fantasy book with witches and wizards and magical people but all magic has a price, like
main character, in awe and slightly terrified: what did you have to give up to be able to control storms with your mind?
powerful enchanter, fighting back tears as they pull down the hood of their cloak to reveal a knotted oily mess: my beautiful luscious hair….no matter how many times i wash or brush it, it always looks like this
main character: [horrified gasp]
fortune teller: and speak up when asking your question, these are my cards so they share my partially-deafness
other character, sympathetically: oh, had to trade good hearing for seeing the future?
fortune teller: no, asshole, i was born with it. i got seeing the future for trading in my ability to wink
there’s a legend in this fantasy land about a powerful enchanter who traded their ovaries for the power to create earthquakes. the grumpy semi-sentient force of nature who negotiates these magic deals had thought it was pretty great one, sure to make the recipient of the deal regret making it soon enough (after all, the point is having to suffer a bit in exchange for magic, because life sucks even in magical fantasy kingdoms)
however, soon afterwards, the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature realized the enchanter had been ecstatic to be rid of periods and didn’t care about not having biological children. the GSSFN felt somewhat cheated by this and ever since has had a strict no-trading-internal-organs policy
“fucking humans messing with the system,” it was quoted as saying
actually, cheating the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature out of the suffering it hopes to inflict with the magic deals is a time honored tradition in Magical Fantasy Kingdom, which is primarily made up of sassy little shits. most of the kingdom’s mythology is made up of trickster figures
there’s the legend of the smooth-talking thief who managed, by describing a certain talent of hers as “the ability to form small growths out of her skin and then reabsorb them” with enough quick confusing descriptions to trade the ability to get pimples for the power to become invisible
there’s the boy who brought the GSSFN a bucketful of cold, liquid silver in exchange for the power to cure a certain sickness, only for the GSSFN to realize once the sun had come up that the bucket contained only water reflecting moonlight
there’s the monarch who offered to trade in their power to destroy people with only their words for the seemingly much less valuable power to turn one grain of rice into two grains — only for the GSSFN to realize later it had gotten the ruler’s cutting sarcasm in payment for a power that could end a famine
every year the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature gets visits from tens of jewish witches and wizards solemnly offering to give up eating all foods that come from pigs or eating meat at the same time as dairy in exchange for the powers they want
“DO YOU THINK YOU’RE FUCKING CLEVER” says the GSSFN, who has frankly had enough of this shit
Worked like a debutante’s coming out used to… (incidentally the debutante’s coming out is where we get the terminology) and so being gay or trans or what have you meant getting presented to the reigning monarch.
“Your majesty, may I present… a gay”
I would love this as a story conceit? Like, an upper class who have to engineer elaborate confections to present the younger generation of queers in the Appropriate Manner for Social Advancement.
“Have you heard about Lady Hemington’s youngest? They’ll be coming out as genderqueer!”
“Oh, poor dear Lady Hemington – so hard on the heels of the first two. She can hardly arrange a come-out until the first two have had their chance to shine…”
“And the cost of another nonbinary ball – !”
“The costume changes alone will be terribly hard to bear. But, of course, one mustn’t skimp. Not when that wretched Lucrezia Netherbottom threw such a come-out for her first.”
“Oh, I know, my dear, I know. I’m so terribly grateful that my wife was able to present our boys at Court herself – I’d simply die if the Netherbottoms had an advantage in wooing the Prince, just because Lucrezia’s quite willing to spend thousands on a French cosmetic surgeon.”
“And you’ve got that dear little daughter who’s looking quite Hard Butch, isn’t she?”
