#cyoria

[repeat932]

Cyoria under magesight and without magesight

[mage-witha-glock]

This is how I imagine Zorian during that loop hunting the cultists. Spinning a gun whilst following the latest clue on their whereabouts, noting down the identities of all shifters at risk whilst plotting to shoot all the cultists dead with his pistol for kidnapping Nochka and brutally sacrificing child shifters the reset before.

[cal-cium-the-nerd]

There could be more important details we don't know.

if it turns out things are even messier than we thought.

Oh, that would be interesting! To be honest I've mostly hung onto the interpretation that Zorian was a very Teenage Boy ("I hate everyone, nobody understands me, leave me alone"-style) and that his adult dislike of Fortov was mostly because of never really interacting with him after entering the loops and then also never making an effort to grow out of his 15-year-old teenager view of Fortov (or even considering that Fortov might mature given enough time, since he's also like, 17? Zorian is about 27 mentally if my math is right, so now he also can't expect Fortov to be as mature as he is, which adds onto his lack of tolerance for Fortov)

If Fortov had done something else to worsen the situation, it'd definitely shift the scales and further complicate a possible reconciliation.

I think what Fortov really needs is a friend or authority figure that he trusts, (...)

Okay this is what really got my brain worms thinking because— who? Who could be that person?

Daimen would certainly try —has already tried, in fact!— to be this role model for Fortov, and we know he has no chance at success. Fortov resents Daimen more than anyone else in his life, and one of the main things he'd need help with is getting rid of this resentment, so basically he needs help before being able to see Daimen in an honest light (as currently he's probably more likely to doubt anything Daimen tells him, on the basis of him already having lied about "helping" Fortov before).

Zorian would rather give up humanity and start a new life inside an aranean colony than be involved with helping Fortov, so he's out of the picture. Xvim is also out because he wouldn't be willing to tutor/help a student he regards as "not trying hard enough".

So then, who does that leave? Who would have enough contextual excuse to be involved with Fortov's education AND be willing to help him in good faith?

Well, the answer to that would probably change depending who you ask, but in my opinion...

....Orissa. She has plenty of reasons to get involved— as part of Daimen's plot to "fix his family", yes, but also as a way of gaining favor within the Kazinskis. She's already in a tough spot with their parents, so she'll likely want to strengthen her approval with Zorian, Kirielle and Fortov.

I just think it would be very wholesome, for her to end up listening to Fortov's struggles with the education system, and perhaps encouraging him to turn to his strengths (music, for example, but maybe even within magic he has something he's better at than the rest, similar to how Kirielle is better at illusions than anything else, and Orissa might want to help him discover that). She has a blatantly honest kind of personality (that part when she said out loud "oh, of course! Daimen's parents invested a lot of money into him, so obviously they don't want him moving away and out of their sphere of influence! We can negotiate that :D") which I think Fortov would particularly appreciate and which might put him at ease, after Daimen lied to him (which he clearly took very personally)

I also think she'd eventually be willing to throw hands with Ibery after hearing of the harassment Fortov suffered. That would be entertaining.

Basically: let Fortov have a cool older sister 2k24

You know, rereading through some of Fortov's scenes and his characterization, what if he had ADHD?

This may be a bit of a stretch, but just the way that Zorian tells Fortov that "you're smart, you're just lazy," reminds me of how friends with ADHD were treated in schools. Teachers and parents would see what they could do when they were hyperfocusing and ask "why can't you do that all the time?" I don't think Fortov is notably smart or dumb, he just has some internal difficulties that happen to sometimes be beneficial and that others don't recognize. I wonder how the Kazinski family would react if he could prove it.

[ersetu-gazette]

Seeing a post talking about how STEM majors in different conferences respect each others kinds of work while fearing it gave me an idea of how Zorian's reputation after the time loop could manifest. Imagine you're at a spell forge conference/convention. Everyone is giving talks, pitches, and grant requests for their very niche work in spell formulas. You've got advanced warders, golem crafters, training sphere designers, etc. And then this new kid comes up to present, an academy graduate that started his own spell forge in Cyoria with the dirt cheap property costs. He starts pitching his spell formula that allowed you to communicate both telepathically and verbally over vast distances. The specifics fly over your head, it's not your specialty, but you think you understand the broadstrokes. And it makes sense for him to be good at this, you heard he is friends with some telepathic spiders or something. And then throughout the event you see him talk animatedly with other experts in their own fields and keeping up with whatever they say. You think you also hear him pitch his own improvements and suggestions that those experts seriously consider. And then he comes to you, at your little golem booth. He compliments your design, makes an inside joke many golem crafters make, and asks you detailed questions with an obvious knowledge base of the field. You have an opportunity to ramble so you take it and the kid asks you questions that allow you to talk more without betraying any secrets. You try to return the favor but you still don't get some of the fundamentals of what his project is about, but he helps you better ask the gist of what you're curious about. Eventually you ask how he knows so much about golem crafting. He waves off the question with "Oh I have a friend who's a real nerd about it. Anyway if you make some space around the inside of the golem's joints you can inscribe a separate animation spell formula which gives it a better range of motion. Good luck with your work!" And then he leaves, not seeming to care he just solved one of the roadblocks your team has been struggling with for weeks. Talking to your other friends you find that they had similar experiences with the kid. What the fuck is he?

