#like fantasy plot level weird

[jack-daww]

As both a writer and someone interested in science, I would like to remind you that you can use any random knowledge you have for writing.

Use what you know to make your world more interesting! Use it to fill that world. Purposefully change things in worldbuilding.

The more you know, the more you can choose to keep or change when building a world.

This especially works for science, but any other field as well! There are so many things in the world too weird and/or crazy for it to be real. Use that.

So take a random bit of knowledge you have and put it in your story. Maybe you can even make it a prompt!

[limerental]

actually it is kinda funny that BO's plot is essentially "gang of misfits come together on a quest and save the day" given that that's also the plot of the saga except they a) don't save the day and b) well

[thehardkandy]

finished a memory called empire and my closing feeling is mostly the same as my feelings at the 3/5 mark. no significant problems from the book, just doesn't click much. going to shelve continuing with the series

[thebibliosphere]

since u hv EDS, i was wondering how do you feel about the portrayal of it in fourth wing? i dont hv EDS myself but ive seen people say that the fact that violet literally falls from her dragon mid air and then is cuaght would dislocate the hell out of her hips and that doesnt happen. which is weird considering that yarros has EDS herself. like youd think she'd know better right? idk what do u think as a writer also with EDS?

I think Yarros is entitled to write whatever escapist fantasy she likes about how she experiences her own disability, but unfortunately, the book gives me the ick on multiple levels.

It's very... disability rep circa the early 2000s...

The disability only affects her when it can be used for angst or to make a point of how small and fragile she is next to the big, strong male love interest (ick). And the rest of the time, she's an unstoppable badass who can fall out of the sky and ride a dragon and be just fine! Except for when there's a plot reason or a man around. Then she's made of spun glass and needs to be handled with care.

At least make it make sense, y'know?

It also needed a better editor, tbh. My writer/editor brain kept flagging issues with the pacing and the tone.

Honestly, based on stylistic tone, it feels like it was meant to be a YA (not a bad thing), but because the publisher is a romance house, they jammed sex into it to make it appeal to an adult audience. It's jarring.

Anyway. Yeah. Not a fan. Sorry to anyone who likes it 😅

It's just very not much my cup of tea as a fellow disabled author with EDS who can't turn the EDS off when it's convenient.

[txttletale]

Do you have recs for combatless rpgs? sorry if someones asked this ! im getting into ttrpgs now and its just pretty hard to find anything non combat focused ?

i recommended wanderhome (melancholy animal roadtrip), dream askew (queer postapocalyptic survival), microscope (collaborative worldbuilding), and crescent moon (kids learning and growing in a fantasy land) in resposne to an ask earlier today. other great rpgs that aren't combat focused include:

chuubo's marvelous wish-granting engine: i'll level with you, if you're just getting into rpgs this one might be A Lot because it's quite mechanically complex. but it's a beautiful game about having ghibliesque coming-of-age adventures in a surreal dreamy world.

nobilis is by the same person (jenna moran, a genuine game design pioneer and genius) -- it's about being godlets, the living embodiments of concepts from the concrete to the abstract. you might find yourself fighting in this game, but it's unlikely to look anything like 'combat'.

brindlewood bay, which is about being elderly women investigating murders.

pasión de las pasiones, a pbta (powered by the apocalypse) game about doing ridiculous romance drama shit based on telenovelas

monsterhearts, about teenaged monsters having weird drama and exploring their sexuality. think buffy or twilight, but queerer

pigsmoke, about being professors at a college of magic and competing to see who can publish the best paper (yes, really)

the girlfriend of my girlfriend is my friend, about... i mean i think the title makes it pretty clear! being gay and poly and kinda broke

it's been a long, long, time, about two people who used to date, their relationship, their lives after it, and their reunion

sagas of the icelanders, about being viking settlers in iceland during the saga period and playing out quasimythical dramas

hieronymous, about being a bunch of sinners making your way across hieronymous bosch's garden of earthly delights

thousand year old vampire, a solo journalling game about being a vampire and living through long stretches of history

blow up hamlet, where your table performs hamlet while changing the plot and improvising new plot beats at semi-random

slugblaster, about being rowdy teens hoverboarding through interdimensional rifts in the spirit of 90s teen movies

woo! that's a fuckin' lot of ttrpgs, but i wanted to give a lot of suggestions because i think it's so important for people getting into the hobby to understand the breadth of games out there and how far from the popular image created by D&D they can go! there are two-player and GM-less and even one-player games on this list. you can do anything! the world of rpgs is so fucking wide and beautiful. good luck and i hope you find something that speaks to you!

(oh, also, my game, most trusted advisors -- about being the untrustworthy privy council to a dipshit king and falling over each other's nested dipshit schemes -- has no combat in it. just saying!)

[abalidoth]

what is cosmere? (is that what its called?)

The Cosmere is a big, interconnected fantasy universe that is the setting of most of the works by the author Brandon Sanderson. The cool thing about his books is that each series is contained to its own world, and you can read any of them in isolation without realizing you're missing anything, but if you read them all you get a sense of the larger plot happening behind the scenes as those worlds start to collide and things cross over.

Brandon's magic systems tend to be very rule-based and well-defined, with a lot of twists being characters finding interesting ways to use those rules of magic. This lends itself well to the crossovers, because all the magic systems (as different as they are) share the same underpinning principles.

Here's some quick rundowns of different series and standalones in the Cosmere:

The Stormlight Archive

Planned ten-book series, currently four books are out.

A massive sprawling epic about the world Roshar, that's hit by a hurricane about every four days, and all the life has adapted to survive that environment. Knights Radiant -- superpowered individuals with a close bond to a spirit -- are starting to re-emerge in the world after being absent for centuries.

Because there are so many characters, this is where a lot of the character fandom tends to focus their efforts. I wouldn't recommend starting with it, though -- the first book alone is a thousand pages. I'd wait until you have a sense of Brandon's writing. But it's very good.

Mistborn

One trilogy (completed), one tetralogy set a couple hundred years later (completed), two trilogies some time in the future.

One cool thing about this series is that it follows one world (Scadrial) from a vaguely Renaissance tech level in the first trilogy, to 1920s in the second series, and eventually 1980s in the third and space-age magic in the fourth.

The magic itself is very intricate and all woven around metals -- there are people called Metalborn who can ingest metals and burn them in their stomachs to get different effects, including super-senses, strength, and Magneto-ish metallokinesis. That last bit makes the gunfights in the second series particularly fun.

The first book is a heist novel about robbing a thousand-year-old God-Emperor blind. It's a pretty good place to start, although it's a pretty hefty novel to start with.

The Emperor's Soul

I'm putting this one in a different category from the rest of the one-offs for a very good reason -- it's, in my opinion, the single best place to start reading the Cosmere.

It's a novella (just over a hundred pages) about a forger named Shai who uses magic to rewrite the histories of objects. She is captured by the government of an empire to reforge the soul of their Emperor, who has been left braindead after an assassination attempt, in the 100 days before the mourning period is over.

It's a fantastic meditation on art, a cool introduction to the way Brandon writes both characters and magic systems, and Shai herself is one of my favorite Cosmere characters. If any of this sounds at all interesting to you, I recommend you check it out.

One-offs

Brandon has also written a bunch of one-off novels in the Cosmere.

Elantris: His first book, and the one that my tattoo is from. About a prince who is affected by a dark transformation and thrown into a city of fellow undead, and the princess betrothed to him who arrives just in time to be told he died. Good, but suffers from some first book issues, pacing problems, and weird plot cul-de-sacs. Set in the same world as The Emperor's Soul, although there's basically no crossover.

Warbreaker: About a world where souls (Breaths) are bought and sold, and used to animate objects to do work, ruled by The Returned, living gods who require a steady dose of Breaths to live. One of my favorites, and an essential if you'd like to get into the crossover-y parts of the cosmere, as it introduces a bunch of elements that show up later (Especially in Stormlight)

Tress of the Emerald Sea: The first of his wildly successful Kickstarter project books, it's a fairy tale style story about a girl who braves a sea of bubbling, deadly spores to rescue the man she loves. It's lovely, especially if you're into a more Diana Wynne Jones kind of vibe to your fantasy. Probably a pretty good place to start!

