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reinedeslys-central · 2 months

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kotlc things that I keep thinking about that are never really addressed by canon

there is a complete replica of sophie's bedroom and perhaps countless other rooms just. somewhere in a building in mysterium that the councillors just know about.

alden and other telepaths were instructed to monitor the citizens' minds for signs of dissent around the time the prentice thing was going down

they regularly torture prisoners and dissenters into literal insanity that they can't come back from

they also have a super weird prison only accessible by quicksand (????) to house said prisoners

there is an ENTIRE DUNGEON OF WEIRD LAB EXPERIMENTS DOWN BY THE VACKER HOUSE?

okay. how - how big is havenfield?

the entire thing with - is their name twix? the person dex was working with for something. why do we not get to see that more. why is dex the criminally underrated goated character and WE DON'T GET FLESHED OUT CHARACTER ARCS FOR EVERYONE

linh flooded. atlantis. linh song FLOODED ATLANTIS hello what do people think about that?????????? do they see her on the street and whisper? what's up with "The Girl Of Many Floods"? Where else did she flood?

What is up with the song family (tong? their name changed after their grandmother or smth got famous with their music right?) that both their children not only have two very powerful elemental abilities, but are also crazy skilled with said Talents.

why are music, art, and culture not a bigger thing? like yeah, plot, obviously, but that's just worldbuilding!!! I wanna see!!!! art hanging on the walls! Defying gravity! more sculptures! more music playing in the shopping centres!! If they have imparters why don't they have long distance radio? are there mandatory dance lessons? what's the etiquette like besides what we already know?

more animal husbandry at schools. speaking of schools: we KNOW foxfire and exilium aren't the only schools. are smaller schools more specialised? are their community colleges or academies dedicated to specific career paths? universities?

okay but the polyglot ability is SO COOL???? tell me about the archaic variants of the enlightened language. there's no way that's just the elves' one language and the other species picked it up due to their 'superiority' or wtv. the goblins have cities of gold and metal and the trolls age backwards, you're not convincing me of anything.

secret societies in the other species. that has to exist right?

.....is squall dex's mom or not? I genuinely can't remember.

anyway remember when she froze gethen's fingernails off, yeah that happened (I think)

so instead of rehabilitating teenagers who have dangerous abilities and not much control over their powers, we just do....whatever the council did with gethen, ruy, and linh ig

hey, um...are we just not going to talk about dex casually HACKING INTO A GOV DATABASE WITH SOME RANDOM BITS OF ROCK AND TWINE? he can just do that. okay. okay. that's - yeah, okay.

did he match a frequency or something? how does the signal network even work in kotlc when everyone is technically all over the world in unplottable locations and they get around by LIGHT LEAPING???

ON THAT NOTE. light leaping. yeah haha funny let's just teach our kids to casually break down their very particles and hold onto their consciousness to travel at the speed of light using quantum mechanics and crystals that are specifically cut to project light in such a way that'll take you only to a specific location nvm im not thinking more about it.

flickering? is apparently a skill you can learn even if you're not a vanisher? remember in book two when fitz got prissy at sophie for knowing how to do it apparently b4 we figured out that she's a teleporter

keefe is a fun loveable goofball and I've always been on the sokeefe train but now the more I think about it he's really um.... yeah, uh, sophie? darling, please just don't date any of these people. obv you can make your own decisions but at least not now, okay. take care of yourself hon

the fitz hate is kinda weird ngl. wdym you don't want your problematic traitor brother to move back in to living literally with your family after supposedly losing his memories and that's a bad thing? wdym your close friend/crush is hiding things from you when yall are supposed to be cognates and she's kinda gaslighting you since, forever? wdym your father's been shadily telling you to stalk this girl in the human world since you were a kid? yeah definitely he does pull some weird stints throughout the series. but the bigger things i see ppl hating on him for are. hmmmmm

the council themselves choose to lock away the government secrets and wipe them from their memories. hey, um - recordkeeping is great, obvious, but - wiping those secrets from your minds isn't gonna help you lead while accounting for those parts of history, is it? nevermind how dangerous it is when there are huge species-wide secrets that NO ONE remembers. society-threatening incident waiting to happen.

the concept of vociferators. that's just kinda funny lol even if it is weird

are their schoold for diff abilities?

what's the genetics of talent inheritance? why are 'stronger' abilities rarer? In my opinion, p much every talent is goated, I don't see why more characters aren't more creative about it.

banning talents is just a bad move. like. are you serious? how is that going to make it better? that's how you get brant. brant was a pyrokinetic, without getting into the primary issue of the whole talentless/talented discrimination discourse, the secondary issue is he wouldve been able to marry jolie as two talented elves. would he have cracked if his ability was just a bit better handled by society?

grady is a mesmer. how - that's a really powerful ability???? how do you even train to use that? what do you even use it for?

same with whatever that lady councillor is that tried to seduce alden during his own wedding. fun times, yall.

rainbow fire??? cool????

so we have the sanctuary, do we also have a gigantic library of alexandria-esque thing? a botanical garden?

according to jolie's wiki she died at twenty as a level 8 at foxfire. so... hang on a minute. okay, sure, numerically that could make sense since sophie, at 12, became a level one - but are you telling me she went through the whole matchmaking process and was planning to get married that young????

hey, here's an idea - in a relatively stable society where economy is great, trust funds exist, people work to have something to do with their lives, birth rate is generally low (now through prejudice as well as societal comfort and ease/cost of living), why are they marrying so young? WHY ARE THE KIDS STARTING THE MATCHMAKING PROCESS IN THEIR TEENS???? the elven society has p much every mark of a stage 5 developed country? help? middle-high school human geography??

if they apparently live so long, show me the funny messy family trees with couples having children generations apart.

so, trust funds of lusters??? lustres?? (which we barely ever see. why is there little-to-no use of money?) which equate to roughly one trillion USD (in value? are you. are you - um. are you....serious?) exist. but I guess inflation and relative currency value from mass money printing doesn't count in this world, as well as the fact that there's only one currency for all the elves.

I wanna see a divorced elven couple now. how does divorce law work??????

if there's such a low BR and low population and people are yet still encouraged to have less kids to 'not dilute the genes' (that's my next point btw), I'm guessing matchmaking is encouraged younger to make sure population stays stable/growing? obv you need it to ensure genetic diversity and no incest, but if it's heavily encouraged for elves to have children like this, are queer elves mandated to have children with a surrogate/other couple even if they have a same-sex marriage?

i'll probably edit this or reblog it to include more stuff (character limit lol) as i remember the books bc it's been a hot minute since i read them.

#kotlc #thoughts #headcanons #meta #questions #the series is actually really interesting worldbuilding-wise #shannon messenger #what's going on?????#keeper of the lost cities #sophie foster #grady ruewen #edaline ruewen #jolie ruewen #fitz vacker #biana vacker #dex dizznee

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elbiotipo · 3 months

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Workbuilding Fundamentalist question: when it comes to dates, times and calendars in a fantasy setting where do you stand? I'm always conflicted as a writer just because changing the length of a year or what all the months are called all makes sense given that most fantasy worlds aren't earth and because every month is named after a person or deity and our calendar has been changed like 7 times in the real world. And yet I don't want to throw all this extra work at the reader.

Example I have a gas dwarf planet with like, winderwaker islands poking out above the gaseous ocean what people live on. And there's only 4 months in a year there so a 64 year old is still a teenager and it just seems like a lot to make someone keep track of.

First of all, very cool setting, I love islands among the clouds! Now, this is actually something I've given a lot of thought into, and might become a real concern if humanity goes to other planets.

There's, for example, an opening line of a Heinlein novel (IIRC) where a girl says she's 10 years old and thus old enough to marry, which is true, on Mars (the year is 687 days there). There is no reason, if one is designing a new planet, or even finding one IRL, to expect it to have the same day and year lenght to Earth, not even close. Mars with 21 hours is pretty close, but the length of our year and day is really just a cosmic coincidence. You could easily have an reasonably earth-like planet with shorter years (because it's closer to its star, or just revolves faster), or longer days or years.

However, very few fictional settings bother with this, and it's not hard to see why, you can have all sorts of exotic additions to your setting, but to wrap our head through different lenghts of the year or the day is a bit too much. Even different week lenghts, which did exist on history, sound strange. There are all sorts of different fantasy and sci-fi calendars, but at the root, most authors operate with "Earth-time". I don't blame them, it is 'extra work' for some readers, and it's not easy to wrap our head around, it's easier to say "this is sort of an alternate Earth" and be done with it. Also, to lenghten or shortern the year or day might bring all sorts of consequences from ecology to climate that should be considered, otherwise it's just a lame gimmick in my opinion.

HOWEVER, it's still an interesting piece of worldbuilding to consider!

