#also yeah i'm just going to drop this on main it's language practice it's culture it's oc it's got everything going for it

[lordandgodoftheobvious]

Alright, time for a major reveal about this world--it was Earth all along! (Dun dun DUUHHHN!!!!!) No but seriously, though...

From pretty close to the beginning I've been thinking about this setting as an AU (in the proper definition of that term) where the point of divergence is that Earth got "invaded" by "demons" at some point in the paleolithic--when I've referred to places as "Europe" or "SWANA" previously in the thread, these were no mere placeholders until I came up with a proper name, I was literally speaking of developments Europe and SWANA. Indeed, the fact that there are so many place names from our world already floating around is a big part of what makes naming these people's gods after biblical figures so tempting, as I honestly believe I can get away with it--the problem is that I'd know it doesn't actually make sense.

The difference is that the reason the Rhône and Saône rivers, say, keep their names is because they are literally the same rivers that exist in our world--the city at their confluence, though it was built and developed in much the same patterns that Lyon was built and developed in due to a ton of shared and similar material conditions, is not Lyon, because it was built by a different people with a different culture and language. Hence why I could never justify the original names I gave their gods, no matter how thematically fitting or atmospherically fitting it was or the fact that not only would the casual reader not notice that it actually made no sense in the face of everything else but anyone who did would have a rich ground for theorizing on account of it ("just how fake are these gods?").

So anyway, I've decided to name the gods Lilith, Samael, Adam, and Eve anyway. My justification (excuse, really) is that I'm just doing what Tolkien did when he had us follow four hobbits named Frodo, Merry, Samwise, and Pippin for nearly 1200 pages before going into Appendix F and being like "Oh BTW 90% of the names in this thing are English localizations--the real names of our main characters are Maura, Kalimac, Banazîr, and Razanur." Fittingly, it also puts me in mind of the Romans learning about Wodin and being like "Ah, yes--this must be the Germanic name for Mercury." Just don't tell the theorycrafters; the truth will ruin all their fun.

(Shoutout to this random website I found for that paragraph--I am not the kind of person who can casually namedrop LOTR Appendix F or the "real" names of the hobbits off the top of my head, lmao.)

The only difference is that I have no idea what their "real" names are--probably not the ones I came up with in the last update, as I was allowing the practicalities of writing overrule my instincts as a worldbuilder by trying to make their names evocative of the biblical characters they're loosely based on, a constraint I am no longer hampered by. (So yeah, I guess I wasted all of our time with that section of the last post.)

This is an idea that has further potential. For instance, were I to name the gods that existed prior to the most recent Ragnarok (whom I have not given nearly enough thought to thusfar) after Roman gods (because of course there was an analog to the Roman Empire in this world), that allows me to imply things about the religion's history of syncretism and assimilation without the need for someone to drop exposition about it.

The main thing it allows me to do, however, is change the word for magical people from witches to lilim.

"Witch" is a word I picked early on for this setting's magic users--the moment I realized magic would discriminate against boys, in fact--and to be perfectly frank, it has long been a bad fit. "Witch" invokes a more scholarly sort of magic--perhaps not in the same sense that "wizard" does, but the cultural idea of witchcraft is still a thing of learned spells and learned potions and learned herb lore and grimiores--whereas the setting's magic system is more akin to something out of a superhero comic: you have a specific power or set of powers, which are distinct from other people's powers, and can learn to use them better, but can't learn new ones. (There are books about how to use magic, but they are more akin to (the cultural perception of) martial arts training scrolls than grimiores.)

Lilim, however, have vague enough lore to have whatever powers I want to give them. What baggage they do have is that they are the daughters of Lilith (which is exactly what the main religion of the setting teaches) and a form of demon (which is--kind of--the contention that central conflict of the story is built around).

Parallel to all this, I've been thinking about the setting's beliefs about magic. I've got a fairly solid magic system here, but it's not like the people in the book will have read the blurb on the back cover--and there's nothing about the fact that some people in the setting can shoot fireballs out of their palms that's going to discourage them from believing in astrology.

I've mentioned watching Esoterica before--you know, when I told y'all how I came up with this culture's gods?--and the main thing it has imparted to me is that people in the past had a very different conceptualization of magic than the typical fantasy writer does. Magic isn't something distinct from the rest of the world; to a medieval person, there's little difference between believing that you can brew the bark of a specific tree to cure headaches (which is where we get aspirin from, BTW) and believing you can brew a love potion. What we call magic in the historical context is a grab bag of folk medicine, avant-garde philosophies, cosmological theories that turned out to be less accurate than the ones ours claim descent from, religious movements and counter-movements, and proto-scientific experimentation.

