Tag: dragons

ChatGPT writes a trashy novel that fits all the current market trends

So just for fun, I asked ChatGPT to list the post popular tropes in science fiction and fantasy literature right now, pick the most popular subgenre, and write up a novel synopsis that mashes up all of those tropes.

To no one’s surprise, the subgenre it chose was romantasy, but it also threw in dragons, dark academia, and time magic. Here is the complete synopsis:

Here is a tighter, sharper, more compelling 1000-word synopsis that follows the same outline but sells the story harder—maximizing emotional hooks, character stakes, and the high-heat romantasy appeal. Spoilers intact.

The Hundredth Life of the Dragon-Bonded

Rina Ashvale has always been ordinary—poor, unnoticed, unimportant. But on the morning of the Day of Choosing, she wakes with the unshakable feeling that she’s lived this day before. And died in it. Images flash behind her eyes: burning skies, a dragon’s scream, a prince’s hand dripping with blood. None of it makes sense.

Everything changes when Sereth, the most ancient and aloof of all dragons, chooses her as his rider. The bond hits like a lightning strike: thousands of half-formed memories, shards of forgotten lives, and a sense of wrongness in the fabric of the world. Sereth refuses to explain, and Rina finds herself thrust into the elite dragon war-college—completely unprepared, utterly overwhelmed, and lodged in the same wing as the kingdom’s most dangerous cadet: Prince Kael Vorian, heir to their nation’s long-time enemy.

Their first interaction is a disaster. Kael—brilliant, beautiful, and infuriating—sees Rina as an unworthy upstart bonded to a dragon she doesn’t deserve. Rina sees him as an arrogant elite who’s never had to fight for anything real. But whenever they clash in the skies, sparks fly far beyond anger. Something in the dragon bond won’t let them ignore each other.

As Rina trains, she slowly forms a found family with three other misfit cadets—gentle Jory, fierce Thalia, and quick-tongued Marek. Life at the academy carries surprising warmth: late-night mess hall confessions, shared exhaustion after flight drills, stolen pastries in the city. For the first time in her life, Rina feels like she belongs.

But then the déjà vu returns—harder, sharper. She predicts an ambush drill seconds before it happens, saving Kael’s life in a maneuver she can’t explain. When she confronts Sereth, the dragon finally admits the truth:

The world is trapped in a time loop. Ninety-nine times, humanity has fallen to the Void. Ninety-nine times, reality has reset to the beginning of this academy term. Dragons remember. Humans do not.
Except Rina.

Her growing memories mean one thing: she may be the first human in a hundred loops capable of breaking the cycle.

But the moment Rina begins changing events—saving lives that used to be lost, altering training outcomes—the Void adapts. Darker monsters appear. Missions that were once safe become fatal. Jory loses his arm. Marek nearly dies. And Rina realizes a horrifying truth: every change she makes doesn’t erase suffering—it only shifts it onto someone else.

Through it all, Kael remains her fiercest rival and most dangerous ally. Their tension spikes during a magical mishap that amplifies emotion, throwing them into a breathless near-scene neither can forget. During the annual Festival of the First Flame, in the chaos of a Void creature attack, they end up pressed together in a narrow alley, clinging to each other with equal parts fear and longing. When they finally give in to the desire they’ve been denying—an explosive, passionate moment in the dragon stables—they can no longer pretend what’s between them is merely conflict.

But Rina’s growing memories deliver an unbearable blow: in one of the previous loops, Kael burned her village to the ground to slow the Void’s advance. He admits it. He regrets it. He would do it again if it meant saving the world.

Their fragile connection shatters.

As the loop destabilizes, the world begins to tear. Rina slips into the Twilight Reach, the dream-realm dragons inhabit between deaths. There she meets the Hollow King, a godlike Void entity who has been feeding on the loop for centuries. He offers her a seductive bargain: sever the dragon bonds and the loop will end forever—no more death, no more suffering. But it would also mean the extinction of dragons, the world’s only memory-keepers.

Rina refuses. She will not save the world by erasing its heart.

Meanwhile, Kael uncovers a devastating truth: his father, the emperor, is planning a military strike to seize the academy’s dragons, a move that could break the loop catastrophically and hand victory to the Void. Kael offers to kill his father to prevent it. Rina stops him. Instead, she proposes a desperate ritual to jump the timeline forward—getting ahead of the emperor’s plan.

The ritual fails spectacularly.

Time fractures.

The academy splits into two overlapping timelines—the unchanged past loop and the altered timeline Rina and Kael created. Students flicker in and out of existence. Some have duplicates. Others appear as ghosts of who they were meant to be.

Rina’s squad members are caught between versions of themselves. With Sereth’s help, Rina merges their memories, giving each friend the best parts of both lives—even if it costs Sereth more of his dwindling strength. Every memory he surrenders feeds the growing collapse of the loop.

Rina finally understands: dragons carry the burden of memory, but they cannot change it. That’s why the loop always resets. Only a human mind—someone capable of holding all ninety-nine lives at once—can force time forward for good.

She volunteers to carry the full weight of the loop. Kael refuses to let her do it alone.

Together, in the Twilight Reach, Rina and Kael confront the Hollow King. Sereth sacrifices himself to shatter the loop, unleashing all his stored timelines in one final blaze. The Hollow King retreats—but not before warning that breaking the cycle will unleash consequences no one can predict.

