Selftopias

Selftopias (Trend)

A self topia (selftopia, self world, author world, etc) is roughly speaking a setting centered around the concept of the author, the author's philosophy, the author's neurotype, or etc as a normal or dominant component of the setting's inhabitants.

There are several versions of the prompt. Two major ones are author aliens and medianverses, though that list isn't exhaustive. Many though not all selftopias include additional magic or science fiction premises.

Here is the (WIP) chapter on the wiki for selftopia settings.

 

Author aliens is a prompt largely rooted in the utopic fiction tradition, treating the concept of "what if my worldview was dominant?" seriously, and then expanding into the concept of "and what would an alien species that strongly meets my personally ideal biology look like?" Author aliens are all non-human by virtue of the prompt, though the focus on worldview can occur outside of author aliens selftopias.

Medianverses are settings which answer the question "what would a world look like if I were the median person in it?" Some of these answer "what world produces me as the median person," while others answer "what world is created by a people in which I'm the median person?" Many medianverse settings are alternate Earths inhabited by modern humans with no magic.

The medianverse version of the prompt became popular in 2021, starting with Iarwain's glowfics set in his medianverse, dath ilan. However, this was not the first instance of the prompt on the constellation (which currently seems to be ChaosMagic and Decima's author aliens, the krissan, from 2020), and there's a complicated development timeline of different versions of the prompt.

Alien Fiction Review Threads

A recent trend (as of May 2022) on the Constellation has been for people to write threads in which members of a world of theirs solicit submissions of in-world fiction (as well as nonfiction and non-literature art in some cases) from other authors' worlds and comment on, categorize, and in some cases censor them. The majority of worlds doing reviews and submissions so far are self worlds, but not all threads are limited to submissions from self worlds. This page is meant to keep track of all of those threads.

Listed in order of posting, from oldest to newest:

Separately, there have been a few threads in which authors post summaries of works from their world. Listed in order of posting, from oldest to newest:

A major precursor to this wave of threads were the interdimensional summit threads, chiefly once you have reached the summit of your own heart.

Interdimensional Summit Threads

There have been several threads depicting interdimensional diplomatic summits between various selfworlds/medianverses. The first was once you have reached the summit of your own heart, featuring Firstplanet (NormalAnomaly), dath ilan (Iarwain), Green (Alicorn), Ozytopia (westwind), Bobbiverse (Bobbi), and Malachitin (sphinx). cobra lily (Green and Bobbiverse) is a breakout thread derivative of the former. These were later followed by: