How much of the real world do you use in your fics?

[Guy Orion]

I've been writing a journeyfic for a bit now, and the way it's world works kind of utilizes aspects and logic from both the games and the anime (i.e levels not really being a thing, but locations remaining the same to how they look in-game).
However; I have encountered the thoughtof how much of the real world I want to add into it to make it the slice-of-life sort of "realistic" storyline I want to achieve. For example, Cell Theory and most science and physics remain true as to how they work irl, but when it comes to theology, religion and what happens after we die, well, it's pretty much agreed upon by everyone. Legendary Pokémon are the true gods, and time, life, space and other real world inquiries have an answer in the Pokémon world: they're phenomena created by Pokémon.

How does this work in your fic? I am genuinely curious ~

 

[MikaelBrigman]

I have some stuff about religions in Pokémon. I usually treat Legendaries as forces of nature but not gods, because they're observed scientific phenomena. Mythical Pokémon are closer to a pantheon, since they're myths. Darkrai is a boogeyman, Celebi is for when you make mistakes and pray for a second chance, Hoopa is the jokey answer for how people get from one place to another quickly. Arceus/Helix is basically God, but not everyone agrees on exactly which is which. Xerneas and Yveltal are somewhere in-between, more connected to aura than the idea of life itself. Their existence on Earth feeds from Zygarde. Xerneas fuels the aura of life and would make nuclear radiation a thing, but Yveltal's existence kills things over time while also making the largest radioactive half-lifes so small that nukes don't exist.
What would happen after people in the Pokémon world die? Is the question different than in our world?

 

[bluesidra]

Lol, lazy worldbuilder here. The short answer to your question: all of it.
My first fic, 26y, leaned heavily on the real world. Geography, city layout, social structure, ethnicity, all the good stuff. Oh, and occasionally there were magical beasties running around, but eh... pokemon? what are pokemon?
I really fell in love with this approach, as it lets me get to know a lot of real-life cultures. For hospice, it's basically the same, but with ghosts.

For my second current project, it's a bit harder. For that I try to stick as closely to Hisui and the PLA lore/canon as possible. Which means I for once have to make up my own rules and reasons for worship, which is taunting, but also a ton of fun. Luckily for me, by the time of Hisui, the gods were still very much absent from the human world, and that lends itself to a more "realistic" approach to religion, where social and historical factors are way more prevalent than the actual deity.
Then there's the clans, who are in dire need of a personality outside from sweater-colour. I'm still working on them and of course find myself falling back to real life ethnic groups to appropriate.

As for your last question: Both hospice and 26y take the approach that Legendaries are so rare, that the modern, enlightened humans tend to laugh them off as believes of the past. Like, a genuine fear of Ho-oh's wrath meant a lot to the medieval peasant, but modern society sees that more as a ploy of the ruling class of Enju/Ecruteak to keep their serfs under their thumbs. This is paired with a general decline in religion. And my newest brainchild takes it back to those peasants who never encountered a legendary, but feared them nevertheless.
Tl;dr: My actual worldbuilding on the deities is lackluster at best, they are so rare that it's more interesting to see what the people have made of them.

 

[Guy Orion]

I have some stuff about religions in Pokémon. I usually treat Legendaries as forces of nature but not gods, because they're observed scientific phenomena. Mythical Pokémon are closer to a pantheon, since they're myths. Darkrai is a boogeyman, Celebi is for when you make mistakes and pray for a second chance, Hoopa is the jokey answer for how people get from one place to another quickly. Arceus/Helix is basically God, but not everyone agrees on exactly which is which. Xerneas and Yveltal are somewhere in-between, more connected to aura than the idea of life itself. Their existence on Earth feeds from Zygarde. Xerneas fuels the aura of life and would make nuclear radiation a thing, but Yveltal's existence kills things over time while also making the largest radioactive half-lifes so small that nukes don't exist.
What would happen after people in the Pokémon world die? Is the question different than in our world?

