Auder is happy to trade fiction! Their fiction industry is funded largely by people buying pretty hardback copies to own, leave in social-bookshelves, and gift to friends. Social-bookshelves in homes and public spaces are a big enough thing that it works. Some Auderan authors would be interested in friendly contracts for a portion of profits from physical copies, if that's an industry in Green? But they're too excited to care all that much. Everything is available on their internet for free, and consumers can still have stuff custom-printed in Auder without paying the author if they like, it's just more expensive.

Auderan authors are delighted to run paid Q&A accounts; that isn't a thing in Auder except for bigger commissions. Possibly because Auderan authors are too willing to perform the service for free and so it hasn't occurred to them. But it's a great idea, and a few popular authors are thinking of trying it back home.

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. Tags: heavy worldbuilding, heavy magicbuilding, large cast, death school, setting-crossover, magic-combat, fantasy, drama. 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; most characters are 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. Tags: light worldbuilding, light magicbuilding, discrete-spells, nondiscrete-spells, costly magic, whimsical cosmology, dystopia, nonsexual friendship-romance, magic-combat, fantasy. 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.
 

Tree thinks that payment arrangement is kind of weird but basically every author who's still alive is thrilled about the idea of running a paid Q&A account! Some of them are a little worried that it might be unfair to take money to answer questions that they've already answered for free back home, is there something they should do about that if their answered-questions aren't all neatly gathered somewhere already?

A historical fiction novel set roughly five hundred years in Tree's past, discussing the attempts of a (real) scholar attempting to prove that another (real) scholar's work was in part fraudulent. A significant part of the work is devoted to the protagonist's attempts to determine whether the work is fraudulent, not-fraudulent-but-sloppy, or whether in fact the protagonist is wrong (although the protagonist is clearly assuming throughout the work that they are not wrong). Other major subplots include: the protagonist mourning the death of rir eldest sibling while simultaneously struggling with complicated feelings about the fact that ae died in an assassination attempt on two members of the de-facto rulers of a neighboring city, the surviving member of which is a major supporter of several of rir friends' scholarship; several background political debates on a war that seems to be going on nearby; and a handful of sex scenes in which rem and rir spouse attempt to conceive a second child while spending the entire time miserable about it. An attached cultural-context guide notes that everything about the story is consistent with the current state of knowledge about the events in question, but notes a few specific places where the narrative in the story conflicts with the current leading hypothesis (though not with an alternative reasonably-plausible hypothesis) and several more places where the story just completely made up details that could be true but probably aren't.

A video game set at a specializedtraininginstitution for people with magical talents, separated from the world by a magical barrier and run by mysterious magical beings known as Guardians, who are nigh-immediately revealed to be parasitic magical lifeforms that feed off of mages' feelings of guilt. The game is divided into six chapters. Each of the first five chapters is divided into three main sections. The first section concerns everyday life at the institution and primarily revolving around interactions with other characters, ending in a character dying under mysterious circumstances; the second section involves the investigation into the character's death, which often involves solving various types of puzzle to represent the use of magical techniques; the third section involves all of the characters coming together to debate how they died, with the answer generally involving murder. After the first chapter, the topic of how to handle known murderers comes up, with the player character always casting the deciding vote; their decision affects what evidence is available in subsequent cases (though never so much as to make a case unsolvable), and can also affect which characters die when. The final chapter of the game involves figuring out how to defeat the Guardians and escape the institution; the exact method necessary varies depending on which characters are still alive, but it is never strictly impossible.

A fantasy novel set in a world where wizards have magically bonded animal familiars. The familiars are intelligent, and can communicate telepathically with their bonded wizard, but are magically bonded to obey their wizard's orders, no matter what, for as long as the wizard lives. The story follows the crow familiar of a wizard who was forcing the crow to participate in a variety of ethically-dubious-by-Tree-standards activities. The story opens with the wizard dying, releasing the magical commands on the crow, who proceeds to spend the rest of the story struggling to figure out what to do with themself now that they've been released. At the start of the story they're still in denial that anything sketchy was happening but by the time the story finishes they've come to realize that the wizard has approximately no one's best interests at heart; the story concludes with them leaving the wizard's home behind permanently and making a new one alongside a magpie-familiar. The submitter includes a note that this was the only book they could find with a crow protagonist and they are aware that this is not how even very intelligent crows act.

