This is a thread to discuss your favourite fanon worldbuilding within the world of FFVII. It might be something you have created to add to their world, or something a fanartist or writer you like has added - maybe an OC, or a new town, or a shop, or a historical event, whatever has taken your fancy.
I’ve recently had a lot of fun creating a boarding school for young Rufus to attend, the FFVII equivalent of Eton, if Eton took girls. The school didn’t want to accept him, as they knew it would be a massive headache and a huge security risk, but they didn’t really have a choice.
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Some of my Cetra worldbuilding, I think. I like playing with odd little details, like the idea of what it actually feels like to feel someone ‘return to the planet’, especially with a few generations of humans in the family tree too, and just trying to make things as weird as possible and in some ways as mundane and physical as possible. It’s not at all what the creators were going for, but I like the idea of families having well-founded superstitions like ‘if granny gets a sore tooth, someone’s just died’ (only turning it into a good rhyme or something, can’t think of one now 
). I like writing characters who are oblivious to the significance of the quirks they grew up with. I also just have a soft spot for characters who can sense death in some way. I used to have a very elaborate daydream where Rufus Shinra was a necromancer.
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This post reminds me of how much I loved the worldbuilding you did with the children’s rhymes and local Kalm legends in “Maladaptive Daydream.” It was inspired and added layers of depth to their world (which is sorely lacking in any kind of history).
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I love coming up with myths, and specifically the way they get twisted by different groups with different priorities and people read different metaphors into them, so that a myth gets a local flavour and a world can have the same myth in multiple forms, and how if it’s all over the place it implies it might be more of a legend. There’s lots of scope to make it ominous or humorous. Plus as a lazy writer I like how it’s a shortcut to atmosphere. xD
I wondered about making a thread to dump misc stuff related to that fic or if that’s a weird thing to do for one’s own fic and I should at least keep it to dreamwidth! xD But I had a nice experience with writing that side of it; had the right balance with drawing on local myth I’d made up for previous scenarios so I knew roughly where the bounds were, but with a lot of scope to create new details as I went along, so it was a fun experience where it felt both very controlled and very free. I really wanted it to have the feeeeel of stories I have in my head, which never seems to make it onto the page! I’d like to play more with it on a project where I don’t have the same constraints from surrounding metaphor, though. I’d tried to keep the metaphor kind of… loose? so it was more impressions of a few things rather than a tight 1:1 mapping, but there were still possibilities it ruled out.
minor fic spoilers
And I wanted to do a lot more with Vincent just casually knowing things as family stories that Gast thought were obscure lore, because I found it funny, but there was nowhere to fit it in. :( I like playing with the fandom trope of always making the pov character a bit cetra by taking that really… literally… and making it as mundane as possible. Still does keep a nice weird vibe that I like.
My fandom friend Ixieko invented and wrote practically a whole book of folk-tales for the world of FFVII. In their world it was called “The Tales of North” by Evan Marius (1932), and the conceit was that at the end of each tale, the reader would eavesdrop, so to speak, on Grimoire Valentine and Dr Gast having a conversation about what the folk tale signified, anthropologically speaking. They’re really wonderful and I borrow from them from time to time when I need a folk tale for their world.
Edited to add: my typing skills are abominable
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I started reading those! Need to go back sometime…
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Oh, another one of mine I like because I am shameless: starblossom. I decided that this was the in-universe name for Aeris’ plants, and I decided they were not lilies, because that’s cheesy, but daffodils. Apparently it’s also the name of something in Star Wars, which was unintentional, but I find it funny since the game has so many Star Wars references!
It also explains the lack of diversity in her garden because daffodils secrete a chemical that kills other plants. Makes me think of Jenova and that makes me happy.
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I do like daffodils more than lilies.
One aspect of worldbuilding I really enjoy is creating brands for their world, like Zolom XXX beer and so on.
I also really enjoy inventing newspapers and magazines. I was rifling through my old fanfic files and found this things I’d created for a fanfic a couple of years ago - a masthead for a tabloid magazine, the Midgar equivalent of the National Inquirer. It claims to be 100% free and independent but is, of course, run by the one department even more clandestine than the Turks: Shinra’s PR department
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Love it! :D Especially the sahagin and the moon. I feel like I remember seeing it on tumblr though I’d forgotten all the details! I imagine that here and there, between the shocking headlines, are pieces of carefully-placed propaganda, crafted by whomever got the job that Vincent-from-Maladaptive-Daydream missed out on…