F*ck Personality Tests, What Font Do You Write In?

me: you’ve already used this exact turn of phrase two paragraphs ago, that’s too repetitive

me, an intellectual: if I use it three more times it becomes a motif

Forget the search history, if you really want to know a writer you should check their notes app...a writer's unhibited mind can be a frightening place.

safe and sound stans reblog this so i know who loves feeling like a calm, ethereal forest nymph

one thing about orpheus and eurydice is you guys are all like “i’m different i wouldnt turn to look at her” because you are all familiar with the story of orpheus and eurydice. but orpheus wasnt familiar with the story because he was in it lol.

How to Write a Chorister

Intro

Singing has always been one of my passions--I’ve been in choirs since I was ten years old, so I have a pretty good knowledge of music and music theory! I haven’t seen many posts on how to write a chorister (aka a fancy word for a member of a choir), so I decided to make one myself. Yes, it’s a very self-indulgent post, but hopefully someone finds this somewhat helpful!

Warm up

You know how in movies and other media, people will start singing out of the blue and they're perfectly on pitch and flawless? Yeah, well that’s kind of misleading. A singer will never perform at their best without warming up. They can sing despite that, but their voice will most likely sound strained or weaker than usual, and their vocal range won’t be as wide. Singing warm ups are omitted in most media because it’s inconvenient to show, and I understand that, although I think it would be fun if the process was shown!

Choir warm ups are frequently both vocal and physical. I’ll give you my choir’s as an example. First we loosen up by stretching, paying particular attention to the neck and spine. Other physical exercises are clapping along to a rhythm that the choir director sets, practicing good posture, and doing breathing exercises. 

Next comes the fun part: vocal warm up. We usually start with lip trills, “sirens,” and repeated words or vowels/diphthongs. After that, we typically do ascending and descending solfege scales, stretching into the highest parts of our range and down into the lowest parts of our range. And then we’re ready to sing!

Vocal parts

There are four main parts to a choir, which I’ll define as simply as possible:

Soprano: The highest range of voices in a choir

Alto: The second highest range of voices in a choir

Tenors: The second lowest range of voices in a choir

Bass/Baritones: The lowest range of voices in a choir

Some people fall in between these ranges or span more than one, which is normal. Also, the average singer’s vocal range is 2-3 octaves on a piano.

Characteristics of a chorister

Choristers typically have or should have the following traits:

A keen sense of pitch, rhythm, and hearing

Strength in sight reading and in reading musical score

The ability to sing as a group and blend well with other voices

Leadership! Being a leader helps you as well as everyone else

Types of choirs

Choirs usually organize and limit themselves according to voicing and/or age of the singers as well as by the size of group or the type of music they sing. Here are some types:

Mixed choir: A group with changed (usually male) and unchanged voices (usually female or children); the voicing for this group is typically expressed as SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass). This is the type of choir I currently sing in!

Equal voice choir: A group for either changed (usually male) voices or unchanged (usually female) voices. Sometimes these choirs are called men's choirs and women's/ladies' choirs. Sometimes they are referred to by their voicing: a TB or TTBB choir and an SA or SSAA choir

A youth choir varies widely in its voicing since adolescence is the time when most male voices transition from the soprano or alto vocal range to the tenor or bass vocal range. For this reason, youth choirs can have any combination of voice parts, including SA, SAB, and SATB

A children’s choir is most typically an equal voice group for pre-pubertal singers. Some children's choirs also include youth and may include changed voices (tenor and bass)

Choirs can also organize themselves by size or repertoire type:

Chorus/choral society/large ensemble: Usually a choir of 40 or more singers and often includes 100+ people. These groups typically sing large works, including operas or oratorios or similar pieces

A chamber choir will never include more than 40 singers and will often be considerably smaller (For example, the chamber choir I’m in has 17 singers.)

Small vocal ensemble/group: Ranges in size from 3 to 12 singers

A cappella choir: Sings only music that has no pitched instrumental accompaniment. A great example is the group Pentatonix (which many choir directors absolutely adore)

Choirs that organize themselves around specific cultural or religious music traditions

How singing in a choir can affect you

You can learn many useful talents from choir, such as:

Learning to work with other people and form bonds with them. The better the members of a choir know each other, the better they will sing together!

