meta question; are there any worldbuilding or genre tropes you can't stand to see, or are intentionally avoiding with the white calf setting?
I'm going to talk about things relevant to settings more or less like my own (non-industrial, no true nation-states, no history of global colonialism, no global culture/mass-media, material conditions are not analogous to anything in the modern era etc) so keep that in mind. SOME things I say 'will never work' here could work in other kinds of settings.
-'common tongue'. A setting where there's a single language that is an invariable lingua franca that everyone knows how to speak across a vast geographical distance. Something like that Will Not develop without being imposed by something like an imperialist entity, and even then you will see variable dialects and linguistic drift across space and time and people who just Do Not Know It Anyway.
I don't think a 'common tongue' is an appropriate conceit on anything beyond very localized/regional scales, or in larger-scale contexts outside of an occupier enforcing the use of its language on its subjects. And even then you should take into account that regional dialects will always exist, the developments of pidgins and creoles are likely, and that the occupier language will not always be the First languages of colonized people or spoken fluently by every individual.
Also just in general an entire continent should have hundreds if not thousands of native languages (depends on size and geography, isolating features like lots of mountain ranges/rivers/islands = more languages). I'd never expect anyone to have them all Established but you should be writing with the presumption this diversity is There.
-DND type rpg stuff bleeding into the worldbuilding. Like 'adventurer' being like, a career? In a setting with any degree of realism the behaviors ascribed to 'adventurers' would be better described as 'mercenary' 'bandit' 'grave robber' etc. Same goes for 'thief' or 'assassin' being its own job + 'thieves guilds' and 'assassins guilds' like, existing. Pre-modern era organized crime looks very different from a guild where you are put to work doing theft and murder for random clients. Don't have thieves guilds. Probably don't have 'assassins' as in 'person whose job is to do contract killings for whoever can pay the price', that's never Really existed.
-Having a sophont species that ubiquitously shares cultural traits like values, morality, modes of subsistence, practices, religion, etc. Not just talking about flagrantly terrible 'good race/evil race' type shit but stuff like: 'they Respect Nature and never cut down trees' 'their food mostly comes from hunting and foraging for mushrooms' 'they value strength in battle' 'they worship the sun' 'they have this specific kinship system' 'they never go around naked and always cover their genitals' etc. Any broad strokes you make about an entire species should be rooted in their biology (especially sensory perception/reproductive cyles, and underlying behavioral drives and ancestral social structures if you're VERY careful about it and don't treat complex social behaviors as unshakeable biological imperatives), and the same biological roots should be expressed differently as a matter of cultural variation.
"They are seasonally fertile for a very short window of time" is hard biology, "the period of seasonal fertility is celebrated as a holiday" is cultural and should not be universal. "Their pre-sapient ancestors formed serially monogamous pair bonds" is a manifestation of behavioral drives, "they only spend a year with any given sexual partner and then choose a new one the following year, and they don't have any form of longterm reproductive contracts in their societies" is cultural and should not be universal.
-I have so many fucking annoyances about how people approach worldbuilding religion that it could be its own post longer than this one. I can't give it in summary form it's too much.
-I don't tend to like settings wherein creator deities exist as self-evident parts of material reality. I don't think that conceit is inherently going to be a bad thing (there's a LOT of interesting ways you could handle it) but most of the time it's not done thoughtfully and just results in a world that feels flat and unpeopled. Everybody believes in the same things in more or less the same ways. Maybe you'll see certain societies Favoring certain gods or interpreting them a little differently, but there's no truly profound differences in worldview. Religion can't serve some of its core purposes of teaching a culture's values and morals and practices and history (or if it does, it's on a dead-literal historical level like 'the fire god favored the xyz people because she likes war and they like war and they were loyal to her and so she gave them fire magic' or fucking something). it becomes decoupled from culture and subjectivity and is more like a form of science measuring empirical reality (it's just that this empirical reality has deities and magic or whatever).
-exact approximations of 21st century LGBT identities existing as identity labels. OF COURSE there are going to be people who are experiencing the same Things we describe as being gay, a lesbian, bi, trans, nonbinary, but it's Very unlikely that you'll have a culture that has these concepts in a 1:1 capacity. Or the concept of "heterosexuality" for that matter. Or the notion of sexuality as an identity, something that's Who You Are and not What You Do.
Also there won't always be a distinction between sexuality and gender in general, gender norms may have expected sexuality Strongly baked in. Some 3rd (or etc) gender spaces may be defined heavily around one's sexuality. As in, a society might find it socially acceptable for someone who has been AMAB to have sex with men, but conceptualizes that as a facet of not Being male and instead part of a separate gender role. Or one that finds this socially Unacceptable considers it to remove one from the category of 'male' in a capacity that is a personal failing. Etc.
-that thing where people go 'look, my fantasy culture has the genders of Man Woman and Nonbinary so there's a place for everyone and there's no transphobia :)'. If sex and gender is being assigned to begin with, that means there are gender norms and thus people who exist outside of these gender norms.
