: Re: Showing cultural assimilation So I have a group of characters who go to a new land. They're stuck on this land, and eventually encounter the culture. How can I show their gradual assimilation/adaption

@Annie587

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I'd pick a few things and highlight them.

Like, at the beginning of the story the characters arrive in this culture and comment to each other about some strange custom. Like, "Wow, these strange people wear socks with sandals. Why would anyone do that?" Then later you mention one of the characters putting on socks and sandals.

If you want to be subtle about it, you just say he did it and leave it at that, and leave it to the reader to realize, "Hey, just a few chapters back didn't this same character say that this was a bizarre thing to do?" If you're worried the reader might miss it, you can have another character ask him why he's doing this, and he replies, "Oh, I don't know, I didn't think about it. It just seemed normal." If you really want to make a point of it, you can have the character say, "Yes, now that we've been living here, I understand why the natives do this. You see ..."

If the point of the story is their cultural assimilation, then you could go through this for many customs and practices. If that's just a side note or a step to something else, then just mentioning two or three such things would probably be plenty. I'd intersperse them with other action. Like have the first one be something very minor, then other stuff happens, etc, and then the last one is something big, the Greek sacrifices his son to Moloch or something.

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