Off Payroll Working (Anti-Avoidance) Bill

An Act to make provision for further anti-avoidance measures in relation to Off Payroll Working and the establishment of employee rights where income is deemed employment income.
BE IT ENACTED by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—
Section 1: Definitions
(1) “Off Payroll Working legislation” refers to successive previous laws and regulations related to the determination on whether a worker should be treated as an employee or self-employed for tax purposes when paid through an intermediary.
(2) “IR35 legislation” refers to the successive previous laws and regulations on off payroll working above, directed at small privately owned businesses.
(3) “Client” refers to any corporate entity which pays for services provided by an intermediary.
(4) “Intermediary” refers to any corporate entity established to provide the services of individuals to a client.
(5) “Individual” refers to the person providing services to a client while remunerated through an intermediary
(6) “Deemed employment income” is any income liable for income tax and national insurance under the terms set out in Section 5.
Section 2: Combination of Off Payroll Working and IR35 rules
(1) From the enactment of this Bill, interpretation of all IR35 legislation will be considered the same as Off Payroll Working legislation, and the treatment between small private businesses and other businesses will be the same.
(2) In all cases, the client will now be responsible for determining the employment status of the worker.
Section 3: Application of Off Payroll Working Rules
(1) Off Payroll Working Rules will be considered when:

a. An individual has more than 5% ownership of an intermediary entity, and/or;
b. Services given to a client by an intermediary equate to more than 5% of the individual’s total taxable earnings.

Section 4: Assessment of Employee or Self-employed for tax purposes
(1) In each financial year, the client must make an assessment on whether an individual should be taxed as an employee or self-employed.
(2) If at least 5 of the following conditions apply, the individual shall be classified as an employee for tax purposes and “deemed employment income” should be calculated and taxed for Income Tax and National Insurance by both the client (in the first instance) and by the individual (true up/down in their annual self assessment):

a. Degree of control - in the course of the services, is the client mostly responsible for establishing the hours of the service or the time of day or date that the work should be delivered?
b. Mutuality of obligations - is the client obliged under the terms of the contract to give regular work and pay for it, and is the individual responsible for delivering that work?
c. Correction of work - is the client responsible, ahead of the intermediary or individual, either contractually or implicitly, for the quality of the services delivered by the individual?
d. Financial risk - are the financial risks related to the contract primarily with the client instead of the intermediary/individual?
e. Provision of own equipment - is the majority of the equipment used (buildings, plant and machinery, technology, sundries etc.) in the service provided by the client?
f. Disciplinary - is the individual contractually obliged to the same or greater behaviour and disciplinary terms as an employee of the client, or where not applicable, an employee of an equivalent business?
g. Exclusivity - does the contract result in substantial terms of exclusivity for a period greater than 3 months?
h. Inclusion in business - is the individual practically included in the client business in the context of internal meetings and communications?
i. Alternative worker - can an alternative individual replace the individual without substantial disruption or public statement?
j. Public opinion test - would a reasonable member of the public expect that the individual is an employee of the client?

(3) HMRC will challenge the judgements made for each consideration above if they appear to be unreasonable in a tax tribunal.
Section 5: Provision of employment benefits for deemed employment income earners
(1) Where an assessment is made that an individuals’ earnings are deemed employment income, the individual retains the right to statutory employment benefits and statutory pension terms as other employees.
Section 6: Repeals
(1) The Off Payroll Working (IR35 clarification) Act 2018 is hereby repealed.
Section 7: Commencement, Short Title and Extent
(1) This Act will come into force on the 6 April 2024
(2) This Act will extend to the entirety of the United Kingdom.
(3) This Act shall be cited as the Off Payroll Working (Anti-avoidance) Act 2023
This Bill was submitted by His Grace Sir Rea-wakey KCT KT KD KCMG KBE MVO FRS, Duke of Dorset, Secretary of State for the Home Department, on behalf of His Majesty’s 33rd Government.
Opening Speech:
Deputy Speaker,
I now present the final piece of anti-avoidance legislation to the House. Many years ago, alongside my good friend bnzss, I co-wrote a piece of legislation designed to tackle the known tax avoidance loophole through off-payroll working. While the legislation has been somewhat useful at tackling the loophole, recent cases such as those of Gary Lineker and Lorraine Kelly have proven that the legislation simply does not go far enough. Therefore I decided to rip it up and start again.
This legislation goes much further than the previous Bill - firstly combining both the IR35 rules for small businesses and the off-payroll working rules that currently apply to larger businesses, ensuring consistency between both sets of rules. Secondly, the Bill establishes a clearer set of criteria and a passable threshold in which earnings made through a company registered under the Companies Act 2006 or it’s predecessor or successor acts or a limited partnership should be recognised as employment income, thereby incurring income tax and National Insurance. Finally, this Bill provides further clarity as to the status of an individual when their income is deemed to be employment income, and extends the rights of employees to these workers including but not limited to the provision of statutory employment benefits and rights under the Employment Rights Act 1996 and statutory pension regulations.
The Government will relentlessly pursue those who wish to use technicalities in our regulations to avoid paying higher rates of tax and companies that wish to avoid conferring statutory benefits to those who are, for all intents and purposes, employees.
In combination with the other two pieces of anti-avoidance legislation I will be/have submitted to the House, these measures are collectively expected to raise £3.4 billion. This proposed revenue generation and these Bills were raised at Her Majesty’s Budget Committee and unopposed. My thanks go to my friend the Right Honourable Phonexia2 for their assistance in costing.
I urge the House to rally behind this Bill.
(M: These costings are calculated as 40% of the tax gap for “Evasion” and “Non-payment”, given the difficulty of calculating the actual revenue generated from these measures).
This reading will end on Friday 2nd May at 10pm BST.