A series of science-fiction short stories on the theme of 'grouphouses, but this time in the future,' with various degrees of plausibility. In this one the grouphouse is more like a groupspacestation! In this one teleportation exists, so the 'grouphouse' is actually geographically distributed, but everyone has instantaneous teleportation from their personal rooms to the central shared house area! In this one everyone is a robot! In this one the grouphouse is part of an underwater dome, and everyone is some sort of marine researcher! In this one a heavily destructive natural disaster has tragically separated two halves of this grouphouse; one half is trying to hold down their physical house location despite having approximately none of the skills necessary to do this, while the other half is trying to get home despite being unsure if anyone is alive or if their house is standing!

Auder will be pleased to learn that there is an industry for books that are physical objects! Usually most of the money for them goes to the people who make the difference between an ebook and a hard copy - illustrators, typesetters, etcetera - but there's no particular obstacle to carving out a percentage for the authors.

The death school books pick up a considerable following among people who like their stories long and complicated and modularly-pick-apart-able. They'd like more of the same; this might be the best one, but it's smack dab in the middle of a bunch of popular things (colliding magic systems, moral dilemmas under lethal constraints, ficcability, shipping potential). It gets tagged "the author only wants you to read it once", which is apparently a common tag for things that have an intended reading experience featuring a state of ignorance; no one literally assumes that the authors want them to stop at once should they be moved to re-read.

The fallen star book doesn't acquire as intense a fandom, but it winds up in a collection titled "A Sampler Flight of Alien Novels" for being reasonably accessible, mostly the sort of thing you'd find in a Green fiction collection except for all those exciting little subtleties that make it clear it's from another world.

--

Tree doesn't need to worry about the redundant questions; sometimes people pay for responses to be convenient when they could have looked a little harder, or pay for things to be rephrased when the original answer didn't quite click for them, and it's fine to take their money.

The historical does not see much uptake - it's kind of dreary and, without already having context on the cultural and historical background, hard to follow. What it really needs is a musical treatment so that all the bleak tedium can be tuneful bleak tedium and therefore beautiful. They'll get right on that.

The murder mystery game gets played a few times and then someone writes up their playthrough in narrative form. That, plus some other people's similar contributions, becomes the primary way to interact with the game - actually playing it is too frustrating for a lot of people.

The familiars novel is popular among people who like books with talking animals. (Tree knows that Green doesn't have sapient animals, right?) This one also wants to be a musical. An animated one, because crows. They will get right on that.

The grouphouses collection is a cute novelty, memorable for its premise more than any specific events therein. The throughline of the collection is not immediately clear - lots of people live in grouphouses - but the various AUs are enjoyed and the memetic distillation of the work has moderate reach even though the original doesn't so much.

All right, here's an AU series of the 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.

Carolingian authors are somewhat grumpy about the idea that people might share their works unattributed, but other than that they find this system perfectly sensible, and send over some books.

This one is 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.

Next up: 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.

And here's 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.
 

Tree heard Green wanted musicals? Tree has musicals! 

The musicals are mostly sung-through, or close enough to sung through that it's possible to pick up on the entire plot from just the songs. Also, the singing is ... fine, these are some of the best singers on Tree, certainly not bad, but not quite as good as the top percent of singers on Green.

This one attained limited popularity in Tree due to the fact that it relies on sign language as well and therefore can't just be listened to to get the whole plot, but maybe aliens will like it? In the musical, a government acquires magical powers that allow chosen individuals to read its citizens' minds. The government decides that in that case, it's going to just ban everything that negatively affects people's well-being, and sets about doing this, implementing increasingly strict regulations, beginning with things that are at least moderately arguable and escalating throughout the musical to increasingly ridiculous bans, such as 'sad novels' and 'spicy food,' as well as increasingly harsh penalties for thinking thoughts that the government has deemed harmful to the thinker's wellbeing. Compliance is rigidly enforced through the use of mind-reading magic (which is also how the government avoids assassination attempts); throughout the show, sign language is used to relay the characters' true thoughts, while the sung dialogue reflects what they're saying out loud with their mouths. When the show concludes, the entire population of the region, save the executive leader of the government, has been arrested; in the final song of the show, the executive leader briefly regrets the fact that their actions have led to literally the entire country being arrested, before being arrested themself because being upset is not conducive to their well-being.