“Oh yes, we do hope it isn’t just a phase; ‘twould be such a nice change to throw a proper Lumberjane Ball…”
Yeah but also fuck the upper class in its entirity.
well that too
so @kingofherrings added some really good Discourse as replies but I can’t reply to them all and they’re REALLY IMPORTANT so sorry about hijacking everything but here are their comments:
I feel like this’d have almost as many, but different, problems and
pressures as now. Genderfluid youth vs. being told every other week that
genderfluid balls are SUCH a hassle, we really couldn’t afford one, so
they don’t come out as that. Genderfluid youth vs. pressure to have two
costume changes at their ball, even though the youth is feeling HELLA
dysphoric and would rather stick with a nice dress the whole time,
thanks.
Suspicion of bisexuals on how it increases their royal s.o. playing
field, and some youths getting pressured to be bi-er than they are.
Extreme pressure to have yourself figured out by about 16. Don’t worry,
nobody’s ever learned anything about themselves or changed when older!
/sarc
(not to dismiss younger teens knowledge of themselves in the real world,
but to say that there are some people who learn more after that time,
and having Come Out to The Crowned Heads at Great Expense as a cisgender
gay and then seeing the same Monarch around years later, them all “oh,
yes, I recall, you are Lady Mallorbody’s gay son-” when meantime the
youth in question is now really sure they’re Lady Mallorbody’s
heterosexual daughter…
Like, THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE WANT THOUGH. THAT’S LITERALLY HOW THE PLOTS WORK AND THE CHARACTERS DEVELOP. THAT’S HOW YOU SET UP THE CONFLICT BETWEEN IDENTITY AND SOCIETY THAT POWERS THE YOUNG ADULT NOVEL, OR THE EXPLORATION OF A NEW WORLD THAT POWERS SF/F.
The story conceit is the pretty, flashy, Regency-Rococo frosting that you sink into because there’s a part of you that genuinely fucking enjoys the pretty dresses and serious manners and masc people in tight trousers, the part of you that maybe would fuck an elf. And there is no shame in that.
But despite what a lot of junior writers seem to believe, a story is not just the story conceit – you don’t make a book out of one pretty idea. You literally come up with something Problematic and then play with it. Harry Potter takes the conceit of a magical British boarding school with a distinct culture and specific rules, and gives you an abused outsider child who knows nothing of the culture, a child born outside of the culture, and a poor child born within the culture, and says “You’re at war. A civil war within the culture. Go. Break the rules.” What if you COULD fuck an elf but elves are slightly evil? What if magic is real (for the umpteenth time) but it costs a Price?! What if X people are among us… but they hate us?! The concept is literally one half of the setup, and the other half starts with a “but.” Narnia is real, BUT it’s at war. Gay people aren’t marginalized, BUT society is still fucked up. Utopia is here and nothing is problematic, but…?
You start with the conceit because it sounds SLY and FUNNY and full of POTENTIAL. You have a funky, fresh, unusual little starting point with a cute aesthetic that will make a catchy cover. Everybody’s ready for it, they want to see what you do. NOW YOU TEAR IT APART. THAT’S HOW YOU WRITE STORIES. Now you add in the protagonist who doesn’t fit into the society. Now you add in the people from other classes and what they’re doing. Now you note the seeds of the revolution. (If Regency, the American revolution? Shoehorn in some Hamilton flavor if you want, some rough-edged androgynous American revolutionaries who sweep the hero off his perfect sugar-colored high heels, eyyyy.) Now you get to the cake under the frosting.
ALL OF THOSE THINGS YOU’RE POINTING OUT ARE THE STARTING POINTS FOR THE STORY! YES! EXACTLY!
“Oh but fuck the upper classes though” – UM, EXACTLY? THAT’S A BOOK. GO.
“But Elodie set up a thing where genderfluid youths might cost their parents more” – I KNOW RIGHT? SOCIAL COMPLEXITY!
“But they’re all too young” – WELCOME TO THE FUCKED-UP WORLD OF YA! USE THIS TO EXAMINE HOW CHILDREN ARE “TOO YOUNG” TO LABEL THEMSELVES NOW – also, surely a come-out would happen in the the Vintage Queer sense, in which your party would be organized when you are ready to announce your identity, rather than when your parents can afford to put you on the marriage market? Or would it? Why are we assuming they’re teenagers? Do they need to be? Could a grizzled handsome war veteran come out for the first time after a shocking encounter? Would you like to take my money now, or later?
