You know what bugs me about soulmate aus? So, I’m assuming that this whole “the first thing your soulmate says to you blahblahblah” is a worldwide thing. So many of the aus I’ve read have a quote at some point that addresses how tragic it is when people have soul words that say something like “hi” or “‘sup” which makes NO SENSE! In a world where the first thing you say to people is THAT important, WHY GOD WHY would the culture still use standard greetings? Who the fuck is still saying hello at this point? Everyone in these worlds would surely develop a personalized greeting different from everybody else’s to prevent confusion. Like how no 2 racehorses can have the same racing name? The best part is that every time people met someone new for the first time, they would try to say something that no one else had said. You’d have people meeting eachother at a job intetview, they’d shake hands, smile politely, then one of them would be like “Every Tuesday, I hard even grape purple farm house sunsets too” and this would be perfectly normal. Or you’d go up to the cash register at Starbucks and instead of saying “Hello, what can i get for you today?” She’d look you right in the eye and say “I don’t know what Space Jam is” THEN ask you what you want and she’d repeat that to every customer in the line for the rest of her career. And because they live in the AU, nobody would think it was weird.
^^In which AUs get interesting with their world building. I love it.
A world where everyone has their own, increasingly bad, pickup lines
Sounds like my kind of world
I actually read one singular fanfic that actually used this idea and it was great, but for the life of me I can’t even remember what fandom it was for
Imagine the ultimate insult though! Saying, Hi, or Hello when first meeting someone would imply “I don’t care if we are soulmates, I don’t want to even try with you.
I would read the HECK out of this!
I’m so sorry if this is obnoxious, but I have to tag my favorite authors in the faint hope that they’ll write something like this @copperbadge @mhalachai @nyxetoile
See, I so rarely write soulmate AUs because I do think it actually requires a fair amount of worldbuilding – you have to really look at culture and see how it would shift, which is fun! But also a lot of work.
Like, it’s definitely funnier if everyone just says something different and new every time they meet someone, and I love the idea of snubbing someone by saying “Hello” dismissively (also if you have “Hello” as your soulmate keyword you know you’re in for some HARD GOING). But realistically we’re pragmatic creatures – it’s much more likely we’d develop a “keyword” and everyone just greets with their own keyword. Likely we’d just use names to greet with, and have a much wider variety of names.
I know that there are some people who don’t like soulmate AUs because they don’t like the implication that there is only ever one (or a few, in some AUs) person who is Right For You, and that your life is predestined to include them, which I get. I prefer the structure I implied in Soul Bomb, where there are basically otherworldly statistical models that know who the best person for you is, the person whose model matches yours the closest, but you’re not necessarily destined to meet them – if they die, you didn’t lose your soulmate, you’ve just shifted down the scale to the next person with a compatibility model above a certain percent. I also prefer stories where either (or both) a) not everyone has a soulmate or very few find theirs, so it’s not so crushing to be an outlier, and b) not all soulmates are romantic.
But yeah I think it requires a rethinking of basic culture and especially with keyword-based versions, some rethinking of how we verbally interact. Which is fun, but often more work than I want to put into a love story. :D
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#story ideas I will never write #(though mostly reblogged for the discussion of worldbuilding)
Brinens and Things 