To start from the beginning, the issue appeared months back after doing a clean installation of Win10 on my PC. The BSOD was most often the infamous Kernel one, sometimes critical process had died. I immediately tried a couple more factory resets, installing all the updates and eventually upgrading to Win11.
Afterwards I went through things like running /sfc command etc., that did fix some stuff but did not solve the problem. I ended up taking my machine to local PC shop and the guy said the issue is with my RAM but I cannot remember what it was. He supposedly fixed it but the problem returned after a couple of days and I ended up giving up for the time being.
I'm trying to tackle it once more now. Important thing to note is my PC ends up blue screening shortly after starting (couple of minutes), then usually does it one more time (again after couple of minutes) but after the crash or two I can use it just fine for hours on end.
I've tried and /sfc commands (all good), made sure all updates are installed, tried running the drivers verifier provided by windows but I am not sure if it has done anything at all. The error code I get nowadays is critical process has died and the problem is my PC NEVER restarts afterwards. It's stuck at 0% and not progressing whatsoever. I left it running for hours and came back to the same screen, it's always the hard reset solution. Due to this I don't get any dumps either I think.
I am reluctant to find a different shop as 1) I do need my PC and 2) There is no way to reliably replicate the issue. Some days it's just fine, some it isn't and I cannot pinpoint what causes it as I can be browsing, using discord or PC can be idle and it still ends up crashing.
If anyone could assist me with this, see if we can at least find out the cause I would be very grateful.

GENETIC TEST RESULTS:
Yo guys! I have some news to share - my genetic results came back and Cogenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) showed up. I'm going for one more test to confirm it but this basically causes excess male hormones that contributes more male body odor too
I've been having very irregular periods since puberty, very painful menses etc. So i always suspected hormones as the root cause
I for sure don't know if this will tackle the body odor, but I recommend an exome genetic test to really see if you have any predisposition towards a condition that may cause body malodors.
Cheers📷

For context: I'm currently a 4th year college student na di pa sigurado kung gagraduate this year. I'm taking a mentally draining course sa isang bulok na state u sa PH. Tanggap ko na na madedelay ako mainly because sa bagsak na exams and hindi ko na rin gaano mamotivate sarili ko to study. I'm losing it. Hindi na ako okay at kailangan ko ng enough time to rest. Priority ko na mental health ko and mas okay na madelay kaysa mawalan ako ng bait.
So ayun nga, recently, I was supposed to take a vacation somewhere far pero in PH pa rin. I was really excited pero nawalan ako ng gana kase apparently ginuilt trip ako ng mom ko. She said, "bakit ka magbabakasyon eh may mga exams ka pa? Saka ka na magbakasyon pagtapos ng exams mo." I see no bad intentions sa sinabi niya pero as someone na struggling at wasak na ang mental health, it was really painful to hear kasi gusto ko lang naman magunwind. Hindi rin kasi yan yung mga salitang makakatulong sakin ngayon. Gusto ko lang marinig from her na "it's okay if di kinaya, magtry ka na lang ulit" pero she's built different hahaha may pagkaboomer like push lang nang push. Dahil dun sa sinabi niya, nagsnap ako, I said "TAMA NA, di kayo nakakatulong" tapos nagalit siya kasi di na nga daw niya ako pinapatulong sa bahay para makapagfocus ako tapos sasagut sagutin ko lang siya.
Ang hirap. We are not affectionate kaya di ko rin alam paano icocommunicate yan. Gusto kong mapag isa pero wala akong funds to do it.
Yun lang, thanks for letting me get this off my chest aaaaaah.

I followed an older partner when he split off from another firm, helped him set up system, trained staff, etc. From the get go, was promised equity after 3 years. Partner is in his 70s, FYI. Initial understanding was that I'd buy him overtime. Now that we're at 2.5 year mark he's saying he's not comfortable giving me any operating control, basically I'd get some share of profits, but not have any say and I'd not be paying anything in (cause he can't value it). Feels like a bait and switch. I'm making low 70k with 6 years experience, got my CPA last year. Need a sanity check, thanks

My BF and I have been together for more than 3 years. Legal din to both sides. LDR din ang set-up namin. Twice a year siyang nauwi, so pag may chance na magkita kami, nagkikita kami. But the thing is, I feel like his mom doesn't like me and here are some situations:

1. Nung may ipapadala siya sa BF ko, my BF told his mom na may ipapasabay ako sa padala. Then okay na napadala ko na sa house nila. But then, nag chat sya (mom's bf) stating na "bawal ganito ganyan". Ending, yung mga important sana na need mapadala e di naipadala sa BF ko dahil sa kanya.
   
2. Bumisita sya sa BF ko without asking me if gusto ko ba sumama. Nalaman ko lang na bumisita sya nung sinabi na nung BF ko sakin.
   

Nahihirapan na ako. Ang bait nya sa akin pag andyan yung anak nya. Pero pag wala, wala rin.
Any advice? Thank you.

I thought I was being a good dps by baiting it into short-distance charges, but the waves came out at a weird angle (not directly behind the boss) and wiped me out. Is it random within some wide arc?

Hello folks!
I have recently purchased a Oneplus 7 Pro phone with the intention of installing Kali Nethunter on it. I followed David Bombal’s Youtube video guide to do, and I had a soft brick on the phone. I unlocked the bootloader, rooted the phone successfully with Magisk. I had a Qualcomm error immediately after install dm-verity through TWRP.After tackling this issue, and learning a lot as a result, I managed to use the MSM tool successfully to restore the device. Afterwards, I managed to successfully install Kali Nethunter OxygenOS 11/Custom A11, and afterwards, I installed the kimocoder kernel 4.14 for the Oneplus 7 Pro. I had Kali Nethunter working successfully afterwards, albeit without usable Bluetooth in the Kali Nethunter app. I wanted to achieve the following, and I humbly ask for your guidance on these goals:

1. I initially wanted to dual boot Lineage OS 20and the OxygenOS11 Kali Nethunter, but realized that the security settings would be sacrificed realistically, as one rom would affect the other. Have you managed to do so ( I am intrigued by the Pixel Experience 13 ROM and Paranoid Android 13 as well)?
   
