kllerwhale

Using Hundreds of Ducks to remove weeds for farming purposes 

- with strong oral tradition and a long cultural memory

- who honor and remember their ancestors, even thousands of years after their lives—“Their faces were stern and strong, and some of them had done terrible things, but they were Starks every one, and Bran knew all their tales.” (Bran VII, aCoK)

- who have religious practices rooted to the land that they live on; tying back to ancestral land and cultural memory, there’s a sense of “we belong here, our ways of worship are as old as our people, and we were meant to be here”

- relatedly, mysticism and magic that stems from that religion rather than being in opposition to it, “good” magic being about working with the world, rather than solely as a means to a personal end, and trance states being a primary expression of this magic use

- I know people like to claim that the CoF are the indigenous analogy here but as an indigenous person can I just say that “magical humanoid who lives in the woods and shuns civilization” is fucking terrible representation

I kinda think that the fact. That the atla fandom seems to be able to forgive and empathise with characters lashing out in their suffering….as long as that suffering is on a personal, individual level, but not doing so for characters suffering broader, inter-generational trauma….is racist. But no one wants to talk about that.

A lil powerpoint of book recs!!!

guys.

shipping absolutely Does Not mean demanding anything from people/creators. shipping isn’t about expecting and waiting for the day it will certainly happen. it is not a direct translation to Happen Or Die.

shipping means you like the idea of two (or more) people together. you like the concept. you find it fun to imagine the dynamics. you even create fanon content of it (fic, art, edits). it’s all in your head and it’s Fine that way.

is it nice to have a ship become canon? oh my god, yes. but that’s not what shipping is about and yall need to take a step back and breathe because being a jerk to people aint gonna change their mind about ships.

Cities - go near water!  freshwater lakes and rivers (rivers especially) are the best places for cities because A) source of water and B) travel and trade is much easier cus you can put your boats like right there.  Basically ever relevant city ever was built on a lake or a river.

for rivers in general - because gravity, rivers run from mountains (forming from melting snow and ice (this is why they get fat in spring–more stuff melting)) to lakes/ocean where they can empty out (and even lakes will have rivers leading out that eventually get to the ocean), which can help when mapping out where those start and end.  rivers are also much thinner and faster in steeper elevations and very slow and wide when the land is flat

mountains - i like to think of what the tectonic plates look like because that’s what makes mountains!  mountains are also never standalone they’re always in mountain ranges (archipelagos are really just underwater mountain ranges babey).  a cool trick I like to do is occasionally separate mountain ranges across continents, because over time the tectonic plates shifted and literally split the range in half.  These mountains are really old tho so they’ve eroded and therefore it makes them smaller and rounder (like the appalachians) as opposed to relatively young mountain ranges like the rocky mountains which have taller and sharper peaks

Another mountain trick: if your mountains run along the ocean, the ocean side of the mountains will get a LOT of rain while the other side will be very dry–almost desert-like, in fact.  think of temperate rainforests in British Columbia vs the drier conditions in the canadian prairies

forests - depends on how warm the area might be.  coniferous forests are found further north (before you hit the tree line, and then it’s only tundra onwards) but as you head south you get leafier trees, and the leaves tend to get larger too

If you think about general elevation too, you’ll have places that might be swampy (wet + lower).  if your world has an ice age like we did, then glaciers may have carved the land, leaving piles of soil in the south that was left when the ice receded and places where the bedrock has been bared north of that (like the Canadian Shield in Canada–the reason we see that is because of the glaciers)

You might also have a land that’s dotted in a shitton of freshwater lakes as well because the meltwater filled the holes that the glaciers scraped out (this is why canada has so many goddamn lakes)

and if the ice age was more recent than it was in our world, then you might not even have the forest re-growth and it could be a lot of open plains

Though, for fantasy, you can make the world operate on entirely different principles:

With that done, the actual topic of city placement can be covered by videos like this:

Or

Once you have your places, if you want help naming them in realistic ways, this video can help:

This one is on architecture, which is definitely a subset of cities:

But for a more relevant practical guide on making settlements realistic:

Here’s a quick guide for making demographics: