#((The internalized homophobia. The racism. Not to mention that the entire universe it exists in exists thanks to HP Lovecraft))

[adreamingsongbird]

no bird I'm dead serious I'd love to hear obama meta re: trflverse it'd seriously make my day

okay okay i’m sorry this took so long i just was waiting for The Right Moment to actually sit down and write out my thoughts

so okay the primary reason obama never was president in trfl is simply that if it’s to be assumed that trfl takes place in the magical analogue of the modern day, then obama would have had to be a major political figure, and frankly i the author am a little incredulous at the thought of trying to write even mentions magic obama into a serious story. i cant do it man i just... 

you know that one tumblr post with the photo of obama dramatically shot against the sun and it’s like “everything changed when the fire nation attacked”? that’s literally all i can think of, it’s just a giant meme, i have to draw the line SOMEWHERE and magic obama is PAST IT!!!!!!!

anyway moving on to some actual meta and worldbuilding talk i guess, if you’re seriously interested hahaha:

okay so honestly i’m trying to keep most things that have real-world counterparts vague and broad--i don’t want specific people or specific events because those are very constraining, from the worldbuilding point of view.  

i’ll be the first to admit that the current setup doesn’t entirely hold water under high scrutiny (this is mostly because i didn’t feel like rehashing the entire global history just for a fanfic), but references to very specific things like a person or particular event lead to questions.

(for example, you’ll probably have noted that international relations between my countries do not actually have much relation at all to their real-world analogues.  russia and italy don’t have a particularly strong tie, but because i wanted a bond between the crispinos and nikiforovs, ruthenia and víteliú are buddies. extending this, it logically follows that history cannot have followed the same course.)

so, given that history cannot have followed the same course, you might be wondering but rimi, what was the point of divergence? to which i would answer fuck if i know, but it definitely has something to do with magic.

in an ideal world, i would have the time to sit down and think about specific ways the presence of magic would influence historical events--it definitely impacted the development of technology, for example the earliest  skyports/carriages (a cumbersome term that’s a holdover bc they’ve been around so long, and don’t get me started on the possibilities for linguistic drift in a world where cultural interactions went global much earlier) were almost entirely magic-based, even before the invention of the nonmagical airplane.

(which also raises the question do the wright brothers exist in the trflverse?, but please don’t ask me that because honestly i don’t have a fucking clue i’d ramble for another several paragraphs about it and end up with a giant question mark anyway.)

however, this is not an ideal world and i have college classes and shit to worry about, so for convenience’s sake i’m just stealing the broad picture of the world we live in at the moment. even though i say i don’t follow the same history, there are by necessity callbacks to it, because the way we arrived at the present day is via the history of our world, so by extension a vague picture of that got transferred to trfl as well (such as vespuccia being a democratic republic instead of a monarchy, bc the US has never been a monarchy. so i’m sorta imagining it like around 1789 when the rest of the monarchist countries were just side-eyeing across the atlantic like “ey yo america wyd”.)

but there are important caveats to that!

for instance, in trfl i have elected to downplay homophobia, racism, and sexism, etc.  these things did exist in the past, but as far as the trflverse is concerned, it’s like star trek - those are ONLY things of the past.  this is more of a narrative choice than any kind of in-universe plot point; i just personally didn’t want to deal with that shit hahaha.  the same goes for religion and religious conflict; i felt that i didn’t have the time to build it into my world with an adequate amount of depth and respect, so i elected to set it aside.

this actually ties back to obama surprisingly nicely. i was rambling and i didn’t expect there to actually be structure in this but you know, i’ll take it.

so another reason that trflverse can’t have obama as a president is that obama’s presidency was very marked by the fact that he was the first guy who WASNT white to be president of the us (vespuccia), and if i included obama it’d put me in a really sticky situation. i would either a) have to include racism when i didn’t want to do that, or b) somehow write obama without acknowledging all the struggles he faced as a result of racist bigots, which feels like it would be really disrespectful.

(also tbh the idea of writing real people, even celebrities who may or may not have reached meme status, as characters in a fictional story is just weird to me. really weird.)

and finally it’s also that i wanted to leave room for other characters to be important in vespuccia, wink wonk.

#trfl #trfl meta #is... that going to be a tag now? #anon #answers