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ways_back_room2018-01-29 08:27 am
bjornwilde) wrote in ways_back_room2018-01-29 08:27 am
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Monday DE:
aberration had this great idea, as inspired by last week's talk of characters we've created to flesh out our pup's stories:Sort of based off today's DE about invented characters, but what other worldbuilding headcanons have you created for your characters' universes? Like culture, language, food, politics, etc. Or for characters from typical-real-world type universes, in what ways might their worlds might different from ours (e.g., fictional places, or that in the Marvel universe kids in gym class have to watch Captain America PSAs).
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We've been doing a lot of this for different aspects of the Star Wars universe, as there are some areas where there's all sorts of detail and everything you could possibly need on Wookieepedia, and then areas where there's very little, and then areas where the Expanded Universe did a lot, where I like taking the Disney approach of "keep what you want and ignore what you don't like."
And that comes up a lot for Twi'leks and Ryloth. There was a lot about them in the old EU that's since been dwindled down considerably, which to be honest I'm glad of. But Twi'lek women in particular have so often really only shown up as slaves in SW (and moreover, sex slaves, though I think the new Disney canon tiptoes around this more, whereas the EU wasn't shy about it at all), and I really do not like the EU's whole "they volunteered to do be slaves to get off Ryloth and are super magic talented in seduction" just. No. So while I've read about the old EU canon regarding Ryloth, I … honestly ignore most of it and make up what I want, which includes:
Language – I am being a huge nerd and trying to keep track of what I invent for the Twi'leki language. I did initially derive it from the few sentences of Twi'leki that are in SW canon, but I've pretty much ignored the EU on it, because I found their linguistic choices kind of boring, typical "alien languages should always have five million glottal stops and sound like Klingon" and whatever. I am sure I have already screwed up and will continue to and will forget the rules I made up like five minutes earlier, and it is kind of killer when I push myself to do this in a thread, but. (I also do make some effort toward a kind of French phonology, but to be honest it's probably more a mix of the languages I know best.) If Hera is shown speaking Twi'leki, I am making an honest attempt to be consistent in her grammar and vocabulary. Here is part of screenshot from my sprawling, crazy GoogleDoc attempting to keep track of this:
Anyway, don't be me. The song she and the other Twi'leks sing in this OOM was also something I'd created for an earlier thing. Though I cut them off from singing the title in the actual thread, the title of the song is supposed to be "Amtder viulsen" which means "rest, my star." In my head it's a resistance song that dates from the period of the Hutt occupation on Ryloth. While the scene itself was kind of inspired by the "La Marseillaise" scene in Casablanca, with the song I was more thinking of the Italian antifascist song "Bella ciao."
Oh, and that thread was the first time I included in a posted thing a third-gender Twi'lek character, which was also already a headcanon for me that Twi'leks have a long-culturally-recognized third gender. And Twi'leks like Hera having a strong preference for bitter food is somewhat my invention, but also them canonically considering certain bitter dishes like "Mynock Lessu" to be delicacies.
... and yeah, I've made up a lot specifically about Ryloth and Hera's upbringing there. I also have headcanons regarding things like Twi'lek religious beliefs, Ryloth's history, and the specific history of Hera's clan, and thinking a lot about questions like "why do Twi'lek women of almost any age where head coverings, even when often wearing otherwise revealing outfits, while men don't" and "what kind of sexual dimorphism produces different ears," when I know full well the answer is "because in the Jabba's Palace scene in Return of the Jedi they clearly put a ton of makeup and prosthetic on the actor playing Bib Fortuna, but couldn't do the same with Oona's actress because she had to move and dance around, so they just gave her a hat." There are many, many things in SW that clearly come down to practical necessity in filming. And also "to make more kinds of action figures."
There's less for Kanan because we have a pretty clear line of canon on his backstory and the Jedi. I can't think, off the top of my head, of a Jedi-related thing that we've made up. There's usually plenty already available.
