeen.1 Let me tell you about an as-of-yet unfinished 6500-post glowfic.
Almost every content warning you can think of applies, this story is very much +18.
First, what is a glowfic?
Many have tried and failed to define that word. There’s a TVTropes page for glowfics, but to quote a Hot Topic Mall Goth acquaintance of mine:
So here’s my own quotable definition,2 a definition so good even Google can parse it and put it as the top result for glowfic and ruin the secret club3 for everyone:
A Glowfic is:
Live, public roleplaying on a forum. Person A and Person B collaboratively create a story by taking turns writing posts, and if you’re really lucky, more letters will join in at some point. Person A and Person B each play a set of characters. For example, Eliezer plays Keltham, the god Asmodeus and the world-saving slave Broom, among many other characters, while Lintamande gets the other half of the cast, including Carissa.
A sample of the most recently updated glowfics. Notice most have two or three main authors, and the word continuity. “Planecrash” at the bottom is the Mad Investor Chaos continuity This form of roleplaying lets you use facecasts, which you can think of as the sprites of a visual novel,4 but most of the time they’re random stills from Hollywood/TV actors. They will show up as the post’s avatar and are chosen based on the current character’s emotions. This almost always means one forum post per line of dialogue, however.5
The facecasts for Keltham, including those classic scenes where he turns into an elephant Glowfics tend to focus on unique viewpoint characters and often unique settings and crossovers, avoiding the general roleplaying tendency to self-insert as popular characters. Thanks to network effects I’m not going to get into here,6 many of the themes are aligned to those seen in rational fiction. Think of the archetypical glowfic as a really smart and serious girl having a bunch of conversations with Lord of the Rings characters and trying to figure out how the setting’s magic works in practice, only to then exploit it.
I need to stress how important conversations are. By virtue of the format involved, virtually all the exposition needs to be requested and received on-screen in “real time” by the protagonists. This makes every glowfic a talky affair, action rare, and romance common. Glowfic readers will say that’s the point.
Some dialogue from Mad Investor Chaos. Most glowfic looks like this, posts on a forum Nearly every main character and world is reused later in other glowfics, maybe best showcased by the Effulgence continuity. Even if the characters are not the same, character archetypes from previous stories sometimes show up, like they’re reincarnated across settings.
They have a loose association to Alicorn’s Luminosity (yes, this is where the name comes from, Luminosity being a Twilight fanfic and the first glowfics themselves being fanfics of Luminosity) and the novel’s main character Bella Swan. Alicorn is the inventor and most prolific glowfic writer, but I feel this background fact explains approximately nothing while also being the most well-known factoid for some reason. It’s exactly like the deal with Terminator and the field of AI Safety.
Maybe the most important fact of all, I haven’t actually ever managed to finish a single one. Glowfics are long.7 I’ve only gotten far into two of them, both co-written by Eliezer. I think he’s got a flair for the dramatic that synergizes with both roleplaying and narrative, or maybe I just really miss HPMOR. Most of the others I’ve tried are either opaquely weird, repetitive, too horny, or blatantly more interesting for the roleplayers than the audience, which is fair, and dare I say it, valid.
Yeah I just called glowfics long after writing all that shit, sue me. Let’s get back on the topic of the specific fic that we (I) care about.
The Story As It Appears to Be
Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus is a story set in the Pathfinder setting (essentially the medieval setting of a less generic brand of Dungeons and Dragons). It’s almost a self-insert, but Keltham, one of our main characters, is a human from dath ilan8, a quirky Rationalist planet, and not literally Eliezer Yudkowsky. In fact, he’s kind of a shitty example of a dath ilani, far, far more chaotic and selfish than average.
Keltham dies in a plane crash and gets sent to this Pathfinder world, Golarion. Specifically, he lands in Cheliax, which is a small part of that whole Avistan continent you can see above. None of this matters. What does matter is that Cheliax is a Lawful Evil country, a ruthless religious dictatorship at the service of the god Asmodeus,9 who loves contracts as a minor part of his domain of pain and suffering.
