Amerkoenna

A schlocky “bastard daughter returns to the magical world to take revenge on her father’s clan” story. Here's a juicy intro sequence:

enraged mom who was pregnant at time of exile from the magical world raises daughter into the Perfect Revenge Weapon
when the daughter is ~10, the mom meets a really nice guy, chills out, heals, possibly goes to church or whatever. decides she will become a Progressive American Mom, and is reasonably successful at this transformation
when the daughter is 17, the mom dies of complications from the torture she underwent during the clan warfare that drove her out of the magical world
at the mom’s deathbed, the girl is like “hey btw. I’m still prepared to do the revenge sequence. I’d be delighted”
the mom is all “no no I’m good now, I’ve moved on, I’ve accepted Jesus into my heart and let go of hatred”
the daughter goes Lady Macbeth on her mom and talks her around. “aww come on I’d do all the work, think of all the unfinished business you have (much of which idk the specifics of, frankly, but I’m a bloodthirsty teenager, so do I really need the full story before I go ahead…)”
the mom cannot resist the temptation. she tells the daughter where the portals are, who to contact, on arrival, etc
dies
daughter goes ahead and starts ruining lives
it’s going to be years before she realized that she wronged her mother by undoing her endorsed personal changes in the last hours of her life

I think the daughter's secret wizard name is Fevronia Amerkoenna but she has a normal name (Phoebe?) she goes in her normie Christian Muggle community and hates. She's dying to have a dramatic debut in the magical world.

She has unfulfilled teen desires to be special, to do things with meaning, to exert power – but she IS in fact special and powerful, and she's probably going to cause a lot of damage before turning it around.

etirabys 07/03

more ideating

I came up with this whole thing when trying to combine two... no, four things:

First, dance magic. When I started partner dancing I was like, holy shit, there should be a magic system about this. Different types of dance for different things (big group dances like contra should raise barns or do other community things). So much opportunity for interpersonal chemistry between two people to result in more powerful magic, or unexpected magical side effects.

Second, I wanted to write a harem romance with a female lead with extremely different types of partnership.

Eshua: the hereditary slave belonging to her half-brother Adumon, who is hers by right if she becomes heir (which is a magical concept as well as a social one). Eshua recognizes her as his legal master at some point, doesn't talk to her at all about it, but switches over to serving her interests instead of Adumon's. Perhaps making huge sacrifice she would be horrified by.

Tefalder: her professor, who was cursed by her dad after an old clan war to never touch anyone. Very distantly a Snape variant. Bitter, powerful. However, uh, she can touch him. And wants to team up with him to take revenge on her dad. It is possible she gets pregnant on purpose with him to steal the bloodline gift out of her family's hands. Insofar as dom/sub is the right lens for their relationship, he's more the dom, but it's relatively superficial and at the end of the day he's not the boss of her, although they have the most interactions where someone else is the stern adult that she's cowed by. He's the only one with scenes with her where he's slamming her against walls and she's feeling fear (that she's gone too far).

Matevosian: sort of the endgame / true equal character although there's no such thing in this story. The other demure-looking secret mastermind whose much more ambitious and virtuous projects eventually subsume her own. Dom/sub is not the right frame for them at all except spiritually/morally. I kink on "character who realizes they are too powerful and evil to be without a master and latch onto the best person they've met" and I want the protagonist to be in the servant position for once.

Third, I want a time travel gender-swap arc where she re-does her first year at magic academy but as a guy.

This might happen at the tail end of her pregnancy where she's hoping the gender-swap will let her evade childbirth (she might be trying to pass it onto her half-brother actually, who is on the other end of the magic) but this doesn't work and she ends up holding a newborn. I think she freaks the fuck out and pass it onto her stepdad's infertile sister. I've never seen a romantasy protagonist get pregnant on purpose, have the kid, and then mostly not deal with the kid afterwards. I think it would be fun.

I think re-seeing the events of the first year as a guy would be really illuminating in a gender-segregated school, especially because Matevosian is shy/stilted around women but gregarious/powerful among men. She also gets to see how badly Eshua is treated up close, which will be nice whump material.

Fourth, I don't think I've seen a social manipulator character as the protagonist before. I have a fairly autistic/strategic social module that I haven't seen represented in fiction before. I also don't want to represent this part of her as bad. (Other parts of her are bad though.) I just want someone whose internal narration is surprisingly explicit about status, motivations, gossip, etc. Some old literary novels (Portrait of a Lady, maybe Middlemarch) are shockingly readable as a lowbrow gossip-liker because it's a stream of dense gossipy social stuff happening. I want this in a romantasy harem novel!