Craft talk: do you build the world first or the character first, and can the answer change?

[Wizard]

A proper craft thread since the challenges always spark these debates in the margins. When a story starts forming for you, what arrives first, a character with a voice walking around an empty stage, or a world with rules and weather waiting for someone to happen to? And is your answer a preference or just a habit you have never audited?

The classic arguments run both ways. Character first people say readers forgive a thin world for a person they believe, but never the reverse, nobody ever loved a magic system. World first people say character IS circumstance, that people are what their world makes possible, and building the pressure builds the person

The genre wrinkle is worth naming too, speculative fiction seems to tolerate world first origins better than realist fiction does, though the failure mode of each is famous, the tour guide story where characters walk through exposition, and the beautifully voiced person to whom nothing ever happens

So, your actual process, not your theory of it. Where did your last finished story start, where did your last ABANDONED story start, and does anyone else notice their abandoned pile leans heavily toward one answer?

[Owen84]

Audited my abandoned pile as instructed and it is 90 percent world first starts. Apparently I love building sets and hate hiring actors, this thread cost me an identity

[StoneCold]

Opposite failure here, folders of wonderful voices with nowhere to live. The character walks, talks, charms, and stands in a white void awaiting a plot that never arrives