Fantasy

Impossible things, sent as texts

Fantasy sits oddly in a messaging format, and the stories that work are the ones that lean into the oddness rather than around it. A character texting about a world with magic in it has to explain nothing to their correspondent, which means the reader picks the rules up sideways; from complaints, from shorthand, from what nobody bothers to mention.

What you will find here ranges from light contemporary fantasy, where the strange thing is the only strange thing, to fully built secondary worlds delivered entirely through correspondence. The second kind is rarer and usually longer; the writers who attempt it tend to keep going.

This is one of the smaller categories in the archive, which means it turns over more slowly but the hit rate is higher; a story has to be doing something deliberate to end up here at all. Sorting by chapters will find the serials; sorting by date will show you whether anyone is actively writing in it this month.