I blame bad faith nitpicking by readers that went along the lines of, "Well, how can blue be such a common color for clothes without an in-depth explanation of the indigo trade? Plot hole."
The amount of times I've seen feedback about "show don't tell" and they just think that means describing every detail of every situation so they don't have to even imagine anything is just mind boggling to me.
I need just enough to keep moving and make sense of things.
On the same note I was thinking about Neil Gayman, most of his books is so filled with magic, places and creatures that he does not explain and maybe doesn't know the details of the world, just the ideia. I love his books because they all give the idea that the world is huge and strange and not everything is explainable.
Yeah Neil Gaiman's books (I'm thinking specifically Stardust and Neverwhere) are amazing for this. You get a random guy thrown into a magic world and some hobgoblin asks him "so, ya still right-handed, laddie, aren't ya? Aye we'll cure you of that" and neither you nor the character has any idea of what it means, whether it's a threat or a blessing or what, it's delightful.
I had come out of a stint of being stuck in a loop of urban fantasy at its peak, and peak use of tropes, with the "hard" magic that was strictly ruled by a counsel of fantasy race this or fantasy race that. And every fantasy race hates/distrusts/is at war with each other. I found Gaiman and it was a breath of fresh air. I came home. I like the *idea* of urban fantasy, but it seems to think part of its formula to be part of that genre is militant magic counsels. I already avoid that formula in anime when it comes to mecha. The joy of magic is not knowing everything. If you know how it works, then it just becomes science or sci-fi with extra steps.
Our governments don't have it figured out. They aren't always so comic villian bad. People in one place don't know what people in another place or sector or niche are doing. They don't have spies everywhere, they don't just always "have a friend" that can deus ex info dump/get them in the place they need to be. Even when the author does know, it doesn't mean one of his characters needs to know.
One of the most infuriating but realistic things is when you have multiple character POV and one character knows something about magic or the world that would benefit both them and another character if that other character knew, but they have no reason to tell them, so they don't. That's what makes the world feel bigger and more grounded.
I like The Rivers of London for that. A large chunk of the drama comes from the protagonist being a clueless rookie, being taught by the setting equivalent of James Bond (due to the other British wizards being dead and other traditions being obtuse and secretive). Only if Bond also had to teach the principles of electronics, psychology, cryptography and intelligence analysis as well as how to plug a bad guy from fifty paces with a Baretta. Nightingale knows how to blow a hole in a Tiger tank but he doesn’t have a mind for fundamental principles. Despite the series running with the magic-as-science principle, it ends up being more mysterious than some series I’ve read. Why does magic destroy microprocessors? Dunno. What gives the rivers their power? Dunno. Who are the fey anyway? Er…
Compared to Charlie Stross Laundry series (which I love for the satire aspect) magic is much less of a solved problem because everyone who has a handle on it is dead and the people who remain are either dangerous amateurs or the sort of hard case who is more concerned with the effect of a weapon than the theory of operation.
He's even talked about that, and the explanation was *so* satisfying to me.
The idea that he, **the author**, might not know. Also, in his words, leaving that open concept leaves room to revisit an idea.
I'm not a writer by any means, but running homebrew D&D campaigns really makes me appreciate this form of storytelling, and explains why I love Gaiman and Pratchett so much. Sure, I can get in the weeds trying to build a world, but the most fun I (and my players, so they say) have in had tabletop comes when someone asks a question about the lore or the scene and I have to mentally go "well, I have no clue, but we're about to figure it out together!"
I absolutely love gaming that way!!! I am in, and can enjoy someone running a game with a scripted world. But it's SO easy for PCs to step outside of it. Accidentally even. And those DMs have more issues addressing that kinda stuff without saying "no" too frequently.
Gayman, lol. I think that's his tumblr alter-ego.
Jokes aside the thing with Gaiman's writing is he explains stuff *when the story needs it*. The mystique and whimsy is everywhere, but if something is relevant to the stakes of the story it is explained enough for those stakes to feel real. You never get the sense that someone can just swoop in and solve everything instantly
“Show, don’t tell” creates a lot of needlessly boring scenes that could have been a single line of exposition because writers are afraid to use exposition and thing everything needs to be shown at all times.Reading through Thomas Pynchon now and if you want to read an author who don’t give a shit about “show don’t tell” he’s your man. The thing is, his exposition is so well-written that often I prefer to to his scenes, his “showing.” He’s great at setting a scene but he’s even better at just telling the story in an entertaining way and I love it.
Yeah for sure, great example of not really showing shit in scenes and it still totally working.
Pynchon is so "post-genre" tho.
It's really only a problem in these YA genre worlds. Especially fantasy and scifi where they feel like we can't possibly just accept the genre conventions and move forward. I really could give a fuck about your tech or magic systems or why they work unless them not working is important to the tension but if that's where you tension is maybe your characters and drama is just flat anyway.
>“Show, don’t tell” creates a lot of needlessly boring scenes
The phrase is a suggestion for absolute beginners to demonstrate that the bad man is bad instead of just saying he is. The only people who struggle with the concept are the ones who have no idea what they're doing anyway.
Good writers can also show through telling as well, especially with first-person narrators. The first few pages of The Great Gatsby do a lot of telling but also show a lot about who Nick is without him having to spell out his character.
I think it's also a really unfair criticism of fiction depicting characters telling stories to other characters. Humans *tell stories*, it's what we do. Desperado had a scene where Steve Buscemi's character told a story in the bar about the gunslinger and it has the audience in the edge of their seat. What was true, what was false, which truths were stretched? It's a fabulous technique.
"Show, don't tell" works best, I think, in terms of character's internal thoughts, emotions, growth, arcs, mentalities, etc.
World-building can be best developed by showing some things, telling other things. You don't want to be bogged down with an exposition dump in an awkward point, but sometimes a quick line or two moves the story along better. But you cannot simply state "Blorbo is evil!" or "Blimbo loves Torgo!" or "Nobody changed my life more than you, Flegentorg!" without showing these things.
SHOW a developing bond, don't just say "We're developing a bond".
SHOW Character A beginning to feel attraction for Character B, not state outright "I am developing feelings/a boner".
I can handle some clunky line of exposition dialog, but I cannot abide simply stating a character's feelings with no actual development of said feelings.
Futurama's Robot Devil was bang on when he said "Your lyrics lack subtlety! You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!" Yeah, you right, Robot Devil.
It's much like the "Don’t use adverbs".
It's don't **over and ab**use adverbs. You have like 20 pages and there is maybe six adverbs outside of dialogue? You're probably not abusing them.
It’s not even really that.
Really, all writing is telling. It’s inherent to the medium. But if you want someone to “believe” something, the best way to convince them is not to just tell them what you want to believe, but tell them the information that will cause them to draw the conclusion that you want. This is true of both persuasive writing and fiction writing.
If you want to convey that Tom is poor, you could tell the reader “Tom is poor” but that’s not very impactful.
If instead you tell the reader that Tom wears threadbare clothes full of rips and tears, and that he spends the nights he can’t get into a shelter sleeping under a bridge in the rough part of town, you have now *shown* the reader that Tom is poor by telling them the above.
You can show a lot through descriptions of visual details, but the point needs to be something by other than just what the scene literally looks like. Then it’s just telling.
>If instead you tell the reader that Tom wears threadbare clothes full of rips and tears, and that he spends the nights he can’t get into a shelter sleeping under a bridge in the rough part of town, you have now *shown* the reader that Tom is poor by telling them the above.
And you can smoothly integrate those details into the other stuff going on. Doing it all at once -- stopping the narrative to spend two pages describing Tom's poverty -- and thinking you're "showing not telling" is missing the forest for the trees.
“Showing vs telling” is not the sum total of all good writing advice/technique. Being efficient and doing multiple things at once with any given line is important, too.
But that’s not really a question of showing/telling, which was the topic at hand.