Growing more confident in your abilities and improving your musical talents

Singing with like-minded people

Harmonizing to pop songs on the radio

Impressing people in karaoke

Writing Deaf Characters

Sources

https://www.sfwa.org/2021/03/23/how-to-write-deaf-or-hard-of-hearing-characters/#:~:text=Write%20Hard%20of%20Hearing%20Characters%20as%20Normal%2C%20Rounded%20People&text=They%20shouldn't%20exist%20in,care%20as%20any%20other%20character.

https://www.tfrohock.com/blog/2016/9/12/writing-deaf-characters

https://www.asha.org/public/hearing/Types-of-Hearing-Loss/

https://writing-ideas-collection.tumblr.com/post/182780796367/how-to-write-deaf-characters-from-a-real-deaf

https://deafaq.tumblr.com/post/190549529559/comprehensive-guide-to-writing-deaf-characters

Introduction

I am hard of hearing, but I am not part of the Deaf community. This is all based on my own research and is not comprehensive. Please don’t hesitate to correct or amend anything in this post!

Terminology

Deaf: a cultural term for people who have hearing loss and are proud of their Deafness and are raised in the Deaf community.

deaf: used in the medical field or used to describe a person with hearing loss that does not associate with the Deaf community.

deafened: a person who lost their hearing in later life, often as an adult.

hard of hearing: a person with hearing loss and who still has some degree of hearing.

hearing impaired: a derogatory and outdated word that was popular back in the 1990s.

Spectrum

Deafness, contrary to what you might believe, is not limited to total loss of hearing. Deafness is a spectrum. Some Deaf people can hear more than others. Some can only hear high-pitched noises and others can only hear low-pitched noises. Some can hear voices but not what they’re saying. What ranges can the person hear? Can your character hear high pitches, or only low tones? Knowing what they can hear will easily direct you to what they cannot hear. Deafness is completely different from person to person.

When you're writing a Deaf character, you need to establish the individual's level of hearing from the beginning of the story. Even if you never tell the reader all of these things, the author must know how the Deaf person will interact with the outside world.

And no, yelling will not make a Deaf person hear any better. If you really want to help them understand you, speak slowly and clearly, but not so much that you patronize them.

Type

What type of hearing loss does your character have? Is it conductive, sensorineural, or mixed? 

Conductive hearing loss happens when sounds cannot get through the outer and middle ear. It may be hard to hear soft sounds. Louder sounds may be muffled. Medicine or surgery can often fix this type of hearing loss.

Sensorineural hearing loss happens after inner ear damage. Problems with the nerve pathways from your inner ear to your brain can also cause SNHL. Soft sounds may be hard to hear. Even louder sounds may be unclear or may sound muffled.This is the most common type of permanent hearing loss. Most of the time, medicine or surgery cannot fix SNHL. Hearing aids may help you hear.

Mixed hearing loss happens when a conductive hearing loss happens at the same time as a sensorineural hearing loss. This means that there may be damage in the outer or middle ear and in the inner ear or nerve pathway to the brain. This is a mixed hearing loss.

Each type of loss will affect hearing differently, and this, in turn, will affect your character's lifestyle and ability to communicate.

Communicating

Lipreading is one way of communicating with other people. Some people think that lip reading is easy, but in reality, not many people can lip read to perfection. Enunciation, focus, and energy is required. Lipreading involves associating a person's lip movement with the sounds that they can hear. It’s all about context. A Deaf person may not know everything that’s being said, but they can fill in the gaps with body language and expression. A lot of mental effort also goes into lip reading, and it can make a person tired.

Sign language is another popular method of communication among Deaf people. Remember, though, that not everyone who is deaf understands sign language, and not everyone who understands sign language can understand sign language by people from other countries. Every country has its own sign language, and people who know two are just as bilingual as those who speak vocal languages. Even within countries, there are regional variations between sign languages.

Another thing to note is that sign language does not equal the spoken language it corresponds to. For example, ASL is its own language with grammar rules and semantics. It also does not directly translate to English: there may be words missing for the sake of speed and understanding. It’s also very literal. For example, the sign for “Bible” is “Jesus book.” But for the sake of clarity, just write ASL dialogue in English.

