Roleplay / Glowfic

Glowfic is the collective term for various interrelated Journal Roleplays on Dreamwidth (and, more recently, on the Glowfic Constellation), connected through the involvement of alternate versions of the same characters (and, in some cases, the same worlds).

The two original roleplays from which all others originated are Effulgence (written by Alicorn and Kappa, currently on hiatus but technically still alive) and Incandescence (written by Alicorn and Aestrix, now dead), both of which contain large numbers of individually-developed worlds which have then been crossed over with each other. (Effulgence tends more towards fanfictional worlds and Incandescence more towards original ones, but both of them have a mix.)

More recently notable continuities and trends in glowfic have included:

• Silmaril, written by Alicorn and Lintamande, which contains lots and lots of Elves. Who are adorable.
• Assorted glowfic with Swimmer963, with the characters Vanyel and Leareth from A Song For Two Voices.
• Project Lawful, known on the

glowfic constellation as planecrash, by Iarwain and Lintamande, in which the nation of Cheliax from Pathfinder receives an extradimensional visitor and does its best to conquer the world with his assistance while also doing its best to avoid letting on to him that that's what they're doing.

There are various other glowfics. An abandoned attempt at an index of the older ones can be found here, and an index mostly of oneshots involving Alicorn here.

As of late 2016, there's also a website called the Glowfic Constellation, on which the majority of glowfic is currently happening and to which a lot of older storylines have been imported. This is the best place to go in order to read glowfic.

Glowfic-related discussion hubs include its Discord server, Alicorn's forum, an IRC channel (bridged to the Discord server), and a bunch of Tumblr blogs.

In addition to these, there's a very, very out-of-date wiki and a spreadsheet to help keep track of all the characters and worlds in the older glowfic. Both of them contain large numbers of unmarked spoilers, for the things which have already happened and for the yet-to-be-written sections of the story.

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These roleplays contain examples of:

Common To Most or All Glowfic

• Dimensional Traveler: Another core part of the premise. Frequent cause of Crossovers.
• The Multiverse: There are all kinds of multiverse structures around here.
• Universal-Adaptor Cast: Large portions of the cast in each world are alts of people who have shown up in previous worlds.