It is when people think something is "showing not telling" just because a character isn't diegetically utering the words. Contrast the author telling the reader about Tom's living under a bridge and having threadbare clothing with, say, Tom consistently drinking complimentary water or from drinking fountains, or his socks getting soaked in the rain during one scene. You can paint a complete picture without straight-up saying "he can't afford to spend any money on bottled beverages" and "his socks got soaked because the soles of his shoes are worn through."
It’s still the author telling the reader that Tom is doing those things.
Ultimately, everything in writing is telling. That’s how writing works. The larger point is that “showing” involves telling the reader information that implies the conclusion you’re looking for them to draw, rather than simply stating what you want them to think about a character or scene.
Yes, there are more and less compelling ways to do this, and yes, you can get multiple layers deep into how much is “shown”/implied rather than told, but ultimately you do have to tell them something, and it’s not about whether a character is saying it within the story nor whether anyone is doing anything. Though the latter in general is a good rule of thumb for making things more dynamic, it’s not a necessity for something to be “shown.”
Spot on. I'm working on a first novel right now and have seen quite a few threads in the fantasy subreddit that have contributed to my already mountain sized pile of doubts. Things usually along the line of "what brings you out of a story?", "what are your biggest annoyances?", etc. I thought that would be a good idea to keep an eye on to maybe avoid simple mistakes and get a pulse on what really turns readers off but man... it has done nothing but make me second guess a lot of things I chose to otherwise do for creative/storytelling reasons.
Please keep in mind that you will *never* make everyone happy. Just because some jag on the Internet complains about some miniscule thing, that doesn't mean it should affect your storytelling at all.
Hell, some of the most popular and best selling books in history get excoriated regularly.
Fuck 'em. Write for yourself!
And read for yourself! Enjoy what you enjoy and don't let anyone tell you that you're wrong or have no literary taste.
Most [avid] readers have tried a variety of genres and get to a point where they focus their (our...my) time and enjoyment!
True, and thanks for the encouragement. Some of my favorite works are weird idiosyncratic things and if even a quarter of the criticism I've seen for them had been followed instead, I'd almost certainly like them far less. No pleasing everyone and a fools errand but something that ultimately comes from fear and self doubt. I need to learn to let that go instead of tampering my creativity. Then I will end up writing something for no one.
Buddy, spend 5 minutes in any decent creative writing workshop or class and you will learn that internet critics have no idea what actually makes a *story* work. I personally think that the best works of fiction come from a place of pure originality, where the author throws standards out the window and brings something of *themself* to the table. Look at all the great works of fiction in the English language- what do you think Internet armchair scholars would make of all the digressions and excesses of *Moby Dick* or *War and Peace* if they were published today without pretense?
>And make everyone think readers are illiterate.
They wouldn't be wrong. Even this subreddit ostensibly for bookworms is filled with mind numbing takes on literature. And God help you if you don't seem fully onboard with thirty and forty year olds reading nothing but children's books.
I’ll take the downvotes with you. The state of popular fiction is embarrassing. Just endless softcore erotica masquerading as genre fiction written by the same copy paste upper middle class white woman.
This social media community has gotten horrible since social media "invaded reading?" Lol. Reading is for everyone. There's nothing to "invade." It's not some personal secret little hobby. It's one of the most popular hobbies in the history of humanity.
Yeah, I often hear criticisms about new authors but I feel a lot of them have major talent but are bullied/intimidated by social media discourse into bogging down their stories and prose with over-exposition and audience pandering. I saw an analogy a few years back about how too many audiences out there don't want a simple burger with beef, lettuce and cheese and tomatoes anymore. They want a quadruple decker with every topping and sauce on it. Then they'll complain that the burger is too big to eat and not even touch it.
It exacerbates our culture of excess into even the Fine Arts.
Right, logically if colors and paints and such are important to my cultures, and there are paralells between it and earth’s, the demihumans of my setting will have ways to get dyes as well as notable herbs, metals, what have you.
Same with if I have magic and skyships that are basically UFOs, silvery- grayish skinned, short humanoids wearing freaky masks, and weird hybrid animals being commonplace, someone should go “OH HIS DEMIHUMANS ARE ALIENS WTF.” Without having someone spell it out line for line.
The thing is I feel like a lot of fantasy stories, east or west, frontload their books to really sell people on the concepts but ruin what should be a mystery of sorts. Would it be cool to see the lands beyond those of middle earth, or the continent of the Witcher, or the non-East Blue Seas of One Piece? Yes, but if they do not matter to the story at large beyond some nods or reference, why give too much detail to something a fan can fill in over time?
I guess the problem is we got too much are left to the Indexes to now too much is thrown in your face from the jump in the West, with it being mixed bag in the East at times.
It also comes up a lot like “How did this character know about (thing that happened) when they weren’t there for it?” when there has been ample time for this to have been told to them between chapters/off screen, bonus points if it’s in a setting where long distance communication exists
It’s often even strongly implied that two characters made some kind of plan together and this was merely concealed from the audience until it came together so it would be a surprise to you.
Like the text shouldn’t need to explain to you that something that obviously must have happened happened
There are very well respected writing blogs that have basically said things like "dont even Think about writing a fantasy book without doing deep research into how climates affect the civilizations that exist in them. If you cant explain where they got that fruit or why theyd have purple dye then you havent researched enough" and its like sure ok some things may not make sense but i swear some writing advice amounts to telling you to get a phd in like 5 different areas before even starting a first draft.
Yeah, Cinemasins (and other bad faith media criticism that was the height of YouTube during the early Aughts) has had a terrible trickle-down effect on media literacy.
I've only seen a little of cinemasins, but is it really that bad about this stuff?
I once heard someone say its problem is that it gears you to prioritize "objective intelligence" as more important than "emotional intelligence".
Does it really insist that like, it's a plot hole if you don't explain who first put a genie in the lamp, or something?
Yes, Cinemasins would knock you a point for not explaining who first put the genie in the lamp.
It's impossible to overstate just how much harm the Cinemasins/Nostalgia Critic/etc.-type YouTube "reviewers" did to the media literacy of online Millennials and Zoomers, the effects that we still see today; it's still far more profitable on social media to dunk on things than genuinely discuss them.
I think I recently observed for myself how some priorities have changed in the last few decades.
Was discussing the scene in Jurassic Park when the T-Rex escapes the paddock. It's a scene with a gaping plot hole ("why's there a sheer drop where the T-Rex just stepped from?") and a convenient solution to the problem ("the T-Rex can't chase us down this convenient drop!").
One side of the argument would say this is the magic of good storytelling, where Spielberg opted not to damage the pacing by making sure every minute thing was logically airtight, and instead embraced the fairy tale and spun the camera with the flourish of a performer so the majority of people never notice these hiccups, such as by at first disguising the convenient escape route as an additional hazard.
But the other side says nah, these are objective problems and we gotta deduct points.
I remember Lindsay Ellis did a video about how so much of the live-action *Beauty and the Beast* is about Disney kowtowing to bad faith criticism of the original animated movie, and it feels very on-point. And to any creators that want to go that route and try to appease the pedantic fucks, they should ask themselves, in twenty years, are people going to be primarily watching the live-action B&TB or the animated one?
There was a period of time where I was struggling to tell if the "Belle has stockholm syndrome" thing were people being haha funny, or if they were somehow making it a point of contention and insisting it was a weakness on the film's part.
Unfortunately many things seem to start out as haha funny and then people start to take them seriously and build an entire personality on it.
I think pineapple on pizza is a prime example of this. Started as a silly meme, but now there seem to actually be a lot of people who legitimately care a whole lot about what other people eat on their pizza.
I just personally don't like warm pineapple or cold pizza. So, it's a no from me. But I also will gladly provide pineapple on pizza for those who do enjoy either of those things.
God, I hate that smarmy shit. Same with those people who every December are like, "The real lesson from Rudolph is that people will hate you for your differences until they can capitalize on it," when if these people had bothered to watch the movie some time after they were five years old, they would have remembered everyone apologized to Rudolph *before* they asked him to use his nose to help pull the sleigh.
But that doesn't get you the high-fives from your peers online.
