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[-] UmbraVivi@hexbear.net 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

All art, all stories are an expression of one's own thoughts and ideas. All stories are about inner and outer human conflict. Your characters' goals, motivations and the adversities they face will always be dictated, or at the very least strongly influenced by your ideology and world view. No fascist will ever write about a communist utopia positively. No communist will ever uncritically write about a great man pulling himself up by his bootstraps to become a billionaire. If you're an "apolitical gamer" you will unquestioningly write about whatever you're finding in the trash can of ideology at the moment. Similarly, everything you write will be tainted by "modern day thought" because everything we have ever experienced has happened in the modern day, including learning about the past. Every fantasy world is merely a reinterpretation of ours and every sapient fantasy race is allegorical to humans in some way, whether you intend it to be or not. We cannot comprehend non-human conflict and thus human conflict is all we can write about.

These people really do believe the curtains are blue, huh?

[-] 1nt3rd1m3nt10n4l@hexbear.net 8 points 1 year ago

All stories are about inner and outer human conflict. Your characters' goals, motivations and the adversities they face will always be dictated, or at the very least strongly influenced by your ideology and world view.

This explains why I'm terrible at writing anything, or coming up with good overarching plots whenever I want to run a TTRPG. Because I don't really understand other people very well.

[-] Thordros@hexbear.net 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I found a lot of success in joint-DM ventures with somebody who is great at telling ground-level stories. I do all the world building, they handle all the people stuff.

One of my favourite settings I built was a world where magic flows out of nexuses of power built by an ancient civilization that's now lost to ruin. (Spoiler warning for my son if he reads this.) The world is a polar-shifted Earth, post-climate change and post-nuclear war. The power nexuses are the locations of nuclear power plants, and the island chain the story takes place on is a flooded European continent. I did a whole bunch of math and simulations in a GIS thingy, and figured out where the floodplains would be, and what would still be above water if sea level rose by X meters. Then I rotated it, just to make it even less recognizable.

It's one of the ways I came to grips with the limitations of being Autistic, and how I can lean into the strengths I have instead.

[-] BurgerPunk@hexbear.net 3 points 1 year ago

fidel-salute that is such an awesome concept for a fantasy setting!!!

[-] autismdragon@hexbear.net 6 points 1 year ago

No communist will ever uncritically write about a great man pulling himself up by his bootstraps to become a billionaire.

This is mostly true but I will state that as a communist one of my major stories I'm working on does have heroic monarchs in it.

To be fair this story is something I've been working on since before I became communist, and I've added revolutionary themes to it since, but the main "heroic monarch" character is one I created after becoming a communist. Like to be clear she's a heroic monarch in a society where feudalism is every country, and I plan for the world the story takes place in to go through historical materialism stages of development over time. She's a proactively progressive character that makes positive developments for the society she rules. She's also one of my favorite characters I've developed.

But ngl I do kind of like Gambo/CKII dynastic stuff aesthetically and one of my two major works features it heavily. And features characters that are part of dynasties that are better or worse than others. And also feudal countries that are more progressive than other ones in the world.

I do worry that i'm letting my special interest make me too ideologically incoherent but its the story I wanna write so shrug-outta-hecks

this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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