History Literature / TalesOfMu

** Generally speaking: [=MUniverse=] dwarves mostly follow the standard model, with a few additions. Their names have a Germanic flavor, they count in [[Literature/SnowWhiteAndTheSevenDwarfs base seven]], and while they seem like a OneGenderRace, it's been explained that male and female dwarves just don't get along. The one full-blooded female dwarf who appeared was not described with a beard. Dwarves have a strong disposition for secrecy and privacy, though the college-going ones are willing to make exceptions for attractive women of other races. One recurring minor character, Gebhard, shows a somewhat fussy and fastidious nature.

* ImAManICantHelpIt: Prevalent in elven culture, due to [[OurElvesAreBetter increased sexual potency]]. Among the more disciplined underground variety, it seems more common among the "[[{{Transgender}} halfkind]]" as they are not expected to show responsibility or constraint.

* OurElvesAreBetter:

** Subverted in the spinoff ''More Tales of MU'', when the main character and his elven boyfriend Iason visit Treehome, the place where the elven "middlings" (essentially the elven equivalents of twentysomethings) live. ''Every single middling'' is a creep and/or violent pervert (like the elven woman who seduces Jamie, then tries to castrate him to spite Iason). There's also the fact that every single elf, upon learning that Jamie has put on a magical bracelet that lets Iason turn him into a stag any time he wants to, up to and including Jamie's own elven grandfather, have stopped treating Jamie like a separate being and instead seem to view him as a sort of extension of Iason. Truly, in the [=MUniverse=], Our Elves are More Fucked Up.

* {{Transgender}}: The culture of the [[OurElvesAreBetter subterranean elves]] features an "ornamental" third gender of [=MtF=]s called "halfkind," who undergo a magical transformation that enhances both breasts and male organs, and who serve mostly as a status symbol for their families. [[spoiler:Dee eventually gives Steff the halfkind potion to try to help her with some of her issues.]]

** Kobolds resemble goblins, but with red skin instead of green. They live in mines beneath mountains and fight dwarves for territory while trying to protect their wealth from human looters. Their society is rigid and more stratified than goblins.

*** In the goblins' own language 'Hobgoblin' roughly translates as 'House-boy'. Hobgoblins make up the majority of the labor pool in goblin society, until the humans came and started mucking things up, filling the poor impressionable hobgoblins' heads with such fantastic notions as being paid for their work.
* OurMermaidsAreDifferent: Mermaids can change at will between three forms: standard lady-half/fishie-half mermaid, an intermediate form with a distinctly humanoid lower half covered in scales, and fully human-like. They can also assume a sort of fighting form by growing scale-armor all over their bodies and claws on their hands. It's implied they can also change their faces to a...less appealing form. They're also fond of [[ImAHumanitarian eating people]]; their mythology says that their goddess inspired the land-dwellers to build ships ''for the express purpose of providing them with food''. While it's possible for them to mate with humans, they normally reproduce by spawning.

* KabbalicGolem: In the [=MUniverse=], golems are created as living tools who must obey orders. Their level of sentience varies; some have more developed personalities than others. They can be "emancipated" by ordering them to consider themselves free beings. Two is one such golem, with a rather uniquely constructed personality.

* {{Golem}}: In the [=MUniverse=], golems are created as living tools who must obey orders. Their level of sentience varies; some have more developed personalities than others. They can be "emancipated" by ordering them to consider themselves free beings. Two is one such golem, with a rather uniquely constructed personality.

** From a national perspective: The Imperial Republic of Magisteria is America mixed with the Roman Empire in a DungeonPunk world. The island of Yokan is a version of Japan populated by PettingZooPeople. Members of [[AlternateCompanyEquivalent a totally original race of little people who live in cozy holes in shires]] have a rural English-type culture. The forest-dwelling elves have Ancient Greek names and [[YaoiGuys culture]]. The dwarves are basically German. Early discussions of the ideas outsiders have of subterranean elves mirror American ideas of the Muslim world. When we see the culture up close, though, there's no resemblance whatever. Pointedly, the "European" cultures don't seem to have colonized nearly as much of the world at any point.

* PettingZooPeople: Maliko, Suzi, and Kai are anthropomorphized cats, unlike Sooni.

* YouNoTakeCandle: A RunningGag in the series is that the [[PettingZooPeople nekoyokai]] Suzi is only marginally fluent in Pax, and usually ends up speaking in WebOriginal/{{LOLcat|s}} phrases. When she speaks her own language...she's a self-centered bitch who considers anyone unable or unwilling to speak her own language to be barbarians. Of ''course.''

* ButICantBePregnant: [[spoiler:Hazel]] went through some ''severe'' denial, even claiming that it was impossible because ''[[YouFailBiologyForever she was on top]]''. It's not until Y2-86 that she can finally talk to everyone else about her struggle with the issue. [[spoiler:Of course, at that point it's irrelevant; see GoodGirlsAvoidAbortion below.]]