2. My current idea was to backup my Kali Nethunter rom, and boot TWRP (I boot it with the adb tools, as I could not install TWRP again to the recovery partition). Afterwards, I would wipe the partitions ( except boot and the data partition, which would have my /sdcard data etc) and install my rom of choice(It would be PixelExperience 14, LineageOS 20 or ParanoidAndroid 13. If CalyxOS or GrapheneOS would be available for my device, I would install them but they are not). After managing to do so successfully, the plan was to make a backup of everything, and then restore my rom of choice after backing up the roms of course. While researching the mentioned roms, I saw that updating to Android 12 is needed in order for the correct firmware to be in place. I am concerned that my restored backup of the Kali Nethunter rom would stop working.
   

the reasoning behind this is to keep the two completely separate from each other for security reasons. I am studying cybersecurity, and I wanted to practice sensible isolation. The other rom would be in place in order to daily drive the phone. I appreciate your assistance and wisdom on this folks, and I will happily provide any information that would help in accomplishing my mission, and complete the steps/research necessary. I am disappointed that we do not have a Nethunter rom that is based on Android 12/13, but i completely understand that it could be due to drivers/kernel issues.
I have included the following information about the Nethunter kernel that is installed currently :
4.14 Oxygen OS 11 BT_RFCOMM, HID-4, Injection, QCACLD, RTL8812AU (<——Could someone clarify the mentioned features? I would be very grateful!)

Hello folks!
I have recently purchased a Oneplus 7 Pro phone with the intention of installing Kali Nethunter on it. I followed David Bombal’s Youtube video guide to do, and I had a soft brick on the phone. I unlocked the bootloader, rooted the phone successfully with Magisk. I had a Qualcomm error immediately after install dm-verity through TWRP.After tackling this issue, and learning a lot as a result, I managed to use the MSM tool successfully to restore the device. Afterwards, I managed to successfully install Kali Nethunter OxygenOS 11/Custom A11, and afterwards, I installed the kimocoder kernel 4.14 for the Oneplus 7 Pro. I had Kali Nethunter working successfully afterwards, albeit without usable Bluetooth in the Kali Nethunter app. I wanted to achieve the following, and I humbly ask for your guidance on these goals:

1. I initially wanted to dual boot Lineage OS 20and the OxygenOS11 Kali Nethunter, but realized that the security settings would be sacrificed realistically, as one rom would affect the other. Have you managed to do so ( I am intrigued by the Pixel Experience 13 ROM and Paranoid Android 13 as well)?
   
2. My current idea was to backup my Kali Nethunter rom, and boot TWRP (I boot it with the adb tools, as I could not install TWRP again to the recovery partition). Afterwards, I would wipe the partitions ( except boot and the data partition, which would have my /sdcard data etc) and install my rom of choice(It would be PixelExperience 14, LineageOS 20 or ParanoidAndroid 13. If CalyxOS or GrapheneOS would be available for my device, I would install them but they are not). After managing to do so successfully, the plan was to make a backup of everything, and then restore my rom of choice after backing up the roms of course. While researching the mentioned roms, I saw that updating to Android 12 is needed in order for the correct firmware to be in place. I am concerned that my restored backup of the Kali Nethunter rom would stop working.
   

the reasoning behind this is to keep the two completely separate from each other for security reasons. I am studying cybersecurity, and I wanted to practice sensible isolation. The other rom would be in place in order to daily drive the phone. I appreciate your assistance and wisdom on this folks, and I will happily provide any information that would help in accomplishing my mission, and complete the steps/research necessary. I am disappointed that we do not have a Nethunter rom that is based on Android 12/13, but i completely understand that it could be due to drivers/kernel issues.
I have included the following information about the Nethunter kernel that is installed currently :
4.14 Oxygen OS 11 BT_RFCOMM, HID-4, Injection, QCACLD, RTL8812AU (<——Could someone clarify the mentioned features? I would be very grateful!)

On Sunday (28 May), hundreds of LGBTQ+ demonstrators gathered outside the Sela Meir publishing office in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan to protest against the publishing of the Hebrew translation of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.
The book was initially published in 2020 and discusses the idea that gender dysphoria is influenced by a youngster’s peers and social contagion, a concept not supported by any major medical institutions and for which the American author has been criticised. The event was cancelled three times and moved to different locations after activists alerted venues to the content of the book.
Outside the venue, protesters waved Pride and Israeli flags, banged on drums and chanted slogans and phrases. Inside the event, 17-year-old Ayelet approached Shrier before being tackled and dragged from the venue.
“We are not a disease, we are not a contagion, we are people,” the teen told the room, which prompted some in the audience to call them "a disease" and a "freak".
Read the full story: https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/05/30/israel-trans-book-launch-abigail-shrier-irreversible-damage/

I was lucky enough to get it on the new dungeon rocket launcher with impact casing and envious assassin. I was just running Ops and eventually got the malfeseance catalyst.
On the left side of my screen, even when I had no buffs or anything over there. I’d shoot the same enemy with my kinetic, then my energy. And almost 70% of the time I didn’t see bait and switch come up.
However, even if it didn’t show, it seemed to be doing the same damage as when bait and switch was showing.
First weapon I’ve gotten with bait and switch and I really like it. Hopefully there’s not a bait and switch glitch going on.

