🍖 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.
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🔗 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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📍 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
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This post was originally from a FAQ, but since the original link is now defunct, I am re-posting it here.
There are many things to keep in mind when naming the town or city in your novel:
1) Genre/Theme/Tone
It’s very important to consider the genre and theme of your story when choosing a town name. Take these names for example, each of which indicates the genre or theme of the story:
King’s Landing (sounds fantastical)
Cloud City (sounds futuristic)
Silent Hill (sounds scary)
Sweet Valley (sounds happy and upbeat)
Bikini Bottom (sounds funny)
Radiator Springs (sounds car-related)
Halloween Town (sounds Halloween-related)
Storybrooke (sounds fairytale-related)
2) Time/Place
It’s also important to consider the time and place where your story takes place. For example, you wouldn’t use “Vista Gulch” as a name for a town in Victorian England. You probably wouldn’t use it for a town in modern day North Carolina, either. Vista is a Spanish word and would normally be found in places where Spanish names are common, like Spain, Central and South America, the southwest United States (including southern California), Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Florida.
3) Size/Settlement Type
An isolated town of 300 people probably won’t be Valley City, but a sprawling metropolis of 30 million could be called Windyville, because it could have started out as a small town and grew into a large city.
4) Geography
Words like gulch, butte,and bayou tend to be regional terms. You probably wouldn’t find Berle’s Bayou in Idaho, or Windy Butte in Rhode Island.
Words like mount, cape, and valley are dependent upon terrain. Most of the time, you won’t have a town named “mount” something unless there are hills or mountains nearby. You wouldn’t use “cape” unless the town was on a cape, which requires a large body of water.
5) History
Is there a historical person or event that your town might be named after? The Simpsons’ hometown of Springfield is ironically named after its founder, Jebediah Springfield. Chattanooga, Tennessee is named after the Cherokee town that was there first. Nargothrond, in The Lord of the Rings, is an Elvish town with an Elvish name.
6) Combination of Words
person name + geographical term = Smithfield, Smith Creek
group name + geographical term = Pioneer Valley, Settlers’ Ridge
descriptive word + geographical term = Mystic Falls, Smoky Hill
person name + settlement type = Smithton, Claraville
landmark + settlement type = Bridgton, Beaconville
Some helpful, basic guidelines for developing a consistent or thematic approach to naming villages or towns or cities in fiction.
And never forget, you can change it later … in fact, one can almost guarantee that the more village, town, or city names you come up with during the worldbuilding phase, the more likely you’ll change one (or all) of them in due time.
Inhabiting areas just above the deep ocean the ochiodont, if you could not tell, is a much larger and much more predatory relative of conodonts and like conodonts ochiodont lacks a jaw bone, so this 6 meter long fish has obviously developed some unique ornamentations to help handle prey. using their primary set of dental destroyers ochiodonts use these to handle prey closing them around prey quickly causing severe damage with the sharpened hooks, if the prey might be more harder to handle that's were the second pair of teeth come in as ochiodonts will use theses ones by ramming in and stab into prey as quickly as possible before the larger set of teeth can deliver a killing blow.
Now of course losing these devastating dental decapitaters would be devastating for the ochiodonts feeding habits, so during periods of rest of just general non hunting they will close their teeth together like a pair of scissors from hell and then use muscles retract them into their body to protect them from damage. Of course this is also how they get food down their gobs, after tearing their prey to pieces they'll latch onto the still bleeding corpse with their primary teeth and start retracting until the food gets to the interior teeth inside the mouth which they'll use to tear edible chunks and send them down the throat.
ngl this is still one of my best sigils to date and it looks So Right. I dont think I can make a different sigil fo SILENCE TRANSPHOBE and get something as fierce as this. Like this is Cunt. I love this.
Gasps could be heard from the gallery after the Republican state senator asked a trans health care professional about her genitalia.
An Arkansas lawmaker shocked onlookers this week when he asked a transgender health care professional about her genitals at a hearing on a bill that would prohibit gender-affirming care for minors.
Gwendolyn Herzig, a pharmacist who is a trans woman, was testifying Monday in support of the treatment for minors during a state Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
“You said that you’re a trans woman?” Republican state Sen. Matt McKee asked Herzig. “Do you have a penis?”
The audience erupted, with some audibly gasping and at least one person shouting, "Disgraceful."
"That's horrible," Herzig said, after taking a few moments to gather herself. "I don't know what my rights are, but that question was horribly inappropriate."
Herzig, who holds a doctorate of pharmacy, then added: "I'm a health care professional, a doctor. Please treat me as such. Next question, please."
Herzig said she went into Monday's hearing hoping that Republican lawmakers would be receptive to hearing her perspective as a trans woman and a health professional.
