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.