A work of literary criticism about a podcast that doesn't exist about people who explored a house that, also, doesn't exist, but it would be pretty fucked up if it did, because it is infinite and if you spend time in it it eats all your memories and your personality and your values that don't involve worshiping the infinite beauty and vastness of the house. The literary criticism and podcast also seem to eat the creators' memories, personality, and values and leave them with no desires except worshiping the infinite beauty and vastness of the house. The literary criticism and podcast are both structured in ways that mimic the house, including entire pages that are black, text arranged in circles, etc. Overall, the book doesn't come to any clear position on whether having your memories, personality, and values eaten by an infinite house or literary criticism thereof is a desirable state of affairs.

A plain-language adaptation is included, which contradicts the original work on many particulars (e.g. the spelling of various characters' names, which characters are dead, backstory details).

It was adapted into a movie, which is to say it was adapted into a six-hour-long talking-head-explains-something video about the symbolism in the original book with a forty-five-minute tangent about how this all intersects with quantum physics. It turns into a splitscreen and two different people talk at the same time about unrelated topics. Some of it is told in stop-motion animation. At one point it becomes a powerpoint. Innovatively, the talking head was depicted as having his memories, personality, and values eaten from the first moment of the video.

The author attaches a note that says that she doesn't normally like explaining herself but, for cultural context reasons, she should clarify that the book is about how beautiful it is to devote yourself utterly to God.

The censorship bureau attaches a note saying that they don't recommend this book be read by people who are prone to psychotic breaks, but they understand that this is less common in Kellearth and there are no specific censorship things about it there.

---

A romance about a woman who struggles with anorgasmia and feels like she is fundamentally broken and doesn't deserve a sexual partner who cares enough for her to make sure she enjoys sex. She meets a new casual sex partner who is very patient with her, pays attention to her reactions, communicates with her about her needs, and is consistently gentle and careful with her. She remains anorgasmic, but discovers that she enjoys sex much more. She cries in her partner's arms and he's sweet with her about it. They eventually separate, but she has higher standards for all future partners. 

---

A woman from a non-Teachingsphere village meets a man from a different village while they're both walking in the woods, so they don't know what village the other one is from. They're really compatible: they discuss philosophy and poetry and sing together, and the man plays with the woman's small child. Eventually, to their horror, once they've fallen in love, they realize that they're from enemy villages. The man had been involved in a mass rape and murder of people from the woman's village; the woman had assisted in the revenge attack, which involved a truly scarring use of roosters. (Both of these are described in nightmare-inducing detail.) The child was the product of the mass rape. Although shocked and horrified, they realize that they are both people and that their hatred has only led to suffering. They forgive each other and debate whether to seek out a different village where they can live happily together. They decide that it would haunt them forever if they didn't work together to bring peace to both of their villages, which task they will take on in the sequel.

---

A book for first-school children (aged six through eight) in which a small child is abused by her parents and decides that this is unacceptable behavior on her parents' part. She sets out to find a different family. It is mostly a comedic fish-out-of-water story about the difficulty she has adjusting to various other families' rules-- this one prays together as a family, this one doesn't let anyone watch television, this one goes hiking constantly, this one will only let her have ONE dessert-- until eventually she goes to live with the monk who runs her Children's After School Club. She lives happily ever after. The abuse isn't exactly graphic, but it is clearly depicted: the girl is scared of her parents because they hit her and call her nasty names. The book also seems to think that going and looking for a different family if your current family abuses you is perfectly reasonable behavior.

---

This book is set in a fantasy universe that is basically Ozytopia, except that magic people wander around the non-Teachingsphere parts of the earth killing zombies and monsters. (Gods exist, but are considered by the protagonists to be a particularly formidable kind of monster that occasionally needs killing.) 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.

---

This book is set in a SF shared world. The protagonist is from a world where everyone does atrocities constantly, but his mother is from a world with the logos, so she taught him to follow the logos. He is very clever, very charismatic, very impulsive, and very prone to solving problems by doubling down on them. The protagonist is physically disabled, and people in this society murder physically disabled people; his mother didn't kill him at birth because she knew it was wrong. The protagonist and his boyfriend run away from home in order to help his female childhood best friend escape an unwanted marriage. He runs up some debt in the escape process, and in order to convince the men with baseball bats that he can pay it claims an empire exists on the other side of the planet* and his boyfriend rules it. The protagonist assigns himself the job of Auditor, which means he can do whatever he wants with the full power of the emperor but doesn't have any actual responsibilities. He ends up bullshitting a bunch of stuff based on his mother's stories about her homeworld. Because of his charisma and the appeal of the logos, people start trying to join the empire. The protagonist agrees to let them do this and ends up organizing them to defeat various cruel local leaders who perform various injustices. The protagonists are casually religious: they pray regularly, sing hymns, and reference teachings of the logos in conversation. The boyfriend and protagonist have a handful of sex scenes, which are primarily intended for characterization; for example, they argue about empire design while having sex.