Effulgence

• Abusive Parents: A large fraction of the Jokers have them, although it's not strictly universal to the template.
• The Ageless: Anyone who's torching-enabled in Effulgence has their apparent age start trending towards early-twenties levels, and then just stay there.
• Agony Beam: Stella designed one for the dual functions of producing coins and entertaining Alice, and its use spread through the rest of the peal.
  • Brilliance's creators installed him with one, too, although it only works on him and was put there with much less friendly intent.
• All Planets Are Earth-Like: Played straight with Bell homeworlds, which tend to be Earth-like even when they're not Earth, but generally averted when they look for other planets.
• All Therapists Are Muggles: Averted by Aether who was studying to be a therapist when she met the peal, and is sticking to her studies because "the peal clearly needs one".
• Amicable Exes: The Bell's Parents typically divorce early but share their child(ren) without issue.
• Amnesiac Lover: Inverted by Shell. By the time she found Milliways, the only thing she could remember about her old life was that "somebody loved me once".
• Back from the Dead: Many people in Effulgence. The Effulgence peal is working on systematic mass return of the dead.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Sometimes happens between Tonies and Sherlocks, depending on what their familial relationship actually is.
• Came Back Wrong: Pearl specifically wishes to avert this when she resurrects Shell Bell. It works—she comes back to life completely intact, exactly as she was the instant before she died—but it leaves a duplicate of her still stuck in Downside.
• Closed Circle: Beast's castle was one for anyone who could find it at all; until the curse was lifted, the forest worked as a Mobile Maze, turning anyone who tried to leave back around towards the castle.
• Conveniently Coherent Thoughts: Justified with Stella and Shell Bell's mind-reading powers; Stella went through a bunch of thought while designing hers, specifically for the sake of ensuring a coherent output, and Shell Bell copied Stella's version.
• Conveniently Common Kink: Masochism is very conveniently common, given all the pain-based magic being thrown around.
• Crapsack World: A bunch of them. Atlantis, Downside, and the Sunny worldfamily are just terrible in general before Bell intervention, and Materia's anti-causality makes it extremely hard to improve in significant ways.
• Dead Alternate Counterpart:
  • In Effulgence, the peal finds a number of dead alts of people in Downside, including a dead Bell (who did not manage to avoid being creamed by a van).
• Death Is Cheap: In Effulgence, after the peal takes control of Downside, they can resurrect anyone whose world doesn't have its own afterlife.
• Dimension Lord: The Administrator of Downside is one, with magic able to No-Sell even high-level wishcoins. Amariah also became one while fixing Alethia's afterlife, since it was easier to make a new dimension where she had complete control than it was to fix the old one.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Jokers in general hate being called by their birth names, Celo being an exception because his name is innate to him and not something given to him by another person. But his name is a sensory impression that cannot be said by anyone who does not have psychic powers so he's just called "Celo" anyway.
• Driven to Suicide: Chelise, after she alienates both Beast and Rose and spends days trying (and failing) to leave the Closed Circle of Beast's castle, hangs herself.
• Earth Is the Center of the Universe: Not necessarily within a given universe, but across the multiverse, Earth is more common than any other planet in Effulgence by a pretty large margin.
• Evil Only Has to Win Once: Libby and Aelise both took this mentality, given the massive destructive potential of their worlds' magic. In Libby's case, it led her to perform some unethical spying and kidnapping, but not much more than that. Aelise, though, ended up building an empire on dead babies and mind control, figuring that everyone being forced to love each other was preferable to everyone dying.
• Faking the Dead: Shell Bell and Tab both pulled it off in order to avoid drawing unwanted attention from their respective local governments while they worked with La Résistance.
  • Cenozoia's Charlie also had his death faked as part of Butterfly's plan to de-Yeerk him.
• Fourth-Wall Observer: Glass, to a very limited degree. She's not aware that the world is fictional, but her aura lets her see authorial intent (or, as she refers to it, metacausality). As a result, she's the peal's go-to member for determining how safe a world is, as well as the only one who's made progress in figuring out what's up with all the recurring templates.
• Fusion Dance: Shell Bell re-merges with Shell, after they figure out a merger protocol which doesn't leave Shell's trauma too close to the surface.
  • Juliet also does a merger. Unlike Shell Bell, she actually split herself for the specific purpose of re-merging afterwards, in order to gain a copy of the memories she would have had of Soph if not for her mental opacity.
• The Gods Must Be Lazy: The Administrator is profoundly lazy, and prefers to do as little as possible. She was willing to let the peal basically reconfigure the running of Downside to their liking once they came up with a workable system.
• Happily Adopted: Harley, who was kidnapped from his Abusive Parents and raised by Elspeth instead.
• If It's You, It's Okay: Shell Bell is generally straight, but managed to make an exception for Pearl by emulating how she felt while under the influence of a Love Potion.