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter: The third Kickstarter book. About a shrine priestess who stacks rocks to draw spirits, and a man who paints the nightmares that roam the streets of his city to banish them -- they become trapped in each other's places and must learn about each other's worlds to survive. This is currently my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE cosmere novel, oh my GOD it's so good. I'm not sure it's a great place to start, as a lot of the conclusion might feel a bit rushed if you don't have a good feel for the vibe of how Brandon writes magic, but honestly it might stand alone just fine even then.

The Sunlit Man: Fourth Kickstarter book. I haven't read this one yet.

Novellas: There are a bunch of novellas and short stories, some set on worlds we haven't otherwise seen, some set on Roshar or Scadrial.

If any of this sounds good to you, I recommend you give his writing a shot. He's one of my all time favorite writers (the tattoo should prove that, lol) and the Cosmere fandom is by and large wonderful and welcoming. I've made many lifelong friendships there.

[electronickingdomfox]

"The New Voyages" review

This one is actually a collection of short stories by fan authors, which makes the stories seem more like episodes of the series. It has also the distinct honor of being introduced by Roddenberry and most members of the cast. The stories are generally well-written and in character.

Some spoilers ahead:

Ni Var (by Claire Gabriel; intro by Nimoy) takes the plot of "The Enemy Within", but applied to Spock and the division between his Vulcan rational part, and his human emotional part. Besides the fact that I'm not sure such division works at that biological level, the two Spocks aren't all that different really. And it's not a very novel concept, specially right after a similar plot in previous book "Spock must die". But bonus points for Kirk giving the middle finger to his own reflection.

Intersection Point (by Juanita Coulson; intro by Doohan) is one of the best stories. The Enterprise is seriously crippled while navigating through an anomaly cloud, which is quickly contracting and threatens to crush the entire ship. Anyone who enters the cloud to retrieve a crucial component of the ship, is mentally destroyed by its eldritch qualities. Great tension and difficult choices.

The Enchanted Pool (by Marcia Ericson; intro by Nichols) is an attempt to write a fairy tale with Spock thrown in the middle for good measure. A bit of purple prose, and doesn't quite work. The resolution of the mistery is ingenous, even when convoluted.

Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited (by Ruth Berman; intro by Barrett) is actually the other half of a fanfic (Visit to a Weird Planet, not published here) where Kirk, Spock and Bones end up in the real world, right in the studio where they're filming Star Trek. Here instead, we follow the actors, who appear in the Enterprise and have to improvise to avert a danger. The other story was more fun, since Kirk and co. are more clumsy and hilarious in our world (being even "attacked" by fans), while the actors are just slightly less competent than their counterparts.

The Face on the Barroom Floor (by Eleanor Arnason and Ruth Berman; intro by Takei) is a really fun story. Kirk gets into a fight in a bar while in shore leave, is detained, teams up with a ratty thief, and crashes a party, while his crew search for him frantically. In the line of TOS best comedy-adventure episodes.

The Hunting (by Doris Beetem; intro by the editors) is a bit "meh". Spock goes into a Vulcan ritual which requires to mind-meld with a wild beast, and McCoy accompanies him. When Spock goes wild in the process, the good doctor has to hunt him and give him back his sanity. There could have been a more homoerotic fight between them, as in "Amok Time".

The Winged Dreamers (by Jennifer Guttridge; intro by Kelley) is another high point. The Enterprise crew falls under the influence of some creatures that make their fantasies seem real. So real that people can actually die if imagining the wrong thing. Spock is less affected, but slowly begins to hallucinate too, and the triumvirate fall into paranoia as neither they (nor the reader) can tell what's real and what's not anymore.

Mind-Sifter (by Shirley Maiewski; intro by Shatner) drags a bit at the beginning, when Kirk wakes up in a sanatory, his mind almost destroyed. It gets more interesting once Spock and McCoy start a quest to search for him. Great interactions between these two, reminiscent of "The Tholian Web".

After the eight stories there's still a little poem about Spock and Leila.

Spirk Meter: 10/10*. Not all stories are equally slashy, but the parts which do, are slashy in spades.

Ni Var has Kirk worrying about Spock all the time, and "human Spock" wondering if what he feels for the Captain is friendship... or love (something which happens too in one of Roddenberry's story concepts for a movie, around this time).

Intersection Point has a clear parallel between the anguish of a female crewmember, after a man (obviously her boyfriend) loses his mind in the anomaly, and Kirk agonizing once Spock has to enter the same anomaly.

The Enchanted Pool, where Spock refuses to kiss a beautiful female time and time again. Even when the woman assures him it's the only way to break a spell and escape. Even when Spock is doing far more dangerous things ALL THE TIME to solve problems. Of course, he considers the kiss a total waste of time once it doesn't work.

The Face on the Barroom Floor: Kirk is invited to a bar by McCoy and Sulu, who have found three women to pass the time, one for each. What does Kirk do? He gets out the bar two seconds later, puts on a samurai costume, and goes instead to a bar full of muscular, rowdy men, to get thrashed by them. Of course.

The Winged Dreamers has Spock wishing to stay on a planet with Kirk, just the two of them, for ever and ever. McCoy totally gets what's going on.

And I thought that Mind-Sifter would be about the love between a (quite unproffesional) nurse, and her mentally unstable patient, Kirk. But oh man, where do I even begin!? For starters, we have Kirk using his mind link with Spock to cry for help, across the galaxy and several centuries. And later he's concerned about how much can Spock read into his mind. Then we have McCoy informing the nurse that no, Kirk can't stay with her, because his love is his career and his... (trails off, having said too much). Gallant Spock carries an unconscious Kirk in his arms, and tells the nurse that, no matter how much she loves him, Kirk DOES NOT love her back (bitch!). If that wasn't enough, there's a lenghty conversation at the end, where Kirk almost melts in love and appreciation for Spock, and the Vulcan blushes at his own emotional display.

*A 10 in this scale is the most obvious spirk moments in TOS. Think of the back massage, "You make me believe in miracles", or "Amok Time" for example.

[physalian]

Physalian’s Curated Tips on Worldbuilding Megapost

Some of these are *not* mine, they’re from author Randy Ellefson, I’m just interpreting the tips I like in my own words. These specifically come from his book, 185 Tips on World Building. I don’t agree with all of them, because he tends to read as a “you must do this specific thing to be successful,” which is limiting and doesn’t consider when elements work because they’re different, these books are also in the “throw all your eggs in one basket” camp for your one series/mythos, instead of different worlds for different universes.

Ellefson also disagrees with my argument of “everything you build doesn’t have to serve a purpose”. Verbatim, in his book, he says: “There’s no reason to invent something if we don’t have a plan for it.” Which, sorry, no. Easter eggs and details purely for fluff in a one-off sentence make your world feel real.

That said, he does have some useful nuggets I’ll paraphrase below, and some I just went off-book entirely.

1. Pacing your Workflow

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and sitting down to hash out all the elements of your world in one sitting and never deviating from that path greatly limits the scope and variety you could come up with. As I wrote in my “when worldbuilding gets weird” post, the real world wasn’t manufactured by a nitpicky author on a quest to absolve us of plot holes—let your worldbuilding be a little illogical and contradictory and just plain strange and inexplicable.

The best way to do that is to worldbuild when inspiration strikes, or at least leaving your worldbuilding loose enough to add in extra details and spice whenever you come up with something cool. Do a little note here or there, toss it in your “worldbuilding” bin, and you’ll likely end up with something far more unique and organic than following any step-by-step method.

2. Are the Gods Real?

In essence—say you have your fantasy world and your fantasy religions. Decide whether or not those prayers can actually be answered, and to what degree, and how the existence (or just speculation) of your world’s religion impacts scientific thought and endeavors.

