cellar like a church

Yes, this.

I've tried pointing out to gamer friends:

What if you had a D&D-ish world but the fire-breathing dragons were all half a foot long and you can squish them with your shoe. What if the necromancers were 80-year-old white guys wearing a black sheet like a charlie-brown ghost outfit, and you could take them out with a quick punch and they'd never be able to cast an evil spell again. What if the lost ancient and deadly dwarven mines had an escalator installed so you could just zip down to the caverns, pick diamonds and rubies out of the wall, and zip back up.

Sounds boring, doesn't it. Or at least, doesn't sound like a Grand Adventure Quest game.

I don't mind fantasy settings with no deadly dragons, no creepy necromancers, no lost caverns of treasure. But the stories you get from the no-challenges worlds are not the same as the ones you get from the games where you have to put real effort into overcoming those challenges, and you might fail.

I can enjoy no-homophobia, no-sexism, no-racism etc. fictional settings. But the stories in those settings won't have anything meaningful to share about queer relationships, about marriage dynamics, about racial tensions in the office.

Moorcock wrote a series, the Dancers at the End of Time, about a utopia where everyone has power rings that can create anything they want, where everyone is immortal and basically omnipotent. They're fascinating books.

They are not about "how to face oppression." They are not stories about overcoming adversity. They are stories about "how do you create and maintain an identity when your life has no adversity at all, and how do you even communicate with people whose lives are shaped by challenges?"

You can have a suspense-thriller story in a no-homophobia world where two gay investigators are trying to catch a murderer before he kills again, and slowly falling in love as they work together.

You can't have a story about their queer romance, because there's nothing "queer" about it, in that setting. It's just a romance.

Romance is good! Romance without bigotry and oppression in the background is good!

It can be delightful to read about a world where people like you, people like me, are not facing weird "wtf are you doing with your life" every time we consider getting into a relationship. A world where our relationships face tensions like "job schedule conflicts" or "the relative are pressuring them to marry before they're ready" or "drastically different income levels" or "they're on rival sports teams" or "one of them is shipping off to Mars forever in a few weeks" or "one has a four-year-old child who hates the other one" whatever. Plenty of opportunity for tension and plot shenanigans without a background that includes societal prejudice, fear, and discrimination.

But the shape of that society isn't ours, and I'd need the author to convey that as well.

What do marriages look like in a world where it's not assumed to be "bride and groom?" Does the government track biological relations separately from legal ones - do birth certificates list multiple parents? What do masculinity and femininity look like - are there toys marketed separately for boys and girls? Do schools have segregated locker rooms for sports teams? What do boy bands look like if they're not specifically targeting teenage girl audiences? If there are arranged royal same-sex marriages, how do they insure the continuation of the two royal bloodlines? Do they even believe in the "divine right of kings" - are the bloodlines themselves considered important at all? If not, what's the foundation of the monarchy? Are there 4-way marriages between 2 lesbians and 2 gay men, contracted for the specific purpose of shared children? Are actual polyamorous marriages - everyone involved with everyone else - legal, with all the protections that modern society gives 2-person marriages? How does that work?

I don't need all those answers, especially not for a short story. But I need to believe the author could have those answers and more, if they had time to answer.

1 - the geese in the background show that the fake coyote doesn't deter geese