Worldbuildingex 2020 letter

[weakinteraction]

Thanks very much for creating for me/thinking about maybe creating for me/looking at my letter out of idle curiosity/accidentally clicking on here and not having already given up reading.

I want to emphasise up front that I would, very genuinely, be delighted with anything created for any combination of character and worldbuilding tags I've picked (as long as it avoids my DNWs). Many of the worldbuilding tags are essentially prompts in and of themselves, to be honest, so if you've already got ideas, please do just go for it, but this letter is here if you do want more detail.

My AO3 name is weakinteraction -- exactly the same as this dreamwidth account. I'm requesting Fic, Art or In-Universe Meta for all of the fandoms below; please note that in some cases I have suggested certain characters that might fit well with particular worldbuilding tags, but that shouldn't be taken as meaning I'm not open to them being explored in other ways. (In all but one of the fandoms, I've requested the worldbuilding-by-itself-is-fine "Any or No Characters" tag, so I really am open to anything. The only one where I haven't done that is Star Wars - New EU, because I'm most familiar with the comics there.)

The last thing I want to say at the top is please don't read anything into differing lengths of the sections for particularly fandoms/tags than that there are some things I am more waffly about than others -- I would be equally thrilled to get something for any of these.

General | SMAC | Frozen | Disco | Children of Time | Quantum Leap | SW - New EU


General likes

• I love worldbuilding in all its forms; my favourite canons split pretty evenly into ones where the worldbuilding feels all wonderfully detailed and I just want even more of it, and ones where I have a ton of nagging questions that I want filling in/inconsistencies I want to see resolved.
  
• That said, I am definitely not averse to shipping if you want to include it. I have listed for each fandom any ships I particularly ship among the selected characters, but I am in general open to being persuaded on any given pairing. I multiship all over the place and don't have any hard NOTPs.
  
• I love canon-divergent AUs; if you want to explore the worldbuilding in question by taking a road-not-travelled approach, that's A-OK with me.
  
• Fic: I am in general happy with many different types of fic; Just the characters doing something that they're stated to do in canon but with the details glossed over would be fine with me, if there's more detailed exploration of how they do it to show the worldbuilding. But I genuinely have no restrictions on things like person, tense, and am very open to epistolary fic, interactive fiction, and so on. Again, go with your inspiration.
  
• In-universe meta: I basically consider this "also fic", but yes please to anything and everything that fits in the category of things you might find in that universe. Encyclopedia entries, newspaper articles, instruction manuals, teaching materials, etc. Even better, something that takes this a layer deeper, like a historical overview presenting bits and pieces from different sources and pointing out the contrasts/conflicts between them. I particularly love the sort of thing that presents a distorted view of the version we "know" from canon, but that you can see where it's come from (slightly random example if you know it: "Living Witness" from Voyager). But in general, anything you can imagine that would fit into the meta category would be great.
  
• Art: I'm open to any and all types of worldbuilding art. Maps! Diagrams! Fictional landscapes! Portraits of characters illustrating worldbuilding elements (fashion, gadgets they're holding, etc.)! If you're inclined to include them, I do love Easter-Egg-y type stuff in art, and for some of these fandoms I would really love something that reproduced the feel of being from that universe, where appropriate (e.g. for Star Wars, something that looked like it was being viewed on a screen on board a ship). I'll be honest -- I don't feel like I'm very good at prompting for art. I've tried to provide some more specific ideas where they occur to me, but they really are just suggestions; if they're absent/not working for you, but something I've put in the other bits of the details has sparked off an idea, go with it by all means.
  

