The Fifth World:Feel

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The feel of the Fifth World means the ambience that must come through in every aspect of the project: in every setting, in every medum.

Contents

[edit] Post-apocalyptic

For main article, see The Fifth World:Post-apocalyptic (Feel)

The Fifth World fits technically into the post-apocalyptic genre, though it defies many of the conventions of that genre. In the Fifth World, the apocalypse meant the collapse of civilization. If the Fifth World told a typical post-apocalyptic story, such an event would seem like an unmitigated catastrophe, and most of the world would dedicate itself to rebuilding civilization. Instead, the Fifth World returns to the original tone of apocalyptic literature: offering hope to the oppressed and downtrodden that one day, evil would fail, and the goodness of the past would re-emerge. Apocalyptic literature assumes a primitivist view of history: that we lived better lives at some earlier time, and things have gotten worse since then. The fundamental mismatch between the apocalyptic literature in the Bible and the progressivist view largely introduced by the Enlightenment gives us the modern post-apocalyptic genre.

In the Fifth World, the collapse often seemed like a calamity, but the cultures of the Fifth World have moved sufficiently beyond that event so that, with a few exceptions, they generally see it as the only result civilization could have ever reached, a ruthless purge made necessary by the excess and evil of the Fourth World. They see it in much the same way that apocalyptic literature portrayed such future events: a calamitous end that destroyed the wicked, and left only the righteous ancestors to create the Fifth World.

As a result:

  • Little of civilization remains. Towns, roads, even cities have largely returned to the living world, overgrown and populated with animals.
  • Areas that can support agriculture occur very infrequently. Where those pockets exist, they form from exceptional confluences of geography and ecology. Farming usually does begin in those areas, but that farming destroys the conditions fairly quickly, and without anywhere to expand to, the end result sees a Neolithic kingdom rise and then fall calamitously, in just a few centuries at most.
  • Mining for metals generally does not yield much. Some metals do exist, though; mostly bog iron, and the occasional meteorite. Thus, blacksmiths with the knowledge to work such metals have become exceedingly rare. Iron tools or weapons generally recieve treatment as magical items, while Fifth Worlders regard blacksmiths as an incredible kind of magician.
  • Though most of the effects of civilization dissipated rapidly, some long-lasting, lingering effects remain, like nuclear power, global warming and feral animal populations.

[edit] Pseudo-utopian

For main article, see The Fifth World:Pseudo-utopian (Feel)

While a perfect utopia seems simply impossible, the Fifth World also departs significantly from most post-apocalyptic settings in that the apocalypse has significantly improved quality of life. Large-scale societies no longer exist; at a smaller scale, basic human intuitions work again. The same tribal societies that humans evolved in have again become the norm throughout the Fifth World. War has become almost unheard of; epidemic diseases died out centuries ago; almost all societies share a primarily egalitarian lifestyle; elegance drives technology, rather than flashiness; most people live longer, healthier lives; the average work day has dropped to 2-4 hours for hunter-gatherers (depending on where they live), and 6-8 for horticulturalists; material items have almost no value—they make them easily and just as easily discard them; even radical personal expression recieves great encouragement; so on and so forth. All of these provide nothing more than the fringe benefits of living a way of life to which humans have adapted.

Of course, the Hobbesian assumptions about primitive life that anthropological research has overturned do not exist in the Fifth World. Life does not seem "solitary, nasty, brutish and short," as it seemed for so many of the poor in civilization before the collapse. Neither does the Fifth World seem like a simple luddite throwback to the stone age. The cultures of the Fifth World seem synthetic and syncretic. While technology and science no longer act as the sole measures of progress and truth, they still have great value, and while the Fifth World does not expect technology to answer all of its problems, they have elegant technology instead. They use passive solar energy to make ice in the middle of summer, or to heat and cool their shelters. They build simple windmills, and even hang-gliders. Scientific theories from the Fourth World inform and blend into mythology.

Even in a society adapted to human life, human passions remain unchanged. The occasional case of adultery, for instance, can lead to deep-seated and even violent tensions. Jealousy, hubris, and all the other motivations that compel the great dramas (though cultural can always alter their form, sometimes in drastic ways[1]) still seem alive and well in the Fifth World, because the human species remans alive and well. No utopia seems perfect, but in the Fifth World, troubles seem just common enough to make life interesting—they no longer define the whole world.

