Thread by @TochiTrueStory

I'm giving a talk on worldbuilding tomorrow and was reminded of a thing that happened in college. So I wanna tell the story of how my college Mock Trial team effectively broke Mock Trial.

I'd done some theater in college and knew I was eventually gonna go to law school so when a girl I had a crush on asked me to join the team and play the part of some witnesses, it was a no-brainer.

One of the trials we did was a defamation case. I'm a bit iffy on the details as it was over a decade ago, but the plaintiff was, I think, an aspiring politician. (I think his name was Walton.) And the defendant was a news magnate, Berkshire, I think.

Walton was suing Berkshire because of some less-than-flattering news coverage, I think. I think one of the witnesses in the case was a janitor. Another was a reporter. There may have been others.

I was new to Mock Trial, but it was apparently a hallowed tradition at the time that if there were black students on the team and they were cast in various roles, they were to play stereotypes. Ingenuous janitor, AAVE-accented woman. Demeaning Rosencrantz & Guildenstern types.

You were given a ton of latitude with the parts you had. There were the facts of the case and whatever you brought to the part. And it was readily apparent that when it came to character, these college students were sorely lacking in emotional imagination.

Our team was led by this renegade coach who understood better than most just how much lay outside the facts of the case to aid your team. Performance and persuasion, such that it wasn't just about paint-by-numbers arguments. The case you presented was about people.

In this defamation case, for the prosecution side, this coach cast me as the aspiring politician. I forget whether or not Obama had been elected by now. He was definitely on people's minds.

So I'm this aggrieved young man whose burgeoning political career stands to be derailed by this magnate who may or may not have a vendetta against me and my family.

Here's what we did:

We made me black.

A lot of teams didn't have a black student on their team, and those that did never seemed to think that casting them in starring roles could offer a winning strategy. But our renegade coach new differently. He saw the talent on our team and what was going on in the world and boom

Our case-in-chief: this magnate was racist.

Understandably, other teams were FLUMMOXED. Opposing counsel had no idea what to do when I asserted my blackness on the witness stand.

A black man was sitting in the witness stand, and all of a sudden teams had to reckon with that blackness in a way they'd never been asked to.

The flustering that this engendered, WHEW CHILLAY.

Nobody knew what to do! Except hope that when sides were assigned, our team was the defendant. (We killed it on that side too.)

Anyway, we bulldozed our way to Nationals that year, I think. Our team didn't win, but I think we racked up some witness awards.

After that year, the rulemaking body passed a new rule.

It is now forbidden to mention or allude to a character's race in your case-in-chief.

They had no problems with stereotypical, reductive portrayals of blackness. But you throw some nuance and humanity at them and they literally have to change the rules to bring back the status quo.

We had fun wrecking the system, but the aftermath was despairing to watch. Tbh, it played out not dissimilarly to a movie. We "won" but we didn't win.

What does this have to do with worldbuilding?

Our characters existed outside of our case-in-chief. They brought the world with them into the courtroom.

The story that was told inside that room contained the lives that were lived outside of it. Lives that were unimaginable to the majority-white participants.

Could any other team have done what we'd have done? Sure. There was nothing against making Walton black. But if a white kid went on the stand in narrative blackface, we woulda tore them to pieces.

The world in your story isn't just the description of buildings or how many moons are in your sky or whether the streets are cobblestone'd or not.

It's the people moving through it. Does it have to make sense? Well, racism doesn't make sense. But it is a governing logic--

that we're all beholden to. Nightmares don't have sense, but they have a logic to them. So do dreams.

So what I've found helpful when building a world is to center its people. That is ultimately what the story is about.

Because you can't put a magic system on trial.