Questions tagged [culture]
For questions dealing with the customary and artistic characteristics of a society.
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The Static Civilization: 1 creating an eternal religion [closed]
In my world, I am trying to design a civilization or culture that is basically unchanging. Well, unchanging is not the right word, rather, this civilization does not experience sudden or deep changes, ...
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Is a society where children are entirely raised by boarding schools sustainable?
In my previous question, I brought up a hypothetical society where children aren't raised at all by their biological parents. Instead, the children are taken care of by hospital staff for the first ...
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How are sapient crows utilized if there are phones for communicating?
A shaman society secret to normal humans, in the late 2000s era where phones and the internet exist: why and how would they still put to work their black feathery friends?
They were crucial before all ...
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Office Superpowers: which augmented soft skills help with happiness? [closed]
Office Universe:
In my fictional universe, superpowers exist, but they manifest in a peculiar manner. Individuals are granted abilities that are strictly related to enhancing their office work and ...
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Extrapolating a culture from its use of armored fighting vehicles? [closed]
Ok, rewriting this one, so some of the answers and comments are from a simpler version:
Let's say, in an alternate timeline, or on another world, we discover the equivalent of mechanized warfare -- ...
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How would a species with intangibility-powers deal with war and violence? [closed]
I've got an idea for an alien species with intangibility powers, similar to Kitty Pryde from the X-men or Mira Nova and the Tangeans from "Buzz Lightyear of Star Command". They are capable ...
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Could a species be highly apathetic to their brethren yet have a strong pack/herd mentality?
This species comes from a world 1.7x the mass of Earth that is about 75% water.
I would like them to be very apathetic so that when a space-faring species contacts then there is a definite difference ...
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What are the parenting options available to species that reproduce by fragmentation?
How would a species that forms new life only when the parent fragments, do parenting?
Like sea stars and molds, my species forms a new child when the parent is broken. However, this is the only means ...
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How would a fantasy world change if every mage exploded/caused natural disasters upon death [closed]
In a fantasy world I'm building, one of the main two types of mages have innate control over natural elements. About 1 in 50 people in this world have the ability to take part in the ritual to give ...
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What would aliens glean from our consumer grade computers? [closed]
David just bought a $1500 grand computer, he put the parts together himself. He was about to play some games on it and aliens just yoinked it to study. Without even looking at David or the biology of ...
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Could earth like planet support a second moon, if it was approximately 1/4 of real moon size?
I would like for my world to have two moons. I think it would look simply stunning at night. Also, I came up with a pretty cool idea for a "God Eye" cult. When the smaller moon would have ...
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What are the practical reasons for a species of humanoids to all wear sexy, revealing clothing?
Many cultures throughout human history have depicted skin, but few have done so explicitly for the purpose of being sexually enticing, especially not in their everyday routines.
Hence, I've been ...
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Why would a highly advanced society still engage in extensive agriculture?
What are some plausible reasons why an advanced, futuristic society would still have a sizable agricultural/rural component, and a significant rural population? This hypothetical civilization is ...
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Cultural identity in an Multi-cultural empire
I'm world-building for a universe. I just came up with Deals Best Kept, and I realized I wanted to have a bunch of fantasy races interact, be very culturally diverse and mixed, and also account for a ...
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Why would LGBTQIA+ people be sacred individuals? [closed]
In my world, there are magical humans often called wizards (their scientific name is Homo magicus) (so, they are still humans, just not Homo sapiens). They are traditionally a very religious race. ...
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Is there any way to justify very different levels of technological development within a few thousand miles?
Imagine a continent the size of Africa.
At the coasts are sophisticated cities, where people use digital technology, electric cars, and whatnot.
Travel inland, across a mountain range or through a ...
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What are good reasons to create a city/nation in which a government wouldn't let you leave [closed]
I am building a city that the main character will be prohibited to leave from and yet their intentions of entering the city are to save the world form an extra-planer threat. So they have to go in. ...
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Why might a repressive order allow for flamboyant newscasters?
Thanks in advance and sorry if this isn't within the scope of the forum, I'm new but I've lurked so I totally get it if this doesn't really fit.
Anyway, let's get into it. Setting is a far-future ...
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Conditions required for a society to develop aquaculture?
While researching Kwak'wala, because I think the languages of the Pacific Northwest have this amazing aesthetic I want to mimic in some languages in my world, I came across the fact that the Kwakwak'...
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Orthographic change over time
This is related to a previous question of mine: Rate of linguistic change among geographically separated descendants of a common language
If you had 4 groups of humans with the same language and ...
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Rate of linguistic change among geographically separated descendants of a common language
I'm developing a story set on an exoplanet where a relatively small terraforming expedition is forced to settle on the planet due to some catastrophe 20,000 years before the story's events.
They ...
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Is it plausible for constructed languages to be used to affect thought and control or mold people towards desired outcomes?
In 1984, newspeak is used to control thought, and to make certain ideas impossible to express, or even to think.
I'm imagining a future totalitarian state which develops custom languages which it ...
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Litmus Test for whether my worldbuilt cultures are too close to modern America/Britain/etc
I was listening to a video on how to write, and the person giving the lecture said something along the lines of "I'm bored with stories where the setting is supposed to be in the far-flung future,...
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Need Help with a Fictional Modern Baltic Country’s Name?
I want the name of the country to mean “eastern border/land”, but I’m not a professional in the Latvian/Eastern Baltic languages.
As an example, would it be Austgale or Austrumgale (gale meaning “...
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Why would a society persecute people who are antisocial misanthropes (sociopaths, psychopaths, narcissists, and sadists)? [closed]
An alternate-historical story is set in a third-world country in 1977 of the Gregorian calendar (the year George Lucas' masterpiece, Star Wars, was released). The country is a Costa Rica pastiche (...