You can write a whole-ass religion with all these beliefs and practices, and leave it entirely up to speculation whether there’s anyone listening. Or strike it somewhere in the middle where they do exist but aren’t very hands on, or they do exist, but only for certain groups, or they did exist, etc.

In my WIP sci-fi series, I had a little bit of both. One world where they’re very much real and there’s proof, and one world where everyone sure believes their capital-G god is real, with zero evidence.

3. Species vs Races

Most of the time, in fantasy, they’re different “races” in that they can intermarry and interbreed and create things like half-elves. In sci-fi, they tend to be different species with different lifespans, biological structures, diets, habitats, restrictions, etc. If your world is the latter, something really underexplored in these kinds of settings is how being completely different species can be devastating to romantic relationships that connect on an intellectual level, but just can’t on a long-term scale.

Also an aside—if you’re going to write a racism allegory consider the following: Racism in the real world is a social construct. We are all human and the differences between us are negligible, making all the fearmongering baseless. And yet, in so many stories, fantasy racism is between two legitimately different species or between one group, and one Much Cooler group (mutants, fairies, elves, aliens, supernatural entities). Suddenly the fantasy racists have a leg to stand on because they aren’t all the same species and they are fundamentally different, which… misses the point entirely? Elves vs “Dark Elves” are a whole different ballgame than “Elves vs Humans”.

4. The Planet of Hats

Taken from OSP, and Ellefson. “Gee, I wonder who the bad guys are?”

The bad guys: Blood red eyes, stereotypically ugly features, skulking around in the dark with yellow teeth, claws, a penchant for hissing, and a color pallet of reds and blacks.

The good guys: Conventionally gorgeous, pastels and bold rainbows of color, sunny utopia of a civilization.

Unless the point is to comment on the planet of hats, or be funny, try to inject some variety and nuance in the Bad Guy realm.

5. Determine the Social Hierarchy

Most of us can come up with the lower class and the rich one percenters for our worlds rather easily, I think, because those tend to be emphasized most heavily in fantasy, and your hero/villain will likely fall into either side. But do you have a middle class? What socioeconomic hurdles are in place to keep everyone in their lanes?

What’s the difference between homeless, impoverished, poor, getting by, renting, home-owning, and land-owning? How can you tell, and how does your world’s rich maintain their place, outnumbered by your world’s proletariat? Hunger Games is a fantastic example—some Districts are much more heavily favored and nurtured by the rich than others.

6. Monsters

Similar to whether or not the gods are real—are your monsters real? Does your world have their own in-universe metaphors and allegory for the “monstrous” that are still myths? What does that say about these people? Has that view around those “monsters” and what they allegorically represent in-universe changed?

If the monsters are real, are they actually monsters, or the victims of propaganda? Are the “normal people” the real monsters? Are they all just people creating violent slander against each other?

7. Plants, Animals, and Natural Resources

Stuff like this is, in my opinion, only important to heavily detail and think about if the plot demands it. As in, I don’t need to know about the land’s farming practices if a food shortage or grain disease or fantasy inflation of corn prices isn’t part of the story. A one-off line? Sure. A farmer’s backstory? Sure. Taking a random aside to talk at length about genetic engineering of onions in your book about fantasy spies? No.

That said, if this is part of your plot, mix together some real-world analogues and when it comes to fundamental methods for survival, like farming, think of what would be the path of least resistance for these people to come up with. A seaside village is probably going to survive mainly on fish, mussels, and crustaceans because it’s right there for the taking, as opposed to trying to farm avocados on starved soil. If they are trying to farm avocados, now that’s a peculiar story I’d love to hear more about.

8. Zombies?

Or the general concept of an afterlife, and reverting back from it. Is there a religion around their dead and where they go when they’re gone? Can they come back? Do the people only think they can come back? Are there whole rituals or beliefs around revival or reincarnation or body-hopping?

What parts of your afterlife really are a myth, and what can you prove within the narrative? Does it even matter to the plot if fantasy heaven is real? Do your characters refuse to believe in it, despite evidence to the contrary?

Are the “undead” bound to religious rules, or supernatural? Meaning: If I write about vampires, am I writing with Christian rules (with the churches and the holy ground and crosses being problematic) or something older? If I write about zombies, are they a natural phenomenon, or a plague from the gods?

9. On Practical Planets (Physalian’s)

I just watched a movie where there was a lock-box with a celestial combination lock, and to unlock it they needed to know the specific future date the last people who touched it would have thought of. The problem: That box predates the modern calendar, and the writers either didn’t know, didn’t care, or didn’t think it was important (it wasn’t, but still).

Same principle applies on creating planets: How “real” do you intend to get? We’re already off the edge of the map when we create multiple humanoid alien races, implying a cosmic degree of convergent evolution. The more “real” you get with your worldbuilding, the more questions you open up, the more it starts to fall apart as you put the audience’s ability to suspend their disbelief under a microscope.

Example: Artificial gravity. We can either make spinning spaceships, or just say the ship has some fancy alien tech that magically makes it happen and not explain in any further detail. And people will buy it because this is sci-fi.

When it comes to planets and concerning elements like tides, seasons, weather patterns, different gravitational pulls, whether the air should even be breathable, it can get very overwhelming very quickly if you yourself don’t allow some room for your own suspension of disbelief. So consider playing with elements on non-Earth worlds like how the night sky would look on an inhabited moon, or a binary star system, but also, this is fantasy. Just roll with it.

If you are intending to write a universe with very realistic and grounded physics, you have a lot of research to do and authors like Ellefson have plenty of guidance to help you.

10. Practical Geography (Physalian’s)

Once again: If it’s important to the plot, go ham on your climates and weather patterns and how the geography and mountains shape rainfall and such. The more bearing the physical environment has on the story, the more detail it deserves. Your fantasy city is going to need a source of freshwater and ample fields for food if they farm, vs import.

But also, get weird. Fill your fantasy geography with crazy natural phenomena. You might have a forest of trees that your fantasy woodpeckers bored a million holes through, and when the wind blows, the entire forest sounds like a godly flute. Or you have a river that runs beet purple in the spring because of a natural mineral deposit upriver, perfectly harmless. Or you have a flower that can walk, creeping around the forest floor on its root ball devouring beetles all night long.

Real world physics are fun to play with and can create some interesting problems: Like your heroes crash land on a jungle world with air they can’t breathe, demanding they address this problem that many sci-fi stories overlook, but it’s also terribly constricting. This is fantasy. Get fantastical.

11. Fantasy Politics and Why They’re in Power

100 years from now, I’d love to know how the textbooks describe the evolution of early 2000s American politics. If you have a fantasy dictator, figure out how they came to power, who they stood on to get where they are, and what parts of the populace were so desperate for a world they don’t live in, that they gave this leader the shirts off their backs.

Figure out the answer to “How did we get here?” Let it be illogical, and let our current political climate serve as example. You can have whatever hill you want to die on for your chosen politicians, for the most arbitrary reasons, and most of us don’t have well-thought-out theses on why we vote the way we do. Our views are filtered through the media we consume, and the media we don’t consume.

Let the system be broken and nonsensical—you can’t get any worse than reality.

12. Romanticizing (Physalian’s)

In other words, does your world have an era, a style of design, a way of living, a philosophy of a bygone time that they romanticize? Do they have idolized fantasy celebrities? A type of home or settlement that’s the Fantasy American Dream? What’s being advertised by the fantasy luxury, leisure, and cosmetic brands?

Was there a previous leader who led like no other? Do you have your own “Make Fantasy Land Great Again” group? Do they have merit? Is there another culture one group strives to live like? Architecture or clothing or cultural items they buy en masse to “be like the idols”.

I have a world with cultural artifacts inspired by Italian Murrine style glassblowing and via magic, they can make some physics-bending art pieces. Those artifacts, from that ancient culture, have been stolen and sold to enemy museums and the elite and have become a status symbol, even though the ancient culture just made plates and bowls out of necessity and would be horrified at their legacy.

