Regarding contrasting the worldviews of the city and the forest, I’ve found that story elements like that are best when they are inevitable, given the larger context. It makes their existence more natural and profound. The alternative tends to lead to stories feeling contrived, and at worse case can even encourage a distorted view of how the world works.
Given what I have so far, the most obvious inevitability is with an ancient forest surrounded by a progressive world, is to have the progressive world break through and try to pull the forest into modern times.
But I don’t want to do that. The more I think about it, I want to deal with timeless issues. The notion of traditional vs. progressive is illusory. There is nothing new under the sun.
The forest villagers rely more on tradition than the cities, but that is mainly a stylistic difference, not a moral difference. In the end, they face the same problems and make the same mistakes.
<aside> 💡 This restriction was the conclusion of the brainstorming captured in Contrasting the city and the forest.
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