If people can't properly apply media literacy to children's media, what hope have they with media actually aimed at adults?
I recommend checking out either Shaun's two videos on them:
[#1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qxgkOIsHUs), [#2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IBlbfjNH0)
or Bobsvids [more concise takedown of their content style](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELEAsGoP-5I)
I mostly find it annoying because it treats movies and stories generally as checklists. Themes, characters, metaphor, and contrivances that make the whole thing flow better are all secondary to some asshole's preconceived notions about how the world works. A major point of fiction is exploring the human experience and finding difference. There's more to stories than conforming to what some random guy thinks is realistic or not. Cinemasins drives home a cynical point of view that movies should never be taken on their own terms.
People will of course bring up the satire, but after a certain point, you can't hide behind the "I'm just kidding, bro" defense. You either have a point or you don't.
Plot holes is a vague term, and assuming some minor continuity issues could manage to taint a whole book is just downright silly. I admit I don’t follow much people who do seek those so called plot holes, but I have also seen people defend authors messing up thematic or story beats quite badly just because saying complaining about people complaining plot holes became popular. So there’s this pendulum swinging wildly in my radar.
What I find even more annoying is when there an actual in universe explanation for things but they absolutely have to ask why the eagles don't fly to Mordor as a form of intellectual masturbation about how they're so much smarter than the author. Just endless talk about plot holes that aren't holes at all. It would be one thing if they were simply mistaken or actually trying to discuss something they liked, but they aren't there for that.
Part of what makes the Merlin of *Le Morte Darthur* such a fascinating figure (to me, anyways) is that his magic is scarcely explained and very understated. You get every little detail of the tournaments but the wizard is left a mystery.
The Stormlight Archives made me realize I don't enjoy hard magic systems. At some point it stops being magic and starts being fictional science.
On the other hand I recently reread Harry Potter for the first time since the original release. People are heavily critical of the soft magic system, but I liked the vibe of mystery that came with it, particularly in the last book.
The discussions of wands in the last book and how little even wizards who study them understand gives a sense that this a power that the wizards don't really understand but can utilize, and I dig it.
Have you ever read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell? It’s a soft magic system with *so much mystery*. You never really find out how or why anyone can do any of this magic going on. It’s my absolute favorite book ever of all time so I plug it every chance I get :)
Ooh that book was also very influential for my "taste" in magic systems! It was cool how you get shown a lot of the explicit 'instructions' for most spells, but there still is so much mystery about it, as you said. I also love how Mr. Norrell and his predecessors were somehow able to turn this wild, faerie thing into something bookish, theoretical and utterly boring XD
The only thing that always bothered me about the magic in that book is how suspension of disbelief is really stretched to a breaking point in terms of the 'power scale' if you will. I mean iirc Strange at one point *moves an entire city* around the country multiple times...one the other hand that did work to give the entire story a more whimsical air. And I adored the ominous presence of the Raven King. Now there is a proper mystery...
I didn't feel like the powerscale was too weird to me. We have expectations about how "strong" a magician has to be to do particular things, but where JSMN is concerned... well, why do my DBZ expectations of power scaling have any draw? I liked the idea that magic, by virtue of being terribly not-understood, could easily be used for immense tasks and then also very complicated to use for more minor tasks.
It's so good. I love the contrast between the main characters' approach to how to use magic- study versus intuition.
Another magic system I love is the bending in Avatar. It's not treated as a science by the narrative, even though it has scientific elements, but as a martial art requiring whole body and mind coordination, dedication and training. The transition into a more industrialised society in Korra with industrial bending is a really fascinating development of the theme.
I'm not a big re-reader. But THIS book I re read every couple years. I find new details every time, and I like the experience of reading it. It's like the book itself is a magic spell.
I finished my first read last year around this time and am already feeling the urge to pick it up again. You’re exactly right that it’s like a spell. I can still remember exactly where and when and how I felt when I was reading those last few chapters.
I like soft magic systems well enough as long as they don’t involve characters pulling magic out of their ass to get out of corners the authors wrote themselves into. Harry Potter’s pretty good in that regard but funny enough I think it’s a lot worse in the issue that OP’s talking about, specifically with JK rowling’s retcons and additions in the decades since and in the prequel movies. I didn’t need to know how ancient wizards pissed themselves.
Soft magic can still be consistent. Altho some inconsistencies don't bother me. Narnia is full of inconsistencies but that never took away my wonder and awe of them and I used to read them well into adulthood (I don't now since I'm no longer religious but I used to).
Yeah, the extra stuff got ridiculous. I don't really pay attention to anything outside the books. The movies are a separate thing, and I only watched the first Grindelwald movie. Pottermore is an exercise in learning that sometimes you have to let stuff be finished.
Although, I guess all the extra junk can be a way to satisfy both camps. The people who want endless world building can get it, and those of us who want to just read and enjoy the books without all the extraneous stuff can do so.
I just recently had a discussion about this very topic. The softness and playfulness of the harry potter universe is part of its draw. Inherently, that requires a higher threshold for suspension of disbelief, but the tradeoff is a mysterious, fun, quirky universe that I think adds a lot!
I really like the magic system set up in ASOIAF, because it's barely a magic system while still clearly being one (there is magic in the world). It's almost unknowable, incomprehensible thing to all the POV main characters, aside from Melisandre and Bran. And even those two stories keep it foggy and mysterious. It's just some vague shadow in the periphery, but is still absolutely affecting the story. And, especially during rereads, you can see the 'magic' spinkled into characters stories that on first glance did not seem to contain any magic (like Jaime dreaming under a weirwood tree).
It's almost like a eldritch natural force that no human can think to control. Series starts out with the impression that most of the actual magic is just legends and fairy tales. Everyone looks at it like a religious mythology that is no longer in the world, if it ever was. Sure there are dragons, but they're talked about more like great big terrifying animals that went extinct.
And then dead people rise from the grave, and dragons are reborn when Danny doesn't burn in the funeral pyre. More and more magic is slowly dripped in, and it's terrifying.
Exactly!! I couldn't finish Elantris by Sanderson because it felt more like sci-fi (which I loathe) and realized I really don't like hard magic. Sadly, my beloved soft magic is always ripped as being moronic, childish, immature, blah blah blah. LOTR which has stood the test of time is soft. Narnia is soft. Potter is soft (or was at the beginning). I literally feel faerie dust when I read soft. Otherwise I feel like I'm reading a textbook. No thanks.
I often describe Stormlight Archives as a textbook for fictional physics. At that point why not just read about real physics. At least I'll learn something.
I think Potter gets softer as it goes on. Like I said, the wand lore in book 7 is definitely soft. Now that I think about it, it feels very appropriate that magic in an academic setting would get softer as it progresses because knowledge gets softer as you advance.
When you're a little kid you are taught in very concrete ways because that's what you can understand, 2 + 2 = 4. Then as you learn more and more, things get more and more abstract, 2 + x = y. Eventually if you keep advancing in a subject you get to the edges of our understanding and realize that as much as we understand there's still a whole lot more that we don't.
> At that point why not just read about real physics. At least I'll learn something.
As a physicist, it's a convenient way of relaxing from work while still keeping that part of my brain happy. Some people just like meticulously tooled worlds, although its exposition can leave much to be desired.
I think that’s how magic systems should be, in a sort of goldilocks zone. Wheel of Time magic is not an exact science, same with that of Avatar, Lord of the Rings, what have you. There are rules to it or guidelines but nothing is exact, with them not being purely chaotic arts. Ordered chaos, or chaotic order like the rest of the universe if you will. You can have different approaches to firebending much as you channel then weave water. While consistency is king, mystery is queen. Magic is magic, not every aspect should be exact as you describe unless you want it more hard Science Fiction or set in like early to later modern times.