13. Fantasy Weaponry and Innovation

Necessity inspires innovation, but what if your world never invented cars or gunpowder? For example: American land travel and urban design was built, with rare exception around our oldest cities, for cars in mind, not trains or horses and wagons and foot traffic, because of where we sit on the industrial revolution timeline. Our cities aren’t retrofitted for cars, our roads are wide enough for that sole purpose. Our settlements can be very widely spread apart because they were built with the knowledge of speedy travel in mind. Very few things, especially in the South (where I live) can be considered in “walking distance,” much less safely. You must own a car, you have no other option. The Powers That Be also hate trains because more trains means less need for cars and car companies like money.

Alternatively, how does warfare change depending on how deadly and plentiful your fantasy weapons evolve to be? Modern soldiers don’t prance around in their national colors and fancy feathered hats anymore, standing across from each other and shooting on command. Was there any practical reason for dressing your soldiers in bright, candy red, Britain? Surely must’ve been easy to spot for an ambush. Surely wasn’t practical, or logical, but it did happen.

14. Timescales

I want to address the alternative to the obvious “create a standard unit of measurement”. Show what happens when there isn’t a standard unit of measurement, and let chaos ensue. You should have one for the sake of not confusing your readers, but in-universe, have different cultures choosing to die on their hill of having 25 months when the rest of the world has 23, with the former based on their local natural phenomena and the latter based on lunar cycles.

“Military time” as we call it in the US, is the standard 24-hour clock that still confuses us and has us counting up on our fingers. A system we refuse to change even though it’s fundamentally the same amount of time, is a broken system that we still use because it's too hard to change (like the imperial measurement system).

15. Famous Places and Significant Architecture

Do you have a fantasy Disneyland? What about a fantasy remnant of a fantasy World's Fair randomly in your city? Or a bidding war between rival artists amounting to crazy monuments and art installations around the region trying to one-up each other? Your own Chicago Bean with a real name that no one uses and most of us aren’t even aware exists?

Or for religious purposes, what do your churches look like? Do they tower skyward as a monument to a celestial creator, or do they bury deep below ground and into the ocean, to reach a land or water god? Are they massive monuments or humble temples? Are they beautiful displays of wealth, or little wooden gazebos built by the locals? What does your architecture say about your culture?

16. Languages and Cultural Barriers (Physalian’s)

Whether you decide to write your own language (of which I made a guide for) or come up with a few words here and there and allude to foreign tongues, how do these languages, and the people who speak them, navigate foreign lands? How is the dominant language taught? Is the foreign language looked down on and discriminated against? Is even speaking it or having a name from it considered a crime? Are signs and advertisements written in multiple languages or just the dominant one?

What foreign traits are seen as unsavory by the dominant one, whether it’s clothing, religion, lifestyle choices, names, social behaviors, food, parenting, etc? How does the dominant culture discriminate–through law or social pressure?

Is your culture striving to protect a dying language and offering free courses and resources to learn it? Is there a dialect specific to one class or group or region? Do you have a pidgin or creole (not Creole) that comes from a blending of cultures, by force or by chance?

—

I want to make it clear that I don’t think Randy Ellefson is objectively wrong. He makes a lot of good points—for grounded worldbuilding. As I said above, the more central any one piece of your worldbuilding is to the plot, the more detail and thought you should put into it so it feels believable and it feels like there’s much more beneath the tip of the iceberg than just what’s on the page.

He points out many facets of how a society is established where it is, when it is, and why a people would come together, stay together, thrive together, and fall apart. Lots of elements you might not think about when you’re staring at a blank canvas.

I just think his tips don’t allow for the creative freedom of the weird and illogical aspects that make a world feel organic, and not manufactured with step-by-step instructions. His tips are for world building, not world discovering.

[msnova-scotia]

Maybe a weird idea, but what if for Fantasy High: Senior Year, it was set ~50 years in the future or so, where all the Bad Kids are seniors now (hence the name). This can allow the Fantasy High series to get out of just the high school setting, the huge time jump means the characters can be level 20, the plot doesn’t have to revolve around immediate things that happen a year after this last season.

Fig can have her separation from the group where she’s lived many years doing her own thing growing. Emily can even choose to keep her retired, saying she’s happy just being a rock star or arch devil in hell or whatever she wants Fig to ultimately do, and can have another character or bring Fig back for a little here and there if she wants, without it being expected to bring Fig back.

Fabian can have his little sibling all grown up, and we can explore more about that. Chungledown Bim can be defeated during the time skip or even as a side plot during the season. He can be retired and not have to worry about keeping up his maximum legend status all the time, and live peacefully but accomplished.

Riz will probably have spent tons of his time exploring other planes of existence, being a secret agent with his dad, taking down all kids of baddies across the universe. He won’t have to be so stressed all the time having to keep tabs on his friends and make sure they don’t get themselves killed (though now he does have to do this with all of the newbies at his job).

Kristen is finally living her best life with a huge congregation following her pantheon of gods, spreading the word of doubt and justice and the true meaning of what these gods stand for. And who knows, maybe Kristen resurrected even more. Now Kristen is making sure each god has a following that believe in and shape the gods in the way the gods want to be shaped.

Adaine has long killed her mother at this point. Her and Aelwyn are best friends, inseparable, though each with their own independent life. I’ve also seen a couple posts about how Adaine would make a good principal (much better than Augefort at least), so she could be doing that as well as changing Fallinel to be less stuck up and pompous. Also she’s settled into her role as the Elven Oracle, and while it may still annoy her that every elf and their mother seems to want a prophecy from her, she at least accepts that her visions are important enough to change the tides of the world and her role shouldn’t be taken so lightly.

And lastly, Gorgug has proven himself as the greatest wizard of all time. Barbaficer has become as common as any other class. He’s changed the world with his inventions, and could be head of some engineering department or whatever that’s brought the entire world of Spyre into the future with crystals and vehicles and all sorts of technological advances that could never have been dreamed of before he came along.

And after all of this personal growth each of the characters had, they have to get together for “one last adventure, for old times’ sake.” But none of them have really adventures in a couple years. Not like when they were younger, that is, but whatever’s going on can’t be stopped by just anyone.

I was also thinking that tbh, it would be neat to maybe explore permanent deaths for the characters at the end, whether it’s from the final battle or the epilogue where each Intrepid Hero gets to choose how their character finally passes, and ends their story. It can put the Fantasy High series to rest in a good way, maybe leaving an open ending to give way for a new generation of heroes but also a final ending to the Bad Kids (so fans don’t keep asking for another year, then another, maybe college this time, etc etc.)

It would also be fun to start off the season with their deaths, have the typical introductions and scene settings that happen with each season, and then the end of the episode: BAM! They all die, put to rest, who will avenge them, the story begins, the Intrepid Heroes start their actual characters, and the whole season is whatever the cast wants it to be, I’m just not sure how well that would work, or how it would still play into being Fantasy High without the main characters. Maybe it could be a side quest or even a longer one-shot or something if they did it this way

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 49 – Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Introduction

I forget who initially recommended me this book, but I owe them an incredible debt. Really the only disappointing thing is that I hadn’t heard of it even sooner, as this really is just perfectly tailored to appeal to me specifically. First science fiction/fantasy novel I can remember reading in a long time that I actively wished was longer. As a testament to how much I liked this book – this review is long enough to need subheadings.

So! Some Desperate Glory is a space opera, following Kyr (Valkyr, technically), a 17-year-old cadet and genetically enhanced ‘warbreed’ golden girl of Gaea Station – that being the quasi-fascist statelet of militant dead-enders who fled to a desolate planetoid in a dead system to continue the war after aliens destroyed the earth/most of humanity. After she gets assigned to Nursery (read: breeding the next generation of soldiers) instead of a combat wing and has a crisis of faith, she talks herself into running away to help her brother on the suicide mission terrorist attack he was deployed on. With the help of one of her brother’s friends and a captured alien, she manages it, discovers that her brother had absolutely no intention of actually following orders once he’d made it out, and take it upon herself to do her own, better, terrorism. From there the plot gets weird, and I’m going to spoil it shamelessly talking about it, but if you value surprises when reading at all just stop this review and go read it.

