Rambling about Intent and World Rules (Patreon)

This is going to be my longest ramble yet, but it’s important to me because it shapes how I write my stories.

I’ve hesitated to post this one for a while because it’s more serious than my usual rambles, but I want you guys to know how I write and why, so here goes.

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I could split this into two separate Rambles, one about Narrative Intent, and another about My World Rules—but both are fairly dependent on one another in practice. So I'm combining them.

If you are more interested in the world-building stuff specifically—rather than my own philosophy on writing this story—you can skip ahead to the “World Rules” section below. :D

First, I’m going to make it abundantly clear that I am not perfect. Even with these foundations I’m about to talk about in place, I can still fuck up.

But with them there, it’s less likely to happen.

So before getting into the World Rules, let's talk about how I approach Omen of a Bluebell as a whole. It ties neatly into why the World Rules exist in the first place.

PS: This ramble reflects some of my personal views on storytelling and worldbuilding. You do not need to agree with them. It exists to explain the foundations behind how and why I write Omen of a Bluebell the way I do—not to convince anyone to share those views.

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Narrative Intent

I enjoy writing powerful characters, but I’m not interested in power as a universal solution. It’s fun, yes, but I don’t want it to be everything.

Strength matters. Numbers matter. Progress matters.

But none of them exist in a vacuum.

Limitations, tradeoffs, and friction aren’t punishments or excuses for failure; they’re the building blocks that make growth, tension, and heartfelt victories possible.

You might read that and say, “Well, duh.”

But it’s at the core of everything that matters when writing a story. To me, it’s an obvious statement that’s worth stating a thousand times.

So... my story is built on Rules (with a very deliberate capitol ‘R’) that are meant to both enable and limit that aspect.

Those Rules exist in-universe for reasons, and they apply even when they are inconvenient for characters I like.

When Emilia runs into constraints—whether personal, biological, magical, or systemic—it’s not because I want to cheapen a conflict or retroactively excuse outcomes with “she was dealing with X bad thing.”

It’s because the world operates consistently, and consistency matters more to me than maintaining a power fantasy. There is a reason for every narrative choice I make, and if I were to spell all of them out, there wouldn’t be a story in the first place.

I’ve talked about it in another ramble, but it’s worth saying again: This is a first-person, present-tense story. You only ever know what Emilia knows, when she knows it.

Side note: I know for a fact that I could probably write her story better, in a way that expresses her knowledge more than I have already. And I do intend to go back and ensure that is done before self-publishing book one (see:Rambling about Possibilities Pt.2)—but that's not really the point I'm making here.

What I'm getting at is that some mechanics, lore, and reasoning exist long, long before they’re explained in-story, and not every answer is meant to be immediate or visible yet.

Hell, some answers aren’t even meant to be known to you guys at all.

So… lets explore a few pieces of the framework that I use with this foundation.

The World Rules

Way back in Chapter 14, I brought up something I think should be implicit in a story:The age where people are considered adults.

In the case of the world I’ve crafted, that’s 18 years old.

Not because I am attempting to impose real-world values on the setting, but because—unless a world explicitly operates differently—this is the baseline assumption most readers bring with them.

If the story doesn’t follow that convention, then it should be stated clearly in the text, through the story itself or the characters who live in it.

But that’s not the only “Rule” I operate by when crafting worlds.

1. Time Travel

Short version: no.

Time travel doesn’t exist in this world, and I don’t intend to add it unless I someday write a story built entirely around time travel from the ground up.

Given how complicated stories with any kind of time travel are, that’s not happening anytime soon.

It opens up too many loopholes and introduces way too many problems. It also has some risk of breaking the rules below.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love well written time travel stories (looking at you, The Perfect Run)… but I’m nowhere near skilled enough to manage something like that yet.

Lore-wise, Fylem, the God of Time and Eternity, doesn't allow time magic because its his domain and he doesn't want people fucking it up. Lol

2. Autonomy

This one’s big.

The world I've crafted contains no Skills, Classes, Magics, or System mechanics that inherently violate personal autonomy.

No mind control, no body puppeting, no soul manipulation, no “press button to override X person’s free will.”

You may think, “What about the Faen Binding Stone that Emilia made with Kophis?”

Even that is limited by this rule. The binding simply would not have formed if Emilia tried to overstep with her demands. This is the case for anything that may seem like an exception to this—or any other—rule.

(ie, suppression items, which have their own sets of limitations depending on lots of factors.)

I will not explain more about how or why it works as it does because spoilers.

Basically it boils down to this: Only people violate autonomy.

Never the System. Never the magic. Never the world.

Whether it’s ultimately benign, like Carmine measuring Emilia for tailoring…

Or truly terrible, like the abuse the women at Tails & Temptations suffered under the Ratweaver gang…

It’s always a person choosing to cross that boundary.

Does the power people gain make certain violations possible?

Absolutely.

But that’s no different from how a weapon works. The dagger on the table won’t suddenly grow legs and stab someone to death—someone has to pick it up first.

Lore wise, a lot of this is supported by Morena, the Goddess of Life and Death. Because she lives every life there is, she'd experience it if autonomy were allowed to be stripped. And she doesn't want to experience it. So it's not a thing.

3. Insta-Death Mechanics

Okay, this one’s more nuanced, but very much in line with my stance on autonomy.

When I say “no insta-death,” I don’t mean characters can’t die instantly.

Obviously if Emilia and Kophis fought to the death, Emilia would be paste in a blink. Less than a blink, even.

But what I do mean is this:

No death-without-agency.

No true no-win scenarios.

No inescapable instant-kill mechanics.

No. Removal. Of. Options.

If a character dies instantly, it’s because the situation itself is hopeless. Not because the story or System mechanically (or magically) forced an outcome with zero possible alternatives.

Even in the absurd Emilia-vs-Kophis example:

She can run.

She can fight.

She can even attempt the impossible miracle kill that would never realistically work.

These options suck.

These options would fail.

But they exist.

On top of that, they only fail because a person—Kophis, in this case—intervenes.

That means the world rules stay consistent. Death can be instant, but it is never predetermined by a mechanic, and never completely inescapable in a conceptual sense.

Those kinds of hard-coded, no-choice, no-wiggle-room death rules break the feeling of fairness and agency I want my worlds to have.

Lore wise, this is a bit of both Morena and Fylem, though mostly Morena. She wants life to have a fighting chance, basically.

Afterword:

There are a few more, but they are worthy of their own Rambles.

Realism, for instance. It involves how I crafted the healing, regen, killing, and life sustaining aspects of the world. Realistic in some ways, magical in others. It's genuinely a lot to cover.

Also Competence, another hugely important one. That one's all about making sure the characters I write aren’t fools for the sake of pushing the narrative forward. Not just tools for the story, but actual people. As best I can, anyways. It's difficult.

I'll make another ramble with just those two at some point.

So... right... I've rambled enough.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my TedTalk Ramble.