*Communication is poor because of all the atrocities meaning no one can maintain a global communications system.

---

The Teachingsphere has included the plain-language adaptations of all of these books other than the one for children, which is already in plain language. Other than the first one, they closely follow the plots and character beats of the novels they adapt, but use simpler sentence structure and less complicated vocabulary. They also include explanatory footnotes about background knowledge the reader might not have. For example, the footnotes clearly explain all the references to worldbuilding details of the shared world that a reader unfamiliar with the genre might not have picked up on, define "anorgasmia" and provide information about its treatment, and explain that people outside the Teachingsphere worship gods that don't exist. Kellearth might want to transfer the explanatory footnotes to the regular version. 

OK, so the genre descriptions are just going to be a mess, it's fine, everything is fine, she'll call it Ozytopian and probably Psychological Realism unless something else fits better. These aren't *great* descriptions, normally she'd go into more detail, but this stuff needs to get out the door today so the readers can get their hands on it: right now it's good enough for an emergency and they're marking everything as open to crowdsourced ideas.

A work of literary criticism about a podcast that doesn't exist about people who explored a house that, also, doesn't exist, but it would be pretty fucked up if it did, because it is infinite and if you spend time in it it eats all your memories and your personality and your values that don't involve worshiping the infinite beauty and vastness of the house. The literary criticism and podcast also seem to eat the creators' memories, personality, and values and leave them with no desires except worshiping the infinite beauty and vastness of the house. The literary criticism and podcast are both structured in ways that mimic the house, including entire pages that are black, text arranged in circles, etc. Overall, the book doesn't come to any clear position on whether having your memories, personality, and values eaten by an infinite house or literary criticism thereof is a desirable state of affairs.

A plain-language adaptation is included, which contradicts the original work on many particulars (e.g. the spelling of various characters' names, which characters are dead, backstory details).

It was adapted into a movie, which is to say it was adapted into a six-hour-long talking-head-explains-something video about the symbolism in the original book with a forty-five-minute tangent about how this all intersects with quantum physics. It turns into a splitscreen and two different people talk at the same time about unrelated topics. Some of it is told in stop-motion animation. At one point it becomes a powerpoint. Innovatively, the talking head was depicted as having his memories, personality, and values eaten from the first moment of the video.

The author attaches a note that says that she doesn't normally like explaining herself but, for cultural context reasons, she should clarify that the book is about how beautiful it is to devote yourself utterly to God.

The censorship bureau attaches a note saying that they don't recommend this book be read by people who are prone to psychotic breaks, but they understand that this is less common in Kellearth and there are no specific censorship things about it there.

The Plain Language accompaniment is...difficult to parse, in terms of what Jendra's doing, and she really wishes that she knew enough about Ozytopia's genre conventions around it to figure more out. Unfortunately, there's a job to do. The movie is not included in her recommendation, because she expects the book to be popular among those interested in art but a six hour movie is just too much to subject a person to under reasonable conditions.

Category: Written (Meta(Meta))

Scales: Distance 3 (Slightly different metaphysics / humans are recognizable), minimum reading level 0 (comprehensible for most middle school students), maximum reading level 4 (complex material, abnormal presentation, nested work, layered implications), scope 9 (multiple complex world elements of critical importance)

Topics: Literary criticism, exploration, beauty

Themes: Beauty; The Divine; Absolute-Goal-Sharpening(1)

Elements: Podcasts, Architecture

Stances: Goal-Sharpening(1) (strongly supporting), Creator/Universe (Strongly supporting)

Genre/Movement: Ozytopian Art

1: Goal-sharpening is deliberately or passively changing yourself to better pursue some specific concrete goal, at the expense of messier more human and fuzzier goals, particularly when it involves sacrificing other aspects of yourself.

A romance about a woman who struggles with anorgasmia and feels like she is fundamentally broken and doesn't deserve a sexual partner who cares enough for her to make sure she enjoys sex. She meets a new casual sex partner who is very patient with her, pays attention to her reactions, communicates with her about her needs, and is consistently gentle and careful with her. She remains anorgasmic, but discovers that she enjoys sex much more. She cries in her partner's arms and he's sweet with her about it. They eventually separate, but she has higher standards for all future partners. 