At www.everyonecanpiano.com we answer music questions for free! Today we tackle chords. I'll bet you tried learning chords and gave up less than ten seconds in. Most people explain chords through the eyes of knowing chords already, which is extremely overwhelming and NOT helpful.
It's actually extremely simple when explained correctly, and you'll learn all the material in about ten minutes. Using words you actually understand and pictures that make sense. After, you will be able to literally pick out and play ANY chord. Get ready to experience chords actually making sense!!
FREE PIANO LESSON - CHORDS FOR BEGINNERS

Hello folks!
I have recently purchased a Oneplus 7 Pro phone with the intention of installing Kali Nethunter on it. I followed David Bombal’s Youtube video guide to do, and I had a soft brick on the phone. I unlocked the bootloader, rooted the phone successfully with Magisk. I had a Qualcomm error immediately after install dm-verity through TWRP.After tackling this issue, and learning a lot as a result, I managed to use the MSM tool successfully to restore the device. Afterwards, I managed to successfully install Kali Nethunter OxygenOS 11/Custom A11, and afterwards, I installed the kimocoder kernel 4.14 for the Oneplus 7 Pro. I had Kali Nethunter working successfully afterwards, albeit without usable Bluetooth in the Kali Nethunter app. I wanted to achieve the following, and I humbly ask for your guidance on these goals:

1. I initially wanted to dual boot Lineage OS 20and the OxygenOS11 Kali Nethunter, but realized that the security settings would be sacrificed realistically, as one rom would affect the other. Have you managed to do so ( I am intrigued by the Pixel Experience 13 ROM and Paranoid Android 13 as well)?
   
2. My current idea was to backup my Kali Nethunter rom, and boot TWRP (I boot it with the adb tools, as I could not install TWRP again to the recovery partition). Afterwards, I would wipe the partitions ( except boot and the data partition, which would have my /sdcard data etc) and install my rom of choice(It would be PixelExperience 14, LineageOS 20 or ParanoidAndroid 13. If CalyxOS or GrapheneOS would be available for my device, I would install them but they are not). After managing to do so successfully, the plan was to make a backup of everything, and then restore my rom of choice after backing up the roms of course. While researching the mentioned roms, I saw that updating to Android 12 is needed in order for the correct firmware to be in place. I am concerned that my restored backup of the Kali Nethunter rom would stop working.
   

the reasoning behind this is to keep the two completely separate from each other for security reasons. I am studying cybersecurity, and I wanted to practice sensible isolation. The other rom would be in place in order to daily drive the phone. I appreciate your assistance and wisdom on this folks, and I will happily provide any information that would help in accomplishing my mission, and complete the steps/research necessary. I am disappointed that we do not have a Nethunter rom that is based on Android 12/13, but i completely understand that it could be due to drivers/kernel issues.
I have included the following information about the Nethunter kernel that is installed currently :
4.14 Oxygen OS 11 BT_RFCOMM, HID-4, Injection, QCACLD, RTL8812AU (<——Could someone clarify the mentioned features? I would be very grateful!)

I'm doing three today because due to holiday/weekend things I missed Sunday and Monday
Counting down to the beginning of the season - I'm going to attempt to do one player per day for the next 99. The players will be random. Use this thread to celebrate and Talk About Some Guys^TM
​
Steve Emtman was another poster child of the 90's football aesthetic: massive shoulder pads, neckroll, cropped top, hip pads showing. He was also a certifiable bad ass. After redshirting in 1989 the massive DE (6'4" - 293lbs) was a huge reason the Husky defense was elite. in 1990 he won the Morris award and Pac10 Defensive player of the year. The Huskies also went 10-2 and won the Rose Bowl for the first time in 9 seasons. He followed that up with a more impressive junior campaign. Emtman won the Outland, Lombardi, Morris (again), UPI Lineman of the year, Pac-12 Defensive player of the year (again) and was a unanimous All-American. He also finished 4th in Heisman voting and had 62 TFL and 20.5 for loss.
He was voted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2006.
​
Emtman celebrating after a tackle vs Arizona

At www.everyonecanpiano.com we answer music questions for free! Today we tackle chords. I'll bet you tried learning chords and gave up less than ten seconds in. Most people explain chords through the eyes of knowing chords already, which is extremely overwhelming and NOT helpful.
It's actually extremely simple when explained correctly, and you'll learn all the material in about ten minutes. Using words you actually understand and pictures that make sense. After, you will be able to literally pick out and play ANY chord. Get ready to experience chords actually making sense!!
FREE PIANO LESSON - CHORDS FOR BEGINNERS

Hello everyone!
I am an experienced veterinary doctor and i am working with "meat" diets for the past 6 years. I have deep knowledge and extensive experience in raw, barf, prey feeding as well as with diseases like cancer, diabetes and very strong allergies. Working with raw and barf led me to the "enlightenment" and creation of the "individual clinical diet", which is built according to the each individual, not by standard recommendations that offers raw/barf diets.
Since the pandemic, i am more or less working remotely, except when doing emergency or home calls. My clientele consists of three categories - the ones that have history of health problems and wants to tackle them only with the diet and without drugs/medicines (as much as the situation allows), another one which wants to transit their pet to the raw/barf/individual diet with supervision, maintenance, in other words - hand holding and to be sure of the process and the last one - just having more complex questions regarding health, nutrition and the whole process.
I am based in the eastern Europe and i am looking for the clients from the globe. I didn't post any ads because most people find me through referals (in my country and around), but i think it's time to move forward.
I am mostly interested in working with Western European, Scandinavian, Uk and USA "markets". I am interested in a ways where/how i could show/market myself to be reachable as much as possible in your country or general recommendations.
Huge thanks in advance.

