Setting Meme

[aldersprig]

Okay, that's fun enough to make into a meme:
✍🏻
If I wrote a setting just for you, what would it look like?

— Lyn Thorne-Alder (@lynthornealder) January 15, 2017

I was playing around with my friends on Twitter (thinking about Month of Letters) and this came up.

So: If I wrote a setting just for you, what would it look like?

Comments

[inventrix]

Edally Academy? *wink wink*

No but for real, I dunno, I like lots of genres. Maybe a non-dystopian portal fantasy universe?

[aldersprig]

Non-*peers*

Non- *tries again*

non....

Oh wait. *looks at Patreon files*

[inventrix]

Well you said if you wrote a setting, not "which setting have I already written". >.>

I don't like dystopias nearly as much as you. ;P

[aldersprig]

I don't think George Orwell likes dystopias as much as I do! :-D :-D :-D

I wonder what you'd think of Portal Bound, though that does have The Government Is Being Assholes sort of elements.

[kelkyag]

Portal Closed!

[aldersprig]

Oooh

Ooh yes.

[inventrix]

Are we talking like oppressive bureaucracy or like Queen of Hearts?

[aldersprig]

Queen of Hearts like, Alice in Wonderland Off With Their Heads or...???

[inventrix]

Yeah, that.

[aldersprig]

I never got this comment!! :-( :-(

Power-behind-the-throne Bureaucracy.

[inventrix]

*considers* That doesn't really explain what they do to make them an asshole government, just how they function. >.>

[aldersprig]

oh! /considers/

Some of it is spoilers. Mostly they aren't, just efficient.

[inventrix]

Ahh. That doesn't sound dystopian!

[aldersprig]

*considers* Really not, no. You might like this one if I ever get into it.

[inventrix]

Because I ~never~ like your stories with dystopias, right? ;o

[aldersprig]

Fair point, fair point.

Rephrase: Portal Bound might meet your earlier-stated qualifications.

[kelkyag]

Ensemble cast, multiple interacting storylines, variable epic level leaning low, strong world and character development, mechanics consistency.

I'll pass on the dystopias and erotica.

So, umm, Aunt Family and Dragons Next Door? :}
And Fairy Town and Things Unspoken and Reiassan/Edally and ...

[aldersprig]

"variable epic level leaning low?"

[inventrix]

I think she means "the plots are not very epic in scale but some are more so than others".

[aldersprig]

Oh! Oh hrrm! Thank you.

[kelkyag]

What inventrix said. High epic level plots tend to step on low epic level plots. Destroy the world trumps rule the world. (The guild used to put this as "the CIA and the KGB will team up to stop Cthulhu".) Smaller plots can happen around those things, but get warped by them. Sometimes that's the story one wants to tell (what happened on the way to end of the world), but one save the world plot after another gets old.

For instance, the Informer who might be trying to unbind the sea and the people of it, in that one northern city in Things Unspoken, is on a rather more epic plot than Junie dealing with her not-so-friendly school mates, but even a successful unbinding seems likely to affect mostly that city, with some ripples elsewhere in the Empire, not destroy the world, the empire, or even the city. ETA: okay, maybe the city.

[clare_dragonfly]

Just posting to share again my brilliant idea of "fae-apoc + assassin's guild" :D

[sauergeek]

I've thought about this one for a bit now, and I'm baffled. I suspect an outsider might be able to find a useful set of common threads through all my reading, but I'm not seeing one. I range from hard science fiction through pure fantasy and into mysteries, though there are authors and/or series in all of those that I am not fond of. I tend to be left cold by standard fiction, and think that straight up romances like those published by Harlequin are singularly awful. I like history and occasional philosophy, ranging into law and politics.

I'm not at all sure what that adds up to.

[eseme]

For a setting that you would be likely to write and I would enjoy and would be right up my alley - you writing about a cast of characters in a place, and how their lives intersect. Along the lines of DeLint's Newport.

Possibly more high fantasy than modern, possibly not. Your Stranded works already have this feel for me. Bits of romance, but mostly how people's lives intersect, and their bits of magic work.

I have been enjoying something on Netflix called Midnight Diner, which is a series of stories about people in Tokyo who all eat at the same small diner. That-ish, only with a bit of magic.