Death is an interesting subject. Ghosts, for example, are agreed upon to exist, and PokéDex entries of Pokémon like Honedge (“Apparently this Pokémon is born when a departed spirit inhabits a sword. It attaches itself to people and drinks their life force.”) also allude to the existence of other supernatural entities that aren’t necessarily ghosts.
Of course, Pokémon being a kid-friendly franchise, I don’t think there’s a canon approach to death, so it is cool to hear how fan works work with it ~

 

[bluesidra]

Of course, Pokémon being a kid-friendly franchise, I don’t think there’s a canon approach to death, so it is cool to hear how fan works work with it ~

Oh, pokemon has multiple approaches to death :D But no canonical version of the afterlife. Any pokedex entries just end with either an individual or the entire world dying. Then again, multiple ghost types are quoted to consist of the souls of the dead, so maybe there is no afterlife after all, only return to the stream or stay as a ghost.

The problem with the afterlife is, as always, that no one lives to tell the tale. It's most likely up to cultural interpretation, and that can vary widely. Some cultures might believe that the dead are reunited with their loved ones in the eternal light of Arceus, while others believe that, as your body returns to the earth, your soul returns to the flow of time, harvested by Celebi.

I may just have a fic ↓ centered on this premise... ↓ just saying. If you're curious ↓

I do have soft worldbuilding on the "afterlife", how human and pokemon get there and how that interacts with other entities like nature spirits and ghosts. But that'll reveal itself in time (aka when I ever get over that boring exposition hurdle)

 

[MikaelBrigman]

Oh, pokemon has multiple approaches to death :D But no canonical version of the afterlife. Any pokedex entries just end with either an individual or the entire world dying. Then again, multiple ghost types are quoted to consist of the souls of the dead, so maybe there is no afterlife after all, only return to the stream or stay as a ghost.

The problem with the afterlife is, as always, that no one lives to tell the tale. It's most likely up to cultural interpretation, and that can vary widely. Some cultures might believe that the dead are reunited with their loved ones in the eternal light of Arceus, while others believe that, as your body returns to the earth, your soul returns to the flow of time, harvested by Celebi.

I may just have a fic ↓ centered on this premise... ↓ just saying. If you're curious ↓

I do have soft worldbuilding on the "afterlife", how human and pokemon get there and how that interacts with other entities like nature spirits and ghosts. But that'll reveal itself in time (aka when I ever get over that boring exposition hurdle)

I like to think that Ghost-types are created from remnants of aura after people/Pokemon die, while their actual souls go on to whatever afterlife there is. Spiritual residue, basically, but not a total recreation of the person because that would lead to functional immortality, which probably sucks a lot.

 

[Venia Silente]

DID ANYONE SAY WORLDBUILDING?​

I could speak at length on how I do it but 1.- it's mostly meta since I dont have that much published material 2.- it's usually covered in the wiki and 3.- better to make some talk around here. So I hope y'all don't mind if I tackle this piecewise, although I'll preface this by saying that in a very general sense I take it a "geological scale AU history Earth" / "Star lifetime AU" approach to development.

Legendary Pokémon are the true gods, and time, life, space and other real world inquiries have an answer in the Pokémon world: they're phenomena created by Pokémon.

How does this work in your fic? I am genuinely curious ~

Partially the same. Some Pokémon are the true gods (specifically, seven of them); while anyone is entitled to start their own religion, only some are intrinsically true whether they know it or not. There's some phenomena that are created by strong force-of-nature tier Pokémon, but there's also lots of wiggle room for phenomena related to non-Pokémon creatures or to other non-living sources. At the macroest scale, entropy is still a thing and together with timezones they are the ultimate enemy of all forms of life and death, but moving energy around is much easier in the Pokémon world than in ours, even between dimensions.

Besides, Groudon is busy doing his own thing which consists in being a jerk; it's not like if you pray really hard and you ask him really nicely for a new continent he's gonna even give you the time of the day, anyway.