This one is historical fiction, in the sense that it's set in the past and some of the events that happen are historical events, but not in the sense of any of these people having actually existed. Someone steals from a farmer during a famine, and is sentenced to several years of labor as punishment. When ve is finally released, ve is assigned to a parole officer who has noticed that the existing punishment systems are mostly really bad at rehabilitation, but in the absence of a way to fix that, je basically expects that there's a good chance any given ex-criminal is going to recidivate upon release, and is especially concerned about this one on the theory that stealing from someone during a famine is especially bad, and letting something like that happen again is much worse than letting someone get away with random petty theft from someone wealthy. The ex-prisoner spends months barely scraping by and struggling to find work, before finally being taken in by an orphanage, which offers vem food and lodging as long as ve's willing to work there. Ve spends another couple of months there, but the orphanage is at its theoretical capacity, and when ve finds another child starving, ve attempts to steal from the owner of the orphanage in order to buy the child something to eat, but is caught by vir parole officer, claims to have had permission, and is brought back to the head of the orphanage. Ve attempts to persuade the head of the orphanage that ve had a valid reason, but before being able to actually explain, the head of the orphanage tells vem that they know ve wouldn't have done something like that without one, and corroborates vir story to the parole officer. In a duet between vem and the head of the orphanage, the orphanage head tells vem that ve is needed elsewhere, and instructs vem to go to a specific different city in order to set up another orphanage there. Ve objects that no one would ever trust them to do something like that, and the orphanage head tells vem to disguise vemself, flee the law, and lie about vir identity, which ve does. Ve founds and runs an orphanage for years (a song follows various children growing up). Just as the first infants ve took in become adults, ve happens to encounter the parole officer arresting a child for theft and lamenting that je has no other place to send them. Ve offers to take the child in, and the parole officer agrees, and happens to mention that someone has been arrested on suspicion of being the ex-prisoner (the parole officer doesn't recognize vem). Ve wrestles with what to do about this, and specifically about what will happen to the orphanage if ve turns vemself in, but ultimately decides that the best thing to do is to leave some of the now-grown children in charge of the orphanage and turn vemself in. Ve does this, dramatically interrupting the trial just as the random innocent person who's been apprehended is about to be convicted, and throws vemself on the judgment of the court. Various of the children ve's helped to raise, as well as the head of the previous orphanage, collectively plead the court for mercy in an interwoven musical number, and the court seems to be about to pardon vem, but at the last minute, vir parole officer recognizes the orphanage head and reveals jir suspicion that ve had actually been trying to steal from them, years prior. Ve confesses to this as well but explains ve had been trying to save a child's life, but the parole officer accuses vem of using motivated reasoning to avoid feeling guilty for what je sees as transparently unethical actions and not actually caring about the children at all, and the court decides to convict vem. As the parole officer is escorting them back to the labor camp, the two of them are attacked by bandits, who mildly injure the ex-prisoner and severely injure the parole officer. Rather than taking the opportunity to escape, the ex-prisoner drags the parole officer back to a hospital and seeks medical treatment for jem. When the parole officer regains consciousness, je questions why ve didn't just take the opportunity to run, before ultimately admitting to having misjudged vem and letting vem go. The parole officer realizes that this is just one more string of instances of the justice system failing to help people, debates whether to try to reform it from within, concludes that if it hasn't worked already it's not going to start working, and, in the concluding number of the show, turns jemself in for deliberately aiding the escape of a prisoner, presenting the court with an itemized list of changes they could theoretically make that would incrementally improve the system.

This one appears to be science fiction, probably. In this world, everyone has a chip installed in their brain at birth; the chip augments their memories and cognitive processing, and allows them to be effectively resurrected if they die. Forking is possible, but only forks of someone at the present moment; forking a younger version of someone who exists invariably fails. The musical follows two forks of the same person, created in infancy and raised on two separate planets with very different systems of government. Ultimately, both of the two of them conclude that they would be happier on the other planet and wish they had been raised on it, and the story ends with both of them setting out for the other planet. The majority of songs in the show are duets between the two of them, occasionally with participation from the choruses (the show features a separate chorus for each of the two main planets). 

This one follows a new interviewer-judge, which essentially appears to be someone in charge of determining whether or not someone actually committed a crime and assigning punishments as appropriate. They encounter various different cases involving different levels of honesty and have to get to the bottom of each case. Each case includes the judge and the true culprit facing off in a confrontational duet, as the judge gradually gets to the truth of the case. In the climax of the show, their best friend confesses to having committed a culpable-accidental-homicide that they falsely believe themself to have been responsible for and attempts to convince the judge that they deserve the harshest possible penalty; the show structurally mimics the previous cases in a way that initially makes the confession appear to be true, and the judge has an impassioned solo in which they question whether it actually is true and they're just continuing to search for alternative possibilities because they want an alternate possibility to be true, but the judge is ultimately able to determine the truth and figure out who was actually responsible. (A cultural note states that obviously no one would actually be assigned a case involving their best friend.)