Calendars of a sort have existed since humans started to count seasons and days, but our current society where there are calendars and clocks everywhere is quite recent, actually. I'm sure you are aware of the different calendars besides the BCE-CE one was imposed as the standard, many cultures . But there are also different ways of counting years;. The classic one is seasons, farming societies of course need it the most but hunter-gatherers also follow and know the seasons. There is no reason at all for them to correspond to the "temperate" seasons (summer, fall, winter, spring). Dry and wet seasons, cold and summer, and other options are not only possible, but have actually been widespread on human history. I recommend reading on Wikipedia about seasons, especially the section about non-calendar based seasons.

Of course the above applies to pre-industrial civilizations where timekeeping isn't as widespread. But even in those, counting years and ages is treated differently. Birthdays, for example, don't exist in all cultures. Koreans still count age based on the Korean new year, not your birthday. Some medieval Christian celebrated on the feast of the saint they were named after (and there are lots of them) or IIRC, their baptism. And so, a culture as yours might use different ways of counting the age of a person, perhaps by more "qualitative" rituals than just counting the years (though I have a feeling they would quickly adapt to their own calendar). Much like I told you about different kinds of seasons for different climates, I imagine that in worlds where the years are too short (or too long) to really make sense for the average person, some other ways of counting time will prevail. For example, are there predictable climate cycles in your planet? Moons (lunar calendars are always fun)? I can assume your planet has shorter years because it's closer to your star (by any chance, did you base it on red-dwarf orbiting planets?), so perhaps you could use something regarding the very visible star to count time?

Like I said at the beginning, this will be a real concern when humanity expands through space, and there's even a bit of debate if the human body can adapt to such heavy changes on its circadian rhytm. In any case, my prediction is that there would be a "Earth time", that is, 24-hours day and 365 day year, that is kept as standard out of convenience and in spaceships and space habitats (in my own setting Campoestela, it's called "ship time" because human spaceships use it as standard) and lots of "local times" on different planets with all the quirks I mentioned above, with everyone going into space learning how to convert their own time to "Earth time". Or maybe, to make things even more fun and, admittedly, complicated to the reader, the time of another time is taken as a standard. There's lots to play with here.

DON'T even ask me about relativistic time (like in Interstellar) because it makes my head hurt, even if I did use it a couple times on my stories. But "ship time" might be a real thing. Some cultures might have completely different 'times', not calendars, actually *times*, depending on relativistic time delation.

BTW anon, sorry for using this to promote myself, but if anyone loved this rant and would like to see more, I would appreciate some tips on my ko-fi (given the situation down here, now more than ever) and suggestions for other topics to talk about!

#worldbuilding #calendars #writing

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favouritefi · 3 months

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Hi there, I'm here to ask about whether you have thought of the childhoods of Blanky and Peglar in your purror and errebark au? Because they're favorites of mine.

thank you for this q tho im sorry i started out writing about their childhoods but somehow ended up talking about the legal and political worldbuilding in my catboy au through the lens of blanky and peglar's lived experiences? enjoy?

our main cast is largely middle/upper class and this is obviously only a small subsection of the overall cat/dogboy population in england. blanky and peglar are working class and a lot of the really fucked up stuff around adoption don't apply as much here. sure they still don't have legal autonomy and life isnt easy and they still get treated like shit by humans, but there isn't that pressure to be adopted / breed like there is amongst the pedigree-holding cat/dogboys.

blanky is old enough to have lived through legal changes that actually imposed more restrictions on dog/catboy freedoms than ever before. for example, when blanky first joined a crew as a young dogboy and learned to sail and became a whaler, they didnt need to declare the number of non-human crew members and their pedigree status/breed. for a komondor like blanky, this meant he could easily hide the fact he's a dogboy if he just grew out his hair. by the time blanky was a young adult though laws had come into place that required ships to declare this info whenever they reached a british port (bc as empire grows its need to control and manage its citizens and noncitizens and make clear distinctions between those two becomes ever more important) but by then he'd had enough experience under his belt that crews wouldnt turn him away just because of his species. so he had a very interesting and atypical childhood, he wasn't always treated like a dogboy.

peglar had what i think of as a "typical" working class catboy childhood. mid-sized family, working class parents, generally speaking they were getting by but they werent doing well. they could put food on the table, and they loved him, and that was enough. the interesting thing is that his father was a bastard so somewhere in his ancestry is a savannah which might explain his nimbleness and his extra long ears. his father was also a political radical who believed that cat/dogboys should have legal personhood and supported universal male suffrage. peglar was too young to fully absorb those ideas before he left the home and was enrolled in a catboy naval training program, but his naval and military experiences brought him to places where cat/dogboy rights did exist either legally or culturally and so in a strange way him and hickey actually share similar political values, aka if humans get to be people then why shouldn't I? this leads to some spicy hickey x peglar later down the line and also influences his relationship with bridgens in interesting ways.

#purror and erebark

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ilovedthestars · 10 months

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**Contains character/worldbuilding info that is slowly revealed over the course of Witch King, but no big plot spoilers**

Witch King was the first non-Murderbot book by Martha Wells that I've read, so I spent a lot of it playing "Spot the Murderbot Parallels." They're very different books in style & content but there's also lots of of fun little things that reminded me of Murderbot. (I'm curious how many of these are Wells trademarks that show up in Raksura or her other books, but I don't have any other points of comparison). I kept a running list while I was reading, and most of them ended up being related to the respective protagonists, so without further ado:

Similarities between Murderbot & Kai

Villain-coded protagonists

Set apart from “mortals”/“humans”

And also exist somewhat between two worlds/two different kinds of being

And also are somewhat unique and alone among beings like them because of their choices/circumstances

Very dangerous to go up against as an individual, but also very much in danger themselves from larger societal/political forces and spend a lot of time on the run or hiding who they are

Fewer physical limitations (don’t need to breathe as much, can heal/repair, not slowed down by injury or pain)

Have the ability to become disembodied and occupy different “hardware” (ES gunship and 2.0, Kai’s body swapping and travel between the underearth and upper earth)

Also have telepathy (the feed) allowing private/secret communication, detecting people from far away, and sharing of senses

Touch is significant to them and associated trust/intimacy (although it sort of works in different directions for the two of them)

Despite all the politics happening around them, their driving force is “keep my people safe” (Kai uses the phrase “my mortals” at one point which made me very happy, and getting his found family back together is what drives the plot)

Use pain magic / self sacrifice to protect others (Making the decision "not to be like them" even at personal cost to self, more of a vague theme than a specific thing but I think they have this in common. this could probably be its own whole post tbh)

But also very willing to murder people when necessary in self defense, pursuit of goals, or occasionally sheer anger

“If they hurt my human(s) I will murder everyone”

Bonus: other similarities with the Murderbot books

Casual brownness and queerness and polyamory!!

Switching to very matter of fact writing style for effect, often when describing violence/emotion (Wells is really good at deploying this at just the right moment and it was so cool to see it in literally the first chapter of Witch King)

Worldbuilding elements are dropped in without ever being explained for the convenience of the reader (what exactly is the feed? what exactly is a cursebreaker? who knows)

There's clearly a huge world full of culture and politics and history and we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg

Oddly specifically, there's a lot of different conflicting calendar systems (none of which are ever explained, obviously)

and finally, even more oddly specifically:

Chapter Four of Witch King 🤝 Chapter One of Network Effect Protagonist sneaks onto a boat and then beats up the people on it

#murderbot #witch king #witch king spoilers #mostly vague ones #stars has thoughts #me reading ch4 of witch king: is this a boat fight. martha wells do you just really like boat fights #there is arguably at least one more fight on a boat later in the book. possibly several depending on how you count #i may end up making the whole post about the pain magic & self sacrifice if i can make my thoughts coherent enough

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snow-lavender · 4 months

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Re-watching OSP's Trope Talk: Those Dang Phones and having Fable Thoughts TM

If you haven't seen the video, go watch it, it's really good. In it, Red breaks down how the technology of a certain time influences what its contemporary writers think of as normal, possible, and impossible. It looks at the sudden popularity of magic smartphones in fantasy and sci-fi and goes from there, looking at a century of stories. Again, go watch it, it's really good and this rant won't make much sense without that background. But I think there's something related that Fable SMP exemplifies that's also really interesting.

So everybody in Fable has a cellphone. They call it a communicator (because it descends from a larger mcyt fanon but that's a whole other rant) but it's a cellphone for all intents and purposes. Every character can communicate through instant text and audio calls. If they need to fly away and retrieve something, continuing a conversation is rationalized in-universe by turning on comms. The whole village is in a group chat, and has some of the same culture around that that exists in real life (mainly, panicking when you send what was supposed to be a DM publicly, or complaining about repetitive pings). Like Red's thesis in the video states, this is a reflection of what technology is normal to the cast.

But something else that carries over is the timeline of technological development that the cast considers normal. Because while every character has a cellphone that they use regularly, none of their parents do.

