A realistic mystery novel for adults involving the murder of one member of a company's internal policies board. A witness claims to have seen someone dressed as a certain employee and sharing her fur color standing over the body. The main investigation dives into seeking out other people who might dress similarly and who have similar fur colors, as well as the exact internal policies of the company and whether or not the employees would have a reason to protest against them, and whether or not anyone would have a personal grudge against the particular victim. In the end, the case is cracked when the witness is revealed to have an undiagnosed form of colorblindness that widens the suspect pool, allowing them to find the actual killer. The killer is revealed to have been attempting to have a civil discussion about a certain company policy, but constant insulting needling from the victim led to them snapping and escalating to murder. Their sentence is partly decided on with input from the deceased's family, and in the end a short jail sentence and therapy for those violent urges are the final conclusion. Interestingly enough, at no point is someone deliberately framing the first suspect suggested as a hypothesis.

There is also a version of the above novel that's intended for younger readers. Several of the suspects are removed from the plot to shorten the book, although the main forensics and investigation methods are still described in detail. The main plot difference lies in the ending, where the murder is framed more as a fight gone wrong, and much more detail is given on the need to control those impulses, as well as methods for doing so.

A nonrealistic fantasy culture-clash novel for all ages about two species, both somewhat distinct from grayliens, where one group is obligate carnivores and the other herbivores. The book focuses on a herbivore ambassador to the carnivore city, and alternates between surreal illustrations that the herbivore is telepathically transmitting back home, narrative from the perspective of the ambassador's host as they try to be a good host, and various records of the minutes of the council meetings on each side. The herbivores are generally presented as overly paranoid and hypervigilant, with the ambassador constantly distorting the actual events as something horrifying, although there are also some hints that the carnivore host is being overly positive about some things themself, and the two slowly get to understand each other better and better. The climax involves the herbivores nearly declaring war on the carnivore city when they believe their ambassador has been murdered, and the carnivores preparing for war due to an unintentional insult, but by now the host and ambassador have become fast friends/romantic interests (it's not entirely clear and could go either way) and manage to stop the war from erupting. The last scene is the herbivore ambassador carefully trying a meat dish, a callback to a previous discussion about the two species having an omnivorous common ancestor.

A semirealistic trilogy of novels for all ages taking place in a prehistoric setting, with the first one being about a pair of protagonists fleeing their original pride (an archaic word that has connotations of both "harem" and "housemates"*) where they are both considered low-status, and finally finding a place to settle down and create a New Pride with just the two of them. The second describes how the protagonists have to deal with having their first litter, and the needs of their children for both privacy and safety. Several comments are made about how the original pride structure had its uses. Eventually, they reconnect with several of the friends they made in the previous book, who join the protagonists in their childcare duties. The maned protagonist worried that he** might become a tyrant like the original pride leader, but he is reassured that the division of power here is already different, and furthermore that he himself is not that type of person. The book ends with the characters declaring themselves to have formed a New Pride. The third book is about the New Pride's interactions with other nearby prides and individuals, as well as the slow development of various romances within the pride and a few more children being born, and eventually ends with the first use of the modern word "housemates." Various appendices describe the inaccuracies in the novels, such as how research has shown that most prides were not as tyrannical as the first, as well as the fact that the change from prides to the current standard of living probably took much longer than a single generation, as well as the linguistic drift which means the final book's ending is unlikely to be how the term was actually coined.

*This term shows up quite often in graylien novels, and it seems that generally their family setups are assumed to have multiple adults living together to split various duties. It can have connotations of polyamorous relationships in some usages, though it can also refer to a found family.
**This pronoun does not quite map to the typical Earthling concept of gender, but has a closer match to a certain social role. Previously in the first book, a different pronoun was used for both protagonists while they were still living in their original pride.

A song for children about a young Joey who is implanted with a lover (executive-function-boosting symbiote, the more or less literal backbone of their society) and immediately sets out to adventure, leaving his dozen or so fathers behind, because he's desperate to do something interesting, not just make art and have fun. Unfortunately, he is not very well suited to adventure; fortunately(?), he's self-deluded enough that he manages to convince himself at every turn that whatever disaster has just ensued is what he wanted. He loses his possessions fairly early, but reasons that he wanted to experience the world on his own merits. He makes several friends and drives them away with his terrible luck and inability to own up to mistakes, but convinces himself that they were the cause of whatever disaster latest befell him. Eventually, he falls in battle against a shark he had convinced himself was threatening a nearby village, which is actually a farmer's beloved pet; he goes to his grave convinced that he is a hero dying before his time, and when the spirits of the deeps show him his life and ask his regrets before letting him drift out of reality, he cheerfully claims none. The spirits state that he is the only man who has ever died happy, and that on balance, more people should lie to themselves if they want to enjoy life.

A lightly annotated collection of poems by a fry afflicted by a terminal illness which meant he would not live long enough to be implanted with a lover, and chose to spend his brief existence writing about what life meant to him. It's stylistically shaky, not as polished as one might expect from a professional, but it's certainly more than might be expected of a six-to-ten-year-old equivalent. His tone shifts almost schizophrenically between bitter sarcasm and raw fear-anger-suffering and appreciating small joys in life, not only between individual poems but between stanzas or lines within the same poem. One of the better-regarded poems swings wildly between apologizing to his fathers for bringing them pain and railing against them for not smashing his eggsac with a rock when they realized the suffering he would experience. The poems deteriorate stylistically as his health declines, until his final poem, which he transcribed through a Morse code equivalent after seizures had taken his speech and motor function: i am filled with words i cannot say i fear the end no end my pain is not your pain beloved fathers love me let me leave you

A book centered around the internecine drama of a family of Joeys that really shouldn't be raising a child together! Some of the fathers aren't even speaking to each other, though they present a unified front to the outside world. As their fry grows, the fathers' relationships break down further, and the kid grows up faster than he should; he ends up climactically yelling at them for a while and going off to live on his own until he's old enough to get his lover. (This is seen as incredibly impressive; apparently the executive dysfunction treated by the implantation of a lover is normally so crippling that a Joey without one should not expect to be able to get out of bed most days without the help of his fathers.)

A fanfictional sequel to that last book, submitted significantly after the other works came through the pipeline, which has found significantly more success in the wider universe than among the Joeys themselves. In this one, picking up a few months after the boy left, we see that "living on his own" turned out to be kind of a very bad mistake. He is in many ways more unhappy than he was back at home, though in some ways he appreciates his newfound freedom; it's just not enough to make him eat consistently. He is propped up to a limited extent by the wider community, but only enough that he's surviving, not enough that he's happy; after a few tearful breakdowns, he decides to run off into the mainland, where he can starve and no longer inconvenience anyone. However, he's found by a wight (glossed in the annotations as "a grown-up Joey who lost or never got his lover and turned into a monster about it"), who initially considers eating him but eventually decides against it. The wight decides to take him in and feed him in the expectation that he will grow up to be the wight's mate. The Joey is conflicted about this, because on the one hand, it's very nice being taken care of by someone who isn't one of his dysfunctional fathers, but on the other hand, he's still got a lot of "wights are scary monsters" built up in his head from when he was in Joey society, and he's not sure he wants to be a scary monster. By the climax, he's almost to the point of metamorphosis when a rescue party finds him while the wight is hunting and brings him back to the village. He lets them implant him with a lover, mostly on inertia rather than because he wants it. Then there's a lot of internal turmoil mediated by the lover's calming presence, which eventually resolves with him seeking out his wight friend in the hopes that they can still find a way to be together even though he'll never be a wight like him.

A working group has been put together to curate a collection of some the Union's most significant or impressive works. These are some of the selections they've made for fiction. (The form of the submission is a box containing paper books, naturally.) Excepting the book of lies, all are certified for accuracy*.

A fantasy novel in which people have physical 'souls' which record their memories, instincts, and parts of their personalities. Moreover, it is possible to 'eat' the soul of a dead person and gain some of their memories and instincts. Since this is transitive, and most souls are eaten after death, some small part of most people lives on for hundreds or thousands of years after their death, although transmission is lossy. The story who follows a young monk and his life in a monastery (which is equal parts academic and spiritual). One day, returning from an errand, he discovers that the entire monastery has been slaughtered by an errant monster. Alarmed, he hastily eats as many of the souls of the dead that he can before they expire, almost one hundred in total. This is many more than most people ever consume, and for the rest of the story he is afflicted by mysterious visions and impulses. In the aftermath of the massacre, he travels to the nearest military outpost to report the attack, only to discover that they too have been overrun. Soon learning that a large group of monsters have penetrated civilization's defensive lines and are now heading inwards, towards populated areas, he sets off for the nearby large city to warn them. Along the way, the intuition borne of the souls he consumed helps him narrowly avert disaster several times, and he comes to trust it. After reaching the city, he helps organize its defense, and distinguishes himself. After the crisis is resolved, he is recognized as an exceptionally wise and resourceful leader, and accepts a position on the city's ruling council.