[cal-cium-the-nerd]

Silverlake snapped her fingers in front of his face, spraying droplets of salamander blood and other bodily fluids all over his glasses and breaking him out of his inspection. Despite his resolve to be polite to her, Zorian couldn’t help but glare at her in response. She just grinned at him, showing him two rows of gleaming white teeth. Apparently in all of her 90 years of life she hadn’t lost a single tooth. Yes, definitely magic. “If you’re done gawking at my home, we can continue our discussion,” she said. “I have a request for you. You have a way to get in contact with Kael, yes?” “Of course,” said Zorian. “We’re friends, he and I.” Or they would be, once he returned to Cyoria in one of the future restarts. “Then I would like you to deliver a message to him,” she said. “It’s nothing urgent, but I want him to know… that I regret how our last meeting ended and that I would very much like it if he came to visit me with his daughter sometime in the future. Oh, and that I want to teach his daughter the secrets of my magic. She is a descendant of a proud line of witches stretching back to time immemorial, and it is her birthright to continue it… should she want to. Got all that?”

(chapter 28)

You know, while I understand why the story didn't follow up on this plot thread, it's still a bit disappointing that we never heard anything more about this. I mean, THE Silverlake being willing and even encouraging about teaching someone "the secrets of her magic" (therefore dimensionalism, pocket dimensions, potion making, soul magic, and other very advanced disciplines) is very surprising, as well as interesting.

I wonder if eventually Kana would be tutored by her—after all, while Kael might not be Silverlake's biggest fan, I also can't see him turning down such a big opportunity for his daughter. Maybe once Kana is older and able to make her own choices this could be brought up to her...

[somerunner]

Hm. I'm wondering now, having just read the end-word to the original Conference Call, if Xvim would actually be a good choice of Node user for my fic idea. I don't think Xvim would be so attached to his own life that he would sabotage Cyoria's chances against the invasion. Nor any of the main mentors. Maybe Silverlake? Yeah.

For that matter, Armsmaster is a terrible idea. Too close to Kid Win, and if I go with post-Gold Morning or something then I'd have to do a lot of consulting on Ward canon. ...he'd still be good, actually.

Hmmmm. Ok. My working title was "No Countries for Old Men" but given that Armsmaster isn't old, and Silverlake isn't a man, it's not all that great. Oh, and I haven't even seen the movie "No Country for Old Men." So maybe I should go for "distant/rejected mentor" archetypes, which would still fit most of the others.

Plus, although I really think Akura Justice was funny and would be fun to write, this is a much more fitting archetype for Northstrider. Double plus, this would really intrigue him regarding his Presence project. So he'd probably be the Node user from Cradle.

So, the new Node users I'm thinking of: Silverlake, Armsmaster, Northstrider, and Tenisent Winterscar.

Maybe I'd call it "No More Mentors" or something. Idk. Not like I'll ever get around to writing this thing.

[inthefightgarden]

a kinda small and silly mother of learning thought that comes from my audiobook listen...

so i'm really enjoying the audiobook. i think jack voraces does great job with the narration and zorian's voice (really captures that "this dude is kinda an asshole, but you will love him anyway" energy), but some of his other voices can be a bit jarring or annoying at first.

and the most obvious one is kirielle, cause her voice is literally the first one we hear. her voice is loud, and squeaky, and annoying af when you first hear it. but something happened over the course of the arc 1 audiobook. every time i heard her she was just. slightly less bothersome. i noticed my annoyance slightly less. until by the time she was in cyoria with zorian i realised i wasn't bothered anymore. like at all. i was just excited to hear more from her.

and i loved that! because it mirrored my journey when i read mol to myself really nicely. at first kiri was an annoying bother at the beginning of every restart. that she was kinda annoying but sweet moments with zorian in between the big story bits. and then she was a really cool character that i was always excited to read!

and i know that probably wasn't intentional or anything. and it was only my experience, idk how other people found her - in the story in general or the audiobook specifically. but it was a neat little parallel that i enjoyed.

[entropy-mephit]

I feel like you'd enjoy this one:

mostly for sake of discussion about "what about other people in the timeloop". But explaining too much would be a spoiler.

the cosmic horror implications of timeloops are fascinating if you actually stop to think about it. because in order to trap someone in a situation like that you'd either have to reset all of time with each loop, which suggests a staggeringly horrifying scale of power and personal pettiness, or you'd have to isolate an area of effect to keep replaying like a broken record while the rest of time continues around it, posing potentially destructive consequences for the integrity of reality itself if people and things caught in the timeloop fail to show up in the present and effect change outside of it.

[greengargouille]

I finally read that latest Mother of Learning worldbuilding post on politics, and while some of the points were already talked about in the novel itself... I never made the connexion between two important things. The latest Splinter War and the Weeping are recent. We know that. Zach’s backstory means that it’s less than a decade old- yet I still had to pause reading “just a few years ago, when the Weeping swept across the lands”. A few years. Kael’s wife couldn’t have died of the Weeping before giving birth to Kana, who is between 3 and 4, but I thought that surely the Weeping must have lasted some years and she was among the latest victims (and if soldiers were among the first, then it made sense for the remaining Noveda to be among them). But it didn’t really occur to me, wow, this is really recent. (And, now that I’m remembering the read the commentaries, yeah, Nobody confirms that the Weeping was just 3 years ago story wise.) Look, it seemed a bit further to me because Zach did said it happened when he was a small child, and what kind of 14 years old would say they were a small child 3 years ago, but then you have to remember he’s actually closer to 30s mentally at that point.

