Topic of the Week: Districts

[Caelphon]

The districts of Mendell City are considered “old lore” for the most part. What do you think should be improved upon or retouched? Should every species get a centric district?

[FlamingLily]

map map map map map map we meed a mendell map there's like 15 districts and we have no idea how much is where is D1 the centre of the city just geographically or is it also the biggest, D3 is the most populous, but how does that translate size-wise? How much of the city is a literal warzone in 6/9/11? Even just percentages of how much is what would be good imho.

[Lly2]

The one thing I'd love to see is additions that give Mendell the sense of scale it deserved.

It gets implied quite often by characters that Mendell doesn't have xyz thing, or that it lacks certain amenities, when realistically it has a population of around four times that of New York. With the population it has, one would expect it has more or less anything you could possibly want out of a city. I couldn't place a finger on any one thing particularly that makes people think that Mendell isn't that big, but looking over it now the only big, obvious indicator of the scale is the population that's mentioned on the main page. Maybe something like Lily mentioned above, like a map or individual population numbers for the different districts (even if they're vague), would help people to get a better understanding for just how big the city really is?

[FlamingLily]

52 minutes ago, Lly2 said:

The one thing I'd love to see is additions that give Mendell the sense of scale it deserved.

To be FAIR D12 does say "This single district has over twenty-five universities, fifteen colleges, thirty high schools, four training centers, and three NanoTrasen research facilities, as well as other corporate research laboratories." While I definitely agree with you generally, to play devils advocate slightly, there's definitely not *no* sense of scale here.

[ImmortalRedshirt]

So, I really like the idea of the districts being a place where characters can choose a place to live that has it's own unique style to it, from housing for the wealthiest to a district perpetually embroiled in a miniature civil war oh God someone please do something about them. It's overall pretty good, and the diversity of living situations is something that I'm going to miss greatly when transitioning over to the standardized, sterile halls of the Horizon, where everyone lives in the same types of living spaces.

That being said, there are some glaring issues. For one, the city is the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined, which may be a bit too excessive. I'd recommend dropping the physical size of Mendell from the wiki, we can infer from the population that it's a really big place. As for districts themselves, I'd love to see it talk more about places where the various species and nations of the cosmos live near each other instead of dividing them into neat little district-sized boxes. Places like D6 and D9 are iconic at this point,  but what about the other residential districts? How do the unique experiences of each species mix together and what does it create?

[Montyfatcat]

I agree with Redshirt there, I think that dividing species up into their own sections misses the chance for cool interactions and also kind of fails to hammer home how cosmopolitan the city actually is. D6 having specific lore about non-tajarans being specifically labelled tourists comes to mind, it feels weird especially since there are already natural sources of conflict with the majority of tajaran culture anyway, inventing a new conflict seems like adding a hat on a hat.

The others already mentioned city size and maps, those would definitely be preferred so people can know exactly where stuff is, but also if a map is made let's not fall into the fiction trap of thinking things gradually get worse as you get further from the nice parts. Having some of the roughest districts next to incredibly wealthy ones would be a great way to have some stories develop as well as add some realistic life to the city. For example in London the fairly deprived Croydon is directly next to the very well off Sutton, and I think the same kind of scenarios would add that extra depth to Mendell.

[Owen]

Unless we were going to expand and increase the number of districts in Mendell City, I don’t think that each species should necessarily get a specific district for themselves. That does not mean, however, that we couldn’t include details of waves of immigrant groups to Mendell all generally setting up in the same area, and clinging onto their culture there. 

Things that we already have set up such as District 6 being Little Adhomai are a fine addition in my mind, given the sheer number of Tajara immigrants to Tau Ceti that we hear about. It makes sense that they would likely settle in the same area, especially if they immigrated in waves with families and friends, etc. But taking Skrell, for example, they have been in close contact with Humanity for so long, I can’t necessarily imagine the need for a specific district set aside known for being the place that Skrell tends to reside in. An exception in the Skrell case, in particular, could be that we see a lot of those Skrell refugees who were fleeing the Traverse settle down in groups, and maybe make a “Little Pluat” or a “Traverse Village” center in one of the districts at large, where perhaps many of these Skrell refugees were placed once they were let into Tau Ceti. It could be an interesting point to include some sort of difference between the old waves of Skrell who migrated to human controlled space and how they interact with the newer waves of Skrell. Just sort of spitballing here a bit. 

I guess my main point with this is that while it makes sense to have these communities pop up across Mendell City, I don’t think that they should necessarily encompass an entire district, like in the case with Little Adhomai. I do think, however, that it would be neat to see a little blurb included in some district descriptions that are just like “This district is also home to many [insert group here] immigrants who moved here during [whenever event], setting up a cultural diaspora of their own.” and basically describe some sort of cultural shift in this specific area whether in politics, religious convictions, language, things of that nature. Maybe even, depending on the age of this community, the architecture of these buildings might even be different and reminiscent of where these groups came from. 

Overall, I don’t have any major issues with how Mendell City is set up at the moment, it is simply adequate, but I think that we have the ability to greatly expand the foundations of Mendell City since so many of our characters live there. It could be neat to have more ‘slice of life’ details about the city, just to make the characters who live there feel more alive and active. And as others have mentioned, the inclusion of some sort of map could be a great help to at least to get a general idea of where all the districts are located and how things would overlap and connect.

[Haydizzle]

I've seen this topic come up to me personally a couple of times after this post, so to give my own thoughts on it:

We are hitting a point where aliens segregating themselves into these communities is starting to make less sense. Tajara and vaurca have some solid reasons to not fully integrate themselves into Biesel society, but past those species, the reasons start to dwindle. It also starts to become a question of how crappy can Biesel become if it's supposedly better than the other nations of the Spur yet the only reality is aliens are not outwardly discriminated against by most people and instead done so in private— it starts to feel samey when done ad hominem.

I'm likely not adding a unathi district for these reasons. I think there would be other ways to write them into the setting there without falling for the template, so to speak. I think the same with synthetics can also be done.

[Marlon P.]

On 22/02/2022 at 12:04, Haydizzle said:

I've seen this topic come up to me personally a couple of times after this post, so to give my own thoughts on it:

We are hitting a point where aliens segregating themselves into these communities is starting to make less sense. Tajara and vaurca have some solid reasons to not fully integrate themselves into Biesel society, but past those species, the reasons start to dwindle. It also starts to become a question of how crappy can Biesel become if it's supposedly better than the other nations of the Spur yet the only reality is aliens are not outwardly discriminated against by most people and instead done so in private— it starts to feel samey when done ad hominem.

I'm likely not adding a unathi district for these reasons. I think there would be other ways to write them into the setting there without falling for the template, so to speak. I think the same with synthetics can also be done.

I agree with this. Adding districts also removes the story fun of biesel being where all these people integrate. Biesep should be the place where every playable species can share the same apartment block or suburban street.