I saw that "Willy Wonka as the commander of the Terran Cosmic Navy in the war against the Affini" post you made a while back and got really excited because it sounded right up my alley but I'm having trouble understanding the fic. Can you help me out?
That is an excellent question, anon!
So I was talking about Their Barbarous Wastes, a Glowfic set in the world of Human Domestication Guide. This requires a lot of context, and I'll assume you're going in with no background knowledge.
Human Domestication Guide is a shared-universe setting for kink erotica. The basic premise is that a dystopian interstellar human civilization, the "Terran Accord", is being conquered by a vastly technologically superior species of mommy-domme plant-people called the Affini Compact, whose deal is that they conquer the universe and turn every sentient species they encounter into their mind-controlled pets. Common HDG kink tropes include pet-owner dynamics, institutionalization, body horror, mind control, nonconsensual drug use, coercive-but-ultimately-for-your-own-good forced feminization, etc. The Affini are nominally "anti-capitalist" and HDG authors often treat them as being the good guys in a (nominally) leftist way, but also their defining political policy is that they're a racially-stratified expansionist empire that uses prisoners of war as sex slaves. So there's some tension in the setting that most authors in that community aren't interrogating because it's not super relevant to its purpose as a setup for kink erotica.
Unless your kink is good worldbuilding that takes the economic and political implications of its setting seriously! I know mine is.
Their Barbarous Wastes (named after the "Our Blessed Homeland / Their Barbarous Wastes" meme ) is a fic that does get into that stuff, and as someone who's both unhealthily fascinated and deeply frustrated by HDG as a setting and shared-universe project, I really loved its version of the setting.
Their Barbarous Wastes depicts an alternative version of the HDG setting where everyone's motivations make sense. The "corporations" of the Terran Accord aren't just cartoonish punching-bags for leftists' frustrations - TBW portrays a dystopia run by off-the-rails LLM AI agents larping the idea of cartoonish capitalist villains to the benefit of nobody. The Cosmic Navy aren't idiot fascists blinded by nationalism, they're just trying to do the best thing for human wellbeing while forced between uncaring AI overlords on one side and rapist invaders on the other side. And the Affini aren't just motivated by biological urges, they're just trying to do the best thing for humanity while coming from an alien perspective that doesn't value things like individual rights or informed consent. (It also breaks from the HDG shared-universe canon in ways that make the Affini's strategy and end-goal a lot more sympathetic than just "all humans are our pets/slaves forever")
The other thing is that Their Barbarous Wastes is a glowfic, a type of collaborative roleplay fiction. It's written mainly by two authors, þeremin (playing the role of the protagonist Amethyst) and aurelia (playing the role of the HDG universe and most of its inhabitants), plus leyline who plays the Willy Wonka character. How To Read Glowfic is a good guide to understanding the formatting that's used to indicate the change in authors and viewpoint characters.
Glowfics are often fanfiction containing a very high degree of multi-universe crossover. The series that started the whole genre, Effulgence, began as "what if Rationalist Bella Swan went to high school with a teenage pre-supervillain version of The Joker and they got magic powers...", introduced more and more alternate universes with the same characters (what if Joker and Bella were at Battle School? What if Tony Stark and transfem!Sherlock Holmes were siblings who both won the Hunger Games and Bella was a starving kid from District 4 who spends half her childhood in the bar between universes hearing stories about her alternate-universe selves being the empresses of their respective universes?) and crossing them over with each other, with all these "alts" of the same character templates sharing their powers and technology to improve (and often rule) their respective worlds. So cross-universe travel and the world-optimizing potential of outside-context superpowers are also common tropes in Glowfic.
Their Barbarous Wastes is the third thread in a continuity called All Active Accounts of Amethyst. TBW starts with a character named Amethyst arriving in the HDG setting from some other universe. The first thread in that continuity, Assembling Amethyst, explains where she comes from. But it's 37k words and I haven't actually read it yet; with Glowfic you sort of just learn to go into a setting and character with zero context and figure out the important parts as you go. The TL;DR is that Amethyst was empowered with magical abilities (including the ability to travel between alternate universes) by The Spirit Of Femininity Unleashed (i.e. the Mary Sue CYOA, a magic force that turns characters into overpowered Mary Sues in order to get the self-awarely-tropey fanfic plot rolling). More specifically, she's a "fork" (i.e. a clone) of the person who was empowered. She's sending out versions of herself on adventures across the multiverse, and this is just one such adventure.
Amethyst comes from Fixipelago, an extremely high-tech sci-fi society where everyone has access to universe-rearranging "fixity" technology. The Affini have total technological superiority over the Terrans, but Amethyst and her forks have overwhelmingly superior firepower over both of them. She also comes from a liberal utopia and she places a decent amount of importance on legal rights and a lot of importance on consent, so she's not going to bulldoze their entire universe if she can avoid it. Thus we get a setup for the Terrans, the Affini, and Amethyst to hash out their differences and try to come to an agreement in spite of enormous inferential distance. Regrettably like most Glowfic, this thread went on hiatus before it could actually finish, but I still very much think it's worth the read if you're at all interested. I hope that this explanation helps, and that it contains a sufficiently excessive number of links. Writing this explanation was a lot of fun; I'd be happy to say more about this if you want to talk more, on or off anon.
