Tales from the Oedipal Zone

The Oedipal Zone idea is a creation of Squelchapron, from his old “freeusecaptions” Tumblr. The original captioned stories (Field Observations and Paragon Magazine) have been used here with his permission.

An Oedipal Zone is an area within a more general free use world. The normal free use tropes apply in most parts of the world: society functions more or less as it does in the real world, but adult women are expected to submit to any sexual request from an adult male. This is a relatively recent change in the world, within the last generation or so, but one that’s universally accepted.

Many variants of the baseline free use rules exist in this world, but in an Oedipal Zone, the first born son of a family assumes the duties of head of household when they reach 18. In Bakerton, for example, they’re followed in authority by younger adult sons, then the father, then any female family members, but other variants of the social rules exist in other O.Z.s and secondary male family members may have no authority at all

The original story followed a graduate student doing research on life within the Oedipal Zone of Bakerton, and Squelchapron also did a captioned story about the world's first Oedipal Zone in Greenville, North Carolina, which was caused by a chemical spill.

Tales from the Oedipal Zone is best viewed as an anthology, so I would recommend logging in and checking the story map. Some branches are long-form stories, while OZ One-Shots are short snippets of life in an OZ. 'Browsing the web in Greenville' take a more multimedia approach, showing us a view of the internet in this world.

I hope you have fun exploring the Oedipal Zones, and feel free to create one of your own!

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Edit: I'm a little late on this, but I can't quite believe we're past 100 chapters. Thanks to everyone who's been reading and contributing. - CD

Edit: Almost up to 250 chapters now! Thanks again to all our great contributors! - CD

Edit: We have a discord server for the OZ now. If you're a interested as a contributor, or would just like to ask questions or discuss the OZ stories with others, feel free to DM Squelchapron or myself for an invite. I had previously posted a direct link here, but apparently those expire. The server is fairly quiet most of the time, but it is a good place to ask questions of the story owners (myself and Squelchapron) or other contributors about OZ lore. - CD

_Edit: For a different take on a similar concept, check out The Zones. If you have a story idea that doesn't quite fit the restrictions of an OZ, it might find a home there. - CD

_Update 24-April-2023: It looks like Imgur will be removing NSFW images as of May 15th (https://www.wired.com/story/imgur-bans-porn/). A lot of images for this story are hosted there. I'll be going over the chapters in the next few weeks and saving local copies of the images, in case they need to be re-uploaded later when another suitable hosting site is found. Individual OZ authors may wish to do the same - CD

Update 15-May-2023: Big thanks to CHYOA's own Friedman, who ran a script to move all imgur-hosted images to a different location (site wide, not just for the OZ). That was above and beyond. :) -CD