Yaelokre’s Meadowlark | World Running

When I refer to a “world,” I mean it in the broadest possible sense: A shared reality/fantasy/system that is internally consistent and has a boundary—an inside and an outside.

The artist Yaelokre released a new song recently, and the buzz around it online prompted me to write about their work—or rather, their world—as a medium.

Yaelokre’s world, Meadowlark, demonstrates how an artist can build and sustain a world as part of a creative practice—but it also shows how quickly things can become overwhelming when that world goes viral.

The Evolution of Worlds as a Medium

The idea of worlds-as-a-medium can be found in predictions made by media scholars throughout the 90s and early 00s. Henry Jenkins discussed the rise of transmedia—stories extending across films, games, music, and more. Matthew Freeman examined how story worlds evolved into sprawling, multi-platform projects in the 20th century. Yet, we’ve reached a point where creators like Yaelokre can do a great deal of the worlding themselves, weaving together different forms of media into a singular, coherent artistic vision. 

When I speak about worlds and running them, I’m referring not to singular bits of media across different mediums—music, illustration, game design, fiction—but to the world. The idea or container from within which any other media emerges – in any medium – or form. Do not confuse the media for the medium.

Paul Graham Raven puts flesh on this idea in his Magrathea Protocol series:

the fabula is not exhausted by the story—or, in less theoretical language, there is always more fabula than the story shows the reader, just as (by way of analogy) there is more to the world than today’s newspaper shows us.

In simpler terms: there’s always more world—the fabula—than any single story can convey. 

For a world-runner, the world is the thing that needs managing, not just the stories or media that emerge from it.

In 2024, virtually all forms of media—be it theatre, music, fiction, puppet theatre, costume or film—can be swallowed by the world as a medium. And as I’ve written elsewhere, creators must also contend with the internet’s role in ‘worlding’ the world. Fandom logics apply to all things, and with any sufficiently advanced world, audiences start craving canon. Yaelokre’s Meadowlark is no exception.

Meadowlark

Yaelokre’s Meadowlark is the creative project of an incredibly talented artist from the Philippines named Keath Ósk a self-described “minstrel” who uses they/it pronouns. Yaelokre shares their world of Meadowlark through illustration, music, costume design, and storytelling. They describe it as “a field where everything I foster is kept.”

For the uninitiated Yaelokre’s music has big Bjork energy, but also mixes folklore, fable, animal masks, and illustration into a cohesive and complete world-as-medium.

Meadowlark centres on four characters—Cole ‘The Storyteller’ (a hare), Clémentine (a goat), Kingsley (a tree), and Perrine (a moose)—a group of young minstrels called The Lark. Traveling through various lands, they perform songs inspired by mythical beings known as The Harkers – beings that manifested from and embody Meadowlark’s fairytales and folktales. Illustrated music videos like Harpy Hare, stories, costumes and other social content bring this world to life.

Beyond these “primary sources,” the world expands through interactions with fans. Yaelokre answers questions, builds lore, and deepens the narrative, drawing fans in as co-creators.

Fandoms crave canon, and Meadowlark already boasts a shared lore document spanning 16,000 words—a fan-run wiki soon seems inevitable.

An aside: I have some thoughts about how wikis function as “codespaces” or worlds of their own. Their adoption as a primary sense-making tool by fandoms is a core part of fandom logics in general, and an under discussed phenomenon. 

The Challenges of World-Running

But with enthusiasm comes challenges. Over the past year, Yaelokre has gained over a 1 million followers on YouTube in just seven months, built a vast TikTok following with 1.1 million followers and 12.8 million likes, and developed a community on platforms like Tumblr and Instagram. The single Harpy Hair released in Jan 2024 currently has 56 million streams on Spotify.

With worlds as an emergent medium, there are no established playbooks for how to handle the unique and new challenges that an artist faces when a world catches on. This is where the discipline of world-running comes into play.

When your world-building goes viral, you don’t just gain fans—you inherit a host of problems. This includes: ‘fans making shit up on the internet’, falsehoods / non artist lore running across social media like a game of telephone being accepted as canon. 

One last point to make on this matter is the increasing openness of the authorial role, which has become more accessible (or destabilised, depending on your position) by the increasing democratisation of the means of production and distribution of texts. Or, to put it in a word: fan-fiction (a.k.a. fanfic). This is another deep-weeds topic, but the main thing to note is that certain fabulae seem to engender in their readers the urge to write new stories and texts set within them—and, quite frequently, to thereby RE-write the author’s original stories, or even “retcon” their fabula, to the end of making it more congenial to their particular interests or enthusiasms, or making it more just, or both.

One notable challenge was Yaelokre’s Discord server. What began as a fun way to connect with fans quickly grew into a management nightmare. As the community expanded, issues surfaced—moderators mishandling pronouns, and a fan-created currency system modelled on tiktok’s Dabloons phenomenon called “crickets” which quickly turned toxic.

Users could lose crickets for trivial reasons, leading to a negative atmosphere. Ultimately, Yaelokre had to shut the server down.