%%
%% Surely there are non-Mackenzie examples of this
%%* GenreSavvy:

-->Sooni narrated things in her head? That was easily the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.

Chapter 496, plus a number of side stories, concluded Mack's first year at MU. The second year has reset the chapter numbering; so far, 338 chapters of the second year have been released, along with more side stories. Specific chapters will be referred to with the Y__-__ format; first blank is the year, second is the chapter number. Through there has been no official word on the story being over, it has not been updated since February 2017.

Chapter 496, plus a number of side stories, concluded Mack's first year at MU. The second year has reset the chapter numbering; so far, 338 chapters of the second year have been released, along with more side stories. Specific chapters will be referred to with the Y__-__ format; first blank is the year, second is the chapter number.

* FantasticSlurs: Several, including "pinkskins" for humans and "treefuckers" for elves. Unconventionally, "drow" is a slur for dark elves, along with "cowl head" and "spider jockey". The inhabitants of the non-human dorm, Harlowe Hall, are collectively referred to as "harlots".

* FashionBasedRelationshipCue: "Middling" elven females wear a veil over the lower half of their face to indicate that boys are off-limits. They can also gift this veil (as well as other things, such as underwear) to someone to indicate their interest in them, which is how Grace and Nicki's relationship begins.

** Played with a bit, in that it's a compulsion that the nymphs don't necessarily want, it constantly snowballs into BlueAndOrangeMorality, and more than once it's just off-the-charts creepy. Attempts to fulfill the 'nurturing' part also sometimes go horribly, horribly wrong since the nymphs' hard-wired innocence is maintained by a divinely-enforced ignorance.

* GreenEyedMonster: [[spoiler:Barley]] is deeply envious of [[spoiler:Amaranth]], because of both [[spoiler:her popularity in their hometown and that she only went to college because Barley did, but ended up being more popular than Barley]]. This jealousy has been the driving force behind all of her objectionable actions, [[spoiler:but the second-year side story involving her indicates that she's making strides toward dealing with it.]]

--> I couldn’t help but notice that he did things like use “fight” twice in the same sentence… and “underprivileged underclass?” It also seemed like he just dropped commas in wherever he felt like it...like there was no actual rules regarding their use...like he was just in love with them as a punctuation mark, or something. (Note that Mack, at another point, remarked in passing that she had once been marked down on an essay for using too many ellipses.)
** Also:
--->Sooni narrated things in her head? That was easily the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.
* IDoNotDrinkWine: Several of the characters cannot or will not eat certain types of food, often due to restrictions of their race or religion.

* INeedToGoIronMyDog: The side story [[http://www.talesofmu.com/other/bonus-story-how-suzi-broke-her-leg "How Suzi Broke Her Leg"]] has a rather over-the-top {{exaggerat|edTrope}}ion--Maliko pushes Suzi off a staircase, and when that doesn't hurt her badly enough, ''breaks Suzi's leg''...all so they can go to the medical center and get away from Sooni's brainstorming for her fanfiction.

** Well, somewhat averted. The most socially and economically advanced state in the setting (the counterpart to the USA) is a full (not constitutional) monarchy with no concept of civil rights and an economic system based on slavery, and it goes downhill from there. Magic literally cannot be advanced through systematic study because the setting's gods are bastards, and the only reason labor exploitation hasn't become and issue is that mass production really hasn't become a thing yet. Essentially it's still medieval stasis, just of a later, less terrible part of the middle ages than [[TheDungAges usually depicted]], more akin to the 1300s to 1400s than the 1000s.
* MediumAwareness: Lily Binder has apparently become aware that she's a character in a story and is '''not''' happy about it, since it's not ''her'' story[[note]]she's from ''Star Harbor Nights'', one of Alex Erin's older works[[/note]] and she's apparently been stuck in a kind of stagnation for almost seven years...which happens to be how old ''Tales of MU'' is.

-->'''Mackenzie''' ''(narrating)'': She'd just let out what would probably qualify as a deep, dark secret, or a shallow, bright one or whatever they'd call it where she was from...

* {{Polyamory}}: Extremely common among main characters. It is mentioned that this kind relationship is significantly more common among non-humans, although while the story seems to confirm this, the source is of questionable credibility.

* RPGMechanicsVerse: Done very subtly, but played completely straight and not [[PlayedForLaughs for laughs]]. Specifically, it's a Tabletop RPG Mechanics Verse, with gods and other extremely powerful entities in the role of GameMaster. For example, RocksFallEveryoneDies is a known and well-understood phenomenon in adventuring circles, and NoFairCheating is a codified fundamental principle of magic, on par with the Laws of Thermodynamics. It's made explicit in [[http://www.talesofmu.com/story/other/mumoo one side story.]]