A memoir written by a woman who grew up as a member of one of the last isolated primitive tribes of the great river forest. When she is a young woman, a group of Hadarite missionaries arrive, bearing gifts. Once they learn the language, they tell stories of faraway lands, vast cities, great wealth, and an incredible amount of knowledge about the natural world. Most of her tribe is skeptical, but she, ever curious, listens to them with rapt attention. After a year, they depart. She chooses to accompany them to the city, leaving her old life and family behind. Over the next several years, she attends a school, and learns a great number of things---the knowledge of more than a thousand years of civilization—very, very fast. The book describes in detail her thoughts and inner experience, and what it was like for her life and view of the world change so much so quickly. She seems to have found it both overwhelming and exhilarating. During her time in the city, she also comes to grips with an entirely foreign culture, and the book recounts various stories of misunderstandings or confusions on her part or on the part of others, not used to people with her background. These events are not only humorous, but also offer a deep look into both cultures, and the unstated assumptions and beliefs that underlie them. (This book is popular in the Union for its rare perspective on Hadarite culture, and the curators expect that, for similar reasons, it will be useful to help other worlds understand that culture.) The increased comfort and security available to her in her new life is also a significant change, although she seems to find this less important than what she's learning. After studying for several years, she returns home to visit. After so long, and dressed in foreign clothing, they do not recognize her at first. When they do, they welcome her back, and ask her about her travels. She struggles to recount the most magnificent things she's seen or learned, but finds it difficult to communicate why they mean so much to her when her audience lacks the background knowledge to understand. In her time away, she has grown accustomed to Hadarite culture, and must make an effort to remember what it was like to be so different, to know so little. Realizing that she cannot go back to the life she once had, she departs for good. It is a bittersweet farewell. She returns to the city, begins a career as a biologist, and (as described by the afterword) eventually makes several significant discoveries and is acclaimed as one of the greatest minds of her era.

This book isn't fiction, precisely, but it's definitely not nonfiction either. The most common religion on Olam, called Hadar, is centrally about truth. A fringe sect (allegedly) believes that the best way to learn truth is to be exposed to lies—the trickier the better—examine them, and learn from them how to overcome illusions. This book, written by a member of that sect, is one of the most acclaimed examples of what are known as 'books of lies'. Not everything is a lie, of course, or else you would be able to reverse them and consistently discover what the author really thinks. Instead, the book is a careful mixture of truths and falsehoods, some more obvious than others. It combines various arguments about philosophy, psychology, sociology, and history into a strangely persuasive theory of everything. This book is clearly labeled as not-reliably-true, and the included advice recommends reading this carefully, treating it as a challenge to discern which parts of it are true and which are false, and avoiding drawing any strong conclusions from the text, even if you're pretty sure you've got it right. The curators have included an 'answer sheet', containing the priesthood's best judgments about which parts are true and where the deceptions lie (although it is strongly cautioned that they could have missed something). It is strongly recommended not to distribute these answers, except to a small group of sanity-checkers who will be in a position to notice if your extra-dimensional civilization has a special vulnerability to any of the deceptions contained herein. If used in accordance with the provided instructions, the curators expect this book to be much more valuable as a learning exercise than it is dangerous.

(There are other books of lies, designed to be deceptive taking into account that you expect to be deceived, those are much more dangerous and the curators thought it best not to send any to other worlds just yet.)

A book of post-post-apocalyptic speculative fiction (set on Olam) in which, in the aftermath of an improbably dangerous plague that killed most of the population, the survivors rebuild civilization. It follows seven characters from all around the world, of various ages, genders, and social roles, over a period of several decades. In this period, substantial recovery and reconstruction takes place, and isolated lands come back into contact with one another. Many decades of separation—and varying consequences of and reactions to the plague and its aftermath—cause the already distinct cultures of these various lands to diverge further. When characters from these separate populations meet, they are struck by the differences between them, and seek to understand each other and draw together despite those differences. The book focuses most on its examination of the cultural and economic consequences of the plague, and contains several appendixes detailing the timeline of events, how the economic and cultural conditions changed over time, and why they changed in those ways. The plot, in comparison, is rather straightforward and unsurprising.

*'Accuracy' in this context, seems to be related to how safe it is to draw conclusions about the world from a work. In the case of fiction, it mainly has to do if the work's implicit or explicit models of psychology, sociology, economics, biology, etc. are accurate.

An alternate-historical novel set after the Zadian Theocracy has been overthrown by revolution, following the revolutionary committee trying to set up a new government.  We have several characters pushing for new theocracies (but disagreeing on which religious sects to favor - a few of them still agree with the Zadians' teaching just not the strictness of their practices), some other characters advocating a more secular aristocratic-democracy, and others who want each town choose its own course.  The book majors on their debates and their interaction with the city around them.

(The author's brief prologue explains that in actual history, the Zadian Theocracy was overthrown by foreign armies some time before this book was set.)

A historical-fantasy novel set in the late Middle Ages (before the rise of global trade, the translator's preface explains), where magical elves kidnap some novice Historian-Monks, and they must use their historical and philosophical training to resolve the elves' political dispute and convince someone to bring them back home.  Along the way, they convince two elves to take Historian-Monk vows and set up their own Elven monastery.

A historical novel set during the Barren-Power war, about two (fictional, the author explains) people arrested for treasonously passing secret information to the Barren-Power army.

(The translator explains that the Barren-Power war was Ev's last major war, about a century before the present.  It was started by the Barren-Power ideology, which condemned abstract philosophy as useless, advocated whatever led to success, and saw successful dictatorship as its own justification.)

One person did it out of cowardice when they temporarily conquered his town; he's horrified at what he did and can't imagine how to atone.  The other person felt that a stronger Barren-Power movement would push the world out of their suboptimal equilibrium; he agrees he did wrong but thinks it was worth it.  We follow their psychological and religious journey while under sentence of death for treason.  The first person finally forgives himself and begs to be kept away from any similar situation; the second person finally trusts in God and other people to handle the situation.

In the end, both their sentences are commuted to lifelong vows as Astronomy-Monks.

(The Ecumenical Astronomical Monks also send their complete tables of supernova and pulsar observation, with a letter from the Abbot-General of the order expressing his wishes for profitable exchange of nonfictional knowledge.)

A tale for young workers about a new mushroom farmer who is very unhappy with her* job and desperately wants to change it and become an explorer, but feels like she must stay in her current job for the good of her hive! The story details her becoming less happy and satisfied, until she eventually makes new friends in her fiction-reading group who encourage her to tell the hive-manager that she’s unhappy and wants to switch jobs. She does this, and becomes much happier, and finds a new valuable type of fungus for the colony, that is eventually used to make a new kind of antibacterial. It is clearly written with a moral lesson to tell people about your problems and not just tough them out.

A very complicated political novel with around 600,000 words, featuring nine diplomats from three different hives navigating a tension-filled debate about the morality of executions, while also trying to make the most advantageous trade deals, with several backroom discussions between every combination of hives at different points, embarrassing interpersonal drama, and a tremendous amount of dramatic irony.

A rules and lore book for a tabletop RPG, featuring several books of additional content based on other series, and a wide variety of different powersets. Nearly three hundred different personality traits are listed in the original alone, all with various mechanical benefits and downsides. 

An collection including seven novels, three books of short stories, four series about the most popular alternate universes, a collection of poetry, half a dozen epistolary books, and an annotated book of music scores. An additional eight powersets, 412 character traits, and new faction-loyalty and relationship mechanics for the RPG above are included, all inspired by this series. The base series is about a worker, named Halru, who is taken as a war-prisoner by a rival hive as slave labor and is forced to care for their grubs. Two of her limbs are cut off, and she generally has a terrible time doing awful labor under threat of death. Her best friend, Terilu, sets off on an extremely dangerous and ill-advised quest to rescue her, which at various points includes having a riddling contest with a dragon to gain fire breathing, bargaining with a Fairy Queen to gain wings, fighting a variety of creatures, secretly training under five separate rival hives to become a master of all five styles of spearfighting, and generally becoming a really powerful and dangerous warrior. She then rescues her best friend, and they return home, only to find themselves dealing with complex social dynamics now that Halru is maimed, which means that she is lower status in Semi-Generic!Fantasy!Past world. They cuddle a lot, talk about their feelings, play around with various power dynamics, and become lifepartners.