Aww, it's sweet! Learning that your flaws don't rule you out for everyone is an important thing that many people struggle with.

Category: Written(Novel)

Scales: Distance 0 (Real alternative universe (Ozytopia) / present day / original fiction), minimum reading level 0, maximum reading level 3, scope 2

Topics: Romance; Sex; Love; improving-relationships(2)

Themes: Romantic Standards, Self-Doubt, Partner-Quality

Elements: Disabled Protagonist (Anorgasmia), Informal Sexual Therapy

Stances: Self-Doubt (Moderately against)

Genre/Movement: Ozytopian, Psychological Realist

2: Improving-relationships are relationships that leave both parties better off after they've ended.

A woman from a non-Teachingsphere village meets a man from a different village while they're both walking in the woods, so they don't know what village the other one is from. They're really compatible: they discuss philosophy and poetry and sing together, and the man plays with the woman's small child. Eventually, to their horror, once they've fallen in love, they realize that they're from enemy villages. The man had been involved in a mass rape and murder of people from the woman's village; the woman had assisted in the revenge attack, which involved a truly scarring use of roosters. (Both of these are described in nightmare-inducing detail.) The child was the product of the mass rape. Although shocked and horrified, they realize that they are both people and that their hatred has only led to suffering. They forgive each other and debate whether to seek out a different village where they can live happily together. They decide that it would haunt them forever if they didn't work together to bring peace to both of their villages, which task they will take on in the sequel.

Well. That was a thing. Roosters. OK. Kind of horrifying, really. OK. This is part of the job. But maybe 

Category: Written(Novel)

Scales: Distance 0 (Real alternative universe (Ozytopia) / present day / original fiction), minimum reading level 0, maximum reading level 2.5, scope 3

Topics: Romance (Heterosexual), Revenge, Violence

Themes: Power of Love, Forgiveness, Choosing-To-Fix

Elements: Rape (Mass, War, Impregnation), Revenge (Cycles, Large-scale), Romance (Heterosexual, Unknowing Enemies), Gore (Horrifying), Violence (Depicted, Prominent, Horrifying), 

Stances: Peace Through Forgiveness (Strongly in favor)

Genre/Movement: Ozytopian, Psychological Realism

A book for first-school children (aged six through eight) in which a small child is abused by her parents and decides that this is unacceptable behavior on her parents' part. She sets out to find a different family. It is mostly a comedic fish-out-of-water story about the difficulty she has adjusting to various other families' rules-- this one prays together as a family, this one doesn't let anyone watch television, this one goes hiking constantly, this one will only let her have ONE dessert-- until eventually she goes to live with the monk who runs her Children's After School Club. She lives happily ever after. The abuse isn't exactly graphic, but it is clearly depicted: the girl is scared of her parents because they hit her and call her nasty names. The book also seems to think that going and looking for a different family if your current family abuses you is perfectly reasonable behavior.

Aww, this is really sweet. It seems like pretty reasonable behavior for an only child.

Category: Written (Children's book)

Scales: Distance 0 (Real alternative universe (Ozytopia) / present day / original fiction), minimum reading level 0, maximum reading level 0, scope 2

Topics: 

Themes: Finding Fitting-People, 

Elements: Abuse (Child), Found Family (Finding), Child (PoV), Religion

Stances: Child Rights (Strongly in favor)

Genre/Movement: Ozytopian, Children's Novel, Slice of Life

This book is set in a fantasy universe that is basically Ozytopia, except that magic people wander around the non-Teachingsphere parts of the earth killing zombies and monsters. (Gods exist, but are considered by the protagonists to be a particularly formidable kind of monster that occasionally needs killing.) 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.

Huh, this is an...interesting...view of the rooted/nomadic split that she was not expecting. The premodern bias of nomads towards judiciary and violence she supposes makes sense.