"Any other question I was expecting other than what I got," Herzig, 33, said in a phone interview with NBC News. "It was probably the most publicly humiliating thing I've ever gone through."
McKee did not immediately respond to NBC News' request for comment.
The exchange prompted outrage on social media from trans activists and the state's Democrats.
"Absolutely sickening," Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, wrote on Twitter. "Arkansas State senator Matt McKee asked a trans person at a legislative hearing 'do you have a penis?' Does this State Senator have any basic human decency?"
The Democratic Party of Arkansas tweeted, "Republicans are not hiding their transphobia."
The legislation, S.B. 199, introduced in the Arkansas Senate this month, would prohibit physicians in the state from providing most types of gender-affirming care to minors, including prescribing puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy, or from performing transition-related surgeries.
It would also allow anyone in the state who has received gender-affirming care as a minor to file a malpractice lawsuit against physicians for up to 30 years after they turn 18.
More than a dozen major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association, support the treatments that would be barred if the bill becomes law.
In 2021, Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming care for minors, but a federal judge temporarily blocked the law. The 2021 legislation largely mirrors the bill introduced this year.
Five other states have enacted similar forms of the legislation, including South Dakota, whose Governor signed a measure into law on Monday.
Less than two months into 2023, lawmakers in at least 24 states, including Arkansas, have introduced legislation that would restrict transition-related care for minors, according to an NBC News analysis.
S.B. 199 advanced through Arkansas' Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday, and it is expected to pass through the state Senate in upcoming weeks.
After testifying, Herzig said she defiantly sat through the rest of the hearing before heading back to work at the pharmacy she owns, Park West Pharmacy in Little Rock, the state capital.
As video of her exchange with McKee spreads on social media, Herzig said, "Going viral, I guess, is OK."
"I really just hope it just shows people that there's people like me who want to stand up and that there are people who want to make sure there are access to resources," she added.
An old man and a 20 year old are paired together at a golf tournament. They’re playing a long par 5 that dog legs around some tall trees.
As the 20 year old sets up his tee shot to hit onto the fairway the old man notes “when I was your age we used to hit over the trees - not around to the side.”
So the 20 year old readjusts and tries to hit over the trees - but can’t clear them and loses his ball. He tries again and loses that one too…
Then the old man says “of course, when I was your age, the trees were only 6 foot tall.”
Everybody who wears The One Ring in LOTR starts to refer to it as ‘My Precious,’ and Tolkien’s right that is super creepy, but what I really love is that everybody does it, which says to me that this super powerful scary evil sentient ring has a favorite pet name and just, like, will not respond to anything else.
look i’m just saying, even as educated as frodo is, would he really KNOW the true name of sauron? like shit, of any of the elves left in middle earth by the time the events of LotR actually happen, only círdan and galadriel are old enough to remember that sauron existed in valinor (not counting old sindarin/avari elves because iirc sauron was never called mairon on the shores of ara [except possibly by melkor wink wonk]), let alone what his name was.
so to everyone in ME, he’s always been sauron, and there’s no connection to “precious” in any linguistic sense…
but mairon remembers.
no you’re a hundred percent right!! no one would know, and it wouldn’t make sense to anyone except maybe Gandalf, but that shredded little piece of sauron’s souls remembers
So, I’ve been pulled over a few times in my life. Not many, but a few. And I’ve also been in a couple of cars that got pulled over. And let me tell you, if you were actually doing something wrong, the officer doesn’t make any small talk, just straight into “I clocked you doing 70 in a 55.” The only time I’ve ever gotten the “do you know why I pulled you over?” was the time when I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and I got let go even though he insisted to the end that I was doing 87 in a 70 (white privilege at work).
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” is a trap. It means there’s a good chance the officer doesn’t actually have a good reason to ticket you, and is trying to get you to waive your 5th Amendment rights and incriminate yourself. If you make a guess, that’s a confession of guilt.
But there’s another trap, that I’ve heard of but haven’t yet experienced. It’s “do you know how fast you were going?” With that one, they’re hoping you’ll say no, because then they can name whatever speed they want – you just said you didn’t know how fast you were going, if you deny the speed they name then you’re lying to them.
Oh, I’ve had that one. Go with “yes.” Don’t give them a number, just say “Yes.” Then they still have to offer a number and you can deny it without contradicting yourself. They could just ask you, at that point, but that’s suspiciously similar to saying they don’t know, and they tend to avoid doing that.
Also, you can always go to court and contest a ticket, and a lot of times you’ll win. Or if the cop thinks you’ll win they won’t even show up and you’ll win by default.
They like to target out of state plates because anyone who would be majorly inconvenienced by a court date two months away is a lot more likely to just pay it.
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