Favorite background details?

[ThisAdamGuy]

One of my favorite parts of worldbuilding are the little background details that nobody is really going to pay much attention to, but add a bit of flavor to the story. What are your favorite examples of this, either in your writing or someone else's?

In my writing, I love coming up with random products. In Henry Rider: Clown Hunter, Henry's favorite cereal is Chocolate Frosted Cocobutts with Marshmallow Turds. There's also an old-timey advertisement for Duke Tottingham Broffenhangletompten’s Box o' Cheery Good Times. What exactly they are is never specified, and with my knowledge as the author (which is both a privilege and a curse) trust me, you don't want want to know. There's a fast food chain called Wombo World, where they sell Wombo Combos, Wombinators, and a Icee-like drink called a Toxic Sludgee that makes your teeth glow in the dark.

In I Applied for a Delivery Job and Got Turned Into a Flying Reindeer?! some of the toys they're selling on Black Friday are the Bonnie Blah Blah doll, which weighs almost one hundred pounds and repeats twenty phrases at one hundred forty decibels. There's also Janitor Jim action figures (Wielder of the Ultimop and Archenemy of Vaumettar the Pukelord! Comes with PP-Equipment Armor Set and spinning Megasonic Battlebroom!) Sammy-Truck dolls, and Major Monkeytron Moonbase Playsets.

Movies and TV shows are fun too. In Henry Rider, there's an anime called Shikai Warriors: Jaws of Heaven, about magical dentists who fight each other with giant toothbrushes. There's a cartoon called Oops, I married a Giraffe! about a giraffe named Jeremy Jeroff whose wife and in-laws are constantly trying to kill him in comedic ways because she didn't realize he was a giraffe when she married him.

Henry and her friends also like watching cheap horror and scifi movies, like Gnomaggedon 5: The Revenge of Count Flamingous, where evil claymation garden gnomes attack a suburban neighborhood. She also references another movie they watched (which I'm just realizing I never gave a title) about a zombie dinosaur unicorn fairy princess named Zombiesauruscorn Rex, Princess of the Pretty Pretty Kingdom and Wielder of the Magic Scepter of Friendship.

In IAFADJAGTIAFR?! book 2 (currently unreleased) they watch an old rubber-suit monster movie about an army of hundred foot tall mutant turkeys that attack America on Thanksgiving, along with their eight-legged queen Turkantula.

Your turn! what are your favorite background worldbuilding details?

 

[FluffyGura]

Probably like stray cat where at the start of every chapter there's a little tibit about the world for example a professor sharing their opinion on a topic or advertisements like you created it adds abit of life into the world.

 

[Deleted member 84247]

In my Vampire Princess story, the MC is gifted an endless bottle of paint. This is achieved by the gifter paying a subscription service to the paint shop. The bottle of paint is magically connected to a large barrel of paint that gets refilled. So the endless paint bottle won't work if the shop stopped filling the barrels.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Have not really done much (that did not directly refer to a plot point eventually) in any stories I have up here. One of the stories I have on Royal Road was a TV series (and has "section introductions" by the actor who starred in it) in a series of stories I wrote for an APA in the 90s, my section of our "Omniverse;" The Omniverse was an "invitation only shared world" and I was in the second wave accepted to it. The idea was a world where the golden age of superheroes happened between 1950 and 1970 - then, around 1980, an alien invasion devastated the Earth - heroes and villains switched sides, died, or suffered career ending injuries and the survivors all retired their costumed identities - either going public or just abandoning the "life" before the aliens were finally defeated in 1986. The world was rebuilding and there were no superheroes or supervillains until something happened around 1995 and suddenly, they were popping up again...

 

[TheBestofSome]

In my story, I like the little references to previous isekais that I've scattered about, such as my mc coming upon a deck of playing cards that look suspiciously like the ones he was used to seeing on Earth, or the armor of a particular culture looking awfully familiar.

My favorite, though, is coming up with new turns of phrase. Such as 'speak of the fae' instead of 'speak of the devil' (since devils are a distinct species instead of a theological figure), or 'happier than a dwarf in a gold mine', though that one's not the most original. I also simply tweak idioms occasionally; 'like pulling teeth' became 'like pulling hydras' teeth'. It can be a challenge to come up with phrases that both flow well and make sense, but it's a fun challenge.

In my Vampire Princess story, the MC is gifted an endless bottle of paint. This is achieved by the gifter paying a subscription service to the paint shop. The bottle of paint is magically connected to a large barrel of paint that gets refilled. So the endless paint bottle won't work if the shop stopped filling the barrels.