I guess some other things about the SW universe in general that I kind of assume:
- Multilingualism is the norm for most people rather than the exception. Which I think there's a strong canon basis for, with the exception of maybe people trained solely by the Empire/First Order as their trainers might see speaking anything besides Basic beneath them. But for our characters in particular, in my head Hera is fluent in at least Twi'leki, Basic, Binary, and Huttese, and Kanan canonically knows Basic, Binary, and at least some Ithorese. (Though this opens questions I have like, would it be weird to handle learning a language you can understand but not produce. But then I've had many experience of having a conversation where I'm speaking one language and the other person is responding in another, so.)
- Food in general feels like something I invent a lot of the time, though after basing it on something I found while scouring Wookieepedia for waaaay longer than I should have. Which is true of a lot of things, even if it's just "choose a planet for them to be going to" or something like that. Spending at least 45 minutes considering your options for some one-off mention is definitely a necessity.
... and this is long enough so. Sorry.
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I tend to cheat slightly with some food and play with the fanon of Fest being based off of Mexico so building off those kinds of foods for him then adapting to what's not available.
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- Firstly, most of Sahaal's history and battles through the Great Crusade, Horus Heresy and the Scouring are my own invention.
- Same with Sahaal's (as yet unseen) command squad in Third Company. None of them are canon.
- There's a surprising amount of information on 42nd Millennium food, but I had to come up with the Space Marine ration packs. The contents of which are filling and nutritious, but taste like something you can't quite put your finger on. Sahaal hating them is likewise headcanon.
- In terms of politics, most of the Planetary Governors or high-ranking Imperial officers depicted are either idiotic nobles, incompetent or actively evil. Given that the Imperium of Man has survived for ten millennia, it's my view that these are the minority, and that most of the leaders of humanity are actually good at their jobs.
- And because I'm actually a massive nerd, humanity uses as its basic computer operating system a modified version of Unix. Seriously, there's an OOM I'm finishing off that has Sahaal use /grep/ to search through files.
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They've also got a hydroponic farm providing a lot of their supplies, because two hundred years of canned foodcrap takes up way more space than I think they really had available. Vault food is generally bland and any sweetness probably comes from beets. The spices ran out long ago and I don't know how much white sugar you'd need for two hundred years of baking. The dead are given a proper funeral and taken to a Promessorium, which breaks down the corpse into liquid components which are then returned to the hydroponic nutrient supply, because it's supposed to be a sealed environment, so cremation is really an amazingly wasteful thing to do with the corpses (and there is nowhere to bury them, so yeah).
Outside the Vault I gave the Capital Wasteland Brotherhood of Steel a custom of making an Initiate who passed his or her tests to become a Knight or a Paladin do a night's vigil in their memorial room in the Citadel, which is basically an eternal flame room in the Pentagon. I also gave them a little more structure to their religious beliefs (basically monotheistic, no mention of any particular religious text, reference to the divine Power as the Architect of the Universe and the Master of Engineers) based largely on a few comments from one of their characters in Fallout 3. Their belief in technology and in trust in each other is more significant to them than belief in any specific deity, however. I also gave them the funerary custom- in the Capital area, at least- of taking a dead Brother's corpse through a series of tunnels from the Citadel to Arlington, because Arlington National Cemetery still exists, and burying them there.
Until Fawkes and Theresa of the Faint Smile destroyed Vault 87 and collapsed the adjoining Lamplight Caverns in the process, I had the all-under-16 population of Little Lamplight making a point of taking in Wasteland orphans of appropriate age. Look, the community was supposedly two hundred years old and had been ejecting members age 16 or older the entire time. You can only keep up your population through babies born to girls who've hit menarche but not yet turned 16 for so long. Orphans seem common enough in the Wastes.
Bottlecaps are canonically used as currency, but because real bottlecaps weigh around two grams plus a bit (depending on which metal they're made out of the number can vary), I've declared that certain types of cap are accepted as larger denominations of currency, so that you don't have to come up with close to two pounds of metal to pay for a suit of combat armor. Caps are backed by water, but I can't claim credit for that- it was declared back in Fallout 1 that the water merchants in the Hub all agreed on cap-for-water rates. I just lifted the idea for Ellen's neck of the woods.
