"Well, I sure feel like I now have enough information about their situation to start predicting some things."

"I don't think I'm seeing whatever you think you're seeing."

"Yeah, because your own backstory doesn't involve you reading any significant amount of dath ilani fiction.  A little surprised Thellim hasn't seen it already, but she's supposedly less intelligent than me so I guess that tracks."

Keltham's fingers are rapidly chording a number of different bids on submarkets that did not, previously, exist.

"Huh.  Well, now I feel stupider than whoever is the smartest person betting in this prediction market."

"Setting aside gendertropes, the latest update points out that the general trope here is that Leareth is some sort of ancient wizard and/or military commander who never had any time for romance before, and Ramona is the woman from the more scientifically sophisticated dimension who solved a number of his planet's problems using her superior knowledge, but not all of them, thus freeing him up to figure out Relationships and even his own gendertropes for the first time under conditions of great pressure where he needs to get them all right on the first try in order to preserve his irreplaceable relationship with Ramona."

"Ramona, did you not previously notice that you were the protagonist of a completely stereotypical romance novel premise?"

Um.

What?

Did Thellim just recap their entire weird relationship and then call it stereotypical?

Aaaaaaaah where are the prediction market bettors getting their information. Leareth hasn't said ANYTHING about his immortality method - that's the main unexplained part, the rest you could probably get from material he's actually said out loud to Thellim, but where does someone get "ancient wizard" without knowing facts about him that he's incredibly uncomfortable about mysterious people knowing! 

Leareth is trying to stay calm by reminding himself that the prediction market bettors are, one, bound by thorough confidentiality oaths and, two, are on a different level of reality or something and probably not in a position to go tell the less-pacified Velgarth gods, but he is still KIND OF UPSET about this. 

"Uh, no. No, I did not notice that. That is not a trope on my world -- it sounds pretty outlandish, actually -- and I don't think it would have been possible for me to notice?"

"Ahem. How does the story typically end?"

"Obviously your world has had some standard romance novel tropes deleted from it to preserve the conceit that you haven't noticed you're in a romance novel."

"And there aren't typical ends to a story like that.  How could there be?  If the story end was predictable, who'd bother writing it?  So the prediction markets are now more uncertain about a lot of things, except for the part where your very clever and reader-sympathetic idea to outsource your relationship problems to a third-party therapist is going to run into some sort of obstacle that forces you to discover and solve most of your key romantic problems by yourselves.  That's not to say we're being useless here, just, the set of problems we solve are only going to be relatively straightforward problems that your generalized readers would otherwise find boring to read about."

"Some sort of obstacle? So you're saying that you refuse to help us? For... plot reasons?"

"No, I'd guess it's going to be external to me.  I can't think of any thinly justified reasons I'd refuse to help you."

This seems like an even more crazymaking way of thinking than trying to predict godplots.

"...Is this theory supposed to have implications for how we should be approaching the couples therapy? Should we be - trying to approach solving our problems in ways that would be particularly interesting to read about, so that it is less likely to fail for 'plot reasons'?" 

"Probably ultimately yes, but I would try the reasonable strategies first."

Thiiiis is not a school of therapy Ramona is aware of on Earth. Is this designed for people who enjoy overcomplicating things and/or believe they are the protagonist of everything that happens, or assume that everything they do has a large audience with high expectations? What kind of a world develops therapies like that?

This is not standard therapy from Thellim's world!  She is making up everything as she goes along, with heuristics partially derived from her experiences the last several times she got isekaied in various ways!

"Okay! Let's try the reasonable strategies first! I have lost track a little bit... what exactly are the reasonable strategies you recommend, given that we find ourselves in the standard ancient-wizard-tackles-relationships-for-the-first-time plot?"

"Now that you're aware of the situation you're in, my guesses aren't necessarily better than yours!"

"But if I was narrowing things down from my end, the first thing I'd ask is whether this is the sort of ancient-wizard-tackling-relationships-for-the-first-time who enormously undercommunicates everything and keeps all his thoughts hidden out of time-worn hard-learned habit, or a different kind of ancient-wizard-tackling-relationships-for-the-first-time."

Is...that...sufficiently a common point in stories in Thellim's world to count as a "trope." 

"...I suspect I do have that habit. It might not be the only habit I have that - causes problems for Ramona - but, yes, that seems like a good summary of part of the problem."

Also he's not yet entirely sold on changing the habit. It's hard-learned for reasons that he's not convinced are different now? 

"Well, in terms of practice, the obvious thing to try is writing down notes to yourself about which thoughts you're having, and then asking yourself, for each of those thoughts, if there's any good reason not to explain it out loud to Ramona."

"But of course if your character is playing straight the trope of the ancient-wizard-tackling-relationships-for-the-first-time-who-undercommunicates, you may first need to have a long conversation with yourself, or with Ramona, about to what extent you believe that it's now safe for you to talk about more things with her.  Ramona may need to go on some sort of subquest about that, about proving it to you or figuring out the right experiment to run; she's probably the main character given that more information is being concealed from her."

"I'm the main character? Of our relationship?"

Ramona is maybe offended?

"Of the story plot about your relationship.  Relationships don't have main characters, plots do."

Okay. Ramona is mollified. Confused. But mollified.

...Leareth is perhaps a little more impressed with Thellim's theory, now that it's produced at least one accurate prediction that he was surprised Thellim was able to guess. 

"Well, that part is also true. It - does seem somewhat unfair to Ramona to make it her sidequest to solve?" 

"I don't mind doing side quests! I think that's pretty normal in relationships, and reluctance to participate in side quests can be a barrier to increasing intimacy! I was mostly miffed before because I have definitely seen couples where one person thinks it's all about them, and that they're the main character, and I don't want this relationship to work like that."

"What kind of a side quest would help Leareth know that I'm trustworthy?"

She thinks for a minute.

"Seems like trust mostly builds over time. You can destroy it very quickly, but you can't build it quickly."

"Then we should ask how to make that timeskip -- which the two of you will actually need to live through, from your own in-story perspectives -- bearable and even pleasant for both of you!"

"But it really does make sense to see if there's cheaper cheatier answers than that, before assuming a problem can only be solved by time.  Like if telepathy is a thing on your world, for example, or if there's one particular enemy of Leareth that the two of you can together hunt down and persuade of some true fact that makes them stop being your enemy."

"...I mean, I do have Thoughtsensing? Though I am not sure how much the reluctance to change this habit is about not trusting Ramona specifically. I think that even if I trusted Ramona absolutely and had no concern at all that she would try to harm my interests, I would still feel a need to be paranoid in general, because there are still hostile actors in my world, and it feels difficult to change a habit of paranoia only for Ramona and not have it affect how I approach everything else? And I do worry about Ramona's safety. It would not be the first time that my enemies," the gods, "had placed the people close to me in danger. ...I suppose this is in theory solvable if we could convince all of my enemies to stop that, but in practice that would be very complicated and it would be hard to - be sufficiently sure."