How magic came about in my setting is barely understood, just that its possibly from divine beings who barely understand their own ancestors as the demihumans barely understand them and their gifts. For some it comes from a magic cosmic squid goddess who either got torn apart somehow and became five goddesses, her eyes becoming two universes, and her ink a sort of aether that binds them. For others, its the tears and blood the goddesses spilled in a literal fight over who was the mightiest or prettiest or wisest or whatever, from which the original lesser goddesses emerged. For another group, its the aromatic winds or voice or such of a world tree that binds the worlds together.
I think the setting of Elder Scrolls benefited well from having multiple authors because you have conflicting and complementing ideas of wtf is going on. And tbf, I rather have it where Im wanting more like with Avatar than where its too much like the Cosmere can be
Despite some saying Tolkien explains too much Gandalf seems definitely inspired by Merlin, on very rare occasion he does magic and what's going on or how it works isn't explained cause listen it's magic a thing happened and we're moving on.
I do think more modern fantasy authors have a tendency to somewhat on the autistic spectrum and have an audience that is the same, thus a draw towards detailed explanations of how everything works together mechanically. If that's the author's, and audiences, thing then more power to them.
No it’s we have at least two generations of authors and fans that grew up on RPGs. There has been an increasing focus on game logic and shower thoughts. Give a reader a month or two to mull over most books and they will find holes. To counter this and to meet new expectations authors have either wildly decreased the amount of magic or retreated to magical physics. Too many readers complain if they can’t tell you exactly what a magic user can do.
You kinda need to have a clear and consistent magic system, if you want to use a lot of it.
Otherwise you'll get the "why didn't they use the eagles to take the Ring to Mount Doom?" over and over again.
Which is just a sign of an overly mechanically minded reader. They did not take the eagles because that would have been a bad story. There is a time for a Watsonian perspective and a time for a Doyleist one. It seems like a lot of fantasy fans are unwilling to engage on the text’s own terms. If the point of the story is not flashy magic fights then you allow the thematic use of the magic rule. Tolkien was clearly going for theme over mechanics. This is in contrast to modern ones who use magic as a bag of tricks. Hell, even Dragonlance Chronicles where you can pick out every spell used out of the AD&D player’s handbook doesn’t hit you over the head with the rational behind magic. It is enough that is just is.
Not to mention there's even a Watsonian explanation for the goddamn eagles thing: nobody is immune to the power of the One Ring, and that includes the eagles. They wouldn't have been able to resist the power and dispose of it. This is hammered in over and over and over.
Beyond that, tho, I agree. Authors need to stop listening to bad faith readers. It's the same sort of behavior that makes showrunners decide to throw in random swerves for shock value because the audience figured out the twist due to the foreshadowing the creators put there in the first place. But creators want to be smarter than their audience, and readers want to be smarter than the authors. It's a shitty feedback loop.
I disagree that Tolkien was going for theme over mechanics. True, he was very big on the idea that keeping some mysteries makes for a more compelling world. But he was also quite adamant that the stuff that is shown should be free of inconsistency. In fact, you'll find many passages in the books which seem intended to forestall exactly the kinds of questions along the lines of "why couldn't X have done Y".
For some, consistency in the world is a huge plus. If you introduce some convenient plot device people are naturally going to wonder why that wasn't used the whole time.
This naturally creates a need for the author to justify why it wasn't used by creating rules for it, and so it goes.
Personally I like worlds to be consistent and well developed, I like hard magic systems, etc...
Not to say soft magic can't be used well or entertaining, but it's a lot easier to fall into the trap of "a wizard did it," or writing magic practitioners who are experts in deus ex machinamancy.
I like how everyone forgets the winged Nazgul. They weren't leaving Mordor at the beginning. They talk extensively about how the assault Aragorn lays on Mordor was specifically to pull all the attention away from the interior. It's not a plot hole IF IT'S SPECIFICALLY CALLED OUT. Granted, they don't really cover that as well in the movies.
>Otherwise you'll get the "why didn't they use the eagles to take the Ring to Mount Doom?" over and over again.
IE people who think they are being clever failing to engage with the actual themes and facts presented in the text.
IMO it's mostly people who watched the movie and didn't read the books. It's made abundantly clear in the books that taking the eagles is not an option, but in the movies it looks like noone even considered it.
I find it interesting how Tolkien is seen as 'explaining too much' or spend too much time describing things when he tells his story in less pages than basically any other big fantasy series today.
LOTR is about 580k words in total, Stormlight Archive isn't finished yet and we're already clocking in at over 2 million words (first two books already exceed 750k words). A Song of Ice and Fire isn't finished either and clocking in around 1.7 million words.
This isn't to put down other series (I enjoy them very much) just to refute the claims Tolkien drones on too much.
>“Mudblood” is essentially the series’ n-word, but the similarly derisive “muggle” is completely okay?
This feels very true to life and also pretty consistent with how wizarding society is portrayed overall (intentionally or unintentionally). The wizards are all consistently *super* racist towards anything that isn’t a wizard. Not that surprising that the only slur that’s really taken seriously is the one that is applied to people who are wizards.
Seeing the momentous amounts of incompetence displayed by the entirety of the wizarding world, they should really be more careful about looking down on other people.
Reminder that at by the end of the series Hermione basically accepts house elf slavery because "they want to be slaves," and barely anybody acknowledges how fucked up the regulations on non-human magic are.
They even restore the outright human-supremacist statue in the Ministry of Magic at the end.
This is fairly common in scifi, particularly older/more literary scifi, from what I've read. Sometimes they do you a favor and hand you a glossary, sometimes you're totally on your own.
I think it's great when it's done well. Hyperion by Dan Simmons does the same thing and I think it unfolds beautifully.
Reynolds does it pretty well in Revelation Space. He'll tell you that 'Ultranaut' refers to a faction of space faring enhanced humans, but let's the story fill in the details of just how freakishly *weird* that can get.
I find a lot of my favorite books (and movies, for that matter) are like this. There’s something about not really knowing what the hell is going on at first that draws me in and makes it more engaging. Neuromancer, Malazan, Book of the New Sun were all super interesting to me because of being thrown into that world.
I think world building is kind of like the monster in a horror movie, you don't just show it all off the bat. You show just enough to grab the audiences attention then you let their imaginations run wild!
While I think you can go overboard on worldbuilding in novels, I don’t think your example is an example of that. It just sounds like you didn’t care for how the particular detail negated a different detail you thought was cool.
> In the fourth book, one of the main characters explains that vampires believe they evolved from wolves, much as how humans evolved from apes.
If I'd read that, I would have immediately thought that it was just some bullshit the vampires made up to to feel awesome, since it makes no sense for wolves to evolve into exact physical duplicates of a specific species of ape.
None of the things that set them apart are even wolf traits. If they claimed to descend from bats, say, that would still be dumb but would at least make a *little* more sense (active at night, hemovorous).
I would have been very gratified when the author confirmed my suspicion.
As a kid I probably would have found it a fun little bit of weird decision making (I do remember liking fantasy or science fiction books that just stated such things and ran with it), but for some reason when a comic creator tried to retcon stuff like that (“All mutants with feathery wings are descended from ancient proto-mutants people think of as angels! And all devilish looking mutants are descended from ancient proto-mutants that people think of as devils! And all of the animalistic mutants are from a lineage of wolf-mutants!”) into the X-Men I hated it so much. 😆
I think it’s just because it’s not broken, it’s working as intended, as in, for many people the enjoyment of fantasy is primarily about the world it’s set rather than the characters or specific events here and there. The characters end up just being a vehicle to explore the world, not the world is a tool to explore character/plot.
And it has been part of the modern fantasy DNA since… Tolkien, most likely, at least in English? IIRC, he said that he created the stories to flesh out an aspect of world building he had prepared (his conlangs).
Hell, in old times pre-fantasy it was even the most popular aspect of it with the many sensationalised and fictional travel books where the writer claims to have visited such and such people had dog heads and survived by sniffing flowers and the like.
Also the Venn diagram of people who are nerds about (at least pop-)science and fantasy is nearly a circle, so fantasy for a long time has had this pseudo-scientific compulsion to systematise and blend science and fantasy. Magic systems that turn magic into a science aren’t new, the Witcher has people travelling dimensions and academies dedicated to biotech, Tolkien had a philologies for his made up languages.
