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meta-with-anne · 2 years ago

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World Building Project

Welcome to The Alpha Cluster, a group of the 30 closest galaxies surrounding Earth-Alpha, and their respective planetary systems and member planets.

Religion: “The One” - The creator of the universe is all seeing, all knowing, and controls everything that has ever and will ever happen, he is both spiteful and tempestuous as well as empathetic and loving towards those who give him their reverence. “Light of the Word” - Worshippers who view knowledge both as a deity and a goal, knowledge molds us, guides us, and must be the ultimate pursuit of all we do. “Utilitarian Humanism” - The sentient beings of the universe are the msot important and all we do must be to benefit ourselves and each other, easing suffering, the pursuit of pleasure, and our sentience and "spirit"/soul is of paramount importance. “Omniscientism” - The ultimate goal is to have total awareness of everything that is happening at any given point in time and place, the creator of the universe had this power, and one day it will return and allow the most faithful of its followers to become omniscient as it is. The “Galactic Priesthood - Worshippers of the galaxy itself, they believe that the energy and unexplainable forces (such as dark matter) are the paramount forces, they are to be respected, cherished, and admired rather than understood.

Government:

The main governing body is an intergalactic organization known solely as “The Sanctum”. Each planetary system has a senate which takes between two and ten representatives from each planet proportional to population, never exceeding more than 1000 members, and each system has between two and eight representatives in The Sanctum. Constitutional monarchies and other parliamentary systems are allowed but authoritarian or dictatorial rule is punished harshly by The Sanctum, which values cooperative governing (pure democratic, democratic republic, parlimentary republic, etc.) above all else. The Intergalactic Peace Keeping Force “IGPKF” are the men behind the curtain, they take orders from the Sanctum, however because they protect and promote the sanctum’s agenda they’re also beholden to the IGPKF’s agenda (mainly exponential growth/always acquiring more recruits)

Economics: Interplanetary Credit System "ICS" ,each galaxy maintains a type of credit, credit exchange and rates work the way international currency exchange does on earth, there is an intergalactic stock market, but also strict limitations on individual wealth, no person may have personal combined assets that exceed one billion of their planetary system's credits, all else is either distributed to charitable causes of the individual's choice, but at least half must be paid back to the system's overseeing government. Homelessness, hunger, poverty, and several types of disease (like cancer) have been eradicated, to receive these benefits, however, you must either be actively in some sort of schooling, employed, or given temporary or permanent special dispensation for the government (i.e. Cases of parents raising young children or permanently disabled individuals)

Geography: Each planetary and galactic system is diverse, all occupants are descended from proto-homosapiens spread across the galaxies, the humanoids shaped their environments which in turn shaped them, there are space rails owned by the Sanctum, as well as ships owned by various organizations, governments, and (very powerful) individuals, owning your own ship would be the equivalent of owning both a private jet and a super yacht all in one, many people get very rich just by renting theirs out.

Social Structure: Richer worlds are more powerful + respected, the most humanoid species are treated the best, ones that look less human but are considered pretty or interesting looking are devalued/discriminated against but also exotisized, the "Halo Effect" has isolated several entire subspecies on various worlds to the point they have no representation in the larger government. “Terran” humans (humans from earth with little to no non-earth DNA) do best with gene hacking and other “modifications” so are valued as soldiers, pets/oddities, and other specialized roles but viewed as weak and unintelligent in their unaltered form

Magic/Science: Planets with several different types of new elements have been discovered, allowing for tech that allows “powers” such as telepathy, nanites, biological restructuring, intergalactic travel, and super strength, speed, invisibility, and flight. Certain types of genetic modification is allowed but diseases cannot be eradicated unless they are guaranteed to be fatal (like some birth defects), phenotypical traits may be altered but only within existing the species existing and it’s very expensive.

#fandom255 #worldbuilding #scifi

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meta-with-anne · 2 years ago

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Fan Ethnography

In a conversation a few days ago, my best friend, Rose, asked me what should have been a very simple question. “What fandom do you plan to focus on for class?”

I knew Rose’s answer before they told me, our fandom discussions have been a highlight of my life every few days for going on four years, and I knew that mine—as it seems so many of my answers in life tend to be—was much less concise. “It doesn’t feel right to pick one, but I already know my lens,” I tell them in an Instagram voice note, an on-going “whenever you’re around” conversation that after about a year of use must amount to hundreds of hours worth of discussion, nearly all involving our fandoms and fan culture at large.

Me 'n Rose (Bestie in Fandom)

I have identified as a “fangirl” for as long as I can remember, long enough that I still can’t always bring myself to use the more widely accepted term of “stan”, long enough that although I was officially too young for an account I have vivid memories of 2013-15 tumblr culture, long enough that despite only being twenty-one I have earned the term “fandom elder” entirely on accident. Maybe I was six? When my older sister Abby introduced me to a song called Fearless, only for me to be paying out the nose to see Taylor sing it live fifteen years later on the Eras Tour. I might’ve been eight, when this madman in a bow tie lit up the hospital room where I was getting cancer treatments. I definitely couldn’t have been older than eleven, though, by then I had a tumblr account, a rotating cast of dedicated fandom OC’s, and a t-shirt reading “Booknerd” with the classic Harry Potter-Percy Jackson-Hunger Games “Big Three” logo right beneath. By the time I entered middle school I was a self declared expert on the television shows Doctor Who, Glee, Star Trek, and Criminal Minds, and had read (or rather listened) to the Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Lord of the Rings series’ over a hundred times through, etv. There’s not much else to do when you’re a chronically ill child, stuck in bed, alone, and desperate to live without having to leave the hospital.