* ImAManICantHelpIt: Prevalent in elven culture, due to [[OurElvesAreBetter increased sexual potency]]. Among the more disciplined underground variety, it seems more common among the "[[{{Transsexual}} halfkind]]" as they are not expected to show responsibility or constraint.

* CrystalDragonJesus: What we've seen of the worship of Khersis is very much like Christianity, except in a world where gods are known to speak to mortals, demons are real, and exorcism works. Considering the one passage from the Khersian holy book that's been referenced parallels the gospels directly, and one creation myth says he was born of a great dragon from a crystal egg, he may be a literal "Crystal Dragon Jesus". We don't know if he has any [[GodIsEvil dark secrets]] yet, but some of his followers are assholes.
** There's also the "Mechans", expies of Wiccans.

* DancingPants: In Y2-197, Steff enchants Mack's jeans with an undead animation spell in an attempt at magical bondage. It goes hilarious awry because they didn't account for her belt and boots. [[spoiler:Once off her, the jeans try to wrap around Mack's head and eventually have to be destroyed.]]

[[http://www.talesofmu.com/story/ The story can be found here.]] Definitely NotSafeForWork!

* {{Lolicon}}:
** Implied to be a motive for [[spoiler:Two's creator designing her with a waifish body and to be completely hairless except for her head, although Two does later deny that he used her sexually]].
** Played with by [[spoiler:Mack Daddy]], who feeds on innocence.

** The delving students who Mack encounters after the botched teleport spell (see ContinuityOverlap above). One wants to kill her for XP, another (Seth) is ambivalent about whether she lives or dies, and another (Lacey) half-heartedly argues to let her live. This gets reinforced even more by [[spoiler:Seth's]] petulant attitude when [[spoiler:he's caught by Eloise after he and Lacey mess with a dwarven sword as a prank]] in a second-year side story.

* MagicVersusScience:
** While magic works and is commonplace, belief in the power of scientific thinking is generally regarded as either dangerously deluded or childish fantasy. The Mechans are treated as the counterpart to Wiccans in our universe. See also ScienceCannotComprehendPhlebotinum below.
** This especially comes into ply when deaing with the Mechans. While it's a bit muddled by the fact that the author, like most authors, lives in a universe with empirically-determinable physical laws, the setting actually does a pretty good job of setting the "physics" up such that the magical view is actually the ''correct'' one. Mack's arguments against the Mechans, especially, are 100% valid in terms of what science actually is (in terms of being a method of working out how the world works, not just the set of laws that the system uncovers in ours). The "science" that the Mechans follow relies heavily on ignoring large swaths of empirical data in favor of cherry-picking only a few examples that fit their existing theory, and is in every real sense the opposite of science. To one-up even that, devices reliant on real-world physics and mechanics ''do'' work... but only when they've specifically been isolated from magic, such as in an extremely restrictive and uncommon set of physical circumstances. The Mechan faith is the equivalent of someone in the real world creating a physics model without gravity, arguing strenuously against the idea of gravity and ignoring any evidence that it existed, and then pointing to how things behave in free-fall in orbiting space stations as if they "validated" the world view. The comparison to real life Wiccan magic is, if anything, overly generous; Wicca can at least attribute matters of happenstance to its rituals, but the Mechans are empirically outright wrong.

* NotAfraidToDie: Callahan. [[spoiler:She reveals to Mack Daddy that she's killed herself several times, and has no fear whatsoever of death, or even hell]].

** Implying that an elf enjoys heterosexual intercourse is apparently a dire insult.

Chapter 496, plus a number of side stories, concluded Mack's first year at MU. The second year has reset the chapter numbering; so far, 322 chapters of the second year have been released, along with more side stories. Specific chapters will be referred to with the Y__-__ format; first blank is the year, second is the chapter number.

** Special mention goes to the gods, who are theoretically walking, physical presences in the world, but (in a parody of D&D pantheons and how players interpret them) have commandments and belief systems so utterly meaningless that the faithful can declare anything they're doing to be in accordance with divine will and anything the non-faithful do as a vile abomination against nature. Since the protagonist is a half-demon who is literally damaged by the presence of sacred things, the complete lack of any real guiding code for any faith becomes rather painfully relevant on a regular basis.

* BadassNormal: Callahan is an dwarf/elf/ogre/orc mongrel, which probably gives her an edge relative to humans, but she's still normal relative to the dragons and demons in the world. And we never see her using magic. But, among other feats of badassery, she [[spoiler:once killed a god]]. This makes her a good foil for Mack, who as a half-demon has a host of racial advantages (strength, partial invulnerability, flamethrowing) but is a woefully incompetent fighter.

* ChronicBackstabbingDisorder: Pretty much a way of life for elven middlings in Treehome (and, it's implied, for middlings in general), as Steff lays out in Y2-151. It's really not a nice way to live, for anyone there, which is why Glory's so keen to remove her court from there and establish their own space.