Which put the subsequent fact that rich and middle class people have now better access to magical education into a really recent thing too. I knew, we all knew that the two were linked, it’s within the novel. But I somehow never linked those facts together. And while that worldbuilding post does bring other causes for a more widespread magical training, like population and literacy increase, it really shows that the destruction of most major noble houses to the wars and epidemic was the most influential event. If I’m not mistaken, then Cyoria’s Academy might have started bringing in students of ‘lower’ backgrounds barely a decade ago. (...Though, I might be mistaken. I’m done for a reread of the novel, I can’t quite remember the infos we were given on the Splinter Wars timeline- though it seems it’s going to be in a future worldbuilding post). ...Which brings me to Daimen. Who is 22 within the story. If Zorian and Zach started they 3rd year at the Academy as 14yo, we can expect students to start their studies there at 12. So, for him, a decade ago. ...He was there when there was a massive cultural shift at the Academy on the whole social class dichotomy. How much did it play into his reputation as a genius, or his popularity? Was he shown as a symbol of “this is the kind of genius we would have missed with the old system”? Was he an hope for a whole generation of students? Is the reason he’s shown to be well-known in early chapters not just because he is rare talent, but because of all the politics that played out back when he was at the Academy?

[mage-witha-glock]

[braininatankwithalaptop]

The people of Cyoria need a bit of kinky stress relief, the aranea and empaths need the use of mind magic to be normalized. This solution is a win win! Right? For you it's not. Because you're the simulacrum burdened with the job.

*drops wraith bomb of crack without warning*

Day Five: Simulacrum

[greatwyrmgold]

There's a lot of interesting analysis in this post and the reblogs, but I kinda got stuck on one detail. Fitting Mother of Learning into the same mold as progression fantasies and HPMoR. (Which I think is an awkward mold, but that's a less important artument.)

I won't say that comparison is unwarranted. Zorian is focused on improving his abilities in the time loop, and I literally used MoL as one of my rational fic archetypes in that post where I articulated a definition of the genre. But reducing the story to just those elements is like reducing Lord of the Rings to a road trip to make a bad man go away. It's not strictly wrong, but it kinda misses the point. Two points, actually.

The first point is, in my opinion, the central theme of Mother of Learning, the thing that binds everything together: Zorian learning to trust other people.

Yeah, he does magic practice, but that's not where most of his power comes from, and certainly not how he accomplishes the tasks needed to get out of the time loop. He does that by meeting new people, asking them for help, trusting them.

The annoying girl he used to have a crush on, the extroverted rich kid in his class, his aggravating mentor, the crazy witch in the woods, the psychic spiders living under the city, the neighbor family, the ancient lich, even his frustrating older brother.

And for the most part, it's not as transactional as that sounds. (The lich and witch are, but they're exceptions.) To pick an extreme example: Zorian deciding to take his sister to Cyoria one loop was done entirely because he pitied her situation and wanted to do something nice for her. That set a series of events in motion which coincidentally lead to him living next to one of the victims of the villains' plot, which let him figure out what they were planning.

This is significant, because Zorian at the start of the story is a distrustful, lonely prick. He only has one or two friends, and he considers both of them nuisances as much as anything. He resents all of his siblings—the oldest brother who his parents can't stop comparing him to, the other brother who keeps trying to mooch off Zorian's hard work and effort, the little sister who is a little sister. This is a problem, both in that it's an unhealthy headspace to be in, and that it's physically dangerous due to the narrative constructed around Zorian and his flaw. Fuck, in the original version of the timeline, Zorian dies because he stayed in his dormitory instead of going to a party! (...it makes sense in context.)

And that's not the only overt nod to this central theme. Zorian's biggest asset—more than his experience, or the mana pool he develops, or the golems and such he constructs—is his mind magic. In its final form it's telepathy and mind control, but its initial form is heightened empathy. His talent for it is literally called empathy. (By most human characters, anyways; the aranea have their own terminology, which Zorian adopts.)

And Zorian is initially reluctant to embrace this power, because he sees empathy (the magical kind) as a soft, girly kind of magic, which has obvious parallels to how the kind of lonely dude Zorian is often thinks of positive social relationships. It's also worth pointing out that Zorian's discomfort with social situations is due in part to his untrained empathy; that's arguably the biggest barrier between him and other people, and it boils down to a combination of social pressure against weird magic (generational trauma on his mother's side, I don't have time to get into it) and Zorian's reluctance to be the kind of person who relies on his connections with other people.

It is not a subtle theme, or a subtle character arc. I don't know how anyone could miss it, unless they got so hung up on the "progression fantasy" tree that they missed the whole rest of the forest.