DNWs

• character or ship bashing (in particular, where there are conflicting canon ships for any ships you might be writing, quietly ignoring them/AU-ing them away/handwaving everyone as being happily poly are all far preferable to me to devoting large chunks of the fic to demonstrating that the canon love interest is The Worst and breaking them up; OTOH, angst where everybody feels bad about it can work just fine)
  
• non-canon-divergent AUs like coffee shops, A/B/O, etc. (canon-divergent ones, on the other hand, are a big yes as mentioned above)
  
• pregnancy/kidfic
  
• watersports
  
• scat
  
• emetophilia
  
• bloodplay
  
• breathplay
  
• vore
  
• violent non-con (coercion/mind control/etc. are fine)
  
• incest
  
• underage (my definition isn't quite the same as AO3's: what I don't want is people under 16 having sex; for characters in the 13-15 range I am OK with it being mentioned that they're sexually active if that's plausible given their canon circumstances, but I wouldn't want it front and centre)

General | SMAC | Frozen | Disco | Children of Time | Quantum Leap | SW - New EU


Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

General note: I am intensely agnostic about SMAX. I have no preference at all as to whether you include ideas from it, ignore it completely, or treat it as a source of inspiration without feeling bound to the details.

Characters: Corazon Santiago, Deirdre Skye, Planet, Any or No Characters, Original Character(s)

(I ship Corazon/Deirdre.)

I would in general be happy with explorations of the worldbuilding from the perspective of any of the faction leaders, not just the ones in the tag set, or OCs from the factions. Or things with no characters at all, especially on the meta front.

Worldbuilding: Impact of discovery of human psi powers on society, Previous Flowerings, Religion on Planet, Social Engineering, Transcendent Thoughts

Impact of discovery of human psi powers on society -- The game does jump quite quickly from the early mind worm attacks revealing that psi powers are real to empaths everywhere, and there are later bits that imply the far future implications, like the Telepathic Matrix, but especially in the early days it must have caused huge ructions in a society that was already only precariously clinging on in an alien world. What does it mean for ideas about privacy? How does it affect people's view of what it means to be human? Do some factions shun telepaths? (Or are they just too useful even in the ones that we might imagine would be suspicious, especially in fighting mind worms? And obviously all the faction leaders seem to turn out to be powerful telepaths, given the connections they form with Planet.) Or were there hints that there was something to it even back on Earth? (maybe all those '60s parapsychology experiments caught on to something?) For art, I would be very up for something that gets at the same type of vibes as some of the related Secret Project videos (from the creepiness of the Empath Guild one to the outright horror of the Psychic Amplifier to the everything's-great-or-is-it Telepathic Matrix one).

Religion on Planet -- How does life on a new world affect religious views? The Gaians are an obvious candidate here: the Weather Paradigm is a very early project and comes with its own Gaian prayer. But what sort of belief systems existed among Deirdre's followers on board the Unity? What is Deirdre's role, and how comfortable is she with it? That sort of thing. If you're up for doing fictional Christian theology, I'm also intrigued by how the Believers adapt their take on things. There are implications in some of the in-game quotes that they put the expulsion from paradise front and centre, but then there's also all the endgame "We Must Dissent" stuff. But I'd also be interested in, e.g. how the University (which I kind of assume is at least officially atheist) handles rituals around major life events, death, etc. or whatever weird rituals the Hive use to help people "extend [their] awareness outward, beyond the self of body, to embrace the self of group and the self of humanity", and so on. Art-wise for this, I'd love some religious art from Planet.

Social Engineering -- the social engineering screen is seriously my favourite game mechanic ever; none of the later Civ takes on the same idea have quite given me the same feeling of pressing a lever here and getting an outcome over there but also an unintended consequence to deal with in the corner. How do the faction leaders weigh up these choices? (Given that these often determine diplomacy as well -- what do they do if their neighbour is pushing for something that isn't necessarily what they would go for?) Or taking a more ordinary citizen's level view of things, what's it like to go through an upheaval? (The fact that you just have to pay a bunch of money for it with none of the disorder in Civ II suggests that the Psych Chaplains and similar are doing a lot of stuff to people to get them to accept new models, for example.) Art-wise, some sort of chart or diagram representing connections between different areas? Or a map produced by a probe team of the likely willingness of an enemy population to adopt certain models? Or a propaganda poster?