Before we go into detail, let’s begin with an example on the overtrading process. Imagine that when you enter the market, it will either go in your favor or against you. So once you reach the target, you exit from the market.
Next, let us say your stop loss hits. If it reaches the goal, you will either make money or lose. And imagine if you made a profit, whether by accident or because you genuinely used some logic that resulted in a profit. As a result, your mind cannot relax, and you make several trades by the time the day ends. This number can reach more than 100, putting your loss between 1000 and 2000.
Now the question is how to tackle this problem handy. By taking a maximum of 2 trades/day as per My Trade Logic. Only two trades? Why? Because by taking more than two trades per day and exceeding the daily limit can manipulate your mind, resulting in huge losses, as discussed above. So it is better to put a limit to it.
For a better explanation of this whole process, watch this video now!

At www.everyonecanpiano.com we answer music questions for free! Today we tackle chords. I'll bet you tried learning chords and gave up less than ten seconds in. Most people explain chords through the eyes of knowing chords already, which is extremely overwhelming and NOT helpful.
It's actually extremely simple when explained correctly, and you'll learn all the material in about ten minutes. Using words you actually understand and pictures that make sense. After, you will be able to literally pick out and play ANY chord.
FREE PIANO LESSON - CHORDS FOR BEGINNERS

Welcome one and all! Some of you may remember me mentioning the idea of this series a while ago in the Daily Discussions, and now, many moons later, we’re finally here. Worldbuilding is one of my passions and one of the things that keeps my brain playing with fanfiction, so I’m here to share my dubious expertise. Remember though that these are just my methods and preferences, and if you can find something different that works for you, that’s great! I hope at the very least this series of posts will provide a decent basis for people to develop their own skills and style of worldbuilding.
The goal of this first post is to get you acquainted with some fundamentals of worldbuilding, things that apply to both original fiction and fanfiction, and we’ll to expand on how to apply these ideas in the next post.

First Principles

Back in my younger days in uni, I spent a while exploring the interaction of history and anthropology, which meant I learnt a little about anthropology as well. I’m far from an expert, so if you have actually studied anthropology in any depth, you may have to hold your nose through this section, but I want to stress that this is not necessarily a commentary on anthropology as a discipline, but on what I took away from it as a useful way to think about fictional societies.
Okay, disclaimer done. Broadly speaking, we can talk about two major approaches to analysing the rituals and practises of societies: as symbolic or functional. A symbolic understanding of a society will take the approach of focusing on the, well, symbolic meaning of rituals, essentially having them stand in for something bigger. Functional analyses, meanwhile, will focus on what purpose a certain ritual may serve in a society, which may not necessarily be what it appears to be on the surface.
(“Ritual” is another bit of anthropology speak here: rituals aren’t necessarily religious or virgin-sacrifices-under-the-full-moon (that’s only the fun ones), but can just be shared traditions. For example, singing ‘happy birthday’ could be considered a celebration “ritual” in our society.)
Now, “symbolic” and “functional” reasons can overlap and even be different ways of understanding the same thing. For our purposes, we want to remember that every bit of detail we introduce about a society should serve at least one of these functions in order to feel realistic. If you’ve ever seen an obvious Bad Guy Nation that worships Evil God Bob who regularly demands human sacrifices and puppy kicking and rolled your eyes, it’s probably because these rituals failed to establish symbolic or functional meaning, and thus society felt shallow and unrealistic.
What purpose do the human sacrifices serve? Perhaps those sacrificed are symbolic methods of bridging the gap between the people and their god: by spilling innocent blood, the people grow closer to their god’s power and incorporate some of it into themselves. Or, perhaps those sacrificed are criminals, and thus the function of the ritual is punishment and as a focus for the community’s anger against those who have transgressed social norms or broken laws. Just because a nation is full of bad guys doesn’t mean their society can’t have sensible meaning in it’s rituals.
Symbolic or ritual or both? This question is worth asking yourself as you build your society. Of course, you should feel free to work backwards if you come up with some really cool shit. This is fiction after all: “because it’s cool” is half the point.

