Dear Worldbuilder
17 Jan 2020 21:18![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
extrapenguinHi! I'm ![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
ExtraPenguin.
For OCs, I prefer to read about women, especially ones in F/F relationships. I greatly enjoy people who are competent at what they do and loyal to those they find worthy of it. People who make or fix things are wonderful, as are people in complex webs of loyalties who swim in them like water.
Relationship-wise, I enjoy Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, Shen Wei & Li Qian, Shen Wei & Ye Zun, and Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan &/ Ye Zun (/ and & options both fine). Plotwise, either some casefic, or Zhao Yunlan turning up for an anthropological tour of Dixing, or Shen Wei and/or Ye Zun telling someone something about Dixing. Or a compare and contrast of the past Shen Wei grew up with on the surface with modern Dixing.
Timekeeping in Dixing
How do they keep time? Is their basic unit of time based on some cave flora, or some natural (lava-related?) phenomenon? Are there multiple calendar systems that are in conflict? Or is there simply someone with an hourglass who turns the Palace Hourglass and every second turn there's a ringing gong?
How time works in Dixing
Does time flow at similar rates in Dixing and Haixing – so that one day in one is one day in another – or does it alter? Is the conversion rate a constant, or some sinusoidal thing where one year in one is one year in another, but one day in Dixing could be anything from 0.1 to 10 Haixing days long?
Dixingian customs
Dixing is all alone in the dark – what sorts of customs do they have for births, deaths, celebrations, etc? How closely do they relate to imported Haixing customs? Do Haixing customs have some sort of prestige value that everyone seeks to emulate?
Spaceship that brought Yashou and Dixingians' ancestors to Haixing
Why did it leave the homeworld, why did it come to Haixing, what happened to it, and how much tech did they lose and why? Did the crew toss Yashou and Dixingians from idk cryosuspension to Haixing and continue on their merry way to the next planet to colonize, or was Haixing their final stop?
Life in Dixing before the meteor
So, uh, what was it like? How were the trade links to the surface? Based on what Shen Wei says, at least some Dixingians lived on the surface; were there some humans and Yashou living in Dixing? Was Dixing just as dark as it is in the present (as it didn't have any Hallows as the Sun), or was there some illumination system that the meteor broke?
The Hallows
How do they actually work? Why do they work? Who made them, and for what reason? Ma Gui speaks of their time-disrupting properties being something he'd heard legends of – did he simply discover the ancient artefacts, or were there blueprints at some point?
I greatly enjoy our wily philosopher and the fierce determined fin clawing her way back to sentience! I enjoy Creideiki/Hikahi, and Chissis &/ Tkett. Feel free to include any other dolphins and aliens, though I'm not one for the humans or chimpanzees.
Format opt-in: if you want to write a fic entirely in Trinary, or with significant Trinary elements, I'm game!
Trinary
What's it like to think in Trinary all day? What sort of poetic imagery is most popular? What sorts of things count as undertones of Primal that e.g. Makanee is worried about Brookida displaying? How did Trinary form exactly? (Dolphins finding haikus cool and just unilaterally to only communicate using them?) How does thinking in Trinary affect dolphin views of art? What are the images that are considered most poetic, and why? How often do they use Trinary to subtly or not-so-subtly troll humans? What does a Trinary courtship look like? What're dolphins' favorite wordplays?
The Whale Dream
I'd love to see some sort of opening up of what it is and what it means, and how it's reflected in modern Trinary! Do our spacegoing fins miss the song of the humpbacks of Earth's oceans?
Progenitors
What were the Progenitors like? Why did they make the choices they did? Did they unifiedly disappear one day, or was there fractiousness? Why did they leave? How did First Contact between the Progenitors go? What sorts of traps did they leave behind?
Buyur Plan for Jijo
Is the Buyur plan simply what they said it would be in Temptation, or is there yet another layer hidden there? Do they have things hidden on Jijo beyond the things mentioned in Temptation? What was the method to their choice of things to leave behind?
