The Harmonicsverse is an original Mundane Fantastic verse created by Floria as the setting for several original writing projects, which currently exist at varying proportions of "purely theoretical" to "actually has something written down."These include:
- Venus Envy: a four-piece Canadian all-woman punk band, most active in the late 1980s through the 1990s. Consists of a Red Oni, Blue Oni lesbian couple, a transgender drummer and a Scottish-Canadian punk rocker, and an Erudite Stoner werewolf who can see ghosts. Very loosely inspired by Hard Core Logo.
- Maenad: they've had the most written about them, and have their own page here.
- Seax: Multinational Scandinavian five man Viking Metal band, noteworthy for the fact that their normal lineup is all guys, although they do have a female manager and had a female guest vocalist on one album. They're not weirdness prone in the way that Maenad is, but they do have an odd habit of accidentally summoning things.
- The Differently Powered Individuals: Venus Envy's bassist is a werewolf (which is treated like an exotic medical condition in this universe) who can see ghosts, Seax's guitarist and drummer can sense spirits, and the drummer can also astrally project (powers he inherited from his Siberian shaman ancestors). Then there's Mockingbird, a music savant mutant with sound-manipulation powers, who sometimes hangs out with Seax, and Karma, a mutant healer who manages to benefit from both sides of her Equivalent Exchange based healing powers. There's also a quirky group of low tier semi-superheroes who occasionally do in fact fight crime, although they spend more time on various sorts of mercenary work and exploring their own interests.
See the Character Sheet here.
Contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Dani's stepfather, Delilah's dad.
- All Drummers Are Animals: Averted across the board. Zandra of Venus Envy is the sensible, feminine Team Mom, Musa The Smart Guy of Maenad, and Hallbjorn of Seax is a relatively calm and spiritual Gentle Giant.
- Always Chaotic Evil: averted. Vampires, werewolves, and demons are all capable of being perfectly nice people, although you wouldn't want to push them too far.
- Author Appeal: music, exotic pets, lesbians...
- Blessed with Suck: Delilah's Healing Factor has saved her life on multiple occasions, but having a body that heals away any alterations and processes drugs super-efficiently is a mixed blessing for someone contemplating gender transition.
- Brand X: Glacial Geyser bottled water.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: most creative types.
- Canon Welding: Maenad, Delilah and her associates, and Venus Envy's stories were originally in separate continuities.
- Captain Ersatz: the Shogglets are based on the Shoggies from The Unspeakable Vault (of Doom), although they can't talk and are written more as the Cosmic Horror Story version of the Ridiculously Cute Critter.
- Cooldown Hug: Delilah winds up giving a lot of them, since if the person she's trying to calm down winds up violently freaking out on her there won't be any lasting damage.
- Creepy Child: Billie Jiang was a mild example in her youth, due to odd mannerisms and an aura of eeriness rather than anything actually dangerous. Didrik might also have qualified, given his Oracular Urchin tendencies, except the adults around him were too wrapped up in their own affairs to notice any subtle weirdness about him.
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Crosses the Line Twice: Thanatocide's entire body of work.- Also, the Anna: She Wolf of the GOP series of porn movies, which feature a No Celebrities Were Harmed evil Republican dominatrix having her evil way with a wide variety of victims before dying in a spectacularly gory way.
- Everyone Is Bi: or at least most of the women.
- Extreme Omnivore: Shogglets. They have a particular fondness for oatmeal soap.
- Fake Band: loads of them.
- Fictional Media: quite a bit of it.
- The musical output of the various Fake Bands.
- Dee Savage's movie career, from soft-core Swedish Porn with Plot to Hair Metal Mockumentary There Will Be Glitter.
- Friendly Enemies: Victoria and Tea. They're sort of a sexually ambiguous female version of Magneto and Professor X.
- Genius Ditz: Amalthea Hunter would be an extreme example, as she's a musical savant but actually mildly developmentally disabled.
- Improbably Female Cast: the Maenad and Venus Envy stories in particular, but women in their mid-thirties and younger who range from "attractive in their way if you like that type" to outright beautiful do make up a rather large proportion of the cast.* Informed Ability / Take Our Word for It: side effect of being a musician in a non-auditory medium.
- Inspirationally Disadvantaged: as a disabled celebrity, Amalthea Hunter gets a lot of this sort of treatment from the media. She doesn't usually mind, except when reviews of her latest album spend six paragraphs talking about how darn inspirational she is and only one on the actual music, but sometimes she finds it confusing, since having Williams Syndrome doesn't make singing any more difficult.
- Intelligence Equals Isolation: Niobe Hunter has, at times, resented the fact that her younger sister Amalthea has half her IQ but twice as many friends.
- Ho Yay / Les Yay
- Lighter and Softer: Venus Envy is less of a Dysfunction Junction than Hard Core Logo, even allowing for the fact that the Hard Cores didn't have to deal with a band member's lycanthropy.
- Moe: Violet, Didrik, and Amalthea are the most overt examples, but even the less deliberately adorable characters can have their cute moments.
- Sigyn Solefald is a subversion, as she looks girlishly pretty and can be quite charming when she's is a good mood, but is also an unstable sociopath with prejudices against most human ethnic groups (including other Scandinavians) who, despite her talent and charisma, wound up alienating most of her friends and attempting to murder one of the few who continued to put up with her.
- Mundane Utility: standard for Differently Powered Individuals in this setting.
- Norse by Norsewest: the Venus Envy cast is the only group that has no connection with Scandinavia.
- Oscar Bait: Discussed by Amalthea. "So, does that mean that if I played a tone-deaf person who was good at math, they'd give me an award for it?"
- Our Monsters Are Different
- Porn with Plot: Delilah's brief career in "Swedish experimental films."
- Reed Richards Is Useless: averted in various small ways due to the prevalence of Mundane Utility - for instance, medical technology is somewhat more advanced, and most dead languages that left sufficiently large samples of written text have been deciphered thanks to the work of a DPI scholar with universal translation powers.
- Serious Business: Black Metal fandom, despite the fact that, unlike the situation with Maenad, nobody believes that Sigyn Solefald et al are going to bring about the end of the world anytime soon.
- Slice of Life
- Stealth Parody: despite their Punny Name, some intentionally ridiculous lyrics and the conspicuous levels of Camp in their stage show, some people believed that Aryan Heresy were actually Neo-Nazis.
- Take That!: An in-character example occurs when Amalthea's watching a friend play Metal Gear Solid."Honesty, stop whining about how horrible it is having recessive genes. I have deleted genes, and I'm pretty sure that's worse, and you don't hear me complaining."
- Since Amalthea has Williams Syndrome
, this is technically true.
- Since Amalthea has Williams Syndrome
- Team Mom: Zandra Mackenzie, for Venus Envy.
- There Are No Therapists: Averted, although plenty of characters who probably need help still aren't getting it, and the one therapist to get much characterization has plenty of issues of her own.
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: Kate Cadaver and Zandra Mackenzie
- Tyke-Bomb: Glory, one of Delilah's associates during her time as a superhero.
- Ugly Cute: the Shogglets, blobby cat-sized extradimensional Eldritch Abominations that will eat just about anything.
