The Quick Questions About World Building Thread

Hey guys, I was doing some research on Muslim views about fantasy (specifically, what to do with "mage" characters) and as usual, I got a boatload of "Your Mileage May Vary." One of my characters is a Muslim mage of the Magic Knight / Combat Medic variety, who lives in a Fictional Country in the Mediterranean. There's an in-universe distinction between "healers/acolytes/clergy" (whose powers are granted through religious oaths) and "mages" (people with inborn abilities, frequently tied to the natural world like weather magic, elemental powers, and the like).

He has inborn powers (healing and weather-magic), and it's noted in-story that non-magical people frequently mix up the terms "mage" and "clergy" when there are noticeable differences: The clergy are granted powers that are dependent on oaths, so they view magic as a tool/weapon/skill, but mages are born with it regardless of religion, so they view magic as a part of themselves and it's notably linked to their energy in a way that doesn't happen with clergy. It also doesn't help laymen confusion that many mages become clergy members because they view their powers as a gift from their deity.

At one point, a Muslim woman says that a religious person like him must have such a hard time reconciling his powers with the Islamic creed to avoid magic, at which he points out that he's also having a hard time using his hands to write things down. And whether he uses his powers or not isn't for anyone to judge but Allah.

Obviously I'm not trying to pass this off as realistic fiction, but should I make a fictional sect of Islam whose members state "inborn magic is given from Allah, so of course you should learn to control and use it, but seeking to learn magic from external sources isn't okay" or something like it?

I could also syncretize Islam with the country's indigenous beliefs for the same end, so the Muslimah he talks to would follow a traditional "all magic is bad" sect while his country's modified it to "inborn magic = good, actively seeking magic = not good."

edited 21st Feb '16 6:40:48 PM by Sharysa

Just a QQ:

Is it redundant to have a plasma weapon with twin nozzles?

So I shot the question about my Muslim mage character onto Nanowrimo and it got mostly answered (don't make a fictional sect of Islam, the character has some work to be done but otherwise he's a pretty solid portrayal of a Muslim, and leave out references to the real-life forbidding of magic because it would break Willing Suspension of Disbelief).

I had to talk to two Christians who kept insisting I should only follow the Quran's words about homosexuality and magic, though. And it slowly devolved into them repeating that I'm wrong and I need to overhaul how my character is fine with being a gay mage, even though I've mentioned that Muslim authors are writing fantasy/sci-fi themselves, and that the Muslim LGBT community HATES the stereotype of a "self-hating queer Muslim."

Typically, an actual Muslim person provided the practical advice up above. The question's still open here, though.

I'm currently in the process of planning a story which involves mecha being able to use a system of magic. However, I'm torn between Mini-Mecha and Humongous Mecha.

If I went with Mini-Mecha, they'd be around 4-5 meters tall, while if I went for humongous mecha they'd be about 50 meters tall.

On one hand, Mini-Mecha would allow for more intimate, personal battles, while the battles involving Humongous Mecha would be more epic. Which one should I go with?

edited 27th Feb '16 9:02:55 PM by PhoenixFalcon

Does it have to be one of those ? What about mechas in the 10-20 m range ?

How much collateral damage do you want your mechas to cause? Do you want your characters to deal with the side-effects of destroying multiple blocks or multiple cities? What's the scope you want these mechas being used for? "iNuke, your smart, personal nuke" or "we can use it to fight land wars with aliens"?

Aetol, really the size of the Mecha is irrelevant. This is more of an issue of what scale the conflict should be.

Victin, I suppose the latter. The Mecha are meant to basically be really powerful, really specialized infantry.

Hi there. I think this question has been asked before, but is this the right place to be asking questions about fictional settings in a modern, semi-realistic context? Most of the threads here pertain to more fantastical settings, see, so I was somewhat uncertain.

Yes, it is.

Noice.

Anyway, I recently had this idea for a big fancy literature-type book that you read with your eyes. It was a darkly comedic Mature Animal Story set in a fictional African country (which I would aim to make much deeper than your average Bulungi, but that's neither here nor there).

The idea I had was to have the various animal species act as stand-ins, not for specific real-life ethnic or tribal groups, but rather for the extreme diversity of ethnic and tribal groups present in Africa that, for your average Westerner, appear largely interchangeable.

Another thing I wanted to do was deconstruct Predators Are Mean and Herbivores Are Friendly by having this universe's version of Europe being mostly populated by Carnivores while the locals are all Herbivores, creating apparent parallels with Europe's colonial and 'exploitative' history in the region (which are acknowledged very frequently in-universe), only to then subvert it by showing good and bad characters in both categories.

Thing is, though, I was a little concerned that it might be loaded with Unfortunate Implications or something that I'm not detecting. Which is why I've brought it before this thread.

edited 5th Mar '16 1:22:22 AM by PresidentStalkeyes

Is there any languages which uses "double gendered" (i.e. both male and female) and/or "dual gendered" (i.e. either male or female) distinct to neutral (i.e. genderless) nouns?