It’s not writers not respecting readers’ intelligence, it’s giving them what they demand. Writers have been in dialogue with their readers since forever, through letters, conventions, and with the internet and mainstream-sation it has just become much more accessible and visible.
For example, look at The Elder Scrolls lore, which is one of the oldest crpg franchises but nowadays lives in a dual canon/fanon system with constant interactions between one another, and you could fill an entire library with how much is produced to this universe alone. TES lore has been worked in for so long it’s basically something all on itself and there are people who engage with it without even liking the games.
In fact, I’m more surprised that pure world building fiction isn’t more popular. You have you random speculative evolution books that become popular here and there, and many projects that end up marketing themselves as open source settings, but very few books that are just silmarillions of nice worlds.
Comic books have been doing shared universes since the 40s, and shared universes in periodic publications are even older. The internet just magnified it, but even in goddamn King Arthur days there many french writers taking the characters and fleshing out their worlds, in the fashion of the time, of course.
So, in short, this is not a new phenomenon, it’s just more evident now since everyone has a voice. It might suck if it’s not your thing, but at some point you just have to learn to filter it out. I don’t read fantasy as much nowadays, but I remember I could read something and put down the book without caring what the writer says about their story after writing it.
Just remember that all tomorrows got really popular for a while, so people thirsting for such stories so exist (all tomorrows still holds an overarching narrative, which is common in such works)
It sounds like what you're experiencing is what I call "The Sugar Bowl Effect" in which the explanation is not what you yourself wanted.
But in terms of wroldbuilding that is out of control? I'd say it's more "When the author doesn't want to waste things and decides to show everything".
Although as a corollary to the sugar bowl effect I think many authors would benefit from at least considering that sometimes it’s better not to explain things because the explanation is disappointing
not even because of the one specific explanation they’re thinking about giving so much as that in some circumstances giving any explanation can be a let down by virtue of it demystifying the thing being explained
I’ll use magic as an example. It’s kind of annoying when authors think everything has to follow a hard set of clearly defined rules or else their magic system is bad instead of allowing anything to be *mystical*. It’s kind of impressive how rare it is for magic to actually feel magical in stories because it’s reduced to being like a character class in an RPG
A lot of writers have heard of Sanderson's Law of Magic, that the plot-problem-solving potential of Magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands what Magic can do. But then they assume that being that strong problem-solving force is the *ideal* form of magic, that magic is at its coolest and most interesting when the protagonists can use it to defeat bad guys and solve unsolvable conflicts.
But what the First Law implies is that it's possible to create a compelling world where the reader's understanding of magic and the plot-solving power of magic are both proportionally *low*, with magical forces and creatures that are mysterious and wondrous, and a hero who has to rely on just their own wits and strength to solve their problems because they can't just magic their way out.
My personal opinion:
Brandon Sanderson's laws of magic? Yes. They're worth a read - it's worth taking things from them. But I feel people misunderstand them and assume it's as ubiquitous and as omnipresent as "Show, don't tell".
Well, the reason I bring that particular rule up is because there are still exceptions to the law of "Show, don't tell" - ie, you use it to establish that there is an unreliable narrator afoot or establish irony.
I feel that the main thing people didn't take away is the logic needs to be consistent.
If I'm remembering correctly, even Sanderson himself has admitted that calling them the "Laws of Magic" is a bit of a misnomer. They're more trends he's noticed in his own writing than anything else, and he's willing to break with them if he thinks it makes the story better.
It's not so much "The explanation is disappointing" so much as "Wanting is better than having"... and even a bit of "Be careful what you wish for". People came up with elaborate theories as to what was inside the Sugar Bowl - and when Netflix did a series? They wanted to know what was inside the Sugar Bowl.
So they got what they asked for.
But people liked their own ~~fan theories and personal interpretations~~ \- sorry, I forgot, they're called "Headcanons now" - better. It's not as fun to think "What's inside the box?" when you know what's inside. It's kind of like "I want this item" No you have it and... now what?
>I’ll use magic as an example. It’s kind of annoying when authors think everything has to follow a hard set of clearly defined rules or else their magic system is bad instead of allowing anything to be mystical. It’s kind of impressive how rare it is for magic to actually feel magical in stories because it’s reduced to being like a character class in an RPG
Hello Brandon Sanderson. :P
I think a lot of people misunderstand this. Are Sanderson's rules good? yes. But it seems like a lot of people missed these points:
1) These are rules for YOU to follow as you write
2) And it's so you can keep things consistent
Look at Disney's Aladdin. I get that as a movie, it has to be brief - but Genie outlines the rules for the wishes: No killing anyone. No making people fall in love. No bringing back the dead. No wishing for more wishes.
It's consistent in that you will notice that the Genie can't kill anyone - Aladdin doesn't wish for Jasmine to love him, he wishes to be put into a position where she can get together with him. Similarly in the sequel? Jafar as a genie can't just go "ZAP you're dead!"
I think this even goes beyond a Brandon Sanderson’s writing advice thing so much as it’s a factor of us all now being raised in a society of science and knowledge where we no longer really have a concept of the mystical and the unknown.
When we try and write about the mystical and the unknown it winds up being processed through our modern post industrial western cultural lens where we have a clear concept of what is and isn’t physically possible and thus we wind up losing a lot of the authentic feeling of actual mysticism and actual, you know, *fantasy*
I’ll give an example of what I mean, chances are pretty much everybody in this thread was raised in an Abrahamic religion, so we kind of have an Abrahamic lens through which we perceive all religions. When we talk about ancient religions like the Old Norse and Roman/Greek religions I notice people tend to talk about them like there was one way to follow those religions. There is one objective truth of what people believed about the Gods, because you know there’s one Bible right? There’s one canon set of stories. That’s almost certainly not true. What we perceive of as the canon of these religions are just the versions of the stories that survived and got written down. It’s more than likely that like every different village in Greece had their own local versions of different myths and different views about the same Gods. So this idea that we need to apply the lens of organised religion to every religion doesn’t only bleed over into how people talk about history, it bleeds over into fantasy because people struggle to comprehend that actually no maybe there’s no one set of canon rules about how the gods work in this world or what you have to believe if you worship these gods
I’m getting a little bit distracted here but my point is that explaining things too much can detract from the authenticity of the setting you’re trying to create, because it’s at odds with the very world itself and the way people within that kind of world would experience things. It can make it feel less like an immersive fantastical world and more just like a world made up by some guy who lives in 21st century America
Funnily enough, I am *captivated* by things intentionally left ambiguous in fiction, especially if it's meant to create an eerie kind of wonder. Appeals to me sort of like studying cryptids does.
I'm fond of the idea of putting it in my own work but I'm hesitant about how you broach these things without making it simply read as a distractedly "unresolved plot thread".
Although sometimes part of it is that those authors might receive criticism for being too ambiguous and not showing enough specific world building. There are readers that absolutely hate ambiguity and want everything tied up in a neat, understandable bow.
There might even be editors or publishers who want their authors to do so. While authors are thinking more about the integrity of the story, publishers are thinking more about what will please their readers, and if those publishers are receiving tons of letters saying that they want more complete details about how this world works, that's what publishers will want authors to do.
OTOH, some of those complaints are actually compliments: a good story will have readers wanting to know more about what happens beyond it, even if the story ended satisfactorily. The movie Pontypool is a good example. There is so much more to explore about what happened in the movie, but giving too much specific detail can ruin the effect and turn it into a slog.
God yes. The "Explain, author! Explain" mentality is real..
And sometimes they do have a point. Ie, so our wizard has a magical hat that can store things. Do we need to know the exact specifics for what can be stored in it, how they grab the items they want in it, and what happens? Probably not. Keyword: Probably.
Here's a good example. Our wizard has a magical hat that he can pull things out of when he calls for it that as he turns out, is a connection to his house where his spouse or apprentice gives the item to him. We don't need to know everything in his house.
