WORLDBUILDING CULTURES - Writing Advice

Twitter/X: / lordtea_truly
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:43 The FOUR Components
1:11 One - Geography
3:27 Two - History
5:12 Three - Neighbours
6:23 Four - Fantasy
7:50 How to Start
11:12 Common Mistakes
13:25 Summary

[@qzamap3870]

Anthropologist here, a few things to take note of for helping build cultures.
- inheritence and sexual division of labor is very important. In some regions of the Himalayas, its common for a woman to take multiple brothers as husbands. This way, land does not leave the family as the children stay within the same family.
- Funerary customs are crazy important too. Dying is one of the most significant and impactful things that can happen to people. The way people treat their dead is thus a hugely important way of understanding their philosophy.
- Culture is not bound by geography. People move and bring their cultures with them. A great example is by looking at a map of languages that say variations "tea" or "shai" and how it corresponds to ancient trade routes. As merchants brought their goods across the world, they told the locals what those goods were.
- Subgroups! Not everyone agrees on everything and things so culture differs regionally, within professions, socio-economic status, sexual preference, and more will all shape outlooks, language, identity, religion, and so forth.
- On copy-pasting cultures. Don't do it not just because its lazy, but because you'll fuck it up. Your desert culture of not-arabs is likely going to be more orientalist than truthful to actual middle-eastern cultures. Slapping a bunch of -esques winds up not only showing that you are lazy, but ignorant, or worse, too.

[@xyreniaofcthrayn1195]

You do realise that thanks to the muppet who divided the Occident and the orient through constantinople and not the ural mountains (the more logical flipping natural barrier) every desert culture ends up looking like some dipshit who got off the burning bush call to a deity if using the silk road as the basis looking like a muppet however the better desert trade empire to pull from is the ghana trade network through the sahara.

[@cheesypoohalo]

I found a lot of this advice really hard to imagine without giving examples. For example, it's fine to say a long-lived race would have a stagnant culture, but what would that actually look like? I'd love to see another video where you took this advice you give and actually made a few settings, giving examples of how the cultures are built in each example.

[@skree272]

Honestly i find writing about the place helps alot before writing the people who live there, like for one idea theres an island nation who have access to tropical fruit the other countries see as a delicacy, now add in strict control and gaurding the tropical fruit and boom, it makes sense in a way, being some countries took advantage of others who couldnt grow the plants or harvest material of a type, now these guys have a statewide monopoly on say bananas, now thier country will have yellow on the flag because the banana is important to them, maybe the banana becomes more than just a fruit but even a symbol of luck or something

[@Menzobarrenza]

In my setting the Inquisition are very much the good guys, and are only feared in the same way you might get a litte nervous if a cop asks you couple questions on the street (unless you really ARE in league with dark forces, in which case you're pooping brickwork).

[@jjhh320]

I always get this weird vibe when people insist upon looking at fictional cultures through modern values, like always judging them in comparison to it. It's low key ethnocentrism, harmless toward a fake culture, but still a bad perspective through which anyone should practice learning about different people

[@korniestpatch]

Games workshop 2024 😂

[@keirscott-schrueder5625]

what would be an example of this? just out of curiosity

[@xyreniaofcthrayn1195]

my favourite version of dwarves are offshoot children of earth elementals and thusly live to a grand old age of 52,000 years maximum before they start petrifying into weird and whacky minerals. Elves being some sort of mutant offshoot of dryads, treefolk and a time travelling horny wizard was involved as well which is why my elves have a reverance for and a massive stick up their butt for the forest. Humans, orcs (half dark elves, a quarter troll and a quarter human), goblins and the humble trollfolk who are whether or not the bridge or road is taxed by the nation that claims ownership of the road or bridge toll road you (while officially it is unknown but it's widely believed that every minister of tax of every nation is in fact a troll).

[@Menzobarrenza]

I love the tax-troll fact.

[@bencemervay]

I wanted to work on my Gothic 1 review (yeah, still not ready yet...), but I saw you uploaded a new vid, so I thought, I might just watch it first... :D Very interesting, thank you!

[@bencemervay]

Then I opened davinci resolve and realised in the next section I need some skyrim footage for comparison. Guess I need to boot it up...

[@averageeughenjoyer6429]

Definetly using this for dragons

[@shzarmai]

Something I think should be done is that each race or species in a fantasy setting should have multiple nations or multiple sovereign countries since because it's unlikely that these races or species are Monoliths. I always find it weird that in popular fantasy humans can have multiple countries but others only have one country each......

[@lordtea7688]

True, the best they can do is divide those into a different side-species (elves, dark elves. Dwarf, Mountain dwarfs or things like that)