#realistic worldbuilding

[aethersea]

another thing fantasy writers should keep track of is how much of their worldbuilding is aesthetic-based. it's not unlike the sci-fi hardness scale, which measures how closely a story holds to known, real principles of science. The Martian is extremely hard sci-fi, with nearly every detail being grounded in realistic fact as we know it; Star Trek is extremely soft sci-fi, with a vaguely plausible "space travel and no resource scarcity" premise used as a foundation for the wildest ideas the writers' room could come up with. and much as Star Trek fuckin rules, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic-based fantasy worldbuilding!

(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.

actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)

a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.

deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.

the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.

and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.

however.

you do have to know which one you're doing.

the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).

and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.

the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.

the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.

point is, as a fantasy writer there will always be some amount of your worldbuilding that boils down to 'because I said so,' and there's nothing wrong with that. nor is there anything wrong with making that your whole thing – airy worldbuilding can be beautiful and inspiring. but you have to be aware of what you're doing, because if you ask your readers to engage with the worldbuilding in gritty mechanical detail, you had better have some actual mechanics to show them.

[mariecuttlefish]

One crucial thing I always feel is missing from "social media in the Splatoon world"-type posts is that inklings absolutely would not use Twitter. Inklings would hate any social media site that didn't offer, bare minimum, fully custom color palettes and drag-and-drop profile layout modification. They'd take one look at the uniformity of sites like Twitter and Facebook and die of boredom instantly.

Dome-born octolings, on the other hand, might be fine with Twitter's mundane layout, but I guarantee you half of them are too busy on 2000s-era Neopets doing insane things with CSS customization.

[caffeine-and-computers]

Worldbuilding is crazy, like welp guess I'll write an entire wiki page on a rare disease I just made up

[daisywords]

So annoying when people try to hold alternate-world fantasy to "historical accuracy" standards like. if I wanted historical accuracy I simply would have read/written historical fiction.

The only thing that should matter is if the alt world feels internally consistent/believable. Not "oh but back then" THERE IS NO BACK THEN. IT'S NOT REAL

and just because some aspects of the world (fashion, systems of government, levels of technology) feel consistent with a particular time period in our history doesn't mean that the author is obligated to stick to all other characteristics of that time period. The POINT of alt-world fantasy is to create a world in which the story they want to tell can work, and that's the metric I'm holding things to

[promantis]

How Autistic are you?

I'm "Create a fictional nation with multiple languages, cultures, architecture, and companies" Autistic.

[allgirlsareprincesses]

I don't go here and I realize I'm in the minority with this opinion, but it looks to me like GRRM is just trying to distract from the fact that he's never going to finish his f*cking story. I hardly think he's in any position to criticize someone who may have created a flawed product but at least GOT IT TO THE AUDIENCE. Also he's a misogynistic, entitled hack and I will die on that hill.

[jamesunderwater]

I think it’s honestly more realistic for the trio to give up on their revolutionary/anti-authoritarian ideals and work for the government as adults(I think generation wise, while they might technically be gen x they have much more in common with the boomers). The thing is, Harry Potter is a fantasy series. The characters could tear down the system and make a new, less corrupt government so easily, but they don’t because Jkr is a neo-liberal:/

I thought about that as I was writing the tags -- is it actually out of character for the trio to join the Ministry? And I ended up only saying something about Harry because I think it makes total sense that Hermione would be the type to try and "change the system from within" and I think Ron probably retains some faith in the Ministry because of his dad + would see it as a means to have financial stability (plus just the thrill & notoriety of being an Auror).

But Harry, see, this is what depresses me about the fact that you're right. Because I entirely blame JKR for the fact that it does feel realistic for Harry to eventually have decided to be an Auror. It's her lazy writing and lack of focus on the macro levels of the society she's created that leave room for us to believe that, sure, maybe Harry just saw being an Auror as an obvious path to continue helping people in the way he's best at, and sure, maybe Hermione convinces him they really can change things from the inside. Sure.

But in the hands of a better writer and someone with actual revolutionary ideas (not to mention a soul), Harry's character traits of naturally distrusting people in power, being absolutely incapable of going along with the program, and unwilling to let the tiniest injustices go, plus the fact that he's spent the formative years of his life witnessing the heart of the Ministry's corruption firsthand, would make him the PERFECT character to say fuck that, I refuse to accept that this is the the system we all have to live under. Which is why I said in the tags that Harry James Potter wouldn't let a Ministry man tell him what to do -- because my Harry James Potter never would (just like my Sirius Black would never have confused Harry with James, but that's another issue).

Which is all to say, I agree with you -- it's a fantasy novel, for fuck's sake. A more talented writer with an actual moral compass would have done SO MUCH more with this world JKR threw together, as evidenced by the incredible fanfiction so many people write that far surpasses the original media. Comparing HP with other YA and/or fantasy series like The Hunger Games or The Lord of The Rings really puts into perspective the things JKR didn't address in the books, and what that says about her as a person. (Though at this point she has made it clear all on her own.)

