Laser Tag Party by Scalar Seventh
This is surprisingly good. Tropes were effectively deployed to make a mostly silly romp really bring the heat at various points.
My ego would like to register its objection to your surprise, thank you very much.
Joking aside, it really is supposed to be mostly fun and games. These girls keep surprising me, though, and strange things keep popping up. Thanks for the encouragement!
It's interesting to me that people find Fair Share and College Undercover dark. I know they are, but in some ways those characters have it far better than the victims in many stories. They have lives, jobs, money, friends. Alison will even let her slaves have a career. They're not cutoff from their families. Carol is still working undercover, helping put criminals away. I think I know what's dark about those stories, but I would be curious to hear what other people think.
I read
Fair Share as it was being published, and haven't looked at
College Undercover, so all I've got is my two cents on the former, but if you're curious...
I wouldn't really call it
dark, exactly. Alison isn't mean or cruel, she does no physical harm to those she influences and she regrets and tries to redress any mental and/or emotional damage she does. What makes it... let's say, less light, is that we're not looking at Alison as a
moral protagonist. Heroes in all sorts of stories do far worse than Alison ever did, but since they're framed as good, forthright, upstanding citizens, we understand implicitly that their actions are "good," so far as the story world defines it. Because Alison isn't framed as a holy crusader, but an ordinary, flawed (sometimes dangerously so), struggling human being whose actions are morally questionable - even if they're influenced by forces outside her control - she's given the veneer of darkness, which when viewed under a certain light, definitely
looks shady.
Is what she does morally pure? No, but it's fairly real. I think the fact that she doesn't suffer "proper" consequences for her actions is what makes people think of it as dark, but what you're reading isn't a morality tale. Would her victims be better off if they hadn't met her? You could argue that, but the fact is that they
did meet her, and they're
exceedingly happy now, aren't they?
It leaves a lot of characters in completely different places than where they started, and arguably, from a standpoint
outside the story, based on our own views of morality, those different places are worse. But the characters sure don't think that they're worse off. An argument could be made that they didn't want to be where they are before they got there, but now that they
are there, do they want to go back? Given the choice, would any of them turn back the clock and walk a different road?
I wonder if That Guy got these moral questions about
Ethics 101 for Mind Controllers or
Checking Out the College. In both of those, women are permanently changed and enslaved to the mind controller (happily so, one by choice, one not) and placed in lesbian relationships (happily so, one by choice, one not). In fact, Ethics 101 brings up these very real questions and explores them. I wouldn't think of either of them as
dark, though, in the end.
Maybe it's just because...
Sorry but you are not allowed to view spoiler contents.
Because that's all kinds of grey areas, but it's really not a lot different in function or structure from what happens to Rhonda in Ethics 101. I think it's all in the framing.
