you know what’s really good is Worth the Candle. it’s… the premise is that a sadistic DM has been isekai’d into a mashup of all his own D&D campaign settings, and has to confront those things and what they say about him. it’s also the good kind of rationalfic- the protagonist is smart and questions the things you’d expect him to question and puts appropriate effort into creative problem-solving.
what especially makes it appeal to me is that the protagonist, Joon… is me? i get this uncanny sensation from reading it, in that he keeps anticipating my next question and my next idea and my next reaction, so reliably that i can go long stretches feeling like i’m the one dealing with his problems and making decisions, and only rarely have to remember that, oh, right, this is a different person with his own life experiences and i’m not literally playing this like a videogame. i don’t know if i’ve ever been so on the same wavelength as a fictional character, and that enhances the stuff where it deconstructs and plays with self-insert isekai tropes.
anyway, apart from that, i can highly recommend it on the strength of its character writing, humor, and worldbuilding- though be aware it is long, over one million words broken up into multiple books. it’s not quite Worm length yet, but it’s getting there.
Oh hey, Alexander Wales moved to AO3! I enjoyed his fanfiction.net works [link], and now I have a bunch more to read.
(And when I googled him to find the URL for his fanfiction.net profile, I found he also has a website with some *more* things on it [link].)
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Brinens and Things 