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worldbuildingexSomewhat reluctantly, I've come to the view that I'll have to disallow RPF for this exchange. I can come up with various arguments of different degrees of seriousness, not all of them mutually compatible:
I will give it 24 hours for people to present any counterarguments, but after that I'll be rejecting the fandom unless I've been convinced otherwise.
Someone on FFA raised the question of whether the Star Trek mirrorverse would be its own fandom, which opens up a more general question of parallel universes which exist within canons. ("Canonical canon-divergent AUs", if you like.)
I am very much in favour of nominators following their own judgement, but for what it's worth, I think that in an example like this where there is a significant amount of canon information about that one particular universe to use as a basis for worldbuilding, it would be sensible to nominate it as a discrete entity. On the other hand, giving each of the universes Worf visits during the S7 TNG episode "Parallels" their own main fandom tags would probably be excessive.
To take a different example, consider Marvel comics. Marvel 616, Marvel 1610 (the Ultimate universe), and whatever the new universe is supposed to be called, are all obvious candidates for having their own separate worldbuilding tags. But so too would be the universes of big events like Secret Wars (2015), House of M, and Age of Apocalypse, where a large number of miniseries provided significant amounts of detail about the new universe of that event. On the other hand, giving every Earth-[insert long string of numbers here] that the Exiles or America Chavez have ever visited its own fandom would be OTT. On the other hand, it would also be reasonable to have a "Marvel multiverse" fandom with worldbuilding questions like "Why are mutants so often involved in major changes to the timeline?"
In general, remember that it's fine for fandoms to overlap with each other. The relevant criterion is which source material is fair game for people to extrapolate from.
- "Real world worldbuilding" is a contradiction in terms
- Working things out about the real world isn't extrapolating from the canon, it's consuming more of it
- This is an exchange for fanworks. Anything that could at least theoretically be published in esteemed journals ranging from Nature to the National Enquirer doesn't really qualify as a fanwork.
- There are plenty of other places on the Internet for people to speculate about "real world worldbuilding" already.
- It's just too broad a category.
I will give it 24 hours for people to present any counterarguments, but after that I'll be rejecting the fandom unless I've been convinced otherwise.
Someone on FFA raised the question of whether the Star Trek mirrorverse would be its own fandom, which opens up a more general question of parallel universes which exist within canons. ("Canonical canon-divergent AUs", if you like.)
I am very much in favour of nominators following their own judgement, but for what it's worth, I think that in an example like this where there is a significant amount of canon information about that one particular universe to use as a basis for worldbuilding, it would be sensible to nominate it as a discrete entity. On the other hand, giving each of the universes Worf visits during the S7 TNG episode "Parallels" their own main fandom tags would probably be excessive.
To take a different example, consider Marvel comics. Marvel 616, Marvel 1610 (the Ultimate universe), and whatever the new universe is supposed to be called, are all obvious candidates for having their own separate worldbuilding tags. But so too would be the universes of big events like Secret Wars (2015), House of M, and Age of Apocalypse, where a large number of miniseries provided significant amounts of detail about the new universe of that event. On the other hand, giving every Earth-[insert long string of numbers here] that the Exiles or America Chavez have ever visited its own fandom would be OTT. On the other hand, it would also be reasonable to have a "Marvel multiverse" fandom with worldbuilding questions like "Why are mutants so often involved in major changes to the timeline?"
In general, remember that it's fine for fandoms to overlap with each other. The relevant criterion is which source material is fair game for people to extrapolate from.