Society Load-Bearers

Now that we’ve considered our intellectual starting point, it’s time to consider our pragmatic starting point: the shit that actually makes up “a society”. You could probably make an argument for multiple things to be included here, but I have boiled this section down into what I believe are the three most important elements to consider. These three are: landscape, religion/beliefs, and people.
#1: Landscape
To a certain extent, this list is in priority order, not necessarily because one is more important to consider than the other, but because certain things on the list will necessarily limit what you can do with other parts of your worldbuilding. Nowhere is this more true than with the landscape of your society. The land your people are in will dictate what kinds of foods they can eat, what methods of travel they most commonly use, weather patterns… unless of course you use your Author Fiat Wild Card and declare an exception because of Reasons(tm), but we’ll get into that later.
Let’s say you want to write a pirate story. This means that you have excellent taste because pirates are awesome, but it also means your story necessarily takes place on islands or the coast: the rhythms are a sea are going to be a major part of your characters’ lives, and therefore of your story. Sea travel means you need to think about the preservation of food and water on a ship, hazards that could overcome your characters, and the space on the ship itself, cramped cabins, et cetera, and this will be where you want to focus your research in order to make the “landscape” around your characters feel realistic, even if they’re fighting mythical sea monsters.
In general, knowing the “landscape” of your story is very important, and I recommend having a map, or several maps depending on the number of locations in your story, for your own personal reference. This doesn’t mean you need an epic fantasy style map with detailed illustrations and every river, wood and village named. But having a rough sketch of the area your story takes place in won’t hurt and allows you to keep the areas of your world consistent. This applies to contemporary or science-fiction worlds too! Whether it’s planets in a system or the bus route your main character takes to work, just knowing how your characters move through “their” landscape will make your story feel more real, and allow you put in road blocks (maybe literal, in the case of the bus route) that your audience will understand all the better because of how this landscape has already been established.
#2: Religion/Beliefs
The next most critical element is what people in your society believe. This will guide social norms, relationships, character motivations, systems of government, all of that jazz. This sounds like a broad and complicated category, and it is, but you can simplify development in this area by focusing on one (1) major guiding principle for your society, then adding nuance as you expand through the other parts of the world. You can also, as with the previous example, work backwards from what your end goal to be.
Let’s say for example that you want to build a pseudo-medieval world, but one where gay relationships are completely normal and accepted. To make this work for your society, you might say, okay, let’s set up a society which values individual freedom. The god(s) of your medieval tech society value freedom and love, giving you a culture which puts emphasis on free choice in marriage, regardless of anyone’s gender. Since freedom is a staple of the culture, you probably don’t have a monarchy in this medieval world; instead, perhaps you have something more like the early democracy of some of the Greek city states, with limited numbers of citizens who can vote for representatives. This, again, would play into the individual freedom that was your starting point.
So we have our basics of this society down. But this sounds a bit happy and low on conflict. Here’s where we add the nuance. A society which places a religious emphasis on love puts pressure on people to be in relationships, which is bad for ace and/or aro folks, or for those who simply don’t want to be in a relationship—there could be a character story in this! Similarly, perhaps a society which values freedom also struggles to find reasonable limits on that freedom, meaning that blunt honesty (and hurt feelings resulting) are a norm. People who are more sensitive may find themselves looked down on for not being able to meet societal norms of tolerating others’ freedoms. And a democracy in a low-tech society may be slow to respond to crises (because speedy transport options are limited, slowing communication before you get into group discussion) or troubled by corruption (because it’s difficult to make tamper-proof voting methods)… not to mention those who may not get to vote.
There you go! From a really simple premise we built a pretty decent society and thought of ways its norms might pose problems to characters, whether as internal conflict in character arcs, or external conflict with plot issues. More detail, such as in specific rituals, days of celebration, and so on, will add more depth to this society, but if you’re stuck on this point, you can always go back to your central premise: what sort of things would a society that values freedom celebrate? What religious festivals might there be if their gods that value freedom and love in all forms? (You can try this as a worldbuilding exercise by leaving some ideas in the comments!)
#3 People (or: Movement)
I went back-and-forth on what I wanted to call this part, but in the end settled on ‘people’ because that expresses what I mean better, I think. Anyway, the main point of this society is to remember that your society is made up of multitudes of different people, hundreds or thousands of individuals. You can generalise about values your society might have, just as you can with any modern society – but just like the world we live in today, no society is a monolith. People will push back against their cultural norms in various ways, and even folks who accept cultural norms may participate in norms to different extents, with varying levels of enthusiasm.
As a parallel, think of people who take part in religious festivals like Christmas as a part of their religion, and people who do it as a cultural norm without serious religious elements, or without actively believing in Christianity at all. Those people are participating in the same cultural norm, the same “ritual”, but they aren’t all doing it in the same way. To make the world of your society feel truly alive, you should attempt to show something similar.
Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t have to be something that you dedicate masses of space to. In fact, generally it’s more realistic if there isn’t one “counter-cultural” character who all questioning or negativity about aspects of the culture is pushed onto. I’m talking about things such as, people who leave a cheering crowd because they’re not interested or disagree with a public speaker, a store owner who doesn’t ask questions about these strangers whilst others in the street blatantly stare at them, various levels of enthusiasm in the major religion, the presence of religious or ethnic minorities. You can tie this into your main story by using it as part of character arcs or subplots, too, to get characters to question their prejudices, beliefs, or generalisations they’ve made because of past experiences.
Another thing to remember about building a society of various individuals isn’t just how they “move” through the space culturally (...you can see why I felt “movement” didn’t really work), but how they move through the space of your world physically.
This is partly covered under ‘landscape’ for things like travel (if you have to teleport people around your continent, keep it subtle, yo) and what food is readily available, but it’s worth thinking about more specifically too, how your society will show, physically, that it has a multitude of people living in it. For example, if your character goes to a city, they should probably see signs of different periods of architecture, rich and poor areas of the city—and if they’re not seeing that, there has to be some reason for it. (There could be an interesting story in that idea!)
Think about the ways people will live in a period of your tech level and how that will make the space around your character feel ‘lived in’. Are the city streets clean? Where do children play? What do people do to celebrate festivals? As a modern example: even though I don’t really follow football (soccer), I always know when England are playing, because people start putting England flags in their windows… and then flags of other nationalities start appearing as well, because no society is a monolith! I hope this example also shows that worldbuilding doesn’t have to be complicated or about elaborate rituals. You can add lots of depth to a society with really simple touches like this, things that you may not even think of as “worldbuilding” because it’s so normal. But adding touches of normal is precisely what makes a fictional society feel natural!
So, that’s u/holliequ’s three major points to remember when building a world. My area of expertise, and hence most of my examples, is in (pseudo-)historical societies, but this doesn’t just work for building pre-modern or pseudo-historical societies! Let’s say that the “society” you’re building is a more modern neighbourhood instead: you can go through the list above in order in a similar way.
For “landscape” here, you’d want to think about urban vs rural communities (or a place where those communities mix, such as at a school), which country or area of the world they’re in (weather, basic patterns of life). Let’s say you want a ‘fish out of water’ story with classism themes, so you pick a rich urban neighbourhood for your main character—someone from a poorer, rural background—to move into.
Now depending on the area of the world you’re in, the urban neighbourhood may not be very religious, but they may have certain sets of beliefs already, such as homeowner’s associations which expect certain standards in the neighbourhood, or just shared assumptions about what ‘people like them’ do and how they act: for example, maybe in this affluent neighbourhood they’re used to hiring people to do housework for them, and so when they see the main character working in the garden, they assume the MC is ‘hired help’.
Lastly, people: even if your character encounters classism or snobbery from some of their new neighbours, not all of them are going to be the same kind of classist. The neighbour who mistook them for a worker, not someone who lived in the area, for example, may have made an honest mistake because of being raised with certain classist assumptions. Other characters may be explicitly hostile to the newcomer, whilst still others might be genuinely friendly and welcoming of different perspectives. In a smaller-scale “society” like this neighbourhood, which of these attitudes is dominant depends on exactly what kind of story you want to tell and there’s a bit less room for generalising than there is when developing a whole country, but as you can see, the principles work basically the same.