As for formatting their dialogue, there’s no consensus on whether to surround them with quotations, as you would for hearing characters, or to italicize everything. I would suggest consulting Deaf readers on this point.

If you refer to lipreading or sign language, make sure you research thoroughly first. Talk to people who use ASL and watch videos on YouTube. Don’t forget about the many different forms of sign language in use. For members of the Deaf community, sign language is a cultural distinction. 

Devices

Perhaps your Deaf character uses hearing aids or other devices. However, hearing aids are not hearing miracles and they don’t work like glasses, for example. Hearing aids amplify sound and clarity, but they do not “cure” hearing loss. 

Cochlear implants work in a completely different way, but are still hearing aids. Some people use neither and others use a combination of hearing aid and implant. Again, this varies depending on the type and range of hearing loss. Be aware that if you’re referencing cochlear implants, many Deaf people consider these controversial and unwanted. 

Mistakes and stereotypes

Lip-reading as a superpower, which makes deaf person basically hearing anyway

Wearing hearing aids at night and/or other people touching them and taking them off

Cochlear implants presented as “cure” or “miracle” which makes a deaf person into hearing person

Being able to learn sign language in record time

“Happy” ending being the deaf person losing their deafness via cure/miracle/magic

Deaf people are always bitter and lonely

Using deafness as a “cute” trope to increase angst levels in your story

Deaf person only having hearing friends (it’s often the opposite, aka most friends of Deaf people are also Deaf). Same goes for dating.

Superpowers or magic that basically cancels out deafness

Creating your own name signs for your characters (don’t do this)

Framing the narrative as a “person overcoming their disability”

Including deafness as a punishment for the character

The only deaf character in the story is the villain (bonus points for ‘deafness turned them evil’)

Inspiration porn

Discrimination

Specific term for discrimination against deaf people is “audism” (not to confuse with autism). General term for discrimination against disabled people, “ableism”, is also used sometimes

Deaf people often face discrimination especially when it comes to access to information and unwillingness to offer proper accommodation to them.

Movies/TV shows/videos lack subtitles or closed captioning. Video games have no alternative way of showing audio cues. Lectures, festivals and public events are often without interpreters

There have been numerous cases of arrests and deaths of deaf people after encounters with police due to communication

Hospitals and doctors are often without interpreters and neglect to inform the deaf patients properly. Access to authorities and courts is also problematic

Deaf people have difficult time finding employment due to prejudice. Even if they do find a job, employers often refuse to offer proper accommodation

Many deaf people also struggle in education

Writing a Unique Fairy Tale Retelling

Credit: https://lindsay-elizabeth.com/how-to-write-a-unique-fairy-tale-retelling/

Intro

Fairy tale retellings are one of my absolute favorite genres to read, so I had to make a post on it! Retelling a story is addressing the original one with your own love letter and homage. A retelling is also a deeply personal experience, because whatever you want to retell is something that you find worth returning to, over and over again.

This post is primarily for fairy tale retellings, but any of these elements can be applied to folklore, mythology and other literary retellings as well!

1. Get to know the original story

We all know the most popular fairy tales well because we’ve been told them so many times in a variety of ways. However, the original stories were penned centuries and even thousands of years ago, so there are a lot of things you’ll probably want to leave behind, like misogyny, racism, and underage/toxic/inappropriate relationships. There are many other interesting story details, though, that you can pick up from the original text that can make your retelling richer and more layered.

Every writer interprets things differently. You never know what detail could spark your imagination and turn out to be something few others have used, so definitely take the time to read the original works. You can find pretty much all of the classic fairy tales for free online since they’re in the public domain (meaning the original copyright has expired).

2. Pay attention to themes

What makes fairy tales timeless and so pervasive in every culture are the underlying themes that we all relate to. They’re the truths that we connect with and instantly recognize on a deeper level. They explore topics like transformation, self-discovery, justice, judgment, class, and love. We’re inspired by the main hero’s will, spirit, and perseverance as they face challenges and ultimately overcome them on their journey to finding true love and happiness.