Celebi is for when you make mistakes and pray for a second chance.

I personally am liking this and it's interesting you took this angle considering Celebi is a Grass-type Pokémon, who could be strongly associated with regrowth and rebirth but also with, well, onions as layers of reality that can be peeled off to reach the truest reality the more effort and suffering (crying from onions) you make.

What would happen after people in the Pokémon world die? Is the question different than in our world?

Aaaaaaah undecided there. The afterlife, if any, is always a hazy thing and committing to a solution too early in your worldbuilding can break your entire world later on, so I just mostly leave it unanswered. But as I said, entropy is still a thing: as Kuzgesagt so nicely puts it, "life is for making the universe non-boring". Memories can remain in some form I guess, but what makes a person their own individual being has to end at some point.

Tl;dr: My actual worldbuilding on the deities is lackluster at best, they are so rare that it's more interesting to see what the people have made of them.

So true. You'll have to point me to such content of yours sometime. If you have "what Legendaries think of what others (human or Pokémon) think of them", that would be interesting as well. It's just far too good potential for material to let pass.

Listing some stuff on subjects that have been pointed in the thread, and adding my own to it:

• Ghost types are just Pokémon, and in general not functionally related at all to ghosts (lowercase) proper. Although they do have stronger affinity to the features, energy and capabilities of ghosts like possession, in the same way Fairy types have a stronger affinity towards spellcasting.
• "Legendary" is an umbrella term covering a varied distribution of stuff. Some "Legendaries" such as the Latii and Shaymin are quite numerous, but they are hidden or otherwise protected. Others are countably few enough that they can not remain viable as a species without some sort of external help, divine or not, that they enjoy. Some are old remnants of long gone eras, who refuse to die and make everyone else suffer for it instead. And some such as Reshiram and Zekrom are truly "unique" to a universe or dimension, and are created not from purely biological processes but rather from some higher-order, conceptual power of creation stuff.
• At the general human scale in both space and time, the world happens to be similar enough to our own that (fire-resistant, fall-resistant) humans can survive and enjoy, but at larger and smaller scales things in the world are connected in different ways. For example in the history of my mainline world, Poké!Argentina won the equivalent of the Faulklands war, and granted independence to the islands later named Malvusia; the Siberia and northern-Asian landmass is divded by a great sea product of a meteorfall about 135Mi years ago, and thus we have Yakutia ("Eastern Poké!Russia") and Krasnoska ("Western Poké!Russia"); Galar is but a smaller country of old men who after their defeat at the hands of Poké!Argentina got their comeuppance for collonialism wrongdoings and were absorbed into the larger Walesian Empire, so they are still bitter enough about it to try such crazy stuff as Dexit ("Wexit" in my 'verse, probably) or creating misshapen fossil abominations; and all this happens in a largely different geography where the continents and oceans are different, but only mostly the "relative" position between regions is retained, so for example about the only thing that can be said about Unova and Orre is that they are in the same landmass, and not much more.
• Humans are not only more resiliant enough to be able to live alongside Pokémon, but over the last few millions of years have evolved their mind as well in accordance, with better social behaviours, more capability for empathy and planning, and a better intrinsic understanding of body language (after all, they live alongside Bulba Bulba saur! and Pika chu pi!). The basal instincts that favour things like fascism and nazism are largely selected against, so they are a rarer thing although they still happen.

 

[BossCar]

Quite a bit, but I re-work them to fit. EX: Ragulian Renaissance instead of Italian Renaissance.

There was a Medici family, Route 66 exists, various historical periods like Edo and Victorian existed, and so on. For artists and other historical figures, I keep the name they're known by but usually change the rest. EX: Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn is Rembrandt Aendriessen van Remis.

Other aspects can change too. Champion Napoleon, anybody? I also try to get creative with OC location names, but sometimes I'm like "the in-universe Hong Kong is called Hong Kong City." I have in-universe versions of various ancient cultures as well, like the Egyptians and Etruscans.