Are there people in your world that just don’t get it, and keep spouting opinions that make no sense given the context of your world or would be disastrous if actually implemented? What are some of the most common bad takes in your world and what makes them so bad?

  • drunkpostdisaster@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Due to their community being made up of people from a variety of backgrounds superheroes are the only ones standing between us and fascism which is the natural form of government among the ‘normals’.

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlOP
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    1 month ago

    In my world with intelligent, non-anthro animals trying to live in harmony, a lot of the terrible takes revolve around the banning of predation in some territories while other territories legally enforce predation. Or, even in the territories where different species do live in peace with each other, there are bad takes on the roles of different animals in society. Here are a few common ones:

    “In Feline Territory, which explicitly bans predation but neighbours several territories that encourage it, the most common source of predation related criminal charges come not from cats themselves breaking the law and eating other animals, but from animals living in other territories getting caught trying to bring meat (usually referred to as ‘prey’ but not to be confused with ‘prey animals’ which are species that a territory considers to be food) with them when crossing the border. So why don’t the Felines just provide a trash can at their customs facility where animals can get rid of their prey and avoid getting arrested?”

    • The customs facility of a given territory is entirely within its own borders, so by the time you get far enough to throw something in one of their trash cans, you’ve already broken the law by smuggling prey past the border.

    • The Feline Ministry of Security wants to catch you with prey so they can secure a criminal conviction. Why should they give you any leniency when the very first thing you do upon entering their territory is break one of their most fundamental laws? This is especially true for animals like the Felines where they used to be predators, which means they have more to prove to the other non-predation species by having absolutely zero tolerance for predation in their territory.

    • It would put non-predation territories in an extremely awkward position by forcing them to dispose of your prey for you.

    • How fucking hard is it to just not bring prey with you when you intend to cross into a non-predation territory? It’s not like they keep their non-predation status a secret.

    “How can you convict me of predation when it’s my hunting instinct talking and I can’t resist it?”

    • Because you can. You chose not to. Science is very clear that all animals are sapient in this world, and sapience to them is defined as being able take control of your instincts and not letting them control you. If the Felines, once infamous for being the best hunters, has become one of the most anti-predation territories in the world, what excuse do you have?

    • And if you really can’t resist your instincts, then you’re defective and absolutely should be locked away for public safety. Or another way of looking at it, you’re not considered sapient and not capable of participating in a society of sapient animals.

    • (For context: The response to this is particularly harsh in their society because it’s almost always the first excuse an animal tries when they get caught for predation, and everyone else is sick of hearing it.)

    “There are a lot of small songbirds working as pilots in Feline Territory, but I noticed that they are almost always scheduled to fly during the day while cat pilots are scheduled to fly at night. I thought that when the Felines signed the interspecies peace treaty, they officially became a multi-species society and any other animal living in their territory has the same rights as any cat! So how is their pilot scheduling fair? Shouldn’t every animal rotate between working every shift? Are the Felines racist?”

    • They are a multi-species society and any other animal living there does have the same rights as a cat. Including the right to a work schedule that fits your natural bio clock if your job is safety critical, like flying a hovercraft.

    • Most Felines are noctournal and most Avians are diurnal, and the point of a multi-species society is to take advantage of different species’ natural advantages while having other species cover their natural disadvantages. It’s also why there are a lot of avian pilots in Feline territory, a lot of them apply for that career because they are already naturally suited for it, and the Feline Ministry of Transportation isn’t allowed to discriminate between species and only hire Felines. The only requirement is that you live in Feline Territory.

    • What wouldn’t be fair is if they did force every animal to do every shift, including ones that go against their bio clock. That’s also a fast track ticket to a fatigue related hovercraft crash killing hundreds or thousands of animals.

    • If you want to go against your bio clock in your work schedule, you’re still allowed to do that, just not for safety critical jobs where accidentally dozing off can mean literally fucking dying and killing others.

    “Felines are obligate carnivores and normally has to eat meat, but there is a pharmaceutical called a Dietary Enzyme Supplement which supplies artificially engineered enzymes to their digestive tracts, which allows them to digest plant based food and directly synthesize nutrients only found in meat in their own bodies. The Feline Ministry of Health manufactures these pharmaceuticals, and you can’t live without them without breaking the law if you’re a cat, so obviously the Feline Government is forcibly drugging their citizens!”

