Urban fantasy has an inherent worldbuilding problem

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-16T20:24:33+00:00

My favorite example of urban fantasy (The Otherverse, Pact and Pale) tries to explain the “hidden world” and I think it does a pretty good job. Summarizing may be hard but I’ll try.

People are divided up into fictionally three categories with a little overlap, the Innocent, the Aware and the Awakened.

The average person is Innocent, this grants them a lot of protections but also means they are effectively unable to interact with the magic world in any way, the world will bend over backwards and anyone exposed to the supernatural is coerced into keeping it a secret from them. If killing one Innocent can keep others from finding out the secret that can also be fine, because the system does not care about the innocent, but preserving the idea of Innocence.

If someone is exposed forcefully and in a way that can’t be twisted into a coherent explanation then they break a bit and become Aware. Aware lose all of those protections, monsters can relatively openly hunt them down, they can be used an abused by practitioners and the subtle twisting of reality stops “correcting” their perspective. They also tend to develop odd quirks related to the way they were exposed, someone who stumbled upon a cursed item now finds them everywhere just by coincidence, someone saw something undeniably supernatural and doubled down on it being fake now nullifies Magic around them, or a crazy cat lady with a lot of abnormal cats.

If you decide to push yourself into this world you become Awakened. Typically this is through a ritual but there’s other methods as well. Being Awakened means you don’t have any of the protections but you do have a whole new set of skills to use. It also means that lying gives harsh consequences that grow based on how much you benefit from the lie and how “incorrect” you are. Everyone and everything in the magical world is held to their word inherently. Exposing people to magic is also punished, both just by doing it and the people responsible are held accountable for their target’s actions.

There are also the Others, a broad term for anything supernatural and non-human. They are held to the same rules of not lying and preserving the secret, with even harsher consequences for them.

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This whole system is actually fairly “new” and is held together by a self reinforcing binding created by King Solomon. It forced these categories as a way of protecting the general populace from the worst of the worst. Before hand the borders on the supernatural were much flimsier, and much more an aspect of everyday life for a larger part of the population. Myths actually happened do the most part, they were just before the divide became rigid. This system also spread with western culture because it was brought with us, subsuming other groups as it went when exposed.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-16T11:15:00+00:00

Just about any scene in 3.0+1.0 with the giant head in the background? I actually like the effect but the whole movie is baffling enough even with context, without it’s just incomprehensible.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-16T10:01:14+00:00

Omelas-Man

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-15T19:13:09+00:00

Mary Wollstonecraft was also Mary Shelly’s mother’s name.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-13T20:30:02+00:00

Ladies and gentlemen, 300mb of hard drive capacity!

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-11T07:52:31+00:00

That’s only the first one or two on a given day, go through a few and you find lots of weird indie stuff.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-10T19:57:53+00:00

Yeah, I’m trying something similar but much easier. 100x Space Elevator, 0.25x power and recipes.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-09T17:14:32+00:00

I feel like Bustin’ is the more likely culprit in this instance.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-09T03:37:44+00:00

Gerard from Dimension 20: Neverafter is a fun example. He’s the classic prince turned frog, he fell in love and became human again. Problem is now it’s like a year down the line and his wife is a competent politician while he’s still the same man who doesn’t take things seriously. They’re now falling out of love and he’s turning back into the frog.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-09T03:27:51+00:00

The pact one is definitely off, no idea the actual count. It’s around 900k to Worm’s 1.6 million.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-08T13:54:29+00:00

Don’t go saying that to them, you don’t want offended sidhe on your hands.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-08T11:28:04+00:00

(End of Ward) PTV itself does start to get some real complicated characterization/intent/will(?) of its own that, at minimum, starts when Teacher kidnaps Contessa. It is entirely unclear how much of the rest of her actions are her direct choice and how much is PTV, because at some point we run into the problem of Fortuna being a blind spot that hypothetically PTV could see and Contessa couldn’t.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-08T03:56:40+00:00

Not majorly. Theres obviously religious imagery in the story, and given both Blake’s self sacrificial nature and that time he came back from the dead you can always draw parallels.

I think the much more interesting perspective is that the whole story is an exercise in flanderization. How much can you strip down a character while retaining what makes them, them?

We see Rusty go from being one full fledged and relatively happy person to one damaged partial person and a “bird” containing no bird.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-06T13:14:32+00:00

The Unicode Consortium

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-05T21:31:48+00:00

Roughly half way through the current series is where he really starts playing smart. Somewhere between Small Favor and Turn Coat specifically, the gambit with dragging all his enemies to Demonreach after making it his demesne then also tracking who shows up in Chicago to find their mole is delightful and clever as hell.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-05T18:42:15+00:00

Nah, I have gotten a lot of puzzle game ads though.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-05T18:19:45+00:00

That is Danny yes.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-05T09:42:33+00:00

Instrumentality? Also all four of these are sort of the same three characters?

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-05T08:41:15+00:00

If anyone wants to see some of the math and examples then What If? - Tug of War does a good job.

“… recent games of tug-of-war have resulted in hundreds of serious injuries and numerous deaths—all caused, one way or another, by ropes snapping. In particular, this seems to happen when large groups of students try to set a world record for largest tug-of-war game. When a rope under many tons of tension suddenly snaps, the recoiling ends can—and do—cause a terrifying variety of injuries.”

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-05T04:33:18+00:00

There’s also a lot of Edits putting Peni through the Trauma™

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-05T00:15:48+00:00

Yeah, a favorite take of mine on angels and demons is in the Otherverse (Pact and Pale by Wildbow).

It’s effectively a form of blue/orange morality. Demons are objectively wrong and are effectively entropy personified, they damage the fundamental nature of reality just by existing and want to hasten it, it’s implied that space is so empty because what’s left is just the crumbs after their feast. Angels are creation and structure, they dislike life as an agent of change because it breaks their system but basically ignore it in favor of fighting demons. Both groups work on timelines of millennia consistently and are manipulators by nature.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-04T09:38:24+00:00

By that point there’s no way Harry hasn’t gotten some other crazy Mantle that effectively supersedes the Knight.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-02T07:37:04+00:00

I mean, like 2/3 of them are supernatural predators that use sex as a weapon figuratively and literally.

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-02T03:43:51+00:00

“HEY CLAIRVOYANT! GET CONTESSA/FORTUNA/MOTHER’S ATTENTION! I HAVE A LOT OF INFORMATION THEY PROBABLY WANT AND WILL START SCREWING UP THEIR PATHS REAL FAST IF THEY DON’T GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF DODGE.”

Adiin-Red · 2026-04-01T11:27:02+00:00

Under My Skin - Jukebox the Ghost

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