All of which are the sorts of things that ought to be happening in the setting.

I needed a "It's not magic, it's bending!" type of distinction, is what I'm saying--and as such, a name for my magic system that isn't just "magic." Before changing witches into lilim I toyed with the idea of calling it "witchpower"--and the fact that witchcraft was never seriously considered (and only considered at all because it was right there) tells you how bad of a name "witch" was for my magic users. After the renaming, I was emboldened to type synonyms of "power" into Google Translate until a Latin word I liked the look of fell out.

Eventually (on my second try, lmao) I found one I liked: vis, meaning energy, force, or power. Of course it's Latin so it's probably pronounced "weece," but I'm choosing to ignore that. (I can do that now that I no longer need the reader to pronounce the words a certain way to evoke what I want to be evoked.)

The amusing thing about this is that fantasy readers are already primed to understand that a word that is always italicized like that is the word for some sort of bullshit mystical force or power, but I'm actually doing it because it's a random Latin word in an otherwise English text.

So I have this WIP which will probably be abandoned; it's not problematic like this one is, it's just embarrassing, since every single logical development of the concepts I've integrated into the setting seems to bring it closer to being a harem anime. Maybe things will turn around when I think of a plot for this--it would be pretty funny to create such a perfect setting for World's End Harem If It Was Good Plus A Touch Of Chained Soldier For Spice and then write a story for it that isn't even remotely horny. And hell, something being sexual doesn't automatically make it low-tier juvenile fanservice--everyone seems to have gotten the memo that Makima's seduction of Denji (in Chainsaw Man) is a Very Bad Thing in spite of it having been animated Like That. But I've held you in suspense for long enough--let's start at the beginning:

It all began innocently enough with an idea for a magic system: if a pregnant person gets possessed by a demon for long enough during the right stage of their pregnancy (i.e. during the early stages of the life-energy that infuses the fetus quickening into a soul) some of the demon's essence can be absorbed by the fetus, turning it into a witch. Some witches can pass their powers onto their children if they get pregnant, creating entire bloodlines of witches--witchlines. This demonic essence is not always beneficial to the witch, but detrimental witchlines tend to die out quickly or have their "curse" mutate into more benign or beneficial forms, on account of natural selection. The oldest witchlines--the ones which have had the most time in which to accrue positive mutations in their demonic essence and weed out negative ones--tend to be the most powerful and have the most strains, to the point where there is much debate about how and if certain prehistoric witchlines are related to one another. (There are many holes yet to be filled here: What are demons? Where do they come from? Why do they possess people? How did humanity avoid the whole species getting possessed? If the answer to the last question is that they have some way to fight it--how? But still, it's a good start.)

All this is well and good; just some cool matrilineal magical dynasties. However, while demonic essence isn't alive per se--in that it isn't composed of cells or DNA or even atomic matter--it very explicitly does obey the laws of evolution, and is under a highly specific selective pressure, that of being passed exclusively from mother to child down the host's bloodline--and so any male children the host has is, from the evolutionary perspective of the essence, time and resources wasted on a biological dead end. There are in fact numerous parasites that're in a similar boat IRL (most widely studied in insects, IIRC), and they tend react to it by trying to eliminate male offspring altogether. They usually don't fully succeed because they create their own contravening selective pressure in the host--the rarer males become in the general population, the greater the probability any male who does exist has of passing on his genes, and thus the more you want to have male offspring--which results in a quasi-stable equilibrium where there are quite a few fewer males than in the normal distribution (that's the legitimate scientific term for a 1:1 m/f sex ratio, BTW) but still enough for the species to continue existing. (The reason this doesn't happen with mitochondria--at least in animals--is that our mitochondria's genomes are too small to put up any significant resistance to the will of our nuclear genomes.)

But in that war both sides are using the same weapons--DNA, RNA, proteins; I somehow doubt these weapons could fight literal magic. On the other hand, every time we speak of biological phenomena as if they have agency or intentionality (as I've done several times here, I'm sure) is just shorthand to make these concepts easier to talk about; the only element in this equation that actually has the ability to make plans or set goals are the human beings, so if they become aware of the danger they're in (of every non-parthenogenic witch lineage going extinct eventually) they can do something to counter it, such as making it illegal for any witch woman who doesn't have at least one brother to have children (excluding the oldest and most powerful lineages, of course). Probably a long shot for them to come to any conclusions that would allow them to actually do this before they cotton onto the mechanics of Darwinian evolution (and/or for any populations of mundane humans to have avoided being absorbed by the people who can do literal magic, even as an underclass), but I suppose we can make that stretch, in the interest of actually having a setting.

