почка wrote: ↑01 Feb 2019 06:30
Some don'ts for a realistic conworld:
- no gender imbalance that is too high - even China, a place where artificial sex selection is performed, does not have a sex ratio of 1:200,000, 1:1000, 1:10 or even 1:2, any long-existing gender imbalance with a sex ratio surpassing something like 1:1.2 should always be avoided, at least if your conpeople are human.
Maybe my conpeople aren't human.
- no population large than 200 people with a disproportionally high rate of developmental disorders like autism, ADHD, or any disease that would kill a person prematurely. - even Finnish people, Amish communities and pre-modern Jewish communities, which are known for the high prevalence of certain inherited congenital disorders, do not have a high proportion of their populations killed by congenital disorders prematurely.
Autism and ADHD need not be correlated with premature death, at least outside of the most extreme manifestations.
- no peoples that are immortal or peoples that always look young before death - in real world, except for few non-sentient animals which are very unlikely to even evolve a human-level intelligence in the foreseeable future like lighthouse jellyfish, clams and lobsters, all animals get old and will die of an old age if they are not killed prematurely, and all animals that reach an old age show significant and even apparent signs of aging that can set them apart from younger individuals, therefore, if someone of your sentient species can die old age, older individuals will look old in a way obvious to your sentient species, that is, they will always know who Is old and who is young among them.
The nonexistence of universal immortality and agelessness among sentient beings should be extended to all worlds with magics, even in worlds with magics that enable immortality, immortality and agelessness should always be the privilege of a small minority of people e.g. deities or renowned wizards or alchemists. Anyone who tries to avoid aging and death in their creation simply has some forms of age discrimination, especially discrimination against old females.
Now you're not even pretending to talk about 'realism', but just your personal taste. If you can have magic agelessness, there's nothing more or less "realistic" about giving it to 90% of the population than in giving it to 1% of the population.
Wherever there are humans and humanoids, there should be old people, including old men and old women, even magic exists.
*rolls eyes*
- no shapeshifting that is hard to be explained with known biological mechanisms - if you can't find a simple or at least known mechanism to explain your conspecies, then don't even bother to try unless you are willing to have magic.
This is just a tautology. Sure, every shapeshifter will either use biological mechanisms or won't. The point being?
- no peoples that are physically attractive on average - while there are objective standards for beauty, there are also subjective standards for beauty, and as a result, beauty is subjective; also, anything like this only reflects the mentality of lookism of the author, and discriminations are one of the ugliest things of the world barring more serious things like crimes, lying for personal gains and direct aggression; besides, even using only objective standards for beauty, this is still utterly unrealistic, as plain looking people are always the majority of any given ethnic group.
You condemn "lookism", and then concoct the 'rule' that "plain looking people are always the majority" - something that says more about how you value people than about "realism"...
As for your moralisms, they seem to have no value, since they're just statements of your own personal tastes, and have nothing to do with the value of art. Many great works of art have addressed immoral themes.
- no pacifist civilizations that have never invaded their neighbors actively - all cultures has a dark side, and all societies invade, period. Except for aboriginals that has always been hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years, all cultures has replaced some other cultures, and the replacement can't always be peaceful. Civilization is forged on the anvil of death with the hammer of war and the fires of disease.
Fantasy need not be historically accurate. Again, this is just your own personal tastes masquerading as advice on 'realism', but really nothing more than boorishness.
Like the nonexistence of universal immortality and agelessness, the universality of aggression among all societies should be extended to all worlds with magic, and to all societies of non-human sentient beings. Pacifist societies and sentient beings simply won't survive long enough to even have civilizations.
Clearly nonsense. In a world in which all societies are pacifist, there's no reason why pacifists would spontaneously die off.
- no societies without crimes and discriminations - ethnocentrism is a human universal; crimes also exist in all human societies, but the creator should try not to discriminate against any people themselves.
