I feel like I should reply to this with a speech bubble and a picture of an Umineko character, but hell if I know which one.
Hah! Who needs lockpicks and keys and drainpipes when you have magic. Is this how humans work their ways around locked rooms? Pitiful.
In unrelated news, I was about to engage in my periodic dubious time-wasting activity of "look for a weird tag on AO3 and read summaries for laughs," but I stopped short when right at the top of the page was... The fandom was listed as "General." It's readerfic where the character the protag is paired with is also generic.
Early iron age, actually. Presumably the earliest stories that became the Iliad and Odyssey showed up in the Greek Dark Ages. (obligatory "dark ages just means we don't have good historical records", though in this case civilization did take a massive hit outside of Mesopotamia.)
Someone needs to take it even further. "The character did something, and you reacted in an appropriate manner"
Wait were they shipping the general idea of a male character with a female reader? Because that sounds almost fun in a Chuck Tingle kinda way.
No, it was just porn where you were supposed to search-replace substitute your name for "Y/N" and your favorite male characters's name for "F/N."
Even knowing that there are literal in-browser extensions to do exactly that I have to ask: what....... is the goddamn point then..........?
Given the standard in readerfic for "[your name]" to be abbreviated "Y/N," I've joked before about choose-your-own-adventure readerfic based on your yes/no dialogue options. :::PPP
in this case, it was a harry dresden fic where people were saying it must've been a magical assassination because the room was locked and none of the servants had the key. fortunately, harry didn't buy it until he got a tip from a well placed source confirming that magic assassins had threatened the man, because it turned out the author was not making him carry the idiot ball. still, i felt there could've been more checking with nearby locksmiths to see if anyone had copied the key, for instance.
It's a mystery story about the very concept of the mystery story. Specifically traditional mysteries with things like locked room puzzles and which follow Knox's precepts. This is contrasted with the idea of the anti-mystery fantasy story. Can you explain the crimes without a witch? And do witches even exist, and if so in what capacity? Edit: For more fun that thing you posted there is a decent enough example of the dialogue you see in Umineko.
Heck, if you're doing modern-day, that makes it even harder: how do you know that no one went to a kiosk and got the key copied by a robot? (This is actually doable, it's how I got a copy of the key for the Vancouver apartment before I ended up leaving; we went to a 5-Minute Key kiosk at a Canadian Tire and stuck the key into the tab and had it make the number of copies we wanted.)
i have no desire to read a no-powers meet-cute for any pairing in any fandom ever. i'm really gonna need folks to be better about tagging those.
Plot twist - the magic assassin copied the key (with/without magic). What? No sense teleporting through the never-never when a surreptitious trip to home depot will do.
