About
Refraction is a fiction project inspired by the glowfic genre.
For those unfamiliar with glowfic:
Refraction is a collection of stories that share similar characters, settings, and themes. Not all of each are present in every story, and versions of a character may arise in very different settings. Likewise, otherwise similar settings may not necessarily share the same cast of characters. Refraction will happily employ fusion premises, such as a story where Sherlock Holmes is a fairy in the court of Titania and Oberon, or Odin and Hermes are human lovers in Prohibition-era Chicago.
Refraction aspires to be a subgenre and a literary tradition, like Arthurian myth or vampire fiction or fanon. Characters, settings, and themes may be reused, ignored, or modified, and new ones may be added. Refraction stories inspire and build upon one another, without being bound to fit together as a single continuity.
Refraction uses the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license, so no one can take away your rights to share it and contribute to it.
Refraction is about intelligent, proactive people who succeed by their wits. It’s about the means by which such people achieve their goals, and it’s about what it’s like to be such a person. It’s also about people who sometimes fail, and it’s about how they deal with those failures. Refraction is not about people who win just by being stronger than everyone else.
Sometimes characters may discover unusual magic powers, or make contact with another world that works very differently from their own. In such cases, the focus of the story is generally not on the most obvious consequences of the situation, but on the clever and creative ways that the characters handle it.
For fans of glowfic:
Most fanfiction settings are unsuitable for Refraction. It is released under a Free Culture license (CC BY-SA), and as such it only uses original settings and settings that are compatibly licensed. For similar reasons, characters are not represented with pictures of celebrities.
Refraction is not all one canon. Different stories may freely contradict each other; they are connected by a common style rather than a common continuity.
The focus of Refraction is on moderately powerful characters making clever use of limited abilities. The heroes should win through ingenuity and good priorities. Once they become sufficiently powerful to bludgeon their problems into submission with the application of copious superpowers, the story is probably over.
To that end, there is relatively little world-hopping in Refraction. Worlds can come in contact, but usually only do so in twos or threes. Interdimensional travelers are not funneled to a convenient hub, nor can they efficiently seek each other out. There are not opportunities to accumulate powers from dozens of worlds.
Finally:
Nothing is set in stone. If you have a better idea, go for it.
Please note that Refraction may contain distressing or triggering content. If this is unacceptable to you, then you may prefer to read something else instead.