• I Hate You, Vampire Dad: When Sunny Sherlocks get turned, the first thing they do is to kill everyone involved in turning them.
• Immortality Hurts: Certainly the case for most people Downside before the peal happened to it, the peal themselves have endeavored to avoid this, such as by hiring staff to rescue people who can torch who get stuck in a repeated torching sort of fix.
• Immortality Seeker: Figuring out how to distribute immortality is one of the most common projects for pre-pealing Bells to work on, when their worlds' magic systems support it. It should be noted that Bells are strictly ethical immortality seekers, and avoid Dark Magic and similar.
• Incompatible Orientation: Happens with Kanims and Bells, for example the original Kanim with Glass. Also happened briefly with Shell Bell and Pearl, but Shell Bell managed to make an exception for Pearl.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Pearl starts being attracted to Shell Bell after watching her burn down a train station.
• Interdimensional Travel Device: Jane is a sentient one, once she learns to imitate Sue's freecasting.
• It Makes Sense in Context: All the time.
  “tfw you go to make out with your alternate universe self’s twin brother, but end up hugging him while he cries because he can’t handle emotions #glowfic”
  A teenager convinces a serial killer to become a healer through the Power of Sadism, only for the man to be executed by his older brother’s student.
• It's a Small World, After All: Certain templates end up meeting each other far more consistently than makes sense with just plain causality. Along with the fact that templates are a thing at all, this was one of the first major bits of metacausality the peals became aware of.
• Living Battery: Aelise recruits Harley as one, since his torching makes him an infinite source of Life Energy.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: Mass distribution of immortality tends to be one of the major Bell projects, and very few people have complained so far.
  • Some doctors did complain to Pattern, noting that the spread of immortality was putting them out of a job.
• Love Hungry: Chelseas tend to be this, and also tend to get magic capable of forcing people to love them.
• Make a Wish: Wishcoins allow their users to make wishes come true in what basically amounts to Benevolent Genie fashion. Smaller coins are limited to smaller wishes, and there are some things no coins can do (such as beating an ingot power), but they're still extremely versatile.
• Mass Teleportation: Once she becomes a mint, Shell Bell teleports the entire Capitol to the moon.
• Mobile Maze: The Witchwood in Rêverie was one until Beast's curse was broken. It ensured that most people wouldn't find his castle, but that anyone romantically compatible with him would both find it and get turned around whenever they tried to leave it.
• Narnia Time: Worlds have their time synced up for as long as there's some sort of information-transfer going on between them, but whenever there isn't (for instance, both times Jane breaks), they start getting massively desynced, with the time-passage ranging from a few minutes to a few decades before the connection is reestablished.
• The Needless: The standard Bell powerset in Effulgence includes no longer needing to sleep or breathe.
• No Need for Names/Withholding Their Name: The Administrator actively refuses to use an actual name.
• No-Sell: Ingot powers automatically no-sell any wishcoin based magic that would come up directly against them.
• Nuke 'em: Coin's method of choice for assassinating Shell Bell. It actually worked, too, although she was brought Back from the Dead quickly enough that she could convincingly claim to have survived it.
  • Aegis's shuttle gets hit by a Little Doctor at one point, she simply torches, but it breaks Jane, for three seconds in Peace, but much longer in other worlds.
  • Also Gift's Toronto was nuked at some point during the last war before Aelise took over. Tab resurrects the entire city on a distant planet, minus the people who were apparently the reason it was nuked.
• One World Order: Gift has a single world government and no wars, thanks to Chelsa brainwashing everyone.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted, aside from the name similarities within templates, there are also two unrelated characters called Alice.
  • And two called Sue, though one is from Luminosity and has not appeared onscreen.
• Penal Colony: Shell Bell and Pattern each make one, although they're relatively nice by the standards of the trope. In Shell Bell's case, she just teleports the Capitol and everyone in it to the moon, and adds an extra wing later to house her would-be assassins. Pattern, meanwhile, terraforms Ganymede to be livable and puts Bane and all his co-conspirators there, occasionally adding some amenities to the place.
• People Puppets: Torturers in Downside are able to take complete control of a single person's body at a time, although they can't control Contractors and get unreliable results when they try to control other Torturers.
• Phlebotinum Rebel: Brilliance. He was created to serve as a planet-destroying weapon, and eventually one of his creators forgot to lock down his power output while torturing him, so he blasted their planet in half, left, and did his best to not blow up any more planets.
• Playing with Fire: Shell Bell gets a wand of pyrokinesis in Milliways, and uses it during her rebellion to disrupt the Capitol's infrastructure. She later passes it on to Juliet, who uses it to intimidate vampires.