-Depictions of a Proud Warrior Culture in which it's socially acceptable to kill anyone for any reason because 'might makes right' or 'we have to weed out the weak' or whatever. This is VERY often just done to show how ~exotic~ or ~barbaric~ a fantasy culture is, and even when it's not racist it's dumb as fuck. Having some concept of 'murder is bad' is pretty much culturally ubiquitous because a social species cannot Survive without ways to regulate intragroup conflict (it's just that what exactly defines 'murder' can vary). A society is not going to have 'you can just straight up kill another member of the in-group for whatever' as a trait. You might see regulated and ritualized forms interpersonal violence like duels, or specific insults or non-violent offenses that are considered grave enough to warrant death, or ways to Other a person that socially justifies/excuses retributive violence, or socially protected authority figures that can get away with murder, but these aren't the same as 'we think its normal for people to just immediately escalate to murdering each other when they have a disagreement because we are Proud Warriors and Strength and etc etc' (and the examples I gave will probably still be treated with a degree of gravity).
-Depicting patriarchy as conditions in which Women Are Constantly Being Sexually Assaulted At All Times and there are no social protections against sexual violence (except MAYBE for like the most elite women). Like, the most hardline patriarchies in which women have zero legal autonomy and are functionally property still tend to posit rape as a crime (with marital rape being a BIG exception), even if only legally framed as destruction of another man's 'property'. The nature of sexual violence/rape culture within patriarchies is a lot more insidious and complex than just 'it's a free for all'. You are not going to see conditions in which it is socially normalized for any man to assault any (IN-GROUP) woman.
-Depictions of what is ostensibly a true matriarchy and yet it is Not an oppressive system of gender hegemony that denies autonomy/exploits labor of its underclasses but is instead framed like, a utopia where everyone lives peacefully under the guidance of the wise female leadership and the Earth Goddess, and they don't fight wars and they live in perfect harmony with nature due to all the innate female emotional intuition and earth connection and goddess energy menstrual blood moon magick whateevvrvrrrrrrrrrr.
Ok this one isn't That common in speculative fiction but I've read a few novels that were inspired by the bunk pop feminist theories from (iirc) the 60s-70s about how human societies everywhere (read: in Europe) were all harmonious earth goddess-worshipping matriarchies through the paleolithic/parts of the neolithic, until the Evil Warlike Proto Indo-Europeans conquered and introduced patriarchy and horses (masc). And boy did these books suck.
More story/character-driven nitpicks:
-presumptions that gay men in patriarchal societies are just going to de-facto Respect Women by virtue of not being sexually attracted to them?
-writing women in heavily patriarchal societies as all holding like 21st century feminist viewpoints (unless they are the Bad Women like evil mothers or evil bitch-whores who are obstacles for the protagonists, in which case they are allowed to have internalized misogyny). Like ABSOLUTELY there can and should be women who question their social conditions, can articulate pain and humiliation at being treated like property, will reject social norms and push for better conditions and autonomy, etc. But there's a difference between writing your women as people who have been steeped in their culture's norms for their entire life and question these norms on their own terms, and writing them as if they just teleported in from a women's studies class.
-Systemic oppression in which only the Mean People exhibit bigotry and the Nice People are enlightened social progressives. How interpersonally friendly you are has nothing to do with whether or not you've unlearned bigoted norms ingrained in you from childhood. I think this sort of thing absolutely neuters any attempts to depict systemic oppression by framing it as just a struggle between 'bad people' and 'good people' (and in a lot of cases turns into stories where the oppression isn't even slightly Convincing because your big cast of Lovable Protagonists are all like "Love is love! I think women should VOTE!" and then there's one antagonist in a Bad People faction who is like "BURN THE GAY WITCH", so it feels like it's just a struggle against a small group of meanies and not against cultural hegemony). You should have kind, friendly people who exhibit bigoted social norms.
-a society where arranged marriages are the default but your protagonist is like, SHOCKED that they won't be marrying for love or that they don't have any choice in the matter (because they have been teleported in from a women's studies class). The concept of marriage as a fulfillment of a romantic bond rather than a reproductive contract between families is Pretty damn modern. Like you might have societies where romantic love is an aspiration for marriages, or where it's idealized as something that develops in the process of courting or etc. And there's a good chance that compatibility will be taken into account to SOME extent. But having your character be like "but Puh-PAH I don't WANT to marry Sir Chunt for I do not LOVE HIM" upon the announcement of the arrangement can strain plausibility.
Not saying that someone desiring to marry a person they have actual romantic feelings for or resenting their lack of choice is implausible by any means. It just shouldn't feel like this is a surprise to them. And many people might not be able to articulate it perfectly as "I wish I had autonomy to do what I want with my body and my relationships" rather than stuff like "I don't even like this person, I wish they were xyz instead, god my fiance is ugly this sucks, I don't know if I'm ever going to like them, I would've chosen much better," etc.
Also yeah some people Are going to just be fine with it because they know what they're getting into, they've known it for all their lives and are surrounded with people who've been through the same thing. And there's probably additional cultural/legal facets to marriage that they may look forward to regardless of how they feel about their spouse (security for themself and their family, entering into adult status and social spaces, legal and social privileges, etc).
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