I’ve been sick this week. Most of that time I was stuck in that annoying state where you’re too tired to actually work on anything productive yet not tired enough to be able to take a nap. To keep myself occupied, I surfed around TvTropes. TvTropes is just interesting enough to not be boring, yet light enough to read while brain-dead, making it ideal for reading while sick. It’s also a great place to stumble across great webcomics, anime, and webfiction. It’s how I discovered Misfile, my favorite webcomic, and Oku-sama wa mahou shoujo, an excellent anime.

On Monday TvTropes helped me again, leading me to the Whateley Academy stories. Imagine Hogwarts, but with superpowers instead of magic. This may sound like Xavier Academy. While there are some superficial similarities, it’s very different. Like Hogwarts, Whateley Academy has their Slytherin-type kids, and the Whateley stories focus on life at a boarding high school — the insecurities, the cliques, the mischief. The emphasis is on the characters and their interactions, not on battles, morality tales, or politics. Stories are generally written in first-person, making it easy to empathize with what the character is going through.

The Whateley Academy stories are set in a shared universe, where each author writes stories for one or two characters. For instance, Maggie Finson writes about Fey, a boy turned Faerie Mage, while Starwolf writes about Tennyo, who ended up with a body and powers similar to Ryoko from Tenchi Muyo. Each author brings something different to the table, preventing the cookie-cutter character syndrome that plagues so many anime series today.

Since all these characters are attending the same school (and, for the most part, are in the same dorm), the same events are sometimes described by multiple characters. For instance, during a fight, a character will narrate who she fought, and the problems she ran into, with occasional glimpses of what she saw her friends doing. In the end she may believe she was a hindrance to her friends. In a different story, one of her friends may describe what he was doing doing the same fight, and come out thinking about how his friend saved the day. Even simple things, like trips to town for shopping, are treated very different by each character, which is not surprising given their varied backgrounds.

In short, the world has been well-thought out, with a lot of attention to detail, and the characters feel authentic. As soon as you start reading them, you feel as if you’ve been transported to Whateley Academy, a place where the impossible is possible. I highly recommend them.

For another description of the Whateley Universe, please see http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhateleyUniverse. The Whateley stories themselves, as well as discussion forums and chat rooms, are at http://www.crystalhall.org.