alias_sqbr

Are there any fantasy stories with democratic gods who follow the conscious decisions of their followers as a group? It's like... a typical god may be similar to a king who tries to listen to his citizens else he be deposed, but I'm looking for something more like a democratically elected president who was voted in and can be voted out.

This is an off-shoot of a discussion of Baldur's Gate 3/The Forgotten Realms but I think it should work for any fantasy setting where gods can be deliberately created or are a job mortals can take on, with powers reliant on simple things like their number of followers instead of anything numinous or mystical. I'm mostly thinking high fantasy set in a secondary world, but I guess it could work in other sorts of fantasy too.
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I've been pondering how to resolve how focused Jonathon and Mina are on each other, but also shipping Mina/Lucy, and also thinking about how the the whole thing with Lucy feels like a timeloop story or the bad ending of a "save the character" narrative game.

I think a straightforward retelling as a branching game where you play as Mina figuring out how to save Lucy could be fun. But here's another, odder option that popped into my head.
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Meme from shadaras: How big are your fandoms? List them in order of the number of works posted for them at AO3.
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Via sanguinity and muccamukk, an AO3 meme using NUMBERS to find your 'average' works on the ao3.

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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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As encountered by me while poking Wikipedia. I was specifically researching gods for TGCF/Heaven Official's Blessing, but I think this sort of thing is interesting for anyone with an interest in Chinese fantasy or folklore.

I don't know enough to judge if these wikipedia pages are accurate, and if people have better places to read up about this sort of thing, or any other info, I'd love to hear about it!
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I just saw one of many posts I've seen on tumblr praising the progressive messages in Golden Girls, specifically an episode about chronic fatigue syndrome. I don't remember the show very well but have no reason to question the praise. But this post went one about the great things the actors have done, implying they were the ones responsible for the nature of the show. Which is something I see a lot, and that's not how TV shows work!
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Susanna Clarke: ‘I was cut off from the world, bound in one place by illness’

I thought this was pretty good: it's framed as a Story About An Author Dealing With Life Stuff rather than A Story About A Disabled Person Overcoming Adversity or whatever. I mean it's pretty short and fluffy, but her talking about spending ages unsuccessfully trying to continue her previous creative work before giving up and finding something she can do was very relatable.

Ironically, one reason I didn't get very far into Jonathon Strange And Mr Norrel is that my cfs makes it harder for me to read dense prose, I'll be curious to see if I find her new book more readable, or if her style stays the same (which would be fine, not every book is for me)

It seems to me that the trends for romance arcs in fanfic are different in romances about two people, and those about three or more.

Specifically, while counterexamples exist, the kind of "everyone pines and doubts themselves" romance that is ubiquitous in romances about two people is almost entirely absent in romances about three people.

And I'm curious to know if other people (a) agree that this difference is real and if so (b) have any idea why it exists.
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I had to make a Wattpad account to read something and decided to try out posting something, because I needed a distraction(*). It's a site for posting fiction, with a lot of teenagers writing self insert RPF romances. I settled on Wedding Is Destiny since Pride and Prejudice femslash never goes out of style and it can just sit there to be stumbled upon whenever someone happens to want some.

You can post original stories and charge money for them, and there's also some kinda cute features for adding character notes and stuff to help with the writing process. It's very clean and brightly coloured, posting stories feels easy and light which I can see people finding encouraging.

It's moderately easy to use, certainly compared to fanfiction.net, though there didn't seem to be a html option so I cut and pasted the Rich Text from the AO3. It also has WAY less info on each story than Fanfiction.net or AO3, making finding stories nearly as opaque as searching tumblr tags. There's probably tricks to it I'm missing, though.

If you're curious, here's the three versions: Ao3, Fanfiction.net, Wattpad.

I have had ZERO VIEWS so far lol. Everyone seems to do covers there so I chucked one together haphazardly. As you can see, graphic design really isn't my passion, but eh, noone's going to read it anyway.

I don't know if I'll bother cross posting anything else. My main motivation is to help anyone thinking "I wish someone had written X" and am not sure what I write is what people there are likely to be looking for. I've written a few tropey romances but not for fandoms anyone's much into these days, especially not young people. I was curious to know what it was like to post to, and now I know!

(*)From my toilet breaking and me needing to wrangle a plumber. Yes, great timing, amiright? It's all fixed now, but it was good to have something mindless to do like cutting and pasting chapters.