Previous Flowerings -- this one seems most obvious as a match to Planet character-wise, but if you want to have one of the human characters discussing it with Planet/having some sort of psychic vision/etc. go for it. But I would love to know more about what Planet thinks in those moments of godhood before the dieback. Is it all quite philosophical, or is it a desperate attempt to try to survive? Art-wise, something representing the connections within the fungus all across the planet, maybe?

Transcendent Thoughts -- What are they, anyway? In some games, I seem to have an awful lot of them. I would be up for anything here from pure philosophy to invented science. Art-wise, any sort of numinous representation of a transcendent thought itself would be awesome, or something about the Transcendi -- how they seem themselves vs their reality of living inside a computer, somehow?

A lot of these tags could definitely be combined together. (e.g. how do the Believers integrate the existence of psi into their theology? To what extent do the musings of the Transcendi recapitulate Planet's millions-of-years-earlier thoughts?)

General | SMAC | Frozen | Disco | Children of Time | Quantum Leap | SW - New EU


Frozen (Disney Movies)

Characters: Original Character(s), Any or No Characters, Elsa, Honeymaren

I ship Elsa/Honeymaren, but am also definitely open to Elsa/ofc if you want to create one.

Worldbuilding: Magic elsewhere in the world, Life in the Enchanted Forest while cut off, Geopolitical implications of magical royalty, extent and limitations of Elsa's powers, Arendellian mathematical understanding given that they have the concept of fractals

Magic elsewhere in the world -- I really can't tell from what we see on screen whether Arendelle is a special place where magic exists, and if there is magic elsewhere it's rare, or whether there are all sorts of other things going on in other parts of the world. I'm particularly intrigued by the spirits -- are they global, but have a particular locus in the Enchanted Forest, or are they local and have equivalents elsewhere? Do such equivalents, if they exist, have the same "elemental" split, or a different one? Does Elsa have counterparts? (If you want to build on Elsa's still-only-partial incorporation into the overall Disney Princesses franchise, or indeed Rapunzel's cameo in the first film, and decide that Frozen takes place in the same world as most of the other Disney films, then feel free, but also feel free to go in a completely different direction.)

Life in the Enchanted Forest while cut off -- I'm mostly intrigued here by the fact that the Northuldra and the Arendellian soldiers seem to have managed to stay apart so much for such a long time. What drove that? How do they get along and when was the rapprochement between the sides? But also, I have questions like what were the limitations on their resources (either/both sides), and how did they overcome them?

Geopolitical implications of magical royalty -- whether there is magic elsewhere in the world or not (see above), what do other nations think about the fact that Elsa is so personally powerful in addition to being politically powerful? Presumably no one in their right mind thinks about invading Arendelle if she could just freeze their armies out and create hundreds of Marshmallows to fight them off, but do people consider more insidious possible attacks? Or is everyone desperate to keep her onside? Are they places where Elsa is thought of as The Witch Queen of Arendelle? (Or indeed, the Hans Christian Andersen version Snow Queen, if you want to bring things full circle ...) Very happy for you to bring in Weselton and the Duke if it fits with what you're doing.

extent and limitations of Elsa's powers -- both before and after the second movie, or indeed during the changes that she goes through in Ahtohalla. What could Elsa do that we haven't seen yet? What (if anything, now) can't she do?

Arendellian mathematical understanding given that they have the concept of fractals -- I'm really fascinated by this, and have been ever since I first heard Let It Go, because -- even if in her near-complete childhood isolation Elsa was getting top drawer one-to-one tutoring from leading scholars, which I could totally believe -- in our world the development of the understanding of fractals was definitely helped along by computers, which definitely don't seem to exist in the setting. On the other hand, the fjord-heavy coastline of Arendelle could definitely lend itself to the sort of general "how long it is it?" considerations that led Mandelbrot to fractals. Is there some sort of link to how magic works so that in the Frozen universe early alchemist types came to understand this branch of mathematics? What other unexpected paths has the history of mathematics taken in this universe? (Is this an entire worldbuilding prompt spun out of a word almost certainly chosen for alliteration purposes in a song? Yes, yes it is.)