Rina and Kael awaken in a world that has never existed before: one without resets, without second chances, without dragons except for a few younglings who survived the collapse. The academy is in ruins. Their nations have fractured. Rina’s village is gone in every timeline. Kael is disowned. The world is raw and wounded—but real.

With their surviving squadmates, they build a small dragon-rider outpost beside a river. Half refuge, half academy, it becomes the first place Rina has ever chosen for herself. Kael stays with her—not as a prince, not as a rival, but as the man who shared a hundred lifetimes of pain and desire with her.

For the first time, dawn breaks on a future that isn’t written.

Standing together in the new light, Rina and Kael speak the vow that binds them:

“We will be the dragons who remember.”

The loop is broken.
The world is reborn.
And their love—forged across a hundred lives—has finally outrun time itself.

So what do you think? Does it sound like something you’d actually want to read? Like something that might even be better than most of the trashy, trendy novels out there, even if it’s total AI slop?

I have no intention of actually writing this book, so if you feel like writing (or generating) it, knock yourself out. Just send me a link if you actually publish it.

Fantasy from A to Z: D is for Dragons

If you were expecting a post about dragons, I hate to disappoint you. but that’s not what this is going to be. I think dragons are fine, and there are lots of fantasy books with dragons that I’ve enjoyed (Jane Yolen’s Dragon’s Blood comes to mind, as does The Hobbit, which is, after all, a classic for a reason), but I’ve never read a dragon book that made me go crazy for dragons. 

(And yes, I’ve read the Dragonriders of Pern books by Anne McAffrey, or at least the first two books. I can appreciate how other people like them, but frankly, the dragons are just way too OP for me. I mean, come on: not only can they teleport anywhere on the planet, but they can also travel through time? That’s just too much.)

Rather, I want to explore the idea of “here be dragons”—specifically, how it was that before the modern age, every civilization’s map of the world had a huge part of it that was dark and unexplored. Until that period ended, I don’t think it was possible for the modern fantasy genre to emerge. 

Some people think that fantasy is an old genre, with roots that go back at least as far as the Roman Empire (some lists include The Golden Ass by Apuleius as the first fantasy book) and possibly much longer. But I think that fantasy is a much more modern genre, and as such has much more in common with science fiction than it does with the ancient myths and legends from which the genre often draws inspiration.

It all comes back to this idea of “here be dragons.” Until the modern age, it wasn’t possible to write fantasy fiction because for all anyone knew, there might actually be dragons, or hobbits, or elves, or dwarves, or unicorns in some unexplored part of the world. Indeed, the medieval world was full of fanciful stories that many people actually believed, such as the mythical tales of Prester John that motivated so many crusaders, or the rumors that prima nocta had been forced upon the people just over the next mountain range (as far as we can tell, prima nocta was never actually practiced, but almost all European cultures thought that it had been enforced somewhere else).

If you went back in time and tried to write a fantasy novel for these people, they probably would have read it the way we read some of our more elaborate and creative conspiracy theories today. Part of the reason we enjoy fantasy is because we know that it’s fictional. The suspension of disbelief allows us to enjoy the story without constantly asking ourselves “wait—is this real?” or excitedly shouting “nuh-uh—no way!” Instead, we can just cozy up in our reading nook and let the story carry us away to another world, knowing that it only exists in our head.

The modern era began with the fall of the Roman Byzantine Empire and the Age of Exploration in the 14th century. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, though, that the Europeans had fully explored the world, filling in those parts of the world map that said (in one way or another) “here be dragons.” It’s not a coincidence that proto-fantasy writers like Lord Dunsaney and William Morris came onto the scene at this time. At first, people didn’t know what to make of these mythologies and adventure tales set in fictional worlds, but they paved the way for later writers like Howard and Tolkien to forge the fantasy genre as we know it today.

Science fiction and fantasy may seem like opposites, but they are really more like two sides of the same coin. Both are essentially modern genres, but where science fiction broadly looks to the future, fantasy looks to the past. Indeed, a large part of fantasy’s appeal is this sense of nostalgic longing that it gives us for a world that never actually was. Tolkien was a master of this. Howard was too, though he was a little more explicit about it in his worldbuilding: his Hyborian Age is supposed to be set in our own world, many thousands of years ago in the prehistoric era, as evidenced by the maps he drew up, and the way his Picts carry through all of his stories, including the Roman-era tales of Bran Mak Morn. 

All of this is to say that while we read fantasy for very different reasons than why we read science fiction, we read both genres as children of the modern age, and the genres would make very little sense to us otherwise. If you took Lord of the Rings back in a time machine to the middle ages, it wouldn’t give them that nostalgic sense of yearning for a simpler time. Frankly, it would probably leave most of them feeling confused (and wondering why there’s a distinct lack of religion—even though, to our modern sensibilities, Lord of the Rings has lots of subtle Christian symbolism). 

Every book is a product of the culture that created it, and as such, modern fantasy has far more in common with its brother genre science fiction than with its great-great grandfathers: pagan mythology, Christian allegory, epic poetry, etc. Fantasy certainly draws from all of these, but until the world was fully mapped—until “here be dragons” had been fully excised from our understanding of the world—the fantasy genre as we know and love it today was still gestating in the womb.

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