This one does, as do the others who were around. Sorry it hasn't always been true, but with 500 mods across the network it's not too surprising that somebody didn't.
Yeah, people have to stop assuming that "it's only chat so we don't have to be civil". Um, yes you do; there are real people here.
@BESW oh wow, that looks complicated. And you probably need to encode strength of relationship somehow, though some of your labels implicitly do that I guess (like BFF).
Square = rich, oval = poor, rectangle = middle class; blue is youth, pink is adults.
Alas, the free program I used doesn't do layers.
I tried to add a Venn diagram underlay for things like "the garage" and "extreme sports" to indicate broader social connections, but my brain started to steam.
Some characters have four or five different significant social groups.
It mechanises the idea of reliance on one's friends and family, by having us figure out a field of competence a protagonist can only access because of their relationship with a person.
And if the protagonist leans on that competence too hard, it stresses the relationship.
It's a great way to explore the edges of what makes stories interesting and compelling, and some of the systems we use ARE also used by professional writers.
@BESW yes, I agree -- especially when you're working with other people, talking/playing through something before committing chapters to paper (well, disk) seems like a good idea.
Like, the creator of the TV show The Librarians uses a modified form of the Fate Core system to track his characters' traits, relationships, pressures, etc.
The time doesn't work well for me, and I usually intend to come back later, see what the theme was, and add a late submission, but then I don't, or it doesn't feel like I'm really participating if I'm that late, or something. (But I am not saying it should move; I'm not doing a very good job at showing dedication, after all...)
@BESW nice. And yeah, most cultures assume at some level that their myths are global, and yet that's clearly ridiculous. And the answer isn't to have Santa ride a Chinese dragon and distribute mooncakes in one part of the world and the sleigh/reindeer/sack-of-toys in another...
My profession deals with navigating cultural contact zones and intersectionality, so it's something I think about. There's not really a one-size-fits-all answer.
It's more like, something to be aware that we're going to stumble over and be ready to learn from.
Yeah. When I was a kid the biggest question about Santa was "how does he get into houses without chimneys?". Nobody was asking "does he deliver toys to kids in Korea?".
In "Guardians," the Tooth Fairy is an Indian (like, from India) princess and the Easter Bunny is... an earth spirit who lives on Easter Island.
(And Santa's a reformed Russian barbarian.) It's an interesting approach--to re-write localised stories to have global origins. I'm not sure how well it works for this author, though.
Oh, huh. So the author is taking the approach of "somebody on the team relates to a culture, but each one is different" approach. But Santa/Easter bunny/tooth fairy aren't inerchangable, so I'm not sure how well that would work.
Oh, the book is mostly about how they team up with Jack Frost and fight extraplanetary evil from before the dawn of humanity.
Okorafor's Lagoon, on the other hand, basically assumes that everything is alive and true for some value of itself, and that if they all wake up at once things will get messy. The book is about aliens arriving and waking everything up.
Yes, reading this made me realize that I'd never read any African speculative fiction before and why was that? Soon after I read Three Body Problem, not because it was Chinese but that did move it up in the queue.
Yeah, it's kinda hit-and-miss for me. I really appreciate parts of its underlying aesthetic and concepts, but there's so much baggage piled on top that it's hard to read, and it tends to be so much more cynical than I usually want to read anyway.