wild

This last summer I started working on a project that’s been cooking in my head for a while. I took the opportunity of a school assignment to make the first 8 pages of a hypothetical comic, now called The Drowned.

The Drowned will follow Aconito as she discovers what’s causing her nightmares, what really keeps her bound to her home and what it takes to leave the past behind. It’s set in a land inspired by my own, the northern italian region Veneto, with its fog, rivers and folklore.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

European Geosciences Union Blog — Beyond Tectonics: Building fictional worlds to better understand our own

Reshaping Reality's Worldbuilding Tips

Worldbuilding pasta's series, An Apple Pie from Scratch also check their resources page!

R/worldbuilding's Reading List. Also check out their collected resources link. This basic geology guide from 11 years ago is still nice.

Creating an Earth-Like Planet, and The Climate Cookbook (aka Geoff's Climate Cookbook) technically the climate cookbook is a part of Creating an Earth like Planet I think.

Related: Worldbuilding Workshop's "Working Out Climates Using Geoff’s Climate Cookbook." Which goes through using the resource in order to map make. Also just the Worldbuilding Workshop in General.

Madeline James Writes's Worldbuilding Guide

Worldbuilding 101 (this links to the Biomes section but there's like...everything.)

Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That's because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.

This is a short free introduction to the concept: "Notes on Landscape Archaeology." To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like...studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.

Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the "construct paradigm" of a landscape from settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.

And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:

Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments ...

Landscapes are worlds of cultural product ... Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform physical spaces into meaningful places. ...

Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place contexts ...

Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning ...

Basically a "landscape" is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like... Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it's like...I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it's easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.

Also:

This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.

Place, Landscape, and Environment: Anthropological Archaeology in 2009

Mrs Maggot is kind and sensible. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is jealous and petty but in the end principled and stout. Arwen is beautiful and kind and learned. Galadriel is powerful and ancient and wise, but is tempted by terrible power. The Ents have lost their womenfolk and miss them, because without women there is a loss greater than not reproducing. Ioreth of the houses of healing talks too much and is a little annoying but is knowledgeable and capable. Eowyn believed her work looking after her uncle to be less important than going to war, but she realizes she was wrong. It may be noble to lay down your life, but it's possible to keep on living and building and healing and that is more important than any battle, and much better than making a home in your despair. Rosie Cotton is faithful and patient and does not take bullshit and keeps the hearth warm in times of crisis.

the only female characters in lotr who actually sort of affect the plot at all are galadriel and eowyn. arwen pines and rosie cotton doesn't exist until the last 15 minutes of the last movie. and they're both very much a male character's reward.

lotr is a story that someone deliberately wrote, not a documentary. no quest "just happened" to fall into anyone's hands, it was all a deliberate choice the writer(s) made. tolkien could have just as easily made one or more of the members of the fellowship a woman. peter jackson could have decided to make that change too, and it would have been less detrimental to the story than whatever he did to gondor.

The reach is so unreal it’s pathetic. Think critically please, I’m begging you to think critically with your adult brain.

It probably would be more believable that the ladies you rattled off had that imaginary “better and more important shit to do in the shire while four idiot male teenage hobbits went off and saved the goddamn world” you’re talking about if you hadn’t just listed off pretty much the only female hobbit characters that have names

Rosie cotton has exactly ONE speaking line where she lets Sam know they thought he was dead but she waited for him. So romantic! Love that for her, get it girlfriend. It’s awesome for him that Sam gets rewarded for working so hard in the journey by marrying a nice girl when he gets home. That really rules for him

Now speaking of speaking roles - what was Mrs maggots first name again? Remind me

Except that was a trick question actually because according to the LOTR wiki she doesn’t fucking have one. Real important female background character, there. Lotta depth of personality. Literally her only known detail is that she’s someone’s wife. Fuck all the way off with calling her “kind and sensible” you don’t know shit about her because all ANYONE knows about her is that she’s a farmers wife - I’m pretty sure that makes her not even a character, just a background detail. Like, prove me wrong and tell me even one canon fact or quote about her.

And you DEFINITELY can’t call the entwives female LOTR characters because they’re never named, never speak, never mentioned as more than details in someone else’s story, and are out of the picture before OUR story even fucking begins.

Plus the very fact that Galadriel has such a long cool history as one of the oldest female elves is not exactly as dope as it seems when it clicks that she’s basically the equivalent of at least three different women he didn’t want to take the trouble to make into separate characters. “Long lived” say less JRR we get how hard it is to craft complex characters, you did your best

And the fact that Tolkien wrote literal armies of named and relevant and important male characters for his world and like six women is not something you can philosophize away just because unnamed and unspoken women exist in the background of his world??? Like pull your head out of your goddamn ass. This is some women who cooked the last supper shit. Being there and being completely ignored and unexplored does not a character make.

Stop giving men credit they haven’t earned! Stop praising the absolute bare fucking minimum- yeah I guess he could have explicitly said middle earth has no females and he chose not to do that, good girlboss choice JRR, thanks for not doing that. That’s how you sound.

Later, in letter 53, he condemns the spread of feminism (among other things) as diminishing the diversity of the world.

So while he sought to create a representation of the horrors that men at war experienced in an increasingly mass-industrialized era, Tolkien failed to represent men at war accurately: that is, that there has never, in the history of the world, been an army of men that does not rape women as part of war praxis. There has never been a non-destructive army, because armies are destructive. It's what makes LoTR (and the silmarillion) fantasy.

Tolkien was absolutely a misogynist who believed that men couldn't have meaningful relationships with women. To be clear. I'm not trying to absolve him. But that's why it's written like that. I'm glad he didn't write more women, it would have been just as insulting as Eowyn - where (again, in books) she basically just wants to be a solider because an incel who wasn't a Good Man made her mind sick, and once she met a Good Man, she was perfectly happy to settle and become 'healthy' - to marry and have children and have no ambition - in other words, to be a Real Woman.

It's that "benevolent" patriarchy that says women are for giving good counsel to their husbands and the men should listen. Yet the men make the decisions. We know that later in Numenor, women can inherit the rulership, and this is considered good, as Miriel is narratively portrayed as the rightful Queen, but why in Numenor's beginnings could women not inherit the rulership, resulting in the two sceptres?

Just as how the half-elven line comes from the marriage of a human man with an elven woman, twice - never a human woman with an elven man. The idea was explored in Morgoth's Ring, but in that case, the elf man was like "No, I can't make you feel those feelings :(" as if it was some chivalrous thing. Or as if he himself couldn't stand the eternity of suffering after she dies, but female Elves can withstand the sadness of their male partners dying, because women were made to sit and weep. Almost every time we see a woman making change in The Silmarillion, it's through her fucking weeping and moaning and something magically coming of their beautiful pure sadness or whatever the hell.

Galadriel (and I love Galadriel, I love her story, but in context, it's a pattern) wants a kingdom of her own to rule, and her arc, the thing that makes her great, is that she never gives into darkness to make it happen and ultimately never does become a queen. And for that, she's accepted back into Valinor.

Eowyn wants glory in battle, but it's presented as suicidal, so her arc is learning to value peace and healing.

Aredhel wants to get out from her father's yoke and ends up coercively married, held prisoner, and eventually killed for it.

Nienor wanted to help find her brother and...well...

one who had dreams of being a hero