An included note says that while slavery and treating maimed people worse is something that happened in the past, they definitely don’t do it in the modern era, because that’s horrendously unethical.

penis warning: [so_theres_this_murder_mystery.png]

stellarsapphire: 🍿

orange blossom special: 🍿

bagel surprise: 🍿

penis warning: yeah yeah whatEVER

penis warning: i liked it? i think that the colorblindness obviousbait¹ was a little heavy handed but pn²

orange blossom special: I feel really bad for [killer] :(

stellarsapphire: yeah

stellarsapphire: F

Falcon: Yeah, obviously nobody deserves to be murdered for being an asshole but it sounds like [victim] was probably bothering [killer] for ages beforehand

orange blossom special: yeah and I can't even imagine how it must feel to ||always know you ended a life because you lost self control||³

orange blossom special: it's one thing to injure someone or come close before realizing but I'd just be gutted :(

stellarsapphire: yeah and then have it rubbed in like that

stellarsapphire: id probably LITERALLY turn into a witch⁴

bagel surprise: how did you like the abridged version?

penis warning: its okay i guess?

penis warning: i think the actual murder scene makes more sense this way

penis warning: the annotations say it was written for kids

bagel surprise: oh that makes the extended explanations about self control make more sense :lol:

Falcon: 😠😠😠

Falcon: I hate the way the carnivores were handled!

bagel surprise: ugh yeah

bagel surprise: they all seem really fucking irritating

bagel surprise: and then the way the herbivores were portrayed as being more in the wrong? i think that obviously both the herbivores and carnivores were really irresponsibly biased but it feels like the narrative thinks that the herbivores were doing it on purpose and the carnivores weren't

Falcon: I think it was the other way around for the bit where they almost went to war

bagel surprise: yeah true

bagel surprise: i'm still mad about the meat dish thing. why didnt the carnivores try a fucking salad!

Falcon: I mean, they're obligate carnivores

bagel surprise: yeah and the herbivores are obligate herbivores!

Falcon: I don't think that's actually spelled out though

bagel surprise: well

bagel surprise: okay

penis warning: ha i can feel how mad the annotators were about the historical inaccuracies

Falcon: It's a cute just-so-story though

bagel surprise: i really like the way they demonstrated the challenges of parenting with just two people/advantages of having plenty of coparents and how even dysfunctional ways of doing things aren't all bad

stellarsapphire: you are so fucking cute

bagel surprise: :P

stellarsapphire: 💙

penis warning: wonder what it was like to live in a pride

orange blossom special: 🤔 I'll see if there are reenactors in the Graylien world

¹Red herring.

²"pobody's nerfect"

³Spoilered in-universe.

⁴Yes, this periverser has watched PMMM. 

⁵Site that compiles plot summaries of various media properties. Levels of detail include "help half my friend group/social media feed is into this media that I don't have time to get into, what is going on," guides to plot events that are in extremely plain, direct language so one doesn't get thrown for a loop 3/4 of the way into the plot because they missed the implications of a line 1/3 of the way in, overviews of the general shape of events that preserve major reveals, and the plot as experienced by major (and sometimes minor, for particularly popular media) characters.

stellarsapphire: oh this is gonna be stuck in my head for weeks

orange blossom special: [quotes a particularly catchy refrain from the song]

stellarsapphire: haha stoppp

bagel surprise: i wonder if it's supposed to be a satire thing or an alien values thing

Falcon: I'm just glad the shark was OK 🥺💜

bagel surprise: 🍿

stellarsapphire: 🍿

Falcon: You can 🍿 me all you want! I'm still right

penis warning: 🍿

penis warning: but personally i think its a satire since the joey has all these opportunities to reflect and just doesnt take them

penis warning: i mean at the very least the spirits do that "do you have any regrets" thing which feels like a leading question to me

stellarsapphire: thats true but i think the song does raise an interesting question

stellarsapphire: like can you have real happiness if you never think about consequences?

bagel surprise: i don't know

bagel surprise: i mean, it seems kind of unrealistic

bagel surprise: but maybe i should just accept it's an alien thing

bagel surprise: i think maybe you can be really happy but i don't know if it would be worth it

bagel surprise: although that might be because i'm having a really hard time imagining it not bothering me

penis warning: oh no

bagel surprise: nooooo

orange blossom special: :( :( :(

Falcon: Oh that looks like the saddest piece of media in the entire multiverse

stellarsapphire: yeah i cant do this

Falcon: It says in the annotations that they cured the condition the fry had after this was published

Falcon: So there's that, I guess?

Falcon: 🙃😢

bagel surprise:😢

stellarsapphire: i

stellarsapphire: love this kid?

stellarsapphire: everything about him is so great

bagel surprise: i think my favorite is [one of the fathers]

bagel surprise: can't decide if he has no business raising a fry ever or just with this specific set of coparents

orange blossom special: honestly I wonder if these guys export lovers and if they work for non-Joeys

orange blossom special: not sure if I'd want one for myself but they'd definitely benefit a lot of people

Falcon: [like 3 different pages of wight-related sketches]

orange blossom special: 🧡

penis warning changed their nickname to wight liker

stellarsapphire: do you think the joeys would mind it if i stole¹ "turn into a wight" instead of "turn into a witch"

bagel surprise: haha

bagel surprise: i think they have different connotations anyway

bagel surprise: like the witches are a pure emotional turmoil thing but the wight thing only happens under certain circumstances

stellarsapphire: hmm yeah

stellarsapphire: the witches can stay

orange blossom special: I'm not totally sure how to feel about the mating thing but I do like how the two have each other in - alienation?

orange blossom special: they've both been through things that normal members of their species never will and even though their experiences aren't exactly the same they still have that

orange blossom special: it's sweet

¹Periversers will do this with pretty much any word or phrasing that tickles their fancy.

wight liker: yesss an external souls story

wight liker: 💛💛💛

orange blossom special: 🤔 I wonder if there'd be a way to hack the soul-eating magic system so that you get the whole person when you eat their soul instead of just some memories and impulses

orange blossom special: end result being a gestalt of all of humanity

orange blossom special: or whatever

stellarsapphire: i think youd have to hack it so it didnt get too chaotic

stellarsapphire: or frustrating

bagel surprise: maybe you could split the soul and have two people eat it and then establish telepathy between those two people?

Falcon: I think that'd just kill the soul

bagel surprise: i mean the self is already split between the body and the soul so i was figuring you would be exploiting its existing ability to split

orange blossom special: I kinda hope that now they know that eating a bunch of souls at once leads to that kind of almost-precognition they make more

orange blossom special: shamans?

orange blossom special: that's what I'm calling them anyway

wight liker: ooh yeah

wight liker: i wonder if it has to be at once or if its an over time thing

orange blossom special: oh hm

orange blossom special: the decaying over time aspect definitely complicates things

stellarsapphire: this one was weird

bagel surprise: yeah

wight liker: wonder why the protagonist was the only one out of their village who was interested in the stories and knowledge and chance to explore a new place

Falcon: Maybe the others had responsibilities they couldn't in good conscience put on hold for that long?

wight liker: okay yeah thats possible

orange blossom special: I'm kinda torn

orange blossom special: on the one hand the Hadarites obviously had a higher standard of living

orange blossom special: but I wish that they could have integrated that standard of living with the philosophies of the river forest tribe

orange blossom special: I mean it feels kinda weird that they didn't also have thousands of years of knowledge built up

orange blossom special: or however long they'd been living there

Falcon: Yeah

stellarsapphire: maybe the protagonist just didnt see it that way

stellarsapphire: since it was the background of daily life instead of new stuff being blasted at them all at once

orange blossom special: 🤔 yeah

orange blossom special: maybe

Falcon: I'm not sure how to feel about this one either

bagel surprise: i got tired about a chapter in and tried again reading along with the cheat sheet and it was better then

bagel surprise: i think this is more reflective of the culture that produced it than of any real truth

stellarsapphire: isnt that pretty much everything

stellarsapphire: especially since we now have access to a whole multiverse

stellarsapphire: so even if something is really true in the culture it came from its not by any means universal

stellarsapphire: or multiversal or whatever

bagel surprise: well yeah but

bagel surprise: i dunno

wight liker: i think i know what you mean

wight liker: i did get bored and not finish it though so make of that what you will

bagel surprise: or did you finish the whole thing and you're Strategically Lying to me to test my ability to find out the truth