• Portal Door: Milliways sometimes "possesses" doors, turning them into portals leading to the bar. And when opened from inside the bar, its door will typically serve as a portal to the homeworld of whoever opened it, although it can be forced to open to somewhere else given the right magic.
• Powered Armor: Aegis wore a powered exoskeleton to counteract her otherwise-life-threatening levels of clumsiness. It did its job very well; with it on, she could move extremely precisely, to the point where she could Sequence Break the Giant's Drink challenge.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Aelise's Gift allows her to extract Life Energy from people, then use the stored energy to extend people's lifespans. Before Harley appeared, her two main sources of energy were Luhan (who regenerated) and miscellaneous babies (who... didn't, although Chelsa ensured that nobody minded).
• A Rare Sentence: "I don't think there are any observations we have made that alien pod people can't explain." Given that this is said in the Animorphs universe, they turn out to be 100% correct.
• Reality Warper: The Administrator. It's a bit ambiguous how much of her power is usable anywhere and how much is specific to Downside, but it's mostly a moot point, since she never voluntarily leaves Downside anyway.
  • The sandboxes in which she gets summoned to some world or another imply that she retains most if not all of her powers even when forcibly removed from Downside by some means. Though things that happen in sandboxes should not necessarily be taken as how things work in the main glowfic continuities.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: There is a cave in Chronicle inhabited entirely by ridiculously cute critters of various sorts.
• Resurrective Immortality: Anyone who can torch has it. Conveniently, being torching-enabled also limits how much people will visibly age, even if they don't die regularly.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: T'Mir made a whole career of this, working as a surveyor for the opportunities it gives her to subtly violate the Prime Directive by giving away warp-drive technology to planets which didn't already have it.
• Shed the Family Name: Done by just about every Joker who had a family name in the first place.
• She Is the King: James, King of Narnia is gender nonbinary but uses she/her pronouns.
• Superpower Lottery: Stella won it very thoroughly when she became a mint; minting's combination of versatility and scalability makes it one of the strongest resources Effulgence's peal has.
• Superpower Russian Roulette: Going into a magic on Tayane can have positive effects on people if they're lucky, but it's far more likely to transform them in some undesirable fashion, with the likelihood going up the longer they stay there.
• Terraform: Stella does it with Mars, and it eventually becomes a recurring fashion within the peal, with Juliet and Pattern each doing it with a different planet. Also several moons and asteroids have been terraformed or partially terraformed for various purposes.
• Theory of Narrative Causality: A lot of the metacausality Glass can see basically boils down to this, although it doesn't do so in an obvious enough fashion for anyone to notice in-universe.
• Tranquil Fury: Shell Bell's second response to learning that Coin had her assassinated.
  "You're very glad you failed," says Shell Bell in a voice that might be quite pleasant under other circumstances. "It's the best possible outcome. If you had not failed, Sherlock would most likely have killed you with her bare hands. I, on the other hand, am just going to put you and everyone who helped you on the moon. In fact, let's all go there right now."
• The Unmasqued World: Phaeton, unlike Sunshine, where the Extra-Strength Masquerade is in full effect. Phaeton's residents actually caught on to the existence of vampires at some point, leading to some pretty major social changes.
• The Underworld: Downside was a particularly nasty one before the peal got to it. Afterwards, it was relatively nice, with all the torture removed and with the peal working on building the infrastructure for a mass-revival project. Alethia's afterlife was also fairly nasty, as in His Dark Materials canon, and ended up being replaced wholesale with a nicer version and the option for ghosts who could get enough living people to vouch for them to return to life.
• Universal-Adaptor Cast: Large portions of the cast in each world are alts of people who have shown up in previous worlds.
• Upgrade Artifact: Wishcoins can be used to give people permanent nonmagical skills (in the case of pentagons) and permanent magical abilities (in the case of hexes).
• Vegetarian Vampire: Sunshine and Phaeton's Sherlocks weren't vegetarian by default, but they switched to it without any fuss after meeting their respective Bells.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Libby and Aelise both developed shades of this when faced with the risk of The End of the World as We Know It. Libby was relatively tame about it, just doing some spying and kidnapping, but Aelise took over the world with the help of Chelsa Dawning in order to end war by making everyone love each other.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Libby and Stella got into a round of it after Stella started talking to Lazarus. It didn't get played to its conclusion, though, since Libby's conversation with Elspeth convinced her to help Stella instead.
• Young Conqueror: Bells tend to become this when their local government is a negative influence on society and can't be reformed from within the system.
  • Sometimes so to the point where, for example, Steel was worried a Bell would take over some place that didn't need it.