The entire story will revolve around hiding those simple facts from Keltham. In fact, at its core, Mad Investor Chaos is a farce, a work where Satan himself is trying to tempt a rationalist into becoming evil while being unable to directly hurt him or reveal itself.10
Asmodeus and Carissa (who he meets right after arriving)’s strategy to corrupt Keltham from Good-poisoned Lawful Neutral into Evil is to take advantage of his repressed dominant urges, and, eventually, have him mistreat Carissa enough to qualify for hell. To Keltham, “Good” means manipulation, emotionless utilitarianism and the bad parts of “the greater good”, while “Evil” means good business sense and libertarian everyone-for-themselves societies. This is not at all how it works in Golarion, Pathfinder, Dungeons and Dragons, or anywhere, in fact, but it’s a misunderstanding the Asmodeans are only too happy to confirm.
It’s original to be sure, but it’s overloaded with a sexual thematic that hurts it a little. Don’t get me wrong, the reader is given enough warnings about it, but I’m sure one or both of the writers are really into BDSM, or at least writing about it, and it’s slowly becoming a personally annoying pattern with Yudkowsky’s work—at least if you think he’s the writer behind The Erogamer, which had very similar issues.11 This is just added on to the pile of evidence.
Anyway, while that’s the overall plot, the story goes places. Maybe I should go in chronological order? Let’s do this.
Keltham has his thoughts unwittingly read right after arriving to Golarion. The thoughts are “wow, this world would really benefit from my genes and I can leverage this to get rich and powerful”. The bad guys’ obvious move would be to instantly enslave Keltham and force him to have children, then. Unfortunately, Asmodeus is not the only god, and a series of clusterfucks and lack of key information force Fantasy Satan into making a deal with the God of Fair Deals, Abadar—neither he nor his followers are to directly hurt the guy. In fact, he can leave the country if he wants at any point.
But something strange is clearly happening. And it would be a huge wasted opportunity if this mortal ended up being squished by Asmodeans before it could, at least, tell other mortals some things that Abadar hasn't been allowed to explain directly.
But if Abadar calls up Asmodeus and offers to buy the avoidance of squishing this particular squirrel, might that not call the attention of Asmodeus down upon this squirrel, in exactly the way that the squirrel might (on some hypotheses) have been trying to avoid by deliberately not asking Abadar for clerichood?
Abadar sends a brief packet to Asmodeus which might translate as:
Hey, Asmodeus. I want to reveal information relevant to negotiating a potential gainful trade, where that information itself might otherwise worsen my negotiating position for the trade, on the standard condition that you promise not to use that information to implement strategies that lead to worse outcomes than would have obtained in the counterfactual where I stayed silent, as evaluated by either my utility function or by the best-guess probable utility function of another party who revealed that information to me.
So tempting and slowly corrupting Keltham, while driving useful lessons out of him and not telling him about the deal, is the way to go for Asmodeus’ followers. The gods of Golarion think in a way that reminds them of Keltham, and their ultimate goal is to be more like their god. Keltham liked Carissa, the first woman he meets, so she’ll be the first of many, many attractive women magicians that are coincidentally hanging around as his research group in case he has any questions.
Over time, Keltham teaches these girls the Methods of Rationality, but, honestly? These lessons are kind of copypasted from Yudkowsky’s blog posts, to the point of often having multiple links to them. Some of them are interesting…
KELTHAM: What sort of precautions should you take, when trying to create new strains of corn using a clever new method nobody's tried before? […] Feed the corn to mice before you fed it to humans, sure. But then, besides asking 'What precautions should I take?', one should perhaps first ask, 'What exactly could go wrong in the first place?' What could potentially go wrong with trying to create a new strain of corn? How could there be a disaster, not just a minor stumble, from trying to create a new strain of corn?
This is a question Chelish wizards are spectacularly good at answering.
"It happens to be really good for a certain kind of pest, and they grow to ten times their usual size and eat everyone in the village."
"It smells irresistible to dragons."
"It angers the fae."
"It's so much more fertile than all other corn that it gets carried away on the wind and grows everywhere, blotting out all other life, until nothing grows anywhere on the continent but corn."
"It's great for a couple years but it's sucking all the vitality out of the soil and leaves only sand behind."
"It lures maneating rats from the Underdark and then the infestation is impossible to root out."
"It grows six hundred feet in height and angers the aerial dragons."
"Locusts that lay their eggs in it have an unnaturally high survival rate and so instead of occasional clouds of locusts we have constant clouds of locusts and they blot out the sun."