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.

The Grapeverse sends their usual collection, and some authors or author-like entities set up Q&A accounts as appropriate.

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. The author of this one can't set up a Q&A account due to having been dead for, like, a while, but the historical society that's been taking charge of getting it interdimensionally published can do one if that's acceptable.

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. No Q&A account for this one.

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. The author happily sets up a Q&A account.

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. The author would like to set up a Q&A account shared jointly between themself, their kids, and the top maintainers of the fan wiki (one of whom is also one of the author's kids).

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. The author happily sets up a Q&A account.

Grayliens are pretty approving of the Green desire to share fiction widely! Most of their authors get paid on a similar donation-based basis, although commissioned work is also a thing. They don't really have paid Q&As but are happy to set them up, mostly using the default sites.

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. The author (of both the original and simplified version) is happy to set up a Q&A account. They've also provided a link to some commonly asked questions.

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. The authors set up a Q&A account, and mention that the illustrator is also willing to answer questions, although they're not sure if they should share the account or get the illustrator a separate one.

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. The authors also set up a join Q&A account.

*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 that Earthlings would usually associated with male lions. Previously in the first book, a different pronoun was used for both protagonists while they were still living in their original pride.

Auder's contributions are much appreciated! Do they have porn of the characters in fanfic or something already? Green can produce that in-house if they just never write any for some reason but there is demand if they've got some and just haven't sent it yet.

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Carolingia should rest assured that it's very rare for anyone to actually repost an entire work without mentioning who wrote it. That would tend to fail on the consumer end - they could always just do an internet search for a distinctive passage, hoping to find more by the author they like, and find a better fiction archive that doesn't strip that information. They just don't have laws against it because it would introduce a lot of regulatory overhead and make people anxious about posting quotes or working on translations or whatever.

Gender magic is not unheard of as a conceit on Green but wow, this is a lot of thought put into it. It's more interesting because the gender greebles are totally different from Green ones. It is not as popular on Green as it is on Carolingia - in particular it's pretty rare for hermaphrodites to seem attractive on Green and that makes their romance plots less appealing, even if they have cool magic - and visual porn (especially weirdly-gendergreebled visual porn where nobody is actually having penetrative sex for some reason) and board games are both slightly harder sells here, but there's uptake on this one.

The epic poem is - weird! Not in a bad way, at all, so people who are interested in what stories Carolingia tells about itself pick this one up. They'd like an annotated version, as long as they're using it as a window into the society and its tropes.

Suicide-by-zoo-animal essays are weird. It doesn't have much uptake among unironic readers but it attains niche popularity as a parody format for various silly ethical positions, and abridgements get adopted as snowcloneable copypasta.

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Tree is correct that Greens like musicals! Thanks for the musicals! They will remake them with local casts once they've been translated well enough to rhyme.

The sign language one is great, excellent concept and plot, and will need subtitles anyway so they might as well have double sets of subtitles. Green does have sign languages, and they can probably dig up a cast of CODAs or linguists or whatnot who can sing, to do this one locally in a faithful form.

Les Mis but with orphanages is an instant hit. Do they have actual orphanages that work okay in Tree? Green's orphanages keep succumbing to various symptoms of being orphanages-and-not-families - selection effects on the kids, burnout in the adults, everybody being really low on slack - and they've been iterating on the problem when they have ideas but if someone else has orphanages that don't suck they'd love to copy.

If/Then meets Blood Brothers is a fun setting and a cute plot and a great premise to hang a musical on. It is not as possible as Les Mis but with orphanages but it's solidly well-liked.

The judge musical is popular as a window into what things are crimes in Tree and how they go about prosecuting them, in addition to having a good theatrical structure. Someone gets started on a spinoff from within the Green legal system.

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Antsfolk are... wow, ant people, that's cool. Are they like, giant ants, or... just... ants who are also people.

Mushroom farming story is very niche and considered kind of simplistic. Some kids like it.

The complicated political novel has a lot of people bounce off it, but anyone who finishes it tends to quite like it. It gets a lot of questions about the details and context.

The RPG is not very popular - RPGs on Green tend to be rules-light, if they have mechanics at all - but some people like to read it just for how weird it is and as commentary on antsfolk.

The adventures of Halru and Terilu acquire a contingent of enthusiastic fans, though even those aren't super into the RPG version. They would like to make a TV adaptation.

