#character jargon explained

[sysirauta]

Is it a good day for some infodump of your headworld? I love learning about what goes into people's headworlds but like, in a more personal way, what inspires what, do you talk to your characters in your head? is it just Finland but fantasy? too many saunas? explain pls

First of all yes there's definitely Finland affecting a whole lot, as this is the only place where I've properly lived (okay a had of year student exchange in Austria has its own inspiration there) and I like our forests and stuff like how ice age shows around and that we have saunas. There's definitely too little saunas and glacial erratic rocks in any fantasy setting.

I have basically just one single headword (which has spawned a couple of AUs to accommodate the fact that I've got some too fun extra iterations to certain characters and they cannot fit in by any means). I don't keep it set in stone or create a new one when I need to change something, so it has gone through a lot of reconstruction. It started accidentally in 2003 when I wanted to draw some high fantasy esque art but had no skill nor interest to draw humans, so I just replaced generic fantacy races with some person-creatures which then remained and became their own things. Back then it followed pretty regular high fantasy rules and there were actual plot of this one bloodline of certain creature which were in the key role to defeat some big bad and end a hundred year old war blahblahblah. Anyway when time went on, I created more things, got different tastes, got more characters, discarded a lot of old stuff, the world got a lot weirder, and there's no single "plot" anymore. Everyone are just vibing (or not, but there's no The Plot. Every character has their own story and shenanigans.)

Canonically the world is old, created by a big yellow bird. It has gone through at least two proper apocalypses, by time changed from "normal" to something that looks normal but includes lots of elements of magic and unexplainable things, and old ruins of things which sometimes are leftovers from previous ruler species. There's no humans, nor humans have ever been. There's no big scale cities nor technology, but there are things like advanged medical skills, working postal system, (and saunas!), overall working society between sapient species, which could be referred as common folks (salkahi, gureta, dravene, aridmander, datyle) which make the most of world population, and mythical folks (gryphons, dragons, kirins, perytons) which are less in numbers but still visible in everyday life. Everyone are just...people. They're biological and usually do normal things like eat and breath and die one day. Aaand then there are all other things. Two supreme gods (Creator and Chaos), not-time-tied weird looking ones which help to keep things together (true angels), their helpers (angels, but like, hybrid kids of once lived mortals), postcreateds (unique non-biological non-dying surreal/bone-esque creatures which are put under a single umbrella term for clarity) and postcreated-related creatures (any other unique creechur), and also possible other weird things. ... Of course there be also just animals, which I mostly borrowed from our world (I'm apparently more interested of making sapient weird creatures than animal-intelligence-creatures).

So back to original question so uhh I just keep throwing things into one place and see how it goes. Sometimes it makes things more peaceful, like introducing postcreateds. Any large scale war cannot happen when there are non-killable, absurdly strong metal/stone/porcelain creatures which have no interest to rule or anything like that, nor they like unnecessary killing.

For the last, I don't really chitchat with my characters. There's no "me" in my current headworld, I'm just observing it from the outside perspective. Even if there's always moments when something happens that makes me feel like [insert character here] is [insert emotion here] in my head.

[sysirauta]

Postcreated or postcreated creature: Collective term for individually created, supernatural, (mostly) inorganic creatures. Their individual aspects vary wildly but none of them have biological functions. They can be roughly classified to real, surreal and ethereal types.

Essence: The "soul" of a postcreated, which is integrated into their body.

Real: "Skull-faced fantasy critter." Real-class postcreateds are one solid creature, with none to minimal possible floating parts, and may look like biological creature from afar.

Surreal: "Walking metal skeleton." Most often mostly or fully skeletal-looking body, with clear deattached floating parts.

Ethereal: "Semi-abstract whatever." Creatures with usually most abstract features. The defining feature is their forced ability to co-exist with their own side dimension, so their whole existence wouldn't interfere with reality and the laws of physics too much.

[sysirauta]

What do the rest of the postcreated sins look like without their body? We already have pride, but now I'm curious about the rest. Also, is the ability to be able to remain bodiless shared by all postcreated creatures, or is it a particular trait of those 7? Thanks in advance.

(This ask is referring to this thing.) I'm dodging the question a bit because I don't have other sins planned, but they'll be similar colorful floating mess with some of their shapes. All the postcreated creatures are basically unkillable by traditional means ( = physical damage), like if their body gets heavily damaged or downright destroyed, they can slowly heal or rebuild their body. In the meantime, they are just "a soul blob", their essence. Real class ones have thick jelly-like essence integrated into their body, meanwhile ethereal classes have something that resembles a fire. Exact color and shape varies from creature to creature.

Small damage doesn't trigger their healing process so they can have things like Extreme's wings. Purposefully throwing yourself under a falling rock or something would technically fix the damage, but the idea is as uncomfortable as it would be for any normal breathing creature, also it would hurt.

There is at least one case where a postcreated got its body destroyed and got so bad mental aftershock that it forgot what it used to look like, so it rebuilt its body from an abandoned object and the result is basically a sentient object. Nowadays it is a sword. Very annoyed talking sword.

[sysirauta]

Some (useless) info about regarding postcreated creatures and pronouns. Firstly, if somebody doesn't know yet, my own language (Finnish) doesn't even have gendered pronouns, and we got this apparently peculiar spoken language where we call everything and everyone "it" while our actual Human Pronoun is used mostly sarcastically, so this as a starting point has caused some issues while learning literally any other language.

Anyway so, postcreated creatures are non-biological and supernaturally functioning in the first place and it's always morally correct to call any of them just "it". They cannot reproduce and most of them are not even at person-level sapient. While "it" is logical in their case, I've never felt calling sapient things as "it" any issue either, because aforementioned weird language perk.

However, yeah, English (that I use as a worldbuilding language and sometimes to communicate with people) works differently. Sometimes it's just annoying while your normal level of gender in language is none, but in this case I've seen it as a funny nuance that adds something to creatures otherwise outed from gender. So, many sapient ones have preferred pronoun even if only real reason behind them is just that I as a creator made them because English forced me to think nuances. But a vast majority of postcreated creatures are just "it" and they don't have enough concept of gender to even think of it.

"Why is that with this pronoun?" I'd say that I just kinda throw mental darts/"ask" them and then get some result, as creatures themselves are not very gendered. They're skull/shape headed oddities, there's no deep logic.

Eventhough I keep joking that Pride is a he because he's kind of dick and Envy is they because I remember all "gender envy" memes...yeah.