Glowfic Events and Trends

Sometimes something happens, leading to a new cluster/wave of threads, characters, etc. For documenting this community's history and making navigating it easier for readers who come along later.

Timeline of Notable Community History

This page is a work in progress, especially as history continues to happen, documentation continues to be found, and the in-retrospect notability of events likely shifts. Still, this is an effort to note and document major community moments.

 

2012

The First Glowfic

The top post of "he couldn't have imagined", the first RP thread in the Effulgence continuity, was posted in September 2012. (reference)

 

2014

Alicornutopia

The Alicornutopia board was made by Alicorn as a center for the glowfic community to discuss things in March 2014. (reference)

 

Incandescence

The top post of "Picknicking", the first RP thread in the Incandescence continuity, was posted in March 2014. (reference)

 

Coining of "Glowfic"

The term "glowfic" was coined by Lambda (Sonata) in July 2014 to refer to the extant glowfic continuities in response to Tulip creating a TVTropes page for them. (reference) The term was fairly quickly adopted by community members. It was noted in an earlier post that "glowy RP fiction" was a term already in use, due to the existing continuities' mostly light/ glowing themed names.

 

Creation of the TVTropes Page

The TVTropes page was created in August 2014 by Tulip. (reference)

 

2016

Glowfic Community IRC

The glowfic community gained an IRC channel created by Lambda (Sonata) in April 2016. (reference)

 

2017

Glowfic Community Discord

The glowfic community gained a discord server created by Tamien in March 2017, which was bridged via bot to the IRC channels. (reference)

MZDS/The Untamed

MZDS/The Untamed

MDZS/The Untamed (Event/Trend)

Began Summer 2020, involving MDZS/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, and its live-action show adaptation, The Untamed, coming into glowfic.

History

The first glowfic thread involving this fandom set, making room for new regrets, a peggy sue fic for The Untamed, was started at the beginning of August 2020 by argona and st753m. Other glowfic users [MaggieoftheOwls, ...], were already enthusiastic about the fandom set, while others were aware of and to varying extents familiar with it from the wider internet.

Several glowfic users began consuming MDZS/The Untamed after seeing it in glowfic and/or joined in on threading. This includes Neva, st753m, SparrowSea, ChaosMagic, Decima, [others to be added].

Constellation links:

See also: MDZS/The Untamed sandboxes

Many-person RPs

Many-person RPs

Tumblr RPs

What's a Tumblr RP?

A Tumblr roleplay (RP) is a roleplay in which the participants write in-character blogs on tumblr and the characters interact with each other as though they are tumblr users. Interactions are mostly unscripted, although sometimes authors confer with each other out-of-character to decide that particular things will happen.

Origins

The origins of the glowfic tumblr RPs can be traced back to Alicorn's AUSJ (Alternate Universe Social Justice) tumblrs, in which she answered asks in-character as various people with, well, weird alternate universe social justice related problems. Alicorn used her main blog to respond to these asks.

In late spring 2017, after Alicorn and lintamande wrote the glowfic thread in color, lintamande began an AUSJ blog as an Amentan caste abolitionist. This was the first instance of an author making a blog that was entirely in-character, as opposed to just writing some in-character things on their main blog. (Note: lintamande's original Amentan AUSJ blog, colorjustice, was incorrectly labeled NSFW during the great tumblr NSFW purge and can now only be accessed from within the tumblr dashboard.)

Amenta RP

Starting in summer 2017, several more people created in-character blogs as Amentans and began interacting with one another, and thus the Amenta RP was born. As the RP grew more active, it was decided that the plot events from "in color" would transpire in the RP, and the RP characters reacted to these plot events. The Amenta RP, following the plot of "in color," continued until summer 2018, when both the plot and the RP ended. In total, over 100 Amenta RP blogs were created, though not all were active at the same time.

A lot of people joined the glowfic community through the Amenta RP. It may have been the single biggest contributor to the population of the glowfic community (note: this is speculation).

More information about the Amenta setting here. A curated subset of the Amenta RP may be read here.

Cascadia RP

After the end of the Amenta RP, westwind and several others founded the Cascadia RP. For a variety of reasons, they chose to make the Cascadia RP a closed RP, meaning that people had to get approval from the RP organizers in order to join; in contrast, the Amenta RP had been open to anyone. The Cascadia RP took place from early fall through winter 2018-2019.

More information about the Cascadia setting here. A large subset of the Cascadia RP may be read here.

Many-person RPs

Many Worlds Forum

Many-person RPs

Scholomance (glowlomance)

History:

The Scholomance megacontinuity RP began in 2021. The RP is open to anyone (unlike most glowfic, which typically has a pre-defined set of authors). The moderator of the RP is lintamande. See the megacontinuity's wiki page for more information.

The megacontinuity is sometimes called "the glowlomance."

Many-person RPs

The Chelish Constitutional Convention

Megacontinuity written in 2024-2025. See here.

Selftopias

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.

Selftopias

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.

Selftopias

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:

Pharasma trials

In the Golarion setting, souls get judged after death by the goddess Pharasma and her judges, and sent to one of nine afterlives, corresponding to the nine D&D alignments. The afterlives send representatives to the trials of souls they're interested in. Nirvana, the Neutral Good afterlife, sends a representative to every trial. The first trial appeared on-page in the middle of the "only that which they defend" continutity, in the thread "what can be destroyed by the truth", in December of 2020. There was another in "the sigh of the oppressed creature" in June 2022, and then a number of threads about trials in spring 2023.

Pharasma trials

List of trial threads

what can be destroyed by the truth by lintamande, Swimmer963
started Dec 03, 2020

the sigh of the oppressed creature by westwind, Fay
wen ning's trial
started Jun 22, 2022

Scarcely the bell had ceased to toll by Nemo
started Mar 20, 2023

immortal hand or eye by extent_of_foxes
started Mar 27, 2023

Enemies Like These by QTesseract
Hell argues for Nirvana
started Mar 31, 2023

incompatible file format by extent_of_foxes, Rockeye
Karakan Stoneheart on trial
started Apr 06, 2023

in spring, anyone can make a fine meal by lalaithion
axis shows up for a trial
started Apr 11, 2023

finite and temporal crimes by Arete/Stars
Nirvana sends a representative to every trial, no matter what the defendant has done.
started Apr 13, 2023

dare we hope that all be saved by westwind
tar-baphon gets a trial
started Apr 16, 2023

nobody is damned until burning and damned by ilzolende
Griffith Young gets an afterlife trial
started Apr 17, 2023