Whenever part of the previous generation's story is revealed, this technology isn't a part of it. Any communication between the characters is non-digital. Soul and Isla communicate through written letters. Enderian travels to the Nether to talk to Soul in person. All of Wolf's war reports are handwritten and, presumably, delivered by messengers. Even Ven's propaganda, while reproduced on a mass scale, is physical. The previous generation didn't have the same access to digital communication as their children do.

This is reflective of technological development in the real world. We've made leaps and strides in communication in recent decades. What used to be a fantasy of the elite is now accessible to nearly everyone on the planet. We don't communicate the same way our parents did.

People our age witnessed huge changes in communication from early childhood. I think we all grew up hearing grandparents and even parents talk about how bulky, complicated, and limited phones and computers used to be. When I was six, we still had a tape deck in the car and a record player at my Omoe and Opa's. My parents didn't get their first cellphones until well after I was born. Now everybody has Spotify on a touchscreen the size of three large crackers. It's not at the forefront of people's minds, but I think witnessing that in your key developmental years sticks with you.

So this major change was folded into what the writers thought of as normal too. Not only is it "Of course everyone has instant communication over distance," it's "Of course their parents didn't have that."

(And, if I can be cynically critical for a second, it does introduce a kind of crazy timeline of development in-universe. Like, my parents didn't have cells as teens, but they had faxes and landlines and shit. Isla didn't even have a telegraph.

TO BE CLEAR: I'm not saying this is a mark of bad worldbuilding. Haley and Sherbert made a normal low-tech fantasy world for the backstory and pulled from what they were used to for the present story. This sort of reflection of reality that Red talks about is unconscious, that's the whole bit. It's just a little silly if you think about it too hard.)

Anyway, I think it's interesting how fiction mirrors not just our present but our history. I'm interested to see how this sort of carryover develops. Gen-Z storytelling is still pretty relegated to social media and indie projects. I can't wait to see how the mediascape changes as our perspectives make their way into the mainstream. In the meantime though, I'll just sit over here thinking way harder than the cast intended about my beloved little cube people.

#fable smp #mcyt #anyway someone please write a fic where icarus has to explain how to use a smartphone to fable

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icyrambles · 3 days

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of all my transformers takes, i feel like the one that'll get me sent directly to fandom hell is my feral hatred of the term "femme"

like genuinely it's such a stupid term. not because i don't think the robots can't have gender. because i do think they have some concept of gender. but because it's just woman 2.0

like you've got this super interesting alien species. they've got their own culture, their own language, their own ideas of sexuality and right and wrong, and their own religion. and to see most of the fandom look at that and go "but what if i just made man and woman but for robots" pisses me off

it makes me mad because it's fucking boring as shit. you've got all this cool worldbuilding and lore and you decide that the best thing to do when discussing robot gender is just to give them human gender but slightly to the left

"but icy, how to you distinguish the women transformers from the male ones?"

just fucking use mech for all of them. i use mech/mecha as a catch all term. it's my replacement for person or man or guy. like when someone says "you guys" they could obviously be referring to a group of all men, but let's be real here, "you guys" as it is used in colloquial english, is a gender neutral term despite having a more gendered term within it.

and it's specifically the term femme that grinds my gears. i don't have any issues with people headcanoning characters using she/her pronouns. i think that's cool as hell because pronouns do not equate to gender and in a fandom where like, 90% of the characters use he/him it's nice to see some switchups for pronouns because it gets a little repetitive after a while. but the term femme just tells me that you subscribe to the idea that the alien robot species who do not have the same concepts and ideas of gender as humans do, somehow managed to craft together the exact same gender concepts as an organic species halfway across the galaxy.

and i'm sure someone might be like "well it's not a gender thing" but i only ever see the term femme used to describe a canon character who uses she/her pronouns (like arcee or elita-1) or to describe a fandom headcanon that revolves around a character using she/her pronouns (like starscream or ravage) it has everything to do with how the fandom seems to cling to the idea that cybertronians have to have the same concepts of gender for humans

i've been in this fandom for a little over a year and despite going through forums and tumblr posts and even looking at twitter for a tiny bit, i've yet to see an actual attempt at exploring the concepts of cybertronian gender.

so here's mine; taken from my worldbuilding ideas that i'm sorting out for my in the works fan continuity

cybertronian gender, like a lot of their societal norms, is tied to one's altmode.

as taken from the marriam-webster dictionary: gender is - a subclass within a grammatical class (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (such as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms

now applying that to a species that has the specific characteristic of being able to literally change shape with the assistance of an internal organ (ie the t-cog) leads me to the idea that instead of gender being based on the biological sex like it is for humans, gender is instead rooted in the altmode.

the terms of seeker and speedster are adjectives to describe the altmode of a cybertronian, but also can describe the gender. this isn't meant to be a direct 1-1 copy of human ideas of sex and gender but instead a theoretical worldbuilding exercise in how a species that does not reproduce in a sexual manner would develop similar concepts of personal expressions through their established canon biology.

within my worldbuilding. the common language packs of cybertron come with three sets of standard, altmode neutral pronouns. these roughly translated into english, are he, she, and they. notice how i said altmode neutral pronouns. that's because most altmodes have their own sets of established pronouns that crop up within the groups.

this particular idea ties in with how my versions of cybertronians communicate. basically cybertronians communicate both via verbal speech, such as talking using a vocaliser, but also via manipulating their EM fields, and attaching non-verbal alterations to their spoken words via radio waves and the EM field.

so the pronoun [He] when used in a sentence, might have extra attachments added onto it.

EX: [He (positive/neutral) went to my house the other day.]

So in this case the speaker is referring to someone in a positive or neutral manner.

Here's another one using pronouns on a personal level when referring to one's self.

EX: [Hello. (courteous) My name is Starscream (Vosian - Seeker). I use He/Him (Neutral) pronouns.]

This is a typical cybertronian style of greeting. It includes a hello to the other party/s, the title of the individual along with their region of origin/residence and altmode, and finally their preferred set or sets of altmode neutral pronouns. In this case, Starscream would tag his "Hello" with a neutral emotion, being courteous but not excited because the mech he's talking to is someone he doesn't know but isn't enemies with. He then attaches his region of origin "Vos" and his altmode group "Seeker" and finally caps it off with his preferred set of pronouns "He/Him" which has a neutral emotion modifier tagged onto it because while it's his preferred set of pronouns in the neutral sense, it's not what he'd like to be using all the time.

he/him, she/her, and they/them are all equally neutral and for all cybertronians they exist in a state of purely personal preference. there's nothing about arcee using she/her pronouns that makes her more woman gendered anymore than starscream using he/him pronouns makes him male gendered. that's just human bias. they're robots, so they don't view themselves in the same way. those sets of pronouns, again, are merely translated into english for the reader's convenience.

Now I've thrown around the term "altmode neutral" quite a bit so here's an explanation for that.

Cybertronians with the same or similar altmodes will often develop languages and cultures surrounding those altmodes, similar to how many cultures and identities are developed through similarities with each other. This varies from region to region, with many languages and cultures not meshing together even if those mecha have the same altmode.

A jet like Pharma who was raised in Iacon around primarily ground based altmodes tends to use pronouns specific to grounder based language families while someone like Starscream or Thundercracker, who are from Vos, use altmode specific pronouns indicative of language families developed by mostly flight frames.

The common language data pack exists as an easy way for mecha to communicate with each other without potentially butchering another individual's native language. While one could theoretically download a whole language into their brain module, their actual speech would likely sound distorted or unnatural due to the fact that the brain module only retains the information that was on the download and is unable to account for things like accents, region dialects, and other such nuances in languages

Altmode specific pronouns are often tagged with extra modifiers and would function similarly to the concept of neo pronouns in english.

Megatron as an example has a tank altmode and his specific altmode pronouns are chk/chiks and using them in spoken dialogue would require one to either create a noice similar to a tank canon loading with their vocaliser, or in another tank's case, would simply have them use their own tank barrel to produce the noise.

flight frames often clank their wings together or whistle as their altmode specific pronouns. speedsters will revv their engines. smaller cars like bumblebee or cliffjumper will beep their horns, and ambulances like ratchet will whoop their sirens.

going back to my "pharma raised in iacon" example. he's a jet, but rather than clanking his wings together, he'll utilize his inbuilt siren (installed while he was in medical school) as his altmode specific pronouns. it, roughly translated to written form is wheep/whoop

this also extends to preferences for partners. i've seen people joke about how ratchet has a thing for speedsters because of his thing with drift and rodimus, but genuinely i do think that within the idea of altmodes being tied to gender, mecha would develop preferences for certain altmodes.

and when i say preference, i do mean just a preference. altmodes are fluid things within cybertronian society. megatron, as an example, is a gun, a tank, and a heavy bomber plane across varying continuities, yet at the end of the day, he's still megatron. his altmode is not what defines him as a character.

therefore i think changing altmodes is purely a thing that's tied to economic status. it's very expensive to have the whole exoframe completely reformatted so those who regularly change their altmodes either have shanix to spare, or have saved up enough money to have the procedures done.

this is even touched upon within idw's version of cybertron, what with the existence of relinquishment clinics, where mecha will go and donate their frames for money, and then those shells can be bought so another individual can have a new altmode.

when a mech decides to have their altmode changed they'll often shift up their altmode specific pronouns too. a smaller car changing altmodes into a bigger vehicle will instead honk their horn instead of beeping or maybe they'll revv their engines louder just to signify that they've changed altmodes.

going back to my sentence examples. here's one with ratchet and pharma introducing themselves to a patient

EX:

Ratchet: Hello (positive/friendly/welcoming) My name is Ratchet (Vaporex - Ambulance - Medic) I use He/Him (Positive) and siren whoops pronouns.