...oh yeah. The second point is worldbuilding. A lot of the basic mechanics of the world are pretty generic, but nobody103 put a lot of thought into other aspects of the setting, like the political situation and various monsters and so forth. A good world alone isn't enough to support a good story, but I spent a lot of words talking about the character side of things.

so back in the day i read HPMOR, right? like many people. and as it went on (& yudkowsky kept talking about his writing process on tumblr) it became more and more clear that this was fiction approached from an angle i had never really considered before. i had been vaguely aware of places like the spacebattles forum or the dark lord potter forum, where apparently people wrote stories that were mostly just a long-form way to debate “would the USS Enterprise win against a star trek star destroyer”, or whatever. yudkowsky kept saying wild things like “the point of this scene is to vicariously enjoy somebody solving a problem” or “all characters should always do smart things so the reader doesn’t get frustrated with them” or “i wanted to add a short arc where this character doesn’t instantly solve all his problems but i was worried it would alienate the reader”. (see also.) just like, expressing this conceptualization that the point of fiction was to… write a character stomping through a little fake world going from victory to victory so that the reader could enjoy the vicarious glow of having a hard problem presented to them and then immediately resolved. how smart you are for following the line of thought of the main character, who did this smart thing!!

so that was very weird, but it was mostly a singular kind of weirdness. another weird, out-of-touch artifact from the rationalists, like roko’s basilisk but harry potter fanfiction instead.

anyway a while back i stumbled across “Mother of Learning”, and i think my initial response to it was ‘this is less a story with a plot and more a series of obstacles that are presented to the main character to be sequentially overcome’. there was a furry webcomic years ago that was a calvin & hobbes knockoff – small child, stuffed animal companion who became alive when they were alone, whimsy, etc – only where calvin & hobbes left the premise unstated, this comic, roughly 30 strips in, had a whole plot explaining: okay so these are a special kind of magical creature that bonds with children. in this metaphor susie’s mr. bun is also a magical creature. eventually they start going on adventures together. my overall thought was like, oh i guess i was assuming this was a narrative framing device structured around the themes of the work, but actually this was all meant to be fully diagetic and fully explained as part of the work’s “worldbuilding”.

anyway mother of learning is like that but for groundhog day. the time loop isn’t an unexplained device used to inspect a character through a lens, it’s a dragon ball-style training chamber. there are “plot developments” as more information is revealed, but all of that takes a back seat to extensively and exhaustively describing every ability and technique that the main character learns and how they use them to be more powerful. mother of learning is 800,000 words long. the time loop is because they’re actually duplicates of the ‘real people’, in a pocket universe constructed inside of an eldrich monstrosity that was designed to be used every x years by some kind of fated hero to keep it sealed. the main character has to escape partly to make sure some evil cultists don’t unseal some stuff, but mostly so he doesn’t lose all his experience gains.

anyway so reading that brought me to royal road. (i’ve always found the name very funny since my main familiarity with the term is the phrase “there is no royal road to geometry - euclid”, aka there is no shortcut to learning something; you always have to put in the hard struggle of comprehension. it’s actually named after… something from a light novel or something? it used to be a fan forum for a specific work before branching out into a publishing platform.) anyway it’s a place to post stuff, like fanfiction.net or fictionpress or whatever. there is a strong genre constraint: they mostly want to hear about their protagonists getting endlessly more and more powerful, and sometimes collecting a harem of sexy women. it’s for that kind of fiction. reading a few stories there was very illuminating, in that finally i could place HPMOR in a genre: that of the ‘progression fantasy’, a profoundly self-indulgent and formulaic genre that’s mostly just an action story with a lot of the bits stripped away so they can describe how much more powerful the protagonist is getting. a subgenre of this is the ‘litrpg’, which are stories with a diagetic video-game-mechanics layer. people are checking their stats and getting experience from killing monsters and leveling up and all that. a lot of them read like text LPs of videogames that don’t exist. where the author is, of course, executing a min-maxed run.

(there’s a lot of overlap here between progression fantasies and like, xianxia stories? cultivation stories are generally all progression fantasies, and so there’s a lot of overlap thematically.)

anyway so that was kind of a grim awareness of a dark corner of the literary world. this stuff is popular. royal road is pretty aggressively farmed by publishers wanting to license stuff so they can make ebooks or w/e; there are author patreons there that make like, thousands of dollars a month for writing chapter 1394 of “my character with a cool spear levels up more”. i’ve read a bunch of progression fantasies but i wouldn’t say i really enjoyed any of them, partly because a lot of them are really bad at like… constructing a narrative with any kind of stakes. it’s all gonna be jettisoned away in favor of talking more about level ups. it is actually almost exactly the experience of grinding for levels in an RPG: it’s not really fun, but it can be engaging in the moment, and also you get to see a number go up, so that’s like a reward.