These are deeply human feelings and experiences, which is why they resonate with people of all generations and backgrounds. Fairy tales (and the best stories in general) make us examine these truths and help us understand them more deeply.

When writing a fairy tale retelling, look for the core of the story that you’re putting a spin on. What human experience is at the heart of it? As long as you have this, you can get as creative as you want with the rest of it!

3. Take note of your favorite elements

Besides the themes, what else do you love about the fairy tale you want to retell? Take some time to examine the story and take notes on what draws you to it over and over again.

If it’s the love story, what is it specifically about the love story that captures your heart more than others? The dynamic between the characters or a particular trope?

Keep pulling back the layers. The more you understand what you’re drawn to about this particular fairy tale, the more creative license you’ll be able to take because you’ll know what needs to stay the same to maintain the core of the story and what you can play with to make it unique.

4. Look at existing retellings

Take some time to go through the books currently available in the fairytale retellings genre to see how other people are playing with these stories and what the common threads are. Some places to check are:

GoodReads Lists of Fairy Tale Retellings

BookBub’s lists like this one of 20 Magical Fairy Tale Retellings for Adults

Amazon’s Best Sellers List for Teen & Young Adult Fairy Tale and Folklore Adaptations

What is missing? What hasn’t been done that you would love to read? Just one twist on the story can be the starting point for something completely fresh and intriguing.

5. Take note of what you like and don’t like

In all of the fairy tale retellings you’ve read and watched, what were your favorite things about them? What did you love about the characters, the scenes, the plots, the dialogue? What inspired you and pulled you into the story? And what didn’t you like? What did you think could’ve been done better? What did you feel was missing? All of these answers could be the first spark and building blocks to your own unique retelling.

6. Read reviews from other readers

Take a peek at the reviews for some of the most popular fairy tale retellings. What did other readers like and dislike about them? You’ll learn a lot about genre expectations here, as well as expectations for each individual fairy tale, and pick up a lot of valuable information you can use when crafting your own.

You never know what could spark your imagination; something someone says they “wishes” had been different in the story or that they never see in fairy tale retellings could be the impetus for a whole new story idea!

Keep in mind, writing is completely subjective, so just because someone else likes or doesn’t like something doesn’t mean you can’t tell the story you want to tell! This is just a way to get different perspectives on the genre and individual fairy tales to get your own creative juices flowing.

7. Take liberties with the plot

Following the original plot (or the most popular adaptation of it) too closely can get boring and predictable because your readers will know what’s coming. This offers a great opportunity to subvert expectations with unexpected twists on them.

8. Ideas for twists

Besides playing with the plot, there are a lot of other ways to put a twist on a fairy tale. To make it really unique, combine multiple twists.

New genre

Different time period and/or location

Gender-swap, role swap, combine roles, change roles

Switch to a different POV

Crossover/mix stories

Prequel or sequel to the original story

Crafting A Fantasy Culture, or the fallacies of using culture in the singular

The world is an interdependent place.

A lot of Western writers will look at the need to diversify their writing and try to cherry pick outside cultures to add. They then come to us with a laundry list of questions about what they’re allowed to change about those cultures because, well, they didn’t pull from a broad enough context.

The thing about researching individual cultures is: you’re never going to be researching just one culture. You’re going to be researching all the cultures they interacted with, as well.

Cultures are made by interacting with other cultures. So you can’t simply plop a singular culture into a fantasy world and expect it to work. There is too much outside influence on that culture for you to get a holistic picture by researching the culture in isolation.

Instead, you need to ask yourself, “what environments made them, and how much of their surrounding contexts do I need to add to my fantasy world to make this genuine respectful representation?”

And before you say that you can’t possibly do that, that is too much research, let me introduce you to the place you’re already doing it but don’t realize:

Stock Fantasy World 29

Aka, fantasy Europe.

It gets ragged on a lot, but let’s take a minute to look at the tropes that build this stock fantasy world.