wight liker: :P

wight liker: i liked this one

stellarsapphire: i bounced off the premise

wight liker: patpat

orange blossom special: haha I bounced off [character]'s whole deal

stellarsapphire: 🤝

bagel surprise: i worried about bouncing off the premise but it wasn't too bad

bagel surprise: i feel like i should have more to say about it but i don't

wight liker: patpat again

An epic poem about an ancient king, presented in the original with extensive annotations. Full translations are going to be legitimately tricky; it's long, it's gorgeous, and the poetic form is pretty strict and doesn't adapt well to the rhythms of other languages, but the writer keeps doing this thing where the rhyme scheme and meter highlight underlying thematic connections between different lines—anyway. The plot begins with an introductory section where the king is going around doing atrocities in a very badass ancient-legendary-figure sort of way, right up until a random peasant girl lights him on fire with her magic powers and he immediately falls madly in love and drops everything to beg her to marry him, then spends the next two-thirds of the poem gradually lightening up on the atrocities front, partly because he has now realized that peasants are people and partly because his wife keeps arguing with him and occasionally threatening to light him on fire again, which he always responds to with a confused mix of fear, adoration, and occasionally anger. The queen's power to set fire to her husband is depicted very obviously and straightforwardly, discussed in the text and the dialogue; the king's reciprocal power to have his wife executed is left completely to subtext and implication, only barely hinted at by means such as using epithets for her that emphasize her fearlessness whenever he gets angry. Accompanying notes explain that the poem is an allegory for real historical events, with the queen standing in for the entire Phoenix archetype, which did appear during that approximate historical era and did have those approximate powers and did have approximately that effect on ancient kings' tendency to oppress people although the exact mechanism was obviously very different.

Extremely well-researched historical fiction detailing the life of a high priestess of the River Kingdom who, by contrast to most high priestesses of the River Kingdom, did actual politics instead of spending all her time managing the movement of water. One gets the impression that the author wishes they could spend all their time managing the movement of water; lovingly detailed descriptions of River Kingdom plumbing and water management take up a solid third of the book, intermingled with plenty of inner monologue from the high priestess and lots of interactions with very well-fleshed-out side characters. An appendix carefully distinguishes side characters for whom there is historical evidence (and what that evidence covered) from side characters the author made up (and the census data and contemporary sources from which they extrapolated those characters' likely traits). An additional appendix tries to explain the context of the Ondine archetype so the aliens can properly appreciate it, but the author admits that they're not very good at explaining this sort of thing and recommends some other reference material to interested reader.

Porn about masochists with access to magical healing is its own entire genre but here is a widely acclaimed example, in which a [sadist who lives by themself in a castle they designed and built using magic] (this is a two-word phrase in the author's native language) gets an unexpected visitor and falls in love with them despite being sort of shaky on this whole 'human interaction' concept. Neither of them has much of a clue how to pursue a healthy relationship, but they are both highly motivated to figure it out, and they make it to the end of the book having successfully reinvented most of the basics from scratch and settling into a life together full of art and luxury and wholesome, loving, extremely gory sex. The climactic scene involves the introverted-sadist-architect breaking into tears about how much they love their partner and needing to be wrapped in blankets and snuggled until they calm down. The two of them are the only characters in the entire book, unless you count the introverted-sadist-architect's house as a third character, which you very well might given how much screentime it gets. The back of the book has a collection of author-approved fanart of the castle, added so the aliens can get a sense of the architectural styles involved that words alone would have trouble conveying.

A duology of very long fantasy novels, which turn out to be collectively about 40% appendix by pagecount. The appendices cover worldbuilding, conlangs, and a set of six different detailed maps of the world, each from the perspective of one of the major nations involved in the plot, all of which have subtle disagreements with each other on matters such as which landmarks are important, what they are called, and who owns them. The plot consists of a ragtag yet lovable ensemble cast, thrown together by circumstances beyond their control which accidentally leave them the only people in the world capable of saving it from a cataclysmic threat, having breakdowns about how they're not ready for this and then going ahead and doing their best anyway. In the end, they pull it off by the skin of their teeth and with rather more casualties than any of them are comfortable with. The second volume has a long denouement consisting mostly of our heroes leaning on each other and their friends and loved ones to help them cope with all their realistically-described trauma once the crisis is over; the last chapter concludes when they're all psychologically stable again and leading healthy, thriving lives, and the epilogue shows a bittersweet scene of the six of them holding a private memorial ceremony together ten years later, after which they are going to attend a massive celebration being held in their honour on the anniversary of their success.

A work of interactive fiction, in which the player's character appears wandering in a starlit desert with no memory of where they came from or how they got here. After finding and exploring a nearby ruin, you eventually stumble upon a talking statue of a beautiful winged person, and although the statue is very shy at first, eventually you can coax enough information out of them to realize that they're some sort of powerful magical being who has been horribly abused by people using them for personal gain. You, too, can horribly abuse them and use them for personal gain; or you can use them for personal gain in less gratuitously awful ways that they still pretty clearly find traumatizing; or you can try to befriend them; or you can try to befriend them but in a sex way; or you can ignore them and try to figure out a way to escape the mysterious magical ruins by yourself. The descriptions of the statue's reactions to trauma are uncompromisingly realistic; the descriptions of the statue's reactions to genuine friendship and love are heartbreakingly sweet. The story has multiple possible endings, depending on your relationship with the statue and on whether you choose to escape the mysterious ruin or not, plus the implicit non-ending of simply never deciding to take an ending option; it is only possible to remove the statue from the ruins by force or with maximum trust levels, and if you do it by force the statue crumbles to dust as soon as they cross the outer wall.

bagel surprise: this one was pretty fun!

bagel surprise: i've been looking up more about the real-life zadian theocracy

bagel surprise: it really enhances the reading honestly

wight liker: sounds about right, fucked-up-governments-kick¹-haver

bagel surprise: :stfu:

bagel surprise: i was actually gonna say the author did a good job of having certain plot points resonate with someone who's familiar with the actual history!

wight liker: oh im sure thats true

wight liker: you also have a fucked-up governments kick :P

bagel surprise: :P

stellarsapphire: this was weirdly cute

orange blossom special: yeah, I like the interdimensional fix-it genre a lot

bagel surprise: feels like it could be a kids' book

bagel surprise: it definitely does a good job pitching the historian-monk lifestyle :P

Falcon: Were you thinking of converting?

bagel surprise: :P

Falcon: :P

bagel surprise: i just meant the way that the historian-monk philosophy solved the elves' problems to the point the elves converted in the end

bagel surprise: it was handled really well though

bagel surprise: in that it explained the historian-monk philosophy and how it can be used to solve problems like what the elves had, but it didn't treat it as some magical perfect solution to literally every problem

wight liker: yeah

bagel surprise: i've seen stuff that does that and it just comes across as insincere bullshit

bagel surprise: the realism definitely helps the case for historian-monkhood

wight liker: … this planet really likes their historical fiction, huh

stellarsapphire: yeah

wight liker: and their monks

stellarsapphire: lol

orange blossom special: honestly everyone involved in this one sounds insane

orange blossom special: the Barren-Power ideology, both of the main characters, the existence of the death penalty,

orange blossom special: it's an interesting read but all the actions feel like they were done by aliens

bagel surprise: well,

orange blossom special: :P

¹Like a kink, but nonsexual. Similar to a special interest.

bagel surprise: awww, i like the message

Falcon: I just feel vindicated that there are totally ant aliens out there!

Falcon: And that they're exactly as great as I always thought!

stellarsapphire: hahaha 💙

wight liker: honestly i might save this one to pass on to kids

wight liker: the combination of "dont assume you know whats good for others without asking" and "putting up with unhappiness for the sake of your friends harms them more than it helps"

orange blossom special: yeah

orange blossom special: plus you just know they'll eat up allll the cool ant alien stuff 🧡

wight liker: 💛

orange blossom special: ngl this one made my brain hurt a little 😅

orange blossom special: politics 😔

bagel surprise: yeah it's definitely not light reading

bagel surprise: i think it's worth the read though!

stellarsapphire: hey citrine the spoilerpedia page has the plot-by-character-perspective sections up

stellarsapphire: there's a section that follows each hive and there's a section that breaks it down into individual diplomats

orange blossom special: oh thanks Indi!

stellarsapphire: 💙

stellarsapphire: but yeah, reading the spoilerpedia article definitely helped me

stellarsapphire: i think the character moments make tackling the politics worth it

wight liker: eeeee 💛

Falcon: Yeah, I really like the worldbuilding!

bagel surprise: [starts excitedly rambling about how they would alt the plots and characters of their various story projects into the RPG]

stellarsapphire: [joins in on the rambling by speculating about various Blorbo-From-My-Shows and how they would be alted into the RPG]

orange blossom special: [makes a self-insert for the RPG and then starts alting everyone else in the group chat into the RPG]

bagel surprise: [fanart of Terilu]

stellarsapphire: [fanart of the Fairy Queen]

orange blossom special: [shippy fanart of Halru and Terilu]

Falcon: …Yeah, that sounds about right.

bagel surprise: :stfu:

stellarsapphire: :P

orange blossom special: yeah 😔

Falcon: 💜

The collected best-of-[mythos/extended universe/fandom] from a setting where men have emotion-powered magic and women have ritual magic and hermaphrodites can combine the power of both and therefore rule with an iron fist. The protagonists variously foment revolution, fall in love with their hermaphrodite masters, die in heroic sacrifices, have eight children, learn to control their magical powers, work through trauma, and struggle with the implications of unethical orders. Also all of this is going on IN SPACE! The collection features works by lots of different authors, some anonymous. It includes an eight-season TV show, two separate novel series (one of which forks into three more series halfway through), a few dozen short stories, a book of recipes using fantastical ingredients and cooking methods, a handful of porn films depicting canon-compliant sex scenes among the protagonists, and a reified version of a board game that appears briefly in one scene of the TV show.

