Worldbuilding Exchange letter 2022

[yvannairie]

Hiya! Another year, another exchange! I'm always saying this, but I absolutely love this kind of writing, and I've been enjoying the different kinds of works coming out of this exchange every year. Once again, looking forward to anything and everything.

My favourite sorts of worldbuilding stuff is any in-universe documentation -- essays, transcripts, characters debating -- and I also love information-dense art like schematics, strategic maps or anatomical charts, but if you wanna write something character-centric, I'm not opposed to that either! I like fics that are just solid thousand words of exploring a mood or infodumping, so don't feel compelled to make a super structured narrative.

I would also prefer the focus to not be on relationships any more than I want the focus to be on characters, except as a tool to communicate something else. Depictions of platonic and familial relationships are fine as flavour, I just don't really care for romance. I would like any discussion of sex work also be values-neutral and focused on the labour aspect, especially if sex-negative attitudes are a thing in-universe. I'd prefer anything written for me to be gen unless descriptions of violence necessitate it to be bumped up to teen, with the caveat that I don't consider the acknowledgement of the existence of sex worth a teen rating in the first place.

Fandom 1: Transformers Prime & Aligned video games

The robot hyperfixation hell never ends. I've thrown out some variation of this each year, I've been trying to find a different flavour for it every year, but I am still very interested in how the pantheon of the Primes gets treated by the people still practicing faith. I'd especially be interested in differences between temple religion and folk religion, how the official scripture differs from the tall stories and how its interpreted to best serve the needs of the people practicing the religion. Which parts of the faith are private, which ones are public etc etc. This also includes veneration of the planet itself as a god, there's definitely some Fun Robot Animism Things there for someone to explore :D

Fandom 2: Transformers (All Media Types)

Now, as an option for Friends of Robots who don't exclusively subsist on the High Moon games like I do, this year I also had an opportunity for a more generic request. Specifically I think there's a lot of unexplored potential of doing "stranger in a strange land" style stories about either mecha living within the more reclusive, stranger communities on Cybertron, or humans living with mecha on a planet that wasn't really planning on sustaining oxygen-breathing organics! Cybertronians have the potential to be such a varied, alien species -- I'm honestly into a little bit of everything, both seeing how humans would coexist with these strange new friends in a future where the two societies are integrated somewhat, but also how mecha would exist in the communities on their own planet that are just... fucking weird even by their standards, like bipedal mecha living mostly among beastformers or insecticons.

Fandom 3: Indivisible

In the absence of any more official content for this game, I'm constantly hoping for some kind of a fandom resurgence, because there's just too much that is interesting that was left completely unexplored. We don't get a ton of lore about the Deva and the Asura, for example -- everyone in the world treats Vetala as a fact of life, and there's lots of gaps that never get filled in for the player -- and the fundamental forces governing the world are still mostly unexplained. Really, I'll take anything, Loka is a beautiful setting that I can't get enough of.

Fandom 4: Final Fantasy XIV

So this is something I got into in a very roundabout way -- I basically started at Endwalker and we're slowly working our way backwards through the content, but the stuff in Endwalker was so much entirely my shit that I am already desperate to see more. I really just want to see anything anyone might have to say about dynamis, its interactions with ether, its influence on magic, its influence on the living and the created, and what we might learn about the more out-there reactions ether can have knowing that it can both suppress dynamis but also be negated by it. Please, please get deep into the Magic Maths for me, I am begging, this concept is so ripe for exploring.

Fandom 5: Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha

I am still very invested in Nanoha even after it's been like ten years since I saw it for the first time. I think as the reboot timeline gets more firmly established as the way forward, I keep wishing for more Strikers/Force-era worldbuilding to come back, to explore this genuinely cool scifi universe that doesn't exactly run on the power of friendship, but definitely seems to play favourites with those who are capable of mustering it. It's just really interesting to think about Midchildan culture being both enriched and constrained by magic being unevently distributed among the population. There's just a bunch of crunchy stuff there.

Fandom 6: Toji no Miko

I was really surprised to see this in the nominations!! One of the best female-led shonen series in a while, just a really strongly paced show overall that left a lot of worldbuilding negative space behind. Tbh take everything I said about Nanoha and apply it here, with a sideorder of the plot of the anime leaving it really ambiguous as to what "normal" Toji activity looks like, and how the non-crisis mode activities really shake out. The Sword Administration did exist as a whole entity before the events of the Giant Aradama Crisis, and had been trying to solve and mitigate the problem for a long time. In the twists of the worldbuilding, you can probably insert a lot of scheming, also -- the show definitely lended itself to there being bad actors trying to benefit in power and prestige from the circumstances :)c

Fandom 7: Puella Magi Madoka Magica

To close out the magical girl block, let's have something slightly different. I think there's still a lot of interesting ground to cover in the mechanics of the magical girl-Incubator relationship, especially post-season 1 but pre-Rebellion -- or even pre-s1 since Madoka explicitly went back in time to erase all witches from existence forever and you can do so many more fucked-up things with the idea of the magical girls eating their own young when pushed into deep, mind-breaking stress. It's a grim world but it's definitely not without its fascinating aspects.

And that wraps that up! As always, these are all all sorts of vague, because I don't want to too too much create expectations for what I would like to see -- part of the joy of worldbuilding is that everyone always has some idea in their mind that I would never in a million years think to ask about, and if I get overly prescriptive with my interests, who knows what I might miss out on? :D I look forward to seeing what you come up with!