Cookbook Worldbuilding
I think by now we are all familiar with the concept of the multiverse, right? Good.
Because what I am going to touch about is something that exists for way longer than this, simply by franchises existing. Today any company will slap the multiverse label on it, but that was not really the norm even a while ago.
If Sonic SatAM and Sonic X cartoons have completely different stories that was just… how it is. One series ended and that was about it. Screw you for thinking Princess Sally would show up at some point.
Sometimes it is on the same world but it feels weirder when a crossover happens. It was shocking to me how Power Rangers Animal Force suddenly revealed not only it was on the same universe as Time Force but all of the other series I didn’t watch, which implies you have giant robots everywhere on the world and nobody bothers address it.
The Recipe
When you take a non-corporative look at an IP, but as a consumer, this kind of adaptation to a medium is a blessing and a curse. You may prefer one era, or one series, or you may be annoyed with the lack of connection or acknowledgement of what should be at least mentioned.
Sometimes it is because a character is being deconstructed, even though it is not the author’s intention, it is how you see that character. And sometimes the IP is a concept, that is straying out of what made it special to you.
You strip it down to bare bones and there is some kind of “core”, a context… and I could really argue what it means, but I feel the best comparison I can make is that they are all variations of the same recipe.
You may change the amount of flour, or how long you fry it, and maybe if you fold it a little different it is called something else. You may be a purist or you may not, and you might refuse to eat it if one adds an ingredient you hate.
Does that make sense? I hope it does because just describing is not the point of the article.
Variations
Okay, let’s do one last reference on big media that does this mostly non-intentionally.
Think of how Red from Pokemon Special and Ash from the anime are based on the same mute video game character, but their world and they themselves are vastly different. One ages, for example.
Digimon did start this way, their second manga (and first serialized, as far as I know), V-tamers, was Tai being isekai-ed by an angel to fight the forces of evil with his Digimon… V-dramon.
He isn’t “destined” but he was chosen, there are those monsters, they evolve, they can get better with help of a human. The concept of being digital is quickly forgotten.
When they went for animating it they brought Tai, but gave him Agumon, they took Matt and Sora loosely based on other human characters, added more because monsters bond to just one human, for some reason. Oh, and they were also isekai-ed too. Have fun being destined to save the world or something.
The sequel reduces the number of characters, takes the DNA/Jogress evolution from the manga, remembers V-dramon exists but doesn’t use him because he is fat and we need a guy that does crunches, so XV-mon it is. And it elaborates for a while on crests and other things that make the human character have a role.
It is at this point that, from memory, Digimon accepts multiverse a bit more, there is a Game with Ryo (the random guy from Tamers) and we do have an actually good crossover of Davis from Digimon Adventures 02 with the original Tai from V-tamer.
Speaking of Tamers, forget destined, digimon still bond with just one person (most of the time). Buy our card-board crack until we drop the concept for emotional-related evolutions and the red triangle, and this time instead of fusing digimon you fuse with digimon get to be evangelion.
Time for digimon Frontiers, where you cut the middle mon and you are the digivolved mon, final evolutions are still something special, this time we remembered you can be isekai-ed by an angel.
Digimon recycles concepts but they’re different worlds.
This is often seen on different mediums of a franchise, where characters may share the same name and even design but the story goes very different, not in a what-if kind of way.
Meanwhile the games are doing its own thing with the IP, and I could get on saying how Savers makes a cameo on Digimon World DS, but you got the point by how 7 year old me without internet tried to put together the pieces of why some evolution didn’t make sense or why a digimon was suddenly not special at all.
If you’re not into Digimon: Legend of Zelda is a reset button - you need a mute boy, a girl whose name everyone thinks is actually the boy and so long it is linked to a bisexual awakening you’re good to go.
You only have the recipe left. And sometimes it might not even resemble the food it used to be, a Recipe of Theseus situation, if you will.
But with time, some themes and characters pop up again and again and you have a certain distinction of what a lore actually is.
It is intentional enough that going against the archetype is a noticeable subversion, but like a chat on tinder you never need to commit; it can always start small and see what sticks.
Comic books used to try to see what sticked with elseworlds/what ifs, from specific moments, and nowadays they run with completely different things to renovate their IP.
Dragon Ball is trying a little bit of both, especially now they’re gonna milk every little drop of canon Toriyama had on his notes for Dragon Ball Online and Xenoverse. And I know it sounds like a bad thing but the joy I wish I had with DBO and even Digimon Masters at the time was a world I could experience as my own story.
Cookbooks
You may have noticed both examples I just mentioned are MMORPGs, and maybe if you play tabletop RPGs I’m speaking the obvious. There are no rules, only guidelines for a open world, belonging to an trademark or not.
A friend of mine was explaining how Tormenta, a Brazilian alternative to RPG had fanon agreements on non-official races, and even some that definitely wouldn’t be official because they were straight up something from classic other franchises.
That doesn’t need to be just games though, just wikis collaborative or not in their worldbuilding nature can shake up the usual world of goblins, elves and orcs.
There used to be even famous collaborative projects 20 years ago. Pixiv Fantasia was something my kid self tried to understand if there was a major lore or not, but it was just… pretty pictures. Concept art for stories that went mostly untold, just imagined.
About 10 years ago, around 2016, I was trying to treat my undiagnosed ADHD trying to make 3 monsters a day. If I skipped days, I need to pay them up. For a year. They were monsters for my main world, Mori.
They helped me think how a world would look like, how humans shouldn’t be the only users of the mechanics of that place, and while a lot of the ideas were uncreative and needed a new design… Well, I always thought about a database where I could share them properly, give ideas to other people to have on their stories, their games in my world or adapted to their own enjoyment.
Eventually this became what I want from this website. Not just being technical and talk as if I’m a know it all, but genuinely share something I think it is special with you, not much different from how I was a kid making my own digimon-like world and making other kids run around with me on a playground.
It is a bit too soon for all of that, but hopefully I can share my own cookbook with you, not just ideas.
PS: Sonic would play five days of the week where I lived so I was not familiar with the satanic roots of the US.
PS2: If you think about it I should really have gone with the Digivolving metaphor where suddenly one or two stages have nothing to do with each other. I was too busy thinking how in Brazil we call them digi-chosen.