On using your Author Fiat 'Get-Out-of-Jail-Free' card

The above is a rough guide to building a society which functions more-or-less on the same principles as our own. But what if you don’t want to build a society that functions like our own? What if you aren’t working with humans, but aliens? Or your society has magic? Or it’s set in the future with some cool science-fiction technology?
This is when you pull out your Author Fiat card to handwave away any of the issues we’ve talked about. (This is also for occasions when you want something to just Be and don’t want to explain it, like “yeah this medievalesque society isn’t sexist. why? it just isn’t ok” but you know… this is a worldbuilding post, so we’re gonna assume you want to do some explaining here.)
For example, you probably need to think about how your characters move around the world, roughly how long it would take to get them from place-to-place with various methods of travel, the distance between stars, etc. Unless you Author Fiat declare there is an element which can make ships travel between solar systems in almost no time at all. (Hello, Mass Effect!) Unless you Author Fiat declare that giant birds can quickly taxi people around the country. (Hi, Pokemon!) Unless you Author Fiat declare that magic lets people teleport, or create gateways between different parts of the world, or… you get the picture, you always have a special ability to say “yup, it is that way because of magic and/or science”.
That said, there are consequences to using your Author Fiat card. If you have a world in which teleportation magic is a thing, then you need to think harder about ways to explain why your characters can’t get to a place: you will lose your audience if you have to resort to explanations like ‘they forgot about teleporting because they were so panicked!’ or ‘this never-before-established way of blocking teleportation magic happened!’ and erode the willing suspension of disbelief.
This is when it becomes necessarily to build probably THE most famous bit of worldbuilding… a magic system! jazz hands Or a sci-fi piece of tech. (A tech system? I guess tech systems can be a thing too.) At its most basic, the idea behind a magic/tech system is to give the audience an understanding of the rules so that things such as “magic that can block teleporting” don’t appear to come out of nowhere. By delivering these explanations early, and keeping to them consistently, you can use them to create tension later when the audience realises that a critical system in the starship is about to fail, or the main character doesn’t have the ability to cast the teleport spell right now, or whatever.
There are two approaches to building magic/tech systems: hard or soft. (Stop that smirking. Stop it now!) You may already know about the distinction between “hard” (scientifically realistic) and “soft” (scientifically plausible-ish, mostly, sometimes) sci-fi, but this can also be applied to magic systems, “hard” magic systems being popularised as a concept by Brandon Sanderson. Essentially, a hard magic system is simply one with more detailed explanations or formulas for how the magic works, giving concrete limitations, whereas soft magic systems may rely on more vague limitations such as “lack of energy” or “magic supply depleted”.
Neither of these is necessarily a better approach than the other, and mainly it’s about what kind of story you want to tell. If you believe Sanderson’s First Law, it’s easier to get your audience to buy characters solving problems with magic if they can understand, as it were, how the magic trick was done, but you may not need this sense of detail in your magic system if the issues faced by your characters are personal, or plot problems that can’t be solved with magic.
There’s not really room in the scope of this post to discuss building magic/tech systems (it’s long enough already!) but in general, unless you really enjoy making these things for their own sake, I recommend building your system backwards, starting with a vague idea of your plot and what kind of issues your characters will need to run into, and then building flaws or limitations into your system that facilitate that. For example, limit the time the character can be in the mech suit without taking brain damage, heightening the tension of the long finale you have planned, or invent some kind of magic rock that blocks teleportation magic, so your villain can have deposited a bunch of it in Plot Critical Location to prevent your heroes just teleporting there to stop them.