Snow

4 seasons

Boars, pigs, wolves, dogs, pine trees, stone

Castles

Sheep

Knights

A king

Farming based economy

Religion plays a pretty big role in life

All fairly generic fantasy Europe tropes. But if you look more closely, you’ll notice that this is painting a picture of Fantasy Germany/the Netherlands, with perhaps a dash of France and/or England in there, all of it vaguely Americanized (specifically the New England area) because there’s usually potatoes and tomatoes. The geographic region is pretty tight, and it just so happens to mesh with the top three superpowers of upper North America, and arguably the English speaking world.

But let’s keep going.

They import stuff. Like fine cloth, especially silk, along with dyes & pigments

These things are expensive from being imported, so the nobility mostly have them

There’s usually a war-mongering Northern People invading places

If brown people exist they are usually to the East

There might be a roaming band of nomadic invaders who keep threatening things

There is, notably, almost no tropical weather, and that is always to the South if it’s mentioned

There might be an ocean in the South that leads to a strange forgien land of robed people to survive a desert (or did I just read too much Tamora Pierce?)

And, whoops, we have just accidentally recreated European history in its full context.

The Northern people are Norse, and their warring ways are indicative of the Viking Invasion. The imports hint at Asia, namely the Ottomans and India, and the silk road. The roaming invaders are for Mongolian Khanate. The ocean and tropical weather in the South hints at Spain, Greece, and the Mediterranean. And the continent of robed people indicates North Africa, and/or Southwest Asia.

Suddenly, stock fantasy world 29 has managed to broad-strokes paint multiple thousands of years of cultural exchange, trade, wars, invasions, and general history into a very small handful of cultural artifacts that make up throwaway lines.

Europe As Mythology And You

European history is what’s taught in Western classrooms. And a lot of European history is painted as Europe being a cultural hub, because other places in the world just aren’t talked about in detail—or with any sort of context. Greece and Rome were whitewashed; the Persian and Ottoman empires were demonized; North Africans became the enemy because of their invasion of Spain and the fact many of them were not-Christian; the Mongolian Khanate was a terrible, bloodthirsty culture whose only goal was destruction.

But because all of these parts did interact with Europe and were taught in history class, writers crafting a fantasy Europe will automatically pull from this history on a conscious or subconscious level because “it’s what makes sense.”

The thing is, despite people writing European fantasy subconsciously recreating European history, they don’t actually recreate historical reality. They recreate the flattened, politically-driven, European-supremacist propaganda that treats every culture outside of Europe as an extra in a movie that simply exists to support Europe “history” that gets taught in schools.

As a result of incomplete education, a lot of people walk away from history class and believe that cultures can be created in a vacuum. Because that’s the way Europe’s history was taught to them.

Which leads to: the problem with Fantasy World 29 isn’t “it’s Europe.” It’s the fact it’s an ahistorical figment of a deeply colonial imagination that is trying to justify its own existence. It’s homogeneous, it only mentions the broader cultural context as a footnote, it absolutely does not talk about any people of colour, and there’s next to no detailing of the variety of people who actually made up Europe.

So writers build their Fantasy World 29 but they neglect the diversity of religion and skin tone and culture because it’s unfamiliar to them, and it was never taught to them as a possibility for history.

While “globalization” is a buzzword people throw around a lot to describe the modern age, society has been global for a large portion of human history. There were Japanese people in Spain in the 1600s. Polynesians made it to North America decades if not centuries before Columbus did. There are hundreds more examples like this. 

You can absolutely use fantasy to richen your understanding of Europe, instead of perpetuating the narratives that were passed down from victor’s history. People of colour have always existed in Europe, no matter what time period you’re looking at, and unlearning white supremacist ideas about Europe is its own kind of diversity revolution.

Travel is Old and People Did It Plenty

Multiculturalism is a tale as old as time. And while some populations were very assimilationist in their rhetoric, others were very much not. They would expand borders and respect the pre-existing populations, or they would open up networks to outsiders to become hubs of all the best the world had to offer. Even without conscious effort, any given place was building off of centuries of human migration because humans covered the globe by wandering around, and people have always been people.

Regardless, any time you have a group of people actively maintaining an area, they want to make travelling for themselves easier. And the thing about making travelling for yourself easier is: it made travel for outsiders just as possible. By the time you reach the 1200s, even, road, river, and ocean trade networks were thriving.

