#yayyy!! more fake world building!!!!

[m0ssycobblestone]

Ough.

Rewrite of the JuLai Parties post because I HATE how I wrote it before SO TAKE TWO LOVE AND PEANITS ✌️

Fake Trigun worldbuilding headcanon yay!! Because I'm such a sucker for that kind of stuff, and I need to throw it back into the void but better!!! This is for the tristamp universe specifically because we get to see the JuLai event happen yadda yadda yadda ANYWAYS

The concept at its core is basically, "What if, in the years following JuLai's destruction, people started throwing parties?" Then JuLai Parties were born.

Sometime after the Third City was destroyed, people from the nearby towns began gathering at the bottom of the crater and throwing these parties (mostly) in secret. They tried to be secret for the most part because, let's be honest, a big party inside a crater where hundreds of people died is probably not very allowed! And at the very least DEFINETELY frowned upon!! Plus, it's just slightly more fun when no one else really knows about it. To keep it all on the down low, those who know about the parties have systems in place. News spreads exclusively through word of mouth, party goers are encouraged to only invite people they know and try to avoid writing things down as much as possible. Also!! Of course!! Avoid clueing in authority figures that could cut parties short or get it shut down completely!!

Part of the wonderful wonderful secret keeping skills of these god-knows-how-many party goers is night time shenanigans and a surprisingly good collective sense of 'leave no trace.' Parties are only held at night, and can take place any time from when the sun goes down to when it comes back up, though typically they end before the sun rises so everyone gets a chance to get home. Party goers are expected to bring their own supplies, including drinks, building materials and a way to exit/enter the crater. Additionally, as kind of an unspoken rule/safety measure, any forms of equipment or entertainment (instruments, etc.) should be easy to carry around and any structures as easy to assemble as they are to tear down. It's silently understood that what enters the pit leaves with the sun unless it can be easily hidden. Due to some of the left over rubble, a few party goers have taken to hiding first aid kits around the crater for easy access.

Aside from generally being a fun thing that's mostly unknown by anyone not in surrounding towns, it also acts as a way for some to process being so close to such a catastrophic event, mourn the loss of so many whether they were family, friends, or strangers, and pay their respects to the dead in their own way. Some party goers like to joke that, "If they didn't want a party here, they shouldn't have died in such a cool place," or that "people might not like it, but someone would have loved it!" And it's a common thought that, in a city as big as it was, at least one person would have wanted their life to be celebrated this way. It is also common for those in attendance to believe in celebrating the memory and lives of those who have passed rather than sitting in sorrow. The parties also offer a good excuse to go out and meet new people from other towns.

I imagine most of the towns sit at around 30 minutes to an hour (or possibly farther) away by car from JuLai's crater, just far enough to be out of range from the blast but close enough to have seen and felt the after effects of the explosion yk? So it's not uncommon to see jeeps packed with groups or small caravans of Thoma carrying people to parties. To get in, most bring along ropes or ladders they tie to the memorials or fences around the crater's edge, using them to go in and later crawl out of the hole. Occasionally, the crater is used as a venue for small bands from the various towns looking to perform, with the parties acting as the perfect place to do so.

Every year after the incident, party goers have made it tradition to hold a special event on the night the city was destroyed. They throw a huge party with lights, music, and typically, a small appearance from the person(s) who first spread the word of the JuLai Parties to get everyone hyped up, lasting all the way from sunset to sunrise. While most party dates are inconsistent and could happen any night of the week, the Anniversary Party is the only one that's consistently on the same day every year.

Eventually it gets to the point where most of the people going to these parties end up knowing each other, at the least being able to recognize each other's faces or names and at the most becoming family to one another. It really does become its own little community (the vibes are immaculate).

The whole thing in general has kind of a burning man vibe that I really enjoy :)

Very strangers helping strangers helping strangers and building community out of nothing. Humanity persists!!! Yippee!!!

Everyone's just there to have a good time and we love that for them✨

[crimeronan]

how did you name your original characters? trying to name some guys without getting distracted making a whole conlang again :/

unfortunately it Did involve getting distracted by worldbuilding. LMAO.

naming conventions are usually the first thing i pin down when i'm culturally worldbuilding bc their construction says a lot -- are there surnames? patrilineal, matrilineal, both? are people named after relatives? do people choose their own names? how common is changing a name? etc etc etc

i think it would be hard to hang out with a million trans people and NOT have a fascination with naming conventions leak into my writing.

so. oichen culture, which is where both ruby and sol are from, doesn't use traditional surnames. people are, for the most part, named for literal concepts & then translate those names literally across languages. if you're a functional parent in this society you're generally expected to name your kid after something that brings you joy/peace. it's a way of passing down bits of a parent's personality/values, which matters more than linear surnames.

ruby sunrise was named by a pair of insufferable morning people. honey fern (another important character) was named for the way sunlight falls across leaves in summer afternoons. winter solstice was named for the most loving and celebratory holiday in the oichen calendar, because when you're in a very northern country with bitterly cold winters, you Must celebrate the days getting longer. and getting together as family and friends is much more important in the dead months than at any other time. we made it to the end of the darkness!!!

sol, of course, now lives in a place with a very small oichen diaspora, at least compared to the rest of tachni's population. both "sol" and "winnie" are easy nicknames that make her sound less Foreign. she's spent years getting rid of her accent and assimilating and building a completely fake self.

so when she tells people her parents named her winter solstice because they sensed the empty ice in her, Most of them don't know enough to dispute it.

(ruby does. obviously.)

on the Other hand, tachnin names are Much more like typical 2020s suburban american names. sometimes literally (robert, nova, maddie, etc) and sometimes just in vibes (camde, adan, etc). because tachni is the heart of global commerce and capitalism and imperialism and whatnot.

so. feels thematically appropriate.

nova's name was chosen because i wanted something sky-related and light-related to contrast winter solstice.

devin is the only one i just named off the top of my head iirc. but conveniently the name has irish origins that mean "poet" and french origins that mean "divine." so it SOUNDS like i put a lot of thought into it.

"tach" as devin's surname is just the name given to every sad kid in the city with no parents. tach, ie: a ward of the state of tachni. yayyy.

moira tach was named to match devin -- moira is the anglicization of máire, which is the irish form of mary. we love divine women who are in hell. YAAAY.

and then when i'm naming Other supporting cast members, i've been working out cultural and ethnic backgrounds on a character-by-character basis. helps me figure out what other countries are in this whole fantasy world!