The worldbuilding is queer, but the characters are het presenting at first...

I made up a world, and between you and me someone stole my outline because they were an AH and yes, I do have physical proof of the fact. I can post the outline I had online, etc. And I know it had to be them because they stole a specific part of the outline I hadn't given to anyone. And I had planned it to be more diverse and queerer than theirs, but they scrubbed a lot of it out in the final work. And seriously, eff them. That idea meant a lot to me. It's ingrained in my name, my heritage, and I spent years working on researching, looking it up, and posting it on Nanowrimo. And unlike them, I can cite exactly where I got all of the ideas for the worldbuilding from and who and why.

After being devastated with that, I decided to queer up the world building even more and start again, though still make reference to all of the fucking hard work I did with the original world building, because !@#$ I'd been working on it since I was in my teens and I wasn't going to scrap it because some AH decided to take my outline and scrub it of the diversity.

But the characters look cishet presenting. One is pan/bi/omni--not sure how you would call them.

The other one is gray-aro?

But in the background and in the worldbuilding it's clear the surroundings are not, and it's a casual slip in there somewhere in Chapter 6-ish that they aren't straight. Haha. You figure out they are likely East Asian pretty quickly. And I squashed the whole, "But the characters must be half" mentality too.

what does AH mean? but man, that sucks! that's a lot of work they took out of your hands! fuck em, seriously.
I do like the idea of characters not being super obviously queer, it just comes out later!
can I hear more about the world? even if they stole it, it's still yours, and I'm interested! I'm also interested in the East Asian part, how is that built in?

Jasper wrote:what does AH mean? but man, that sucks! that's a lot of work they took out of your hands! fuck em, seriously.
I do like the idea of characters not being super obviously queer, it just comes out later!
can I hear more about the world? even if they stole it, it's still yours, and I'm interested! I'm also interested in the East Asian part, how is that built in?

AH==Asshole.

I was going to leave off the details because ya know it's easier to find them this way...

But as this isn't a very public forum, I suppose I can outline it and roughly tell how I came up with it.

My idea was to make Phoenix riders...

How I came up with this idea was the following:

I'm adopted to a Russian-Hungarian family. My grandmother is Russian descent. She gave me a storybook Called The Firebird. It's my FAVORITE Russian Folktale. It tops my list every time. I memorized that book because I'm ND-ish that way. I versioned out that book to have different endings. I loved it so much.

At the same time I also read Dragonriders of Pern series from Anne McCaffrey.

And then of course Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series.

The issues I had with those books were the following:
- The cultures felt way to stable, they onlyrepresented a handful of ethnicities, and the cultures were too even. I also thought they were too light and fluffy. And if you pull from other Russian folktales they can get dark and grimy.

At the same time I was kind of feeling my ace and aroness flux and come out, but I didn't have the vocabulary for it yet. So I wanted to create a series of books that reflected this and after long research in the library (because the internet was thin) and raiding university libraries, I settled on Phoenix riders. I did look it up, and there was an idea for it on a RPG group online, but theirs was pretty much a carbon copy of Anne McCaffrey, and so I wanted to steer clear of that and do something more diverse, more different and more reflection of me. So I looked up Chinese mythology too. And Fushigi Yuugi clinched it. I decided I would use East Asian Mythology and mix it with European. Like my heritage.

I added in The Great Alta books+Sailor Moon/The Bamboo Cutter and then started asking questions on Nanowrimo. But at the time Ace people didn't have anything about Gray-aces, so I thought I wasn't really ace. Then as part of the research I was asking aces what to do when I posted the outline for the Nanowrimo I was writing and one of the fuckers stole it off of me.

The thing is that the Phenix--the Vermillion Bird is tied very much to my Korean name too. The birth dream my birth father had was of that before I was born. So to me, the idea is tied very, very closely to my identity.

See, a lot of the details I had put in made it into their final work.

- Twins which I'd taken from The Great Alta.
- The external threat that was not something like "The Thread"
- Going to someplace cold to find the egg.

But they also backstabbed it by taking out the diversity in the original story. Originally, I had the characters of all different LGBTQIA IDs. They cut that. They made the main character Ace and that was it.
I also had the characters be multi-ethnic from all different locales. They cut that.
I also put in mental health issues. Also cut.
I was planning on putting in disabilities. Also cut.

And it's not that I don't want to share, but usually people ask and then give credit, but this person waited until I said I was going to college and couldn't be around the forums anymore to go and backstab me.

I wanted to innovate the Pet fantasy genre further than it was to try to make new genres. But I got undercut by an asshole.

I should note I've been undercut before, where, for example, I posted an entire novel on a website and someone from China made it into a movie, with the emotional climax being exactly the fucking same, the premise being exactly the same, but it was much more poorly executed. But they did increase the diversity a little by setting it in China instead of Upstate NY.

Koreans aren't better, I should note... but I reversed the tide on that one and instead posted drama requests I want instead of letting them steal from me. At least they don't dump the diversity suggestions, which infuriates me about the people who steal my ideas from the US. The US always, always tries to scrub out the diversity and then it makes it super shallow.

But that idea isn't as dear to me as this one. This one is very much tied to my family, my heritage and my history.

And so, since I only gave them 10 percent of the complete outline I figured I should complete the rest of the outline around it.

