Worldbuilding Letter 2023

[kitsunerei88]

Dear Worldbuilder,
Thank you for writing for me! This letter looks long and intimidating—despite this, I’m actually fairly easy to please, so feel free to pick and choose as you want! I have a tendency to ask for the moon, but I’m pretty happy with a mooncake, too! As always, if there’s something confusing, you can reach out to the mod to ask me because chances are, I just didn’t think of something or didn’t edit something properly.

General Likes:

• Fics that are character-focused, character-driven, and deal with character exploration or character development. Show me aspects of a character I never considered before, or explorations of how a character's upbringing influences
  their worldview!
• Fics as challenge, whether it be a challenge on canon, on fanon, on fandom, or a comment on our own reality! This includes rage-driven spite-fic where you want to make a Point, which I often enjoy.
• A focus on relationships, particularly how a character interacts with the world around them and other characters based on their upbringing and worldview.
• Thematically, I love when characters are put in a tough spot, moral ambiguity, and themes around honour, duty, and responsibility.
• All flavours of AU. Canon-divergence, Modern AUs, Mundane AUs, crossovers, etc, especially if it interacts with one of the above.
• Worldbuilding, especially through in-universe documents (please consider this an opt-in to pretty much whatever in-universe document or weird in-universe storytelling device you can dream up).
• Alongside the worldbuilding, I really like accuracy and real-life details. I’ve fucking adored fic that involve a deep understanding of 9/11, I’ve written fic where R2P is a big deal, I suspect I’m known for my legal shit, and so—if you have specialized knowledge of something, I love seeing it!
• Romance of all varieties: fluff, happy endings, drunken confessions, friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, fake dating, fake marriage, arranged marriages, established relationships, slow-burn, shovel talk, and pining (mutual or otherwise). In general, I prefer M/F pairings, but I don’t mind M/M or F/F pairings and prefer them if canon (I just enjoy them differently because I’m cishet).
• Smut-wise, I love first times, gentle sex, rough sex, possessive themes, mild BDSM (e.g. bondage, spanking with a hand), D/s with
  femsub, impregnation and pregnancy.

I am always open to treats!

General Dislikes:

In general, unless otherwise requested, I don't take well to crack fic, soapbox fic/issuefic, amnesia fic, body swaps, cringe comedy, and plots based on miscommunication or jealousy. If there is hurt, I would like comfort, or I often just can't get through it—same goes for angst (unless explicitly requested, of course!). That said, these are general dislikes--they're not DNWs, I have liked fics with all these themes, I have sometimes requested these things, and if you have an idea that you’re worried might come close to one of these but where these aren’t the focus, don’t worry and go for it.

Hard DNWs:

Please note that these are my general hard DNWs. In some cases, there may be sections where some (or all!) of them won't apply, and in that case follow what was in the sign up.

• Character bashing. In general, I like to imagine that all characters are like people—they're complex, and they have an array of good points and bad points.
• Harm or death of children or small animals (background mentions or past references is fine, as are things like statistics—I just don’t want to be dragged through it in detail, like please don’t make this a central point of the fic).
• Except otherwise indicated, non-canonical major character death, graphic violence and torture (graphic being “more than what is in
  canon”), non-con or dub-con, PWP or large age differences (>15)
• Adultery or infidelity (specifically, this is mostly about the betrayal--if you have a plot where two people are married for convenience and happen to have other relationships, that wouldn't trigger as long as everyone knows and doesn't care)
• Smut-wise, unless it’s indicated above in my likes, I’m likely not going to appreciate anything kinky. To be more specific, I DNW A/B/O,
  age play, humiliation, bloodplay, cannibalism or vore, watersports, scat, mpreg, snuff, or underage (<15).

Onward to the requests!

Harry Potter

 

Any or No Characters	Magical Britain's Economy
Original Characters	How halfbloods balance two worlds
Any Halfblood Character	Modern Hogwarts
Original Female Halfblood of Colour	The Goblin Wars
Original Female Muggleborn of Colour	Urban Magical Society

Magical Britain’s Economy / The Goblin Wars

Honestly, I have so many questions about this. Why, exactly, is this controlled exclusively by goblins? I would think that some witch or wizard at some time thought to set up their own economic or financial system, but why does the goblin one dominate? Do goblins dominate worldwide? Surely some witch or wizard somewhere had the brilliant plan of setting up their own currency and financial system—what happened? Is this what the goblin wars were ultimately about?

I included the Goblin Wars here because in terms of canon they are not really separate from the monetary system since they have a monopoly. And yet, despite the monopoly on the economy, they aren’t allowed wands and it’s pretty clear that they are… not considered equal. Please explain.

(Obviously I am aware of the probably explanation for this involving rampant anti-semitism, but please: I’d like an in-narrative explanation that makes sense?)

Urban Magical Society

London is a magical place, says me who’s never been there. I love the idea of London in the way that people who have never been
there idealize it—there’s so much history, and it’s the land of Sherlock Holmes and black cabs and the Tower of London and all the things! This is a great place to explore the life of a witch or wizard living in an urban magical society, and how they might mix magic with the place they live; or, how about Muggles living in large cities who witness magic, are they just like “oh that just happens here”? What about those legendary places, like the Tower of London—is it actually haunted? Is it magic? Is it both and do Aurors periodically have to go there to exorcise a magical threat?