Pharma: Hello (kind). My name is Pharma (Iacon - Jet - Medic). I use He/Him and clanks wings/whoops sirens pronouns.

like i said, this isn't meant to be a direct 1-1 with human genders. cybertronian altmodes within my fan continuity defy more than just how another individual views them. they can signify occupation, social standing, and economic class. and some mecha even choose to disregard their altmodes entirely when it comes to their personal expression, sticking exclusively to the gender neutral pronouns.

anyways this post is half rant half worldbuilding so if ya made it to the end i'd be happy to hear your thoughts. and as always, if you liked this post please feel free to reblog :]

#icy's writing #transformers #maccadam's #yet another worldbuilding post #transformers worldbuilding #cybertronian worldbuilding

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fairrryprose · 1 year

Text

[BOOK TOUR] THE SPARROW AND THE OAK TREE // JAMIE JACKSON

Today, I'm pleased to be a host on the tour for THE SPARROW AND THE OAK TREE by JAMIE JACKSON, hosted by ESCAPIST BOOK TOURS! This is an adult fantasy romance, with magic, romance (heavy on the romance!), a spirited horse, and... zombies? Check out my review for the book below, as well as a link to find other stops on the tour for more exciting content!

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Book Blurb:

Unicorns don't exist, and dragons aren't real, but the Fae are. And they are to be feared.

Or so the tales say.

As the sole sorceress within the Lion King's court and kingdom, Isolde is valued for her power, provided she fulfills the king's commands.

Her task? Deal with a child who has emerged from a forest no one has returned from in over one hundred years. As Isolde works to fulfill her order, accompanied by her nameless guardian, she'll encounter a creature she's only heard of through myth and legend...

When he kidnaps her.

See Also:

(This is our attempt at a bit of fun. We ask our authors to come up with a few short, clever, possibly pop culture laden, descriptions of their books just to give a little taste of what’s to come for readers.)

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies Goes Medieval

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Book Links:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Sparrow-Oak-Tree-Jamie-Jackson-ebook/dp/B0BM8BR346/

Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-sparrow-and-the-oak-tree-jamie-jackson/1142798365

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63347302-the-sparrow-and-the-oak-tree

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My review:

3.5/5 stars

This book has a very cozy cast of characters, mainly revolving around 3 (4 if you count the horse named Horse!) -- Isolde ("Sparrow"), our Sorceress; Tristan ("Oak"), our Fae; and Bear, Isolde's guardian with a mysterious past with the Fae.

As a fantasy romance, it leans more heavily towards romance, where the love story between Tristan and Isolde is the crux of it and unfolds like a sweet (and tragic) whirlwind; it deviates from the Celtic legend and reminds me much more of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The story is fast, with emphasis on developing the romance, and I felt this made the other characters and other plot elements fade into the background. For instance, we have Bear, who has had dealings with the Fae before, and these are alluded to, yet it's not too deeply delved into, which is a shame as I thought it could have added more to his characterization, to endear him as a solid character to us and not someone who's just comic relief-ish/the more solemn and serious character who keeps everyone on track and fixated on their goals. He's a more realistic and grounded character, with depth to be uncovered, while Tristan and Isolde are more reminiscent of dreamers in love.

There's also magic, deals with the Fae -- as one would probably expect from a Fae story -- and, in a turn of events, zombies. I thought that the action could've been more detailed/intense and with more worldbuilding, but the romance was really well-developed that what occurred at the end did make my jaw drop.

If you're looking for a bittersweet love story with hints of magic and action, this is the book for you!

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Book Information:

The Sparrow and the Oak Tree by Jamie Jackson

Series: N/A, Standalone

Genre: Fantasy Romance

Intended Age Group: Adult

Pages: 385

Published: February 14th, 2023

Publisher: Self Published

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Content/Trigger Warnings:

Shown on Page (things clearly told to the reader):

Blood and gore

Harsh language

Sex and sexual situations

Alluded to (things only mentioned in passing or hinted at):

Sexual assault

Possible animal harm (the horse is unharmed)

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Author Bio & Information:

Jamie writes books with words in them. She lives in Charlotte NC with her husband, three feral children and two badly behaved dogs.

Find her at:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/VillainLeaning

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/villainleaning/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@villainleaning Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/villainleaning

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Check out other stops on the tour below for more exciting content!

#the sparrow and the oak tree #jamie jackson #escapistbooktours #book tour #fantasy books #romance books #fantasy romance #tristan and isolde #fae #magic #zombies

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scholarlypidgeot · 2 years

Note

Out of the receng worldbuilding asks: 2 (because any excuse to hear more about perytons is good); and mayyybe 5 (because if you have thought about it before then you really have a fully functional world).

2 What sort of magical creatures exist in your world? (Dragons, fair folk, spirits, etc)

Magic is a very broad term, but I know what you mean. Unusual creatures in the setting include but are not limited to:

Perytons! Deer with wings and teeth. Generally flightless. Tend to linger around herds of true deer and prey on the predators. Typically a symbol of the strong protecting the weak, and as such symbolic of The Hunt. A symbiotic relationship.

Ornixes! Large breeds are also called dragons, but in reality this is just the collective term for therapod dinosaur-like creatures. Small breeds tend to be very intelligent and clever, comparable to modern birds. Larger species are much more animal, and built to kill. Viewed similarly to sharks as graceful and beautiful but incredibly dangerous, even if they generally avoid human populations.

Aurochs! A collective term for megafauna in general, including what we'd recognize as elephants, Sauropod dinosaurs, Pleistocene mammals, etc. Auroch is most often a generalized or collective term, like cattle, for when these creatures are used as beasts of burden or otherwise raised under human care.

Giant spiders! They're literally just called spiders. Spidersilk is a valuable material within the setting. Coarse spider hair is useful to make brushes or cleaning materials, and shed exoskeletons can be used to reinforce gear or make armor. The venom of most large spiders is actually only harmful to humans in large doses, but a bite will still be lethal (duh). There are also other abnormally large bugs, but spiders have worldbuilding significance.

Don't get me started on what might be in the ocean. Since there's one primary landmass and most people use the inland sea.... yeah.

Magical creatures - magically influenced people, for the most part - tend to influence the idea that creatures like the above are reflections of other creatures, rather than a world where these creatures never existed at all. It's much more symbolic. Speaking of which, magical people-creatures (Fair Folk) can be condensed into 2-4 categories:

Unseelie. Most comparable to the animal reflections of people. Sharp teeth and nails, blood cravings as a side effect, heightened senses honed for nighttime predation. Many consider them closer to ornixes or perytons than people, even if that's wrong, because it's better to believe you couldn't become like that.

Seelie are easier to live with. They're unusual, sure - their hair is strange colors, their eyes are bright and eager, they live life on the edge and recklessly, their bodies are nearly indestructible. They'll do anything in their power to cheat you if it benefits them. But they can't lie. They won't eat you. Oftentimes their demands are somewhat reasonable. And they always stand by their word. Sure it's by compulsion, but hey, at least they're not going to eat you, and even if there is an unfavorable bargain, it's very likely you'll outlive them.

Wulvers are a subclass of Seelie, or once were, according to legend. Every region has its wulvers, adapted to its climate: Arahas has bouda, hyena-men; the Protectorates and North see kitsune, foxfolk; the Forest region has more traditional werewolves; Brydlen has folk that can take the shape of great hounds, called Faoladh; the Basin, coyotes; and in Zanoma are Lobisomem, who appear as maned wolves. They share most of the primary Seelie traits, that is, liability to fast living, near invulnerability-- although, rather than iron as their Seelie cousins, they're vulnerable to silver weapons. There are two primary differences: 1. They have an average human lifespan, believed in different Wulver cultures to have been earned by one of their ancestors tricking death; and 2. they have a co-dependence, and often serve as protectors of their human communities. A wild, vicious Wulver is a force to be reckoned with, however, almost as fierce as an Unseelie and equally dangerous.