I've done a lot more world-building than that, but that's off the top of my head. Part of the reason I lost steam with Ellen for a while was that Fallout 4 came out, set on the same side of the continent as FO3 and some years down the line, and I have been trying to work out how best to synch the events in the Commonwealth with the worldbuilding and RP that grew out of Ellen's canon. (Put bluntly, the Brotherhood presented in FO4 is the result of two characters dying within a year of the last bit of FO3 canon, both of whom are still alive and kicking in Ellen's version of events, and another character negotiating a deal with the supermutants of Vault 87- which can't happen with Ellen's version of events because Fawkes and Teresa destroyed the place and ended the creation of new mutants in the Capital Wasteland forever. Hard to get a reputation for leadership for ending hostilities with the mutants under the circumstances.)
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I operate pretty much the same way, with regards to Los Santos. The map is impressively large, but you can still get from one side to the other in less than 15 minutes. As fun as it would be to have a map to scale, I wouldn't want to download a 12TB game. It's the same with New Vegas. It's funny to laugh at how close Hoover Dam and the California border are to Las Vegas, but again. Space constraints. I just go along as if Los Santos were 1:1 with Los Angeles.
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And that's not even including what the hell Mandalorian culture is like in the first place. Canon has been pretty vague as to what matters for this warrior culture, but hey, more room to play right? I do know of Karen Travis work in the EU with Mandalorians, but it doesn't fit with the new canon, so I haven't included too much. Plus, I've tried reading the Republic Commando books and they were not for me.
Danny: I've decided K'un Lun is a dimensional cross-roads and this is why so many different Asian cultural aspects are known to Danny. This is the only way I can could deal with the shows falling in the Asia is one culture trope.
Izana: Some things are still up in the air as far as their world goes. Things I haven't decided on yet...like is there currency and if so, what does their economy look like? They do have goods and services, and there is one scene where a food vendor throws in a couple of drinks "on the house", but is that a turn of phrase whose meaning has faded? No money is ever shown but there are stores and restaurants, so there seems like there's something.
I've also decided religion is considered out of fashion, mostly because there is only one scene in the entire manga run and both seasons of the anime where they are shown praying, though there are funerals and headstones.
Ecology...another weird one. Canon sources don't show many animals or insects. There's a cat, some crows, and a warrior beetle shown, but no pollinators. They've also only show rice being made/grown, but Nagate eats a variety of food, with leafy greens being shown, as well as corned beef and battered chicken being shown or mentioned. I've decided there is a very limited number of animals and insects that are aboard and it is carefully regulated. No clue how it's regulated, but it is.
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One of the very early choices I made was that while some aspects of the video game side of canon are useful, about 95% of it will be ignored. Basically, I took some of the meta aspects that are pretty universal in gameplay these days, and picked the GTA universe for the basic groundwork to build upon. Because ironically, the GTA universe is the least insane option I had to work with.
The first thing I had to make sense of is how, with just the live-action side of canon to go on, Wilford has been killed at least twice. Depending on how one looks at one of the Slenderman videos, he's probably been killed at least half a dozen times, on camera. Though, I chose not to take that video literally, though I did still include the basic idea of it as part of Wilford's backstory. The other thing that I really wanted to include is how in games where he's genuinely part of the game, and not added as part of the character customiser options, is how he tends to have more than the baseline HP of other character. Usually, he gets about twice the amount of HP. Which is completely contradicted in another video where someone he shoots is able to continue chasing him around, only for Wilford to be killed shortly after from being shot. I wasn't sure what to do with this, until I found another game where someone pointed out the inconsistency, and made a joke that Wilford's secret weakness is bullets, and that's the only way to kill him. I kind of tried to play with this idea at the very beginning, but ultimately it didn't make a whole lot of sense, and it just convoluted and confused everything. So now I just go with the idea that he's got double HP, which in this context just manifests as an ability to take a beating before he falls down.
Similar to this, is another mechanic I've adopted, but it doesn't get too much overt use. But the concept in games where you can have three HP left, and then go drink a cup of coffee crouch down behind a tree and regain health has always cracked me up and seemed kind of stupid. But I've taken this idea all the same, because it's so prevalent in gameplay these days. People from Wilford's universe don't have a healing factor in any sense, but they do tend to recover from injury a bit faster than humans from other universes. I dialled it way back from the scale that happens in games though. Wilford can't eat a doughnut and and just automatically fix his face after he's been kicked in it a few times, but it does take a good deal shorter to heal, provided he doesn't keep going out and causing more mayhem. People can sleep off a lot of things, unless some higher power doesn't want them to.