Resources

One last thing I did want to discuss was, in my opinion, the best way to improve your confidence and ability to worldbuild your own societies: learn about other societies! So to that end I’m going to discuss a some places where you can increase your knowledge and help your worldbuilding :D
The first one is probably an obvious one for writers, which is read widely. Fiction stories are a great resource for improving your writing, especially ones that have in-depth worldbuilding themselves. Some of the books I’ve enjoyed most over the past year from a worldbuilding perspective are Judy I Lin’s A Magic Steeped in Poison, These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong, and The Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal, respectively a China-inspired fantasy setting, 1920s Shanghai with supernatural elements, and a sci-fi alternate history of the 1950s and 60s—so quite a wide range! A Magic Steeped in Poison also has one of the freshest and most interesting ‘soft’ magic systems I’ve encountered if that’s to your interest as well.
If we want to learn about societies, though, there is an entire profession that have dedicated themselves to learning about past societies! I keep telling everyone that my history degree comes in very useful for writing >D However, I do realise that getting into historical non-fiction can be a bit intimidating if you don’t have the degree, as history books are not always accessible. What I recommend if you do want to read more non-fiction is to look into books aimed at a popular audience rather than academic works. Two particular accessible recommendations I’ve read over the past year would be Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides series (particularly useful as they cover all kinds of elements of historical life, from religion to clothing to how people greet each other) as well as The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, which goes into great detail about working class Victorian life through the lens of biographies of the five victims of Jack the Ripper.
If you are willing to tackle more academic sources, when it comes to specifics, I recommend Jstor which allows you to make a personal account and access free articles each month. Trust me, some historian has DEFINITELY written something very specific on your area of interest at some point. Outside of that, I would suggest looking for books that are collections of multiple authors, since these are often designed to give a broad overview of the period from multiple historians’ specialities/perspectives. For example, I finished relatively recently Japan Emerging edited by Karl F. Friday, which was a great introduction to Japanese history from the perspective of someone mostly completely unfamiliar with the topic, and the bibliographies of books like this are an excellent starting point for doing more detailed research.
Apart from these “edited by” collections, series that are designed to be a comprehensive history on the topic can be very useful. I’ve been making my way through the Penguin History of Britain series and two books in particular, Britain After Rome by Robin Fleming (covering c. 400-1070AD) and The Struggle for Mastery by David Carpenter (1066-1300ish), stood out for their excellent attention to detail and the amount of ground they managed to cover.
(If you want any other recommendations, feel free to ask me! My best areas of knowledge are probably early modern and modern Britain and Europe, but I’ll see what I can do for any other periods or topics of interest!)
Non-fiction books are not the only way you can learn about societies either, especially for those of you who struggle to find time for books. Historical documentaries can be a great and accessible way to find out more about a particular era – my favourite documentary of all time is Victorian Bakers which is a BBC series available on DVD where bakers from the modern day try out different methods of baking throughout the Victorian era, starting with stone ovens and all the way up to industrialisation. Since bread has been a staple food for most of European history, it’s a really valuable perspective, as well as fun! (And yes, I am the kind of person who has a favourite documentary of all time, lol.)
There are also plenty of youtube series out there talking about history, but do try to find reliable perspectives if you can, particularly people who actually share their sources with you (and even if you don’t want to read the source itself, you can google it to check out the reviews). Some historians are now putting their work online to try to reach a wider audience, and one historian’s blog in particular which has been useful for me is A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Brett Deveraux which even has an entire section for resources for world-builders, looking at things such as what do pre-modern cities look like, how do people make clothes, etc.
Now I really have talked for long enough, so I’ll leave it there. I hope you all learnt something from this post, even if it’s just “I don’t like this, so I’m going to do everything the opposite way”. I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback in the comments as I may consider posting a revised version of this on AO3 at some point.
There is one more post planned in this series. The next one will cover how to apply these worldbuilding concepts to fanfiction in a more direct way (i.e. when you’re not building a world from scratch, but expanding around existing concepts) and how to actually put all this worldbuilding into your story. Look out for that some time in the next week or so!

My name is Madeleine, this happened in April of 2016, three months after I turned 19. I now live in Castle Rock, but at the time I lived in southern Denver with my family, meaning my mom, step-dad, little brother, little sister, and little, little brother, my little brother's 7th birthday was coming up and at the time I had been studying abroad in Vienna, so I hadn't got the chance to get him a present, but I had the weekend off just to go home and see my family specifically for his birthday, My mom also asked me for Chipotle, and the mall we went to had a huge food court so I accepted. At this time it was about 7:00 at night, and I needed to catch up on some homework that day. and it wasn't that sunny out, so it wasn't necessarily the ideal time to shop, especially since it was a Tuesday so most people either didn't go shopping that day or had already left the mall. As soon as I left my car, I noticed a man.
The man was white with curly black hair and visible stubble on his face, he was wearing a navy blue t-shirt, grey sweatpants, and Adidas socks and shoes, I noticed he was coming out of a white van that had a lock at the back of it, He looked at me one from what I saw, but as I was heading towards Dillard's I noticed he was sort of following me, I thought little of it, thinking he was just getting a present for his wife or something, but as I left Dillard's and entered the main portion of the sparsely populated mall, I noticed he was staying on my trail, I picked up my pace a little bit and headed towards Disney Store to get my brother his present. As the cashier was ringing me up, she, for whatever reason, turned to look at the front of the store briefly and looked more than a little uneasy. I asked her what was wrong and she said something that gave me chills, she whispered, "That guy over there at the entrance, he comes in often and he rarely buys anything, he just walks around looking at the girls shopping or working." This made me really uncomfortable. I told her to be safe for the rest of the night and left the store, I just needed to go to Chipotle, so I went up the escalator and into the food, where most people at the mall were. This calmed me down a little bit because he actually ordered something from the food court, but not that much. I got my mom's Chipotle and walked out of the mall, but things only went downhill from there.
As I was in the parking lot, heading toward my car, the man kept following me. I was starting to shit bricks and I was so scared. But, as I mentioned, the man was driving a white van with a small space for him and a passenger, and a big storage area in the back. I couldn't shake the feeling that there were girls, my age or younger, in the back of the van, so I made the best and bravest decision of my life, I took a picture of his license plate. The man must have seen me take a picture because the next thing I knew, he sprinted toward me as fast as he could, I dropped my bag and food and immediately sprang into action, I ran toward him and kicked him in the family jewels as hard as I could. He instantly fell to the ground, howling in pain, I grabbed my stuff, ran to my car, and drove like a maniac to the police station.
When I got to the police station, I called my mom and told her to get there as fast as possible, I entered the police station and once my mom got there, I showed them the license plate, As they were sending out people to search for the car, I fell asleep at the police station, the police escorted me and my mom home and they stayed with us for the night. The next morning, the police told me something that made my heart jump into my stomach, the police caught the man and searched his car, in the back of the van, they found three girls, my age, 16 and 13, in the storage area of the van. The three girls were returned to their families alive, but after further investigation, they found that the man was involved in many trafficking cases in Denver, some of the girls he and his accomplices kidnapped, had either been killed or had been taken across the Mexican border to be sold by the man and his accomplices into sexual slavery, however after they found the three girls in the van, they found 16 other girls, ranging from a girl my age to a 6-year-old, in the man's basement. I'm glad that 19 girls were found, but I still feel bad for the girls who were killed or sold in Mexico, who will probably never be found. I'm happy that I was able to stop him and his accomplices before more girls got kidnapped by him, but I sometimes think, what would have happened if I didn't tackle him when he started running toward me, I never want to know.