(i started writing one of my own as a writing exercise b/c i wanted to try some short-paced serial work that wasn’t porn, and it shot up to uh #40 top-rated on the entire site. it was in the top 10 for a few days. i have some complicated feelings about that.)

recently, i’ve been reading a lot of, uh, gay incest teenage mutant ninja turtles fanfiction. a lot of it is incredibly overwrought. 200k words of characters pining guiltily over each other! soap opera antics with miscommunications and secrets! genre cliches piled up in a big heap and remixed! and like, fanfic as a genre can be real formulaic too, right? a lot of people who read&write fanfic don’t read much else, and there’s absolutely a 'house style’ for most fanfic. but when i read fanfic i get the sense that the authors are, you know, aware of some literary conventions, of the various aspects that make up a story, and they’re struggling to convey concepts and themes. apparently i’m responsible for inspiring somebody to write what i think is the only sincere donkey/shrek porn fanfic in existence, and personally i think that porn fanfic has a million times the literary and artistic merit as chapter 1400 of randitly fucking ghosthound, because porn, overwrought incest soap opera dramas, is at least saying something about the nature of human desire, whereas most progression fantasy stuff is an utterly self-absorbed thesis on “writing somebody cool and powerful is escapism so i can feel cool & powerful”, stretched out to a million words.

like i guess 'i want to feel powerful’ is an expression of human desire but it’s a particularly flat one. i think a lot about that bit in dead zones of the imagination:

Violence’s capacity to allow arbitrary decisions, and thus to avoid the kind of debate, clarification, and renegotiation typical of more egalitarian social relations, is obviously what allows its victims to see procedures created on the basis of violence as stupid or unreasonable. One might say, those relying on the fear of force are not obliged to engage in a lot of interpretative labor, and thus, generally speaking, do not.

[…]

To be more precise: violence may well be the only form of human action by which it is possible to have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom you understand nothing. Pretty much any other way one might try to influence another’s actions, one at least has to have some idea who they think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, and what their aversions and proclivities are. Hit them over the head hard enough and all of this becomes irrelevant.

a fantasy of having power is, i think, fundamentally a fantasy of never having to know anything you don’t want to, of never having to deal with the consequences of your actions. i feel it’s a particularly grim thing to enshrine into a millon-word epic.

anyway, hi, i’m back on tumblr, i guess. who can say if this will last. i’m still not happy about the porn ban! for reasons hopefully partially explained by the whole bit about porn above. also the increasing sidelining of custom layouts in favor of a uniform interface. sadly even with that it seems like tumblr is basically the only well-travelled social media site that’s not a total algorithmic nightmare, although the first thing i did when i remade this account was to go into the settings and turn off like a dozen algorithmic switches that were all defaulted to 'yes’.

i ended up moving cross-country during the peak of covid b/c my former housemate started having screaming panic attacks literally any time somebody stepped outside the house (literally literally, not emphatically literally). i would not recommend it. now i live somewhere where 'fire’ is a season, which is introducing new complications to my life. we’ll see how things go from here.

oh yeah, also my icon has more points now. i leveled up V:

[necer0s]

We’re coming to the end of MoL reread thoughts, but Jornak just referred to himself as “the ultimate victor of the time loop war” in his POV chapter, and it struck me how much I like thinking of it that way. I love the idea of Zach and Zorian, sometime far in the future, telling historians all about how “The Cyoria Invasion” was actually the final month-long battle in the “War of the Sovereign Gate”, a conflict spanning decades and continents and dimensions of which only the very last tiny fraction was known to the world at large.

Actually, come to think of it, that hypothetical historian would probably approach Quatach-Ichl first, wouldn’t they? He’s known for this sort of thing, after all. But he doesn’t know everything, so he calls up his old enemies Zach and Zorian to share their knowledge together...

[cal-cium-the-nerd]

They knocked Andoril unconscious and then left him lying in a field near Cyoria, set to wake up after a few minutes. After another half an hour to mask their trail, they both returned to Noveda Mansion. Zorian was technically living in his old dorm building again, but he and Zach agreed it would be better if he moved in with Zach for the duration of this restart. That way they would always be close enough to coordinate with each other to either flee or fight off attackers.

(chapter 61)

This is only the 3rd (third) restart they've teamed up in and they're already living together. The ship sets sail by itself

[disengaged-with-reality]

Xvim, Alanic, Daimen: *wakes up in destroyed streets of Cyoria with no memories* ???

Daimen: *sees he's one flipping continent away* wait a sec-

Daimen:

Zorian: I'm just gonna sit here and ignore you guys and yes, I'm not gonna give any explanations whatsoever plus throw a bunch of work on your laps before collapsing. Have fun figuring everything out!

Xvim, Alanic, Daimen:

[lostinthewinterwood]

Heart Attack 2020

Hey friend!

Looks like you and I both like to write like the wind and suffer in the process, so without further ado, let’s go :D

Also, oops, my habit of procrastination has caught up with me… sorry about that!  Here’s a letter now at least…

   General DNW

non-con/dub-con;

explicit sexual content;

incest (incl. adoptive/chosen family);

a/b/o;

mpreg;

non-canonical permanent major character death;

complete downer endings;

hurt no comfort;

heavy angst;

on-page deliberate self-harm*;

on-page suicide;

gore;

graphic physical trauma;

character bashing;

cringe comedy;

fic-as-writer-soapbox;

fic that’s all about real-world bigotries or real-world politics;

canon-typical 2020;

unrequested full-setting AUs;

unrequested identity headcanons;

unrequested romance as the main plot.

*I don’t include things like, say, punching a wall in a fit of emotion under this. However, something like cutting would not be appreciated.

 *****

General Likes

– I really like plotty fics

– Secret identity and disguise shenanigans, the more layers to them and more absurdity the better.

– Crossdressing for whatever reason and gender disguises, also for whatever reason, though not as a fetish thing—that I enjoy less.