Maybe my conpeople are not humans. In any case, my conpeople are fictional, and so I can't "discriminate" against them. In any case, that instruction seems like nonsense - all fiction is discriminatory. If the Ababians are more populous than the Babacians, and the Babacians inhabit the desert whereas the Ababians get to live on fertile grasslands, aren't you discriminating against the poor Babacians?
Like the nonexistence of universal immortality and agelessness and the universality of aggression, the existence of crimes and discriminations among all societies should be extended to all worlds with magic, and to all societies of non-human sentient beings.
Or, alternatively, bollocks to that.
- no challenges on proposed human universals or near universals unless you really know how they work - while some of the proposed human universals, or the existence of human universals, is controversial, it is not a good idea to challenge them, For example, you can't have a country where most people are regularly killed at a certain age
*looks around, checks whether the police are coming*
Yeah, actually, turns out I can if I want to.
, this is simply too uneconomical even ethics are not a consideration, it is not even a good idea to kill slaves just for fun or for their meat for slaveowners with a lot of slaves, having slaves work until they can't work anymore and die naturally would always be a better choice for slaveowners
You don't understand the nature of slavery, which is rarely purely economic in function. Societies in which (at least certain classes of) slaves were killed for fun are amply attested on Earth.
; besides, governing such societies will doomed to be a nightmare for any political leader, even managing death rows, who are minorities even among criminals, has been proven more risky for guards than managing other criminals, and the cost for keeping death rows in order so that an executions will occur is high, thus governing a society where most people will regularly be killed at a certain age will be way much more difficult than managing death rows; therefore these kinds of rules will simply be ignored by the most or soon be abolished, and the killing of non-criminals would only occur in extreme circumstances.
The killing of non-criminals never happens - if they're executed, they must have been criminals. But you can declare anyone you want to be a criminal. At one time in much of Europe, for example, being genetically Jewish was considered a crime against the state punishable by death.
- no societies where most people don't need to work hard to make a living - in all societies, most people if not everyone need to work hard to literally make a living, technological progression never changes this.
*rolls eyes*
Your religious dogmas are not reality; they're certainly not binding on fiction.
The fact that most people must work hard to make a living in all societies should be extended to all worlds with magic, and to all societies of non-human sentient beings.
Or, and bear with me hear, perhaps fuck off.
- no countries without a change of its border throughout the history, except for newly-formed countries - ever country has ever had a change of its territory in the last 1,000 years, the territory of a country always changes from time to time, having an ultra-stable territory is simply unrealistic and ridiculous.
Many countries have not changed their territories - chiefly, island states. If I have twenty people living on an island, each with a life-span of 12,000 years, there's no reason why they would periodically redefine this peninsular or that beach as not being in their territory.
What is ridiculous is concocting these absurd, arbitrary rules for everyone else to follow, with no firm basis in reason, but only in personal tastes.
- no larger countries without a standing army - if a country has a population that surpasses that of Costa Rica, or is an inland country that is not a city state like San Marino, it will always have a standing army to defend the border, even the military regularly involves in politics and causes political instability. Foreign invasion is always a bigger concern than political instability and civil wars, and unless there are no known foreign threats and maintaining the military is too expensive, all countries will always have a standing army, and only very small countries will find the military too expensive to maintain.
"Absurd" and "ridiculous" are not strong enough terms with which to reject this lunacy.
Most European countries did not have standing armies for most of their history. Standing armies are a historical abnormality.
For those who don't see the trick he's trying to pull here: 'Costa Rica' isn't a random pick, it's an attempt to finesse a "rule" that's patently nonsense - because, as he knows, Costa Rica, like dozens of other modern countries, has no standing army. For what it's worth, 5 million people is pretty big by historical standards anyway.
- no "land of mediocre" - every country or society has its heroes and contributions to the world, your countries' contribution to the world in science, technology and culture will be in proportion to the total population and the development level. Even Canada, a country jokingly known as the "land of mediocre", has Nobel Prize winners.