[rabbitcrimes]

one of my favorite little omegaverse things is the proliferation of scenting wrists which is not how human body smell works at all but is where we put perfume. it's so like. anatomy made up by people who have only ever read about having a human body. i also think this pheromones-as-perfume connection is borne out by the fact that everyone always describes characters in the omegaverse as having absurdly unlikely notes to their scents. like you just like perfume you're describing perfume there is no way he smells like cinnamon and chocolate lol

[grirnoires]

rajo's birth parents and his only full blooded sister, and cegerni's family. ocasid died when cegerni was 13 and tracenet 10, and tanorra and sayevast split up when rajo was 5 and ardin was a baby.

[kyliafanfiction]

I mean, I guess maybe it's a matter of different uses of the word, but the biggest reason I would not call Worm 'realistic' (there are others) is because when I call a work or aspects of a work 'realistic', I think of 'is the world at large or the characters therein reacting to the ongoing events of the story in a manner that real people or institutions might'.

Worm isn't doing that. Wildbow did engage with the fact that a lot of superhero comic tropes are pretty trite and overwrought and don't make a lot of sense and and whatnot. That they're not realistic.

But what Wildbow seems to have done is not 'how would a real world react to superheroes and their powers and supervillains, etc', but rather 'how do I make a world where all these conventional tropes of superhero fiction make sense as a thing that happens in the world' with a side dish of 'let's make it as depressing and cynical as possible' (because there are ways to have the same general shape the Wormverse has without it all being so goddamn bleak. The bleakness is part of the point for Worm, I appreciate that, and I'm not criticizing Wildbow for wanting to write a bleak work, that's a subjective taste thing, just... it is bleak)

Wildbow builds the logic of his superhero universe's powers and systems and structures to achieve the intended outcome, rather than taking a system, throwing it at a real/realistic/ish world and characters and seeing what happens.

Worm is just as constructed and unrealistic a world as superhero comics, in it's own way, but it does try to have the world make a degree of internal sense as constructed that superhero comic books don't tend to have because of (if nothing else) the chaotic publishing history and whatnot. But it's all built from the ground up to resemble, on the surface, that same endpoint, so it's not a realistic treatment.

For given values of the word, Worm has many realistic elements, and many of the characters do often feel incredibly, even intensely real, but as a total world and world, Worm is not 'realistic' as I would use the word.

[radiant-absolute-radiance]

I wonder if Romeo and Delilah are personifications of something relating to the Backyard similarly to I-No. Or perhaps something new like an access point to the Backyard/someone tried putting/trapping information from the backyard into human form or whatever.

Delilah’s official profile describing that she doesn’t have access to her full power to keep her body anchored in reality/Bedman deleting his ID(?) and becoming a multidimensional being does sound like kind of a big deal!

[icewindandboringhorror]

Lineup of all of the characters that appear long enough to need a visual representation of them in the game lol

[tea-earl-grey]

i'm not super into star trek novels and the beta canon and whatnot but i'm so glad that i read Last Best Hope because it really makes Picard s1 infinitely better on rewatch (and i say this as a Picard enjoyer/defender). like 100% recommend if you're even a little bit interested in Picard era worldbuilding.

[leavingautumn13]

Pokemon request: Well you know how I feel about the Don, but I've asked for that before so... Zoroark? Either regular or Hisuian.

One of the handful of pokémon species that are fully sapient. For the most part, zoroark colonies isolate themselves from humans. Certain individuals may choose to live among humans, partner with a human, or become a trainer themselves, though this is rare.

Contrary to popular belief, they are not mute, but their mouths simply cannot form human words. Under the guise of magical illusion the species is known for, however, they can be capable speakers.

[send me a pokémon and i'll draw it semi-realistically and add my headcanons]

[mymarifae]

going back to these tags. this shit literally haunts me like i haven't touched bnha since watching the first season when it came out YEARS ago but i still lay awake in bed some nights grieving the loss of This story. i was watching it with my high school ex and i started complaining when all might told deku he'd give him one-for-all and my ex was like "but it'd be so boring if deku didn't get powers. the story wouldn't mean anything." and i was so in shock that i kind of wanted to kill him because WOW . we are not on the same creative wavelength AT ALL are we . like you're telling me you saw alllllllllll that build-up with deku being bullied for not having a quirk and everyone mocking his dreams of going to UA and becoming a pro hero - the build-up that culminates in the scene where he rushes headfirst into danger in a desperate attempt to save someone's life when all the so-called "heroes" with their "superpowers" stood around doing jack shit and you... still wanted him to magically get a quirk via the powers of Lazy Plot Convenience ?!??! you didn't start expecting a story about defying a world that hates you and wants you to fail... ?!?! that's boring to you? nothing about that resonates with you? at all¿!?

[milder-manners]

How did Dream move Sapnap from that bath to the cave of what seems to be an official building ? It doesn't seem abandonned and if it's a house, how come Dream could get into that bathroom without trouble ?

May be a wrong thing to focus on (bc mc dynamic make it you can put a bath anywhere) but I'll keep an eye on clues since you've a rather realistic world-building

It's a wine cellar! Now this will be clarified later in the comic, but it's not really that big of a spoiler so I'll say it here, but the bathtub was originally at an inn Dream was staying at. He immediately moved as soon as he took Sapnap out because he realized the city would be looking for him, and the innkeeper already saw his face.

So the giant wine cellar at this rich (definitely not abandoned) house is his new temporary place.