Look, here’s a bunch of blurbs I wrote using “In a society, BUT.” It took 10 minutes.
“In a world where young gay people have fancy parties to enter society,
one young personis questioning everything it means to be gay…”
“Like any other young trans boy of the aristocracy, Silver’s family can’t wait to throw his first Coming Out Ball. Clever, wild and funny, Silver’s a sure bet to win the affections of the Prince of Flame and Shadow. But Silver has a secret that his family just don’t understand: he’s straight…”
“When a strange masked person with a Virginian twang steals Prince Harry’s crystal slipper at the Big Gay Ball, the Prince embarks on a quest to find them…”
“Clarissa Montclare is a wry-humored, hard-up heiress of a crumbling Yorkshire estate, who can’t really be bothered with London glitter or the big gay marriage market. But Clarissa’s pretty young wife never got to make that choice for herself, and desperately wants to seek her dreams in the big city… while Clarissa’s rugged, idealistic Scottish husband wants them all to overthrow capitalism. Clarissa just wants to work out a new method of fertilization, because somebody has to care about soil fertility. Can she keep her family together? This novel explores the conflict of capitalism vs. aesthetic, power vs. equality, necessary revolution vs. safe peace, and has long pondering monologues where Clarissa strides across the atmospheric misty moors with her spaniel, pondering her conflicting feelings on motherhood. Also, entire paragraphs about the use of manure.”
“In a society in which Big Gay Balls are just an excuse for Porn Without Plot (because boys in lacy Regency knickers), a romance between opposites turns out to be surprisingly sweet and genuine…”
“There are parallel universes, one that’s a standard Pride and Prejudice heteronormative regency AU, one that’s the Coming Out Ball Regency AU. A young gay person from the heteronormative AU switches places with a young grey-ace person from the Gay Ball AU, and they explore each other’s societies. But what seems amazing and perfect to the former outsiders is slowly revealed to be problematic and creepy, and the two young people have to unite again to destroy the parasitic third universe preying on them all…”
COMING-OUT BALLS ARE A CONCEPT. LADY MALLORBODY’S HETEROSEXUAL TRANS DAUGHTER IS A BOOK.
you know what i really want? a modern dudebro vampire. just a typical obnoxious straight boy in a neon tank top and cargo shorts who also happens to be a creature of the night.
“okay, dude, i’m only feeding on you ‘cause i’m starving and there aren’t any hot girls around. no homo.” “wait, you’re gonna suck my blood?” “no, i’m gonna drink your blood. i don’t suck, that’s gay. don’t make this weird, bro”
“ah, i see you’re staring pensively out the window, chad. ruminating on the curse of your newfound immortality?” “nah man, it’s just… i got, like, some flecks of blood on my adidas while i was feeding and they haven’t come out…”
“we do not drink… wine.” “okay but is beer cool? and can we still smoke weed?”
he joins a 24-hour gym because being undead and allergic to sunlight is no excuse for skipping leg day. tragic music swells as he looks over his “sun’s out guns out” tanks (he has seven of them). his coven is a fraternity. someone make this happen
ask and ye shall recieve
He’s wearing a monster shirt that’s so ducking great 👍🏽
why is it always that the sign that the robot/AI is becoming ~*too human*~ is when they fall in looove
give me a robot who realizes they’ve ~*exceeded their programmed parameters*~ when they get incredibly emotionally attached to their favorite movie and start writing fanfiction about it
A robot that gets into an editing war on Wikipedia because this other person is wrong and not citing sources and clearly biased and no it will do that calculations later because this is important.
A robot who doesn’t like one scientist because it thinks her hair is stupid.
A robot that finds logical paradoxes meant to disable it incredibly funny as if they’re jokes and comes up with its own.