Nobody thinks of Canada like that except obnoxious American imperialists. Everyone else knows that Canada has an excellent educational system. Most countries, however, do NOT have Nobel Prize winners.
- no illiterate people near a place that invented writing system - if your people lived near a center of early literate civilizations and had their own country, they would sooner or later adopt writing before modern times, peoples that are against writing down their own languages, like the Jemez people, don't normally have complex societies like countries, and it is high questionable whether any belief against writing will continually be held once peoples against writing their own language have their own countries.
SURE, there are no illiterate people in the Middle East, I'll have to remember that...
- no bloodsucking flies that disable animal husbandry - human beings keep a variety of animals, no known diseases can completely deter animal husbandry from an area. Bantu peoples that had migrated to the south of the areas of tsetse flies, i.e. the Nguni people, still keep cattles.
Lot of cattle in Darien, are there?
- no underrepresentation of peoples that resemble any real-world ethnic group in human-based conworlds, for example, having no East Asian looking peoples in your conworld - this is unrealistic, considering human genetics, you will simply get peoples that look broadly similar to any known ethnic groups. The avoidance or prohibition of peoples that resemble any real-world ethnic group should always be avoided in a collaborative conworld.
This is UTTER BOLLOCKS. The specific phenotypical combinations that characterise notable real world populations are A TOTAL COINCIDENCE. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why, for example, there has to be one population with straight hair and a lack of epicanthal folds - this is just a coincidence. Likewise, the fact that there are no black-skinned, blue-eyed people on Earth is purely a coincidence (given that such a population used to exist).
- no a priori organisms far away from their relatives, unless their real-life relatives are cosmopolitan - having a priori organisms exist in an area far away from the areas of their relatives is very unlikely to happen, and thus is unrealistic, and doing so in order to make a con-society look like whatever you want can be seen as a form of godmodding, especially in collaborative conworlds.
Not unlikely in the slightest - see, for example, the presence of animals in the americas whose nearest relatives live in australia...
- no fantasies in serious worldbuilding - trying to make a world or a society that completely fulfills your own fantasies, including sexual or non-sexual ones, or trying to make a world or a society that is a totally dystopic to you, will always fail. All elements for a serious world-building, including those for all realistic conworlds and all reasonable fantastic worlds, will always be double-sided, and all societies in those worlds will always be in somewhere between an utopia and a dystopia, they will always have goods and bads, no matter how you define an utopia and a dystopia, and what kinds of fantasies the you have.
If people want to fantasise, it seems to me that Fantasy is an entirely appropriate place to do it. Why are you even here? I'm sure you can find some no-fun-allowed alternative home on the internet where you won't be disturbed by people incorporating fantasy in their make-believe...
- no refusal of direct loanwords if they are in-world reasonable - this has nothing to do directly with realism, but it is still worth mentioning, all languages borrow, including Chinese, refusing to add reasonable loanwords in your own conlang is not only unrealistic, but is also against collaboration.
MY conworld is not collaborative, so that seems like a plus point...
- no refusal of changes - this has nothing to do directly with realism, but it is still worth mentioning, as it is a part of all serious worldbuilding. If you do a collaborative conworld, or you want to sell your things to the public, you can't place your personal preferences above realism or consensus at all, always put your personal preferences aside and learn to compromise when you collaborate, and never take anything in-world personal.
Ironic, after a thread composed of nothign but your own personal preferences. But no, actually, *looks around* it turns out I CAN put my personal preferences above "realism" and "consensus", because it's none of your fucking business. I conworld by myself, for myself, and being in "consensus" with you is actively LESS than worthless to me. Indeed, this thread has made me want to incorporate all sorts of things into conworlds, simply to ensure I avoid the degrading humiliation of being found to be in "consensus" with you on anything.
Your post is not, as you label it, "some don'ts for a realistic conworld"; it's "uncalled for insulting of everyone who isn't me because I'm the God of Conworlding and only my opinion matters apparently". It's not just irritating, it's actively disgusting.