the-great-turning

[the-great-turning]

🍖 How to Build a Culture Without Just Inventing Spices and Necklaces

(a worldbuilding roast. with love.)

So. You’re building a fantasy world, and you’ve just invented: → Three types of ceremonial jewelry → A spice that tastes like cinnamon if it were bitter and cursed → A holiday where everyone wears gold and screams at dawn

Cute. But that’s not culture. That’s aesthetics.

And if your worldbuilding is all outfits, dances, and spice blends with vaguely mystical names, your story’s probably going to feel like a cosplay convention held inside a Pinterest board.

Here’s how to fix that—aka: how to build a real, functioning culture that shapes your story, not just its vibes.

─────── ✦ ───────

🔗 Culture Is Built on Power, Not Just Style

Ask yourself: → Who’s in charge, and why? → Who has land? Who doesn’t? → What’s considered taboo, sacred, or punishable by death?

Culture is shaped by who gets to make the rules and who gets crushed by them. That’s where things like religion, family structure, class divisions, gender roles, and social expectations actually come from.

Start there. Not at the embroidery.

─────── ✦ ───────

2.🪓 Culture Comes From Conflict

Did this society evolve peacefully? Was it colonized? Did it colonize? Was it rebuilt after a war? Is it still in one?

→ What was destroyed and mythologized? → What do the survivors still whisper about? → What do children get taught in school that’s… suspiciously sanitized?

No culture is neutral. Every tradition has a history, and that history should taste like blood, loss, or propaganda.

─────── ✦ ───────

3.🧠 Belief Systems > Customs Lists

Sure, rituals and holidays are cool. But what do people believe about: → Death? → Love? → Time? → The natural world? → Justice?

Example: A society that believes time is cyclical vs. one that sees time as linear will approach everything—from prison sentences to grief—completely differently.

You don’t need to invent 80 gods. You need to know what those gods mean to the people who pray to them.

─────── ✦ ───────

4.🫀 Culture Controls Behavior (Quietly)

Culture shows up in: → What people apologize for → What insults cut deepest → What people are embarrassed about → What’s praised publicly vs. what’s hidden privately

For instance: → A culture obsessed with stoicism won’t say “I love you.” They’ll say “Have you eaten?” → A culture built on legacy might prioritize ancestor veneration, archival writing, name inheritance.

This stuff? Way more immersive than giving everyone matching earrings.

─────── ✦ ───────

5. 🏠 Culture = Daily Life, Not Just Festivals

Sure, your MC might attend a funeral where people paint their faces blue. But what about: → Breakfast routines? → How people greet each other on the street? → Who cooks, and who eats first? → What’s considered “clean” or “proper”? → How is parenting handled? Divorce?

Culture is what happens between plot points. It should shape your character’s assumptions, language, fears, and habits—whether or not a festival is going on.

─────── ✦ ───────

6. 💬 Let Your Characters Disagree With Their Own Culture

A culture isn’t a monolith.

Even in deeply traditional societies, people: → Rebel → Question → Break rules → Misinterpret laws → Mock sacred things → Act hypocritically → Weaponize or resist what’s expected

Let your characters wrestle with the culture around them. That’s where realism (and tension) lives.

─────── ✦ ───────

7.🧼 Beware the “Pretty = Good” Trap

Worldbuilding gets boring fast when: → The protagonist’s homeland is beautiful and pure → The enemy’s culture is dark and “barbaric” → Every detail just reinforces who the reader should like

You can—and should—challenge the aesthetic hierarchy. → Let ugly things be beloved. → Let beautiful things be corrupt. → Let your MC romanticize their culture and then get disillusioned by it later.

─────── ✦ ───────

📍 TL;DR (but like, spicy): → Culture is not food and jewelry. → Culture is power, fear, memory, contradiction. → Stop inventing spices until you know who starved last winter. → Let your world feel lived in, not curated.

The best cultural worldbuilding doesn’t look like a list. It feels like a system. A pressure. A presence your characters can’t escape—even if they try.

Now go. Build something real. (You can add spices later.)

—rin t. // writing advice for worldbuilders with rage and range // thewriteadviceforwriters

Sometimes the problem isn’t your plot. It’s your first 5 pages. Fix it here → 🖤 Free eBook: 5 Opening Pages Mistakes to Stop Making:

🕯️ download the pack & write something cursed:

[the-great-turning]

New Clade Added: Fish!!