Which in this case, are pixies. Wilford's entire world is run by pixies. Specifically the ones that give Link his extra lives in the Legend of Zelda. The in-universe sort of creation story is that Link's quest was so vital to civilsation that the pixies granted him the magic that would let him keep going even after he shouldn't have been able to. It kind of conflates the health system with the gold edition being the first console game with a save system. Jump forward a few thousand years and that magic, once only given to heroes who needed it, has now spread to a point where the entire population has it. It probably wasn't the pixies' original intent, but it gives them something fun to watch for the rest of eternity, since life has pretty much lost a lot of meaning for people. But people can die, and often do. Even if true game overs are rare these days, NPCs bite it all the time. In Wilford's case, it just translates to a random chance that this might be the time you don't respawn. There are other aspects that determine whether a person will respawn or not. If someone has a heart attack or cancer, or something that is going to kill you for a medical reason, it's a (scripted) Event. Even if a third party goes back and resets, that person will always have that heart attack, or that stroke, or whatever. There are also aspects that can lock something into being an Event. People are always acutely aware that you probably won't reset or respawn in certain circumstances. Large crowds of witnesses can trigger an Event, as well as being in certain places. When Wilford got shot last year, people wondered why he didn't just reset. The size of the shoot out, and the fact that it had been recorded for the news made it more likely to be an Event. When Billy and Jess took him to the hospital, that solidified it as an Event. If Wilford had died, the only way for him to be able to come back would be if someone else did the reset, and then tried to convince the world's most stubborn man to maybe not go cover that story. After the fact, Wilford didn't reset because the only way to go through it all again without getting shot would be to not go cover the story. But for whatever reason, he thought it was an important story to cover, so he left things as they were.
And when it comes to resets vs respawns, it kind of depends on what's going on. Usually, I pick one or the other, depending on how convenient it is. Generally, I use respawns when someone dies in a large group in public, but the way they died isn't going to trigger an Event. Pretty much any kind of GTA party game is going to make people respawn instead of reset. The primary difference is that when you respawn, life continues on around you. It's kind of like you blip out of existence in one part of town, and back into existence somewhere else. Sometimes it's nearby, other times it's nowhere near where you want to be.
Resets, by contrast, reset everything. It's infinitely branching universes. When you reset, everything else continues as usual, but you go back to do it over. Nobody around you remembers what happened, but if you do it enough times to undo a mistake that you keep making over and over and over again, people will start to have some pretty heavy deja vu.
In the cases of both Wilford and Mark/Markiplier (it's unclear if they're the same person in-universe, but Wilford does have a long history with both of them) have all been reset. Even though I'm largely ignoring the retcon, part of it did kind of confirm that this is sort of how it happens, when Mark discovered the ability to control his own death. Although it does seem to work a little bit differently than how I came up with it to work, because when Abe examines Mark's corpse, he determines that he'd been shot, stabbed, drowned, poisoned, and beaten. So the evidence of previous deaths is still on his body, since instead of video game resetting, it's more like he just comes back to life in the same body.
The last thing I've really had fun playing with are the creatures that live in this world. Werewolves and vampires and things are just a fact of life, but there are still other monsters that most people regard as myths and little else. A bunch of kids up on a mountain weren't expecting a wendigo, for instance. But the SCP Foundation in this universe goes out of their way to make sure the public doesn't know about some of the especially dangerous monsters that go bump in the night. Or in the daylight. This is a world where magic is real, and by extent god and superstition. Most people are aware that if something can't be explained, it's because they don't know the explanation, beyond "probably magic." I've also had a lot of fun playing with the weird properties of domestic or neutral animals. Buster came along because I'd been watching an Until Dawn playthrough, and the person playing it kept making fun of how this FUCKING WOLF understood everything single word that was said to it, and responded accordingly. But that is kind of how most video game dogs behave. They all speak perfect English, and will do your bidding for you as long as you keep them fed and happy. If you have a dog in a video game, you have a helpful shadow that will carry your stuff, solve puzzles with you, and beat up your enemies. Since that seemed a little too overtly intelligent for a pet, I toned it down a lot. Buster will carry his stuff, and while he understands English, he's an absolute moron who would rather chew on his foot than help you.