First off, you... might want to watch Zootopia. No particular reason, just that it might be the sort of thing that suits your fancy for no particular reason whatsoever. No ulterior motive. Just a cool movie. It's pretty good. You should watch it sometime soon. Secondly... yeah there are a lot of Unfortunate Implications there. Even if your point is to deconstruct stereotypes, the very decision to populate one continent with carnivores and another with herbivores is already heavy with implications that you've already put down. You can't say that it doesn't matter who's a herbivore and who's a carnivore, because you've already made it clear why it is the way that it is. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to fix it, but it's something to remember when writing.

There's also the fact that it ironically supports the very concepts that are at the root of colonialism, that the colonists had an inherent advantage over the natives and as such are "genetically superior". Again, it's not a "change this now" sort of thing, it's a "keep this in mind when writing" thing.

Is this towards creating a new language, or using an existing language? I'm no language nerd, I can't help you with either. Maybe you could find some place with more language nerds than here.

What do you mean by "both male and female" ? I see what it would mean for a plural pronoun (but then, the English language has a gender-indifferent 3rd-person plural pronoun), but not for a singular pronoun.

Thanks for the feedback. I should mention that I'm well aware of the similarities to Zootopia, or rather, I am now. At the time I wrote that, I didn't really know anything about the movie other than it starred humanised animals as well. I think the main difference here, besides overall tone, would be that Zootopia, AFAIK, brings the characters' nature as animals into the spotlight as a central element of the plot and the universe which quite obviously sets it apart from the real world (even if it does have some real-world parallels), whereas here it's more 'traditional', i.e. mostly thematic or allegorical in nature, if that makes any sense. Though I probably haven't explained it very well.

I didn't think about those other points though... I might have been acutely aware of the 'genetically superior' implication you mentioned, but only for the purposes of having someone in-universe mention that that doesn't provide an excuse to tread all over people's rights. Then again, in my mind, I didn't really think that predator species are 'superior' to herbivores, just different. But yeah, I'll keep those in mind, thanks.

edited 24th Mar '16 6:26:36 PM by PresidentStalkeyes

Hmm... I'm not sure that I'd see predators as being "genetically superior", but such an arrangement might be argued to support colonialism by the argument that predators hunting herbivores are simply doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Just a couple questions that will probably make the NSA waste their time on me for a few minutes:

1) If most (say, no less than 75%) of the world's nuclear power plants went into meltdown all at once, would the Earth still be habitable in a traditional sense?

2) What would be a good apocalyptic scenario that would leave the internet as we know it intact while still qualifying as a catastrophe (besides the overdone plague)?

1. Absolutely. A "meltdown" does not by default result in the release of radiation, and the acute toxicity of radiation decays quickly with time and distance even if it were.
2. An economic crisis is the closest thing I can find.

At worst the simultaneous meltdown would render the areas around the plants uninhabitable and perhaps would raise the background radiation slightly and temporarily, but that's about it. Most modern reactor design can't blow up like the one at Chernobyl did, so you won't have radioactive clouds sweeping the world (and even that would basically just increase cancer incidence, not make the Earth unlivable).

edited 1st Apr '16 7:07:52 PM by Aetol

To the second, a series of massive chemical weapons attacks could easily do the trick. Infrastructure in itself would not be destroyed, but quite a few people would die.

In that vein, you might want to read M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud. It's pretty old, but the concept is relevant here, given how the titular... thing takes out most of civilisation without actually destroying most physical landmarks.

edited 8th Apr '16 12:13:00 AM by JHM

Is it possible that some time in the future there will be digital mythology, i.e. mythology that takes place in a digital environment or cyberspace?

What do you mean some time in the future? There is only really one obstacle to mythology in the way it is commonly understood. The internet is owned by scientists. Facts dominate the medium. I know what you are thinking, and all that stuff dies out instead of becoming popular.

However, if we are talking about what mythology actually is, Have you heard of Webcomics? How about Know Your Meme?

Oh wait, you're talking about Cyberpunk?

edited 23rd Apr '16 5:58:48 AM by war877

The mythology that we have now originates from oral traditions, folk songs, imaginative drawings by our ancestors. Will the process continues with what we have now and some time in the future the characters created digitally, memes and the cyberspace itself will be mythologized in the same way what we view the currently existing mythologies?

edited 23rd Apr '16 6:58:32 AM by murazrai

Cyberspace explicitly replaces oral tradition as an extension of writing. Stuff like what you're describing is already happening, though, and stuff more like what you are describing will happen in the far future. As to whether or not it is likely or even current, it depends on where you draw the line between story and myth.

I'd point to The Slender Man Mythos

Question: If I had a world I wanted to showcase, could I just start a thread here?