– Time travel and time loops are always fun, especially as a fix-it.  I have a general preference for Peggy Sue style (aka, an older character getting put back in their younger body at an earlier point in the timeline) over the character’s physical body stepping back in time, but either one is good.

– A focus on family and/or friendship, especially characters realizing they’re not nearly as alone as they think they are, and just generally characters who like each other and enjoy spending time together

– Found family; families of choice

– Character studies

– Worldbuilding

– Canon-divergence AUs and missing scenes; things set pre- or post-canon; wriggling into canon and poking at it to see what it spits back at you, if that description makes any sense at all.

 ***** 

wherein i request a time-travel canon and mostly don't request time travelers [art and fic]

Mother of Learning - nobody103  

·        Alanic Zosk & Silverlake (Mother of Learning)

·        Zach Noveda & None (Mother of Learning)

·        Kirielle Kazinski & Zorian Kazinski (Mother of Learning)

·        Kirielle Kazinski & None (Mother of Learning)

·        Raynie & Kiana (Mother of Learning)

·        Neoluma-Manu Iljatir & Zach Noveda (Mother of Learning)

·        Alanic Zosk & Xvim Chao (Mother of Learning)

fandom-specific dnw: romantic and/or sexual Zach/Zorian; physical parental abuse within the Kazinski family; significant exaggeration of canonical emotional neglect/abuse/general family dysfunction

 Prompts:

If you want to write an AU, you can consider any AU requested for AUEx for Mother of Learning, as listed here, to be requested in this exchange as well, even if the requested characters aren’t requested there, as long as it isn’t written as purely mundane.

I’ve written a fair few Mother of Learning prompts already; if you want to see me going off more about things, especially for Kirielle, please see the Mother of Learning section of my Gen Freeform Ex letter here.  If you don’t want to click through, though, here’s a bit of things.  

 Kirielle, Kirielle & Zorian:

If you want to focus on Kirielle’s relationship with someone who isn’t Zorian, for Kirielle and Nochka, they’re adorable and I’d love a further development of their friendship, especially getting to see it grow and develop over the months and years after the invasion.  If you want to write about Kiri and Zach, these two seem to have a lot of fun teaming up against Zorian lol, I really enjoy their dynamic and how they play off each other.  For Kirielle and Zorian, I love their dynamic!  And again here I’d really enjoy seeing their relationship developing in real time, rather than a constantly looping world.  I think it would be great to see either of them defending the other to their parents—and maybe Zorian ends up with custody of Kiri, there’s definitely things to explore there.

For Kirielle by herself, I’d love some sort of character study—what does she do now that the time loop is over?  She’s growing up into a war; will she be a mage?  An artist?  Something else?  Alternatively—what if she got pulled into the loop; what would it be like to grow older while still looking nine?

 Zach, Zach & Neolu:

Assuming you don’t go for a setting AU, I’d generally prefer something set at least in part after the time loop begins, but beyond that I don’t have a strong preference for where in the timeline this might be set.  Maybe something from before Zorian got looped in—maybe one of the iterations where Zach and Neolu just went off across the country having fun the whole month? Zach doing whatever, possibly very early on, or maybe him freaking out a little because what the hell, time travel is supposed to be impossible, and yet—what did he do in the start?

Or for post-canon, I’d really like an exploration of Zach, who’s got the lived-time of a middle-aged man and the body of a teenager—how does he relate to his classmates/other people in the real world, where everyone’s growing again?  Maybe something about his lawsuit against his caretaker, or just a little thing with him, Zorian, and How Do You Live Normally, Again?  This Is Hard, or some such thing.

 Raynie & Kiana:

Me? Latching onto a minor character in a big sprawling canon? It’s more likely than you think!

Anyway I like Raynie a lot; we don’t get a whole lot on her, but what we do get paints her as someone who’s having a very interesting life of her own, utterly divorced from the timeloop shenanigans (except re: the shifter children thing).

I like her and Kiana’s friendship, too; I like how when we finally see more of them both we learn more about how they’re similar and different.

For specific prompts, if you want to go pre-canon I’d really love something with her initial going to Cyoria and how she befriended Kiana in the first place (or, perhaps more likely, how Kiana befriended her; I somehow doubt that Raynie age 13, recently semi-exiled from her tribe, was particularly in search of outsider friends).

For post-canon, really, anything dealing with the fallout of all the things that go down in the real world would be fantastic too.

 Alanic & Silverlake, Alanic & Xvim:

I’ve grouped these because they both have to do with Alanic, but really they’re not very similar prompts.

For Alanic and Silverlake I’d be very interested in something to do with Alanic’s backstory; Silverlake knew him as a young necromancer, so… what happened there?  How did they know each other?  Why was Alanic set on becoming a necromancer; clearly he got far enough to have soul sight himself—how’d he get that?  Why did he leave the necromancer’s path to become a priest?

For Alanic and Xvim, I dunno, this seemed fun?  They’re both part of the “annoying but ultimately helpful teacher” club to Zorian, and they get along well with each other—gonna admit I don’t fully remember what goes down for them in the final, real-world iteration, but.  They’re both a lot of fun and they play off each other well; just go wild here.  I’m down for it if you are.

