#meticulously fleshed out to justify where and how your character got the salt offhandedly mentioned in a meal.
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I think people tend to assume that any criticism of worldbuilding is ultimately a demand for a story to grind itself to a halt and give the reader 20 paragraphs of exposition, and like. Most of the time good-faith criticism of this nature is coming from a core aspect of the story not being grounded in the setting in a way that outright detracts from the story's quality. You fix it not by Explaining but by Showing it passively in the makeup of the world.
Like the last instance I saw this critique in was like 'you can't expect an author to stop and exposit the nuances of gender roles/Queerness in a fictional society' and it's like yeah I don't, and in fact this is actually one of the easiest things to show in the text without exposition. If a society has gender norms to begin with you'll see aspects of these norms baked into EVERYTHING. You'll see it in its stories, its religion, its taboos, its etiquette, its clothing, its family structures, its language, its insults, its labor, its leadership, etc. It will have massive impacts on how characters interact with one another and how they perceive themselves. It will help Shape your characters.
If you do this legwork to begin with for the core facets of your story, you will find very natural places for these concepts to be demonstrated without derailing the plot and with little to no exposition. THAT sort of thing is what's being asked of you.
#Extremely comprehensive worldbuilding about every facet of a society is ultimately just for fun. It's not necessary for good writing.#But if you're doing any form of speculative fiction you need to at least do the legwork for the things that drive the plot/characters#Your story won't work as well if you don't#Like if the central storyline in a spec fiction setting is a gay story arc I don't expect you to have the fucking salt economy#meticulously fleshed out to justify where and how your character got the salt offhandedly mentioned in a meal.#I DO expect you to have given more than superficial thought about gender norms.#(also for the gender norms example this Does Not just go for societies with a patriarchy or other gendered hegemony lol)
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