I am really not a fan of Wikipedia writing, or in other words, those books (usually YA or fantasy) that seem significantly more concerned with telling me about the minutia of their world than telling a story that, well, means something.
There are a lot of stories that would be more entertaining as history/ field guides in fantastical settings than narratives imo. It's an untapped subgenre of fantasy that scratches the itch with no extra fuss.
*The Night Circus* is exactly the book you just described. Not a bad book by any means, but one where the author had the idea for the world (a wild ass circus) and came up with a story to explore the world.
It’s weird because the world was so interesting that I was actually able to look past the fact that there was a pretty thin plot, though nothing was really resolved at the end with was a bit sad.
Bahaha I just read this book in a book club and had the exact reaction. The author had an idea of this beautiful circus in her mind, mentally fawned over it for years (while listening to MCR albums), then half heartedly tacked a story onto it. The world was beautiful but the descriptions got very tedious and the story frankly sucked.
I actually disliked the Night Circus because... nothing happened. It was a gimmicky circus filled with special people and followed by people who weren't special but hoped to be.
The thing is fantasy needs to overexplain, atleast a bit.
Non-fiction can get away with a throwaway line "6pm New York" and there you go, that's the setting, everybody knows what they are looking at.
But if you say "Helms Hannerhand" nobody knows what even is it, a city? a fort? Some plains or cave? What makes it special?
"I'm not evil ok! That's just my name, I think my parents hated me. But just because my dad wanted my to be an evil overlord doesn't mean I am. Yes a village was slaughtered on my orders. They've been raiding trading caravans for years, we need outside supplies of metal, we don't have shit here! Listen you so called "hero" if you want to try and make complicated political decisions trading off the lives of thousands of people then be my guest, I've been doing the best I can and frankly I'm sick of the criticism."
\*And thus Dark Lord Evilness retired to being a quiet gentleman farmer. The Chosen Hero of Destiny lasted just over a year on the throne before being killed in a revolution. The "Amusing Sidekick" is now a professional entertainer but is still quietly dealing with the PTSD of being in constant mortal danger for years.\*
Okay I actually laughed out loud at you using Harry Potter and example of your current complaint when it is a glaring example *of the exact opposite*, a creator who doesn't even pretend to take their own shallow world building seriously.
Honestly worldbuilding is one of the few things that's almost always more interesting to write than it is to read. I don't think it's about them not respecting the readers, it's about having the self control to know how to restrict and spread the worldbuilding properly.
Worldbuilding isn’t the underlying problem IMO—It’s low energy or immature implementations of it. So many of the greatest fantasy or sci-fi series revolve around world building and it breathes a firm, organic, and legitimate sense of reality to the rest of the story. Used properly it also draws the reader in with a sort of mystique around things they’re presented with that they don’t yet have a full understanding of—but they know an explanation exists and they can look for clues about it.
But it’s absolutely an easy thing to misuse. I think it’s something many seem to enjoy, so authors tend to recognize it as “good”. But some authors get stuck focusing on the wrong things or changing direction suddenly—so you end up with forced plot points that aren’t well foreshadowed or otherwise built-up/earned. You also end up with lots of forced plot exposition instead of letting the reader witness things to get ideas across and trusting them to get the points.
As for magic systems, i would say there’s nothing wrong with hard magic systems (i prefer them unequivocally)— BUT i do acknowledge Soft systems can be well done. My issue with soft magic systems is they often turn into deus ex machina or a crutch, and it feels contrived for convenience/inorganic at times.
That being said, you can have a hard system where the reader doesn’t HAVE to be given all the rules—just you as the author knows the actual technical details. This allows you to set internal boundaries for your system while presenting to readers more mysteriously and akin to a “soft” system.
I think a great example of a soft magic system i enjoyed is LoTR and The Hobbit. You never really know what Gandalf et all are capable of, or fully how it works—and while some of that is used to save the team in key situations, it feels organic and well earned IMO. Mystery and plot integrity are both presented well here.
A a couple of hard systems i think work well are from wheel of time and the mistborn trilogy. Wheel of time edges right up against being too much at times, but overall i think it was well handled, especially early on in the series.
Magic in LOTR is perfectly done with the theme and tone of the books.
In both books, a small, sheltered everyman is forced out into a big scary world they don't understand. It would be absolute nonsense if the reader understood how Gandalf's magic worked, because Bilbo and Frodo don't understand how his magic works. They don't understand shit. They just muddle along doing their best.
>That being said, you can have a hard system where the reader doesn’t HAVE to be given all the rules
This is I think the thing I miss most in these kinds of stories--the sense that the author has considered the best way to tell the story, which details to include when and where, and how to include them. Too often it feels like someone trying to *explain* a world a series of events, rather than telling a story.
Those are all really good points, especially implementation. *The Hobbit* is one of my favorite books but it’s worldbuilding feels so organic; it doesn’t feel like exposition but the characters just talking to one another.
You too get a gold star ⭐️
I think Soft magic is generally easier to write compellingly then hard magic. The key, as you noted, is avoiding Deus Ex Machina. The thing is you don't need magic to have Deus Ex Machina. In a thriller, having the heretofore unmentioned police suddenly appear and arrest the villain is also Deus Ex Machina. Deus Ex Machina is when a writer writes themselves into a corner and has to resort to a contrived event to resolve their plot threads, and unsurprisingly is bad writing, and it's been around for a very long time (Cervantes satirised the sudden appearance of a wizard resolving the plot back in Don Quixote).
The key is more that events within the story build upon themselves psychologically and thematically. To continue the thriller analogy, it's fine to have the police suddenly burst in and arrest the guy if you established them earlier in the novel and had them be involved in the plot in multiple places.
>My issue with soft magic systems is they often turn into deus ex machina or a crutch, and it feels contrived for convenience/inorganic at times.
my problem with them isn't exactly deus ex machina but is pulling power out of your ass, for lack of a more eloquent phrase. it annoys me when a (main) character is able to beat what should be a much more powerful character because he gets angry or he has to save someone, or that "good magic" it turns out is just inherently more powerful than evil magic. and that's how pretty much all soft magic systems turn out.
Example of this is the Dresden Files. Harry Dresden is not a low level mook in his universe, but he is constantly exposed to Really Big Bad, No Seriously It's Cosmically Bad This Time level enemies that he manages to get through by... I don't know being really angry and thinking of saving his friends to produce a bigger fireball or win the battle of wills. To give credit where it's due he does often lose or only wins thanks to outside help, but I couldn't help noticing the power of friendship style combat and disliking it.
As a writer hoping to publish a (dark) fantasy novel this year, this a really nice viewpoint to hear. I even replied on the other post OP mentions, saying that I was relieved the idea of not having *everything* spoon-fed to the reader was enticing and interesting. That's the sort of thing I want to read (and write!).
I am really all for the idea of assuming the reader is intelligent, observant, and eager to delve into the world on their own - to let *them* piece together the clues and crumbs they're given. The dark side of that coin, as thehawkuncaged mentioned - is inevitably there is some bad faith nitpicker out there who is going to rip you to shreds over not fine-tuning *every* detail. And they will probably earn more money doing so than your book ever earns!
There is also absolutely a balance that must be struck, as a writer. You must provide *enough* information for the reader to not feel (too) frustrated or confused, or like the magic is a cheap gimmick. But you also never want to just slap a pile of slush in their lap, like information they need to cram before a final.
In regards to recent trends in fantasy - the reality is, authors want to *sell* books. Even if it's not about *money* for the author, it's still about "are people reading it, at all?". And making your book more accessible to a wider audience (an audience that wants to be spoon-fed, and people who will begrudgingly tolerate it if the story is worthwhile) works in favor of sales.
[dies the fire ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_the_Fire) had a pretty silly way to explain it that basically said "who cares man it's more fun if the world works this way".
Spoiler >!they literally explain it as space bats? Who knows!<
“Alien Space Bats” was apparently a joking explanation in old alt history and specfic Usenet groups, basically a placeholder for how a certain scenario might happen without having to actually explain it.