Running an online community of any sufficient size is more than a full-time job—work that often requires an entire team. For independent creators like Yaelokre, you’re juggling these roles alone, without the resources big organisations rely on. It’s a monumental challenge.

Despite these difficulties, worlds thrive on the energy and engagement of their participants. It’s this dynamic interplay that drives a world’s growth and sustains its momentum and makes the discipline of world running essential.

Worlds Need Running

The struggles faced by Yaelokre are part of a broader phenomenon. Similar challenges  arose  for Clown, the pseudonymous creator behind the world of Welcome Home! a psychological horror project and ARG. Despite their best intentions, the fandom quickly became toxic and ignored the creator’s personal boundaries – to quite an alarming degree. Nevertheless, despite the growing pains, there is nevertheless a real burgeoning interest in worlds-as-a-medium.

Having spent over a decade stewarding Solarpunk, I’ve seen my own fair share of fandom drama, but I’ve also seen how eager people are to join worlds that aren’t fully mapped out.  Idea containers that give people room to explore and shape. People aren’t just looking for stories; they want places they can inhabit, worlds that invite their participation.

This is why the concept of world running matters. It’s not just about creating a world, but also about sustaining them over time. World-running involves dealing with the realities of a big engaged audience, with an appetite for the world as a medium. It’s about making decisions, setting community norms.

In just seven months,  In addition to worlding and maintenance of their creative universe. Yaelokre has had to juggle multiple roles: world-builder, community manager, and copyright enforcer – they have a Google form for fans to report copyright violations. 

This level of audience management requires evolving skills and strategies, but there’s no established playbook—yet.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Big franchises like Lord of the Rings, Warhammer, and Star Wars have entire teams dedicated to world-building, lore and canon, community management (though really big franchises often seem to thrive despite being actively hostile to their core audience), and legal affairs. And that’s before you even get to making movies, writing books, or developing video games. Even Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe relies on a team infrastructure to manage its sprawling narrative, art direction, spin-off RPGs, and highly engaged fanbase.

This is why we need to treat worlds as their own medium and recognize world-running as a distinctive and new creative practice. With creative work must come the world’s strategy for dealing with its fans and inhabitants.

Fans want canon to be established, community rules to be enforced, and content pipelines to deliver regularly—all while expecting creators to remain accessible and authentic. Many also assume that worlds will operate with the same consistency and even greater transparency as large franchises, without realising the immense strain this places on independent creators.

Meanwhile, smaller creators like Yaelokre must do it all themselves—artist, manager, moderator—often without the safety net of financial backing or institutional support.

Meadowlark shows us what’s possible when a world catches on, but it also underscores the challenges of managing it. As more creators experiment with world-based projects, we need to develop the tools, protocols, and frameworks that will make the process smoother. And I include all worlds here—franchise, video games, books. We need to figure out how to manage audience expectations and their behaviour effectively.

Reality Coordination

This calls for what I call a Reality Coordination. An evolution of UX to work at the level of worlds — a system for navigating and balancing the needs of both creators and audiences. Just as user experience design helps streamline interactions in software, reality coordination could guide the interaction between fans and the world, helping manage expectations and behaviour. 

The frameworks we prototype here could extend far beyond media, shaping not only creative industries but potentially influencing politics and governance.

See also my episdoe of 301 post about Coordinative/Co-play.

A New Discipline 

The rise of artists like Yaelokre and their world Meadowlark – and the enthusiasm of its audience is just one small slice of a much bigger shift in how we engage with media: worlds are the first new medium of the 21st century. 

These worlds are not just collections of stories or multimedia projects but shared realities held together by narrative rules or systemic coherence. They invite participation, co-creation, and deep engagement from audiences who are eager to inhabit spaces that aren’t fully mapped out.

However, as these worlds capture the imagination, they present unprecedented challenges for creators. Artists find themselves juggling multiple roles—world-builder, community manager, moderator, and copyright enforcer, legal department etc etc. The enthusiasm of engaged audiences brings not only energy but also complexities that require careful navigation.

This is why world running should, and needs to become a discipline. It’s not enough to create a world; sustaining it over time demands new strategies, tools, and frameworks. Just as user experience design streamlines interactions in software, a coordinated approach to world management could guide interactions within these new media spaces. Running a world is as much about managing a participatory audience as anything else.

As more creators experiment with worlds as a medium, developing protocols and frameworks becomes increasingly important, and playbooks will surely emerge.

These tools won’t just benefit individual artists; they have the potential to shape the future of creative industries and even influence broader aspects of society, such as politics and governance. These worlds are everywhere—in social media platforms, train stations, workplaces

By embracing the discipline of world-running, we can support creatives at any scale in bringing worlds to life. This is something I do in my own consulting work and why worldrunning.guide is a “.guide”—I have a long-term ambition to help this discipline emerge. 

The future medium is not just in the media we create but in the worlds that we build—and then, how we choose to run them.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a weekly podcast 301 seconds in length; written, recorded and edited by @thejaymo