An ancient epic poem describing the awesome deeds of a female folk hero. She is born with a full head of braided hair, never cries, suckles from a large predator after it eats her parents, is adopted by peasants, and speaks in full sentences before her first birthday. Some middle parts of the poem are lost, but it picks back up with the heroine weaving impossibly complex patterns, cleverly deceiving an invading army into harvesting her family's crops and then leaving peacefully, marrying a prince, having an intimate and ambiguously sexual friendship with the prince's female cousin who lives with them, inventing the mirror, detecting and exiling a thief, smothering her deformed newborn, negotiating a treaty with a neighboring tribe, and dispensing miscellaneous wisdom in her old age.

A series of essays between two policy-makers, arguing back and forth about whether suicide by being fed to large predators is (a) awesome, exciting, and a great way to ethically allow zoo animals the occasional hunt, or (b) selfish, because someone who's willing to choose a scary and painful suicide method should instead volunteer for risky disaster relief missions until one kills them. The victory ends up going to (b), and the book concludes with the text of a law denying government funding to zoos which enable suicide-by-large-animal.

A treatise that appears to be passionately arguing that people who don’t like arguing don’t have a mental illness. The fact that some people might think that is considered extremely obvious. It’s noted to have been very controversial, and one of the first modern anti-discriminatory arguments, written around four hundred years ago.

A collection of official treaties and documents detailing an agreement between 264 hives, agreeing for favorable trading treaties, shared-science knowledge, and common ethical laws. The reason for the censorship is the included law against all slavery as an “ethical abomination, and all who are complicit should feel the strongest self-betrayal.”

A slightly complicated political novel, classified as “short,” with only 70,000 words and three subplots. In this one, one of the hives is secretly preparing to wage war on both hives and framing it on the other, and is thwarted when one of the ambassadors has a crisis of faith, which is detailed in full. She defects, tells the others about the evil plans, and gets lots of cuddles with her new friends.

Further selections from the working group (likewise certified for accuracy) include the following.

A romance/coming-of-age novel. This is an extremely common genre in the Union, but a very important one; the curators felt they had to include one acclaimed example. This book is more than a hundred years old, set in the Union of that time. It alternates perspective between the two main characters, a boy and girl who meet as children, become friends, slowly fall in love as they grow older, get married as young adults, and build a life together. Romance, as depicted in this story, is primarily composed of friendship, trust, and some understated lust, which culminates in joyous, certain-as-the-sun-rises love. This is not to say that they don't have disagreements, but all are resolved amicably. There is some explicit sexual content, almost entirely after they get married, but it's considered to be moreso pornography-that-makes-you-cry than pornography-that-makes-you-aroused. Their comings-of-age include of course increasing knowledge and sexual awakening, but the story also places great emphasis on seizing one's agency and the way the couple grows into each other, simultaneously adapting to their relationship and the world around them to together form an integrated whole.

A fantasy epic set in a very high-magic world with a long power ladder (and ensuing chaotic, complex power dynamics). The magic system works in such a way that it is possible (albeit difficult) for even the lowliest mortal beings to ascend to great power (and for even the greatest to be usurped). The story follows a woman of great ambition and deadly cleverness. After the spillover of a battle between two mid-level entities destroys most of her hometown, she becomes determined to gain the power necessary to control her fate in a chaotic world. The first act tells the story of her quest, the trials she undergoes, the stratagems she employs, the people she meets, the fantastical locations she visits, the entities she slays. Most of her victories are the result of her intelligence and strategic acumen (or, perhaps, her lack of mistakes). Notably, she does not at any point use deception to get ahead, although there are plenty of situations where it seems advantageous to do so, and several occasions on which she would gain from dishonoring agreements she has made. The second act begins as she nears the peak of power. At this point, she becomes more contemplative, stepping back from her schemes to gain power that she might think about how to use the power she has gained. She comes to realize that, despite the unending struggle and change, the nature of that struggle is constant. ("What did you expect? That you would climb to the top, seize power, and find waiting for you a switch to flip and fix the world? This world runs in cycles of cycles, and if it were easy to break them it would have happened already. When everything changes, nothing changes.") So she seeks a way to undermine those patterns, to make way for a world which is less chaotic and truly different. But—she decides—despite the constraints of the ecology they all participate in, everyone makes their own choices, and there is no reason it is impossible for them to make different ones. In the third act, she brings her vision into reality, persuading and bargaining for people to change their behavior, to work together to build something better. The costs of her honor are repaid many times over, as she alone has the credibility to make this plan succeed. What makes the difference is helping others to see the truth, to recognize the fundamental stupidity of collectively choosing to create a world rent by conflict. Over many thousands of years, the forces of coordination creep forward, and eventually overcome those of conflict. Peace at last.

A slice-of-life/comedy with tactical elements, which follows a group of six teenage boys, who have long been friends, as they decide to form a kravmabid* team and play together. At first, they aren't very good: unskilled, uncoordinated, and prone to blunders. As the book goes on, they learn from their mistakes, get better, and eventually become one of the better teams in the region. The story focuses most on the camaraderie and friendship between them, as well as the humor they share together and find in their situation—despite numerous losses, they do not become dispirited, instead joking about their ineptitude. The incompetence only enhances its effectiveness as an ode to boyhood friendship. Almost as an afterthought, the story offers detailed insight into the tactical dynamics and competitive landscape of kravmabid—the narrator often describes the characteristics of skilled play as an ironic contrast to what the boys are actually doing—as well as what it feels like from the inside to slowly get better at something by experimenting and learning from your mistakes.

*This is a sport on Olam, combining hiking, navigation, tracking, archery, and martial arts into a sort of multiday wilderness wargame. It was originally developed for training soldiers, and has since evolved into a more fun recreational activity. Play is dominated by maneuver, team coordination, stealth, and tracking.

An inside-view novel (set on contemporary Olam) from the perspective of a man who is a narcissist. He is often inconsiderate, and treats the people close to him poorly, but is exceptionally good at justifying his actions to himself. Since the entire book is from his—often warped—perspective, readers may initially believe that he is in the right, and underestimate the depth of his shortcomings. Eventually, he upsets someone in a way, and to a degree, that he cannot explain away, and for practically the first time is actually confused about why they feel as they do. He carries this confusion with him for several weeks, ruminating over it until he is eventually forced to conclude that he is responsible, and has very deeply fucked up. This triggers a long process of introspection, and attempts to change. Slowly, haltingly, with great difficulty, he is able to see through some of the illusions that have afflicted him, and comes to understand himself and others better. He repairs some of his relationships, and at the books end, makes a heartfelt apology to the person he has wronged the most (their reaction is not shown).

A crossover fantasy series about a group of 64 young adults from a wide array of settings who wake up in a sapient, magical library-slash-academy and are trapped there. The characters each bring some form of magic or powers from their respective worlds. They are tasked with surviving for four years so they can "graduate" and return to their respective worlds with new and more powerful magic. The academy itself is hostile, and produces a variety of threats both environmental and active each year. However, the primary challenge is the end-of-year exams, which test the students on magical knowledge (in particular, each other's magic systems,) and which pass only the top 50% of the class each year; the bottom half are turned into books by the library. Dead students are treated as having gotten a score of 0, so students are incentivized to kill each other to increase their chances of passing each exam. The magics brought by the various characters are not at all balanced against each other, and the characters also vary greatly in competence, but beyond these factors, it is difficult to tell which characters will die or fail and which will survive; some characters get more screentime than others but there are no clear primary protagonists. A fair amount of sex is implied but it occurs offscreen, and pairbonding is not a focus; everyone is too busy not dying. Death-school-magic-system-analysis-many-setting-crossover-fantasy is a popular enough combination of tropes to constitute its own genre. This series is an exemplar due to the variety of novel magic-and-power-classification systems studied and invented by the characters, a few of which are groundbreaking by Auderan standards and many of which are refinements of popular classification systems, and which have since entered common usage. The settings and characters involved are not actually from other works; the team of authors who worked on this series took great pride in its originality and scope, and there's a perceptible aesthetic that holds across the diverse settings. There are numerous appendices expounding on the settings and their magic systems. At the end of each novel, this information is included for all of the characters who have died, to minimize spoilers in the intended reading experience.

