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.
Ohh got it, so how was the transition phase between the current and former societies? I assume there were multiple huge wars to create it. I also wonder if the animal life spans are longer now thanks to the technology.
Unitist revolutions tend to be extremely violent and lead to the deaths of many, mostly because the individuals adamant on continuing to hunt prey tend not to have many moral qualms about killing members of their own taxa who are trying to get them to not hunt either. Unitist revolutionaries often start off with an idealist concept of “predator conversion” where you convince the remaining predator population in your carnivore species to plant based alternatives, but, in a real revolutionary war it generally very quickly turns into a “predator purge” where the predators try to kill you so you end up “having to” kill them in response. Helped (or not helped) by the fact that a carnivore species or taxon in a position to initiate a Unitist revolution tend to already have a well defined internal split where the scientists, engineers, and other intellectuals are generally on the Unitist side and the “brawn over brains” individuals tend to be on the Trophist side, so in an all out war the Unitists tend to have the technological advantage, even when they are physically much less experienced with paw to paw combat. Also, due to the fact that predators will fight tooth and claw against the banning of predation in their species/taxa, the revolutionary wars tend to only end when almost all the hardline predators are dead, hence a “predator purge.” This is either convenient for the Unitists who won’t have to deal with a lot of predators when setting up their multispecies society, or an utter betrayal of their pacifist ideals to form a Unitist society by killing all who disagree with it, or both, depending on how you think.
Absolutely, and while I tend to keep the ages of the animals ambiguous, it is heavily implied that pretty much all species have at least human-scale lifespans and reproduction rates (mainly to make storytelling easier because really short lifespans aren’t conducive to complex character development). Even for animals like small rodents where it’s an orders of magnitude increase in lifespan and decrease in birth rate. It’s also implied that this change is part of the reason that drove different species to Unitism, because the natural food web breaks down when your prey grow and reproduce at a similar rate as you.