Finally, there are normal humans who can channel magic in little ways. A voice that can bend people to their will; sparks of fire; bursts of electrical discharge; an abnormally green thumb; temporary invisibility; speaking the language of animals. The causes of this are yet unknown, but no one with these abilities is more or less likely to become Seelie or Unseelie, and it doesn't seem to be genetic. Sometimes your child just starts talking to a cat and you have to be open to accept that.

Thank you for the ask! The worldbuilding questions can be found here, for anyone else interested!

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lang-rangler-enjoyer · 1 year

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FOR THE VIV ANON IM SO SORRY I ACCIDENTALLY DELETED YOUR ASK😬

Here’s my answers:

•First Impression:

•I felt really bad for him during his fight :( he was just an average guy who got dragged into Pucci’s conflict without his consent. I was just really glad Araki never outright confirmed his death (even if his body did mysteriously disappear from the stairs during the Dragon's Dream fight).

•Impression Now:

• Baby boy. Baby. I love him so much. I love how weird and extreme all the other Stone Ocean characters are, and then Viv is just. aggressively plain-looking. He’s still super duper duper hot tho, like holy shit, but just LOOK AT THIS FUCKING LINEUP

POV you asked your straight brother to pick you up at the gay bar

Araki doesn't always make good writing choices, but having one of his villains just be Some Guy who has a regular 9-5 job and isn't a part of this conflict at all was great. Sad for Viviano that he got dragged into all this, but conceptually a very fun arc.

•Favourite Moment:

•I just find it so funny that one of the ONLY things we know about Viv is that he's into some degree of CBT. I love the vague implications of this, like what other situation Mr. Westwood? Is he referring to a normal, out-of-work CBT session....or does he just legit get off to prisoners attempting to crush his genitals to escape being detained??

•Idea for a Story:

•Post-Survivor, "holy shit I have a magical ghost now and other people do as well". Not only is he recovering from being supernaturally forced to kill his coworker and friend :( he also has to deal with now having a stand, which must be absolutely terrifying for any adult who's gone their whole life without knowledge of this phenomenon. Especially considering his first experience with other stand users was so awful. Like, once he realizes he wasn't just hallucinating the whole thing, where do you start? He doesn't even know they're called "stands", how do you find information on them? IDK maybe I just like the worldbuilding aspect of this, but I wanna see stand user culture, how do new adult stand users (which aren't unheard of, like Tonio and Aya) find out about how stand stuff works?

• Unpopular Opinion:

•Hmmmmm once again with the minor villains not a lot of people really have serious opinions on him. Just APPRECIATE HIM MORE HOLY SHIT. HE'S HOT. HE'S GOT A STRONGMAN BOD. REAL MEAT ON THOSE BONES. HE'S NOT DEHYDRATED-LOOKING LIKE SO MANY OTHER "MUSCULAR" JOJO CHARACTERS LIKE HE ACTUALLY HAS A HEALTHY AMOUNT OF FAT. HE'D BE SO GOOD TO CUDDLE WITH. HE CANONICALLY LIKES COCK AND BALL TORTURE. I MEAN COME ON WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT WHY DON'T MORE PEOPLE LIKE HIM???

•Favourite Relationship:

•The brief period where he was just hanging out with Sonny Likir was nice. I wish Stone Ocean showed us more antagonists interacting! That’s like, one of the best parts of jojo, when you have a villain duo or squad like Cioccolatta and Secco, La Squadra, Oingo and Boingo, or Sale and Zucchero, seeing how these characters act with the people they love/respect/tolerate before we see them trying to kill the protagonists adds so much depth and sympathy and investment. Seeing Sonny and Viviano just have some regular coworker banter before the fight was really fun and makes me wish we could see more of that in Stone Ocean.

•Favourite Headcanon:

•He's bisexual and literally the most closeted man to ever exist. He's the type to laugh at the homophobic comments his friends and coworkers make, and even make some of those comments himself, it's a learned defensive habit. I'm not trying to make him super angsty or anything, he just gives me mega bi energy. I don’t think he grew up in a particularly abusive or neglectful household, just the kind of environment where people in his family/community would make gay jokes because they honestly didn’t think anyone around them was gay. And I can’t see a prison in the early 2010’s as being the most accepting place either, so he’s just learned to keep certain things to himself, and hope those feelings he has about men sometimes just go away on their own.

#asks

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nickywhoisi · 2 years

Text

Okay, now I would like to put in my general headcannons and worldbuilding for my envisioning of humanoid!TTTE Let's go!

ALL THE ENGINES

Their body types are human, but their bodies are made of solid metal and iron, all the things that make up a train would be utilized/rekajiggered into anatomically correct versions of body parts. I wouldn't really know the specifics of that because I'm not a train expert orz There are slight lines that they all have on their exterior bodies which imply jointwork and plating, but the rest stretches and bends as if it were flesh. Their inner bodies also have a main gut/stomach that is their furnace, and it remains unchanged in how that works, just that the engines can eat coal and stuff exclusively with their mouths.

They are ONLY humanoid, this universe does not have engine forms to go into as they are already like mini giants...giving them a train form wouldn't actually work out as well, since they would be way too large to fit on the tracks! I know, doesn't seem to make sense for a train fandom, and the fact that these golem people seem to work as the trains but dress up as drivers, yet they have no trains to fit into? uhhhhh just consider this a fledgling universe for now I'll work out the kinks maybe retcon things if it doesn't work so well it's still in the drafts uhhhhhh shit whaddo i do now

The sizes and shapes of how they are in canon translates to their body types in this universe. For example, Percy is a small engine, so he would be little, but Skarloey and any other engine smaller than him would be even tinier. And while the squatter you are to your own golemy kind isn't so neat, they are on average 7 to 8ft. So if you were 6 or 5, then you would be within normal human size anyway! But it seems like the bigger you are, the wider reach you may have, which is more favourable in their culture. Not so much about height as it is about the most capability; being useful. The tender engines would have larger frames, very thick and muscular like Henry or Gordon, or they can be slender and athletic like James or Edward. Then the diesels would be large too, but also with a stockier shape to reflect their overall square shape feeling.

The steam-diesel rivalry still exists of course, but it's a little harder for the untrained eye to tell who is what type of golem. The only way to spot the difference is when they're so mad they're physically fuming about something; steamies blow usual puffs of steam, diesels blow out their dark chemical smog. And electric? I was gonna say nothing, but the idea that they produce small electric charges around their heads is way more interesting! I don't remember if anybody said there were electric train characters, but just to be inclusive and just to be sure...

Almost all of the story beats from the model series is what I infuse the most of into my rendition of the cast. Of course it's not limited to, as I'd love to find inspiration from the railway books and cgi series, it's just that I've only ever experienced the model show and movie. So I guess that would be the Britt and HiT era? They are basically them, but with leggy to stand up. and arms to finally hug trees and hold up mirrors isn't that right henry n james hoohoohoo

The Magic Railroad story exists here as a "world arc", but possibly with different human characters (I am inspired by the cryptic but grounded old man from Blue Snowplow's Hawin the Lost Blue Engine mystery thriller series. Go have a watch it's really good!), and after that biz, Lady and D10 would be mainstays. Because I grew up with that dorky little movie. Speaking of, I really prefer the characterization of the engines from the amazing movie parody by MrConductorFan1406, give that a watch too, it's such an adorable love letter that will also leave you in laughing fits. In fact, it was the very first Thomas movie I ever knew about, so it's special to me. So I emulate a bit of their personalities into my verse's version. While Lady is less involved than others, D10 takes a very active approach to a lot of things. He does not actually stop trying to destroy Lady's magic, he's just plotting how to do it and biding his time.

will add more to this post later, I am sadly getting sleepy...why body must you betray me at my finest hour...at least when I typed this last night, but now I am still bleary like that and I have to work hard at things today. dear god it never ends.

#I try to sleep and get kept awake #now I try so hard not to and succumb #fuck my body for real #ramble brambles #ttte #my writings

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writingonesdreams · 2 years

Note

Hello, hello, and happy wbw to you, Dreams ^^ I hope you're having a lovely one.

I know world building isn't your favorite part of the writing process, and I know you don't go into Tolkien levels of detail with it, so I was curious as to how you decided to go about fleshing out the world for Sky of Shards/Tears of Iron? What did you start with and how did you decide what needed to be known, what could be left up to the imagination, and what was touched on but not delved into particularly deeply? Did anything come up that you hadn't planned on building out? Or did you end up not needing to build out apart of the world that you had thought you would have to build? Do you think you'll have more world building to add in the future or do you feel like the setting itself is mostly complete?

I always flash out the parts of the world I'm interesting in and that play a role in the story itself. If I flash out things that aren't relevant, I tend to push myself into a corner and feel trapped and frustrated with the whole thing. Better not to develop and write out rules that I don't need and that feel limiting about that aspect, when I do end up needing it.