Adding fish to the repository is only possible thanks to the generosity of the site's Patreon supporters and everyone who donated through Ko-Fi to fund a trip to a big aquarium in another state. You guys made this happen - thank you! - and there are many more fish species to come.

So without further ado, let's meet our new finned friends:

Arapaima:

Blue Rockfish:

Canary Rockfish:

Electric Eels:

Four-Eyed Fish:

Pacific Lampreys:

Red-Bellied Piranhas:

Wolf Eels:

Want to have input on the next species page created, or what animals are photographed for the site next? Join the Patreon!

Artists creating derivative or transformative works (without AI) have blanket permission to use these and all photos in the repository as references, including works that will/may be sold.

The Animal Photo Reference Repository is an independent, permanently open-access project and funded entirely by donations, please consider contributing if you can!

**Patreon** -- **Ko-Fi**

[the-great-turning]

Juneteenth ❤️

[the-great-turning]

getting a new interest that it feels like nobody gaf about is so excruciating what do you mean people aren't going ham nuts over this thing. please start losing your minds

[the-great-turning]

WHEEL YOURSELF A DRAGON!

First take this classic dragon shape

Second, take this wheel and spin it 5, 7, or 10 times to modify the dragon!

Lastly, bask in your wonderful new child I ended up with a basilisk looking creature after spinning 7 times

[the-great-turning]

hi, I was wondering if you could elaborate more on the Libby ripping technique? I’m not super experienced with computers, so it’s kind of hard for me to understand. Can you explain it like I’m five?

Yeah, yeah!

So. Go and borrow a book on libbyapp.com.

Next, go to the "Read With..." menu

Then to "Other Options" and then press "EPUB"

This'll download a .acsm file, which is basically an encrypted .epub.

Now is the hard part: going through the trouble of setting up Calibre and the necessary plugins.

I'm not going to be able to explain it all here, it's wayyy too much for a tumblr post, and there are a lot of online guides, but once you have calibre all set up, make sure you have BOTH the DeACSM plugin and the DeDRM plugin installed. The DeACSM is what will convert the .acsm file into a .epub, and the DeDRM will make it so that the .epub can actually be read.

The DeACSM plugin is available on the Get New Plugins feature from within calibre, but since removing DRM is technically messing with the law, you have to manually download and install the DeDRM plugin.

Here is one guide, here is another for setting up the DeACSM plugin, you can search google to find more help, idk. It's been a while since I set it up, so I don't remember all the details. The MobileRead forums are AMAZING for this sort of thing.

Once it's all set up though, you should be able to select the .acsm file from the Add Books menu on Calibre, and it'll go through all the conversion automatically, so the book will end up on Calibre as a plain epub.

Yeah it's quite the process! I'm sorry I don't know enough to go into all the detail, but I hope this can get you on the right path! Calibre is an amazing program if you want to organise hundreds of ebooks and manage all the conversions and metadata, but for casual use like this? Yeah, it can be quite intimidating.

[the-great-turning]

It's impressive how Neil Gaiman vanished from the internet. Wish Rowling would do the same.

[the-great-turning]

[the-great-turning]

i learned that the Twilight Zone was created after Rod Serling’s teleplay inspired by Emmett Till’s murder was heavily censored by networks and advertisers. The censorship led Serling to rethink his approach and delve into the era’s social issues through a filter of science fiction and fantasy (x)

[the-great-turning]

good smut is really a character study and that is final. i need it to be about vulnerability i need it to be about trust or lack thereof and most of all i need it to be emotional agony. thats what sex is for

[the-great-turning]

[the-great-turning]

I wish Mythbusters was still around so we could see them fuck up a Cybertruck

[the-great-turning]

on twitter in 2022 i said “fandom likes to baby white villains and excuse their behavior, like with kylo ren and snape and izzy hands” and i got torn to absolute shreds even though i wasnt saying anything new and now people are coming out of a black-ass vampire movie doting on the white villain

[the-great-turning]

RB if you think CD drives in computers are not obsolete, but in fact still necessary, despite being artificially phased out

[the-great-turning]

[the-great-turning]

biblically accurate dungeon meshi btw

[the-great-turning]

Rebecca Sugar cooked with "Character whose entire existence is devoted to the service of another character who's now dead and now they have no idea what to do with themselves except live." I love that shit. I forged myself into a tool for you and now you're gone. I'm sniffing this like a bloodhound