Another Worldbuilding Application Of The "two Layer Rule": To Create A Culture While Avoiding The Planet

Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.

Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?

Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.

Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.

Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.

You know, Finland.

Gaming Backlog Side Quest: Kingdom Hearts Re:Visited - A Fragmentary Retrospective (Part 1)

So it's only my second blog post in this backlog series, and I'm already veering off-course from what I originally thought it was going to be lol. Basically I want these KH Re:Visited posts to be a way for me to look back on how I got into this series while I share it with a friend of mine: @plzdonthitmewithyourcar. I think both fans of the series and people with <1% knowledge about this funky ass series should be able to enjoy the post though.

(Start of backstory) My introduction to Kingdom Hearts was very unconventional; I essentially stumbled across a volume of the manga while browsing my local library as a kid:

Picture of the first volume of the "Kingdom Hearts II" manga. Roxas and Sora stand back to back in front of a blue background featuring doves and an upside-down view of a beach covered with palm-trees.

So to my naive self, I assumed that this was the first volume of the whole series, and the "II" of the logo was lost on me (cuz I was a 11 year old lmao). I knew nothing about it, and the cover stood out to me so I decided to take it home and give it a read.

My introduction to the series consisted of what I think is still my favorite false-start to a game I've played. I fully went into this book, and by extension the KH series thinking that it was all about this young teen named Roxas and his friends living in Twilight Town slowly discovering a series of odd events relating to strange creatures called "Nobodies"; Enough to say that by the end of the first volume the rug got pulled out from under me as I was introduced to the true protagonist of the series, Donald, and Goofy: the first truly Disney characters (which also took me aback because I didn't know that the Square Enix x Disney crossover was so literal)

So with that first volume consumed and my pre-teen mind absolutely blown, I voraciously looked for anything else I could consume about the series. (End of backstory)

So now that I'm introducing a dear friend of mine to the series, I've decided to essentially follow the same path that I went on when I was learning the series while introducing them. I've only played the opening of KH2 with them, before we have now switched over to KH1. I'm very pleased that the opening still has the same charm that captured me years ago. The pleasant coziness and simplicity of Twilight Town, contrasted to the feeling of ominous foreshadowing when the supernatural elements begin to become more present and Roxas is forced to confront the answers to the questions he's been asking himself.

Game cinematics are sick AF, gameplay holds up so well (looking at you KH1), and the writing is very recognizably that charming yet unnatural approach to character-driven story.

Some of the things that I hadn't appreciated as much on my first playthrough was the interactions with Seifer, and how Hayner was essentially behind-the-scenes rallying people in the town to help figure out what was going on with Roxas and all the strange events that were beginning to show up around their quiet town. I think noticing interactions like those made me appreciate even more the tragic story of Roxas.

So yeah, this series is really special to me, and I'm really glad to be able to share it with people and blog about it. :)

Tags

kingdom hearts roxas kh2 Public Library gaming backlog

7 notes View Post

mintyfreshka

2 months ago