Sure, you might be gone for a year or three or five because the methods were slow, but you would travel. Pilgrimages, trade routes, and bureaucratic administrative routes made it possible for people to move around.

And also, soldiers and war did really good jobs of moving people around, and not all of them went back “home.” Hence why there have been African people in England since the Roman empire. When you have an empire, you are going to take soldiers from all over that empire; you aren’t going to necessarily pull from just the geographic region immediately surrounding the capital. 

Yes, the population that could travel was smaller than it is now, because land needed to be worked. But Europe isn’t the be all end all in how much of its population needed to be in agriculture in order to function; the Mughals, for example, had 80% of their population farming, compared to over 90% for Europe in the same time period. That’s an extra 10% of people who were more socially free to move around, away from their land. Different cultures had different percentages of people able to travel.

This isn’t counting nomadic populations that relied on pastoralism and horticulture who didn’t actually settle down, something a lot of history tends to ignore because cities are easier to discuss. But nomadic populations existed en masse across Eurasia, and they took cultural traditions all over the continent.

Just because it wasn’t fast doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. And just because a lot of Europeans couldn’t travel because of the agricultural demands of the continent, doesn’t mean every other culture was as tied to settlements. 

Multiculturalism and Diffusion

While each individual culture is unique, and you can find pockets of difference anywhere, cultures exist on a sliding scale of broad customs across the globe. Greece and Turkey will have more in common than China and England, because the trade routes were much closer and they shared central rulership for multiple hundreds of years.

This is why we keep saying it’s important to keep cultures with other cultures close to them. Because those are the natural clusters of how all of the cultures involved would be formed. The proper term for this is cultural diffusion, and it happened all the time. Yes, you could get lots of people who had their own unique customs to set themselves apart. But they had the same natural resources as the dominant group, which meant they couldn’t be completely and totally alien.

Even trade influence wouldn’t produce the same results in two places. When Rome imported silks from China, they rewove them to be a different type of fabric that was lighter and more suited to their climate. Then the Romans sold the rewoven silk back to China, who treated it differently because they’d woven it the first way for a reason. They didn’t talk to each other directly because of how the Silk Road was set up at the time, either, so all they had were the goods.

And people automatically, subconsciously realize this whenever they write Fantasy World 29. They put like cultures with like cultures in Europe. Because even if they weren’t really taught to see the rest of the world as anything more than a footnote, they still transfer those footnotes to their fantasy.

The problem is, people don’t realize the gradient of customs. In the modern day, Greece and Turkey are different countries, with histories that are taught in totally different frameworks (Greece as an appropriated white supremacist “ancient land” that all Western European societies are descendent from, Turkey as a land of brown people that were Muslim and therefore against the Good Christian Europe), so it’s really easy to ignore all of their shared history.

People often fought for the right to rule (or even exist) in a place, which deeply impacted the everyday people and government. Ancient Persia is a fantastic example of this, because it covered huge swaths of land and was a genuinely respectful country (it took over a deeply disrespectful country); had it not been for Cyrus the Great deciding that he would respect multiculturalism, the Second Temple wouldn’t have been rebuilt in Jerusalem. 

You can’t homogenize an area that was never homogenous to begin with. Because there was a ton of fighting and sometimes centuries-old efforts to preserve culture in the face of all this fighting (that sometimes came with assimilation pressure). Dominant groups, invading groups, influencing groups, and marginalized groups have always existed in any given population. See: Travel is Old above. See: people have always been people and wandered around. Xenophobia is far, far older than racism ever will be, because xenophobia is simply “dislike of Other” and humans love crafting “us vs them” dynamics.

This lack of unity matters. It’s what allows you to look at a society (especially one with a centralized government) and see that it is made up of people that are different. It leads you to asking questions such as: 

Who was persecuted by this group?

Did the disliked group of people exist within their borders, or were they driven away and are now enemy #1?

What was their mindset on diversity?

How did they handle others encroaching on what they saw as their territory?

