Writing a Fantastic College Series

I'm currently toying with the idea of writing a Slice of Life Fantastic Comedy taking place after the existence of the supernatural is revealed to the world at a college for supernatural studies, and I'm open to ideas at the moment, particularly about how such a school would work and what courses it would offer, etc. Ideas I already have for the series (which would ideally take the form of a web serial novel) include:

• The main character is a female student that majors in what is basically a Magitek engineering course, and is the resident Only Sane Man.

• Her roommate is a succubus who keeps bringing guys (and girls) into the dorm room for sexy time... and is allowed to do so under campus rules, because that's how her species survives, and thus the heroine can't say anything about it without basically asking her roommate to starve to death instead.

• Despite humanity having more or less accepted the idea of magical sapient species living among them, Fantastic Racism is still an issue, to the point where it's implicitly stated that the university's taking both human and non-human students is considered radically progressive for the time.

Any other ideas?

Mythology has SCADS of Fantastic Racism.

Fairy changelings/hybrids might be minorities who are discriminated against, at least in Europe. There'd be a lot of culture clash between European students who think they're dangerous or just fun to beat up, and American students who didn't grow up with that specific brand of xenophobia. The Fair Folk might be seen as, well, The Fair Folk for their constant toying with humans, so changelings would be either be stereotyped as products of rape or rape-by-fraud even if their parents are stable and willingly married.

Foxes may also be discriminated against in Asia, since folklore implies that like the European Fair Folk, fox-spirits are dangerous motherfuckers. There's even Chinese slang where "fox" means "homewrecker," so female fox-spirits would be seen as women you need to hide your sons/husbands from in Asia, while (some) American folklore holds the view of foxes being the Loveable Rogue instead. Hell, even European folklore is divided—some cultures think foxes are friendly tricksters, other cultures think they're dangerous tricksters.

edited 15th Jun '15 1:16:39 PM by Sharysa

Dwarves have their love of tradition combined with rampant alcoholism. It sounds the perfect recipe for a frat house to me. So, yeah, dwarven frats.

Dwarven frats! Why didn't I think of that!

That would make sense. So perhaps many of the foreign students at the school are immigrants escaping discrimination in their homelands, similar to a common Real Life reason for the Worthless Foreign Degree trope?

Yeppers, that would be a really big incentive for people to head over. Changeling lore is REALLY terrifying—most of the lore involved is simply to detect a changeling child/infant and then get rid of them through violence, so parents of half-fairy children would be lining up to send their high-school graduates to American colleges just to keep them physically safe.

Note on frats: Most frats are okay, but some of them are getting a LOT of notoriety for underlying racism/sexism. Not sure if dwarves would be cool with that, because it might lead to a lot of Unfortunate Implications.

I imagine the frats in the story being like frats in real life- mostly alright, but you occasionally find some filled with racist/sexist jerks, and those specific examples end up being the only ones people talk about for a while.

And it's a Canadian school in this case. You can blame Creator Provincialism for that.

Another question about writing this series I have to anyone reading this: what laws do you think would have been put in place in response to the reveal of supernatural entities living among us?

A particularly squicky example, almost to the point of Fridge Horror, came to me when I was working out the Horny Devils of the story (collectively called lilim). Lilim are shapeshifters, can live for thousands of years, and become sexually mature adults not long after their "birth". So how would consent laws apply to them?

Biologically, they can be any age they want, so would it be wrong for a human to have sex with a lilim taking the form of an adult but that Really Was Born Yesterday? Also, lilim feed on sexual energy for sustenance, so where would the morality be in denying a sentient being a biological need because they're "not old enough" by human standards? Or would consent laws in this world really depend on the species in question, rather than there being a universal standard for everyone within a country/province/state's borders?

...But if you'd rather not think about that specific example, I'm open to other ideas about laws in an Unmasqued World.

As long as they're mentally adults, I don't see the issue. There's lots of stories with beings that are days old chronologically, but mentally they're adults. If it looks like an adult and acts like an adult, it's an adult.

Most of the consent laws are due to the possible consequences (pregnancy, which in some cases can be quite a ... negative effect, yes) and due to some people having problems (because the law does in no way actually care about the mental and emotional maturity but only about some arbitrary cut-off age; that, however, is a discussion for another time, and possibly for never), so if the character in question is not human but merely appears that way and there's no risk of the standard consequences and the whole thing is somewhat required, I don't see anyone but the most fanatical of people actually trying to enforce anything related to "age of consent". Because doing that would probably be akin to trying to enforce a rule that rivers can't be wet; in other words, completely pointless and quite inane.

So does this mean Vampires are Goths or that they go food shopping at blood banks? Or that Werewolves are just hairy jocks?

