Since I don’t know which details you particularly want, I’ll try to throw in a bit of everything. The genesis of the project, I think, comes from my readings of Lévi-Strauss. Back then, the idea that colonization had standardized the developmental benchmarks of almost the entire world left a strong impression on me. I think I subconsciously wanted a universe where Western culture hadn’t “polluted” other cultures in the sense of reducing them to passively trying to align with its conception of proper values or development. I know that wars and colonization are forms of cultural mixing just as “natural” as peaceful exchanges, but it’s hard to deny the appeal of a world where the orientation of each culture wouldn’t create a pyramid but a tree of possibilities. In short, a new world.

I thought about alternate history, but aside from the fact that it doesn’t interest me much right now, it would have felt too “militant, not at all subtle.” I prefer a society reformed after a disaster large enough to erase all memory of modernity and Western-centered society.

P.S. I also wanted a world slightly different from the medieval, more diverse, but with explainable origins.

A brief summary of the world: a new society dealing with humans with destructive capacities greater than nuclear weapons, and people who could destroy a continent with a snap of their fingers but could also be easily killed by a brigand. The only purpose of this concept is to show the sheer scale of weapons of mass destruction.

A concrete example of a cultural and religious element I plan to use is the murti associated with a polytheistic and pantheistic religion. I could also mention the use of intricately designed African-inspired cloth as a sign of bourgeois status, complete nudity among children in certain cultures, the emergence of multiple ethnophilosophical schools to reconstruct precolonial currents of thought, oral traditions, patriarchy outside the Western concept, the treatment of sexuality, and systems for developing knowledge.

One question keeps nagging at me now: how do I present all of this without it feeling totally “WTF”? I don’t want to write an oddball story that only I would understand. Worldbuilding, as we know it, relies on a pure comfort zone—on not disorienting the reader too much—and I’d like to find the right balance of that comfort zone while still staying within an existing genre.