Aspects I focused on in Tears of Iron world:

Magic system

Culture around the magic system (something that's dying out, limited to the lucky and wealthy ones who can afford to pursue it even though it's such a common phenomenon among people)

The connection between magic and emotional state or more commonly the magical block that's usually connected to emotional/mental block

The consciousness and backstory of the Flying Islands

Dragons, their culture and emphasis on telepathy

Certain important settings like the Academy, Sea of Stars, The Moving Mountains etc

The scifi tech only to the degree to have available technology to grow plants and food independently of contact with earth underneath (my biggest unreasonable fear about worldbuilding is where do they get their food and how do I make it so they can do it on their own without spending too much time and effort doing it XD)

The animal and plant spirits, specters and fairies on the Islands (though I still need to flesh those out in that ask from you...but then again I don't really want to make out rules before I get to writing them and see what I need for the story)

Then again I'm also discovering more and more my appreciation for slice of life stories that don't bother with PLOT or WORLD at all (and that most writing guides and books I read don't teach you the kind of stories I want to read, but they actually do exist!) and how amazing and deeply satisfying for me it is. And that I need to train myself to write those scenes I crave more (but also talking about those cravings helped me realize what I want and that I can probably just...look for that actively irl too lol. I'm trying to fill a well with fantasy water, when the river is right around the corner, I just need to grit my teeth against the cold unknown stream).

I think at this point the fantasy is there only for the metaphorical meanings (what mind magic, Art, aural magic and all the culture stuff around it is for, the Islands), and for some of the cool stuff/imagineries like the Sea of Stars, planes, fairies. I could add more for the scifi feel I guess, the futurism and the comfort it promises fascinates me. And I think I take solace from fantasy and what differences it offers to real life, cause I still don't dare/feel uncomfortable writing about modern urban settings for unknown reasons. The magical element gives it the distance and the dissonance I need, so it doesn't get too personal but also let's me write directly from real life inspired emotions.

I also think fantasy settings give the author the opportunity to create all the context and backround cultural feelings and meanings that are otherwise set by the modern world and the backround of the reader. The suspension of disbelief in fantasy world allows for more openness for the reader and more freedom for the author to built it on their own terms. What do you think?

I would like to make the mundane things interesting, to show them in their full dramatic importance, to make it all about relationships and emotional responses. I think this actually requires more skill than writing the big dramatically deaths and world saving fight scenes and gory bloody killings and monster fights and whatnot. And I can't do it to satisfactory level for myself yet. XD I rely on the over dramatic and deadly stakes too much still, it comes easier, why only does it come easier?

So yeah I don't expect to be needing more worldbuilding. XD I just wish I could write realistic stories without the fear of someone I respect telling me it's not realistic and only shows how young and inexperienced I am. XD Which hits me more now, since I'm more aware of all the cultural webs and social relationships around me cause of my studies.

Anyway, thanks for the question Ren :D I really appreciate the effort you put into making them interesting for me. <3

#writeblr #worldbuilding wednesday #on writing #wip meta #wip: tears of iron #ask

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athingofvikings · 2 years

Text

I was asked what sort of explicit writing lessons I learned from "taking notes" during my hate-read of David Weber's work five years ago, so here we go:

Pure exposition is bland, and needs to be salted with other things like character interactions and foreshadowing if you want people to swallow it instead of ignore it.

Less is more when introducing characters. Give just enough to imply other things, you don't need to spell it out.

Worldbuilding that caters to your interests is fine. Worldbuilding that panders to your interests is not. And yes, there's a difference.

Basic research on things you're not interested in is still important if you're planning on referencing specific details, especially if those details are real world things with a lot of history of their own.

The death or personal sacrifice of a character who readers have grown to know and love, even for a short time, is more memorable and impactful than any number of anonymous casualties in the background who we have never met.

Conversely, introducing a character and then immediately killing them off makes readers leery of investing in anyone, so there's a fine balance there.

People don't usually give their personal biographies in their inner monologues.

Foreshadowing is important; it's the foundation for later revelations. The bigger the revelation, the more you need to foreshadow.

Suspension of disbelief will not work when you directly contradict your previously established details.

If you're putting your ideology in the story--which you're going to do, because it informs your worldview which you're writing your story through--having it be the Most Perfect, No Drawbacks Ever thing to the point where even the antagonists admire it is exasperating. It will have drawbacks. Examine them. Don't pretend they don't exist.

Likewise, having one group or institution or political body that is blatantly favored by the author and then having the antagonists admire it is also tiresome. Yes, we get it. Your favorite society was born on third base and thinks it hit a home run. Don't think we haven't missed that you never show this perfect society from everyday person street-level. It has humans in it, ergo it has flaws. Show them.

Conversely, showing rival institutions and ideologies only as exaggerated strawmen and anyone who follows or belongs to them as being either idiots or corrupt is even more tiresome--and just makes it all the more hilarious when you undermine your own strawman all the while insisting that, "no, they're bad, they really are! Look at how bad they are!" It just comes across as petulant. Let them have the win and show it as such, and use that as showing why people might believe in it--or is your own conviction in your ideals so weak that you're afraid of questioning in the slightest?

Emotionally intense climaxes are the payoff for plot arcs. Don't cut away to a different scene or back away emotionally. If you're showing a climactic duel, show the duel, don't go talking about technical details. Let us experience the moment through the character's perspective.

Societies change over time. They just do. The culture of a hundred years before will be different from the culture of the present. Social pendulums exist and swing back and forth as the new generations reacts to their upbringings. Institutions evolve. Political and social status quos do not last for centuries practically unchanged, even in near-isolation.

Worldbuilding generally exists to support the story and the characters, not the other way around.

Building up an antagonist and then killing them off unceremoniously off-screen through no action of the protagonists is just bad storytelling, full stop. Doubly so if it is obvious from the historical model that you're pulling from that they were too big a threat to your favs and needed to be nipped in the bud.

Historical models are a guideline or inspiration, not an outline, and if you treat them as such, then it becomes very obvious when you break from that outline and why.