The shorter political novel isn't a big hit - the ending is kind of pat - but it's easy to blitz through in one sitting, so people who want just a little bit of ant fiction sometimes go for this one.

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The Grapeverse having magic is very neat but the fact that it's limited to certain personalities is annoying, since it means it's basically not going to happen that any specific individual on Green who'd like magic powers is going to get it. Maybe some people are close enough to being "griffins" - House of Truth types, presumably - or even "ravens", if the magic system is contagious, but they won't get their hopes too up.

The poem about the king and queen is not very popular - it's not exactly shippable, is it, a bad dude and his wife who does activist-domestic-abuse to him? Losing the poetry in translation is presumably not helping. Maybe it would make a good musical but nobody is lining up to write one.

The historical fiction is, ironically, kind of dry. A sufficiently lively translation could see some uptake as educational fiction but it doesn't even have enough plot to be a musical.

The porn with the sadist-architect gets a substantial amount of fascinated readership. If it's a genre they'll take some more. Greens don't usually write that kind of thing, their porn tends to be less injurious, but apparently they're up for reading it.

The duology is not Green's biggest hit ever but the people who like it really like it and climb aboard the fan community with delight.

The statue game is not terribly popular, mostly due to being game-shaped; some Let's Plays of various routes with slow parts sped up and dead ends edited out get views.

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Grayliens are FUZZY. This is very important. FUZZY ALIENS.

Murder mystery is not a popular genre in Green. Readers are mostly driven by interest in Graylien psychology and fuzziness.

The carnivore/herbivore story is a great premise but the execution isn't terribly exciting. It gets fanfic, among Greens who finish the original.

The trilogy has interesting gendergreebles, relatable-yet-alien family formation behavior, kind of dumb reproductive decisions (you ideally line up alloparents BEFORE you get pregnant, not that Greens never make this mistake). It doesn't really seem like it needs to be three books but it's also not obvious what to cut; it tends to get shipped in a single package with three parts rather than as distinct books.

Watchmaker's Heart is considered the genre-ending book in the "creative angst" category. It's not actually out of copyright but someone has decided to share it with Green anyway in a fit of enthusiasm.

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.

Heart might or might not want this distributed? They don't have to post it till they get the go-ahead; they recognize that one weakness of their fiction sharing habits is that someone might upload something that was meant to be kept private, and "copyright" seems like it might be analogized to that.

Watchmaker's Heart, should it be distributed, is economically confusing (sure, lots of people don't like boring work, but they usually can't be fully supported by their lovers indefinitely at materials-costly hobbies while not even doing useful household tasks, especially not if there are two less-useful people to every useful-person and they haven't trained any animals to help with anything??) and lower on events happening than most readers like, but some people ship it real hard and love the story mostly from that angle.

Explicit sex tends not to appear in canon works, but Auder does have porn of the death school characters in fanfic. Here's a selection of the most popular erotic fanfiction of the 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.

Here's 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. 
  

The Greens do not notice right away the remarkable level of OTP consensus from Auder erotica. That's just how it is if there's a sufficiently compelling ship in the canon. It's a lovely spread of material and the interested parties will not be bored with it any time this week.

The novels about the magical girls are great but it seems like the story'd benefit from strong visuals. They might make a TV show or a graphic novel of it; are there canon character models or illustrations to base things off of there?

Yes! In fact, there are canon character sketches by the author! Alas, she's not really an artist.


And here's some author-approved fanart as well. *

*commissioned from Kiddysa

The fandom and author are SO EXCITED about the possibility of a visual adaptation.

Cute. They will get on visual adaptations.

Here's a fantasy tabletop RPG that's widely popular on Auder. Much of its appeal among Auderans comes from its organic exploitability and imperfect balance: the first version was written by a bright, extremely passionate 12-year-old, and the currently most popular version uses the same mechanics but has been edited by an adult to resolve ambiguities and patch only the most gamebreaking exploits. There are three core books, but a few other books have been officially released with additional player options, spells, and monsters. Currently there are around 500 spells total. The game uses a character archetype system as is common among such RPGs, with archetypes for studied-wizards, innate-sorcerers, pacted-diabolists, inspiring-paladins, practiced-spellblades, minstrel-enchanters, naturalist-biomancers, and inventor-artificers, as well as numerous subarchetypes, playable species, and other character options. This TTRPG has been so widely played that it started a trend of child-written imperfect TTRPGs which has since blossomed into an entire genre.