"It's addictive and once you've eaten it you can't eat anything else."
"It disrupts the flow of magical energies through the land beneath its roots and remaps all the ley lines in Cheliax, which causes a bunch of adjustment hurricanes and strands half the towns on the royal line."
"It develops impossible geometry - the kind where looking at it gives you a headache - and anyone who wanders into the field come harvest time is lost forever."
"It requires so much water that it sucks up water for hundreds of miles around, turning half of central Cheliax to desert."
"It's actually just mediocre corn but with mind-control to make you think it's really great corn, and we're convinced we succeeded and plant it everywhere at which point it's powerful enough to enslave the whole country."
…but the majority, especially when they get into economics and have a tongue-in-cheek section about how Eliezer’s theory wasn’t accepted by economists just because he didn’t have a degree… they really bring you out of the story. There are in fact many meta-wink-wink moments like this.
Carissa starts really getting the gist of his lessons, though, and while she’s a loyal Asmodean, she convinces herself she’s onto something—she’s going to invent Lawful Evil Rationalism, take Keltham’s weapons for her own, and this way she’ll reconcile her budding feelings for him with her actual satanic loyalty. This makes the bad guys really confused.
CARISSA: Keltham noticed that no one in Cheliax indicates how they feel during classes by looking distressed, and inferred from this that no one would indicate how they felt during sex by looking distressed, and that bothered him on some kind of principle that - so I think it did not in fact occur to him that one could simply not really care if people are secretly distressed, he instead concluded that we've got some extremely clever way to notice secret distress despite everyone hiding it, and was worried that not knowing this himself he'd fail to notice I was distressed, if I was, and I swear I didn't give him any reason to think I would be, he's just like this. And the problem with trying to lie to him is that which facts about the world are inferrable from which other ones is completely sideways for him, I'm genuinely worried that if I'd just said 'oh, normally people are really good at reading lip twitches, but I'll just tell you', then something else would've gone horribly wrong because he made a bunch of inferences from our presumed use of lip twitches - he was really confused about the fact people don't look distressed at each other on purpose, he felt like it was broken, a norm that shouldn't be able to persist in existing. And I have no idea what I'm allowed to tell him about anything and I'd rather as much as possible tell him the truth because of the sideways inferences problem but I haven't gotten any guidance on which things, specifically, I should lie about, besides Hell and I'm separately worried that if I just sleep with him, which I'd really really like to, and then later explain the thing where some people solve the inference problem by simply not caring how the other party is doing, then he'll be - he won't endorse having slept with me without knowing that.
Ferrer Maillol may need to go get his own notebook for this one. He taps his fingers, again, to show that he's thinking.
FERRER: I'm afraid that after hearing your analysis of Keltham, I have some absolutely terrible news for you about my opinion of your competence to handle this issue. […] My opinion is that, even after reading the transcripts of everything Keltham said in his lessons, I have no fucking idea what you're talking about. If you understand what the fuck you just said to me, then you are, in fact, the most qualified person inside this villa to make the call as to what to tell Keltham and when.
Carissa seems to always know what to say to Keltham, but he’s an alien to everyone else—dath ilani are weird even to us earthlings, let alone a medieval society. For example, Keltham is completely clueless to all innuendo that includes beds, since in his planet they have a separate room for sex, and beds are for sleeping only. They don’t have kissing, and they’ve got a specific language for romance that precludes subtlety and subtext. They know literary tropes but are kind of bad at understanding how stupid people act in real life.
Also, Keltham really, really likes talking in circles and justifying things from game theoretical and economist perspectives, which is all kinds of a mood killer. Hard to corrupt someone who’s protective of his genetic material and wants to make sure everyone is getting an equitable share of pleasure.
Regardless, Carissa’s unique understanding of him makes it so she keeps climbing through the ranks of the conspiracy, while Keltham remains unaware to all of it. He’s got the smarts, but he’s lacking Sufficiently Advanced Magic.
While all this takes place, the gods play their machiavellian games (they’re something of a rationalist themselves) over who gets Keltham, or how they can use his advanced technology, discoveries or social changes to fuck over other gods they don’t like. They’re essentially opportunists, and eventually one of them, the Lawful Evil god Zon-Kuthon, who’s literally known for liking torture and little else, decides to attack Keltham’s research center.