Let your readers think. You do not need to walk through every logic chain while holding your readers' hands for them. Yes, some will manage to screw it up and draw the wrong conclusions, but first, when you spell nearly everything out, it becomes obvious when you're trying to be sneaky because it's the one thing that's not explained, and second it robs the reader of the ability to invest their own thoughts and analysis into the story. All they have to do is regurgitate yours.

~~~

There's probably more if I went brain dredging, but those are the major high points. It's amazing how much you can learn from critically examining bad writing by a mediocre ideologue.

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writingwithcolor · 2 years

Note

Hello! I've been wanting to create a fictional world where the British didn't ruin the world (I'm really sick of the trend of 'what if the oppressors 'succeeded' 'narrative) and while I know the world would still be super complicated, i kinda just want to explore all the cool shit we could have had. I've been reading a bunch of your posts and other history stuff and I feel like I'm not really getting it (since there's SO much to think about). I was wondering if you had any tips/resources on how I could approach this subject.

Alternative History Where British Didn’t “Ruin The World”

Please go to the ask rules and check out the existing resources before starting.

WWC is not here to direct you to resources--our focus is on specific questions regarding scenarios that arise within your writing experience which cannot be answered through your own research. In particular, please take a look at our "What Does Our "Motivations" PSA Mean?” post. While the concept is something we can tackle, we are human like you, and need some more detail to accurately assess a scenario.

I’ll walk you through how to set this up so we can answer it accurately.

1- Give us more background on your starting point.

The British were not the only colonizers that had a lasting impact on the world, nor were they the only European colonizers to have had a lasting impact. Yes, the world would be complicated regardless because of human nature and the expansion of the species over time, but removing the British doesn’t erase the colonial impact of the Spanish, the French, the Portuguese, and far more outside of Europe, including the Ottoman empire, the Japanese, and the Mughals. Not to mention that there are centuries of conflicts that occurred locally across the world. Focusing on a region or even one particular country as well as a time period will reduce the work necessary in establishing changes.

Also, to what degree would British influence be removed from a global scale? I would suggest picking a starting point in history that you think is the critical point of change, alter the British influence, and go from there.

2- Create a narrative or other form of vessel for your setting.

Getting started when you have a narrative to fit it to is way easier than starting from nothing. There are countless possibilities for how the world could have changed without British influence, but if you have an idea of the technologies, societies, and conflicts that would exist to make your narrative basis, you’ll be better off by a significant margin. This means picking a route and sticking to it. Coming up with all sorts of changes to the world will not mean anything if you don't have a way of explaining them well and keeping them on track. It’s much harder to explore this kind of scenario without knowing what you need to plan around.

3- Start worldbuilding from the ground up.

What kind of world do you want to get out of this? If you’re really trying to do this, I would start with elements of societies that are necessary for worldbuilding, and move forward from there. This is what will give you more depth as well as what will bring up the scenarios I referenced earlier.

Consider the effects of:

Trade and commerce, both local and global

The world powers/major empires that would continue with colonialism in the absence of British colonialism

Local and global relationships pre-British intervention

Power structures and systems of government that would have been maintained without British colonial intervention

The cultural elements that would significantly affect the world in the absence of British colonialism

The differences in technology development as based on global and national priorities

Religious differences and the proliferation of specific belief systems

Creating a world in this scenario cannot solely be about what cool things could have happened, but also what damage could have occurred.

4- Consider your audience and the purpose of this work.

Who are you writing this for, why are you writing this, and how are you getting the point across to them? You need something concrete to work off of if you are intending to create something of this scale, and knowing your audience and purpose will help. Our goal at WWC is to help with crafting stories that speak to wider audiences than what most literature reaches--how wide do you think you can reach?

5- Find a voice for this world.

Whether it’s a general layout of the changes you want to make or a character who lives in the changed world, bringing this setting to an audience requires some kind of voice. This is also where questions may pop up regarding a character’s background. I would be wary of taking a character from an oppressed minority and making them into an oppressor in this situation, especially if they were specifically oppressed due to British influence.

There’s more that I could go into, but again: WWC is not here to be your personal researchers. Please follow our ask guidelines and give us the information we need to give you an accurate assessment.

~ Abhaya

Seconding what Abhaya has said, and adding a few points of my own:

1- You’re going to have to address the concept of “racism” and what discrimination would’ve existed

In pre-colonial times, the primary form of bigotry towards outsiders was xenophobia. This is a hatred of “the other.” There was discrimination based off mismatched cultural practices, classism, different religions, colorism (which is separate from racism and is instead an often classist-based ranking for darker skinned vs lighter skinned) and other factors that WWC is not equipped to discuss.

Race in Europe was invented primarily to enslave African and American Indigenous peoples. If they were somehow different from Europeans, then they were okay to treat this way.

As a result, back in the day skin tone would have been less of a deal. The oppressive structures were based off factors that will look wildly different and unusual/unintuitive for those who grew up on racism exclusively. Communities weren’t necessarily divided by skin tone (or, if they were divided by skin tone, it wasn’t always in groups from different continents) but instead class, religion, culture, and profession.

You’re really going to have to de-centre “race” as the primary structure of oppression you know and instead learn about societies where groups of people who look similar to their neighbours are opposed because of something other than race. Class would have been huge, and religion would have been even more salient (see: how many European countries banned Jewish and/or Muslim people from existing in their borders).

There’s also plain old “we both want this territory, we are from different groups, let’s fight over it.” This is not necessarily a colonial relationship, so long as the goal is simply to temporarily gain access to a certain tract of land and the resources therein, without brutally getting rid of every person who existed in the rival group.

Learning a whole new system (or multiple systems) of oppression and how it would have been at the time is going to be necessary to create an accurate what-if. Because people just… create in and out groups. That’s the history of people. It happens around the globe. You’re not going to create a magical discrimination-free society if you remove European colonialism, because people have been fighting wars about religion and sources of food/clothing/trade goods for as long as there have been multiple groups in the same region.

As Abhaya said, colonialism isn’t unique to Europe, and it also isn’t unique to the 1700s. It has happened for millennia, across the globe, with different belief structures guiding it. It comes from cultures with attitudes of superiority, and those attitudes can come from a whole host of factors.

It’s not automatically a natural state of being, but it is something that has happened fairly regularly in history. You need to think beyond certain time periods and certain countries and instead take everything from a very long, very macro lens.

2- For European colonialism, you’re going to need to address Christianity, especially the Catholic/Protestant divide

Y’know why England tried to take over the world?

Because the French and Spanish were already taking it over, and the English Crown wanted to prove that God preferred Protestants over Catholics.

The initial motives for colonialism were, likely, to circumvent Muslim control over the Silk Road. So the Catholics and Protestants wanted to get direct trade links to the other side of the Silk Road and cut out the Muslim Ottoman empire, which had also been a refuge to Spain’s Jewish population. Christian Europe wanted to gain the wealth they felt entitled to, because God preferred Christians, did he not?

At first, colonialism was about simply gaining the most wealth to show god loved them the most. And then it rather literally became a proxy war of who could convert the most people to what religion.

This religious proxy war didn’t necessarily exist in Asia, but in Europe it absolutely did. If you want to what-if this, then addressing Christianity and its entitlement to everything is necessary.

3- You’re going to need to address the concept of assimilation vs multiculturalism and how those attitudes have fluctuated with time

Not every empire on the planet was unilaterally terrible for its whole existence.

What made England, Spain, France, and Portugal so devastating is the fact they did not allow anyone to live a slightly different life from them, both inside their borders and in the lands they colonized. It’s why the Spanish under Isabella cast out their Jewish and Muslim populations, after trying for decades. It’s why France and England were constantly at war (and also casting out their Jewish populations). They had determined others were living life wrong therefore they needed to go away, and if they cast out all of these groups, then the church could grab their resources and richen themselves.

In France, you could be punished by death and seizure of your property if you harboured a Jewish person as they began resettling the country in the 1610s. In England, they didn’t start resettling until 1655.

Notice: Europe had been colonizing on the European continent plenty before they expanded their borders. They simply spilled over into the Americas and Africa, put themselves on unequal footing with the Indigenous populations (weapons and illnesses), and that’s when they became the global supervillains we know today.

But the Spanish didn’t just wake up one day and decide that the Indigenous population of North America was uniquely bad and needed to go away. They had decided centuries prior that everyone not Catholic was terrible and bad and they were better off as a purely Catholic nation (they were not). Before they went after Indigenous peoples, they had removed the Muslim and Jewish populations from Spain.

Those are going to be the attitudes you need to address in this alternate reality of yours. Why did England, Spain, France, and Portugal feel it was their right to dictate everyone’s way of life? Same with the Ottomans, and the Japanese. What cultural factors made them think that they had the right?

Meanwhile, on the total opposite side of the spectrum, some empires preserved multiculturalism, or, at least, selectively preserved it. Some pretty unilaterally went “diversity is good”, so you have people like Cyrus the Great building the Second Temple, or Akbar who tried to found a whole religion to merge Muslim, Hindu, and Jain beliefs to show he held them all equally. Then you have the Ottomans who, for a period in the 1600s, both harboured the Jewish populations cast out of Spain and brutalized a whole bunch of groups that they didn’t like and wanted to grab the land/resources/property of.

It all depends on the ruler and the time period, which leads me to…

4- You’re going to need to look at time periods fairly closely

Empires’ attitudes towards their populations were extremely ruler-specific. In the days of divine right to rule and the ruler’s words being law, the beliefs of the rulers were very influential towards the rest of the population.

Even the French, in the early days of Canada, had decent relations with the Indigenous population at the start. It was fairly open trade, shared land stewardship, and basically the French considered the Native population more valuable alive than dead. The devastation came later. Not much later, but still later.

If you don’t want to address basically Europe’s whole history with Christianity and how they existed as a Christian place (wording chosen deliberately, because they tried very, very hard to be homogeneously Christian—they failed, but the fact they tried counts for something), then look and see how individual rulers were kinder to their populations and try to replicate that.

5- How recognizable do you want this place to look?

The thing about “the oppressor won” narratives is: they have recognizable worlds.