* CombatPragmatist: This is the essence of Callahan's teaching style, and also how she defines her own methods. She reveals to [[spoiler:Mack Daddy]] (and the reader) in the side story "Splish, Splash" that she keeps her thumbnails much longer and sharper than the others for gouging purposes, [[spoiler:and then she dissuades Mack Daddy from trying to attack her by pointing out that she is wearing magic press-on nails so she doesn't have to use a separate weapon against him.]]
* ContinuityOverlap: When Mackenzie's clothes, hospital bed, and knife disappeared in a botched teleportation spell, they all appeared in other stories by the author. [[spoiler:Her bra went missing for quite some time, until it was returned to Mack in a second-year OT story]].

* {{Filler}}[=/=]FillerStrips: The series attempts to present a close-to-real-time story, which makes some parts seem written just to make the deadline. For example: one of the early chapters was devoted to Amaranth and Mack walking a few streets, getting on a subway-equivalent, getting out, and walking into a building.

** Played with a bit, in that it's a compulsion, not something the nymphs necessarily want, and it constantly snowballs into BlueAndOrangeMorality and more than once it's just off-the-charts creepy. Attempts to fulfill the 'nurturing' part also sometimes go horribly, horribly wrong since the nymphs' hard-wired innocence is maintained by a divinely-enforced ignorance.

--> I couldn’t help but notice that he did things like use “fight” twice in the same sentence… and “underprivileged underclass?” It also seemed like he just dropped commas in wherever he felt like it… like there was no actual rules regarding their use… like he was just in love with them as a punctuation mark, or something. (Note that Mack, at another point, remarked in passing that she had once been marked down on an essay for using too many ellipses.)

-->Sooni narrated things in her head? That was easily the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.

* MakeAWish: [[spoiler:The entity in Hazel's necklace]] claims to not be a genie, but has the power to grant wishes. When it asks Mack if [[spoiler:getting her pitchfork back]] is what she wishes for, she responds with a carefully-worded wish for [[spoiler:the entity to start spilling the beans about what it really wants]]. Later on, she makes an even more carefully worded wish to [[spoiler:keep the entity from (hopefully) causing any more problems in the future]].

* MissingEpisode: Y1-489. [[invoked]] It would cover the time in [[spoiler:Embries’ office]] where he deals with the matter of [[spoiler:Leda’s death]], magically forcing Mack to bear witness, while preventing her from passing on the experience to anyone else, including those who are viewing the world through her thoughts and perceptions (i.e. the readers). Accordingly, the entire narrative (including chapter heading and link) cannot be seen.

* TheFairFolk: Elves historically fall into this trope, and some wild adolescent elves still live there. Faeries exist, too, and are the only thing that the {{Badass}} elven hunter is afraid of (apart from {{bears|AreBadNews}}).

** Coach Jillian "Jilly" Callahan has retired from being a mercenary and a successful dragon-slayer to teaching in the combat-athletics department of MU, but has not in any way retired from being {{Badass}}. This gets even more ridiculous when more of her past is revealed. She is also known as [[spoiler:Gillian Gottmörder]] and she received an imperial pardon for [[spoiler:three counts of attempted deicide (one of which succeeded, but they don't have a law to cover that), two counts of genocide, five counts of high treason against the Imperial Republic (which normally merits summary execution), and her various "petty" murders and property destructions. She also apparently stopped at least two attempts by the giants to retake the world]]. She has also killed seven [[spoiler:greater dragons]]. Possibly eight. One loses track.

* ArtifactOfDoom: [[spoiler:The pitchfork]], which induces rage in its bearer.

* MakeAWish: [[spoiler:The entity in Hazel's necklace]] asks Mack if [[spoiler:getting her pitchfork back]] is what she wishes for. Mack thinks about this and then does wish...for [[spoiler:the entity to start spilling the beans about what it really wants]], using a carefully-worded wish.

** In Y1-121, 122, Rocky and Hissy confront Mack over the way Belinda's been acting since their fight, but at this point Mack is blood-hungry and rather demonic, and it goes very badly. Hissy is nearly driven insane when she tries to read Mack's mind, and Rocky gets a finger bitten off.

* {{Squick}}: Elves have a deep-seated cultural aversion to genital contact. Glory even says it's [[InvokedTrope squicky]] in Y2-214 when talking about the reasons why elves avoid hetero relationships, and Steff notes in the previous chapter that any sexual hijinks that she, Mack, and Amaranth could get up to with Glory would, for the other elves present, pale in comparison to the kinkiness of eavesdropping on a human (Nicki) actually going down on Grace (an elf, and Glory's sister to boot).

* ScrewYourself: [[spoiler:Acantha]] makes out with [[spoiler:her mockboxed replica of herself]] in Y2-166.