The Heroine

Kyr is, and I say this lovingly, the most insufferable bitch of a 17-year-old military brat I’ve ever spent time in the head of (at least at first). Even compared to the other indoctrinated child soldiers she’s the cop nobody likes. She then spends the first third to half of the book unlearning this indoctrination, by which I mean very arduously and painfully reaching a point of ‘the fascist cult was a corruption and black mark on the good name of the death cult vengeful crusade, I’ll do it better’ and ‘it’s probably okay to not, like, personally hate aliens who were too young to have been alive when the earth was destroyed. Torturing them for no reason is wrong, like abusing animals was, back when there were animals’. She spends the entire book expecting on a bone-deep level to get herself killed for the cause, and at the end of the book is only like 10% of the way better (one of the last beats in the entire story is, standing with one of her only friends and sure they’re both about to run out of life support, offering to snap their neck for them because ‘asphyxiation’s a nasty way to go’). Whenever she is confronted with the idea that some people aren’t constantly aware of the possibility of physical violence or get to live their lives as something other than a bullet in the gun seeking vengeance for a dead planet she wants to scream and smash things at the unfairness of it all. I adore her.

Honestly my only real complaint is how quickly she starts mellowing out in the second and third acts of the story. There’s extenuating circumstances (whole extra life of memories, time loop bullshit, forcibly confronted with what she said she wanted and what it looks like, etc), but past the one real big hump it did rather feel like her character development suddenly became a bit smooth and easy/. This is one of the things I’m talking about when I say I wish the book was longer – everything after the first big climax and the time travel/universe editing felt kind of rushed and abbreviated.

As far as being a #problematic fave goes, Kyr was also very carefully kept from being, like, directly personally culpable for anything really unforgivable. Which I do understand why from a wanting people to sympathize with the racist homophobic fascist child soldier, but like – you’ve already introduced time travel and retroactivity. C’mon, don’t get cold feet now. Let her and Avi really share the ‘killed trillions in a universe that retroactively never happened’ credit.

Also, and entirely tangentially – you know how in a lot of action shows, the hero has incredibly emotionally tense rivalries and/or camaraderie with other guys, and then also an extremely conventionally feminine girlfriend off to the side somewhere who does like two things in the entire story and mostly seems to exist to prove he’s straight? Kyr has that, except she is textually gay (if incredibly repressed about it and like 90% of the way to asexual in terms of libido). Sorry Lis, but you are literally barely a character. Cleo’s right there, and already has a personality that’s more than two bullet points and is actually involved in the plot in ways beyond ‘love interest’.

Gaea Station

The shitty fascist asteroid habitat that Kyr grew up on is (if barely) the primary setting of the story, and as far as portrayals of incredibly unbalanced and fundamentally broken society just full of cultlike and ultranationalist neuross. I kind of love it as a dystopian setting, though I feel like the author kind of over-egged the pudding on it by the end of the book.

Society is organized into what feels like an intentional parody of a lot of YA dystopia setups, where you live in a tightly integrated mess all through adolescence (each with their own heraldic animal to idenity with!) but then at 17 your exams determine the branch of society you will be assigned to for the rest of your life to do your duty for humanity. Of course, unlike most YA dystopias, the System isn’t the result of some leviathan-state ruling the fates of millions or a tradition that’s going back generations upon generations – it’s a ramshackle mess that can barely consistently feed its warrior elites enough protein slop to take advantage of their genetically engineered hormone levels for muscle growth. It’s all so clearly and intentionally artificial and fake that it loops around to feeling extremely realistic.

Also do love how the elder generation all have names like Joel or Ursa or Elena, while the younger generation are all Valkyr and Magnus and Avicenna and Zenobia. The only really surprising thing is that they don’t specifically call out how children are raised in common and without individual families as following Plato’s Republic – it’s exactly the sort of attempt to create a grand unifying mythology for all of Earth’s true and vengeful children.

I really do wish Tesh had trusted the reader a bit more about it, though. Like, we can tell that almost all the names of the younger generation are either historical figures form the Mediterranean/Greco-Roman world or Norse mythology (with a few exceptions like Avicenna who fit the general aesthetic if not those exact conditions), which puts a bit of a lie to the whole ‘pan-human’ bit. It’s a clever bit of characterization through worldbuilding! You don’t need to call it out twice in dialogue between characters and then again in an in-universe scholarly essay excerpt at the start of a chapter. I can’t complain too badly though, she’s really not even close to being the worst for that I’ve read recently.

One thing I did like especially because I don’t think it was ever called out and brought front and centre is just the sort of, like, perfect irony of both Kyr and her brother Magnus – ‘warbreed’ engineered supersoldiers with physical capabilities beyond any baseline human, blonde aryan ubermensch, the golden children and eugenic future of Gaea Station/true humanity – both being queer and totally unsuited to their assigned gender roles. If it was, like, specifically brought up in a big monologue as disproof of the Gaean ideology or something it’d feel much too on the nose, but as just a set of facts underlying the characterization of the protagonists I liked it quite a lot.

Trio Dynamics

They don’t actually have all that much pagecount spent together, now that I think about it, but as far as I’m concerned the absolute heart of the story is the dynamic between Kyr, Avi (Avicenna, genius-level hacker and cynical rat bastard discontented Gaea Station restaurant) and Yiso (young and rebellious Prince of the Wisdom, taken captive by Gaea when they’re personal ship came too close and then liberated/kidnapped by the other two in their escape attempt). It’s peak trauma-bonding in that the first time it involves a) Avi torturing Yiso to force the alien supercomputer to let him access it and b) Kyr shooting Avi in the head after he uses access to the supercomputer to wipe out 90% of galactic civilization as payback for the whole ‘destroyed Earth with an antimatter missile’ thing (she got a case of morals when confronted with what ‘winning’ would mean. Also her brother shooting himself.)

By all rights they should absolutely hate each other and after two temporal recursions and oceans of retroactively unspilled blood on all their hands they’re the only people who even slightly understand each other. At one point Kyr tells Yiso ‘just so you know, I don’t really care about you as a person,’ and then immideately thinks ‘that was a lie. Why did I say that?’ Avi and Kyr both deprogram themselves from the cult that raised them but only the ‘loyalty to the cult’ bits and not the ‘alien race war vengance death cult’ bits. Yiso meets Kyr in an atemporal training simulation and gets retroactive Stockholm syndrone even though the first time they actually meet she breaks their ribs for repressed teenager reasons. They all drive me absolutely insane and I absolutely adore them. Even if Avi’s redemption felt waaaaay too rushed and unjustified in the final recursion, willing to forgive it here.

Time Loops

The big twist of the story is that, having fucked up and enabled Avi taking vengeance for Earth by doing the same thing to every other alien species, Kyr jumps into the alien supercomputer time manipulation buisness wholesale and goes back to prevent the destruction of Earth. Which then fast forwards to her being a newly minted officer in the Terran Expeditionary Fleet that is the imperial power dominating the known galaxy in increasingly high-collateral damage ways as time goes on. Yiso, in this timeline the beating heart and soul of the main alien resistance group, seeks her out and restores her memories and they go back to try and hijack the alien supercomputer before the government office whose hijacked its crippled remnants (as helmed by the alternate-timeline version of Gaea Station’s great leader, now a fleet admiral of the ‘Providence’ division) manage to literally destroy the universe.

It is mostly down to all the fanfic I’ve read, but I really, really adore timeline divergences that ropagate out and leave all the major characters different but similar people in alien yet appropriate situations. I also adore time travel stories about someone turning the timeline into swiss cheese trying to brute force their way to the one and only golden ending. So I adore this whole conceit. Really my only complaint is that there were only two (one and a half, really) recursions. Not that I’m demanding a full groundhog day here. But, like, it’d have been nice. And Kyr/Avi/Yiso continuously bumping into each other in different configurations and usually ending up at gunpoint would have been ann absolutely amazing bit.

