>>5518829>that does not attempt to soften the blow of it's universe or sand off the edges of the world that it's immersing you inThis is excellent advice, I really agree with this!
You can study lots of anthropological or ethnographic behavioural detail and just incorporate it. Interestingly, Jack Vance of the dnd Vancian magic does this in his short stories as does R Scott Bakker in his apocalyptic ones lol.
You can also adapt hyperattentive observational details from your own life and human experiences and incorporate them into your world setting; this embodiment of your lived personal human experience is what distinguishes your writing from gpt-3 and its 175billion parameters.
It sort of amuses me how maybe the ziggurat or chacmool, where priests cut out the hearts of war-captives with obsidian knives offering their remains to the feathered wind serpent god - this captures the spirit of America today better than empowered inclusive corporate workplace diversity and wellbeing training lol. So I put it into my game world settings hehe.
If you want a translated literary / pretentious artistic distinction version, it is the American psyche of Hemingway vs Henry James, hehe.
But I think that heart-sacrifice is what America has become nowadays, compared even to the America that produced Conan,
>>5513595>>5501055Rambo
>>5515272and Gordon Gekko
>>5517497>>5513939that I once knew.
>>5513939>>5518707>Fantasy, swords-and-sorcery as a western>Althusser, imaginary reality as ideology>authors reproducing their own societal means of production and cultural conventions etcOf course, if you ever read the Conan short stories, you know he differs from the Schwarzenegger depiction; both are very enjoyable in their own ways.
Take a look at how the author Robert E Howard described - in his very own words - his process creating Conan the Barbarian:
>It may sound fantastic to link the term "realism" with Conan; but as a matter of fact - his supernatural adventures aside - he is the most realistic character I ever evolved. He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known, and I think that's why he seemed to step full-grown into my consciousness when I wrote the first yarn of the series. Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian. From a letter to Clark Ashton Smith from Robert E. Howard (23 July 1935)