Here's the most popular series of setting books for the aforementioned TTRPG, written by adult professional bottom-up worldbuilding specialists based on the mechanics of the magic in the game. They depict a setting that is modern and globalized despite a low technology level and a low percentage of the population using magic. The setting achieves this by leveraging magic intended by the original designer to be dungeoneeringmagic, dungeoncrafting magic, and adventuringmagic as potent economicmagic. For example: city-states in the setting use a spell which enchants objects to repeat recorded messages in response to a trigger for computation and long-distance communication; trade guilds use an extradimensional storage item, an extradimensional-mansion-creating spell, and a party-teleportation spell in combination to move massive quantities of goods and people between cities; and the construction industry uses a dispellable stone-to-mud spell intended to be used as crowd control in dungeons as magical concrete. There are hundreds of little tidbits about uses of magic that influence the world's industries, geopolitics, and cultures. It's extremely popular for the sheer number of things that are used in ways due to the diligently bottom-up worldbuilding, which lends the setting a feeling of interconnectedness and not-easily-compressible detail that some Auderans compare to the wonder of the modern world.

TTRPGs are kind of a niche interest in Green. It's an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that more people like to invent them than to play them. The setting books sell really well, by comparison, with an abridged summary of the originals to make it clear what they're building on.

A responsefic to the Green ex-animist autobiography; the main character has similar realizations about how things need to be acted-upon rather than just cajoled, but goes on to apply those ideas to their interpersonal interactions. This meets with mixed results at first, but the protagonist works out the kinks over the course of the story, ultimately ending up with better interpersonal skills than they started with.

It's a free country IP regime, but this one is not very popular.

There's a new Grapeverse book going around, Shattering Cascade, about a world with ubiquitous mind control and a diplomat from the anti-mind-control faction rescuing an outcast from the pro-mind-control faction and struggling to connect with them in a way that is both feasible and ethical while helping them to recover from catastrophic psychological damage.

Green really likes this one! Fun-to-wrestle-with moral dilemmas, accessible yet interesting societal-grade worldbuilding. They would like more of this sort of thing, it's their favorite Grapeverse export so far.

The Nature of Joy is about a young woman who works as a shop attendant. It's a boring and very low-demand job, almost painfully generic. The narration supports the theme of mindless genericness, with the store's layout and products seeming to change almost paragraph to paragraph, and the protagonist referring to regular customers with new but similar names every time. There's technically a plot about some friends' school troubles, but mostly it's about her wistful daydreams during the workday. She imagines being swept off her feet by a beautiful man - or woman - or alien foxboy. She imagines being handed a precious artifact by a poisoned spy and crashing headlong into a wild urban fantasy. She imagines becoming a fighter pilot putting her life on the line to protect the planet from aliens, or a brilliant tinkerer dodging jackboots in the catacombs of an old city, or a poet-chef on a quest to find the ultimate ingredient. All these fantasies run together, blending with the actual events of the world and with her friends and customers' conversations, and it's clear that she lives halfway in a fantasy. They urge her to write, to draw, get it all down, she's very creative and it'd be popular. She could write and write and drop the clerk job. But she says- No, that's not the point. Daydreaming is a joy, something done selfishly. If she tried to make money with it, it'd stop being her escape. Boredom is precious to her, that one odd state of mind that's so difficult to maintain where the world isn't quite real and you can almost step into another one - that's where she wants to live. They think she's insane to work the shop clerk job and not take vacations or buy new video games and fancy makeup and art. But they're her friends, and if that is what makes her happy, so be it. After all, joy is in the mind. She does develop over the course of the book, finding new writing-friends, being pushed out of her comfort zone at times when she's dragged to places for drugs and sex that are way too intense and distracting by her friends, and to fancy writing clubs full of people who, to her, are trying too hard to be happy - or to look happy. She scowls and looks bored all the time, and she's happy. She has a few relationships and grows as a person, being more considerate to her friends by the end and actually sharing some of her writing rather than deleting it or keeping it all secret.

(If you feel like giving money in exchange for this story, the author likes these particular charities that are specifically aimed at helping troubled teens).

This book is pretty relatable to a substantial minority of Greens. They might turn it into a musical, it seems like it'd be a fun opportunity to play with costuming and staging and musical motifs! Are the charities interested in a fallback-fund-like style thing where if their revenue falls below some below-average threshold in a given month some Greens who liked the book will kick in to help?

These Planet charities are used to operating on impulsive donations and a few long term steady kickback commitments and keeping their own reserves but will put in the effort to work with fallback funds if it seems, like, worth the effort.