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fuck stellantis

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the big thing about worldbuilding is that it’s ALL about tone. The other thing about worldbuilding is that it’s about repeated tropes that keep showing up in aggregate. You can control your story’s tone but unfortunately your story exists in conversation with all the other stories in its genre and you can’t control those, only how your story engages or doesn’t engage with the trends those other stories set.

“why are there potatoes in this Generically Vaguely Medieval European Fantasy World?” gets mocked a lot but it’s a question worth asking. If your world has Wizard McDonald’s with a McDragon (dragon hamburger) and Magic Fries no one is gonna be asking where the potatoes come from because you have set the tone of the world: it’s silly and satirical and those aren’t the relevant questions to be asking.

There’s also something very fair to be said for the Vaguely Medieval England Fantasy World, like the Vaguely Star Trek Sci-Fi World, as a known setting: we all know it, we all know its tropes, we all basically know How It Works, so authors don’t HAVE to do any meaningful worldbuilding any more than they’d have to if they set their story in, like, London, or New York City. Anyone in the English speaking world is at least vaguely familiar with how London or NYC work; similarly, the Generic Medieval Setting and the Generic Space Setting are places English language genre readers Basically Know. It’s a pre-made world full of inbuilt connotations to drop your characters/plot/concept into. There’s value in that, imo particularly for short-form works.

But if you take your secondary fantasy world to stand seriously on its own, to support a fantasy epic of your own, it can fall apart at the seams under the conflicting weight of own casual assumptions, and that’s what the “where do the potatoes come from?” question is all about. It’s about assumptions. The potatoes question is basically a synecdoche for, “if your world has the (literal) fruits of nonwhite people’s labor and cultures in it, does it have any nonwhite people?” The Shire has potatoes, tobacco, and iirc sunflowers and strawberries: all plants native to and domesticated in the Americas by Indigenous American people. The question is for you to ask yourself, why are potatoes a quaintly charming English thing for hobbits to eat, while, say, a hobbit eating quinoa or avocado toast would be jarring? Why do the royalty of Westeros eat lemon tarts but not curry? Why is coffee normal in this temperate-climate setting, but papayas and bananas would break immersion? Why are some foods “normal” and others “foreign”? What does this indicate about the assumptions baked into your story-world about what is Normal and what is Foreign? And why are potatoes, in particular, so common in fantasy worlds that are Vaguely European? Why is this a Normal Part Of The World but quinoa or maize corn (other South American Andean staple crops) aren’t? Why don’t we think of potatoes as a South American food?

It’s not about the potatoes, not really. It’s about whether you’ve thought about how Your World works, whether you’re being deliberate with the tone and the type of expectations you set, or if you’re just repeating what Feels Normal without digging into what’s Normal and what’s Foreign and why.

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tumblr coded dare i say?

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having withdrawals from. the river

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got so deep inside my knight with my healing magic that my eyes shifted color to match his. the way he groans and writhes in my arms as his wounds mend over is how I know my gods smile on the use of my talents. true story

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This "music" thing is insane

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eating would be fine if it was only a recreational activity. instead, its a horrible sisiphean nightmare and you need to do it every day without fail on threat of pain and death

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there basically isn't a single established action archetype that you can't improve tenfold by making it a girl

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The thing with Harry Potter is that if Daniel Radcliffe can walk away from it then so can you. No one else on the planet has their identity more tied to that series than him and he walked away. So to see the actors for the new show saying JKR isn't doing anything wrong, to see the actors involved in the new audible super production supporting her, when she has explicitly, loudly, and proudly said she's gonna use that money to fund taking away rights from trans people is ridiculous. No sense of morals if people pay you enough and this is insane.

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i step out onto stage clad in full corpse paint and death metal regalia and start playing the most middle-of-the-road soft rock you've heard since 1974

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joy gore on main oh my god

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"you are annoying about x & y" okay. this is the being annoying website.

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being a horror fan will have you saying sentences such as “i liked it a lot, super gross and sad”

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getting called frankenstein's monster at work for the small crime of saying i feel like im wearing someone else's arms

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that one fanfiction you're obsessed with that never got completed and was abandoned a decade ago but it's actually just bestselling fantasy series kingkiller chronicle

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an awesome day to be a woman in slapstick #CartoonWomenInMaleDominatedFields #HittingMyselfOnTheHeadWithA #FryingPanAnd WolfWhistling #AwoogaStyle #PianoFallingOnHead