Category: Written (Novel)

Scales: Distance 2 (Magic or similar impossibilities / fantasy / present day / original fiction), minimum reading level 0, maximum reading level 3, scope 10

Topics: Violence, Defense, Magic, Poverty

Themes: Trauma, Costs of Violence

Elements: Major character death, Contract-Deception, Trauma, Female Leader, Sex (plot-progressing), Violence (plot-progressing)

Stances: Roots vs Nomads (Very strongly pro-Roots)

Genre/Movement: Fantasy

This book is set in a SF shared world. The protagonist is from a world where everyone does atrocities constantly, but his mother is from a world with the logos, so she taught him to follow the logos. He is very clever, very charismatic, very impulsive, and very prone to solving problems by doubling down on them. The protagonist is physically disabled, and people in this society murder physically disabled people; his mother didn't kill him at birth because she knew it was wrong. The protagonist and his boyfriend run away from home in order to help his female childhood best friend escape an unwanted marriage. He runs up some debt in the escape process, and in order to convince the men with baseball bats that he can pay it claims an empire exists on the other side of the planet* and his boyfriend rules it. The protagonist assigns himself the job of Auditor, which means he can do whatever he wants with the full power of the emperor but doesn't have any actual responsibilities. He ends up bullshitting a bunch of stuff based on his mother's stories about her homeworld. Because of his charisma and the appeal of the logos, people start trying to join the empire. The protagonist agrees to let them do this and ends up organizing them to defeat various cruel local leaders who perform various injustices. The protagonists are casually religious: they pray regularly, sing hymns, and reference teachings of the logos in conversation. The boyfriend and protagonist have a handful of sex scenes, which are primarily intended for characterization; for example, they argue about empire design while having sex.

*Communication is poor because of all the atrocities meaning no one can maintain a global communications system.

Oh, this is fun. Great protagonist, interesting perspective, unusual *way* to improve the world but it's very recognizable. Jendra sends it along to two friends.

Category: Written(Novel)

Scales: Distance 2 (Limited Impossibilities / Science Fiction / Future / Shared World (Nexus) ), minimum reading level 0, maximum reading level 2, scope 8 (4 leads, important worldbuilding aspects, many important side-characters)

Topics: Religion (Teaching), Power, Romance, Governance

Themes: Religion (Teaching), Imagining into Existence, Value of Good Governance

Elements: Charisma Protagonist (Conman, Leader); Disabled Protagonist (Substantial Discrimination); Religion, Government Design, World-Improvement, Arranged Marriage

Stances: Proselytizing (The Teaching, Intense), Good Governance (Strongly in favor)

Genre/Movement: Space Opera (Shared Universe (Million Stars))

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.

 

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.

Here's 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.

Here's 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 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.

...is it wrong to give an important complex worldbuilding tag to a distance 0 just because they're aliens? She'll flag it as a policy question, and include her recommendation: not at the moment, but include that the important complex worldbuilding is to the specific real Antsfolk universe, and plan to reconsider in a generation if the company is still around.

Also, wow, aliens are really low-communication by default.

Category: Written(Novel)

Scales: Distance 0 (Real alternative universe (Antsfolk) / present day / original fiction), minimum reading level 1, maximum reading level 1, scope 3 (1 main character, multiple important side characters, important complex worldbuilding (Antsfolk))

Topics: Employment, Self-fulfillment

Themes: Communication (Weakness)

Elements: Farming (Alternate Universe (Antsfolk), Mushrooms), Friends (collectively, important), Fiction-reading, New Job

Stances: Self-Actualization (Strongly in favor), Goal-Sharpening (Moderately against), Exploration (Weakly for), Communication (Strongly for), Communism (Weakly against)

Genre/Movement: Tutelary Novels(Antsfolk)

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.

Category: Written(Long novel)

Scales: Distance 0 (Real alternative universe (Antsfolk) / present day / original fiction), minimum reading level 2, maximum reading level 3, scope 10 (9 major characters, important complex worldbuilding (Antsfolk))

Topics: Politics (Diplomacy, Domestic), Morality, Capital Punishment, Trade, Interpersonal Drama, Dramatic Irony, Complex Negotiations

Themes: ???

Elements: Embarrassment

Stances: ???

Genre/Movement: Antsfolk (Political Realism)

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. 

Ooh, this is fun. RPGs get a totally different categorization scheme, and she reads carefully for degree of player/character goal separation; player/player goal separation; player/GM distinction; complexity of character design (minimum and maximum); rules-complexity of play; GMing complexity; scenario-presentation; setting-categorization information, and a few smaller factors. The exhaustive listing of personality traits is interesting, and she appreciates the splats. There are some odd assumptions, but she's going to Curate this one as a tentative: new complex RPGs only come out so often, and playing an RPG from an alternate world should be an interesting experience. 

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.