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Incandescence

• The Ageless: Anyone who's had either Ice's immortality spell or her resurrection spell cast on them in Incandescence has their apparent age start trending towards early-twenties levels, and then just stay there.
• A Hell of a Time: Hell is, according to Revelation, pretty comfy.
  Ice: Hell is really comfy, huh?
  Revelation: The lakes of fire are not and have never been intended to contain people.
• All Planets Are Earth-Like: Played straight with Bell homeworlds, which tend to be Earth-like even when they're not Earth, but generally averted when they look for other planets.
• Amicable Exes: The Bell's Parents typically divorce early but share their child(ren) without issue.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: Natariem has Cricket kidnapped, and threatens to kill him (and thereby unmake Katydid) unless she marries Rain. And he makes it look like the threat came from Rain himself.
• Back from the Dead: Many people in Incandescence. The peal is working on systematic mass return of the dead.
• Came Back Wrong: When Ice resurrected Cypress, he came back without his magic, which instead persisted as a ghost. His magic couldn't be reattached with him still alive, either, so he had to be killed again in order to be resurrected properly.
• Death Is Cheap: You can easily be resurrected by any witch who has the right spell.
• Earth Is the Center of the Universe: Not necessarily within a given universe, but across the multiverse, Earth is more common than any other planet by a pretty large margin.
• Familiar: Having a familiar is necessary to become a spellbinder in Hex.
• Immortality Seeker: Figuring out how to distribute immortality is one of the most common projects for pre-pealing Bells to work on, when their worlds' magic systems support it. It should be noted that Bells are strictly ethical immortality seekers, and avoid Dark Magic and similar.
• It's a Small World, After All: Certain templates end up meeting each other far more consistently than makes sense with just plain causality. Along with the fact that templates are a thing at all, this was one of the first major bits of metacausality the peals became aware of.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: Mass distribution of immortality tends to be one of the major Bell projects, and very few people have complained so far.
• Love Hungry: Chelseas tend to be this, and also tend to get magic capable of forcing people to love them.
• Marriage Before Romance: Katydid and Rain, thanks to the gigantic mess that was their initial marriage.
• Narnia Time: Worlds have their time synced up for as long as there's some sort of information-transfer going on between them, but whenever there isn't (for instance, both times Jane breaks), they start getting massively desynced, with the time-passage ranging from a few minutes to a few decades before the connection is reestablished.
• Not a Morning Person: Adarins in general can't really do much of anything before they have their tea in the morning.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Lynns have a daughter who dies young.
• Poor Communication Kills: Katydid and Rain managed to go for months after their wedding before having a long enough conversation to realize that something fishy was going on.
• Portal Door: Milliways sometimes "possesses" doors, turning them into portals leading to the bar. And when opened from inside the bar, its door will typically serve as a portal to the homeworld of whoever opened it, although it can be forced to open to somewhere else given the right magic.
• Portal Network: The peal in Incandescence is building one, and use it as their primary means of interdimensional travel.
• Screw Yourself: Zevs have an active interest in screwing themselves, to the point where Turtle talked Prime into scrying for another male version of himself specifically because he wanted to do it too.
• Shipper on Deck: Cypress was this to Prime and Spring, alternate version of himself and Cypress' wife.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Cypress and Ice, at least according to Katydid and Rain.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: One of the default modes of conversation that Bells and Adarins tend to slip into with each other.
• Superpower Russian Roulette: Going into a magic on Tayane can have positive effects on people if they're lucky, but it's far more likely to transform them in some undesirable fashion, with the likelihood going up the longer they stay there.
• The Unmasqued World: Daevinity, thanks to Revelation's work.
• Universal-Adaptor Cast: Large portions of the cast in each world are alts of people who have shown up in previous worlds.
• When the Clock Strikes Twelve: Spellbinders' spells recharge every midnight. Normally it's not particularly dramatic, but the time Katydid and Rain were trapped under a ruined building without their spells, the wait for midnight was a pretty big deal.
• Which Me?: Mostly averted thanks to the use of disambiguating nicknames, but played hilariously when Savir meets Adams and has no idea how to refer to his wife in plural.
• Young Conqueror: Bells tend to become this when their local government is a negative influence on society and can't be reformed from within the system.

