Daily Archives: April 12, 2020

Worldbuilding Songs

Perhaps it’s because I love and appreciate implied storytelling following a childhood of reading probably the worst bestselling book in history that, while supposedly full of crucial information that’ll keep you from being infinitely tortured forever, is nonetheless so fantastically obscure that the vital tenent of the trinity that makes it a monotheistic text and not just another fantasy novel of fake bullshit isn’t even in there and you have to kind of guess around the edges and read the supplemental materials to get what the fuck it even means that means alternate history narratives are oftentimes wonderfully interesting to me. The problem with them, and we’re not going to talk about how long that sentence was, Dad, is that alternate histories are also extraordinarily boring works, usually penned by extremely thudding individuals and strangely, tend to attract audiences that are pretty, well, let’s just say it’s not that these communities are overwhelmingly racist, it’s just that they clearly haven’t done enough to make sure racists feel uncomfortable enough to fuck off.

But what if instead of churning through a civil war era novel that wanted to explain in detail how it went about handling the difference in Ironclad technology, there was some kind of short, fun, punchy way to get alt history, in increments of say, five minutes or less? Well, they’d have to be really good, because then you’re talking about worldbuilding for a real world history in a tiny amount of time. Maybe you’d need something to string it all together, like, you know, music and rhythm and wordplay and all that.

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