    • No one is forcing you to take Dietary Enzyme Supplements. The Feline government bans predation but has no laws saying what alternative you have to take.

    • They’re not even the only way for a cat to not eat prey, they’re just the easiest and therefore most common. You can also get regular nutritional supplements that directly supply nutrients not found in plant based food. You can even get fully synthetic meat analogues that contain all the nutrients found in meat. You can also intentionally starve yourself to death if you were determined to do that, the government can’t stop you.

    • early_riser@lemmy.radio
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      7 days ago

      non-anthro animals trying to live in harmony

      Off topic, I am very intrigued how their ergonomics works. How do tools and architecture in this world account for vastly different body plans, sizes, and sensory systems? Xenoergonomics is one of my favorite aspects of worldbuilding.

      As for terrible takes in the Lonely Galaxy, probably the Partisans. Most other residents of Focus are indifferent toward religion, but the Partisans are militantly atheistic. While their dislike for the Bright Way (Focus’s historically dominant religion) is somewhat understandable given the Partisans are descendants of former ecclesiastical slaves, there’s no excuse for genocide, especially when the majority of the believers you’re killing are trying to dissolve the Bright Way’s economic monopolies that permitted debt slavery in the first place.

      Even after the War of Dissolution reverted the Bright Way from system-spanning megacorp to a purely religious institution, the Partisans wanted control of the whole system, austencibly so that the clergy could never rise to power again. This caused a rift between the Partisans and the other factions of dissolutionists, the Pious Dissolutionists (internal renewal movement) and the moderate secular dissolutionists (remnants of the secular governments of the inner planets who were puppets of the clergy during the Age of Decadence.)

      The Pious Dissolutionists would very much like it if the Partisans didn’t kill them, and the secular governments of the inner planets weren’t keen to be anyone’s puppet so soon after throwing off the clergy’s yoke. Most of the newly freed planetary governments sacrificed their hard-won independence in order to form an economic and political union to counter the Partisan threat.

      The partisans are so anti-theist that they’ll even happily slaughter misotheists. To despise the Uncreated Light is to acknowledge its existence, and the Partisans will brook no compromise in that regard.

      • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlOP
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        23 hours ago

        Off topic, I am very intrigued how their ergonomics works. How do tools and architecture in this world account for vastly different body plans, sizes, and sensory systems? Xenoergonomics is one of my favorite aspects of worldbuilding.

        Admittedly, I kind of handwave that away as “their paws have evolved to be more dexterious in the millions of years between when humans existed on Earth and their current societies developed”. I mostly visualize this world in a cartoon style so they basically have “magic paws” that things just stick to on command.

        However, due to them being four-legged, they can’t really hold things with their paws while walking. So they mostly carry things in their mouths while they walk, either directly or by putting it in a basket and carrying the basket in their mouth. Birds carry stuff in their talons while flying. Some animals are good at balncing things on their heads while they walk. Failing all those, they always have the option to use a bag that they sling over their shoulders and front paws.

        However, being a place where animals of all kinds live in relative harmony, size logistics are integral to nearly every part of society, and is regulated quite heavily to ensure accessibility for all. The Universal Animal Access (UAA) Staging Guidelines is a collection of documents and engineering standards with the lofty goal statement of “providing all animals, regardless of species, political affiliation, residence status, or ability, safe and equitable access to all resources offered by built-up, urbanized, or industrialized development; while avoiding segregation and the development of parallel, closed off, scale specific infrastructure, whenever possible.”

        UAA categorizes animals into four rough size categories. They are officially denoted as either size groups 1, 2, 3 and 4, with 1 being the smallest or and 4 being the largest, and are more colloquially referred to as Micro, Small, Medium, and Large, often abbreviated as Mi, S, M, and L. These categories are qualitative and on a spectrum, but generally:

        • Micro animals: Insects, Worms, up to Hummingbirds

        • Small animals: Most songbirds, most rodents, up to rabbits and hares.

        • Medium animals: Canines, Vulpines, Most Felines, Raptors

        • Large animals: Ungulates like deer and cows, the largest birds, all the way up to whales.

        What is often referred to as the “UAA paradigm” of engineering and civil planning has the following principles:

        1. Wherever possible and safe to do, animals of different sizes should be allowed to occupy the same space and be free to interact with each other, as opposed to being separated by barriers. Example: A corridor where animals walk through should accommodate both large and small animals in the same space, this generally means ensuring the ceiling and wall clearance can accommodate large animals, while the floor and any inclines must be flat enough for even the smallest paws to navigate.