General | SMAC | Frozen | Disco | Children of Time | Quantum Leap | SW - New EU


Star Trek: Discovery

Characters: Any or No Characters, Sylvia Tilly, Gabrielle Burnham, Saru, Siranna, Zora, Airiam, Mirror Philippa Georgiou

There are a few of these that I think go particularly well with some of the worldbuilding prompts, and I'll sometimes mention that below, but do feel free to mix and match as you see fit. (I'd have split this across multiple fandom slots if I wasn't open to that.)

Worldbuilding: Gabrielle's one-woman Time War against Control, the future the USS Discovery arrives in, Kaminar, what Section 31 knows about the Mirror Universe, cybernetic implants, Zora's origins/existence, sealed files on the USS Discovery

Gabrielle's one-woman Time War against Control -- Perpetual Infinity was such an amazing "how big is the scale of all this, again???" episode and played hard into my love of apocalyptic timelines, etc. If you want to explore this via Michael looking at the suit logs, feel free, but anything at all about all the various timelines, what Gabrielle learned, but how things kept going wrong, would be great.

the future the USS Discovery arrives in -- or "I can't wait for S3, please give me your version", if I'm honest. Has the Federation collapsed by then? ("Calypso" implies that this happens at some point in the future, to me, though exactly how far in the future again we are before Zora's emergence, I don't know.) What's the reaction of people in the future to a living piece of history? How have things changed since the time periods we're familiar with? How do the crew react to finding out about "historical" developments we know well from the TNG/DS9 era but might be surprising to them? Feel free to bring in the Temporal Cold War from ENT, if you want, given that they're going only a little further forward than Daniels's home time.

Kaminar -- at any point in its history: before the Ba'ul gained ascendancy, during the transition, the present of the series (there's surely an awful lot to explore between The Sound of Thunder and Siranna and co. turning up to help at the end of the season), or the future -- what will happen eventually?

what Section 31 knows about the Mirror Universe -- what it says on the tin, really. How much information do they have NOT from Georgiou? How is she slanting the information she provides them?

cybernetic implants -- I'm thinking Airiam is the obvious choice here for exploring this, but do feel free to go in other directions as well. There seems to be rather more of this sort of thing in Discovery than other parts of canon. Did people resile from it somewhat because of Control? Or is that just coincidence? How does the Federation regulate this sort of thing?

Zora's origins/existence -- anything/everything about this would be amazing. (One specific but very out there idea: Every time I watch Calypso, I'm reminded of Emergence from TNG, and I almost wonder if all Federation starships evolve towards sentience, given time/the right stimuli.)

sealed files on the USS Discovery -- we see at the end of S2 all of the people who remained explaining why it's not a continuity error they never mentioned any of this in TOS keeping their silence. But how much does the Federation know and/or speculate? (This could link to the "future" prompt earlier, I guess; if there are Federation archives around, what do they make of what the Federation thought happened to them?)

General | SMAC | Frozen | Disco | Children of Time | Quantum Leap | SW - New EU


Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Characters: Original Character(s), Any or No Characters

Worldbuilding: Stomatopod History & Culture, The Old Empire, Other abandoned terraforming projects, Life on Earth during the Ice Age, Guyen's cult

Stomatopod History & Culture -- the book mentions them once or twice and then basically sticks to exploring life on land. But what are the Giant (? - presumably by the same nanovirus logic as the spiders) Shrimp People up to underwater? What do they make of events later in the novel?