Space Orcs

I can’t be sure Tesh actually had any exposure to the whole online meme of ‘humans as space orcs’, but I do and it’s really impossible to read the book as anything but an examination of the idea. Compared to every alien species ever encountered, humans are tall, heavy, muscular, impulsive, and violent. In a one-on-one confrontation they’ll snap any other species’ neck. The very first pages of the book are an excerpt from an in-universe text writing for an aliens about how actually really humans are very intelligent, and then talking about how threat displays and ‘human culture’. In the original timeline they even fit into the usual social niche of orcs in a lot of fantasy these days – the scattered and diminished remnants of a brutal empire that was defeated and mostly-exterminated in their attempts to conquer the universe.

The book’s handling of this doesn’t really have a point, as far as I can tell – the worldbuilding’s sufficiently divorced from anything real that trying to call it a commentary on racism or genocide or conquering empires is a stretch. (It is after all a fundamental point of the book that the obliteration of earth and extermination of the vast majority of humanity really was the only way the Wisdom could prevent the Terran Federation from conquering the known galaxy. Which is I’m extremely sure not something the author intends to be a historical analogy.) I found it a fun bit of worldbuilding and interesting subversion of normal space opera tropes regarding humanity’s relative abilities, anyway.

Theodicy

Is an incredibly pretentious way to title this section, but also in a sense kind of the core of the book’s plot? In an interesting way, and I think it’s really the book’s greatest weakness that it doesn’t explore or grapple with it enough.

Which is to say – the Wisdom is at the heart of galactic civilization. It’s an alien AI with vague but vast (though limited) reality-warping and precognitive powers. It does not rule the civilizations that accept it, but guides them as a benevolent god towards best, happiest outcomes with whatever support they ask for or need. To determine what ‘best’ means, it creates its Princes, vat-grown heirs to the dead species that created it, with a lifespan of millenia spent going through simulations and interacting with the world to provide the data and decision-making it requires to make that sort of strategic decision.

The Terran Federation’s attempt to reverse-engineer or hijack the Wisdom put it in a situation where the only solution its princes could find was to destroy the better part of humanity and even more of their industry and culture. Through the plot of the first acts of the book, Kyr and her genius-level-hacker friend hijack a node of it and Kyr convinces/forces it to accept her decision-making instead of its prince (who they just killed). This results in an explicitly colonialist human empire ruling over aliens as oppressed subjects, and using the half-wrecked and poorly understood Wisdom to eliminate threats before they occur (shunting the reality backlash off to alien worlds they don’t care about). The next acts of the book mostly resolve around fixing or reverting this, and end with Kyr diving back into a node and having another conversation with it.

A conversation which is basically it giving up. It reverts things back to the human-genocide timeline, then shuts down its infrastructure and goes dark, leaving the entire mostly pacifistic and loosely governed galactic civilization it had protected suddenly on its own. Humanity were such assholes we found a loving god and then convinced it to kill itself.

Which, like, could 100% totally work. As far as high concept short story prompts go its incredible. But as far as actually driving the action goes the Wisdom is the one who makes the most important deciisons in the entire book, and determine the entire shape of the plot. For it to land, it really really needed more than two and a half short conversations on screen, at least to me.

TL:DR

Good book, lesbian doing space atrocities, should have been longer.

[slocumjoe]

I'm curious if you have any more variety NSFW headcanons about the companions (sexual or non-sexual like you did before is fine)

sure

🎉NSFW grab bag 3🎉

Cait; Completely desensitized to public sex. If she catches it, doesn't think anything of it. So, if/when someone else notices, their reaction confuses her. Someone could be bare ass boning on a table in a bar, and Cait won't react. This bothers her compatriots immensely. "Cait, please, for our own sanity, alert us when there is sex so we can leave." "...Why are you watching? Kinda rude." Stresses Danse the fuck out in particular. She's not even a voyeur, she just doesn't care. How do you think they made y– oh. Right.

Curie; Dreads inspections of the genital variety because her patients make it weird. Ma'am, Curie knows what's down there. She isn't spooked. She has one too. Just let her do her job so she can figure out how to help you. If one more person makes a fisting/fingering/prostate exam joke, she's going to do it, regardless of what they're actually in for. Broken leg? No, you brought this upon yourself. Oh, and by the way...if the doctor/nurse doesn't ask you to drop your pants, or undress in anyway...DON'T FUCKING UNDRESS.

Danse; Hypervigilant of public sex ever since he figured out that it could be happening anywhere, in any manner, and Cait won't say anything. A bossy partner has him by the throat and he's completely obsessed with it. Can get out of handcuffs pretty easily. Doesn’t know where he learned that, just knows its a fun plot twist in bed. Especially if there are repercussions. He's a good little soldier boy, he wants to serve and be punished for disobeying. Sometimes wonders if he subconciously joined the Brotherhood for impure reasons. They do have collars on the jumpsuit...and Danse ends up liking that sort of thing...

Deacon; His ultimate fantasy is a generic Royal setting. He's the concierge/bard for the visiting noble family, there to marry their son off to the king's child (his partner). But the marriage cannot go through, as there's been a murder attempt on the king! As the bard, he sees all in the court and festivities, watching from the sidelines and speaking in hushed tones with the servants, gathering clues, but...the bride/groom-to-be is what truly catches his eye...but they, themselves, suspect him as the would-be assassin. This ends in doggy in a bush outside a fancy colonial building in Boston, in place of a castle garden.

Gage; A lot more prudish than you'd think. Not to Danse's levels, but definitely not Cait's, either. Becomes more prudish if he's into someone, and they're being risqué. Most of it is directed at himself, feels like the dirty old man he is. Guilty of wandering eyes. Gets more flustered by someone being half-dressed/dressed revealingly than them being naked. Leaving it to the imagination and such.. Naked is nice, yeah, but...let him think about it, and his partner will have a noticeably more intense experience.

Hancock; Once had a wet dream his dick fell off and he kept it for himself. The idea doesn't appeal to him at all in his waking hours, so he's terribly confused. Has a soft spot for a nice jawline and eyebrows. Acts like a bottom to his partners, bratty, and then tables the turns once they're in bed. If his partner switches it up again, he'll play along, only to also switch things again. This will continue until someone cums, or they're so stubborn they never stop and both of them die of exhaustion. The longest streak was 45, both sides.

MacCready; Would die if he had sex with one of them thick gothic milfs those tiktok kids are always drooling over. MacCready likes mean, bully women. Valley girls, maybe even that Ann Codman lady in D.C. Would he get in a relationship with them? God, no. One-night stand? Yes. Yes, 100%, no question. Maybe it's the confidence to be horrible? He's pretty embarrassed about this. He should be. This fuck would clown around with Regina George in The Costume.

Nick; Long, long ago, Nick Valentine, with his theatrical tastes, his love of the arts, found himself in...certain circles. Ones with polite, soft-spoken men and women, who could turn as hard as you begged for. Later in life, Nick would use his experience in these circles for his and Jenny's enjoyment, though at that point, he was the ring-master of the show. And maybe, potentially...200 years after the world ended...a synth detective could use implanted memories of such times to gentle-dom someone's brains out.

Piper; Has spent a concerning amount of time scavenging adult shops for sex toys. Anything that works and is clean/cleanable. Just...needs something that isn't ol' reliable, y'know. Gets a bad case of the Idiot when horny, everyone becomes a bit more appealing. If she was totally honest...Cait would be her first choice, if she had one. If not Cait, X6-88. That man is goddamn pretty. Yeah, Piper has a things for bad girls/boys.

Preston; I've said before, Preston had a hoe phase, when he first joined the Minutemen. He was a good looking young man, traveling around with other physically fit people who just joined as well, sometimes helping people who were very grateful. So, yeah, Preston has had more than one partner at a time. Would he do that now? If it was a poly situation, and he liked both of them, maybe. But looking back, he's surprised he never caught something, be it a a disease or a complex. Sometimes remembers lines of dirty talk and cringes out of his own skin.