In the end, pretty much all of this comes together to mean that sanity is a relative concept where Wilford's from. With so little regard for life just being the baseline for behaviour, you kind of have to be actively going out of your way to be as awful as possible for people to notice there's anything wrong with you. Wilford's disregard is a little more extreme than usual, if a scene where he gets screamed at by his producer(?) for killing another guest is anything to go by. But he's just vaguely annoying in the grand scheme of things, so most people just ignore him when he's being like that.
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-the environment went to shit sometime before the events of the movie (which seems to be implied by the artwork and a couple of lyrics)
-the reason zydrate can be drawn out of dead people is because it floats around a person's system even after the high wears off, which is how Graverobber is able to draw it out of corpses -- and since most people in the world get surgery at some point, most bodies will have some traces on them
-the city it takes place in is called Genetic City and is located somewhere in California (which I believe is actually canon from the stage show's MySpace pages from 10 years ago, OR could be me totally misremembering everything! Hard to tell because they deleted everything!)
-the rest of the world is just as ravaged as the United States is, so there's no real escape from how bad everything got
-there's very little resistance to GeneCo or the Repo Men, and it's partly due to a way more cavalier attitude towards death after the plague made constant death kind of inescapable for everyone
-tying into point #1: the reason why everyone (including Graverobber) is so goddamned pale is because the environmental damage has blotted out the sun to some extent, so everyone's getting way less sunlight than they would normally
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Omnics were originally non-sentient robots with self-improving software back in the 2030s or so, before the Crisis. They became sapient by accident because of the combination of self-improving programming and loading that software onto computational hardware powerful enough that it was capable of supporting true AI, Omnica Corporation freaked out and shut everything down because they didn't want to be responsible for robotic slave labour, and then they got in trouble for leaving their investors in the lurch. Then something mysterious happened that made the omniums reactivate and build legions of killer robots to conquer and/or exterminate humanity; we haven't really expanded upon this because Blizzard probably has plans for the true cause of the Omnic Crisis, related to the equally mysterious method Overwatch used to end the Crisis.
Canon has more to say about written omnicode than spoken; apparently the original idea was for written omnicode to be animated. I figured it made more sense if there was more to spoken omnicode than the audible beeps and whistles, because while Bastion has a wide variety of beeping sounds as audio cues for different situations in-game (where other characters have spoken lines), usually their responses to other characters conversing with them in the pre-match dialogue are just a few beeps rather than a lot of distinct notes like most of the Binary dialogue in Star Wars. So I decided most of the meaning is conveyed as an electronic transmission and the beeps are a tone cue.
Canonically Bastion is capable of understanding human languages, since during in-game dialogue exchanges they react with an offended noise when a human character insults them and a happier noise when one of the human characters says something complimentary to them. I decided that the manufacturing process included installing some off-the-shelf language software for multiple human languages commonly spoken in the area because it would be useful to be able to intercept human communications, but speaking to humans was totally unnecessary, so Omnic Crisis models weren't given sophisticated voice synthesizers. (Not just Bastion units but also the OR-14s seen in Reinhardt's short. Null Sector omnics don't talk for the same reason, but I'm not sure how many of them are former Omnic Crisis troops.) As a result, in text Bastion speaks fluently and has a large vocabulary, but uses very little figurative language, though they do understand idioms and metaphors. They consider omnicode to be a "spoken language", but distinguish between it and phonetic languages, i.e. most human ones; they didn't really think of themself as having difficulty with spoken communication until recently when they started interacting with humans on a regular basis, which is why they keep trying to start conversations by beeping at people and switching to writing after it becomes apparent that the person they're talking to has no idea what they're saying.
Bastion's precise model, the E54 series, was invented in the middle of the war by the omnics. They were iterating upon the existing Bastion unit designs, such as the B73 series seen in an alternate skin. I figure E54s are more mentally flexible than B73s, although they're comparably intelligent in other respects. (There's likely also some small physical improvements that aren't important to game mechanics.)
I've got more, but that's all I can think of right now and this is pretty long already.