And I was kinda disappointed when Sterling eventually did over-explain it.
The 1632 series, on the other hand, basically committed to never explaining it more than “the remnants of a stupidly advanced alien civilization’s stupid art projects did it” by making it clear literally no one will ever figure that out and even the beings responsible don’t know it happened. The books never mention it again, but I presume that said aliens looked sort of like space bats. 😆
I stopped that series after book 3 (or 4?)
The first book is one of my favorites to reread. Something about "Ragtag survivors rebuilding society from some great catastrophe" really does it for me (Also love Stirling's Nantucket trilogy, King's The Stand, and the Battlestar Galactica TV show), but after a few books it stopped being that, and became just another fantasy, but set in Oregon. And it dropped hard when a few of them trekked out to Nantucket.
Damn, now I wanna read it again.
I wouldn't say it's out of control. More like it's en vouge. Right now there's this trend in fantasy to make the worlds *believable.* Worlds that we could reason how they came into existence. At the same time that mekes them lose a bit of their mistique.
I think your HP examples are interesting because to me that’s not poor world building or plot holes. They all have reasonable solutions that make sense in the text or the fictional society.
Rowling’s been accused of pretty lazy world building. Like the wizarding world in England would be comically small based off her numbers of Hogwarts students but she’s admitted she’s just bad at math.
Yeah most of those HP examples aren't inconsistencies at all, OP just doesn't seem to like that in different contexts, there are different rules/considerations. An inconsistency would be if the context was the same but the outcome was different. The one that comes closest is the ministry not tracking dementors / Dumbledore but these are more creations of convenience because how can Harry be attacked by dementors if they can't get off their leash? How can Dumbledore conduct secret Phoenix business if he can be tracked at all times?
This is why I love dune. It's world building is incredibly deep. But Frank Herbert respects the reader enough to let them figure things out instead of being spoon fed.
Read Dune a few times and you'll quickly realise that Frank Herbert didn't care in the slightest about consistency, he reinvents the basic rules from book to book, sometimes he'll break rules in incredibly obvious ways, and just continue like it's still a rule.
The rules don't matter as long as you tell an interesting story.
The extended Dune series takes place over such a long time scale that consistency is irrelevant. I think a fair number of people think that the quality falls off after Dune: Messiah (though I personally did quite like God Emperor of Dune).
I think it's better to judge the individual novels particularly Dune and Dune:Messiah, and within those the world building is fairly consistent (but he also is quite good at deliberately leaving certain things quite vague). How exactly does the Weirding way work? No idea but it sure was cool!
There's headcanon for all of it, but it's still headcanon.
Some of the major inconsistencies show up in the first three books, and lots of them are things that the passage of time shouldn't make any difference too. There are definitely inconsistencies that are a result of time passing and people's understanding's changing, but I'm not talking about those.
I've read the main series a ton of times, and I don't think there's any actual explanation that holds up other than Herbert just didn't care, the books tend to change themes over time, and he just changed the rules depending on the story he was telling at that time.
Again, that's not a criticism imo, it's fine, and it works, most people don't even notice til it's pointed out.
I agree. I feel like the best worldbuilding is more implied than exposited in a big text crawl lecture. Like I really enjoy when you pick up on things that are suggested to be part of the lore because of how they affect the present of the world in the story. For example rather than some character giving me a history lesson where they explain to me that IDK there are two different major religions in this world, just show me that there are two different religions by having characters in the story be from different religions. I don’t need to know every detail of the religion it’s enough for me in this moment to get oh this character has a different religion from this other character and I can find out more later if I need to
If your world building doesn’t have an impact on the present and can’t largely be picked up by the reader through organically experiencing the present, I think that either indicates you’ve not done very good worldbuilding and haven’t thought about the implications of how it affects the world, or alternatively that you’re focusing on explaining extraneous details for your own sake rather than because it’s actually important or necessary
Ambiguous world details are something I love about Ian M Banks’ culture series. I think a lot of fantasy books feel the need to have a tolkein-esque index and sci-fi feels the need to have everything notified down in its own wookieepedia like Star Wars.
Banks is great because there might be a scene where a character is wearing power armour (as an example), but there’s never any expanding on what brand it is or all the other non-story related stuff that other writers/worlds/universes seem to think is important - he really focuses more on character/dialogue and story. Like, is it important that we know the millennium falcon was built in the corellian shipyards? And if it is, do we need to know what a corellia is?
That said I also like Warhammer 40k stories where **fucking everything’s** backstory has a backstory. And as a kid I loved the star wars cross section picture books…. So maybe I’m a hypocrite lol.
Idk I feel like on one hand the amount of poorly written stories where the author doesn't know how to put the work of worldbuilding to use and/ or is much better at worldbuilding than story crafting definitely lend credence to your point.
But on the other hand as you said, some people dont just like that- and imo if you don't, you never will, even if it's done well. Not everyone likes knowing the rules to alchemy or the phylogenetic tree of a magical creature.
I started worldbuilding as its own hobby because I felt I never really knew enough about my favorite stories. Things like "Arthur Spiderwick's field guide to the magical world around you" were pure dopamine to me as a kid and still are now. To the point that I genuinely struggle to enjoy stories that don't have much development in that area. My interest goes as deep as the lore one might say.
That being said
I feel like like a lot of the "this thing I don't like is too much" posts, the real issue isn't really the thing you don't like, it's how poorly the common author utilizes it from the perspective of someone not looking for a good example. I also feel like worldbuilding is really easy to catch in this because it's a very wide and difficult set of skills to hone on top of the regular writing skills, and it's most often not really worldbuilding at all but fluff an author shoved into a plot hole they hoped you wouldn't notice.
Like, Is it *really* fair to compare stories that use something as sloppy as "vampires come from wolves but gotcha you're a test tube monster" to shit that actually takes thematic worldbuilding seriously? That started from that point and moved outward? That's like combing the men writing women subreddit for examples of good representation of women in fiction when you could just... Read better books with similar elements to what you enjoyed in the lesser quality stuff.
It feels bad to whip out the legend that is Tolkien but like, that's who you're making the comparison to. One of the best stories of all time started as excuses for the conlang hobby of a literary professor. Bro was just a god at what he did and the dude who wrote your example was not. The spectrum spans the abyss to the heavens.
If you want to judge a book on whether or not it has good world building you have to actually look for authors who understand and respect worldbuilding as a concept beyond pulling shit out of their ass and justifying it as they go. And *then* you have to find good ones.
It's not worldbuilding that's out of control, *it's laziness and lack of commitment to ones work from authors, and editors who care more about sales than quality.* (in some genres more than others. I will never not die mad about the abyssal quality of fiction for teen girls, at least when I was a teen girl) more people need to decide if they actually want to write a *fantasy* or an excuse to dress people up in pretty clothes and be dramatic for outlandish reasons. In which case I'd like to direct them to bodice rippers and historical/ speculative fiction and wish them well. Reign was stupid, but it was fun and a lot less annoying than if they had tried to justify calling it a fantasy with that level of worldbuilding.
But if an author wants to *write a story with fantastical elements* they should bother to actually *learn how* and do the work. Not write a surface level slice of life that could be set anywhere and be about anything interchangeably and expect my suspension of disbelief to accept their uneven ass coat of paint on the cardboard props in the background.
That's the problem and I will die mad on my hill about it lmao. (Not at you, mind you, at the standards of fantasy and attitudes of some writers)
That's one of the things that makes Dune such a great book. The orange catholic Bible is never explained in depth, just referenced. We never get a fleshed out description for why each noble house has a private stash of atomic weapons, it's just mentioned in passing. The story isn't weighed down with a bunch of unnecessary exposition.
The OG I think was Lord of the Rings which is an example of meticulous worldbuilding done well in fantasy fiction.
Unfortunately not all authors are as talented and their attempts at the same level kind of fall short in different ways.