An annotated book of music scores? What? Alright, that's apparently a thing. She'll categorize each individually, but include a categorization for the main series as well, and link it all under RPG-verse(1)

Category: Written (Series)

Scales: Distance 2 (Magic or similar impossibilities / Past(Fantastic, Inaccurate) / RPG-verse(Helru)), minimum reading level 2, maximum reading level 3, scope 4 (1 main character, multiple important side characters, important complex worldbuilding (Antsfolk))

Topics: Friendship, Quest (Rescue), After The Climax (New Fit)

Themes: Empowerment (Discrete, Magical), Relationship Changes (After a time apart, both parties, friends-to-bonded)

Elements: Permanent Impairment (maiming), slavery, romance (power dynamics, bonded ending, extensive cuddles, feelings-conversations), Kink

Stances: ???

Genre/Movement: Antsfolk, RPG-setting-novels

(1): It's actually named after the name of the RPG, but I don't know it, so.

(2): New Fit: after substantial change, a character is not capable of returning to the life that they used to live. Contrast "Different River", shorthand referring to the idea that you can't step into the same river twice, because the river has changed.

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.

Category: Written (Short novel)

Scales: Distance 0 (Real alternative universe (Antsfolk) / present day / original fiction), minimum reading level 2, maximum reading level 3, scope 3 (1 main character, multiple important side characters, important complex worldbuilding (Antsfolk))

Topics: Politics (Diplomacy), Deception, Betrayal (Loyalty, Norms, Morally motivated)

Themes: Crisis of Faith, 

Elements: Cuddles

Stances: Rule-utilitarianism (moderately against), absolute promises (moderately against)

Genre/Movement: Antsfolk Political Drama

Here's 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.

Well, this is one of the *longer* tag-sets she's written, ever. That much crossover is a lot to handle. She sends a request for some classification guides used by the Auderans for magic systems: she suspects that the team is going to need them. She flags it high priority: Auder apparently makes great stuff and has good taste, so there's going to be a lot of demand for tagging their fiction well. She also notes that, given these traits, they probably have their own fiction-categorization systems. Depending on how the interuniversal competition rules end up working out there may be problems, but she's pretty confident they can agree to a full swap for home-universe works and maybe something more. 

The teambuilt novel is impressive, and helps explain how the authors managed to pull off something so complex.

Normally she wouldn't break out a 2.5 distance just for basically comprehensible magic systems, but the sheer number make this qualify. Similarly, calling it original fiction feels wrong, but they did come up with all the constituent parts.

This one is going at the top of her rec list, and she makes a note to look for more Auderan works.

Category: Written(Novel, Series)

Scales: Distance 2.5 (Magical aspects / present day / Original Fiction), minimum reading level 2, maximum reading level 3, scope 22 (Many important characters, incredibly detailed worldbuilding)

Topics: School, Magic System(Plural(64), Interactions, Competition, Combat, Creative)

Themes: Collaboration vs Competition, Education,

Elements: Genre-defining (all relevant magic systems, Death-school-magic-system-analysis-many-setting-crossover-fantasy), Teamwritten, Death (Unpredictable, important character, setting-important, murder, environmental-murder(incentivized, direct), questionable utility)

Stances: Chance (very important), Extreme Educational Competition (Against, Satire)

Genre/Movement: Auderan(Death-school-magic-system-analysis-many-setting-crossover-fantasy)

Here's 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.

Category: Written (Novel)

Scales: Distance 2 (Alternate fantasy universe / present day / original fiction), minimum reading level 2, maximum reading level 3, scope 4 (3 main characters, important complex worldbuilding)

Topics: Quest, Overthrowing the government, 

Themes: ???

Elements: Magocracy, Protagonist (curious, impulsive, creative), deuteragonist (combat genius, paranoid), important-subject-character (naive, intelligent, alien, cute), dangerous-magic, sacrificing-magic

Stances: ???

Genre/Movement: Auderan(Fantasy)

Watchmaker's Heart is considered the genre-ending book in the "creative angst" category.