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In a righty-dominated society, how can authorities prevent a right-handed child from being born to two lefty parents?
In this society, superstitions regarding right- and left-handed people are accepted as fact. (I'm going to be politically incorrect and call them "righties" and "lefties" ...
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How can bonobo that evolved sapience maintain their 'conflict resolution' strategy without risking spreading of STIs?
If humans die out tomorrow the two most likely candidates to achieve sapience after us are our closest genetic relatives. One of these, chimpanzee, has been discussed quite thoroughly in stories such ...
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How to keep paper copies of a "knowledge base" up-to-date in a fantasy world?
I am currently working on a fantasy world, in which one city maintains a written knowledge base about all knowledge they have about the world. This knowledge base consists of dozens of tomes, each ...
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How could a nomadic society establish a stable civilization?
In my world, there is an entire nomad-based society. While they have some influence based on gypsies, they are mainly based on Mongolian Horsemen. At some point in my fictional history (ca. 12th-13th ...
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Can there be an Underwater Advanced Civilization? [closed]
After watching Aquaman and, most recently, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which features Namor and his underwater empire, I got curious about the feasibility of an underwater civilization composed of ...
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What are some of the most culturally universal names? [closed]
This is mostly a shower-thought type query rather than an active problem I'm looking to solve, but here it goes.
Say I have a character that gets an opportunity to choose his own name, and he wants to ...
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How to name an Ancient Egyptian Prince?
I have created a character and only still need his name. I've spent the past 3-4 hours googling stuff about Ancient Egyptian royal naming conventions, and it's a lot! @_@
The character is a young man (...
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Impacts of matricentric reproductive laws [closed]
My world is a matricentric America that holds men legally responsible for unplanned pregnancies. Roughly, the idea is that if an unplanned pregnancy occurs and the woman does not get an abortion, the ...
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Any natural way that a River can "move" by hundreds of kilometers seasonally
I'm designing a Nomadic culture and I had an interesting concept.
One of the reasons for nomadism is to find resources that "move" annually.
In the case of pastoral nomads, it is to find new ...
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In a fantasy world where people can ride monsters and fantastic beasts, why does the horse still remain in active duty?
A fantasy staple, the fantastic mount (TvTropes). People in Fantasy Land ride giant yellow chickens, giant wolves, giant beetles, caterpilars, ants, and other insects, evolved bears, sharks, miniature ...
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What would modern color wheels look like if the human eye saw fewer/different spectral colors?
The typical human eye can see wavelengths between 350nm and 750nm. In 1666, Isaac Newton used a triangular prism to split a beam of white into a rainbow and then define the first color wheel.
Fast-...
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Are there plausible ways a spacefaring society could develop along feudal lines? [closed]
There are works in science fiction (the Dune saga probably being the most famous of them) where in the future, a space-faring human society has somehow, instead of being a republic (at least in name, ...
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How to eliminate male on male competition? [closed]
What behavioral and biological changes would be needed to make males not fight each other over females and for females to fight each other for males and to not make males expandle and extremely ...
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Can a society completely erase all memory of a predecessor culture’s collapse in only three generations? [closed]
Something bad happened and the world chose to cover the event up by erasing their activities.
My world believes they are survivors/refugees of a "lost civilization" such as the Khmer, and ...
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What are the evolutionary advantages of males wanting females to mate with other males? [closed]
What would cause males to evolve to want the females to mate with other males?
Males use mate sharing as a bonding method for males and to combine their bloodlines with unrelated males to gain ...
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Is cultural development possible in a "hive-mind" species?
One of the main species in my world has human level intelligence and works as a "pseudo-unified consciousness", in that the creatures are capable of intra-species telepathic communication, ...
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Does a secondary world setting need a religion? [closed]
So I have been debating about what to do for the secondary world setting I am developing. My big question is about what to do for the in-universe religion(s). The thing is that I am mostly doing ...
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What are the implications of gorilla anatomy on medieval warfare? [closed]
Let me know if I need to break this into smaller questions...my preference is to keep it as one.
I have a sentient species that has intelligence indistinguishable from humans, but with the body of a ...
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Why would murids (such as rats and mice) be sacred animals?
In a future web-series I want to create, there is a species of massive humanoids named giants (Homo gigas) (technically, there are still humans, just not Homo sapiens). They are less social than ...
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Why would a nation require immigrants to fulfil a decade of military service to gain citizenship? [closed]
A militaristic, autocratic nation masquerading as a democracy resembling a mixture of Communist Romania & Post-Soviet Belarus exists in the future. This country has two pathways for migrants to ...
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War and Conflict within a O'Neil Cylinder
I have an idea for a story I'm brewing but I want to know if such things are possible or even plausible.
The basic idea is that the O'neil cylinder was created after a failed attempt of colonizing a ...
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What unique differences might evolve in a society where an exclusively nocturnal and exclusively daytime species shared the same space?
Using 21st Century Western Anglophone society as a baseline:
How would the infrastructure of cities (For example shared leisure spaces, transportation networks and homes) differ from our own in order ...
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How likely for a religion to be almost similar in a different world? [closed]
In my secondary world, one of the main religions is a vague medieval Christianity. Of course, there are differences made for it to fit in with the lore, as well as a few other major religions. After ...
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Would it be plausible for a group of pseudo-spiders to form a colony?
So, ants and bees form colonies, could my spider analogs from colonies? They’re the dominant species on the planet they live in, like humans are. The pseudo-spiders are about 2-3m long, about 1m tall ...
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Multi-Sophont Alliance, Episode 1: Is It Even Possible? [closed]
This question, if not the entire series, is based on the premise behind this painting by Dylan Bajda:
Source
Set in the world of Serina, the creatures on the boats are called "gravediggers" ...
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