History Literature / WorthTheCandle

** KillItWithFire: Fire mages are capable of at least throwing fireballs.

''[[https://archiveofourown.org/works/11478249 Worth the Candle]]'' is an ongoing TrappedInAnotherWorld WebSerialNovel by seasoned RationalFic writer Alexander Wales (of ''Fanfic/TheMetropolitanMan'' fame) under his "[[https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/7x3ifv/rtwip_worth_the_candle_ch_76_date_night_start/#du56bh2 cthulhuraejepsen]]" PenName. The story's first few chapters were released in July 2017, and it has periodically updated ever since.

[[caption-width-right:300:This page needs more Administrivia/{{Wick}}s.]]

Discussion of the story takes place on the [[https://www.reddit.com/r/rational r/rational]] subreddit. Has [[https://worththecandle.wikia.com/wiki/Worth_the_Candle_Wiki a wiki]] ([[TheWikiRule naturally]]) which could do with a bit of [[NeedsWikiMagicLove Wiki Magic Love]].

* OurElvesAreBetter: Played straight (they're dicks about it).

* AlwaysChaoticEvil: The Infernals are fully sentient creatures with a good understanding of morality who seem to exist for the sole purpose of making mortals of Aerb suffer as much as possible, mainly through inflicting horrible physical and psychological tortures on all mortal souls who end up in hell (and unlike in most Earth religions, hell isn't a punishment for sins committed in mortal life). The sole objection anyone has to the idea of enacting the complete genocide of trillions of these creatures as soon as it becomes possible is that it would give them a common foe to rally against.

* CrapsackWorld: Aerb is a horrible place to live in - there are more and more exclusion zones (almost all of which are a veritable hell on earth by itself), singular events that cause dips in population that it never recovers from, magical research into making the world a better place overall usually ends in an exclusion (often taking the whole magical discipline with it), and when a mortal dies without having their soul extracted and destroyed, they go to a hell for an eternity of torture that will only get worse over time.

* {{Autocannibalism}}: How the Doris Finch clones feed and clothe themselves. (See SelfDuplication, below.)

* AFateWorseThanDeath: Juniper has an in-game setting to automatically die instead if he's ever caught in one of these. He immediately deselects it, on the grounds of not knowing who's the judge of that.hg

* SelfDuplication: Doris Finch learned how to do this when she was nine years old. Unfortunately she grew up to be a total bitch with a bad case of ChronicBackstabbingDisorder, and there are now about nine million of her in the exclusion zone that she and her power are restricted to.

* GameBreakingBug: The "game layer" seemed to break for a moment when Juniper made "[Null Pointer Exception]" a companion and then raised her loyalty to 10.

* SelfDuplication: Doris Finch learned how to do this when she was nine years old. Unfortunately she grew up to be a total bitch, and there are now about nine million of her in the exclusion zone that she and her power are restricted to.

[[caption-width-right:300:This page needs more {{Wick}}s.]]

!! Worth The Candle contains examples of:

* EverythingsBetterWithPrincesses: Almost every one of Juniper's companions turns out to be a princess or something reasonably close to it. He's not too amused by this.

** Water magic is a form of macrohydrokinesis, capable of doing things on the scale of diffusing (or creating) storms, but likely with no fine control.

* GameBreaker: [[invoked]] Anything that's too powerful or world-destroying tends to get "excluded", restricted to a single individual and/or geographical region. [[spoiler: Juniper discovers that maxing out still magic lets him make any temporary effect last for as long as he can stay awake. There's a magic tattoo that gives six seconds of immunity to damage, and another that lets him delay going to sleep. The Dungeon Master lets him exploit this for a while, then restricts skin (tattoo) magic to a geographical region.]]

* KilledOffForReal: It takes significant sacrifice to revive the first party member to die. [[spoiler: The second seems to be dead for real - though Joon plans to bring her back, the game itself tells him that this'll be a significant challenge.]]

* UnusuallyUninterestingSight: Juniper based some things in his tabletop games on ideas from the SCPFoundation. He ends up having to fight creatures with "anti-memetic" properties; one is a giant monster that anyone not in its presence can't remember exists, and others are creatures that are effectively invisible because people's brains can't perceive them properly while they're still alive.

* NotIfTheyEnjoyedItRationalization: Bethel makes several passes at Juniper, and when she gets a body capable of feeling sexual pleasure, she sets out to seduce him in earnest - and refuses to take no for an answer. Juniper resorts to using MindManipulation on himself to deal with the aftermath.

* GameBreaker: [[invoked]] Anything that's too powerful or world-destroying tends to get "excluded", restricted to a single individual and/or geographical region.

* MedievalStasis: Aerb has SchizoTech that mostly peaks at around the 1920s. Aside from certain technologies (such as nuclear weapons in particular) being "excluded", one reason for this is that the Infinite Library has books describing that certain technologies, such as cathode-ray tubes, turn out to have strange properties that lead to disaster when mass produced - the reason Aerb has radio but not television is that the librarians always take action to prevent the latter from being invented.

