mcahogarth

Worldbuilding: Sleeves

Added 2019-07-08 14:23:03 +0000 UTC

Every once in a while, people ask me how to do worldbuilding and I never have a good answer at the time because it’s one of those things that works better with an example. And I have an example now, so let’s talk about worldbuilding!

In this case, about sleeves.

Yes, I know, it seems really random. But there’s a reason I translated Carl Sagan’s quote about having to invent the universe in order to bake an apple pie, because every single thing around us has a provenance, and if you start picking at one thread you unravel a tapestry. So… sleeves. In particular, my observation that I keep drawing Ai-Naidar with weird rectangular sleeves on top of other sleeves. Why?

(Because, you say, reasonably, you’re drawing them. Probably you haven’t thought about it. Certainly because it’s easier to draw the folds of a square sleeve that exists only from the elbow down. Plus, it looks cool.)

Are you right? Yes, all yes. And I’m so grateful I made this bizarre artistic choice, because that gives me a random seed. I stole that term from computer engineering (it’s a number you give a random generator so the results will have a different starting point, and thus give different results), but it serves, because the number one thing I find I need to do good worldbuilding is that unplanned and random starting point. It’s the number one thing that authors are bad at when generating their false worlds: they’re too regular. They make too much sense in one specific direction (the author’s thoughts). The real world is full of conflicting layers of sense, and modeling that is the real Holy Grail when aiming for believability.

It’s hard, y’all. No one does a perfect job of it. But you can get closer. Let’s get back to my process.

So I have my random seed: this weird sleeve design I put on characters because it looked cool. Why do they have sleeves like that? It’s time to ask questions and follow their answers into rabbit holes! In my case, using language as a tool, because hearing how characters refer to things helps me figure them out.

I began with the word for sleeves, which is tomas, something I derived from smashing together the word for ‘cloth’ (tom) and ‘arms’ (yas). (Don’t worry, we jam words together all the time and lose letters in the process. ‘Brunch’ is a common example, but for an uncommon one did you know that ‘electrocute’ was formed by combining ‘electric’ and ‘execute’? This is called word blending. It is legit!)

Tomas. Sleeves. Now I need to figure out what they call a sleeve you put on over another sleeve, because it’s evident from the pictures that these sleeves are removable. My first instinct, in response to the question ‘why would you do that’, is ‘to keep the sleeve under it clean.’ I start hunting based on that assumption, starting with words like ‘protect’ and ‘guard’, but none of those feel right, mostly because they’re related to activities done by people and the Ai-Naidar like to separate things-done-by-people from things-done-by-things. That leads me to ‘shields’, tara, and that looks promising. I derive a couple of verbs from that noun, one for the shielding done by people (taran) and one by the shielding done by objects (tarait), and that gets me to taraitom, another blended word, this time for ‘shielding done by an object’, and ‘sleeve’ with the ending lopped off because people are lazy and stop using long words if the word is still intelligible once they’ve truncated it (again, totally a thing we do: see ‘photograph’ becoming ‘photo’ and even my paragraph above, with ‘legit.’).

So now I have a word that means ‘something that shields a sleeve,’ to describe my assumption that sleeves were originally used to protect the sleeve under it from damage or staining. But the taraitom I’ve been drawing have designs on them, which means they’re decorative and… that seems absurd, right? You don’t protect a plain sleeve with an ornamented one!

At this point it would be tempting to say ‘whoops, I did that wrong, let me re-do it.’ But this is another opportunity, to my mind, to insert complexity. Instead of backtracking and trying to come up with a new word that means ‘this is a sleeve you use to decorate a plainer shirt’ I decided that historically, the taraitom were intended as protection, and so they were plain and the sleeves under them were ornamented. But as time went by, people started decorating the taraitom too, which made them just as precious as what was under them! Because they were removable, though, if you got your Super Ornamented taraitomi dirty, you could switch it out for a cleaner one, no harm done. And, you know, for extra Decorative Ornamentation, you could have an ornamented sleeve under it, too, because why not?

In this way, the original use of the removable sleeve evolved into the modern custom, which treats the taraitom as a way to add extra oomph to your outfit.

I like this better. It feels true to human (alien) nature for things to change: and particularly when it changes status as well as use; in this case, protective sleeves might have been used by those with less wealth because they didn’t want to wash their best shirt too often, and then they were co-opted by the wealthy as a way to demonstrate more wealth. But I think it’s good to leave some footprints to the past, so I decide that the plainer taraitom are still used for their original purpose by priesthoods that have been around since those styles were new.

This explains both the dancer I drew with her elaborate paneled taraitom… and Shame, kneeling at Thirukedi’s feet, with his starkly unornamented ones (you'll see those Friday). The former is using them as modern Ai-Naidar do, to ornament an outfit… and the latter is wearing a costume with historical antecedents, the robes of Shame’s priesthood. This also gives me some interesting cultural notes to drop into stories and art: someone who wears a plain taraitom over richly ornamented sleeves might be conservative in dress, or prefer older fashions to newer ones, or might be old enough to have seen those eras in person (see: Emperor).

If I had to choose a piece of advice for the curious, then, I’d have to choose two pieces of advice. One for those of you who don’t want to build worlds yourself but are interested in the process, and one for those of you who are writers or designers. For the idly curious, I would say: question things you take for granted and dig into them. Why do I have apples in Florida in winter? Why doesn’t the US have a good railway system? Why do we say someone’s ‘over the moon’ when we mean they’re thrilled? Where did high-heeled shoes come from? And why are they mostly associated with women now, given how they originated?

Things are complicated, y’all. The more history and the more cultures touched a thing, the more complicated it gets. It’s fantastic.

For those of you who want to build a world yourselves, my advice is: embrace the random seed. Did you make a mistake and give your aliens two different words for the same idea? Run with that—maybe it was a borrowed word from another culture, or it meant something different initially and that stopped being relevant to their culture, or maybe it originally sounded different and over the years the sound changed. Did you have two different characters report that the same event happened at different times? Maybe there’s more than one calendar. Maybe someone is teaching something wrong—or maybe the experts disagree on it because there’s evidence that it could have happened at either time. Or maybe it’s in your character’s head; does one have a faulty memory? Are they uneducated? Do they transpose numbers? You said everyone has purple fur, and forgot that some character has green. Different race? Foreigner? A class of people not spoken of because elitism? Or maybe it was dyed? But if there’s only one character with green fur, fur-dying is obviously not widely accepted… why?

You can call this the Kittycat’s Rule of Worldbuilding: Every mistake is an opportunity to say ‘I meant to do that.’

In fact, I like that. So let’s sum up: