#this is kind of incomprehensible and has like 5 different topics all mixed in and is objectively kind of shit

[dizzythegreat]

a God

do you believe in a God?

well it's complicated, i say. is it really? here's what they told me: there is someone out there who loves me. no matter my sins, no matter my faults. He loves me, i will never be worthy. forgive me, father, for i have sinned, and there is nothing i will ever be able to do to make up for that fact.

there is someone out there who created me, piece by piece, and made no mistakes. took each part of this broken body and mind in His hands and curved them all together in a wretched attempt to create something beautiful.

they say i have His love, but how can i accept it knowing what i was made from? i'm stretched between desire and resentment, acceptance and rejection. they say that the woman committed the original sin, that although the man slipped the fruit into his own mouth, it was her who convinced him, although having been deceived herself. i think i'm both the man and the woman, continually deceiving myself, continually sinning. i hand myself the apple. just take one bite, and another, and another, and another, and. i know exactly what i'm doing and i do it anyways. i am the original sin and the generations damned for it afterwards. i am the tree and i am the fruit and i am the hands that passed it between them and i, too, will fall as they did, be thrown from the garden that my God created for me, cursed as i deserve to be. screaming the whole way out, i'm sorry to be like this. i'm sorry to have crumbled and cracked this body back into the dust it was made from. i'm sorry you love me.

/ / / /

well, it's sort of the same with you, in a way. i want you here with me and i want you exactly where you are. i want you to want me too and i want you to reel back in disgust. i want you to see me, to take in all my cuts and bruises, and i want you to close your eyes. i want you in a glass case, for me to look, but not touch, and i want you in my mouth. i want you to love me the way i love you, and i can think of nothing more terrifying.

this was supposed to be a religous poem, goddamnit, and i've brought it back to you again. well. i'm sorry to be like this. i'm sorry i love you in a way that you might not be able to reciprocate. i'm sorry i'm the way i am. just please keep me with you, i'll perch on the arm of your chair like an angel, keep my mouth shut and my lips upturned, close but never too close, just as i was made to be. i love you in a way that's just right and nothing less. i feel for you the way i am meant to. give me my undeserved love, pour it down my throat into the starving hole that lives beneath. i will never be worthy and you will never stop giving, and i hate you for it.

[dlamp-dictator]

Allen’s Rambling: The Four Dreaded Questions of World Building

Y’know, I was going to write this Rambling on my RP blog about why trying to mix world-building and RPing can make things confusing and difficult for your RP partners, but as of editing this I’m going to make this a bit more general.

For a lot us that want to make an epic fantasy or sci-fi world I’m sure we all took a few days or weeks to sit down and draft a bunch of notes on how we want to things to go down in that world. How people live, how they dress, how they talk, what kind of environments they have, and so on. Just... create a living, breathing world to get yourself and your readers lost in. I know the feeling, I’ve wanted to do that myself for awhile now. The issue is... how to exactly do that. Making a bunch of notes about a faction here or a faucet there can have building that world take forever. I’ve done a lot of thinking on this topic of the past few months, ultimately decided to not bother with it anymore due to my own... weaknesses as a writer. While I’ve personally decided to change how I write my original stories so I don’t have to worry about world building, I think I’d try and do a little good and try to share the system I made for world building before deciding to scrap it.

In short, world building can basically be boiled down to answering three to four questions:

Where/How does this group of people get their food?

What do these people do after they get their food?

Is there magic?

If yes, how does that magic effect how these people get their food?

You think I’m kidding, but that’s really it. Answering those 4 questions will lead to so many, many others. “But why the focus on food?” I hear some of you ask. A simple answer.

If there is no food, there is no world. 

If there is no grass for cows to graze, there are no cows. If there are no cows, there is no beef. If there is no beef, there is no meat for humans and predators to eat. You see my point? A few years ago I took a college course on ancient history as an elective, and that class went into great detail about how many great civilizations got started by the blessing of merely being formed by a river of large source of fresh water to grow crops. That history of Japan video that was floating around awhile back was a great example of my point, research ancient history in general is a great way to learn world building, but moving on.

Just to show I’m not all talk I’ll use one of my own worlds/societies that I’ve been trying to make. Awhile ago in one of my RP Ramblings I said that I had a group of female forest ninja that I was writing a story for. I’ve since then deleted that story due to... issues I was having, but I’ll answer those questions about that group here.

Where/How does this group of people get their food?