* CoversAlwaysLie: The author had a habit of describing the story as a [[SelfInsertFic self-insert]] [[RPGMechanicsVerse litRPG]] [[TrappedInAnotherWorld portal fantasy]] - while ''[[MathematiciansAnswer technically true]]'', the [[ScifiGhetto loaded nature]] of these terms has a habit of putting people off from the story.
* {{Deconstruction}}: Of "TrappedInAnotherWorld" stories - particularly the kind that seem to run off some kind of [[RPGMechanicsVerse game mechanics]].

*** Turns out that [[spoiler: the typical "died and ended up in another world" protagonist? That already happened, and it was Juniper's best friend, who became the aforementioned legendary king. The story goes into great detail how that loss affected Juniper and his friends, which most of those Isekai stories ignore. And they weren't the only ones sent over; most just weren't as successful at causing changes.]]
*** The "game" has a RelationshipValues system called "Loyalty". Party members get certain [[SkillScoresAndPerks perks]] at certain levels of Loyalty to Juniper. This ''also'' has existential implications, and Juniper doesn't like how exploitative it feels. [[spoiler:When Amaryllis literally sits there and ''makes'' herself more Loyal to Juniper, he freaks out a little.]]

** Video games are often designed to give the player a rush of dopamine when they [[CharacterLevel Level Up]]. This still happens to Juniper, but the rush increases with each successive level - he soon finds himself [[DescentIntoAddiction Descending into Addiction]].

* EverythingsBetterWithPrincesses: Almost every one of Juniper's companions turns out to be a princess or something reasonably close to it. Juniper is not amused by this.

* FromASingleCell: One of the many reasons Fel Seed is impossible to get rid of, although even destroying literally all life within its exclusion zone (as confirmed by a god) didn't stop it from coming back.

* KilledOffForReal: [[spoiler: Fenn. Though Joon plans on bringing her back]].

* MedievalStasis: Aerb has SchizoTech that mostly peaks at around the 1920s. Aside from certain technologies (such as nuclear weapons in particular) being "excluded", one reason for this is that the Infinite Library has books describing that certain technologies, such as cathode-ray tubes, turn out to have strange properties that lead to disaster when mass produced, so the librarians take action to preven them from being invented. This is why Aerb has radio but not television.

* NotUsingTheZWord: People in the [[ZombieApocalypse Risen Lands]] get up in arms when Juniper uses that word. The reason is explained later in the story. A specific necromancer trademarked the word "zombie" to refer to a particular type of undead only he could create, a reanimated corpse that could follow simple orders until it eventually decayed away to nothing. He used them as cheap industrial labor and advertised his goods as "Zombie Made." Unfortunately it turned out that the souls of the people turned into zombies were bound to the corpse and fully conscious, but were unable to act and suffered all the pain of being stuck in a decaying body. Now even the word "zombie" is somewhat taboo.

* OurZombiesAreDifferent: You have to destroy the heart, not the head.
* RageAgainstTheHeavens: When the Dungeon Master (re)introduces himself to Juniper, the first thing Juniper does is beat the Dungeon Master's avatar to death with his bare hands while accusing him of being directly responsible for all the horrible suffering that exists on Aerb.

* SuddenGameInterface: It's revealed at the end of the first chapter that Juniper has access to a character sheet that appears when he closes his eyes for three seconds - but even before that there are text pop-ups.[[spoiler: The game system is apparently based on the one that Aerb!Juniper made. Or the DM made A!Joon make it...it's confusing.]]

* TheoryOfNarrativeCausality: Frequently discussed and [[spoiler:partially Jossed. According to the Dungeon Master, it doesn't have nearly as much weight as the characters seem to think.]]Despite this, after [[spoiler: Fenn's death]] Amaryllis bushes for it even harder.

* NotUsingTheZWord: People in the [[ZombieApocalypse Risen Lands]] get up in arms when Juniper uses that word.

->''From the age of nine, Juniper Smith began filling notebooks with his worlds, at first places of fantastical imagination, but later with each as an expression of some theme or idea that momentarily grabbed his interest. Over the course of eight years, he shared these worlds with his friends through twice-weekly sessions of tabletop gaming. Now at the age of seventeen, he finds himself in Aerb, a world that appears to be an amalgam of those many notebooks, stuck trying to find the answers to why he's there and what this world is trying to say. The most terrifying answer might be that this world is an expression of the person he was back on Earth.''
-->-- Official description

** Many areas have what amounts to evil magical overlords...which are magically isolated from the rest of the world, because ''nobody can actually defeat them''. And they do a lot worse than [[OrcusOnHisThrone sit on their thrones in black armor]].