TT People tried to steal other parts of the story too, which I also resented. Fuck, if you can't come up with your own ideas, why are you are writer? At least steal from published works instead of someone unpublished. I think it's OK to take idea with consent, if you ask them up front, are you still working on this idea? And then give them credit in the final work. If you can't fucking remember who gave you the idea, don't use it. But it's likely from my own experience of giving out ideas, you won't have the passion to execute it as in depth as they will because it's not really your idea. It's not been brewing for some odd number of years in your head like theirs--they won't expound and expand it because they aren't trying to be creative beyond the idea and explore where it could take them. And I've found through reading feedback comments, people can tell when you're BSing the premise to hook people, but you can't figure out what comes after that because you're used to writing something else.

Magic Kingdom Sold feels like this. (Much love to Terry Brooks anyway because I do like his writing advice book).

But yeah, the characters in this one are adjacent to the original plotline which was stolen which was part of my planned timeline to begin with. The main plot isn't "These are queer characters doing queer things." It's more they are queer, so what, look, there's a different plot and it's not about them coming out. It just comes up along the way and the reader deals with it and moves on. But up front the characters look het presenting. cis woman. cis man. How could it be queer? But nope. There's twists I add in to make him not straight. And she's not straight either. And as you travel through the story, hey look, about everyone in this world building is queer. Even the characters you think are straight--in the later book you find out they are queer too, but because it's not the "gotcha" plotline, it's like, hey, deal. You liked this character before, you shouldn't hate them after. I don't put it in the front because it really has nothing to do with the main plotline, but still has something to do with the character interactions and how they think of each other. Which, to me, is a good middle.

Haha. Almost everyone in the cast is poly (I'm not, but I figured, screw it, I will add it anyway and include it with respect). And I used a bent version of East Asian harems (looked up all of the countries involved before I invented it). Then I queered it up and figured out rules for it to make it functionally work.

(sorry, lol, I was sitting here thinking AH was an abbreviation for some kind of advance reader...)

that sounds like a really awesome premise - and that's such bullshit, all they took from you! and then the ways they watered it down! I can't believe people would do something like that. even if we aren't thinking of the primary morality issue, you'd think it'd be easier to come up with ideas than actually write it out...? that's rough, I'm sorry. thank you for sharing what you could, though. I really love the picture it paints.
I can understand having the idea of continuing to write the story feel quite soured for you, but if you still have any interest in it, I'd encourage you wholeheartedly. I think you'd have a lot to bring to it that they wouldn't be able to - considering it wasn't even theirs in the first place. i think you could make it clearly yours.

Jasper wrote:(sorry, lol, I was sitting here thinking AH was an abbreviation for some kind of advance reader...)

that sounds like a really awesome premise - and that's such bullshit, all they took from you! and then the ways they watered it down! I can't believe people would do something like that. even if we aren't thinking of the primary morality issue, you'd think it'd be easier to come up with ideas than actually write it out...? that's rough, I'm sorry. thank you for sharing what you could, though. I really love the picture it paints.
I can understand having the idea of continuing to write the story feel quite soured for you, but if you still have any interest in it, I'd encourage you wholeheartedly. I think you'd have a lot to bring to it that they wouldn't be able to - considering it wasn't even theirs in the first place. i think you could make it clearly yours.

Haha, it happens (commenting on the AH thing).

Anyway, I've met other writers who are also diverse where their idea has been undercut from them, and then the person decided to purge the diversity as well and then gave them no credit. Someone said they wrote a BL piece as a gay person, shared it someone and that person undercut them, made it *straight* and pretty much used the same scene beat for beat, word for word. And that's utter BS. (and yes the primary meaning of BS). !@#$. Seriously? They trusted you with their manuscript and you stole it that deep?

Magazines, for example, have had ideas pitched to them, and instead of letting the person who pitched the idea do the piece, they find someone less diverse do the exact same piece. That I've also seen people report. Like a month later after their pitch, they find someone with less diversity to do the same pitch same angle. I had one undercut similarly, where I said their piece was missing some things, and I wanted to pitch a more complete piece to them with a different angle, and then they spent the next few weeks trying to bait me by asking me for more background, etc, and the used the information I gave to beef up their existing piece *without credit*.

And again, I'm not against sharing, etc. But there has to be consent involved. And I think there should be credit given with consent. (Again, with consent.) I think the internet, in this case, has made it worse. Because some people think that the words generated aren't a real person, so they don't think about consequences.

You may not be able to copyright ideas, but there are still morality issues involved.

There is a website where writers report on magazines who don't pay after they publish them, etc. And whisper networks about agents that hate us diversity writers.

I fully see and believe that. Diversity is, in our current era, good for marketing, but only so much; there's still this attitude that anyone with more than one way they differ from the norm is too much, too weird, too 'cringe'. (for example, people losing their shit making fun of anyone writing, say, a schizoprenic bisexual latine in a wheelchair... but I know someone like that. There are many real people like that. especially since anyone not in the norm in one way or another is a lot more likely to fall out of the norm in other ways, due to environment or comorbidity or so many different variables.)
And especially when it comes to corporate environments. diversity is encouraged only in theory; really that's too much work to deal with, too many eggshells to walk on. they want everyone simple and uniform because that's who's easiest to turn into a cog.