X6-88; The Institute is very strict on schedules and worktime, and there isn't much privacy. The walls are thin. There isn't often individual bedrooms, so as to save time and resources. So...when humans get a little frisky...they do it when, and where they can. This can means down a work tunnel, behind loud machinery...under a desk, occasionally. Sometimes you get guard duty. Sometimes you have to go find the people in question. Sometimes you're just walking.

X6-88 has seen a lot.

[lonelyroommp3]

u dont have to answer this but i was wondering if u could elaborate on ur opinions about rpf -- bc i kind of agree with you that it's like, it's fine and it's not morally wrong or anything but it def is a little weird? idk ive never been able to rly explain my feelings about it so im curious what u think

honestly my main view on rpf (whether of the y/n self insert variety or the gay shipping variety) is it's literally fine as long as you're not putting it anywhere the people involved are going to see it. like when you boil rpf down to its bare essentials it is just fantasising about a famous person (or multiple famous people, in varying combinations), which is something human beings have been doing in their brains since people first started becoming famous. and i think expressing those fantasies through creative outlets like fic, art, 2013 polyvore outfit boards about going on a yacht trip with harry styles, etc is an entirely natural progression of that impulse

and in that way i sort of view it as similar to any other fantasy you might have about another human being: it is totally normal and essentially morally neutral, i hope you'd agree, to daydream about a person you fancy, whether those daydreams are PG-13 or heinously X-rated, whether they're a friend or acquaintance or stranger or celebrity. where it would become weird is if you went up to said person completely uninvited and said "hey, would you like to hear in elaborate detail about the things i thought about you doing to me while i was masturbating last night?" - and so i think the same applies to rpf. like obviously don't send your rpf to the person in question, don't show up with BLINK TWICE IF THE BABY IS FAKE signs to a louis tomlinson concert, archive lock your rpf on ao3, don't proudly post about it on websites that the people in question are active on especially in this age of algorithm-based social media where unless you lock your account you have no real surefire way of ensuring they'll never see it, etc etc. every time i see people talk shipping in the comments of an official f1 post a part of my soul dies

i think another big thing about rpf to me is that all celebrities are essentially playing a fictionalised version of themselves. no matter how authentic they seem to their fanbase, when you combine things like media training + PR/marketing obligations + building a Persona + the pressure of competing in a sport (for athletes) + the level of code switching inherent to being in what is essentially a public facing job, we as fans & observers are not seeing the real harry styles or taylor swift or charles leclerc or whoever else. we are seeing the version of that person that they want us to see (or, in the case of historical rpf, you're writing about a ghost reconstructed from fragments distorted through the lens of missing evidence, potentially biased historians, potentially even more biased first and third party accounts, etc), and so i don't really view rpf as inherently invasive because you're not really writing about the real person, moreso the constructed image of Celebrity Of Choice.

of course, that is not to say that rpf can never become invasive: the clearest example would be ship truthers harassing the people involved due to what they perceive as "evidence" of some great forbidden love story, but i'll be real there is a lot of F1 rpf specifically that i side eye from a distance because of how it will use drivers' intensely personal real life trauma as a plot point, which is a line i'm not really comfortable crossing with real living people, especially not when it comes to dangerous sports lmao. but i think that is an issue with some rpf enjoyers' boundaries and not an inescapable root problem with the very idea of rpf imo

[roachliquid]

The main thing I find so compelling about Lovecraft's work (besides the way he wore his weird bullshit on his sleeve, which is always interesting) is that, unlike many writers who explored similar genres, he didn't just use occult trappings as plot devices in his work. He wrote occult fiction, which is to say, fiction that expressed a genuine awareness and understanding of occult ideas, and went so far as to express his own opinions about them. In essence, Lovecraft was himself an occultist, just one who viewed the entire topic as belonging to the purview of fiction, and wrote appropriately.

Of course there's nothing wrong with doing it the simpler way. Authors are quite free to explore ideas in whatever way they like, and I genuinely enjoy the works of some writers who never really get past the surface level - Guillermo del Toro comes to mind, as a guy who often borrows from the occult in the interest of delivering an unrelated message.

But there's something about a writer who really digs in, who gets the material they're working with and can expand on it, that really scratches my brain itchies. I love being able to correlate something a person has written to some extant body of occult philosophy, to compare and contrast their view on it with the predominant narrative on the subject, and understand how that person's viewpoint probably informed their specific take. And I love fiction, especially fantasy and horror fiction, so getting to have that experience while reading a cool story? I am spoilt.

(Of course, reading his shit does mean dealing with his shitty ideas, which is p. much constantly a downer. I would be more than happy to receive recs for similar authors in the public domain who are less bigoted.)

[ystrike1]

I Was Summoned to Be the Saint, but I Was Robbed of the Position, Apparently - By Yoshitaka Hana (8/10)

Hear me out. I think the vibe of a story is really important. Yandere or possessive behavior doesn't always have to be explicitly bloody or very obvious. I really do appreciate possessiveness that is integrated into the plot.

Anise is the Saintess, but sadly her bully followed her to the fantasy world she was destined to save. People from our world who enter that world get magic that suits their personality. Anise isn't a saintly person. She just likes to help others, and she's pretty tolerant. Hime, the bully, is treated like a nuisance by her. A normal person would have snapped at Hime by now. Anise has alot of patience, and she only uses violence to protect herself. So, because of her good qualities she received special Saint magic.

Hime received ultra powerful charm magic. She uses it to convince the fantasy characters to rape and kill Anise, who has no choice but to run. Hime is a superfan. She adores otome games about saints. She played a stereotypical one endlessly to get the secret character. Her favorite character. General Lector. A man with high charm....Hmm...how odd the love interest also uses charm. It's well known in this world that usually people who are messed up in the head use charm magic. It's a power rooted in either narcissism or the desperate need to be a leader. It's a selfish power. It's very interesting that Hime and the sexy otome man she loves so much have the same power.

Anise runs away with Lec, who found her when she started selling potions to make quick cash. Lec lies about his identity. He tries to use his magic to seduce her into serving him...and then liking him...over and over. Thankfully, her high level healing magic stops that. Hmm. Odd though. The man Hime adores as her true love seems off. Kinda awful actually.

Here's the backstory for the secret route. Lec doesn't trust anyone. He is the only heir with charm magic. People have been trying to use him and marry him and manipulate him since he was a child. He has always, always wanted to marry a Saintess. Saints must be truly kind to get their special magic, so if he marries a saint he will gain a wife that genuinely loves him. How sweet...but wait that's kinda super fucked up isn't it???

There's alot of subtle dialog in this. Lec convinces Anise to stay by his side. He says that if she marries him she can immigrate to his country, far away from Hime and her rabid servants. He claims he doesn't need her love, BUT he only reveals that he's a prince when it's too late. After the reveal it's way too late for Anise to turn back.

Anise gets bullied when she arrives in her new home. Her personal maid only cares about money. Everybody else is jealous, because Lec is the best bachelor in the land. Anise is also, apparently, not very pretty. She doesn't know courtly manners like the previous Saints. She's not a sweet talker like Hime. She puts in effort and the staff eventually accepts that she's a real Saint, but it's a long process.

Lec slowly proves that he is a good husband, but he is jealous. Divorce is not an option. He would rather start a war to keep Anise. All of these nuggets of weirdness are buried in fast paced chapters. Anise is the main character all alone for the first 8 chapters or so too. Lec just kind of appears. He tests her, and he quickly becomes enamored. Anise, from the beginning, doesn't want love and she doesn't like his type. He kinda wears her down and they start to get along when he's more open emotionally.

Hime gets worse. She claims her husband is abusive to get a meeting with Lec. She's shocked when Lec doesn't give a shit. Hime is an amazing villain. Her lies are so deep that she believes them. Her obsession with Lec makes her behave like a literal monster. Lec is terrifying when he's around her....because he's used to women like Hime. He deals with them all the time, because everyone wants the magically charming prince.

