How to worldbuild: Labor relations, economics, and theocracy

Over on the Yultide discord (which, by the way, goes year-round, and so does the hippo pool, if you need help finding a beta) raininshadows asked for help with economic/labor worldbuilding, and since worldbuilding is my jam, I ended up writing a LOT of stuff, which I have cleaned up and presented here. (I sometimes write stories as an excuse to share my worldbuilding with people. I'm the person sitting in the theater going "wait, that makes NO SENSE." Unless I am busy, I will pretty much always be up for infodumping about worldbuilding. I may not know anything about what canon you're looking at, but I can usually at least give some pointers about things to think about, feel free to ask.) (Well. I don't really like dystopias, but aside from that.)

Before I begin, if SFFnal worldbuilding is something you want to build chops in long-term, the best thing to do is to read social histories from all over the world (i.e. the stuff that focuses on ordinary people, not Great Men) and watch for both overall patterns and interesting details that you can crib from. The more you know about "how different groups of people have thought, acted, and handled things over long periods of time" the greater your toolkit is.

When I want to do worldbuilding, especially with fanfic where I'm taking existing canon and extending it, I always start by asking a lot of questions about the world of the text and thinking about possible ways to answer those questions, and everything flows from there. Figuring out what questions to ask (and what the range of possible answers are) is easier the more you know about how various cultures handle such questions today and how they've handled them in the past and how things changed over time, which is where studying history comes in, but even with a relatively limited knowlege base, asking questions and coming up with a variety of answers to the questions is probably going to yield interesting results.

Rain wanted to know about how to build a realistic worker safety history, and especially how to do that in a theocratic society. I'm going to start with worker safety, and branch out into the larger economic picture and the eternal tug of war between classes, and then finish up with some things to think about when dealing with a theocracy.

( Worker safety and economic power )

( General economic questions )

( General pointers on how theocracies work in practice (as opposed to how they think they work) )

Please feel free to comment and ask questions!

An Open Letter to AO3 Regarding Fandom Tagging Changes

ETA: Checking the archive this morning, I found that the Wonder Woman (2017) tag no longer redirects to DCEU, but takes you directly to Wonder Woman (2017).  Also, someone said that even last night, you could (from the DCEU page) click on the "Fandoms" list on the sidebar and filter to just Wonder Woman (2017), but I don't know if that worked last night when the tags were merged, because in my poking around in disbelief, I forgot the 'filter by fandom' option on the sidebar.  I am writing another message to support thanking them for fixing the issue.

ETA2: melannen just checked with the DCEU tag wranglers and confirmed that it was a mistake, somebody pushing the wrong button or something, not a change-on-purpose.  In the list of "bad things that have happened this year because somebody pushed the wrong button," this is fairly minor.  Thank you, AO3, for being so prompt to fix problems like this!

This is what I just sent off to AO3's Support.

Hi!  First, before I get started, I want you to know that I have loved AO3 since its beginning.  I know how huge an endeavor it is, and how much work goes on behind the scenes (all of it on a volunteer basis), and I am grateful for it.  I also understand that there are situations where there is no good answer to a problem because of either technical issues behind the scenes or conflicting needs/wants of users, and I actively try to be charitable in how I interpret the decisions the archive makes, for the reasons stated above.  I know that large fandom trees were straining your servers, and you needed to find a solution.

The flexibility of the tagging structure on AO3 is about 90% of the reason I love the archive.  And by that I mean, the ability to use tags to find EXACTLY what I want to read, instead of slogging through hundreds (or thousands, in some fandoms) of fics I am not interested, is THE MAJOR THING AO3 has always (until now) done better than any other fic archive or website.  My main frustrations with the archive have been when tags aren't granular enough--when I want them to be more specific than they are.  For example, when I wish that character tags were filtered by whether someone was a major or minor character in the story, or when I'm trying to find fic specifically about X-Men: Days of Future Past and get redirected to all XMFC fic.  And I don't think I'm alone in this.  So any change to make them less granular, even when it might make the back end run smoother, is a big problem for me.

In particular, your that solution to current tagging woes (merging sub-fandom tags into one over-arching fandom tag) has broken the archive for me in some of my fandoms, and (if it is rolled out across other fandoms in the same way) will break all of those fandoms for me, rendering the archive virtually useless for doing anything other than reading fic I have already bookmarked.

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