Me, at 12, thinking my Eleventh Doctor shirt was hot shit

Although it is arguably the least interesting branch I hit while falling down the tree of intersectionality, as the child of lesbian parents, as an ethnically Jewish person, and as a someone who was born—and has spent my entire life—chronically ill and disabled, my identity as a woman has always been the one that has effected my fandom experience the most. (I must acknowledge here that I can only speak to my experience as one cisgender white woman, and that the experiences of those who are women of color, trans, nonbinary, and/or not attracted to men, are invariably going to be not only much different, but in many ways much more difficult than my own.)

For as long as I can remember, I have navigated the world with a hyperawareness of gender-based violence and discrimination, I think it’s impossible not to do so when growing up in an all-girl family, much less one where both my moms had experienced said violence, and where they both used fandom to cope themselves. If there was a time I did not, it was before the age of ten, when I was a victim of CSA at the hands of the medical system and the men who run it; to this day I can’t listen to the particular Lord of the Rings audiobook I had playing when it happened without bursting in to tears. It is imperative, in my view, to understand my hyperawareness of misogyny, to understand my experience with fandom. I came in to fan communities, and spent much of my formative time in them, in the proliferation of the peak NLog (not like other girls) years.

Who run the world? I mean not my family of girls...but it would be cool if we did

Bombarded with memes, texts posts, and a general atmosphere that the only “correct” way to exist as a girl, and especially a young girl (specifically one who was twelve pretending to be fifteen), was to not be like other girls. I must not be “shrill”, overly argumentative, disdainful of the casual sexism that lurks underneath the surface of many fan spaces, I must not bad-mouth venerated male creators (bad mouthing, of course, including questioning why it is so unreasonable to wish for a television writing team with more than a single woman), I must not overtly enjoy things like makeup, but I must still be effortlessly pretty (preferably with blue “orbs” and a red messy bun), I must not like pink (purple is usually fine though), and I must not actually say I am not like other girls, but must look upon their love of Taylor Swift, Gossip Girl, One Direction, and Twilight with disdain all the same.

This avalanche of expectations, reinforced by my online companions in fandom communities, as well as by my “enemies”, those who sent anonymous messages that I should kill myself for committing the great sin of writing a Doctor Who Jack/Nine/Rose “Makeover” one shot, caused an inordinate amount of cognitive dissonance, and was often deeply isolating. In my “real life” girls who shared my interests in clothes, makeup, sewing, and my nearly decade-long membership in Girl Scouts were not interested in talking about X-Men comics, Star Trek Expanded Universe novels, or the latest episode of Doctor Who. In my online world I could get my head bitten off in an instant simply for saying I thought it was unfair “girly girls” were usually portrayed as vapid and dumb in series like Percy Jackson and Harry Potter, and god forbid you have the audacity to like Molly Hooper on Sherlock or worse, Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones.

An edit I made circa 2015 of my favorite Sansa Stark quote

Over the years my involvement in fandoms have waxed and waned, I’ve been bullied out of three (including anonymous death and rape threats in two and getting doxxed at the tender age of thirteen over one), Doctor Who, Marvel, and Taylor Swift. All for different reasons, but all really coming down to the idea I like “traditionally feminine” things too much, whether that be “pretty” actors like Matt Smith, “feminist” heroes like Captain Marvel, or “girly” albums like Lover. And yet, I keep coming back, I came back after the Game of Thrones finale (and have two over 100k viewed fanfics on AO3 to show for it), I came back for the thirteenth and fourteenth (no, I will not call him fifteen) Doctors, and have even tentatively poked my head back into the Avatar the Last Airbender and Percy Jackson fandoms with their respective renaissances.

BEHOLD A very dumb photo montage I made at the ripe old age of thirteen of aforementioned pretty actor (I still quote "I was called dumbo as a child" on a regular basis)

It’s easy to ask why I continue to subject myself to the “fandom experience”, and in turn to chalk it up to the chemical processes involved in my ADHD, my desperation for a community I can participate in despite my chronic pain and fatigue, or simply the fact I got involved so young I don’t know how to live without them. I think it’s a lot simpler than that, though, I think it’s because I process the world through writing, and because above else I love to write. Whether it be fan fiction, meta, or original works branching off from the questions the media I love continually invites me to ask, writing is my great passion, and the fandoms and franchises I fall in love with are the ones that spark my motivation to write; whether I’m analyzing Taylor Swift lyrics, breaking down the celebrity culture I’ve watched for over a decade in my original novel, or writing fan-fiction where once in a while I still love a good makeover montage. Fandom introduced me to writing, writing became the way I process the world, and in the circular nature of life, writing is what will always bring me back to fandom.

That was a long post, thanks for reading, here's the best meme anyone has ever made for me (everyone say thank you Rose)

@theofficeofdocmalone

#255fandom

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