I think I'd like to see what people would do in their leisure time or domestic work . You see so many stories about travel and war, but you rarely see people interact outside of that. And if you do, it's usually not made unique for a setting that isn't Earth.

What cutlery do they use? What does a morning routine look like? In a world where fire magic is commonplace, how do they cook? How would those things evolve over centuries?

Fantasy especially feels stagnant for this, but I think sci-fi is guilty of this too. Are there things in specific works where an innocuous detail made you wonder more about how a setting worked?

  • buckykat [none/use name]
    ·
    11 months ago

    There's a sequence in Unjust Depths where a character spends a whole day trying to find a place that will service her prosthetic arm and all of the legitimate clinics and manufacturers send her away because it's not their product and she doesn't have insurance (and because she's a racial minority)

    • FourteenEyes [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      One of my fantasy airship characters is a dwarf who is on the airship because, among other reasons, he's dodging creditors who are after him because he never paid for the undead arm he had grafted on to replace the one he lost in a factory accident, and that's easier to do when you have no permanent address and your contract stipulates cash payouts for your share

      EDIT: Worth mentioning, this factory accident killed several friends of his and was the result of burgher greed and safety skimping, it also radicalized him and I'm thinking that his other reasons are some light terrorism maybe anarcho-bottom