Hime doesn't save Lec as revenge. Lec is destined to die unless certain plot conditions are met. Hime knew how to save him from his fate the whole time, but she wasn't willing to help unless he loved her back. Anise kindly saved a tiny cat demon at the beginning of the story, and it's big enough to ride. That kind coincidence is what saves Lec in this timeline. The magic cat flies Anise back fast to heal him, and that's basically it. Main story done. There's alot of messed up toxic love in this.

Hime was obsessed with marrying Lec.

Lec was obsessed with marrying someone pure and trustworthy.

I was fascinated by how different Lec and Hime are, even though they possess similar magic.

I was also really disturbed when Lec did not stop trying to magically charm Anise into loving him. If she didn't have stronger magic she would have become his brain dead love interest. All because he couldn't resist the urge to use his magic and make her want him, because he really wanted her. The messed up stuff is kinda pushed under the rug though. Anise and Lec have a good relationship. I may be reading into this too much, but the vibe...

The vibe...

[scifigeneration]

Sci-fi books are rare in school even though they help kids better understand science

by Emily Midkiff, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Leadership, and Professional Practice at the University of North Dakota

Claudia Wolff

Science fiction can lead people to be more cautious about the potential consequences of innovations. It can help people think critically about the ethics of science. Researchers have also found that sci-fi serves as a positive influence on how people view science. Science fiction scholar Istvan Csicsery-Ronay calls this “science-fictional habits of mind.”

Scientists and engineers have reported that their childhood encounters with science fiction framed their thinking about the sciences. Thinking critically about science and technology is an important part of education in STEM – or science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Complicated content?

Despite the potential benefits of an early introduction to science fiction, my own research on science fiction for readers under age 12 has revealed that librarians and teachers in elementary schools treat science fiction as a genre that works best for certain cases, like reluctant readers or kids who like what they called “weird,” “freaky” or “funky” books.

Of the 59 elementary teachers and librarians whom I surveyed, almost a quarter of them identified themselves as science fiction fans, and nearly all of them expressed that science fiction is just as valuable as any other genre. Nevertheless, most of them indicated that while they recommend science fiction books to individual readers, they do not choose science fiction for activities or group readings.

The teachers and librarians explained that they saw two related problems with science fiction for their youngest readers: low availability and complicated content.

Why sci-fi books are scarce in schools

Several respondents said that there simply are not as many science fiction books available for elementary school students. To investigate further, I counted the number of science fiction books available in 10 randomly selected elementary school libraries from across the United States. Only 3% of the books in each library were science fiction. The rest of the books were: 49% nonfiction, 25% fantasy, 19% realistic fiction and 5% historical fiction. While historical fiction also seems to be in low supply, science fiction stands out as the smallest group.

When I spoke to a small publisher and several authors, they confirmed that science fiction for young readers is not considered a profitable genre, and so those books are rarely acquired. Due to the perception that many young readers do not like science fiction, it is not written, published and distributed as often.

With fewer books to choose from, the teachers and librarians said that they have difficulty finding options that are not too long and complicated for group readings. One explained: “I have to appeal to broad ability levels in chapter book read-aloud selections. These books typically have to be shorter, with more simple plots.” Another respondent explained that they believe “the kind of suppositions sci-fi is based on to be difficult for younger children to grasp. We do read some sci-fi in our middle grade book club.”

A question of maturity

Waiting for students to get older before introducing them to science fiction is a fairly common approach. Susan Fichtelberg – a longtime librarian – wrote a guide to teen fantasy and science fiction. In it, she recommends age 12 as the prime time to start. Other children’s literature experts have speculated whether children under 12 have sufficient knowledge to comprehend science fiction.

Reading researchers agree that comprehending complex texts is easier when the reader has more background knowledge. Yet, when I read some science fiction picture books with elementary school students, none of the children struggled to understand the stories. The most active child in my study often used his knowledge of “Star Wars” to interpret the books. While background knowledge can mean children’s knowledge of science, it also includes exposure to a genre. The more a reader is exposed to science fiction stories, the better they understand how to read them.

A matter of choice

Science fiction does not need to include detailed science or outlandish premises to offer valuable ideas. Simple picture books like “Farm Fresh Cats” by Scott Santoro rely on familiar ideas like farms and cats to help readers reconsider what is familiar and what is alien. “The Barnabus Project” by the Fan Brothers is both a simple escape adventure story and a story about the ethics of genetic experimentation on animals.

The good news is that elementary school students are choosing science fiction regardless of what adults might think they can or cannot understand. I found that the science fiction books in those 10 elementary school libraries were checked out at a higher rate per book than all of the other genres. Science fiction had 1-2 more checkouts per book, on average, than the other genres.

Using the lending data from these libraries, I built a statistical model that predicted that it is 58% more likely for one of the science fiction books to be checked out in these libraries than one of the fantasy books. The model predicted that a science fiction book is over twice as likely to be checked out than books in any of the other genres. In other words, since the children did not have nearly as many science fiction books to choose from, their readership was heavily concentrated on a few titles.

Children may discover science fiction on their own, but adults can do more to normalize the genre and provide opportunities for whole classes to become familiar with it. Encouraging children to explore science fiction may not guarantee science careers, but children deserve to learn from science fiction to help them navigate their increasingly high-tech world.

[tbookblurbs]

A Court of Silver Flames - Sarah J. Maas

2/5 - Don't read if you're not willing to re-write in your head as you go or if you actually like well-written fantasy

I'll be honest, this was my second time through this book. Upon the reread, I had already erased so much of the plot from my memory that it was as if I was reading for the first time. Anyways ...

All the usual Maas problems are here. Weirdly written gay relationships (if there are any), oversexualization of bisexual people, transphobic undertones, retconning characters to being PoC (lucien) a la JK Rowling (or no PoC characters at all), misogyny, CRAZY levels of toxic masculinity, plot holes, etc.

This book is mostly sex and characterization retcons. I really enjoyed Nesta's character arc, the Valkyries, and sometimes Cassian and Azriel, but everything to do with Feyre left a bad taste in my mouth. Favorite scene, no question, was Nesta's dance with Eris in the Night Court. That was the first scene where I felt they actually gave Nesta skills and a personality beyond bitter alcoholism.

That said, the cons of this book far outweigh the pros. As always, Maas' writing is a breeze to get through just because it's not particularly difficult prose, but her insistence (in this novel and in other books) on using Female/Male and weird gender essentialism is at best irritating and at worst actively detracting from the novel. The entire pregnancy plotline could (and arguably should) be removed from this book. It doesn't add anything to Nesta's journey, paints Rhysand and Feyre in a really bad light, and is frankly an incredibly stupid plot choice. You have magic, can shapeshift, and have indoor plumbing but C-sections haven't been invented yet? Really? The whole scenario is incredibly contrived and I actively skipped scenes dealing with it if I could. The entire Inner Circle acts immature, judgemental, and unforgiving, despite their own insistence to the contrary. Elain also still has no personality. I was also confused by the whole "Maybe Rhysand should be High King of Prythian" subplot like ... huh?? Where did that even come from??

The book tops itself off by using one of my least favorite tropes in fantasy, which is when women, usually main characters, have to give up all their power at the end of the story. Maas is very fond of this plotline. She does the same thing with Aelin in the Throne of Glass series. Personally, I find this trope to be misogynistic and often evidence of poor writing to neatly wrap up the end of a story, regardless of whether the choices post-power-loss are in character.

The version of this story that I was re-writing in my head, which cuts the weird bitterness between Cassian and Nesta and Feyre's pregnancy entirely (she's 19????) while expanding on her powers and letting her keep them, is much more interesting. But alas, that is NOT the version on page. Unless you (like me) had it downloaded on your Kindle and an 8-hr plane ride to kill, I wouldn't bother if you're seriously interested in reading fantasy.