"Let's go with best humor."

"Humor is among the dimensions where the goodness is most incommunicable without actually reading the book!  But my favorite work there is My Footprints Dance With Yours, a tertiary work featuring three protagonists from three different famous secondary works of a primary literature, who've all gone back in time to try to change their secondary worlds' destinies, but they end up in the primary world's past simultaneously.  The high context puts up a strong barrier to entry, but the author was good enough to master the different voices for all the alts plus the primary work's characters, at least up to my own ability to tell the difference; and their different origins allow for so many different layers of mistaken expectations going on that the book can pull off something like one grand collision per chapter.  I was laughing so hard I cried on a sustained basis, not just occasionally."

"Sounds exhausting! What is a tertiary work?"

"I'm not sure how things are done on Earth so I'll go back to basics?  Authors usually start out by using better authors' worlds and characters and running variations on their storylines, in return for paying onward a small share of the gratuities; one-twentieth is standard for a lesser work that sells cheaply.  As authors ascend their career path, the prices of their books rise and the fees they'd have to pay go up, which encourages them to create their own worlds and characters and sell stories set there.  When an author exalts, it's usually with some particular variation of their original world and characters which turned out to be really good, good enough to become famous.  Which obviously raises the sales of other alts' adventures as well, and young authors will start to copy that world and pay gratuity fractions to it.  Some works are so legendary that ascended authors write secondary works of them, and then relatively more artistic writers have been known to write tertiary works varying on those, though that is less of something a young author would try to do.  And then that's as far as it ever goes, of course, because human beings can't track more than three layers of recursion."

"Fanfiction."

"Oh!"

"Fanfiction of three different fanfictions, colliding inside the primary work.  You do not need to laugh at the premise; the humor was in the execution."

"Mostly people can't get paid for fanfic here."

"And if this were any other planet that would be higher on my list of worries."

"I mean, the original authors don't like it, it infringes on their copyright."

"Our strange, alien civilization has invented the notion that the secondary authors can pay the primary authors a small percentage of gratuities to use their worlds, leaving both authors better off than if this arrangement did not exist.  This is not meant to say that you could do any such thing on Earth; I can guess that it would not be possible to you and that I am not able to understand the exact reasons why."

"I'm not sure they'd like it even if you paid them to!"

"Well, a lot of Earth fanfiction is porn, so maybe it's more palatable on dath ilan where porn is illegal."

"Isabella exaggerates in several different dimensions.  Our books have sex scenes.  I expect other material could be found in the Forbidden Stores that sell Ill-Advised Consumer Goods, which I have yet to find any reason to patronize myself.  I do not in any case understand what that would have to do with all of your authors deciding in unison that none of them would like additional revenue from secondary literature."

"...Forbidden Stores that sell Ill-Advised Consumer Goods?"

"Stuff that might kill you, but not destroy your brain or kill other people around you.  Or do less damage than that, of course, but the point is you don't know without further research.  I usually expect, when I buy food in a store, that it's not going to kill me, even if I haven't done any detailed research on who recommended it and checked their panel for conflicts of interest.  A sandwich being sold at a Shop of Ill-Advised Food would come with no such justified expectation, and presumably contains addictive drugs or something else that makes it an Ill-Advised Consumer Good."

"...why would a drugged sandwich even exist?"

"Because we're not a monoculture and somebody on a planet of a billion people wants a drugged sandwich badly enough that we ought to get out of their way."

"Also, like, most medicine can kill you if you take enough."

"Maybe dosing information is an exception to whether products in normal stores are allowed to require warnings? I do wonder how this applies to, like, power tools, alcohol, ladders..."

"I expect that a power tool with particular dangers will have particular warning signs.  If somebody wanted to invent their own system of warning signs instead, no ordinary store would carry those expectation-violating goods.  But if there were weird people who wanted their power tools to have different warning signs, enough to form a market for them, you could sell those power tools in a shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods.  I'm... not sure of the moral theory under which a civilization could reasonably not allow shops like that, unless their smart people were enough smarter than ours to know for certain that nobody ever needed an exception to the rules and that the damage done by Ill-Advised Consumer Goods would exceed the damage done by loss of freedom and individuality."  She hopes they enjoy their system of uniform rules with no exceptions and no way out in case somebody happens to be different!  Maybe someday she'll get back to her 'monoculture' where weirdos have more of an acknowledged right to exist and be weird.

"In the US we mostly manage this by having it be possible to sue people for selling stuff with inadequate warnings and corporations doing what they think will get them sued less, plus our less comprehensive but still existent reputation system. I'm not a lawyer and do not actually know if a shop with a sign up reading 'abandon normal consumer safety regulations all ye who enter here' would be legal?"

"I will be pleasantly surprised if Earth's system has good structural properties!  I have been trying to adjust my expectations of Earth to a well-calibrated point where I will be pleasantly surprised at how well Earth managed something about as often as the reverse, but it's still a work in progress."

Shrug. "I haven't made a study of it and don't know how well it works compared to other systems on this planet, let alone dath ilan."