Obviously this doesn’t have to be in London (I have similar dreamy beliefs about other major cities, like Edinburgh, Glasgow, and pretty much anywhere that Anthony Bourdain has done an episode), so really I’d just love an exploration of how a witch or wizard lives in a huge metropolitan Muggle city.

How halfbloods balance two worlds

This tag is super fascinating to me because there’s so much to explore here in terms of identity—halfbloods, especially halfbloods of a witch/wizard and Muggle relationship, are really interesting to me because of the way it could relate to diaspora identity or immigrant identities, and the struggle to balance two parts of your heritage. Different people come to different solutions—are there some halfbloods who wholesale reject the Muggle part of their heritage, considering it backwards and lesser and going full bore into magical society? On the other, what parts of Muggle identity do some of them keep—what cultural traditions do they hold dear? How do they react to people who think they should wholesale reject their Muggle backgrounds?

Modern Hogwarts

Essentially, I’d love to see what a modern curriculum for Hogwarts looks like, especially because of Muggle technological developments since the 1980s. The reality is that Britain is one of the most heavily CCTV’d places in the world, and with the rise of the internet, smartphones, etc… it’s a heck of a lot harder for witches and wizards to hide than before. How does Hogwarts, and the overall magical world, respond? Are there classes on this for magically raised kids?

Fandom Specific DNW:

For this fandom, I've also DNW'ed narrative justification of pureblood supremacy, by which I mean--pureblood supremacy was meant to be a racism parallel, can we not use this as an excuse to say "but actually it was justified, Muggles threaten wizards and wizarding culture, Muggleborns and halfbloods should wholesale reject their backwards inferior previous identity and become proper witches and wizards." Obviously some characters are going to say that or believe that, and that's fine--what I don't want is the author as narrator leaving that unchallenged and taking it as a truth, e.g. a halfblood character remarking "oh I never thought of it that way, there are so many things I didn't know."  This is an anti-racism space, and by that I include fantasy racism, please and thank you. 

His Dark Materials

 

Any or No Characters	The Magisterium
Original Characters
Lord Asriel
Marisa Coulter

The Magisterium

All right, let’s just confront the fact that Pullman was writing a screed on the Church and especially on Calvinism. So, let’s take that and just run with it—tell me about any of the schisms in Christianity in the context of Dust and daemons. But in real history, we get a massive divide in the Protestant Reformation, wherein a large number of Christians simply reject the authority of the Catholic Church; so, what is the Magisterium? In this world, did the Counter-Reformation adopt some Reformation ideas to reunite the Catholicism with Protestantism into the Magisterium?

To summarize: I am weirdly fascinated with religious history and would probably like anything.

Old Kingdom

 

Any or No Character	The Old Kingdom before the Interregnum
Original Characters	The Interregnum
Touchstone

The Interregnum

I’m just fascinated by the entire period of the Interregnum, and how the Old Kingdom people survived during this time. How does Belisaere decline, if it did at all? What is life like through the Interregnum, both in Belisaere and elsewhere? How did people cope with the rising threats of the broken Charter Stones and the undead creatures through this time?

I’d love to hear something about one of the Regents who held the throne in this period, trying to keep the country together, or about the Abhorsens before Sabriel during this period.

The Old Kingdom before the Interregnum

What was this world like? What world did Touchstone grow up in, compared to the one that he woke up in? From the books, we know a little about the palace, but little else. Alternatively—what is remembered about the Old Kingdom before the Interregnum afterwards? How do the
people rewrite or imagine their own history? I’d love something Touchstone centred, but this is a fairly blank slate, so have fun!

Revolutionary Arc

Any or No Characters	Stormwings
Original Characters

I never really fully fleshed out this facet of the world—honestly Stormwings just happened because I thought they were cool. Anyway—how did this mercenary organization develop? What are their own legends among themselves, and how did their ridiculous traditions develop? Who goes for Stormwing training, and what do these mercenary warmages do after they finish training?

Original Work – Sci-Fi

 

Any or No Characters	Law and Law Enforcement in Outer Space
Original Characters

Law and Law Enforcement in Outer Space

One thing that has always struck me is that space is huge. How are we going to regulate it? What does the early law of outer space look like, in a world where enforcement is necessarily going to be complicated or non-existent? How does policing and law enforcement work, when they know that first it’s very difficult for them to capture anyone committing a crime at all, and second that there won’t be much backup coming, if at all? I’d love something that treats the early space-travel period most, since that’s the time that we’ll be working this sort of thing out.

Alternatively, outside the criminal system, how do contracts and so on work early on? Maritime law is in many ways responsible for modern day corporate and insurance law, because once only a few centuries ago, the ocean and trading missions were distant, dangerous, and expensive. How are early private spaceships funded? How to early private spaceship captains pay back their debts?

Finally, for aliens—what laws do we put into place for first contact? What do regular people do if they encounter an alien, possibly for the first time? Are there regulations that spaceship captains must study before being able to purchase a ship? Is there anything like the Prime Directive? Enjoy!

I hope you enjoy writing as much as I know I'll enjoy reading it!