An AU series of the aforementioned death school books where the characters attend a much kinder multiversal institution which lets them gradually learn each other's magics, including many of the noncontagious ones, and after graduation releases them be free to uplift their worlds in exchange for contributing original research. There are still some stakes, as it is possible for a student to drop out early with insufficient magic to solve all the problems they want to solve at home and no ability to visit their friends, but there's much more breathing room for love and pairbonding. In particular, several fan favorites who died early in the original series get a lot more development, and a prominent pair who led opposing factions in the later books of the original end up pairbonded. A lot of the words are straightforwardly indulgent descriptions of precious precious characters bantering and flirting and being happy together and having fun together and making each other happy like they clearly deserve. However, there is still no explicit description of anything more intense than cuddling despite their sex lives not being implied to be dead offscreen. Also, despite all the sunshine and roses, a few of the students are still egregiously terrible people, and prominent plot in the second book involves a faction of students conspiring to sabotage their experimental results so that they drop out early instead of gaining enough power to take over their homeworlds. There's a lot more tangled-up mixing of magics, analysis of their interactions in edge cases, and characters using multiple magic systems together than in the original series. Many details of magic systems previously relegated to appendices are instead discovered organically through diligent experimentation. Due to the greater focus on magical academics, characters helping each other succeed despite severe executive dysfunction is a prominent theme. The series culminates in the fourth year with a few students designing a communicable near-omnipotent powerset by jailbreaking a few key magics with other magic systems that are able to bypass their limitations. The graduating class adopts this powerset and is implied to have an easy time uplifting their own worlds, while the characters who dropped out with less power are left as further spinoff-bait.

A selection of the most popular erotic fanfiction of these series. Fanfiction set in the first version of the death school tends to have sadistic-exploitation, rapey, desperate-comfort, and desperate-indifferent sex. There is little in the way of explicit consent. Fanfiction set in the AU version tends to have more comfy sex, and a few characters ask for consent explicitly before their first time together, if not thereafter. There is also some crossover fanfiction between the universes which tends to take one of two forms: either a more amoral and hostile character from the original series defiles an innocent cozy character from the AU, or a powerful, kind, and safe character from the AU rescues a character from the original series and helps them learn to feel good and be happy during sex again. The sex tends to occur without any preamble, often while one participant is working on something else, or with a focus on the pleasure of only one participant. There is also a lot of casual groping. In some cases the characters in question are alts of the same character. In none of the fanfiction sent over does a character who is pairbonded in either series have sex with someone other than their partner.

A fantasy novel about a young wizard who steals a fallen star and embarks on a journey to return it to the sky. The protagonist is targeted by the setting's magocracy, who want to get the star back and exploit it for its magical properties. The protagonist's primary character traits are his curiosity, impulsiveness, and creativity. The star is sapient, and is depicted as naive, intelligent, alien, and adorable. The deuteragonist is a girl who has run away from a family of genetically modified mercenaries with superhuman physical abilities but drastically shortened lifespans. She joins the protagonist and the star on their journey and lends them her acute tactical intellect, her abilities in combat, and her well-honed paranoia. The deuteragonist never expresses vulnerability in an obvious way, but there is a lot of adorable cuddling and casual handholding. The featured magic system centers around sacrificing knowledge to evoke magical effects: to perform magic, a wizard focus on some area of their understanding of the world and figuratively "burns" it to power the effect. Efficiency of knowledge use scales with specificity, accuracy, and relevance of the knowledge used. Overdrawing on knowledge is easy and potentially disastrous, as it can not only undo years of study, but in extreme cases erase fundamental intuitions about the world that can't be easily relearned, such as a wizard's instinctive understanding of heat or gravity. This is played for horror, and depicted as one of the most awful things that can happen to a person ever. A central element of the setting is that anyone at all with significant scientific knowledge can perform magic, potentially to great destructive effect, and so the magocracy has outlawed literacy and study of the natural world among the populace. The novel ends with somewhat abruptly with the main characters overthrowing the magocracy. The characters dealing with the resulting chaos, implementing a better way to deal with the dangers of magic, studying sufficient astrophysics to return the star to the sky, and studying sufficient biology to save the deuteragonist from dying in her 30s is implied to be the plot of one or more sequels. This novel is notable for having been written by a particularly young author, whose style is a bit unrefined in a way that many Auderan readers find refreshing. It's also an example of a work with less heavy magicbuilding.
 
A series of relatively short novels about magical girls whose powers each revolve around conjuring and manipulating some class of ordinary manufactured objects, and who must fight monsters that appear in extradimensional fake nightmares to survive. The protagonist's powers are themed around measuring instruments. Her conjures aren't very scary in combat, but each magical girl has a mental power as well, and hers is highly potent: anything she can perceive with her senses, she can perceive with absolute precision, and she can also move her body with perfect precision and imagine distances and motion in space with precision. Early in the story, she is mentored by a magical girl who can conjure springs in arbitrary states of compression or tension. Before meeting the main character, she had been acting conservatively and laying low, but she takes on more monster fights to support the protagonist, as magical girls depend on dream marbles dropped by the monsters for sustenance. In the third chapter of the first book, she dies, and this spurs the main character on to be more self-reliant and agentic despite her offensively weak powers. Besides the necessary conflict with the nightmare monsters, there is a lot of conflict and combat between magical girls over hunting territory and the limited supply of dream marbles. There are around 20 magical girls who are introduced at various points with interesting powers. The most prominent characters besides the protagonist are a sadistic cleaning supplies-themed magical girl who fights with devastating gases and corrosive industrial cleaning agents, a happy-go-lucky balloon-themed magical girl who can conjure arbitrarily pressurized balloons which create pressure explosions, and a recordings-themed magical girl who acts as a mastermind and foil to the protagonist due to her similarly potent mental power. The second book revolves around a conflict with the sadistic cleaning supplies girl, and by the end the protagonist wins her over by outsmarting her in their cat-and-mouse game and begins to pairbond-date her. The third book revolves around the two of them taking care of and training the balloon-themed magical girl, whose power initially appears useless; there are clear parallels with the beginning of the first book. The fourth book is implied to escalate the conflict between the protagonist's party and the recordings girl mastermind, who has been exploiting other magical girls for dream marbles, but it hasn't been released yet. 
 

stellarsapphire: has anyone tried tackling the original version yet

bagel surprise: nope

wight liker: yeah i just read the spoilerpedia article

stellarsapphire: someone on my dash¹ has been posting excerpts for a week

Falcon: Just untranslated excerpts?

stellarsapphire: nah theyve been reblogging some translations

orange blossom special: oh I follow someone who's been taking a stab at translating it!

wight liker: ooh link?

orange blossom special: [link]

wight liker: 🚀²

wight liker: its possible ill end up trying to learn the original language anyway but i dont wanna drop [another language from the periverse] just yet

Falcon: Yeah

wight liker: its really good! i didnt expect to like [king] as much as i did at the outset but

wight liker: theyre really fucking funny

bagel surprise: it seems like they've got a really good dynamic with [queen], yeah

wight liker: i was almost… disappointed when they stopped doing atrocities?

stellarsapphire: 🍿

wight liker: hush

wight liker: like obviously its better that they stopped doing atrocities! the atrocities were bad! but there was a really intriguing level of internal process to the atrocities and how they tied into [king]s other behavior

stellarsapphire: right

stellarsapphire: [link to one of the relevant excerpts that showed up on their dash]

orange blossom special: I like this translator's way with words

bagel surprise: yeah, yum

Falcon: This one was a lot of fun

bagel surprise: reminds me of this book series i read as a kid

bagel surprise: it was really immersive about the events it was based on

bagel surprise: and i skipped the foreword where the author was like "this is fictionalized, the protagonist was not actually a real person, here are some un-fictionalized accounts of the same event"

bagel surprise: so i was so disappointed when i found out that it was just historical fiction

stellarsapphire: haha oh no 💙

bagel surprise: i got in an argument with my friend about it

bagel surprise: they probably still feel smug about when they opened it up and pointed at the part where the author said they made the protagonist up

wight liker: patpat

bagel surprise: haha don't worry i got them back about a math problem 😈

orange blossom special: so Gloss will you be saving this book for your kids

bagel surprise: :P

bagel surprise: probably but i will definitely make sure they look at the table of characters who were real people and characters who were made up

orange blossom special: don't 🍿 me but I wish I could live in this one

stellarsapphire: not gonna 🍿 but i am raising my eyebrows

stellarsapphire: lovingly

orange blossom special: :P

Falcon: I'd probably be a masochist if I had magical healing that good

orange blossom special: right????