I like Yu Ziyuan, though I'd rather not read about her relationship with Jiang Fengmian or the nitty-gritty of raising toddlers. Being the teacher of unruly teens is fine, though! Is she the Jiang sect's primary teacher? Also, OC girlfriends are completely fine.
Differences in Sects' Cultivation Methods
The Lan sect uses more music than others, but everyone seems to be a straightforward sword cultivator. What are the actual differences? Or is everyone actually cultivating according to the exact same method, and if so, why does only that method work?
Cultivational Artefacts
How does one make them? What separates e.g. Zidian from a sword? Why don't we see more of them – are they supremely expensive, or not that effective with limited exceptions, or what?
Night-hunting
What are the popular conventions? What sort of prey is considered highest-prestige, whereas what's considered necessary drudgework? How far afield does everyone hunt? How do they teach the kids to hunt?
Likes
- Same-sex relationships, especially F/F.
- Narratives of reconstruction: fixing something, whether that be a country, a piece of equipment, a relationship, or a person. (Examples: Nirvana in Fire, Zuko's arc in Avatar: the Last Airbender)
- Journeys of discovery, whether the discoverers be the characters or the reader.
- Redemption arcs. Rehabilitative justice.
- Narratives where something happens; plot. External conflicts. Casefic.
- Comedy of Errors -type things.
- Crack taken seriously.
- Engineering, especially of the sort that keeps civilization running – sewage, maintenance, transport etc – plus fault analysis and infrastructure design stuff.
- Characters expressing caring for each other by feeding each other/giving each other tea.
- Good mentor figures/teachers who have their students' best interests at heart and succeed.
- Class issues and other tensions between origins and current presentation (eg. alien whose species is considered monsters in disguise as a human).
- Worldbuilding! Yes, I know, this is the worldbuilding exchange, but the tags are limited. Feel free to worldbuild other things as well!
- Tea.
- Gen.
- Established relationships.
- Competence porn.
- Enthusiasm in general.
- Xenobiology, aliens, very alien aliens.
- Loyalty, loyalty kink, people loyal way past the point of reasonableness.
- Loving descriptions of small details/of how systems run; insertion of Shown Their Work details.
- Happy endings.
Original Character preferences
For OCs, I prefer to read about women, especially ones in F/F relationships. I greatly enjoy people who are competent at what they do and loyal to those they find worthy of it. People who make or fix things are wonderful, as are people in complex webs of loyalties who swim in them like water.
DNWs
- Setting change AUs (eg: Hogwarts AU, Coffee Shop AU)
- "Claustrophobia-as-kink" like relationships that turn into this co-isolated dependence thing of "you are the only person in my entire universe", where suddenly the ship is the only thing in the universe that matters, and the members don't speak to other people.
- Christianity, mentions of "sinning".
- Dairy products.
- Humiliation, especially public.
- Incest, including foster/adopted relationships. (Unless requested.)
- Stories about motherhood or becoming a mother. (Yu Ziyuan can be married as she is in canon; teaching unruly teens is fine.)
- Unrequested het between humans/humanoid creatures. (Dolphins are fine, people having parents is fine, Yu Ziyuan can be married as in canon but please no focus on her marriage/Jiang Fengmian.)
- Requested characters being presented as/rendered utterly helpless; the "damsel in distress" trope; woobiefication.
- Stories about mourning unwelcome changes to the body/realizations about the body, with "body" defined broadly, (ex: acquiring a disability, infertility, weight gain) and the associated grief/angst.
- Stories about mourning a dead person.
- Purity kink – this includes soulmates, demisexuality, single-target sexuality, etc.
镇魂 | Guardian (TV)
Zhao Yunlan, Shen Wei, Ye Zun, Li Qian, OCsRelationship-wise, I enjoy Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, Shen Wei & Li Qian, Shen Wei & Ye Zun, and Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan &/ Ye Zun (/ and & options both fine). Plotwise, either some casefic, or Zhao Yunlan turning up for an anthropological tour of Dixing, or Shen Wei and/or Ye Zun telling someone something about Dixing. Or a compare and contrast of the past Shen Wei grew up with on the surface with modern Dixing.
