Cultural worldbuilding tool: Give them an untranslatable word or or expression or a few. Even if this culture doesn’t have its own language, there can be a slang term, or final traces of a lost language that nobody fluently speaks anymore. But those few words have lingered, because they simply cannot be replaced with something else.
Like calling someone _____, which directly translates to “the chicken salesman”, but is actually an expression for a very specific kind of a con man. It’s a reference to an ancient play, in which the scammer in question first steals someone’s chickens, and then sells the victim their own chickens’ skulls back as a magical ward against chicken thieves. Most people who use the term don’t even know the origin, and fucking nobody has actually seen the play.
A single word that means “the weeks of after-image”, a word for that time in mourning, when the grief hasn’t set in yet, but you notice the ‘after-images’ of the deceased everywhere, silence where they used to make noise, their favourite tasks sitting undone.
One that can be translated to both “outlasting determination” and “survival spite”, though neither translation really satisfactorily expresses the feelings involved. It’s a common term for the phenomenon where two elderly people who fucking hate each other live into improbably long ages because both refuse to be the one who dies first.
i love doing untranslatable idioms. for instance, the kyri in my forge verse have an idiom where “painting your wagon” sorta means taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune, but can also refer to a death in the family, in an irreverent way, like ‘kicked the bucket’ or ‘bought the farm’. because it’s a tradition that if you inherit a wagon, or buy one that’s up for sale because its owner died – which is always real cheap, because of the work it takes to make it Not Haunted afterwards – you have to change its whole look. the old superstition is that the ghost won’t recognize it. which gives it some obscure additional meanings based on those superstitions.
so that’s confusing for outsiders, because even if they learn ‘paint the wagon’ as equivalent to ‘kick the bucket’, or as meaning like “bad things happening to that guy turned out lucky for me,” it’s still going to be confusing when someone up and says “eh you just gotta paint the wagon” when they mean like… not giving your new address to your crazy ex.
I once wrote a thing in which a courteous sign-off for a written communication was a phrase that literally translated as “Eyes of my mothers.” A footnote explained that this was an abbreviated version of a longer phrase meaning “May the eyes of all my mothers dilate upon you.”
Untranslatable idioms are fun.
If you like this, there’s a whole game about making words like this: Dialect.
Get some friends together for an evening and create a fading community and the unique turns of language that will remain once everyone is gone. If you like words, and tragedy, and combinations of both, it’s great!
oh hey I lovewords and tragedy and combinations of both!
I’m still thinking about akasha and how it might have affected other things in the story that might well never be touched on and it’s making me go feral.
For instance: the Calamity’s effect on Ishgard in particular.
That’s not to say that it was solely affected- there are whole swaths of beach in La Noscea and areas in Thanalan completely terra-formed by shards of Dalamud and other debris, the Shroud was decimated by the fires in the wake of the shards and the Calamity generally, and Mor Dhona itself was changed on an aethereal level that they’re still not even a hundred percent able to track in canon.
And that’s not even factoring in all the voidsent that they had to contend with in the days leading up to the Calamity. But otherwise, their climate was seemingly unaffected in a significant way. Their ecosystems -while sustaining catastrophic loss- had a shot at recovery. And they seem to have done so in many places that you can see npcs working in the city-states, or in the surrounding settlements.
But not Ishgard.
I can’t rightly remember where I saw it in the game’s lore, but there was in-universe speculation that it was a sort of divine punishment for their abandonment of the Alliance before Carteneau, but what if the specific reason for Ishgard becoming an icy wasteland was because of the Ishgardians themselves,as a by-product of their faith.
What if their prayers to Halone for deliverance unto her icy palace in their darkest hour were answered- what if the massive surge of aether that expanded out from Carteneau was used in a similar way we’ve seen to primal summoning, with a will-made-manifest effect.
But like every time a primal is summoned with the intent of a god granting deliverance, it goes wrong.
Thus, the Ishgardians, all praying for a good death and deliverance to Halone’s ice palace in the sky, adorned with star sapphires and littered with feasting tables - over a milennia of prayer- was made manifest. It’s heaven on earth, and it killed everything that couldn’t be brought in from the cold to get there.
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The reason Zagreus is the perfect protagonist is because he is simultaneously deeply respectful and an absolute shithead and I think that’s what every developer should aim for
