Scrapyard Station: a note on culture
Oct. 11th, 2022 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariA fully occupied planet won’t usually have just one culture. But not every species fully occupies a planet.
Builders can’t swim, so sailing is quite risky for them. Before they were introduced to flight, they never left their home continent. They do have a few different nations on their continent, but most of what outsiders recognize as “Builder culture” is the culture of the biggest nation.
Scholars were animals not too long ago, and their “uplift” happened by complete coincidence, starting with a single swarm that ate a Tinker. Their culture is just the culture of anyone who chooses to be reborn as a swarm.
(Both of these species have off-planet colonies now, so they’re beginning to develop separately with distance.)
Riders didn’t independently develop a lot of the technology that would allow them to settle different regions and deal with different threats. They were more focused on the day-to-day struggle for food. The sudden leap from Stone Age to Space Age has been quite a cultural shock. (There are Riders who reject modern technology outright, but they’ll probably end up like the most conservative elements of the Pure, stagnating for fear that any change at all will be as bad as radical change.)
Stewards really do have a nearly planet-wide religious hegemony. Their history texts claim it has existed since their Divine Mother left them all those millennia ago.
Winnowers don’t have much of a “culture” as we’d recognize it. They do have shared language and concepts (like the concept of winnowing), but their gatherings are for things like trade and joint labor.
The most culturally diverse folks are Nomads, since they’ve settled more planets than every other species combined. Not a lot of Tinker and Pure cultures survived the destruction of Earth, but they still have multiple subdivisions even within the larger Tinker-Pure split. Scrappers have a lot of different cultures on just one planet, and they’ll scrap with you over which one is the best.
Builders can’t swim, so sailing is quite risky for them. Before they were introduced to flight, they never left their home continent. They do have a few different nations on their continent, but most of what outsiders recognize as “Builder culture” is the culture of the biggest nation.
Scholars were animals not too long ago, and their “uplift” happened by complete coincidence, starting with a single swarm that ate a Tinker. Their culture is just the culture of anyone who chooses to be reborn as a swarm.
(Both of these species have off-planet colonies now, so they’re beginning to develop separately with distance.)
Riders didn’t independently develop a lot of the technology that would allow them to settle different regions and deal with different threats. They were more focused on the day-to-day struggle for food. The sudden leap from Stone Age to Space Age has been quite a cultural shock. (There are Riders who reject modern technology outright, but they’ll probably end up like the most conservative elements of the Pure, stagnating for fear that any change at all will be as bad as radical change.)
Stewards really do have a nearly planet-wide religious hegemony. Their history texts claim it has existed since their Divine Mother left them all those millennia ago.
Winnowers don’t have much of a “culture” as we’d recognize it. They do have shared language and concepts (like the concept of winnowing), but their gatherings are for things like trade and joint labor.
The most culturally diverse folks are Nomads, since they’ve settled more planets than every other species combined. Not a lot of Tinker and Pure cultures survived the destruction of Earth, but they still have multiple subdivisions even within the larger Tinker-Pure split. Scrappers have a lot of different cultures on just one planet, and they’ll scrap with you over which one is the best.
