20: go ahead and pup (pair up)

february 12th, 2024

one of the writing things I’ve been learning about and playing around with in recent months is how to write exposition in ways that’re clear and fun and engaging! so far I’ve been taking a fairly “readers can gradually piece it together via context and vibes” approach to important worldbuilding stuff for this story, but I want to start including some of the basic lore a bit more explicitly as it becomes relevant, rather than leaving it all as subtext.

the tl;dr of this page’s exposition is that this story takes place in the year 2074, in an alternate timeline of Earth where intentional genetic modification in humans got off to an earlier start and went in weird directions very quickly, with a variety of interesting sociopolitical ripple effects! I’m not expecting the science stuff to be a key part of the story, as I don’t know very much about real-life genetic modification technology and don’t want to wildly misrepresent things, and much of my worldbuilding will likely be limited to the US for the time being, as I’m unfortunately fairly unfamiliar with much of the rest of the world (although I’d be very excited to hear ideas from folks more familiar with real-life science and/or other places!). what I am planning to explore in further depth are a few of those aforementioned sociopolitical ripple effects, especially in the realms of systemic marginalization and social justice activism culture and related phenomena, and how they play out within the lives of these alternate-timeline Illinoisan twentysomethings (as they’re simultaneously navigating everything else they have going on)!

it’s been a while since I first started concocting what has eventually become AwS, and I don’t remember exactly how things played out, but I believe that early on in the process I decided I’d like to draw most of the cast as furries (because I enjoy coming up with fantasy character designs, and find things like paws and beaks easier to draw than hands and lips), and that raised a LOT of questions about how species work in this world. are the different characters different species that developed a shared society? or are they all just varieties of human, and if so, do non-human animals still exist in this world? if non-human animals do exist, do humans still eat them? still keep them as pets? how far can human modifications be pushed before humans aren’t easily recognizable as humans? how would that impact what “being human” means? eventually I realized that these kinds of questions could be controversial issues in-world, and that that controversy could lend itself well to exploring actual real-life issues in a genuine yet lighthearted way — I definitely want to tackle very real and serious topics that myself and my loved ones are navigating and unpacking irl, but I often find these things easier to write about when I approach them through analogy and metaphor and silly little jokes, and I’m hoping it’ll be fun and meaningful to put a new spin on my actual experiences via this fictional world and its fictional issues. and also, like, they’re furries and that’s fun! like how the show BoJack Horseman and the comic Dropout by gray Folie are two incredibly heavy and profound pieces of media, and yet you can still look at them and be like “hehe. sad horse man. he’s a horse and he’s a man and his name is Horseman” 😛