People do different things across different households, let alone hundreds of miles away. You wouldn’t expect someone from a rich, white area of California to behave the same way as someone from a middle-class immigrant neighbourhood from NYC. I’m sure, if you looked at your own city, you would scoff at the concept of someone mistaking your city for one five hours away, because when you know them, they’re so different.

So why do you expect there to be only one type of person anywhere else?

Cultural and Geographic Context Matters

A region’s overreacting culture (either determined by groups of people who mostly roam the land, or a centralized government) and their marginalized cultures determine the infighting within a group, even if the borders remain the same.

Persecution and discrimination are just as contextual as culture. Even if the end result of assimilation and colonialism was the same, the expectations for assimilation would look different, and what they had been working with before would also look different. You can’t compare Jewish exile from various places in Europe with Rromani exiles in Europe, and you definitely can’t compare them with the Hmong in Southeast Asia. They came from different places and were shaped by different cultures.

A culture that came from a society that hated one particular aspect of them will not form—at all—if they’re placed in a dominant culture that doesn’t find their cultural norms all that persecution-worthy. And the way they were forced to assimilate to survive will play into whatever time period you’re dealing with, as well; see the divide of Jewish people into multiple categories, all shaped by the resources available in the cultures they stayed in the longest.

You can’t remove a culture’s context and expect to get the same result. Even in a culture that doesn’t wholesale have an assimilationist agenda, you can still get specific prejudices and scapegoats that happen when there’s a historical precedent in the region for disliking a certain group. 

Once you start cherry picking what elements of a culture to take—because you’ve plunked the !Kung into Greece and need to modify their customs from the desert to a tropical destination —you’re going to end up with coding that is absolutely positively not going to land. 

Coding is a complex combination of foods, clothing, behaviour/mannerisms, homes, beliefs, and sometimes skin tone and facial features. A properly coded culture shouldn’t really need any physical description of the people involved in order to register as that culture. So when you remove the source of food, clothing, and home-building materials… how can you code something accurately from that?

And yes, it’s intimidating to think of doing so much research and starting from 0. You have to code a much larger culture than you’d originally intended, and it absolutely increases the amount of work you have to do.

But, as I said, you are already doing this with Europe. You’re just so familiar with it, you don’t realize. You can get a rundown of how to code the overarching culture with my guide: Representing PoC in Fantasy When Their Country/Continent Doesn’t Exist

Takeaways

Writers need to be aware of diversity not just as a nebulous concept, but as something that simply exists and has always existed. And the diversity (or lack thereof) of any one region is a result of, specifically, the politics of that region.

Diversity didn’t just exist “over there”. It has always existed within a society. Any society. All societies. If you want to start adding diversity into your fantasy, you should start looking at the edges of Fantasy World 29 and realize that the brown people aren’t just stopping at the designated border and trading goods at exactly that spot, but have been travelling to the heart of the place for probably a few hundred years and quite a few of them probably liked the weather, or politics, better so they’ve settled.

Each society will produce a unique history of oppressing The Other, and you can’t just grab random group A and put it in societal context B and expect them to look the same. Just look at the difference between the Ainu people, the anti-Indigenous discrimination they face, and compare it to how the Maori are treated in New Zealand and the history of colonialism there. Both Indigenous peoples in colonial societies on islands, totally different contexts, totally different results.

If random group A is a group marked by oppression, then it absolutely needs to stay in its same societal context to be respectful. If random group A is, however, either not marked by being oppressed within its societal context and/or is a group that has historically made that move so you can see how their situation changed with that move, then it is a much safer group to use for your diversity.

Re-learn European history from a diverse lens to see how Europe interacted with Africa and Asia to stop making the not-Europe parts of Fantasy World 29 just be bit parts that add flavour text but instead vibrant parts of the community.

Stop picking singular cultures just because they fascinate you, and place them in their contexts so you can be respectful.

~ Mod Lesya

i mean this so seriously if you have any sort of creative project you can and should be a little obsessed with it. you should reread your own writing and look at your own art and brag about your ocs its literally good for your health

"Oh. Oh," moments can be great.

"Oh shit," moments are even better.

But the long-suffering sigh of acceptance that comes with, "Oh. Right. Yeah. Of course." Like, come on, what could I have been thinking? There's no other way this could have gone.