It is about a young Sky* woman named Amethyst and her craft watchmaking business, which is barely profitable in the modern age despite the level of fine dexterity and mechanical knowledge involved. Watchmaking is Amethyst's lifepath, her passion; however, it doesn't help to support her polycule. Instead the majority of its income is maintained by her Earth, Violet, who works a boring but necessary clerical job in the civil service. Amethyst is sorrowful that she cannot ease Violet's burden of responsibility despite all her skills, and contemplates abandoning watchmaking for a more practical pursuit; however, Violet's other Sky, Oak, who is an archaeologist, encourages Amethyst to continue in her work to honor the past and keep the traditions of watchmaking alive. There is a flint-knapping scene where Amethyst tries and fails to make a stone tool out of chert; this is treated as both a spiritual challenge and a practical one. Most of the events of the book are colored heavily by Amethyst's sense of what is "proper" and "correct", which blurs the line between neurodiversity and spirituality; Amethyst speaks both to a secular therapist and a spiritual leader, and the accounts she gives of her reasoning and motivations differ significantly between the two professionals, neither one able to give a full accounting of the why or what of her condition. Ultimately, Amethyst comes to agree with Oak that the task of preserving the past must fall to someone, and talks to Violet about her worries and her feeling that she's failing her; Violet reassures Amethyst that as an Earth, she loves to come back from work each day to see a smile on Amethyst's face and a disassembled watch on her desk. Amethyst springs back into work, in a sudden creative frenzy that overlays a spiritual montage of significant moments from earlier in the work, and makes a pair of custom watches specifically for her and her Earth. She mounts them on long necklaces, and bashfully presents one to Violet, and asks to be her Kept.** Violet accepts; they kiss, and the novel fades to black. There is an official erotica patch which intersperses several key sex scenes into the novel (between all three members of the polycule, separately and together) and includes the implied sex scene after Violet and Amethyst exchange necklaces. All the erotica is realistic, detailed, and built into the spiritual and emotional journey of the protagonists, though relatively vanilla as this is not primarily a kink work.

 

*Skies, on Heart, are the majority; they are those who work on passion projects, cannot deal with boring mundane work easily, and are generally supported by their polycule's Earth until their passions mature.

**Heart's population are generally polyamorous, but particularly deep relationships, especially ones with a high degree of commitment and trust, are sometimes recognized as a Keeper and Kept by the exchanging of necklaces. This is generally an unequal but reciprocal relationship, with the Keeper pledging to look after and protect the Kept, who pledges loyalty and service. Most polycules center on a central Keeper/Kept pair.

Category: Written(Novel)

Aww, this is really cute. She'll include the sex patch by default but have a link to an unpatched version as well. 

Scales: Distance 0 (Alternate Universe(Heart) / present day / original fiction), minimum reading level 2, maximum reading level 4, scope 3.5 (3 main characters, two important secondary characters)

Topics: Small Business (Hobbyist), History (Re-enactment, Living Memory, Skill-Preservation, Value), Watchmaking (Historical methods), Uneven Relationship Exchanges, Propriety, Spirituality (Heart-typical)

Themes: Partners Supporting Each Other, Somebody Has To And Nobody Else Will, Love(Power), Sacrifice

Elements: Sex (Optional[Sex-free alternate version here], power-imbalanced, threesomes, loving, within-relationships), Financially imbalanced relationships

Stances: Structurally-Inadequately-Subsidized-Decisions (a five-syllable two-word phrase) (Strongly in favor [of making them])

Genre/Movement: Heart(Creative Angst), Genre-Defining

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.

...how on earth had she failed to think about the implications of MAGIC NO LONGER IMPLYING FANTASY! Oh, their system. It's fine. It's fine. She'll just say for now that Grapeverse Magic is just a totally normal part of reality, other worlds adopting the magic system is just a totally normal historical AU, and work her way forward from there. This is Fine.

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.

...Getting set on fire makes him fall madly in love with her? Alright, that's getting a power exchange element tag, even if there is the subtext of them being in a reciprocal relationship.

Category: Written (Epic Poem), Translation(Annotations(Extensive))

Scales: Distance 1 (Grapeverse(Alternate History) / History / original fiction), minimum reading level 3, maximum reading level 4, scope 2.5 (2 main characters, important complex worldbuilding), stakes=10^4

Topics: Atrocities (Historical), Authoritarianism

Themes: Moral Improvement (Externally motivated), Mutual threats

Elements: Historical Allegory (Grapeverse, Premodern), Power Exchange (implicit), Unhealthy relationships (violence(threatened)), rapid marriage, monarchy

Stances: Equal Fundamental Humanity (Strongly in favor)

Genre/Movement: Grapeverse(Epic Poem)

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.

That's a *lot* of water management. It's interesting from a historical perspective, and neat as a genre question. She'll include a wiki link on Ondines, that's good enough for now, and toss it into the fic description as an Editor's Note. It's close enough.

Category: Written(Novel)

Scales: Distance 1 (Grapeverse(Alternate History) / History / original fiction), minimum reading level 2, maximum reading level 4, scope 5 (1 main character, many important secondary characters, important complex worldbuilding), stakes=10^5

Topics: Religion, Water Management

Themes: Internal experiences

Elements: Historical Fiction(Very High Fidelity)

Stances: Reality-Focus (1)(Strongly in favor)

Genre/Movement: Grapeverse (Historical Fiction)

(1): As opposed to the political

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.