This attack forces Keltham, Carissa, and a couple other relevant characters to move to the Royal Palace. Around this time, we properly meet Queen Abrogail Thrune.
She’s both the worst offender for unnecessary sexual undertones and the best offender for comedy, being both incredibly evil and incredibly immature in her own thoughts. She’s Carissa’s foil in the bad guys’ side, and honestly, I’m having trouble describing her, so here’s a quote from Carissa’s internal dialogue:
Whenever Carissa's around Keltham she gets confused about the nature of Evil. It's because the version she gave him just - fits better into a pathetic human mind? In hindsight it's obvious that trying to destroy the world might seem Good, that Rovagug cultists certainly would be, principled believers that the world should be devoured at their own expense. And the observable fact about the world that almost everyone ends up Evil makes more sense if Evil is about selfishness or lack of altruism than it does with the understanding that Evil is - well, Abrogail Thrune. Carissa is pretty sure this thought will end up in a transcript for Abrogail Thrune tomorrow so hi, Abrogail Thrune, please don't turn me into a statue, Abrogail Thrune, I am suffering in your service very diligently, Abrogail Thrune, but most people are not Abrogail Thrune. Most people are not even weak pale shadows of Abrogail Throne. Tyranny, slavery, pride, contracts - most people kind of just bumble along being weak and pathetic and Carissa is confused about 1) how any of them make Law and 2) how any of them make Evil.
And one from Abrogail’s own thoughts:
And now Keltham is thinking about how the other possibility would've played out, whether he could commit suicide using a Create Water cantrip or other tools that his god could unilaterally give him. But Cheliax could just raise you, then, poor fool; Miracle doesn't require consent. The only danger would be if Abadar could instruct Osirion to raise Keltham before Cheliax could, and Cheliax would know it was in a race and they would have that information first -
Now Keltham is also thinking about Raise Dead, and thinking about the story Carissa gave him about oaths, and how he could if necessary break an oath over something trivial, unilaterally in a way that nobody else depended on so it wouldn't actually violate the ~~~~~~~~~~, and so go to Abaddon.
Keltham expects to - just end up somewhere else, if he did that? But he knows he might not and this doesn't faze him. He'd literally rather go to Abaddon than comply. True death doesn't scare him as much as it scares some dath ilani, he's thinking now, and - he's not even imagining Cheliax severely torturing him in a scary way to which he'd prefer nonexistence, the thought that they could break him with torture still hasn't occurred to him, he'd just walk out on this entire universe and existence itself rather than accept a forced unfair division of gains from trade, because if you can't do that, why would anybody bother bargaining fairly with you.
He wouldn't actually have been able to do it, if Cheliax was running Detect Thoughts on him, and not otherwise restrained by Asmodeus. They've ever had experience with uncooperative torture victims. You don't instantly end up in Abaddon and instantly get eaten.
...but maybe, just maybe, Abrogail feels the tiniest shred of respect for Keltham at this point. That degree of 'fuck you' is something she can appreciate.
Of course now she wants even more to see what Keltham's mind would look like when it broke, but Asmodeus said not to do that so she won't.
Also, Pathfinder, Queen Throne? Really?
Anyway, there’s some mild palace intrigue and negotiations between a disguised Abrogail and Keltham (whose thoughts are being partially read by the queen, as you can see in the above paragraph), and it culminates into a cool scene that I don’t really want to spoil, but Abrogail totally gets schooled by her superiors and colleagues, who have definitely had enough of her attitude, and Keltham falls a bit into Evil. Abrogail has a showdown with Carissa afterwards, and the story moves on to a new location, where the “gameplay loop” of lessons-and-dialogue is bound to start again.
There are a lot of new viewpoints, including some of the Keltham-bait girls, as well as the prince of the region of the God of Fair Deals I mentioned a while back (they want to take their Chosen One from Asmodeus or at least understand what the fuck is going on). The intrigue is going international.
And the story is currently there, updating constantly.
Conclusions
It’s kind of a mess.12
Some of it is understandable—the glowfic format has some inherent drawbacks, especially pacing, and that’s going to hamper any story.
Most of it isn’t, though. My criticism on the overbearing BDSM thematics stands. I haven’t quoted any particularly egregious examples, but just trust me. I’m certain the writers and many readers are getting something from it that I don’t. To me, it just makes some otherwise stellar chessmaster plots become repetitive and boring.