        2. Redundant fixtures that are more efficiently suited for each size group should be installed close to each other. Example: A door will have a button to open it or an access control device low to the ground for small and micro animals, to reach without having to climb, and a separate button higher off the ground so medium and large animals don’t have to hunch over, as well as for smaller flying animals. And the buttons will most likely be capacitive touch based instead of a mechanical switch, so small animals don’t have to worry that they can’t apply enough force to activate it. Also, personal items like books, computers, paw-held tools, and anything else one is expected to have to themselves should be produced in a variety of sizes, each accommodating a different size group.

        3. Oversizing is better than undersizing. This is due to the fact that in nature, smaller animals exist in a world with a lot more empty space in relation to their bodies, and therefore will feel more natural and comfortable than, say, a large animal being squeezed into a space that can barely fit in.

        4. The safety of animals must be prioritized. For example, you’ll never see a conventional airplane in the Unified Territories, as for an aircraft to be sky legal, it must be able to stop anywhere, including hovering in place, and be able to fly arbitrarily slowly when low to the ground. So as to not smash into any flying birds or bugs. Tires rolling across the meadow is also unacceptable. For this reason, hovercrafts are the preferred motorized vehicle, as are trains with complete grade separation and active track intrusion detection.

        So this is well and good on paper, but do the actual infrastructure follow these guidelines? The answer is one part “meh” and one part “it depends”. The Unified Territories is the most comprehensive single jurisdiction in terms of implementing UAA, but even then it is only totally comprehensive for small and medium sized animals, with accommodation of micros being almost as good with a few yet unaddressed woes, but limited consideration for large animals. This is mainly because the vast majority of the UT population are micro, small, and medium sized animals, and the argument is often made that because there are no large sized member species and it is unclear if there will be in the foreseeable future, it’s unreasonable to size everything for the largest animals when the extra space is unlikely to be used before the infrastructure reaches end of life and would have to be renovated or rebuilt anyway. Though this is controversial as some large animals do pass through the Unified Territories.

        Feline territory is mostly designed for medium animals, having lost nearly all the big cats to extinction ages ago, but after they signed that treaty saying they won’t eat other animals anymore, they have been making strides in implementing UAA in their infrastructure for the influx of small and micro animals who are now welcomed in their territory. There are still other territories that do not implement UAA in any appreciable sense, be it because most of the residents are about the same size and they therefore do not see a reason to spend their limited resources implementing something that hardly anyone will take advantage of. But other territories are far more intentional in their refusal to implement UAA, as they do not want other species there at all.

        One last thing, when it comes to medicine, medical practitioners have to be certified to treat specific size groups. Most doctors are certified to treat their own size group and taxonomic group, maybe also the adjacent groups. For example, you can have a doctor who is certified for small and medium mammals, or one who treats large avians, or a medicine bug that handles micro insects. Obviously this is waved for emergencies where the “correct” doctor is unavailable, and there is a line somewhere between “a cat and a mouse is trapped in a cave and the mouse goes into cardiac arrest, and the cat had to give chest compression even though they could accidentally squish them or dig their claws into them” and “your feline clinic is the closest to my burrow and come on I’m not that small!”, but that’s up to the malpractice courts to decide. There have also been problems with when a large animal has a medical emergency in a place where most of the residents are small, the medkits nearby might literally not contain enough medicine to reach a therapeutic dose. This is remedied by simply having larger stocks of critical, life saving medicine like epinephrine and insulin when putting together a first aid kit.

        While their dislike for the Bright Way (Focus’s historically dominant religion) is somewhat understandable given the Partisans are descendants of former ecclesiastical slaves

        I’d love to learn more about this religion! Does it specifically mandate slavery or is it more of a “the slavers happen to believe in this religion” thing?

        Also, do the Partisans exhibit any traits commonly found in religion/cults even though they’re atheist? Like do they have their own rituals and customs that could be mistaken for parts of a religion even though their whole thing is that they have no religion?

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Oh yes. My world is a D&D world, so gods, divine powers, and clerics casting spells akin to miracles are reality. Still, there are the god deniers, hardcore atheists who claim that everything divine is just humbug.

    Fun fact: some of the real hardcore GDs are actually immune to clerical magic.