The Lavender Tavern was my attempt at a queer fairytale podcast. It worked, but it was very draining to come up with a bunch of different short story ideas. I have the feeling I burned through years of brainstorming in only a few months.
Gallants in Distress is a typical story: Hamlyn sells take-away ale from a cart near the town market. To attract customers, he puts up a bulletin board where anyone can post wanted ads, and so on. A man named Gully keeps posting ‘gallants in distress’ notices (like damsels in distress, but male), and a knight named Thaylor comes along every few days and gathers the notices. But what’s really going on?
I’m not going to spoil the ending, because that’s not the point (but why not listen to it yourself?). In the story, Hamlyn comes up with two clever ideas: having a set of ale mugs that people can buy ale in, and bring back the empties for a deposit (so they can go about their day in the medieval town walking and drinking), and the notice board with scraps of paper and nails.
Their world didn’t have such things until he came up with them. Until I came up with them. But I didn’t come up with them, of course. I just transposed ideas from our world that already existed.
In a way, it feels like a cheat.
Hamlyn comes across as a brilliant inventor, but I as the author didn’t have to do any brain gymnastics to come up with the ideas. There’s a weightless quality to them, where I feel like I’m praising him for something he didn’t really do.
It’s isekai syndrome. In isekai stories, someone from our world lands in a different world, and immediately ‘invents’ all sorts of things we take for granted and the other world is astonished by them. It’s a cheap, easy way for the hero/heroine to gain some cred and level up.
After I noticed myself doing it in Gallants in Distress, I started paying more attention to my habit to Mary Sue the main characters of my stories. One invention per story or novel, maybe. MAYBE. Hamlyn would remain an exception.
That said, there is an elephant in the room. You may have already seen its trunk, back or tail:
L&L is all about coming up with ideas for a Euro-medieval fantasy coffeeshop that are direct analogs of ones from our world: names on cups, biscotti, and so on.
I read L&L, and I enjoyed it. I don’t feel like Viv, the main character, was Mary Sueing it by inventing all of these concepts. Here’s why. L&L is a book about conceits (by that I mean ideas, not excessive pride). There’s a conceit that this is taking place in a D&D or World of Warcraft world. There’s a conceit that the inventions Viv comes up with are the same as Starbucks in our world. We’re in on the joke, and in on the parallels.
Viv isn’t lauded for being a caffeinotragent genius. Rather, it’s almost as if she’s pulling the caffeinated ideas from some pan-universal collective unconscious. In Travis Baldree’s imagining, the ‘coffeeshop’ is an idea that anyone in any universe would be likely to come up with eventually, because it’s a universal concept. Little wonder that some call L&L a coffeeshop AU.
So by all means, I’m going to let my characters keep ‘inventing’ things from our universe. But in a very limited way, and never to show their intelligence or special nature. It’s more that they’re in on the same joke as me, the author – and you, the reader.