The oppressor did succeed for an extended period of time. As a result, oppressors-won narratives mean a perpetuation of the world as it was; it might be perpetuated to the point of satire, but it was still a grounded possibility.

Doing a narrative where you remove one of the single most influential periods of history?

You are basically writing secondary world fantasy without magic at that point.

You’ve got North America, a bustling hub of river systems and cities and food-forests that are tailor-made to sustain as much life as possible, as sustainably as possible.

Europe, perhaps still with their monarchies in-tact because America didn’t revolt because America didn’t exist, and the various courts didn’t have bloated treasuries that relied on colonialism to enrich themselves (why was the French monarchy in financial trouble? Well they’d kinda just lost most of their colonial territories in the Seven Years War)

Did China take up as much territory as it does today? Did its unification efforts fail?

The borders as we know them wouldn’t exist, because so many places would’ve never had a unified colonial territory to build a state from.

How many nomadic and semi nomadic groups exist, because colonialism didn’t happen to force settle them?

How much conflict is there over resources? Did centralization happen anyway just to have things like public health programs? Do groups have agreed-upon shared territory that nomads are just allowed to pass through, or is there still conflict over that?

Has any colonial empire tried to rise up, and if yes, how much have they succeeded? How long did they last? What were their goals?

These are a bunch of questions you’re going to have to ask yourself as you try to nail down what this place looks like.

6- This is not going to be a paradise

It will be a better world, yes. We wouldn’t be facing this drastic level of climate change without the overproduction and over-extraction of resources that capital-colonialism produces. We would likely have some variations of some types of technology, just with a lot less metal because of how resource-heavy mining is.

But people are people and even in societies where they actively try to teach humility and have cultural markers in place to prevent anyone from hurting each other, they still have murders. They still have stillbirths, and children who die young. They still have wars, and plagues, and oppression.

If you’re going into this bright eyed and bushy tailed, thinking that you’ll have overridden millennia of humanity being humanity because you got rid of colonialism—think again.

Humanity is beautiful, yes, and there is such fundamental care in communities. Humans like taking care of other people.

But humans also like drawing up lines between us and them, and then not caring for “them.” Or caring for “them” so long as they show they’re other. Or a whole bunch of things.

To think that you can solve all the world’s problems simply by getting rid of colonialism is a fool’s errand. It will improve one hell of a lot, but it won’t improve everything. There’ll still be war, and borders fought over, and impossible to reconcile differences of opinion.

I think a story like this is worthwhile. Don’t get me wrong. Writing AUs without colonialism is, at the very least, a tool we can use to imagine how a better world would look like.

But don’t expect everything to be a utopia.

~Mod Lesya

Published Nov 2021

#isammy7936 #colonialism #british empire #British imperialism #worldbuilding #world history #North America #Asks #long post

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shanastoryteller · 3 years

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not to bring up the wei qing discourse again, but i was reading your yiling wei au again and i thought of an explanation that better fits both canon and chinese naming traditions, and i'm pretty sure no one brought it up during the discourse itself. iirc you cited madam jin as a reason to change wq's name, but the thing is that when you use furen (madam), you're supposed to attach your husband's name, which means that madam yu is actually the odd one out skdhskf. an argument could be made for how it symbolises the fraught tension between yzy and jfm, but yeah.

however, your name still stays the same. so madam jin's name would have stayed the same. she just would've been referred to as jin-furen. you can see this with jyl, who's referred to as jin-xiao-furen (young madam jin). also, i'm pretty sure cultivators keep their name regardless of their sect (see: su she and luo qingyang). it's just that most of the disciples we see are clan (familial) disciples, not sect (outer) disciples, which is why their family name is the same as the sect name.

so what i initially thought, upon reading your au, was that wq changed her name to emphasise her declaration of loyalty to wwx. family names in chinese culture is incredibly important, and to change your family name is to essentially turn your back on your ancestors. so what i read was wq turning her back on the wen legacy and declaring her loyalty to wwx in a way no one can refute. even marriage can be written off as political, but the changing of a family name hits a lot harder and more irrevocably.

her marriage to wwx, then, would've been inferred from her position in the entourage and her proximity to him.

btw, if you're comfortable with it, could you publish this publicly so more ppl are aware of this? it's okay if you're not skdjjs but i know a lot of cql fans don't have a lot of knowledge of chinese customs and stuff so yeah this might be helpful

hi! it’s nice of you to point all this out, but it was where i was going to begin with

my point with madam jin wasn’t that she changed her name after she got married because she got married. i’ve written people getting married in the untamed universe before i made that tumblr fic, and i didn’t have them change their name, because i was aware that that isn’t really a thing in chinese culture. and tbh i find character name changes to be a little jarring as a reader, so i avoid them when i can.

my point with madame jin - and at the time i thought she had a jin last name that she used outside of the madame title but i’m pretty sure that’s incorrect - and others is that in canon it seems like people are running around with clan family names without actually being part of the main family. this could just be because of messiness of the drama or because i’m just bad at keeping track of everyone’s names

so how i handled this in lynchpin was i had it being a thing where people take on the clan name while they’re apart of the clan. except for the jiang, who are little rebels.

so it would be like, for example:

birth name: wei ying; courtesy name: wuxian; clan name; jiang wuixan

so like, anyone could refer to any disciple in gold “young master jin” without knowing their real name. and people could either use their clan name or not, but most would as a sign of status and allegiance, but doing so wouldn’t be giving up their name

I UNDERSTAND THIS IS NOT CANON

the point is that i thought it would be interesting and a fun and useful convention to throw into fic. even though it’s not historically accurate, i think that that’s fine because there’s no historically accurate way to address large governing clans of magic knights because those didn’t exist

so when wei wuxian clarifies wen qing’s name is now wei qing, it’s to show he’s gone against the jiang practices he grew up with and in his clan people use a clan name.

it’s significant for the wen especially, because there’s a reveal in that universe (that, in all fairness, i never got to because after everyone got so upset about it i really didn’t feel like getting into) that they give up their birth name wen to only go by wei.

i’d had this scene that i really liked where someone claims all the wen have to be killed and wei wuxian was just like “what wen? there are no wen here. there are only wei.” but again, this whole thing caused so much drama that i just wasn’t interested in getting into it again

even though i didn’t go into that, when we see wen ning later in the fic, he’s going by wei ning

it was never about wen qing getting married. that’s why she’s introduced first as madame wei - to show that’s she’s married to wei wuxian, the clan leader of the wei - and then wei wuxian gives her name as wei qing. they’re signifying different things. if the point had just been to show they’re married and her name is wei now, he wouldn’t have clarified her name in front of everyone, since people obviously already know who she is

jiang yanli is in the same fic, married to jin zixuan, and i don’t refer to her as jin yanli. it wasn’t a marriage thing

did i expect that everyone who read my tiny tumblr fic would have also read my 100k monster fic and know i was bringing in similar ideas?

of course not.

but i also hadn’t expected everyone to jump down my throat about changing her name because she got married when i at no point ever claimed that was why she changed her name, nor had i had literally any other married character change their name

i thought i could just do what i usually do and go on to fill in worldbuilding and reveal in other installments so i didn’t feel the need to go into a deep dive of my motivations from page one

anyway

thank you for the information. i like the idea because it’s similar to the idea i already had. great minds think alike.

#this also comes up in rotten work #asks #ruiconteur

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transformersmr-hq · 3 years

Text

TFMR Daily random facts - Day 04

Random Worldbuilding/Character facts about Transformers: mobius run universe

Random facts about Neocybex (1/3)

Part 01 - Overview

Introduction

What if I said that we have been speaking the same language all along? What if I claimed that the 'language' we speak, e.g. German, Tamil, Hungarian, Swahili etc are not individual languages, but simply different 'dialects' of a hypothetical worldwide language called "Earthspeak"?

Because that's exactly how TFMR Cybertronians think language works.

To them, Chinese and Croatian are the same thing. Sure, these two are completely different from each other in every linguistic aspect, but since they are spoken within the same planet they count as the same language but just different 'dialects'... right?

When Cybertronians talk about "Neocybex", most humans think that it's a name for a single language(likely Iaconian, since that is the most widely-spoken language on Cybertron). And to some extent, Cybertronians themselves think so too. In reality, however, what they're actually talking about is a collective term for all languages spoken within Cybertron and its colony planets, rather than an actual, legitimate language. Polyhexian, Helexi, and Kaonese have completely different pronunciations, sentence structure and so on, but regardless of their differences they are still the same Neocybex.

So, how come Cybertron suffers no apparent linguistic chaos despite people believing in such nonsense?

How Neocybex Exists

There are two factors that allows Neocybex to exist: Cybertronian brain, and the technology that can shove dictionaries into Cybertronian brain.

Cybertronians have powerful translation algorithm embedded into their processor since birth. When a bot is exposed to foreign dialects, the algorithm creates a language database and begins to collect whatever data tht's available. The more the bot is exposed to this dialect, the larger the database grows and thus the better opportunityfor the algorithm to improve.

The database can be downloaded directly into the processor via cortical data transfer technology. Newsparks get to have around 13 different language databases shoveled into their brain once they develop enough to handle the downloading process. In case of any obscure dialects they haven't downloaded, they have to learn it themselves later on.

Thanks to this, Cybertronians can understand each other regardless of the dialect they are speaking.

Foreign Dialects and Accents

This brings up another question: why would they bother studying foreign dialects, if they can understand each other just like that?

In most cases, they don't. majority of Cybertronians rely on their translator instead of making extra efforts to study other dialects properly. However, there are people who need to live in foreign city-states for reasons such as studying, business, political refuge, and so on. Being able to actually speak regional dialect would increase their chance of success by helping them blend into the community better.

For these people, translatior alone isn't quite enough since it only allows word-to-word translation. The bot may misunderstand spoken phrases and homonyms, thus completely misinterpreting what the conversation partner said. Also, it does not help them actually speak the foreign dialect at all. In order to become truly fluent at speaking, they must spend extensive amount time on learning just like how humans do.

This is why an Ibexan tourist visiting Iacon asks for direction in Ibexan, but an Ibexan student studying in Iaconian university speaks with their study group in Iaconian.

Still, it's very difficult for a bot to completely erase traces of their original tongue. Wether they like it or not, their accent would show up in whatever foreign dialect they choose to speak. Some try their best to hide their accent as best as they could in order to sound more "cultured", but usually people don't put much effort in fixing it.

#transformers: mobius run #daily random fact challange #neocybex #worldbuilding #optimus prime #blitzwing #mirage #maccadam

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