I like this; feels very 'real' for lack of a better term. If real-world businesses knew how to do this, they absolutely would.

 

[theInmara]

When there's a major technological or magical innovation that's been around for generations, all the little ways that that will change daily life for everyone, and how everyone including the narrator takes it for granted.

On the Sunspot (an alien generational starship), the construction nanites (which were used to help build the ship) have been used for other technologies for millennia. People take for granted that they don't need to clean their houses, or wash their clothes or bedsheets, because the nanites just take care of all of that.

Since everyone has been living in a post scarcity society from day one (the revolution that led to it happened before the ship was built), customs regarding the sharing of food are very different than almost anywhere on Earth. There's no assumption that anyone is ever in danger of starving (or of being without shelter), so rules of hospitality are more about making sure no one is being bothered rather than making sure everyone is safe and fed. Food is not the central concern of any party or celebration, unless that celebration is specifically about food. There are often no game day snacks! And if someone brings something for themselves to eat, it's not considered rude, and nobody expects them to share.

Because everyone is conceived in a vat and hatched from eggs, adopted by a caretaker and assigned an AI Tutor, families are structured very differently. More like little orphanages. And because personal autonomy is prized and protected, those family structures vary a lot. Some are multigenerational. Some are just one caretaker, one child, and their two Tutors. But nobody is blood related. So all of the structures and norms of our Earthly societies that are built on blood relation do not exist. There's no concept of incest, it's completely irrelevant (nobody can get pregnant). This even affects storytelling, because since it is not a subject to write about, there are no stories that highlight it in any way. Romance stories are way different because they've never had the social restrictions that humans have experienced. No political marriages, because there are no marriages. No gendered expectations. No biological sex. Instead, romance stories often center around extreme differences in experiences, either huge age gaps or different special interests. A 215 year old potter falls in love with an 56 year old astronomer, and they have to figure out if their relationship can really even go anywhere (it probably can't, and it will be frowned upon).

Murder mysteries are way different. You don't have a police force that is derived from slave catchers from a hundred or so years ago, but there is a technocratic panopticon. There's a good chance the murder victim is still around, their consciousness ascended to the Network. And the murder was caught on camera with sound, infrared, ultraviolet, and several other spectra of sensors. The stories often tend to be about the really extreme cases where the system broke, and nobody in the audience believes that's possible but rolls with it for the fun of the story. Or they're about examining the motives and social pressures that lead to the event, and figuring out how to stop such a tragedy from happening again. Much less about a single brilliant sleuth showing off.

The science fiction stories, however, are all about encountering aliens, because that's never happened but everyone hopes it will. Until it actually does happen, and then that genre requires a complete overhaul.

And then, when it turns out the aliens are humans, who have to pay rent and earn enough money to eat and still need to sweep their floors, the Sunspotians have to question everything.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Oh, forgot one - but nobody would know it so...
In "Strange Awakening," there's a reference to a band called Adversary. Several years ago, for NaNoWriMo, I wrote the story of Adversary. The second chapter included a flashback to when the band first met, and initially I tried to create a generic singing competition, but then figured I should just be honest and use the show that inspired the idea - the US version of "The Voice." Finished with 3 days to go that year, and at 62k words... but then realized I could not do anything with it without getting permission from the (TV versions of the) real people involved and I only had connections to one of them (who never responded); not even NBC Universal replied. So it was relegated to the "Either I just scrap this or re-write 30% of it to have all fictional characters," pile (on a hard drive I need to pay a fortune to access, if I can, because the computer itself just flat out died). So that short bit of dialogue is all that remains of the one (of three tries) time I completed a NaNoWriMo

 

[TheIcMan]

In the Trails game series, there are whole NPC character arcs going on in the background that you won’t know about if you don’t talk to them.

There’s a famous one, but that dude actually becomes relevant in future games, so he’s not a background detail. In the first five games, there’s a whole story going on about a couple who run into each other, fall in love, get married and have a child, and go to another country to find the husband’s estranged father to they can work to be a proper family. And while it’s just a normal couple story, it also adds minor details to the world geography and geopolitical relations
The entire thing goes on, and you can completely miss out on it.

TLDR trails is great go play it (all 12 of them)

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Here's two from the story I'm posting on Honeyfeed - in the far future there is a fast food restaurant that "we believe had a different name in the past but we now just call "Golden M"" and another one that...
well, I wanted something like Pop's Choklit Shoppe from Archie/Riverdale, but high tech, so settled on the name "Servo Shakes," a robot-staffed shake shop... And then had the idea of having the robots be sarcastic, with cylindrical red bodies and bubble heads... and most of them have short arms with oversized hands...