Timekeeping in Dixing
How do they keep time? Is their basic unit of time based on some cave flora, or some natural (lava-related?) phenomenon? Are there multiple calendar systems that are in conflict? Or is there simply someone with an hourglass who turns the Palace Hourglass and every second turn there's a ringing gong?
How time works in Dixing
Does time flow at similar rates in Dixing and Haixing – so that one day in one is one day in another – or does it alter? Is the conversion rate a constant, or some sinusoidal thing where one year in one is one year in another, but one day in Dixing could be anything from 0.1 to 10 Haixing days long?
Dixingian customs
Dixing is all alone in the dark – what sorts of customs do they have for births, deaths, celebrations, etc? How closely do they relate to imported Haixing customs? Do Haixing customs have some sort of prestige value that everyone seeks to emulate?
Spaceship that brought Yashou and Dixingians' ancestors to Haixing
Why did it leave the homeworld, why did it come to Haixing, what happened to it, and how much tech did they lose and why? Did the crew toss Yashou and Dixingians from idk cryosuspension to Haixing and continue on their merry way to the next planet to colonize, or was Haixing their final stop?
Life in Dixing before the meteor
So, uh, what was it like? How were the trade links to the surface? Based on what Shen Wei says, at least some Dixingians lived on the surface; were there some humans and Yashou living in Dixing? Was Dixing just as dark as it is in the present (as it didn't have any Hallows as the Sun), or was there some illumination system that the meteor broke?
The Hallows
How do they actually work? Why do they work? Who made them, and for what reason? Ma Gui speaks of their time-disrupting properties being something he'd heard legends of – did he simply discover the ancient artefacts, or were there blueprints at some point?
Uplift series - David Brin
Creideiki, ChissisI greatly enjoy our wily philosopher and the fierce determined fin clawing her way back to sentience! I enjoy Creideiki/Hikahi, and Chissis &/ Tkett. Feel free to include any other dolphins and aliens, though I'm not one for the humans or chimpanzees.
Format opt-in: if you want to write a fic entirely in Trinary, or with significant Trinary elements, I'm game!
Trinary
What's it like to think in Trinary all day? What sort of poetic imagery is most popular? What sorts of things count as undertones of Primal that e.g. Makanee is worried about Brookida displaying? How did Trinary form exactly? (Dolphins finding haikus cool and just unilaterally to only communicate using them?) How does thinking in Trinary affect dolphin views of art? What are the images that are considered most poetic, and why? How often do they use Trinary to subtly or not-so-subtly troll humans? What does a Trinary courtship look like? What're dolphins' favorite wordplays?
The Whale Dream
I'd love to see some sort of opening up of what it is and what it means, and how it's reflected in modern Trinary! Do our spacegoing fins miss the song of the humpbacks of Earth's oceans?
Progenitors
What were the Progenitors like? Why did they make the choices they did? Did they unifiedly disappear one day, or was there fractiousness? Why did they leave? How did First Contact between the Progenitors go? What sorts of traps did they leave behind?
Buyur Plan for Jijo
Is the Buyur plan simply what they said it would be in Temptation, or is there yet another layer hidden there? Do they have things hidden on Jijo beyond the things mentioned in Temptation? What was the method to their choice of things to leave behind?
魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
Yu Ziyuan, OCsI like Yu Ziyuan, though I'd rather not read about her relationship with Jiang Fengmian or the nitty-gritty of raising toddlers. Being the teacher of unruly teens is fine, though! Is she the Jiang sect's primary teacher? Also, OC girlfriends are completely fine.
Differences in Sects' Cultivation Methods
The Lan sect uses more music than others, but everyone seems to be a straightforward sword cultivator. What are the actual differences? Or is everyone actually cultivating according to the exact same method, and if so, why does only that method work?
Cultivational Artefacts
How does one make them? What separates e.g. Zidian from a sword? Why don't we see more of them – are they supremely expensive, or not that effective with limited exceptions, or what?
Night-hunting
What are the popular conventions? What sort of prey is considered highest-prestige, whereas what's considered necessary drudgework? How far afield does everyone hunt? How do they teach the kids to hunt?