But I read it all. How? Why? As I mentioned before, I really miss the author’s previous work, but that can’t be all of it. There are some great moments, but not often enough. I think there’s something here, a seed of novelty that you won’t find in any other story. If I had to boil it down to a single spoilerless fact, it’s how both Lintamande and Yudkowsky are both playing very alien characters, as opposed to the usual “human or human-with-a-coat-of-paint vs obvious-villain” affair.
In fact, those two characters are really likable, as well as the supporting cast.13 This story really would be unreadable otherwise. Their inner thoughts and complex plots, fully exposed to the reader, also makes them feel real in a way that you often only see in rational fiction, which this definitely is.
That alone prevents me from simply giving it a 6/10, recommending against it and going about my day. In fact, I’m not putting any big score on this review. Did you think anything I mentioned sounded original, interesting, unique even? Go give it a try. I don’t regret having done it.
You will like this book if you love: Intrigue, roleplaying, Pathfinder, tabletop ethical debates, DnD alignments, comic farces, spies, Death Note, dramatic irony, BDSM, Yudkowksy writing, alien morality, original formats.
You will dislike this book if you hate: Slow pacing, flip-flopping tonality, meta segments, the forum format, Rationalism, author tract, magical-realming, Yudkowsky writing.
Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus and subsequent Planecrash threads are available at Glowfic.com.14
That’s really, really high for an average glowfic.
I’m only a casual so take this definition with a grain of salt, some of it is secondhand, but I did make the effort to click on five random additional ones during the writing of this review just to see if I was missing anything. This is almost like a doctoral thesis.
The community is actually super nice and has zero drama so I feel a non-zero amount of bad for shining any kind of spotlight on it.
Sometimes I make terrible comparisons and think “this will make people mad” and leave them in on purpose.
Of course, if Keltham is talking to one of Eliezer’s other characters, like Ione, he can write both their dialogues in the same post just fine. But even then, internal monologue is something reserved to posts as the monologuing character, so posts are rarely if ever long. “Narration” is something that happens sometimes, as well as posts by random NPCs that don’t warrant a name and image.
Not gonna get into it here either, go back.
I guess I can use this footnote to randomly mention, from the future in 2024, that the actor I used for my “fanart” isn’t even the same one in the Glowfic, just a similar looking guy from the same show. Whoops.
Okay, the one I’m reviewing right now isn’t finished, so I guess it doesn’t count. For the record, the other one was team tyler’s van, his first glowfic ever.
Never capitalized, this setting first came to life in an out-of-character April Fools Facebook message by Yudkowsky (mirrored on Tumblr here), who revealed himself as an alien from that planet, trying to reintroduce the basic concepts taught to him as a child to our irrational society. It's slightly funnier than I’m making it sound.
There are many, many gods, each using the classic Lawful→Chaotic|Good→Bad scales we all know and love. Notably, there is more than one god per alignment, ranging from the aforementioned Literal Satan to unimaginably obscure gods that people don’t know or care about. This is a Pathfinder thing .
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this most enjoyable aspect of the work shares similarities with Harry and Quirrell’s relationship in HPMOR.
I didn’t want to get into it but people keep being confused by this paragraph. To be clear, there is no issue with a story named The Erogamer featuring BDSM, but I think ideally it should have merely been one of many sexual aspects of the story. Unfortunately, it became the main focus of it by the end, to the detriment of everything else.
Kind of wanted to call this section pre-mortem, but people might assume that’s what an actual part of the story is called. The pains of review writing.
Props to Ferrer Maillol, a spymaster guy that manages to display a broad and hilarious range of emotions with just this face and stellar writing.
If you’re interested in making your own glowfics, you can create an account by searching the Glowfic Discord for the account creation code, an exploit that might be patched five seconds after I release this—most likely they don’t care.
There are in fact multiple pieces of canonical Pathfinder art of Abrogail, and that is to the best of my knowledge canonical Pathfinder art, for the record.
I have some very important and crucial questions, which "why would the presence of BDSM in a story named Erogamer be an issue?", "surely if such a work were *not* "overloaded with a sexual thematic", that would be an issue??" and "does the story entitled The Erogamer have noteworthy aspects *other* than its sexual thematics???"