 *****

 mostly found family and similar vibes here lbr [art and fic]

Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (Cartoon)  

·        Cassandra & Varian (Disney: Tangled)

·        Eugene Fitzherbert | Flynn Rider & Red | Catalina (Disney: Tangled)

·        Angry | Keira & Eugene Fitzherbert | Flynn Rider (Disney: Tangled)

·        Cassandra & Red | Catalina (Disney: Tangled)

·        Cassandra & Eugene Fitzherbert | Flynn Rider (Disney: Tangled)

·        Angry | Keira & Red | Catalina & Lance Strongbow (Disney: Tangled)

·        Angry | Keira & Red | Catalina (Disney: Tangled)

fandom-specific notes: Cass's canonical injured hand/arm that canon just kind of... forgets about and doesn't ever address after it's introduced is totally fair game; I'd love something that addressed that, just nothing too graphic about the original injury please.  Dnw fic which explicitly breaks up Rapunzel/Eugene.

 Prompts:

So, overall, I just love this show a lot?  It’s just so wholesome and heartfelt and hopeful?  Anything you write which can grab that vibe I’ll probably enjoy tbh.

But! Onwards to specifics!

 Cass & Varian, Cass & Catalina, Cass & Eugene:

This is my “team betrayed Rapunzel and/or ill-advisedly trusted a blue spirit in the woods and/or died for her before being resurrected” group lol, and I’d love something that explores one of those things; canon gives us a little bit of that between Cass and Varian in the form of “Nothing Left to Lose,” but it doesn’t really address it after they’ve both found their way back; I’d love something post-canon for any of these pairs, after Cass has finally got her act together and they can start learning to deal with all of it.  Sharing their experiences!  Figuring out how to emotionally process the bad (or good-but-with-unfortunate-consequences-even-if-only-temporary) decisions you made!  I’m here for it.

 Eugene & Angry, Eugene & Catalina, Angry & Catalina, Angry & Catalina & Lance:

All the found family! If you’re just dealing with Angry and Catalina, I’d take anything at any point in the timeline tbh—how did they meet? When and how did they start thieving together?  What did they do between their major appearances in the show?  If you go post-canon—how do they work out their new lives with Lance?  They’ve been living on their own for at least two years, probably longer; how do they learn to let go and let someone else take care of them?  And for either (or both tbh) of them with Eugene—former child-thieves, reformed because of Rapunzel!  He doesn’t have any parental-style authority over them; how do they relate to him as opposed to Lance, in a post-canon world?

 *****

 superhero time babey [art and fic]

Secret Society of Second-Born Royals (2020) [SAFETY]  

·        Matteo & Roxana & Sam & Tuma (Secret Society of Second-Born Royals)

·        January & Matteo & Roxana & Tuma & Sam (Secret Society of Second-Born Royals)

·        Mike Kleinberg & Sam (Secret Society of Second-Born Royals)

·        Eleanor & None (Secret Society of Second-Born Royals)

·        Catherine & Eleanor & Sam (Secret Society of Second-Born Royals)

·        January & Sam (Secret Society of Second-Born Royals)

·        Eleanor & Sam (Secret Society of Second-Born Royals)

·        Worldbuilding & None (Secret Society of Second-Born Royals)

Fandom-specific dnw: January as purely, irredeemably evil; absolute monarchy as unambiguously purely good.

Fandom-specific note: since I’m directly asking for politics in the worldbuilding option, it would be a bit silly to fully dnw real-world politics in this real-world-adjacent setting. Don’t worry about referencing real politics if that’s where you go with your fic; however, I would rather any focused-on politics be filtered through the context of the fictional countries the film uses, and please don’t reference real-world American politics post-2015.  “unrequested full setting aus” dnw has been modified to “unrequested mundane aus” so if you want to, idk, put them in a fairytale au or a sports-but-still-have-powers au or something—go right ahead.

 Prompts:

So, I enjoyed this silly little movie quite a lot—the characters were a lot of fun!  I love them all!  I really mostly just want more of them tbh.  If you want an overarching theme—I would adore time travel here, even more than I normally do. Time loops especially are just… perfection.

 Matteo & Roxana & Sam & Tuma, January & Matteo & Roxana & Tuma & Sam:

Team fic! Team fic! Team fic!  For these two sets, I’d love something about the whole team—of course—doing team-y things. You could set it in the summer, before shit goes down in the climax; or you could set it after—they’re going after January, of course.  What happens when they finally catch up to her?  What do they do?  How do they all process the relevant emotions of having been betrayed?  Do we catch a redemption arc?

 Mike & Sam:

These two are such good friends!  I like their friendship a lot, and I’d love to see more of it.  Something fun would be pre-canon—how did they meet?  What led them to start their band?  How much traction does their band have, really? Or post-canon—even having forgiven her, it’s got to be a lot to deal with, your best friend turning out to not just be a princess, but a superhero princess, while you’re just… a groundskeeper’s son(?).

 Eleanor, Eleanor & Sam, Catherine & Eleanor & Sam:

Family times!  There’s a lot of tension and secrets here, have been for a long time; tell me how they come to deal with it all and learn to live with each other better than they have been before the film—or give me backstory! How did things end up spiraling this far down?

