alias_sqbr

The dream itself was like a very mild nightmare, not because of the vampires but because I was playing the game in the dream and OTHER PEOPLE KEPT TALKING OVER IT AND BLOCKING THE SCREEN (they all thought I was a bit cringe for caring but I just wanted to see the end). Also the game controls were confusing, and I kept accidentally dying and having to restart etc. So I saw a bunch of inconsistent variants of the story, and was thinking about how I'd do it differently as I played. The post below is me collecting the interesting parts.

It was not a sexy game, in fact I kept thinking "this is surprisingly unsexy for a vampire dating game, but I guess that makes it less embarrassing to play in this communal game playing club I have apparently joined". Which also makes it less embarrassing to describe in a post, so, thanks subconscious! I guess! No thanks for the annoying hecklers, though.
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Matriarchal line of queens with magical powers who must prove their suitability for the crown at their coronation by making their own crown using telekinesis. Maybe if there's no suitable heir a sufficiently magical girl is adopted in, to keep the line powerful. And sometimes a less magical queen needs a little surreptitious help but everyone pretends not to notice.

I tend to find both monarchies and magitocracies off-putting as a non-dystopian form of government in fiction, but combine it with craft and I'm apparently into it haha.

In my dream there was a set crown design they had to follow exactly, but it could be fun if designing a unique crown was a way for queen to start their rule with a bang. Crowns from old queens would make for cool historical artifacts. "Ah yes, the one with all the little skulls...Queen Gothica was quite a character..."

Someone has probably done this already in something.

I think this would be funny but don't feel inspired to actually write it, at least not right now.

If you're not familiar with Scum Villain's Self Saving System, here's a fun post skygiants made about it recently. In short: nerdy loser Shen Yuan finds himself stuck as the doomed villain of the terrible porny fantasy webnovel he was reading. Making things harder is a System that deducts points if he acts out of character or loses Cool Points etc. By trying to make the protagonist Luo Binghe to like him enough that he doesn't get murdered, Shen Yuan ends up making Luo Binghe fall in love with him.

When I first read the fic, I was a bit squicked by the initial setup: the villain Shen Yuan is stuck in is the then 14 year old Luo Binghe's father figure-ish mentor/teacher. And then I thought: well, we don't know how old Shen Yuan is! He's canonically much younger than the 50ish villain, and skimmed all the original novel's sex scenes to get to the worldbuilding. Maybe he is also around 14, desperately trying to fake being a middle aged sword master.

Canon eventually made it clear that no, Shen Yuan's more like 20. He doesn't think of Luo Binghe as a love interest until a good decade or so later, so it's not as squicky as it could have been, but I was still sad to lose my headcanon.

Recently I was pondering what an AU where Shen Yuan was the same age as Luo Binghe would look like. Imagining Shen Yuan's "cool immortal on the outside, flailing nerd on the inside" with a young teen is pretty funny, but then I got kind of squicked by all the sex and violence poor teen!Shen Yuan would be dealing with as a consequence of the kind of story he's stuck in.

And then I thought: what if the system has a child-safe setting.
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