A robot that develops a deep interest with a random trivial object like doorbells, dice, or ribbons and devotes a lot of its processing power to studying them. Fascinating.
A robot that was broken down for a while until some animal nested inside it and after it was repaired it was honored that an organic creature chose it as its shelter.
A robot that likes the class of the human-visible electromagnetic spectrum designated as ‘aquamarine’ (#66CDAA) and surrounds itself with this colour as much as possible, even collecting (or stealing) all objects of this colour. Similar colours like sea blue or teal will not be accepted.
Concept: an immortal who doesn’t shy away from photos or paintings. Draws self portraits on cave walls. Photobombs everything with a pout and a suave pose. Commissions numerous portraits of themself as a literary Romantic before faking their death. Tries to be at least slightly famous every time they have a new identity. Creates a conspiracy blog linking all their past photos together before mysteriously disappearing in mysterious circumstances. Mysteriously. Usually only disappears for 10 to 20 years after “"dying”“ before making another appearance. Everyone else in the immortal community lowkey hates them. “Ah, fuck. You’ll never guess who’s resurfaced again.” “Fucking… Dave?” “Fucking Dave.”
draw women in post-apocalyptic world settings with armpit hair, leg hair, bushy brows and pubic hair ya cowards,, draw brown women/women with dark thick hair with arm hair and happy trails and sideburns and mustaches i’m sick of seeing silky smooth soapy clean make up wearing post apocalyptic dolled up women next to stinky sweaty crusty men with dirty nails and sweaty clothes and sweaty greasy hair and 3m long ugly beards
THANK YOU
or, contrariwise, how about the men get dolled up too, in a low tech way? how about the men braid beads into their beards, shave their heads and paint designs on their scalps, paint wild colors around their eyes?
it’s not like hygiene was invented at the same time as electricity. you can shave with a flint or a clamshell. you can make makeup out of berries and clay. the thing that’s gone away isn’t the human drive to be clean and decorated, it’s the constant enforcement of a bland standard of beauty by magazines and television.
tell you what, i’m a guy and if i was kicking around some post-apocalyptic wasteland i’d have my hair and beard all braided up like a fantasy dwarf, eyeliner like the winter soldier, rings on every finger, and be wearing clothes dyed bright with red cabbage and indigo and madder root. and my fingernails would be clean, dammit.
I’m willing to follow dwarf king Madder into post-apocalyptic zombie battle, idk about u
can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?
You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.
You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.
You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.
You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?
Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog?
Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.
Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.
But man.
That stuff is scary.
shit just got creepy
Or maybe magical healing doesn’t leave scars or damage. It is magical, after all.
So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.
And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.
Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?
How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.
How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.
How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?
And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?
How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…
you know how it’s always like “I was just a normal high school kid until one day *FANTASTIC/CRAZY/AWFUL/MAGICAL* thing happened to me!
what if they just had like five entire episodes of vanilla slice of life shit before the director yells SWERVE and throws the “you’re a wizard, harry” moment into the mix or decides the apocalypse starts NOW
so that you’re just as shocked as the main character
tbh I’d love a horror-comedy about a retail worker accidentally becoming a ghost/demon hunter because they’re just so unfazed by difficult and weird and bellicose customers that evil entities aren’t much more of a challenge.
“sir or ma’am or neuter, I’m going to have to ask you to stop crawling on the ceiling, you’re disturbing the other residents”
“please leave this place before I call the exorcist to remove you from the premises”
“company policy forbids me from accepting power from customers in exchange for my soul or firstborn child”
“sir, if you keep speaking to me like that, I’m going to have to end this spirit board conversation. have a good day, goodbye”
the walls start weeping blood. our hero gives a long-suffering sigh, walks away, comes back with a wheelie mop bucket and biohazard gloves. hey, it’s better than bathrooms on the overnight shift, at least blood’s not smelly when it’s fresh.
After facing Karen of the Many Coupons and Screaming Children, Asgortoh the Reaper of the Damned is no contest.
sparksoffandommagic 