wight liker: yeah me too

wight liker: i mean i think id have to use magic to make myself more masochistic but 100% taking that option

bagel surprise: full disclosure i did have to skip some of the erogenous bits but the rest was very good

stellarsapphire: aw gloss

bagel surprise: shh it's fine

bagel surprise: anyway [sadist] was great

Falcon: Yeah, everything I've read from the Grapeverse has really good characters and archetypes

orange blossom special: yeah

orange blossom special: y'know most of the weird [erogenous-to-humans]-but-also-[mating-like-animals]³ porn I see from other universes isn't very interesting to me but this writer was able to keep it engaging

orange blossom special: I think it's that there was really good variety

wight liker: agreed

wight liker: oh but was anyone else taken aback by the official fanart

orange blossom special: yeah that was not what I imagined

orange blossom special: I mean, that makes sense, since it's alien architecture

orange blossom special: but you know :P

stellarsapphire: i looooove the conlangs

stellarsapphire: im probably gonna start stealing from [one of the conlangs] its very yummy

Falcon: I think my favorite is [cast member]

Falcon: Their arc is really endearing and

Falcon: Well

Falcon: I was going to say creative and new, but for all I know character arcs like theirs are the biggest cliché in the Grapeverse

orange blossom special: on the bright side if that's the case then you'll have lots and lots of recommendations for this tried-and-true method of character writing :P

Falcon: Haha :P

bagel surprise: the second one made me cry 😔

wight liker: aww

wight liker: patpat

wight liker: hands up who else had to watch the spoilerpedia playthrough for the mean endings

stellarsapphire: ✋

bagel surprise: ✋

Falcon: 😔

orange blossom special: I was able to get the mean endings on my own but not the one where you fuck⁴ the statue

bagel surprise: there are some sweet moments in that route that aren't in the main friendship route

bagel surprise: i can find the timestamp links for the best parts on the spoilerpedia playthrough

Falcon: Gloss, were you thinking of this bit?

Falcon: [link to fanart from the sexy-friendship route with the embed spoilered. the palette doesn't perfectly match the game itself, but is vibrant and, upon further exploring the artist's profile, is clearly rooted in author appeal. the artist's work also shows a trend of particular attention paid to hands and noses.]

bagel surprise: :D

bagel surprise: 💚

stellarsapphire: honestly i think the one where you ignore it entirely is sadder than the actively mean one

wight liker: oh yeah, or the ||botched friendship route where the statue doesnt trust you enough to leave and you have to choose between abandoning it and forcing it out||

stellarsapphire: :(

stellarsapphire: yeah

¹The social media Indigo is referring to is not literally tumblr and the feed/timeline/whatever you want to call it is not literally called the dashboard and people do not literally reblog posts to give them notes, but the platforms are still remarkably similar.

²In this case, the rocket emoji is used to indicate you're off to read/do/watch something.

³Periverser languages have separate words for erogenous activities, which are based more on the participants' individual kinks than on any actual genital stimulation and may in some cases not involve the latter at all, and mating activities, which are what animals do to make baby animals.

⁴The word Citrine uses here refers to erogenous activities.

An excited Ozytopian with a special interest has curated a set of herofic, a popular shared world based on pre-Teaching mythology. The curation is intended to be a set of classics which, if read, leads to a broad familiarity with the shared world and what kinds of things people are doing with it. 

--

Seven Heroes: A poor village hires seven magic people to defend them from magic bandits by lying and claiming they have money to pay; when it turns out they don't, there's conflict, but all seven magic people eventually decide to defend the village. The seven magic people have varying kinds of trauma, which are discussed but not resolved over the course of the story; four of them die. Four of the magic people are men, two are hard people, and one is a woman. The woman cooks, repairs clothing, and doesn't fight, but is also in charge of tactics and is universally obeyed by the men. The fighting is described in enthusiastic detail, and mostly used as a means of characterizing the protagonists; there are also a bunch of sex scenes which are similarly used for characterization. The theme is that being a peasant is much better morally and for one's happiness than being a magic person who kills people.

--

Good Faith: A twelve-year-old girl's parents are killed by a god who is offended by their hubris. In a touching scene, she takes her mother's keys off her body and commits herself to maintaining their household. (Her brother is sixteen and apparently competent but at no point does the narrative think he might be in charge of the household.) She tracks down a hero that her father told her stories about when she was a little girl, and discovers that he's an alcoholic who can barely ride his horse. (The alcoholic is clearly written by someone who has never drunk alcohol and expects that none of the audience has drunk alcohol and is massively overexplaining the experience.) However, she has faith in him that he can kill a god. He tells her that he is a broken man; she insists that there is goodness in everyone. The strength of her faith in him inspires him to successfully kill the god. Oddly for a Teachingsphere book, there is no sex in it.
 
--

Master of Magic: This story is absurdly long. The protagonist is a genius hero; he invents a lot of the spells used in other stories. The primary plot is an incredibly complicated and thorny political intrigue that blends into both a murder mystery and a war story, which is mostly rooted in the fact that everyone is taking gruesome revenge on so-and-so in response to so-and-so taking gruesome revenge on so-and-so in response to and so on and so forth. (It is strongly implied that the cycle of revenge began long before the book started, although the protagonist assumes that it began because the person he knows least well was Just Evil.) The revenge methods are brutal and sickeningly creative. Further complicating the situation, everyone insists on adopting any orphaned child they happen to come across-- of which there are many, because of all the revenge-- and then is incredibly surprised when it turns out that those orphans are biologically related to people they hate, also adopted by people they hate, or both. Everyone has a bunch of secrets and is incredibly bad at communicating with each other, leading to a lot of dramatic irony; these end up compounding the political intrigue. Everyone is also wildly traumatized, which informs their actions. You can understand everyone's point of view and really desperately want them to be okay. In theory, the heroes are supposed to be killing monsters, but in practice they are too busy with their political intrigue and the monsters rampage around killing peasants. The primary plot is the protagonist and his love interests, all of whom were originally invested in revenge and under the impression that their clans were correct, gradually becoming more fed up with the revenge thing.

The romance arcs are a tonally bizarre series of elaborate humorous misunderstandings and miscommunications, which often parallel and are commentaries on the political intrigue happening in the main plotline.  An example of one such scene is when the protagonist thinks his love interest hates him when actually the love interest is pining hopelessly after him; the protagonist almost dies saving a girl from a monster, and the love interest is very angry and upset, and the protagonist concludes that it is because his love interest has a crush on the girl! Another example is when a love interest got blackout drunk and had sex with him him; reawakening the next morning to see the protagonist bloody and bruised and covered in come, he concludes that he must have raped him, and runs away without a word, leaving the protagonist confused and rejected. A third is after the protagonist resurrects one of his love interests and has to do all kinds of occasionally painful, occasionally invasive medical exams to make sure her new body is working properly; the love interest yearns for the touch and the care, but knows that this utilitarian care is all she is ever going to get.

The climax is thirty thousand words of the world's most painful and awkward group therapy session, in which everyone is stuck in a room together because of one of the monsters they'd been ignoring to have political drama. Most of the characters are broken and implied to never be okay again. The protagonist and his love interests decide that they are SO FED UP WITH THIS SHIT, kill the monster, and decide to wander the earth with their adopted child killing monsters and never talk to any of these people ever again.