Well, they don't ALWAYS call into those specific cliques (I've never been a fan of the Planet of Hats trope after all), but yes, that the goth subculture's fascination with death does make several undead feel welcome, and werewolves being a Proud Warrior Race does make several of them athletically inclined.

And yes, blood banks are a common food source for vampires, although most prefer fresh blood, and often find no shortage of willing victims, thanks to certain... "benefits" of being bitten (conversely, drinking someone's blood without their consent is legally considered rape).

It just dawned on me that maybe this topic is better suited for the World Building forum than Writers' Block. Anyone else think that? (If most people do think that, then I'll just start a similar thread there, with a link to this one.)

The two forum categories this is about are fairly interchangeable in some cases, as it is possible to be trying to build a world for the story and get stumped, and in such cases it's both world-building and a case of a writer's block.

So if you want my opinion, it's all about whether you think that doing this is the thing to do, be it for the sake of getting more views or for the sake of putting it in the category you think it belongs to most; but if it's about whether we think it should get moved or not, I say it's fine with it being where it is so there's no need and only a want if you have that.

So what would elves and their subclassifications be? The cool kids?

I was thinking more among the lines of The Fair Folk, but then again, I suppose most people couldn't help but see them as "cool kids" while under the effects of a Glamour...

On another note, I'm currently pondering what to call this series. For now, the tentative title is "Crowley University" (the college where the series takes place has the full name of, the "Aleister Crowley University of Supernatural Studies"). Anyone else have ideas on that?

If you're going on The Fair Folk as true to mythology, fairies would probably be more Blue-and-Orange Morality than Our Elves Are Better.

My fairies in Moonflowers have been described as Eldritch Abominations, which I fucking LOVE because that's exactly what I was going for.

Sure, they're magical beings who can get one step below gods depending on how powerful they are, but they follow rules to the letter (and not always the letter you'd think). Some of them hunt down humans because it's fun, while others either steal human children and replace them with their own, or they rape/seduce human women and leave them carrying a half-fairy child.

Fairies are weird. In the absolute sense of the word.

What was it in history that made people change their minds about fairies? That they stopped thinking of them as Blue-and-Orange Morality-having troublemakers to being Always Lawful Good? Or at least having more good members than bad ones.

It's partly because the Victorians and Disney Bowlderized them, and I imagine it's partly because modern fantasy sometimes mixes up elves and fairies thanks to Tolkien.

There are good fairies in mythology/fairy-tales, sure, but it's just more interesting to write about the bad ones.

You know, when I imagine elves (of The Fair Folk kind) adapted into human-like beings for the sake of creating a story with human-like characters of various sort that are not actually humans, I always imagine them as people who have a very Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! approach to things which actually is the cause of they problem.

Sure, they were told that hurting people is bad ooh there are some funny clouds there and look how pretty blood is when you stab this guy with a pointy stick ... wait, weren't they told not to stab people, or maybe it was something about bananas, they weren't paying attention.

So yeah, people on a fantasy version of Hollywood ADHD.

edited 27th Jun '15 7:21:38 AM by Kazeto

Many scholars and doctors recently realized that changeling folklore (plus the Fair Folk in general) describes autism to a T, so fairies/changelings could have a high rate of similar mental/development disorders.

edited 27th Jun '15 10:36:48 AM by Sharysa

Yeah, combine a little Antisocial Personality Disorder with almost any other personality or mood disorder, and you get a person who could easily be mistaken for a faerie.

Now that you guys mention it, the similarities between The Fair Folk and those with developmental disabilities may be an interesting angle to explore. Having lived with Asperger's Syndrome all my life myself, I've always found the parallels rather fascinating.

As for whether or not to lump elves in with faeries, I think it's worth noting that elves could get pretty Fair Folk-y in certian cultures...

That's because elves originally were The Fair Folk, one and the same. Fae, elves, elfin, aos sidhe, fair folk, however you'd call them, there are like a bajilion variations of the name.

It's only later that the image of "elves" and "faeries" started splitting from the image of "fair folk". And much later that even those images started splitting into variants and such.

But originally ... well, every place had its own way to name things, but one thing had remained constant for a long time before people actually got to know better than that: it was easier to say that one's child had been kidnapped by [insert local name for The Fair Folk here] and substituted with a fake than it was to admit that there's something wrong with their children. Just as it was easier to say that one had been drained by a succubus or incubus than to admit that they feel like crap due to having gotten an STD after sleeping with someone who didn't wash themselves for a few months, or that they got bitten by a werewolf and having a wound that doesn't cure because "magic" rather than just getting scratched or bitten by some animal with rabies with the wound obviously not healing because it's gotten infected by half a dozen weird things in the meantime.

So yeah ...

Elves can really fit into any grouping you care to name, anything from preps to flower children, depending on what type(s) you use.

edited 28th Jun '15 2:25:39 PM by Eagal

Yeah, pretty much.