So at this point we have not just matrilineal societies in this world but matriarchal ones--class hierarchy in this world will obviously be based on magical power (until the rise of capitalism, at least; liberals don't like it when you just take things by force from other "civilized" people) and while the modal man has just as much magical power as his sisters, the likelihood of men existing in your witchline scales inversely with its power. Marriage as such does not exist, that being a tool of patriarchal societies for allowing patrilineal inheritance, but if The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is anything to go by (and it might not be, having been published in 1884) we can get all the way to pair bonding based on fear of incest alone, with the exception that an all-AFAB witchline will by definition be incapable of maternal line incest and would likely wish to avoid annoying their vassals/allies by stealing too many men from them, and so would likely just ask them for one male to be used by any given generation of the entire family, not to mention the fact that everyone having the same father will increase the "family-ness" of the next generation--in short, we already have the perfect setup for a harem anime here, provided you're into sisters. Hell, if the man being the weakest person in his harem is a deal-breaker for you--you absolute fucking coward--there is a theoretical workaround for this: nothing says a first-generation witch can't be extremely strong, it's just statistically unlikely.

And then the isekai bullshit crashes the party.

It is a foundational fact of the setting that something from outside of this world--that we've been calling demons--is making their way into it. If they can be driven out--presumably how humanity survived long enough for the witchlines to develop in the first place--why can they not be summoned? So far so good--this allows for experimentation with deliberately creating new witchlines--but if demons can be summoned from beyond this world, why not other things? Such as people from our world?

I allowed the stretch of these people figuring out the danger they were in of accidentally genderciding themselves pre-modern-science because it was necessary for their continued survival, but now they have another way out. Furthermore, being aware of the danger won't make a difference; if the powers that be are the ones who can summon men from other worlds--which seems likely, since they are by definition the most powerful witches around--then deliberately allowing the problem to get worse would only strengthen their chokehold on power. There is no incentive for the rulers to try and preserve a native population of men or non-magical people anymore--quite the opposite. Even if alternatives to men exist (which they very well might since, you know, magic), they'll get crushed by Big Kidnapping-Men-From-Other-Worlds like Elon Musk crushed high-speed rail in California.

And do you see where this is heading???

Like, at least the men they summon will be by definition underpowered--particularly since these people will be as well-versed in controlling people summoned from other worlds as Europeans eventually became in manipulating indigenous politics (for much the same reasons; they have experience to draw on, while their victims do not)--but given the facts that it'd be foolish for us not to follow a protagonist who'd be asking all the same questions about this world the audience will now that we've been given the chance and that the most interesting story we can tell here probably involving some kind of revolution, I should probably start considering coming up with a way to fix that. Fuck.

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...Just to be clear, I've known about the kinds of parasites mentioned in the third paragraph for years and didn't, like, deduce all these problems that cropped up based on pure logic before searching for evidence that they existed or something. In fact, I have a couple sci-fi settings based on the concept: "We've got a planet that's almost perfect for colonization--but oh no, some molecule ubiquitous in the local biota is hazardous to human life! Don't worry, we can engineer this local parasite that eats that molecule to live in human beings. It can even be passed on during pregnancy or introduced in vitro. This has all the benefits of genetically engineering colonists with none of the potential political ramifications of doing so or the legitimate downsides, either (a genetically engineered colonist would have to be de-engineered if they ever wish to leave the poison planet; these people can just leave and let their parasites starve). Yes, we know about what similar parasites on Earth do to their hosts, but if we ever stop interfering with human reproduction for the literally thousands of years required for it to become a legitimate evolutionary pressure, that can only mean galactic civilization has been blasted back to the stone age--in which case the survivors will have bigger problems to worry about." Galactic civilization then falls and two thousand years later we get the setting from Wren Spencer's A Brother's Price, more or less. (The settings diverge from one another in the nature of pre-fall civilization and what aspect of imperialism/capitalism I'm criticizing in them.)

[guillemelgat]

Egin zaitez artzain, ez ertzain // “Become a shepherd, not a policeman”

Ernai taldeko eranskailuatik, postera nahi nuen eta hau egin dut. Jesus Maria Arzuagakoa da argazkia, Oñatiko artzaina, bere txakurra eta ardiak. Mesedez erabili eta banatu ezazu irudi hau!

From a sticker by Ernai (Basque leftist group), I wanted a poster and I made this. The photo is by Jesus Maria Arzuaga, of a shepherd, his dog, and sheep in Oñati. Please use and share this picture!