the deep moans round with many voices

Mmm. I had some rough ideas about Calormen and Archenland, but they were mostly unformed -- sort of generic extrapolation from what we see in canon. Like, Archenland clearly has a feudal or semi-feudal culture, and yet from what Lune says they have a strong tradition of rule of law -- it's the law that makes a king, not force of arms -- so it's also a constitutional monarchy of sorts. And the tone of their culture is... small scale, I guess? It seems the sort of land without huge obvious differences in wealth between classes, where it's reasonable for a lord to be on speaking terms with the people under his protection, though I'm sure there are still clear distinctions between knights and farmers.

Calormen, on the other hand, is huge and stratified, and has a lot more obvious "culture," in the sense that they have objects of art for art's sake rather than objects of utility that happen to be also made with appearance in mind. Calormen is also clearly a take-off on the Arabian Nights, so the fragments I recall from reading bowdlerized versions of that book as a child obviously crept in -- I think that's where the sensuality comes from.

Calormen also clearly has a bureaucracy, and they have enough economic influence to extend the slave trade out to the islands (at least during the Telmarine era of Narnia), so while they have lords and estates -- the trappings of feudalism -- I don't think they really have a feudal society. The center, meaning the Tisroc, is firmly in control of the periphery... except, of course, when the periphery rebels. And if the Tisrocs weaken, the feudal trappings may take on more weight until the empire becomes an empire in name only, as empires often do. I find India under the Great Mughals to be a useful source of inspiration, though I suspect Lewis was going more for the Ottoman Empire. But really, both are "exotic" Muslim nations that would have been familiar to an Englishman in the mid-1900s, so I consider them both viable real-world parallels.

I tend to go into a story with some clear world-building in mind, and a lot more present in vague, not-yet-concrete form in the back of my head; it crystallizes as I write. Which is not very clear, is it? I think what I mean is that I have a sense of what will fit into a certain culture and what won't, but I don't know the details until I try them out and say, "Yes to this, no to that," and so on. I know what works when I see it, in other words.

In real-world terms, I think I draw Archenland somewhat from pre-Norman England, for the idea of a conditional monarchy and the sense of a small kingdom always on its guard, and also from the ideals of Arthurian chivalry, because they fit the tone. The Calormene assumption that their culture and country are of course the center of the world is, honestly, drawn from my own experience as an American. It is the attitude of a rich and powerful society very secure in itself. Also, Lewis's attitude toward Calormene poetry annoys me, and I want to go read a bunch of Sufi poetry to get a good feel for aphorisms, so I can write something in that general style that sounds good instead of being written specifically to be mocked.

The courting dance itself I just made up. :-) I am sure there are probably real-world equivalents, but I am not aware of any offhand.

Why did you decide to write Compatible, or rather where did the idea come from? I felt like it was a story to explain some of the background of Aburame, but is that was what you were going for when you wrote it?

I wrote "Compatibility" in response to a prompt from, IIRC, lynati_1, who asked for something about Shino. I had nothing much to say about Shino as a person, but I am both fascinated by and squicked by the idea of living in symbiosis with insects, and I wondered how on earth someone first thought that might be a desirable ninja path. So yeah, it was basically an attempt to explain how the Aburame clan might have gotten started.

It was going to be a horror story, actually -- you can see the remnants of that in the story Shino tells, which was more graphic in the rough draft -- but Team 8 somehow turned the modern-day sections into fluff, which still baffles me. :-)