“I think with world building, it's important to create a sense of culture even if it is just a fantasy, and the best way to do that is to look at a real human culture and see what makes it cohesive.” IfsThinkingWorldWayHumansLooksImportantRealCultureFantasyBuildingBest WayReal Human Author:Laini Taylor
“Woman, then, stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” MenStillsOrderCultureFantasySilentMalesBoundsObsessionCommandMakersTiedSymbolicImposing Book:Visual and Other Pleasures Source: Visual and Other Pleasures
“The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice -- a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick.” MadeSelfSometimesLastsAmericaChoicesCultureSinCitiesFantasyGrewComfortTasteApproachPicksHollywoodMade ItDeceptionFrontiersAmerican CultureVegasLas VegasVisionariesSelf DeceptionAmbiguousReinventionQuintessentialProminencePraguePeoria Author:Hal Rothman
“Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one's own complexes as the norm for others.” TodayValuesCultureBlackWhiteFantasyJourneyComplexesDrivenFavorsIdeologyCommunismConsumersComplexityParadoxResolutionExpensesSensationsDistractionFascismBlack And WhiteReplacedNormFundamentalistRigorOne SidedConsumer CultureEscalating Author:James Hollis