#tw opiates

[deaddog10]

finally

[jiraisupportgroup]

[hydromorphcontinxr]

3 day bender wow. not mine btw these are my friends im a smoker

[wormfood2001]

im just a girl Zzz

[intheholler]

Hi!!! Love your blog and love Appalachia so much, even though I was only there for college for four years and not really in more places other than that one (the triad in nc)

Here's a very large text block with my in-depth lore ponderings relating to the book I'm writing

Today's question relates to worldbuilding! I'm coming up with lore and culture for a fictional city in a book I'm writing, and most of the city is Western European French and like Bucharest, Romania as well as Victorian London. The city is also very very steeped in immigrant culture. While there's original folk sources and original pagan lore, a lot of colonialism happened from Western Europe type countries as well as a lot of cultural shifts due to immigrants becoming a staple of the population so it's become something new.

However, I also wanted to add in a lot of American culture and I really want to know more about Appalachia / know it gets a bad rep. Currently the poorer parts of the city (or at least the working class, factory neighborhoods and the mining neighborhoods) are more towards Appalachian culture but I want to avoid stereotypes and make the culture and lore feel more natural to the grand scheme of things. I'm also thinking this is an older culture from when the city was still being founded and when the city was still frontier and the colonialism hadn't fully kicked in (ie when the land was first getting settled)

Are there any resources you can share for learning about the culture / writing the culture into the lore, and any tips you may have / opinions on how I can make this work while also being respectful?

Thank you!!!

hi there <3 lord knows how long this has been rotting in my asks and i'm so sorry

thanks for wanting to include some positive representation (however esoteric) about appalachia in your novel.

when i get these asks i always like to say, to avoid stereotypes in your writing, think about why those stereotypes exist.

why do we have such an opiate problem? why is our health so poor? why do we have a 'we don't like outsiders' reputation?

appalachian culture is really broad and diverse of course because we span across a pretty enormous section of the country. for example, coal mining is one of the things that most popularly gets associated with appalachia, but where i'm from in appalachian north carolina, mines aren't so much a thing.

but i think one big takeaway from appalachian culture that is pretty consistent throughout is community and hard work. labor rights, labor fights, helping ur neighbor.

we tend to be blue collar, union-positive working class and that sets a pretty stable foundation for a lot of our cultural traits. as in the way we are very community-minded and getting our hands dirty to keep ourselves afloat and use what's left over to keep our neighbors going. sometimes, the reverse of that actually. appalachians are hospitable and generous to a fault

if you wanted to represent appalachia without falling back on stereotypes, a self-supporting community that really values community itself could be a good landing place.

in the format of my earlier advice: why do we have an "us/them" (misconception?) reputation for keeping to ourselves? it's not that we inherently 'hate outsiders.' it's because we had no choice but to be reliant on our communities historically due to being geographically isolated in the mountains without easy access to resources. because the rest of the country turned its back on us many moons ago and so we had to turn to each other.

hope this helps some <3

[jupiterzdream]

M📦3️⃣0️⃣

[emetoandotherthings]

I honestly never understood how people could want to take opiates until I experienced chronic pain... They may be addictive, but if I can bloody function for more than 20 minutes I'll take it

[cyb3rph0bik]