 January & Sam:

I’d love to have something dealing with January’s PoV on the events of the film, or Sam’s PoV on January; more fun with secrets and betrayals!  (Fun for the audience at least; maybe less fun for these two though.) They got pretty close, after all—how did that have January feeling?  Did she second-guess herself over that?  How about Sam—she was the one betrayed by her new friend, after all.  If you want to see me talking more about just January, check out my Yuletide letter here.

 Worldbuilding:

Okay, so, I really did like this movie, so I say this affectionately, but… to call the worldbuilding here flimsy would be to, well, imply that it had bothered doing any worldbuilding whatsoever, and that’s not quite accurate, now is it?  To be clear, I do think this was probably a good decision, given that the movie is dedicated to superhero funtimes, not How The Hell Is This Happening, but it does leave me with so very many questions. For being a movie all about royalty, this movie is almost allergic to actually engaging any of the politics it hints at, what with the presented sides being “monarchy good” and “terrorism is fine actually”; if you want to write about the politics of the world these characters live in, by all means go ahead! For example, how did they manage to be a Western European absolute monarchy all the way to the present day?  I’d love to see that, or anything like it really, explored.  Other worldbuilding I’d be interested in includes an exploration of the “gene” which… somehow… manifests exclusively in second-born children of royal bloodlines—does this include bastard children?  What counts as a royal bloodline?  What happens when one of the superhero royal children has to ascend the throne?  Why only the second-born?  Is it really genetic at all, or is it some sort of magic?  If not magic, then wtaf is going on in the genetics of this world, I have to know more.

 *****

 disguise shenaniganery and/or PUNS

Original Work [SAFETY]

·        Male Student Mage Disguised as a Girl/Female Student Warrior Disguised as a Boy (M/F)

·        Male Student Mage Disguised as a Girl/Female Fellow Student Mage (M/F)

·        Male Student Mage Disguised as a Girl & Male Student Warrior (M & M)

·        Male Student Mage Disguised as a Girl & His Older Female Mentor (M & F)

·        Male Student Mage Disguised as a Girl & Female Student Warrior Disguised as a Boy (M & F)

·        Male Student Mage Disguised as a Girl & Female Fellow Student Mage (M & F)

·        Child Superhero & Their Concerned Supervillain Nemesis (Any & Any)

·        Spellsword Mercenary & Mathemagician (Any & Any)

fandom-specific dnw: age gaps in ships of more than 3 or so years when one character is underage; predatory manipulation between characters in the relationship in service of the relationship–if characters are manipulating each other for non-relationship things and such that’s okay, but i’d rather both parties in any of the ships be interested in the romance of their own accord. Additionally, please don’t have characters react to any gender-disguised characters (or characters in general, but it’s most relevant to them) in transphobic or transphobic-adjacent ways (i.e. none of the characters are requested as trans, but I still wouldn’t want to see the kinds of comments people make about trans people aimed at them). I’d also rather not see any kind of serious relationship with at least one character disguising their gender pre-reveal of that disguise–flirting, starting to date a little is okay but if it’s going further please have them reveal it. Please don’t play into the idea of gender-disguised character as “trap”.

also dnw characters requested as gender-disguised to be written as trans or to be written as absolutely loathing their disguise. other characters are fair game. if writing trans characters, dnw them to be explicitly nondysphoric (but not addressing it is fine).

fandom-specific note: the “setting au” dnw obviously does not apply here; my typical “identity headcanon” au dnw has been replaced by a dnw for “marginalized identities as the main focus of a fic” since there isn’t exactly a canon here lol.

If you’re a lovely friend who wants to do treats, I’d be totally on board for art treats for this section; however, I haven’t requested them as actual fills.

 Prompts:

All of these are fun groupings that, I think, imply both setting and some amount of plot; but I’ll have some more specific prompts anyway.  Overall I like all sorts of settings; all of my requested pairs imply some amount of speculative elements in the setting, but beyond that it’s all up to you.  Just-left-of-modern?  Ancient China but with magic?  IN SPACE? Whatever you want to do, go for it.

 Male Student Mage Disguised as a Girl &/Whoever:

Look, I’m a sucker for identity/disguise shenanigans, and I love gender disguises, and for all the books I read as a kid featuring girls disguising themselves as boys to do [insert restricted activity here], I never saw its natural inverse; this is a travesty and must be corrected for.  Anything playing into this whole trope/idea is just chef’s kiss, I promise you I’ll love it.

 Child Superhero & Their Concerned Supervillain Nemesis:

Another favorite dynamic of mine!  I love supervillains getting tricked into that semi-parental role where they’re like “hang on I may be a supervillain and a criminal but you’re a child where are your parents what are you doing here,” it’s quite possibly the Best dynamic I have yet encountered in superhero fiction… even if I haven’t actually encountered it all that much.

 Spellsword Mercenary & Mathemagician:

Okay, I’ll admit that I mostly nominated and requested this for the pun potential.  But I think there’s also quite a lot of implicit lore you could really dig into; what kind of world is this, where magic can be imbued in or used through swords, but can also be related to mathematics?  Tell me more about it!  How do these two know each other?  Are they both shamelessly, pundamentally invested in wordplay as well as their actual jobs?  If you’re looking for more plot-implying ideas, I would be super down if you wanted to map this onto one of my other origfic requests (but no pressure lol).