#i both love and hate info-dumping worldbuilding stuff like i feel like i'm just total stream of consciousness sometimes

[thedawningofthehour]

JUSt needed to tell you that thinking about "Profile in Quicksilver" got me through the day 💕💕💕

I also love how you incorporate worldbuilding details seamlessly into the narrative without being overwhelming! I love reading Gale & Draxum talking! Do u have any religion/traditions/custom headcanons that didn't show up in the fic (yet)?

thank you so much for writing!!!

Thank you! I do try to avoid lore dumps, even if they can be interesting at times. Ideally, people won't realize they're being lore dumped on. It's like, in a dance when you transition to a different blocking, ideally the audience shouldn't even notice you're transitioning, it should just feel like part of the choreography.

And OH FUCKING BOY DO I. Thinking about the background of the Hidden City and the Yokai as a whole has been so much fun. Making it fit with the lore we see in the show and the actual history of New York City has been so much fun-like, it's not that there happens to be a giant monster city under NYC, NYC became NYC because there was a giant monster city already there. And that's why NYC is Like That. Why are all the dark armor pieces in New York? Because that's where most magic is now, magical beings were driven out from everywhere else.

As far as religion, I've been keeping them pretty secular? Mostly because that's just an aspect I don't feel really jives with TMNT. I have a scene later on where Leo and Mikey attend church with April and her parents, but it's more out of curiosity than any real desire to take up religion. They see it as more of a cool cultural thing that an actual system of beliefs. One of the main things I can remember right now is Leo bitching about the smell of incense.

In the background, I think of the Yokai as following a lot of pagan religions. These people haven't been directly colonized or conquered (or more accurately, were ethnically cleansed instead of being colonized or conquered) so Christianity and Islam are much less common. Probably the same with some other religions that spread due to conquest, but I'm not...entirely sure what those religions would be. (Hellenism? Zoroastrianism? Taoism? Do those fit? I'm singling out Abrahamic religions because those are the most common currently) Also Christianity and Islam are pretty young religions. I haven't made a definite timeline, but I'm leaning towards most Yokai communities being established more than 2000 years ago. Leo mentioned in the Christmas chapter that there were a lot of bright reds and lights down in the Hidden City-pretty much everyone has a winter solstice holiday, so officially they're celebrating the solstice instead of any one religious holiday, and everyone's kind of free to celebrate however they want. Not a lot goes down in December, actually. Schools have most of the month off, a lot of workplaces cut their hours or just straight shut up for a few weeks, most people are partying and spending time with family. It's basically like their summer vacation.

Oh! One thing I will probably work in at some point, but the last of the Yokai migrations happened during WW1. The few remaining exclaves in the human world (like the one in Chongqing, where Tigerclaw was living) basically went "fuck it" and packed up shop, even in places where there was no fighting. It was the nail that drove home that they couldn't exist alongside humans, that even if they weren't warring with the humans themselves they would still get roped into human conflicts, and eventually they would be killed off.

And the thing is, up until recently, the Hidden City was still rather closed off from the human world, despite living underneath NYC. You have to get government approval to go topside, so most people were living their entire lives underground without ever stepping foot in NYC proper. It was really with the invention of television and then the internet that bridged the gap from the Yokai's side, and both those things took a lot longer for the Yokai to adopt. So a lot of human stuff that happened from the 1910s to around 1970s-1980s era didn't get a lot of attention down there.

Like. They know WWII happened. Objectively. By that I mean they knew shit was going down, so the Heads pulled down just about everyone who worked up top and they all just bunkered down for several years until they realized the war was over. It was an annoyance for most of them, a period of time where they couldn't get certain products or had their business disrupted because somewhere in their chain was a guy who worked at a human company and he can't do that now. They were able to read about what happened afterwards and knew vaguely of all the genocides, but most of them didn't look into it very hard. Just more humans bent on killing each other, what else was new? Most of them will still refer to WW1 as 'The Great War.'

And I thought of this scene before October, and I feel like I probably shouldn't use it now due to how politically charged it is, but originally I wanted to include a scene where someone mentions Israel and Josh is really confused because the last time he was living aboveground that area was controlled by the Ottomans and was officially part of Syria. Maybe independent Jerusalem, but why would it be Israel? Bella has to pull him aside and explain. He knew about the Holocaust, but he had no knowledge of Mandatory Palestine or the Nakba. The entire time she's talking and his eyes are just bugging out.

On the plus side, India is no longer under British rule, so he was probably pretty happy to find that out?

I had like several other things I rambled about and deleted because they were going entirely off the rails, I might post those at another time. I've thought about this world way too much and I've written far too little down. (also sorry it took so long to respond! I knew I'd go crazy and wanted to get the chapter done first, and the chapter took longer than I expected lol)