The Old Empire -- either from its own point of view, or that of the humans of the post-Ice-Age era. The book seems to me to be positing a society teetering right on the cusp of a possible hard take-off singularity that rebels against that possibility and ends up falling. What other technology apart from things like Kern's experiments were the NUN types against? What was the solar system like by the end -- there certainly seems to have been widespread colonisation.

Other abandoned terraforming projects -- either in their own right, or being visited by the characters we see at the very end of the novel. Further exploration of Fungus World (a natural grey goo disaster?) also welcome.

Life on Earth during the Ice Age -- how inhospitable were things? Were people reduced to completely subsistence level existence or did certain aspects of Old Empire technology/supplies survive? How did people understand their past? (I'm particularly intrigued -- given the emphasis on "the Messenger" in the book -- by what they would have made of the left-behind satellites that were presumably visible. What sort of astrological beliefs would they arrive at with that sort of stimulus?)

Guyen's cult -- another "humans in very limited circumstances" prompt. What exactly did they understand their situation to be? What did they believe? What happened to people who questioned those beliefs? etc.

General | SMAC | Frozen | Disco | Children of Time | Quantum Leap | SW - New EU


Quantum Leap

Characters: Any or No Characters, Original Character(s), Ziggy, Donna Eleese, Sammy Jo Fuller, Al Calavicci

Worldbuilding: Life at PQL, Effects of Sam's leaps on the timeline

Life at PQL -- what is day-to-day life like for the participants? Presumably PQL time has to shift for most of the major players to match the time wherever Sam has leaped to so that they can sync up with him. Is there some sort of alarm that goes off whenever he leaps? What sort of side projects do they get up to? (Is there any historical research that goes on?)

Effects of Sam's leaps on the timeline -- this is really intriguing to me because it's very much the point of the series that the time travel does matter. I know the Kennedy episode went for "our timeline is the changed one" but presumably by the end of the series a number of significant changes have occurred. And, of course, there's the closer-to-home version that would tie in with the other tag: Does Donna remember a time before Sammy Jo worked there, now? How does she feel understanding her parentage? etc.

General | SMAC | Frozen | Disco | Children of Time | Quantum Leap | SW - New EU


Star Wars - New EU

Characters: Chelli Lona Aphra, Magna Tolvan, Queen Trios, Sana Starros

I ship Aphra/Tolvan. And Aphra/Sana. And Aphra/Sana/Tolvan.

(I've avoided "Any or No ..." here because in terms of EU material, I'm mostly familiar with the comics, specifically the main "Star Wars" line, Aphra -- and the Poe Dameron series, though that's from a different time frame. Consider this your permission to treat it as "Any or No" within those sections of canon ...)

Worldbuilding: Archaeology, Living in the Shadow of the Empire, Legends and Folklore about the Jedi Order

Archaeology -- a rather riskier occupation than in RL, it seems, what with all the ancient artefacts there are out there that are still active, and so on. Presumably there are significantly less rogue archaeologists than Aphra out there, though -- what are their methods? How are they organised? What sort of things do they discover? How did all of that change between the Republic era and the Empire? (If you want to explore this with Trios, I would be very interested in Shu-Torun attitudes towards it, given that presumably there's nothing really buried on a world whose surface is almost all lava.)

Living in the Shadow of the Empire -- could apply in all sorts of different ways, but I guess I'm particularly thinking of Trios, here, and the compromises she feels she has to make.

Legends and Folklore about the Jedi Order -- Aphra is the one with the most direct link to this, via her work and her father in particular, but feel free to look at it from other perspectives too. What do people make of the Jedi by the time the Empire has been in control for a while? The films certainly imply that people like Han see them as ancient history, even though it's only been a few decades, and even Obi-Wan talks as though the "more civilised age" the lightsaber comes from is long past. Is all this because Imperial propaganda has been busy extirpating the official record? Or just people becoming inured to their new circumstances and so refusing to see some ideas/ideals as still potentially relevant in the absence of the Jedi?

General | SMAC | Frozen | Disco | Children of Time | Quantum Leap | SW - New EU