--

In Pursuit Of Honor: This book, by a different author, is set several hundred years after Master of Magic and involving all of the same clans and references to the same events (which have become mythologized, often in ways wildly different from what actually happened). The protagonist, a soft person, has become fed up with all of the revenge and intraclan politics, and has decided to wander the earth getting drunk. (This author has a somewhat more accurate understanding of how alcohol works.) Unfortunately for this plan, he adopts an orphan child whom he has to protect. He keeps giving the orphan child good advice about how life works, and then grudgingly having to follow the advice himself in order to set a good example. The book is most interested in emotional regulation and parenting techniques, which it describes in great detail, as well as the common ways that people fail at doing them even when they're trying very hard, and how you can fix the situation once you've failed. The protagonist is bizarrely good at spontaneously figuring out emotional regulation techniques from first principles; this mostly seems to be a suspension-of-disbelief thing and not a characterization point. A mysterious woman becomes extremely interested in the protagonist and keeps "accidentally" running into him. It turns out that she's the queen of the ghosts; she kills and tortures people recreationally because she thinks it's funny. The protagonist has to explain to her why being a mass murderer is wrong and instead one should behave ethically, and ends up accidentally persuading himself with his own arguments, much to his own disgruntlement. They also have a lot of very kinky femdom sex. There isn't really what one would call a climax; the story ends when the protagonist and his love interest has been successfully dragged kicking and screaming into consistently behaving ethically, and the reader can reasonably predict that this will continue going forward. Monster-related conflicts are episodic and solved through cleverness, cunning use of magic, and extensive knowledge of monsters. Conflict in the monster sequences mostly arises from the protagonist behaving badly because of his poorly regulated own emotions, having been too drunk to have a quick reaction time, not wanting to trouble himself but being forced to in order to be a good role model to the child and the ghost queen, etc.

A cultural note clarifies that the ghost queen who likes torturing people is a common no-nihil-obstat porn trope, and the author worked closely with monks to come up with a version that would be acceptable for the general public. 

--

The Saga of Mathaios: Herofic is based on pre-Teachingsphere oral traditions. Here is the most well-regarded epic poem of the proto-herofic tradition, which is about a war where a bunch of heroes go to war with a bunch of other heroes because one hero stole some other hero's wife. The poem itself is about how Hero A got offended that Hero B was better than him at fighting and took his rapeslave with thin justification. In turn, Hero B is offended by this and decides to go sulk in his tent, occasionally murdering anyone who stops by and tries to get Hero B to instead rejoin the war. (Hero B does not return home because he wants to stay right there so everyone KNOWS that he is SO INSULTED that he is REFUSING TO COME OUT.) Hero B's boyfriend wants to participate in the war, so he secretly steals Hero B's armor and goes to fight. Since he is not a hero, he dies horribly at the hands of Hero C. Hero B is pissed off and tortures Hero C to death and mutilates his body. Hero C's father crosses the battle lines to go to Hero B's tent; he kneels at Hero B's feet, unarmed, and begs that Hero B kill him, because he can't survive if Hero C's body has been so mutilated. Touched by the futility of war, Hero B weeps and gives Hero C's father Hero C's body.

--

The Horrible Villain Saves Himself!: The protagonist (Hero A) reads a terrible herofic and is so outraged by the shitty plot, characterization, worldbuilding, and prose that he chokes on a dumpling and dies! He wakes up inside of the terrible herofic and-- worse-- is one of the people the protagonist of the terrible herofic (Hero B) is going to torture to death! Hero A tries to convince Hero B not to torture him, and is sufficiently successful that Hero B is instead in love with him. However, Hero A is totally oblivious to this fact and continues to think that Hero B wants to torture him; he is so oblivious about this, in fact, that he convinces Hero B that he hates her. Hero B's belief that Hero A hates her, of course, only reinforces Hero A's belief that Hero B is going to torture him to death. Meanwhile, Hero A snarks constantly inside his narration about common tropes and stupid worldbuilding choices in the herofic genre.

--

The Erohero: This is an incredibly long porn parody of herofic, where heroes have sex powers. Monsters are universally driven to rape people, and so heroes have to fuck them enough to keep them sexually sated so they don't go on rape rampages. This story does not so much have a plot as a series of thin excuses for porn, which start out simple (the protagonist is fucked by a tentacle monster) and become increasingly arcane (the protagonist is kidnapped by asexual monsters and put in a zoo, fucks other heroes as part of the zoo's breeding program, and escapes by convincing a curious monster to try sex and then fucking them into allosexuality). The closest thing to a plot is the protagonist's relationship with her love interest. They are both in love with each other and both incredibly oblivious to this fact. A number of the sex scenes play on this. For example, in one chapter, they fuck for contrived reasons and then both wish it was sweet loving marital sex while knowing that the other person doesn't want them. In another chapter, the love interest is exposed to sex pollen and both the love interest and the protagonist are convinced they raped the other one (the protagonist said "no" because the love interest couldn't consent due to sex pollen, but then was so aroused by the love interest's passion that she fucked her anyway; the love interest, of course, was so sex-pollened that she ignored the protagonist's no).

The reader may recognize several of the incidents as parodies of other herofic they've been given. In the Good Faith parody, the girl is nineteen and incredibly horny and keeps insisting that she has to redeem the bemused, not-particularly-evil protagonist with her magic healing cunt. The Seven Heroes parody, naturally, involves a gangbang. The Master of Magic parody is resolved by the protagonist being the group therapist in the terrible group therapy session, and then once everyone's problems have been worked out there's a celebratory orgy. (The audience is assumed to have read or at least osmosised enough of Master of Magic that the story doesn't have to explain everyone's mental problems except in the broadest of strokes.) 

bagel surprise: i'm eating this ALL up

stellarsapphire: [shippy fanart]

bagel surprise: fantastic as always indi 💚

stellarsapphire: ty 💙

wight liker: okay what magic types does everyone want

wight liker: i gotta say i really like the descriptions of the rituals

orange blossom special: emotion for me

Falcon: Same, honestly

bagel surprise: honestly i don't know

bagel surprise: i mean, it's really intertwined with their whole... personality trait test thing?

bagel surprise: i don't know if i'd fit the profile for male OR female, much less both at once

wight liker: i mean

wight liker: if you want to do a bunch of research into carolingian gender so that your self-insert can have maximum verisimilitude thats fine

wight liker: but im pretty much in full on grabby-likey mode :P

Falcon: 🍿s you both

wight liker: 💛

bagel surprise: 💚

stellarsapphire: [link to a playlist of, essentially, fansongs of the poem - different excerpts set to music. some of the excerpts are untranslated, some are in different periverser languages, some of the translations are adapted to various periverse poetic forms, and so on]

orange blossom special: eee thank you

bagel surprise: it's such a shame about the lost parts 😢

Falcon: Oof, yeah

stellarsapphire: personally im the most depressed about (harm to children) ||the part where the heros baby is born deformed and it has to be killed||

orange blossom special: 😢😢😢

wight liker: yeah :(

wight liker: sometimes im REALLY glad about our little corner of the multiverse

Falcon: Yeah, I'd probably go nuts with anxiety over having kids if I had to carry it myself, or my partner did, not to mention the chance of it not being born healthy

Falcon: Then again maybe I'd be used to it?

Falcon: Which is almost scarier

orange blossom special: hey Falcon what'd you think of this one

Falcon: Hey!

orange blossom special: 🧡

Falcon: :P

Falcon: I mean, I'm kind of on the side of "it's selfish to try suicide-by-large-predators" but not really for the reasons presented by the second guy?

Falcon: Which makes sense, since they're from a totally different species and cultural context

Falcon: And maybe even their animals are different from ours, too?

Falcon: I'm trying not to apply my own knowledge/judgements because of that

orange blossom special: yeah, fair

bagel surprise: these guys seem a lot more, uh

wight liker: deathwishy?

bagel surprise: yeah, let's go with that

bagel surprise: and also - i guess the way that they approach death? it's like they want to see it coming

bagel surprise: i can respect it but yeesh, not for me

stellarsapphire: im not totally sold on the disaster relief being much better than walking into the tiger enclosure from a selfishness standpoint

stellarsapphire: wouldnt that mean youre condemning the guys youre providing disaster relief to if you get yourself killed

bagel surprise: probably not everyone volunteering for that is doing it so they can have an exciting death?

stellarsapphire: yeah i geuss

Falcon: Geuss
 
stellarsapphire: GUESS

bagel surprise: geuss

wight liker: 💛

stellarsapphire: :P

wight liker: to get back on topic, the impression i got is that people who want to commit suicide specifically by putting themselves in a painful and scary situation are going to do that anyway

wight liker: so they might as well do it in a way that provides benefit to some other creature and

wight liker: im not totally sure how to articulate this but

wight liker: if you walk in front of a train thats no contest

stellarsapphire: oh i think i see what you mean

wight liker: but if you get put into the enclosure of a deadly predator or conversely if you volunteer to do disaster relief in a life threatening way, then

wight liker: yeah

stellarsapphire: so then its primarily about the weight you put on an animals enjoyment of hunting vs saving human lives

stellarsapphire: ?

wight liker: at least the way i interpret it, yeah