Kind of a weird question I know, but let me explain. I’m not talking about your themes or messages, but the general feeling someone looking into your world or imagining themselves in it might get about the situation, when the world is not in conflict. Basically, you know how when you watch a franchise like Star Trek, it has certain recurrent moods and feelings, like the tranquility of flying through space, the bittersweet isolation of being on a ship in deep space, where you are close to your crewmates but far from everything else you know, and the general professional but still sufficiently jovial atmosphere that they seem to go for? Or with Pokemon when it’s very adventure driven and based around meeting everyone you come across and making friends both with other humans and also with these magical creatures! I’m sure you can think of descriptions like these for your favourite franchises. We’ve all imagined ourselves in these worlds or imagined ourselves as characters in these worlds right? What were some of the vibes or feelings you imagined when you imagined your world? Or I guess another way of putting it is what would a slice of life exploration of your world be like?
I’m basically kind of writing a pulpy resident evil-style thing set in a spacefaring socialist society, so I guess whats most important for me to get, vibes wise, is the vibe that things really were okay before this. I loved the resident evil books as a kid, but it’s impossible to read them the same way as any kind of leftist. Most of the main characters are cops but it’s never examined, it’s always just treated an an in-universe reason to make your cast of characters a squad of armed martial artists. But this refusal to engage with any part of what they actually do day to day creates a kind of anesthetic blind spot in the worldbuilding, where early on it’s just sort of assumed that everything was totally fine on every level until this one dang bad apple company got too greedy and went too far and did evil stuff, and then the later the reveal that there was also government complicity is hinted at as something shocking and weighty.
I’m rambling, but I want to create a sense of true peace and prosperity on this world to contextuaɔize the horror to come, not a sense of uneasy peace-by-omission conveyed through the perspective of a capitalist enforcer.