Worldbuilding Hows And Whys And Whats.

[chn_breathmint]

I identify primarily as a gen fic writer even though I do ship (and slash) characters in this movie. For me the slash tends to be sort of a spicy relish on top of the delicious delicious setting Nolan has given us to extrapolate upon and my entire gen fic output (nearly 80k words so far oh god I have no life) tends to revolve around worldbuilding

Comments

[fae_boleyn]

Damn, I am impressed. This is a very workable method to worldbuilding, and as someone who does a lot of it, I really like it.

My version of worldbuilding often involves tweaking existing worlds in an AU situation (see Tudor novels, new Supernatural oneshot series, that bloody crossover series) so I admit I've not given as much thought to my process in canon. My AU process I'll be going into on my own journal. I tend to work on character backstories and mostly not much else in canon fics.

However, I did find your Mal/Arthur/Cobb (er, not-necessarily-in-the-ship-sense slashes there) theory interesting, especially since I had a different take on them. Or sometimes I do, anyway. I have to keep tweaking backstories or else my headcanon wants to put all my fics in one universe or a series of AUs existing in one multiverse. I'm not kidding.

But, anyway, I tend to see Arthur as maybe ex-military when he gets into dreamshare; that he was recruited by whatever shady agency did the initial dream work. Either they took him out of the military or were overseeing the soldiers, I've written both.

So we have Arthur (and sometimes Eames is there) and then there's the Cobbs. Now, in the film, Arthur and Cobb know each other very well, but they don't... actually have the best bud vibe feel that so many seem to give them. So I saw Arthur as the Cobbs' handler, who stuck around with Cobb because he felt the Limbo disaster with Mal was partly his responsibility for letting things get so far, and he stays with Cobb to prevent it from happening again.