cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40388903
I have a science-fantasy world with intelligent non-anthro animals living in harmony, which I’ve posted some lore about this in the past. Think “communist non-anthro Zootopia with sci-fi technology.” This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while and combines my interests in worldbuilding and software. I want to create a fictional social media platform for the animals in my world, and stage fictional threads in the typical Reddit/Lemmy format discussing news and politics taking place within the world. Then post screenshots here with context explaining what is happening. I just thought this might be a more fun way of sharing lore about my world than just the articles themselves, almost like an ARG. I’ll also be able to introduce some of my main narrative characters through their social media presence.
On the technical side of things, I don’t know if I want to compile and spin up a local Lemmy instance at home and actually stage accounts and posts on it. But actually logging in and out of different accounts sounds like way more work than necessary so I could also just take the Lemmy UI and add my own mock thread data to it. Or, I could write my own code for a completely fictional GUI, since I don’t want to just use the default Lemmy UI and break the illusion. The second and third options might be more important if I want to make this an actual ARG and host a website for it, since in that case I don’t actually want people to sign up and post.
I would love some feedback in general on this idea, and maybe gauge interest on if this is something people would like to see.
Ah I see, very interesting! So the world is like the human world but in animal terms, reminds me a lot of Cold War dynamics, I assume that’s what it’s partly based on.
So in this universe, wouldn’t there exist plant based meat? Isn’t that a lot more efficient than bioengineering plants to have the same nutrients as meat? And I was also curious what the culture of these animals are, are they like separate completely or do they share traits and beliefs with one another?
Kind of. I started this project well before I became a socialist, and while I’ve changed some things to parallel real life socialism, a lot of it is either coincidental (developed before I had a good idea of what socialism is) or just comes down to how I describe it, which nowadays is often through a socialist lens.
The world is similar to the human world in a lot of its constructs because they were heavily influenced by the discovery of the humans’ stored knowledge and data after they went extinct. It have them a huge boost in their technological development because they didn’t have to start from scratch once they figured out how to decode and extract information from human data storage devices. It’s how I justify why animals would use things like meters, minutes, human programming and mathematical constructs, etc. The Unitists were almost certainly influenced by human socialist theory as well, but I generally don’t make a lot of in-universe references to human history or theory because that breaks the immersion IMO.
Plant based meat exists, as do synthetic meat where you just make the exact same chemicals found in meat from raw materials. But by far the most common solution for carnivores is dietary enzyme supplements. You take a pill once a week, which contains synthetic enzymes that attach to your digestive tract and lets your body do nifty things like digest cellulose and convert it into protein, and synthesize essential nutrients only found in meat. My main character, the cat, helped develop a dietary enzyme formulation for obligate carnivores like Felines.
The Unitist species are very cooperative with each other, and there is a general philosophy that because different species are good at different things, working together allows everyone to focus on what they’re best at and collectively cancel out what they’re not good at. Different taxonomic groups have somewhat different cultures, but they form a harmonious mosaic where the differences complement and make the whole stronger as a result, basically hijacking the concept of niches for their multispecies society.
Trophist species are significantly less cooperative, even between species with the same ideology. Different predator species are inherently competitive and not cooperative, and it still holds true in their world.