hi, i love the tithenai chronicles!! it was a breath of fresh air to see a fantasy society where queerness was more accepted! i'm curious about the worldbuilding and was wondering what you drew inspiration from to write the culture and cuisine of ralia & tithena the way you did! (and thank you for bringing markel to life, he's the BEST and i adore him!)
Thank you so much!
Ralia is very loosely inspired by Britain/Europe during the Age of Sail: I wanted it to feel western in terms of the class and social structure, but not unambiguously reminiscent of a specific time and place. Tithena, by contrast, is meant to read as somewhere wholly invented, so while my imagination is still indelibly informed by my knowledge of real history and places, I was making a specific effort not to draw from any one location. Partly this is because it's a queernormative society, which strongly incentivizes trying to build its religious and social institutions from the ground up rather than copying something from Earth, but mostly it's because I wanted there to be a clear contrast with Ralia. Growing up, I read a lot of fantasy novels that situated European-inspired settings as the obvious center of their various worlds, with other places frequently othered, exoticised and/or stereotyped; and with ASASE and ATHP, I wanted to subvert that dynamic. We start out in Ralia, the familiarity of which is explored through the lens of it being an oppressive society, not an enlightened one, and then we go to Tithena, which is the actual narrative center of the story, and whose culture expressly contrasts and highlights Ralia's failings. Obviously, this doesn't mean Tithena is perfect or that Ralia is completely without redeeming qualities - something ATHP explores more than ASASE - but it's meant to invert our sense of who, to put it simplistically, the barbarians are, and why.
Which leads to one of the many ways in which Velasin and Asrien are narrative mirrors/foils. For Vel, Ralia is like a Gothic mansion from which he's finally escaped - even if he goes back one day to deal with his unfinished business there, it'll never be home again, and he doesn't want it to be. Whereas for Asri, Ralia is a ghost that haunts the narrative: something beloved that was taken from him before its time, and which he'd reclaim if he could, even while knowing that it never loved him back, and likely never will.