Silmaril

• Alien Abduction: Played straight in the opening to Kadrona; the Andalite strike force on Earth grabs a dozen humans to acquire, interrogate, and then mind-wipe and deliver home. Bella is not on board with the mind-wiping, and wrangles a position as consultant on humans instead.
• All Therapists Are Muggles: Averted by Boots, who was studying to be a therapist when she accidentally went to Telperion and later finished her degree when the Valar sent her back to Materia. She's been helping all the traumatised people the peal comes into contact with ever since.
• Apathetic Citizens: From the Valinor Elves only the Noldor even think to do something about it once Melkor breaks parole. In Doriath people are much the same, not caring one whit what happens to people outside their borders.
• Big Bad: Melkor, one of the Valar who tortures and terrorizes as many people as he can whenever he gets an opening. Nukes can't scratch him. Most of the Silmaril plots feature an escalating nightmarish war as the heroes try to cobble together magic powerful enough to do the job.
• The Caligula: Elu Thingol. Hunted Dwarves for sport, later used them as forced unpaid labor before inciting a genocide against them. He also attempts to kill his daughter's significant others via sending them in impossible and deadly quests.
• The Cassandra: Nerdanel had visions of her youngest son burning alive and it being her husband's fault. Whenever she told Feanaro he dismissed it because being a loving, doting father he could not conceive of even the idea of harming his children. Also Artanis had a vision of the Alqualonde massacre.
  • Arda prophecy in general is such that the person who sees a future event can never avert it, whether because of their own psychology (most maiar) or this trope (many elves).
• Democracy Is Bad: Or 'democracy isn't necessary', at least. Ardas are monarchies, and even when they get extradimensional magic, new neighbors, and lots of new priorities, they stay that way. The protagonists don't really want to cede their power and there aren't particular signs of internal social pressure for them to reconsider. It helps them that Elves are very conformist and that the royal family (at least if encountered before the war gets bad) is competent, benevolent, and popular.
• Fatal Flaw: For the Feanorians stubbornness in general. For Feanaro is impulsiveness, for Maitimo the need to be liked by a majority and to be politically relevant, for Macalaure is his need for drama. Tyelcormo is unwilling to compromise and nearly as impulsive as his father.
• God Is Inept: The Valar have a really alien worldview that is incompatible with incarnates. Therefore people get deeply frustrated and disappointed with them. Feanors tend to regard the Valar as stupid and evil as a result. Many agree with them.
• Gilded Cage: Valinor is beautiful, plentiful and generally a good place to be as long as you don't object to mental tampering by Mandos, want to make your own choices or want to leave.
• The Grim Reaper: Mandos collects the souls of dead Elves and orcs. He is capable of re embodying them but will only do so if they agree to be mentally modified until they fit the mold of what Mandos thinks a person should be.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: Gem's plot - as the world was ending she used her wish for a chance to go back and fix everything, becoming stuck in a loop of endlessly repeating Februaries until she manages to eliminate the world-ending witch.
• Hypocrite: Elu Thingol is under the impression that he holds the high moral ground since he has not killed any Elves. But Dwarves were hunted for sport under his watch and actively discriminates against them. Also Galadriel.
• It's Personal with the Dragon: Loki decides right away to help the Elves in their war, but once Sauron kidnaps and tortures Vár and taunts Loki with it for years it's personal. Loki comments on how Melkor, the Big Bad, seems more like some kind of force of nature. But Sauron? She hates him and wants him dead - and gets it done.
• Money Fetish: Caranthir's template is obsessed with economics and making money and are very, very good at it.
• Omniglot: Fëanors (and by extension Curufins) love languages, and are able to pick up seemingly unlimited numbers of new ones in between a few hours and a few weeks (depending how good a memory their species has). They will often prioritize learning a novel language over things that are objectively much more important.