She doesn't translate [sadist who lives by themself in a castle they designed and built using magic], just transliterates it: she expects it's going to be popular, at least among a subset of fans.

It's not really important-complex-worldbuilding but that's better than counting the house as a side character. 

Category: Written(Novel)

Scales: Distance 1 (Grapeverse(Alternate History) / History / original fiction), minimum reading level 3, maximum reading level 4, scope 2.5 (2 main characters, important complex worldbuilding), stakes=10^.5

Topics: Idiots to lovers, reinventing relationships, 

Themes: ???

Elements: [sadist who lives by themself in a castle they designed and built using magic], unexpected visitor, kink (gore, masochism), Easily Overwhelmed Partner

Stances: ???

Genre/Movement: Grapeverse (Porn(Masochists with magical healing)), Genre-defining

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.

Ugh, what was the character combination for quantitative values in non-Scales tags?

Category: Written(Series(Novels, 2))

Scales: Distance 1 (Grapeverse(Alternate History) / History / original fiction), minimum reading level 3, maximum reading level 4, scope 3.5 (3 main characters, two important secondary characters), stakes=global destruction

Topics: Quest, Found Family (Accidental), Trauma Recovery (fully portrayed), Trauma(Self-inflicted, goal-focused)

Themes: Recovery, the costs of saving the world

Elements: Extensive Appendices(40%), Maps Included, main character death, long denouement

Stances: ???

Genre/Movement: Grapeverse(Postmodernism, Fantasy Adventure, Epic non-kellearthfic novel series)

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.

Well, that's weird and interesting and she cries a little, as she sometimes does for a particularly good story. She plays two routes to get a proper sense of it. A third because she can get away with it and she really likes it. It's...certainly something. Hard to describe. But she cries, and she calls an old lover to catch up.

Category: Interactive Fiction

Scales: Distance 2 (Fantasy / History / original fiction), minimum reading level 2, maximum reading level 4, scope 2 (2 main characters)

Topics: Abuse, Healing

Themes: Trauma, Recovery through friendship, Taking advantage of others, 

Elements: Interactive Fiction, Sex(Skippable[Character choice])

Stances: Kindness (Strongly in favor)

Genre/Movement: Grapeverse (Interactive Fiction)

A novel about two members of the same literary salon during a civil war, whose ideological loyalties place them on opposite sides, falling in love. It's an epistolary novel told primarily via the fiction, poetry, and letters the two lovers and other members of the salon write, although there are also occasional full-color oil paintings. One of the lovers dies at the other's hand in battle in the second-to-last chapter, which is conveyed by the use of the color red in the subsequent art and poetry by the lover who killed them. Not all of the within-story fiction and poetry through which the story is told has sexual themes but a lot of it does; within the salon there is a sprawling implied polycule/love dodecahedron, which mostly isn't super relevant to the central tragedy or the war politics but does come up frequently in the things they write to and for one another, and relationships within it frequently foil the relationship between the main couple. (There is, fortunately, an appendix explaining the cultural references and subtext to aliens who might not pick it up, written just for export. It's two-thirds the length of the book.)

A video game about three mecha pilots in space in which mecha battles are a metaphor for flirting and sex, which is occasionally interrupted by characters getting out of their mechas to have literal sex; each mecha pilot is a member of a different faction in the three-way war for the future of humanity in the solar system. The game goes into the worldbuilding on mechas, which establishes that mecha battles never kill or even injure, but Neptune weapons can and do. There are three possible endings, in which each of the respective factions wins; in all three, the three pilots live together and are in love. The backgrounds are painted in watercolor (except for scenes that take place outside of the mechas, which are instead rendered in different mediums depending on which characters are present) and every scene has subtle aesthetic variations depending on which pilot's perspective you're playing from. The soundtrack won several awards. 

A tragedy in which a character (the central protagonist is never named) makes maps of a house they're staying in; the maps shrink in scope but acquire denser detail as the story progresses, until it becomes clear that the other person in the house is abusing them very badly. The ending is ambiguous; probably the main character died??? Since clearly they are not around to make any more maps???

...OK, so she'd heard that malachitinous fiction was Impressive, but there was a lot of stuff to get through. This is going to get some devotees who genuinely love it, and more people reading it for signaling purposes. They're really not supposed to use reading level 5 very often, but malachitinous fiction might break that.

