Married Mai Waifu For Real
So you're Trapped in Another World, one that you recognize from fiction back home. And it's a work with a character that you really, really liked. And you've met that character here. Wonder of wonders, after the character gets to know you, they really, really like you, too; when you ask whether they want to get married, They Do. Congratulations! But this story doesn't end there with a Happily Ever After; you and your special other still have a life to live together.
Married Mai Waifu For Real is when what would otherwise be an "Author Avatar or similar original character Trapped in Another World gets the canon character" Wish Fulfillment story continues after the wedding. This is not just about getting the girl (or whoever); that's Happily Ever After. This is about telling stories about full-fledged relationships; the characters have to balance their work and family lives, and they have children if they've been together for long enough. In many ways, this is a Deconstruction of Happily Ever After, done in a way that doesn't invalidate that trope's basic premise.
Contrast with Happily Ever After, as mentioned above, and And the Adventure Continues..., which ends the story without showing any of the life that the isekaied character and the canon character live together.
The Trope Maker is Undocumented Features, where five of the Author Avatars form families with who in Real Life would be considered to be fictional characters.
Fan Works
- As mentioned above, the Trope Maker is Undocumented Features:
- Most of the pairs above have at least one child. (And Hammer and Eiko have had a series of foster and adopted children.) There are so many children of avatars that starting with its Future Imperfect phase, UF has become focused on the adventures of next generation rather than the original Author Avatars.
- The only reason the Official Couple in Isekai by Moonlight (Robu and Makoto) isn't married is because her guardian has told them to wait. They're otherwise an example of this trope, wearing each other's rings, scheduling fun times around work, shopping for groceries together, sharing the household chores, and eventually supporting each other in combat.
- In the New Beginnings fanfic cycle by Hiver (based on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic) the Author Avatar - who awakened as a unicorn - marries Princess Luna (and a few others). They're deeply in love, and they have to work their private time around their jobs as rulers.
- Neon Exodus Evangelion, if you insist that DJ Croft is a "disguised" SI despite Eyrie Productions, Unlimited's claims to the contrary. The end of Apotheosis Now has DJ proposing to Asuka, and the fragmentary "sequel" material that's appeared in the years since make it clear that they've been married for at least a couple decades afterward.
- Taking Sean Gaffney's Sailor Moon stories Made of Stone and Trials and Errors as a single narrative gives us Sean and Hotaru as a couple.
- The completed Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? fanfic I am a girl in the dungeon? has the isekai protagonist arriving in the Dungeon below Orario. She marries her local lover roughly two-thirds of the way through the story.
Literature
- The "Mary Russell" series by Laurie R. King: Halfway between fanfic and literature, in The Beekeeper's Apprentice we are introduced to Mary Russell. It is unrevealed whether her middle name is Sue, but Mary is a Sherlock Holmes fan who runs into the aging detective in Sussex (at a point after where the Conan Doyle stories end). Mary eventually gets a degree in theology and marries Holmes. She is of course written by an author who is a Sherlock Holmes fan with a degree in theology. Played With in that Mary is an Author Avatar rather than Trapped in Another World.
- Harold Shea, who from what little description we have of him at least looks like his writer L. Sprague de Camp, married Belphebe from The Faerie Queene in "The Mathematics of Magic". They went on to have adventures together in the subsequent novels of the Compleat Enchanter series.
- Played with in-universe in the Chinese novel The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System. Airplane Shooting Into The Sky, the author of the in-universe novel "Proud Immortal Demon Way", transmigrates into his novel as minor villain Shang Qinghua, a Dirty Coward Heel Face Revolving Door type of character destined to die in the hands of his employer, ice demon lord Mobei-Jun, who was written as Airplane's ideal man. So Airplane decides to avoid his canonic fate by going full Lickspittle on Mobei-Jun, and accidentally manages to make Mobei-Jun fall in love with him. The problem was that Airplane's ideal man was Tall, Dark, Buff and Stoic Ice King, and also he wrote the demon race as extremely violent people who don't get love particularly well, so not only Airplane/Shang Qinghua doesn't realize for a long time that Mobei-Jun has fallen (or that he can fall) in love with him, Mobei-jun himself didn't realize he had fallen for Shang Qinghua until the latter gets into mortal peril.