As a result:

  • Societies exist at a smaller, human scale, so most stories revolve around the interplay of distinct and unique personalities, rather than global events. The Fifth World focuses more on the epic of a particular place, than on sprawling, global tales.
  • Technology and science still exist, but attitudes towards them have changed. Rather than defining society, Fifth Worlders see tham as tools. They prize elegance over flashiness.
  • While many of the seemingly intractable problems our civilization faces have become irrelevant, many sources of conflict remain.

[edit] Magical realism

For main article, see The Fifth World:Magical realism (Feel)

Tribal societies did not simply believe in magic—they experienced it every day. They spoke to animals, changed shape, and experienced the spirits around them directly. Magic simply made up another part of reality. The collapse of civilization required humans to rediscover their magical heritage, or die; as a result of that natural selection, the cultures of the Fifth World live in a magical world. Magical realism does not present this as a matter of simple fantasy; feral humans have a worldview very similar to that of surviving animistic and oral cultures still alive in our own time.

That boundary [between magical and mundane] is not drawn in traditional cultures. In indigenous, tribal, or oral cultures, magic is the way of the world. There is nothing that is not in some way magic, because the fact that the world exists is already quite a wonder. That it stays existing, that it continually keeps holding itself in existence, this is the mystery of mysteries. Magic is the way of the world. It's that sense of being in contact with so many other shapes of awareness, most of which are so different from our own, that is the basic experience of magic from which all other forms of magic derive.[2]

As a result:

  • The literary style of magical realism seems uniquely suited to tales set in the Fifth World. Authors like Gabriel García Márquez provide excellent sources for tone and style.
  • The rediscovery of shamanism and animism often form major, watershed moments in the history of Fifth World cultures.
  • Talking to animals, shapeshifting, vision quests and trips into the spirit world form part of Fifth World life as normal as making tools or hunting.

[edit] Spirit of place

For main article, see The Fifth World:Spirit of place (Feel)

Because the Fifth World operates on a human scale, spirit of place forms an incredibly important part of life. While Fifth World cultures continue on from their Fourth World ancestors, they also had to become native. Thus, the same forces that shaped native cultures before them have also shaped them: the same geography, the same weather patterns, the same plants, the same animals, and so forth. From the feral perspective, the land itself acts as the protagonist of every story. Every person, human or other-than-human, enacts their part of the land's story, living in the land as part of the land, the land living through them. Every place has a spirit, a genius loci in Latin. Individual organisms come from many complex systems, but a spirit emerges from that complexity; likewise, the spirit of a place emerges from the ecology and complexity of life in that place. Regardless of culture or genetics, a group of people living in the same ecology must live with the same animals, the same plants, the same resources, the same climate, etc., leading to very similar cultures, even when no conscious emulation takes place. This provides one of the primary reasons that the cultures of the Fifth World so often resemble the native cultures their forebears had so ruthlessly wiped out: whether they consciously emulated native ways or not, the collapse forced people to adopt those ways simply because they worked so well, the very same reason the natives had turned to those ways in the first place. Even in concerns as seemingly transient as fashion and language, native patterns emerge. Fifth World cultures still hear the same sounds as the natives that lived there before them, which influences their language through the same onomatopeiac sounds. Decoration and art influenced by access to the same materials, and the same setting for inspiration, tend towards similar styles.

As a result:

  • Fifth World cultures tend to reflect a unique combination of Fourth World influence and the general outlines of native style from the region they come from.
  • The most important relationships to any Fifth Worlder come from her relationship to her family, and to her land--the very soil of her ancestors.
  • While other-than-human persons in the same land relate like kin, even humans from other lands do not. Family and land form the most basic relationships; people from other lands, for all practical purposes, might as well come from other planets.
  • One's native land empowers a feral human. When something happens, the whole land tells them about it immediately. The whole land acts like an extended set of senses for them. Outside of their land, that works against them, depriving them of a sense they have come to rely on.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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