About Worldbuilding

About worldbuilding

My style of worldbuilding is observation, feeling and perception, allowing the world to grow on its own, favoring ideas that resonate with me personally over those that are logical and realistic. It is important for me to see, feel and then - to understand what my world and characters wants to say and show me, and not to be their designer.

Because of this, I care little about the biology of the creatures, what they eat and why they look so strange. I don't know much about them, but I allow them to be mysterious, although I am always glad to finally see and understand some details of their life and nature.

«One of my favorite ideas/scenes is about wandering in the snowy mountains. It’s like a journey through the afterlife, lonely and very personal. Climbing the mountain, where the only obstacle on the way is the mountains themselves - snow-covered and cold, with blinding blizzards, and threatening steep slopes. One wrong step - and you will fall down and die. Or freeze to death»

This is purely emotional and feeling, there is no question of whether this is real for the character or not, and why this lonely Vaeraf went to the mountains if it is so cold and dangerous. These mountains are a symbol and a metaphor for his life, feelings, difficulties he faces, and his way to the top of the mountain - to the goal, to the sky, to realize something, to overcome difficulties.

Simply put, the emotion and feelings that I experienced from my stories or when I met, for example, a Vaeraf person in my imagination or dream, are more important for me. In my art, I want to share these feelings, and not to build and describe their biology in detail. I also don't try to give all the characters I meet detailed biographies or stories. I only know these characters who are my close friends, just like it works with people in real life. What makes my characters so dear to me is my personal relationship with them, and I love them as persons that live in my mind.

Sometimes I worry that my way of creating and showing my world is wrong or stupid, because I noticed that the vast majority of people interested in worlds and creatures are more designers and "scientists" than people for whom personal impressions and feelings are way more important. But I no longer want to try to change myself, my art and my world into something that is not close and not interesting to me personally.

I remember such an idea that there are two types of artists - architects and gardeners. Architects build their world and stories according to the rules, trying to do everything well and right, they intentionally plan, build and control every detail. Whereas gardeners let their world grow on its own, but take care of it and choose which grown ideas they keep and which they uproot. In that case, I'm a total gardener who also tends to let things just grow and die on their own, even if it turns into overgrown chaos. It is important for me to feel, experience and analyze this chaos as it is, but at the same time - to love and take care of those parts of my world that are important and dear to me.

Only this way feels natural to me and keeps me in touch with my world and art, and I sincerely love this way of working with the world, even if it is hard and sometimes inconvenient to explain things to strangers. But my art, characters and my world are inherently connected to my feelings, experience and mental state, and I do not want to destroy this connection for the sake of some "true" worldbuilding just because my way is different.

~~~

Update: (I decided to add and supplement these my comments in the post)

I also want to add that it doesn't mean that I don't try to analyze and explain things from my world. It's just that my focus is different, it is important for me to feel and understand Vaerafes as persons, so I focus on their perception, feelings, morality, philosophy and psychology, trying to understand how they see, think and feel, while their nature is part of their personality. But I rarely share it because it's usually too personal - for both me and my characters.

It may be their understanding of the world, their morals and values, their relationship with each other, and also - my own relationship with them. While their world as a whole is just the world they live in, I don't study or detail it as seriously and in depth as my characters' stories, which are quite personal and can be quite metaphorical. Besides, I have some different worlds/alternative universes with different stories and ideas. Some of them don't even have the idea of being at least a bit realistic/scientific.

It's not about worldbuilding only, but also about my personal interests. Things related to philosophy(?) and psychology, as well as symbolism, self-exploration and self-expression in art, are more interesting to me than the scientific side of nature and wild animals. I like science, and sometimes it's interesting to think about my beings from that perspective, but that's just not my focus and I still perceive it from a more philosophical point of view.

I would say that the truly "scientific" side of my world is the very fact of having a world and living characters in the head of me, a living animal being of the human species. Therefore, knowing me and my interests, I would rather dig into the learning more about these weird natural processes of my mind, to know what it is and how it works, than into what these fictional creatures eat and how their digestion works, heh.

This is just my personal perception, understanding of things and interests.

~~~~~

Thank you for reading ~

Mountain lions By: Unknown photographer From: Disney's Worlds of Nature 1965

Is this a problem?

Happy national day Norway!!!! 🇳🇴🇳🇴🇳🇴

Putting these here, cause Instagram scary

I'm hyperfixating on marble hornets the youtube series sm rn it's actually horrendous-

his character design and its every detail are simply insane

*edit: there were comments saying how the yellow shoelaces (other boot) represent anti-racism, and I didn't want that to get lost in the notes