Tell me more about your Iron Lung worldbuilding I'm very curious about how you came up with the language and things.
I'm bored at work so!! This won't be a huge breakdown of everything because I'm still working on it, but it will be about what I have so far :3 Thank you for the ask, I've been waiting for an excuse to talk about it.
Martian/Eden's Written Language
(This and this are what I'm talking about)
Quick note: As someone who speaks English and is in a country whose major language is English, this is going off the assumption that English is the original language of the Mars colony. This is based in the fact that English is the language of trade and business, and a lot of other countries/cultures know it/are taught it (which makes communication regardless of that easier). And let's be real - most of the people who could afford to be the pioneers of Mars would be rich white people. This was the 1990s. (I'll talk about my thoughts on the COI's language development either later in this post or in its own post :3)
So! What purpose does having a different written language from the English alphabet serve?
Promotes/enforces a further separation of Earth and Mars culture. The introduction of the language was coupled with the IMC calendar, with the calendar being integrated later. It's grown and adapted throughout time, but it was widespread before The Quiet Rapture, so at this point every Martian or member of Eden knows it and uses it fluently. The fact that there is a different calendar, canonically, told me that (as historically proven), colonies want to be separate from the people that created them initially. And that makes sense - Mars is an entirely different planet, let alone people and culture and traditions that have developed over the last couple hundred years. Of course they want a way of communication that serves them and only them.
It's a lot easier to write than English is! The Martian alphabet is all sharp lines without curves, English has so many swoops and circles. That's not conducive to carving or quick scrawlings, as the Mars resources would require. Resource scarcity and finding plants sacred/valuable means less paper is available, so carving into harder surfaces is more common if you need to write something. Most of the time, it's verbal communication (the cult doesn't want records, shocking). It's also easier and quicker to use in battles, for warnings and short messages in the floor or walls of a station.
Martians speak English! Their written language is based off of it! They just have a sharper accent. But it's been long enough that many of the newer COI members genuinely believe that the people of Eden can't read, write, or speak English (the COI-derived version of it, similar but slightly different). It's commonly taught in the Convict Realization program because of this (which definitely pissed Simon off - "I can read" was the quote that started all of this, actually!). This is a lovely (/sarc) way of segregating and dehumanizing Eden and its members.
As is common in most languages, especially symbol-based ones, the more often a word is used, the more likely it will get its own symbol. It's ever-evolving - there was nothing for The Quiet Rapture before it happened, that's why there are two versions: one combination of the characters for "star" and "death", the most literal description and the one that came first; and a combination of the characters for "q" and "r" when they realized "fuck, this is important, and one character is easier to write than two". Both are used, and a preference for one over the other can suggest a lot about the time period of a document, the age of the writer, or a person's personal views. Some people are creative and, similar to how we make acronyms or shortenings or slang, will combine symbols to make their own. There's no deciding committee on if a symbol gets "officially added" to the language, so if a new one spreads, it naturally gets more widely/casually used.
Some more fun details about the language:
Numbers are Roman numerals, but multiples of four are the previous numeral with a horizontal line through it (examples in the first link above)
There are no capital/lowercase letter differences. Everything is at the same level, regardless of individual importance. If it's truly significant, it'll get its own character
Spaces are signified by a "/" between words
There are no commas, apostrophes, colons, semi colons. The only punctuation are periods, question marks, exclamation marks, ellipsis, and hyphens (distinguished from the character for "0" by context)
Jumping off of the last point: this is a context-based language
The COI character's first variant is a combination of the characters for "C" and "I". Over time, it adjusted to be similar to the character for "enemy".
META TALK TIME: How/why did I make it?
Long answer: Languages, especially written ones, have always fascinated me (you KNOW I was bouncing off the walls during the language translation scenes in Project Hail Mary). The notebook I picked for the dictionary is actually one I've had for ages, and I forgot until I looked through it that I had used it previously for decoding in books and making my own languages (one was specifically for carving!!). So I've been doing this for a longggg time. It's the classic "I saw an opening and took it" scenario. It's so fun to make something used for communication and put it in another, bigger project (I'm going to have to figure out how to make it on AO3 because I NEED it for my fic).
How I made it is really simple: just draw shit. I was at work looking for a break and I just started writing jagged lines that were similar to the English alphabet. I'm looking at the first draft now, it's on a sticky note that's stuck to my desk calendar :3 It's gone through a couple iterations to get to the solid one I put in my big lore notebook for my fanon (it's red for the blood ocean). I've gotten a lot better, cleaner, and quicker at writing with it since then! Sometimes I get tired of our alphabet and will switch to writing in Martian for class or for fun, and I love translating sections of the movie into Martian - all of which is helping my ability to read and comprehend it. There have been about three or four rounds of adding new symbols for new words because I found I used them a lot!
My alphabet is free to use, by the way! Art, fic, whatever. My one ask is please tag me and give credit for it. I want to see what you do, and I want others to be able to find the original to use themselves.
I love space. This is, of course, the main inspiration for my expansion of the Iron Lung universe. I did a lot of research on black holes, supernovae, binary stars, neutron stars, quasars, pulsars, wormholes, dark matter, rogue planets, and space theories (like Alternate Universe Theory), etc for multiple of my classes. And then I did more on my own, because space is fascinating. It by no means plays by our rigid rules of the universe, because it isn't rigid! It's cosmic and unfathomable, it's not going to conform or play nice and simple with what scientists try to assign it. Paradoxes! Impossibilities! Things that should not happen or should not exist! All of this happens, and it's so amazing.
I'll make another longpost about the worldbuilding and lore once I have something more solid, but here are my notes, in no coherent order:
What if The Quiet Rapture was the space stations being blipped through a black hole? By the Red-Eyed God? By the colony leaders? On purpose? On accident?
Obligatory Sagittarius A* mention (the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, discovered in 1974, roughly 20 years before Mars was populated). About the size of 4.3 MILLION solar masses
Obligatory Cygnus X-1 mention (the first black hole we found, in the Cygnus constellation, discovered in 1964 - roughly 30 years before Mars was populated)
Black Hole typing breakdown: Ultramassive, Supermassive, Intermediate-Mass, Stellar (typically formed via stellar collapse [dying star]), Micro/Primordial
Dark Matter doesn't interact with light. Nobody knows what the fuck is up with her
A theory that DM makes gravitational scaffolding for cosmic structures (like planets, stars, moons, etc). Could be how they stay in place
Dark Energy drives the accelerating expansion of the universe
DM is about 27% of the known universe
Baryonic Matter is about 5%
Another DM theory is that it's many primordial black holes
Rogue Planets are fucking sick, they're interstellar objects of planetary mass that aren't gravitationally pulled/bound to orbit a star/brown dwarf. They're literally just floating in space
MULTIPLE COLONIES ACTUALLY (I can't for the LIFE of me remember what post I saw about Ava being from a Venus colony and there possibly being a Jupiter one too before TQR, but that was really cool and I liked it a lot)
That's what I have so far! I hope this is any kind of understandable, since I stopped-and-started like three times due to being on the clock. Thank you for reading this far if you did, and thank you anon ily <3 I love questions and ideas and theories, and even just yapping about shit, so please do fill my askbox with them hehe
Not entirely DIRECTLY inspired but @ctrl-shift-alt-9 's analysis posts and Iron Lung master drive has been very helpful in this project and getting ideas running (Hi yes I did send you an ask rambling about various things but then I made this post and wanted to tag you as well!). Go look at their page it's really fucking cool. The theme is on point and I get very excited when they post :3
Also Iron Lung is peak go watch it. Right now. You can change your life for just ten dollars.
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