A novel about two members of the same literary' salon during a civil war, whose ideological loyalties place them on opposite sides, falling in love. It's an epistolary novel told primarily via the fiction, poetry, and letters the two lovers and other members of the salon write, although there are also occasional full-color oil paintings. One of the lovers dies at the other's hand in battle in the second-to-last chapter, which is conveyed by the use of the color red in the subsequent art and poetry by the lover who killed them. Not all of the within-story fiction and poetry through which the story is told has sexual themes but a lot of it does; within the salon there is a sprawling implied polycule/love dodecahedron, which mostly isn't super relevant to the central tragedy or the war politics but does come up frequently in the things they write to and for one another, and relationships within it frequently foil the relationship between the main couple. (There is, fortunately, an appendix explaining the cultural references and subtext to aliens who might not pick it up, written just for export. It's two-thirds the length of the book.)

After everything else she's been reading it's almost refreshing to read a properly sprawling polycule! They're kind of high-drama about it? 

Category: Multimedia (Primary: written(epistolary), poetry, paintings(Oil, plot-critical), within-story fiction), Annotations(Extensive)

Scales: Distance 0 (Neptune / History / original fiction), minimum reading level 4, maximum reading level 5, scope 3 (2 main characters, some highly important side characters), stakes=10^5

Topics: Love, War, Death, Murder

Themes: Brave Man With A Sword(1), Star-crossed lovers,

Elements: Literary Salon, Brother-killing war, Detailed Romantic Web

Stances: ???????

Genre/Movement: Malachitin(???)

(1): Classical reference to killing your lover. Complex tags are often references to other works, but those that don't delight Celer have been converted for readability. The implications are sarcastic and negative: only a fool or someone utterly incapable of controlling themselves would kill a lover. Still, there is sympathy for the resulting suffering.

A video game about three mecha pilots in space in which mecha battles are a metaphor for flirting and sex, which is occasionally interrupted by characters getting out of their mechas to have literal sex; each mecha pilot is a member of a different faction in the three-way war for the future of humanity in the solar system. The game goes into the worldbuilding on mechas, which establishes that mecha battles never kill or even injure, but Neptune weapons can and do. There are three possible endings, in which each of the respective factions wins; in all three, the three pilots live together and are in love. The backgrounds are painted in watercolor (except for scenes that take place outside of the mechas, which are instead rendered in different mediums depending on which characters are present) and every scene has subtle aesthetic variations depending on which pilot's perspective you're playing from. The soundtrack won several awards. 

She enters the new awards into the system: it's a bit of a pain, but they seem like important enough ones that it's worth going through: one of the intern data-finders will make sure all the winners are correctly tagged.

Category: Video game(Turn-based, RPG, story-heavy, Art Style=(Watercolor 85%, Varied))

Scales: Distance 2 (Science Fiction with implausible worldbuilding / original fiction), minimum reading level 2, maximum reading level 5, scope 4 (3 main characters, important complex worldbuilding), stakes=10^10(ideological)

Topics: Sex, Flirtation, Romance

Themes: Playfighting, Love vs War

Elements: Triangle relationship, Giant Mecha(Space), Non-lethal fighting, Fighting as Romantic Metaphor

Stances: ???

Genre/Movement: Malachitin(???),

A tragedy in which a character (the central protagonist is never named) makes maps of a house they're staying in; the maps shrink in scope but acquire denser detail as the story progresses, until it becomes clear that the other person in the house is abusing them very badly. The ending is ambiguous; probably the main character died??? Since clearly they are not around to make any more maps???

OK, she's going to spoiler-tag this pretty aggressively. It's not even that there's that much to spoil, but other things in the category do have major spoilers and they're not supposed to leak information that way. She'll also flag some uncertainty on the reading levels...

...she suspects that Genre/Movement: Malachitin(???) is going to get used a lot.

Category: Other

Scales: Distance 2 (SPOILER() / SPOILER(???) / original fiction), minimum reading level 3, maximum reading level 5, scope SPOILER(2 (2 main characters)), Stakes=SPOILER(10^-1)

Topics: SPOILER(Abuse(shrinking))

Themes: How we understand the world, objectivity vs subjectivity

Elements: Maps 

Stances: ???

Genre/Movement: Malachitin(???)

---

Is Neptune OK? War, war, and abuse. 

An excited Ozytopian with a special interest has curated a set of herofic, a popular shared world based on pre-Teaching mythology. The Seven Heroes, included above, is probably the most well-reviewed work in the shared universe. 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. 

--

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.
 
--

An incredibly long herofic, Master of Magic. 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.

--

The Saga of Mathaios: Herofic is based on pre-Teachingsphere oral traditions. Here is the most well-regarded epic poem of the 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 Kellearth archivist 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.)