The forest ninja get their food by hunting and gathering in the forest they live in, eating while plants and forest animals like deer and bears. Most are vegetarians and only eat plants, but hunting and the consumption of meat isn’t forbidden.

What do these people do after they get their food?

Before actually eating, most will prayer in thanks of the meal. In terms of general activities most go through religious rituals. Prayer, dance, training in either martial arts or religious studies.

Is there magic?

No. At least not in this society.

See? Pretty easy right? 

WRONG. 

Now here comes the hard part. Answer those questions leads to so many others. Why do the forest ninja only hunt and gather? Do they grow their own food? Why don’t they if not? What kind of plants do they eat? If most are vegetarians why isn’t hunting and eating meat outlawed in their religion? Why do their leisure activities focused on religion? What is their religion? What are the tenets? What kind of god do they follow? Is it just one god or many? Are all members of these forest ninja religious? Why is there no magic? The list goes on, and on, and on. And even answering all of those questions will lead to others, and you just keep going, and going, and going until you run out of questions and every faucet of that civilizations daily life and existence is answered.

Sounds fun, right?

“No Allen, that sounds like a lot of work.”

Oh, you poor child, we aren’t even if at the fun part yet. There’s a fifth question in this I didn’t mention:

5. Do other groups/civilizations interact with your main character’s society? If so, how?

And this is the question that leads you asking the previous four at least 1 more time.

You see what I mean? You understand why this is a pain to do properly? And don’t even get me started on magic and superpowers. I’ll spare you all 5 paragraphs and just link these two great videos on Hard and Soft Magic and how they relate to world-building made by a Hello Future Me. The long and short of it that magic changes everything about your world. 

If your characters can spawn fire out of their hands to cook food it means harvesting firewood isn’t a thing that people need to do as frequent, which changes how much wood is gathered in your society, which changes how wood is viewed in your society as a resource. If your characters can shoot out lightning it means industrial-level uses of electricity works very differently, which my lead to certain jobs not existing and your economy running in a completely different way than our own. If you characters can spawn and control water it means that water distribution and droughts are probably not a thing, which mean there is likely a huge population boom due to the abundance or clean drinking water, which means a high disparity between rich and poor and large city areas in general, which mea- 

You see my point, right? World Building is complicated.

Thankfully, there’s a nice way to get around, which is to explain literally nothing about it. This was covered in that soft magic video, but a tumblr post I reblog a while back explains it much quicker than that video does, and I’ll just quote it here for those that don’t don’t want to be view several tabs.

Either explain it or don’t.

When authors include things that don’t fit within the real world–magic, time travel, anachronisms–there is an impulse to explain how it works. Which can be fantastic for worldbuilding, but if you don’t know what you’re talking about, it can make more problems than it solves.

Stephenie Meyer tried to explain some bizarre thing about chromosomes, and it made the biology of vampires and werewolves make no sense. Suspending disbelief worked better in that case before she tried to ground it in the real world.

Lemony Snicket, on the other hand, just has random anachronisms that are never explained, but because there’s nothing even close to resembling an attempt at an explanation, we can just shrug and go, okay, that’s how it works. The magic in Harry Potter seems to basically not be grounded in anything, but we can believe it within the context of the story because she doesn’t try to ground it in anything.

In Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera, on the other hand, he goes into a lot of magic theory, and it gives us a strong feeling of worldbuilding. There’s enough logically coherent explanation for it to feel grounded within itself.

It is possible to go too far (see: Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide and Children of the Mind) where the plot ends up so tied in the reader understanding intricately detailed scientific and pseudo-scientific minutiae that the story is incomprehensible without it.

Generally, though, if you’re going to make something up, either say it exists and leave it at that, or entirely figure out how it works. Halfway is always less believable than nothing at all.

So, while I could go through all the effort of explaining how the forest ninja live their lives, I could also just say forest ninja exist and show off all the cooler more interest parts I want to show off and not worry about explaining any of it. The major flaw in doing this however is the lack of immersion and the risk of losing a reader’s suspension of disbelief by having something really nonsensical happen.

So... why write about this? 

Honestly, I just... wanted to get my thoughts out on this topic before redoing my forest ninja story. I plan on moving to writing more short stories and little vignettes with my original pieces as opposed to writing longer, chapter-based stories since trying to do something longer will always lead me to writing myself in a corner. That’s a topic for another day, but for now... I suppose that’s it. Thanks for bearing with me folks. Feel free to reblog with your own tips about world building. I’ll be playing Under Night In-Birth in the meanwhile getting my butt handed to me by Merkava and Gordeau mains.