Non-Boring Environments that need Fantasy Representation
Tropical Rainforests
Scrubland/Dry Forests. For extra effect make them the sort that burn very often; some native plants never germinate until after a fire, and some animals not only rely on fire to smoke out prey, but may even start them themselves.
Savannas/Tropical Grasslands
Temperate Rainforests. I almost didn’t include this bc New Zealand is covered in them, and that’s where they filmed Lord of the Rings. But tbh, no one really knows about them, so it belongs here
Taiga Forests
Barren Tundra, perfect for some extreme seasonal dichotomy
Polar Ice Sheets
Desert-Grasslands (arguably the same as Scrubland but Australia’s good at adding its own twists)
Barren Desert
If you like Cacti, look at American Deserts like the Sonoran
Salt Flats
Soda Lakes and Alkaline Lakes
Madagascar’s Karst Limestone Formations
Madagascar’s Spiny Forests
Madagascar’s Baobab Forests
Madagascar’s Subhumid Forests (Madagascar is cool as hell ok)
Danxia Landforms
Badlands/Mountainous Deserts
Steppes and Highland Prairies
Flood Basalts
Newly-Formed Islands, still rife with Volcanic activity
Now for Underwater Environments, sure Coral Reefs are cool.
But there are SO MANY other kinds of environments for aquatic settings, it’s unbelievable:
Seaside Cliffs
Archipelagos. Not just Tropical Island chains like Polynesia (Moana anyone?) but also Coldwater Archipelagos like the Aleutians.
Tidal Flats
Bayous/Cypress Swamps
Tropical River Basins, AKA Seasonally Flooded Rainforests
Mangrove Swamps/Deltas/Beaches
Kelp Forests
The Open Ocean
Coastal Seabeds
Rocky Beaches with Tidepools
And there are a LOT more I could name but this post is already obscenely long as is, if you’d like to toss in your own go right ahead, but my point is if you limit yourself to European Deciduous Forests you’re a wimp.
Pretty inspirational!
Environments are as important as the characters most of the time!
I had a vivid dream that I had to name every single horse owned by the national park service but I had to abide by thoroughbred naming conventions (entire Real words, no mispellings, no profanities, no repeats at all ever) for like. Paperwork reasons? I had to enter the names into a text box on the horse registration website and the whole dream was me figuting out the Secret Rules and Giving Horses Increasingly Strange Named
I can still remember my reasoning like “There probably aren’t that many horses named after REALLY deviant sex acts” and “What if i give them hyphenated Puritan-style names? What if I give them LAST NAMES?“ “I can probably just string random nouns together and get them past the online checker”. Some names I Remember:
Nasty Santa
[The first third of the Bee Movie Script before I hit the secret character limit]
Brown Saddlebacked SOB #472
Valid-To-Eat-Fingers O’Malley
Hyper Nightmare Fetish Pop Art
Lamp
“Fuck-You, no, wait. Can’t use ‘fuck’… Forinicate-Your-Fences-Johnson!”
A lot of Christian conspiracy theorists are weirdly, outspokenly threatened by the goddess Ishtar. Who do they think they are? Gilgamesh?
There’s this one guy in Indianapolis who goes around destroying statues and monuments because they’re “idolatry” and believes the whole city, being constructed in the shape of a wheel, is “a summoning circle for the goddess Ishtar”. Which, like, I wish. Indiana suffers from a distinct lack of culture, but if it were secretly a hotbed of ancient Mesopotamian religion, that would really put it on the map.