• Parents as People: Finwe toward Feanaro. Sure, he did mess up the kid a lot but he also was in a very bad place himself.
• Pass the Popcorn: Eru's attitude toward Arda. He designed a universe according to his own aesthetic sensibilities, and he loves tragedy and grief and horror.
• Planet Destroyer: Demons can make arbitrary material objects, including black holes. Cam cuts a deal with Melkor to destroy Valinor and end the war.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Mitros and Iobel, once they've resolved the awkward thing where he's gay but seduces her anyway because he thinks she'll run the country well. Mitros tells Epic that sometimes the King and Queen are best friends who work very well together, instead of being in love.
• Prophetic Dreams For Everyone: Quite a few of the Noldor have unclear, unhelpful and out of context dreams that pinpoint to Feanaro committing atrocities. Sadly they end up being Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
• Repressive, but Efficient: Sure, the King keeps a political prisoner chained up in his bedroom and the empire's a military dictatorship, but Midnight prides himself on how well-run the whole thing is, and humans in his Arda might actually be better off than their counterparts in the standard setting. This is among the reasons it's hard to get rid of him, even though everyone would really rather he not be in power.
• Recycled IN SPACE!: Space Arda's just the exact same story as traditional Ardas with faster-than-light travel and starships instead of boats and swords.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Every single one of the prophecies random Noldor and Ainur had about Feanaro could have been avoided if they had not acted on them.
• Suicide Mission: In standard-setting Ardas Findekáno goes off on foot to infiltrate Angband and find his cousin. He does not have a plan to get either of them out, though it works out anyway.
• Traumatic Haircut: Happens to Elves taken captive in Angband, particularly Maitimos. Since the scalp and hair is a major erogenous zone for the Eldar it is extremely violating to cut an Elf's hair. Midnight, the evil Maitimo, does this to his Findekano, nickname Forever.
• Universal-Adaptor Cast: Large portions of the cast in each world are alts of people who have shown up in previous worlds.
  • The Elves/Feanorians need to be aristocracy, though, and sometimes this interferes with putting them in a world, such as modern Earth, because it doesn't really have an aristocracy.
• Wicked Stepmother: Indis, second wife of Finwe. Arguably mild since she is an Elf but she does cause considerable psychological damage to Fëanáro. When Fëanáro was little and criticized her for jumping in the bed of a man that was too depressed to think clearly she shot back at the child that he made his father miserable while she made him happy. Also she was the one that petitioned the Valar to banish Fëanáro from Tirion after he pulled a sword on Nolofinwe.

Other Continuities

• Morality Chain: Jean pretty clearly has one or several disorders that limit his ability to empathize or relate to (most) other people. His sister has to set rules for him to follow to keep him at socially acceptable levels of behavior. Predictably, bad things happen if she is removed from the picture in some way, especially if the setting itself exacerbates his screwed-up-ness.

Sandboxes

• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In Room of Requirement, Cam goes on trial for war crimes, genocide, fifty million counts of murder, and seven counts of kidnapping (a family of orcs whose car he grabbed to ask them how orcs worked).
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Revelation and the space Ardas are all completely appalled on contact with 1802 wizarding Britain. They beat children! They eat animals! They have slavery! They transfigure kittens into teapots and haven't really checked whether Mandrakes just look like babies or are, actually, pretty much human babies. Revelation and the Valian justice system run into this, too: the Elves aren't really on board with retribution or deterrance and think Ganymede is much too harsh, and the humans are horrified that Elves, who live forever, don't especially care about giving their arrestees a speedy trial.