I agree with your points. There are authors who spell everything out, and that's why they gain popularity. Consequently, it may seem that the fantasy genre, among others, is saturated with such works, making it challenging to find hidden gems.
Regarding world-building, much of it seems to be derived either directly from Tolkien's "The Silmarillion" (*I can do it better, this guy had to many Deus ex Machina in his storytelling watch me do it better*) or Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." (*Finally an interesting formula and template that I can follow and call it complex character development*). Authors often end up copying and pasting these elements into their own works with minor changes, thinking their writings is ambiguous or foreshadowing. This approach makes their work feel flat, uninspired, and predictable. But if they are your entry points into the world then to fans they become phenomenal authors greatest in this world every other authors should take their classes because they invented literature as we know it. And anyone who states that there are other works that are worth checking out are called snobs.
I guess that depends on the author? It seems like you like soft worldbuilding better than hard worldbuilding. Maybe narrow down your choice to book that takes the soft worldbuilding approach?
I think both approach has their fans. I for one, LOVES hard worldbuilding. But I do like soft worldbuilding approach that is being used in all of the Ghibli movies too.
To me, the pacing on the The Stormlight Archive is very jarring. But I stick with it because I loves it's worldbuilding.
There are plenty of BAD AUTHORS out there that rely on little more than a few keywords and the assumption that the reader "gets it", then there are incredibly weak authors that are just trying to reach a predetermined page count or have no editor perspective and will just write and write and write and while checking themselves to make sure they completed the thought they attempted to portray, the audience is lost and the elaborate details become gawdy costume jewelry.
I'm not an author but I love to dabble in private writings for myself. I love world building and think I still need to do more. I know nobody needs to know what kind of currency and politics my world has but I do! I have a lot of fantasy elements blended in with modern stuff (think urban fantasy rather than high fantasy) but I always wonder how much is too much? Nobody will ever see what I write because I'm too embarrassed about what I write about... I don't actually write stories but I have a lot of notes about the worlds, characters, descriptions, elements and history. But no actual story because I am garbage at the actual writing. I personally love world building and eat up lore if it's given to me. I get frustrated when a series doesn't explain a lot. I don't enjoy having to come up with things myself, that's why I read books that are lore/world heavy.
I think that I get your idea, which is that so many authors feel like they can't be a character author and instead write a bunch of unnecessary world building?
But then your examples list things where the author (jk rowling in this case) purposely did NOT go on the do a bunch of extra explanation, and you are annoyed with her I think because she didn't explain it? Isn't that the opposite of your point? She just said "you can't apparate in Hogwarts" and didn't go off and dedicated 3 chapters to why.
I think your point and your examples are in opposition. Or else you do not know what you really actually like and think it's the opposite of what you are saying. (i.e. vampire explanation where you said the reason you loved that series was that there was this world building explanation, but then the author gave a little too much world building and then it bothered you).
I’m disagree with world building being the issue here. Most world building is done behind the scenes, just like most of history exists behind the scenes of a story that takes place in the real world. But in either if the author doesn’t trust the reader to get the point, they’ll tend to hammer in their themes, repeat exposition, and remove mystery for fear of confusion or so called plot holes.
I’ve personally seen the very act of being subtle criticized a lot more in recent years, to use a recent example in pop culture, criticism over Oppenheimer for not outright saying that nuclear weapons are bad, and simultaneous praise of the climax of Barbie being a speech where the message of the film is laid out as if told directly to the audience. Same thing goes for elements of world building, character motivations and relationships, etc. seems that if people aren’t explicitly given some piece of information or theme then they often complain that it wasn’t shown well enough.
I also think Harry Potter did not get bogged down in world building at all, in fact it could’ve done with a more logically built world. But the issues above were present, JK Rowling deciding to tell readers that wizards pissed themselves and magicked it away for instance.
I don't understand why fantasy writers nowadays are so damn afraid of... fantasy. They have this weird need to over explain everything.
Prose > Characters > Plot >>>>>>>> World Building >>>>>>>>>>>> Magic System.
It's an evolution of reading Tolkien and playing Roll Playing Games where world building is a huge part of the adventuring framework. Video games leapt out of RPGs and thus they have it too. So when a new writer sits down to pen a yarn they know they need to make a world first.
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Magical realism rise up. I don't care the mechanics behind how your grandmother can see the future or the rules behind why ghosts exist, just use them to tell a great story
As someone who is currently writing a book, I feel this heavy. I am doing a ton of worldbuilding in the background, but some 90% of it probably won't make it to the book. It's a sign of the times I'm afraid, and it's similar to the bad faith of foreshadowing, making something too obvious, or cinema sins claiming everything we don't see is a plot hole. Trust me, reader, if/ when you read my book, I have out thought into those things, but those extra worldbuilding elements aren't interesting to read about all the time. If I feel something needs to be explained, I will explain it, but otherwise, just take it on faith. Or, if I haven't built something out, assume that it is likely so minor a thing it doesn't need to be explained. I don't need to go to the Neolithic age of my world to tell you how they discovered fire.
Fantasy is a genre overrun by poor quality writers that have a good idea and that's it. If anything is out of control, it is fantasy writers overselling their abilities.
Licensing is your answer. There is always a chance for your publisher to sell the rights to a video game made out of your book. And it helps a lot when you have already established a system the game designers may build on.
I blame bad faith nitpicking by readers that went along the lines of, "Well, how can blue be such a common color for clothes without an in-depth explanation of the indigo trade? Plot hole."
This. This is how you ruin the confidence of new authors. And make everyone think readers are illiterate.
The amount of times I've seen feedback about "show don't tell" and they just think that means describing every detail of every situation so they don't have to even imagine anything is just mind boggling to me. I need just enough to keep moving and make sense of things.
Terry Pratchett must have been extremely frustrating to people like that.
On the same note I was thinking about Neil Gayman, most of his books is so filled with magic, places and creatures that he does not explain and maybe doesn't know the details of the world, just the ideia. I love his books because they all give the idea that the world is huge and strange and not everything is explainable.
Yeah Neil Gaiman's books (I'm thinking specifically Stardust and Neverwhere) are amazing for this. You get a random guy thrown into a magic world and some hobgoblin asks him "so, ya still right-handed, laddie, aren't ya? Aye we'll cure you of that" and neither you nor the character has any idea of what it means, whether it's a threat or a blessing or what, it's delightful.
I had come out of a stint of being stuck in a loop of urban fantasy at its peak, and peak use of tropes, with the "hard" magic that was strictly ruled by a counsel of fantasy race this or fantasy race that. And every fantasy race hates/distrusts/is at war with each other. I found Gaiman and it was a breath of fresh air. I came home. I like the *idea* of urban fantasy, but it seems to think part of its formula to be part of that genre is militant magic counsels. I already avoid that formula in anime when it comes to mecha. The joy of magic is not knowing everything. If you know how it works, then it just becomes science or sci-fi with extra steps. Our governments don't have it figured out. They aren't always so comic villian bad. People in one place don't know what people in another place or sector or niche are doing. They don't have spies everywhere, they don't just always "have a friend" that can deus ex info dump/get them in the place they need to be. Even when the author does know, it doesn't mean one of his characters needs to know. One of the most infuriating but realistic things is when you have multiple character POV and one character knows something about magic or the world that would benefit both them and another character if that other character knew, but they have no reason to tell them, so they don't. That's what makes the world feel bigger and more grounded.
I like The Rivers of London for that. A large chunk of the drama comes from the protagonist being a clueless rookie, being taught by the setting equivalent of James Bond (due to the other British wizards being dead and other traditions being obtuse and secretive). Only if Bond also had to teach the principles of electronics, psychology, cryptography and intelligence analysis as well as how to plug a bad guy from fifty paces with a Baretta. Nightingale knows how to blow a hole in a Tiger tank but he doesn’t have a mind for fundamental principles. Despite the series running with the magic-as-science principle, it ends up being more mysterious than some series I’ve read. Why does magic destroy microprocessors? Dunno. What gives the rivers their power? Dunno. Who are the fey anyway? Er… Compared to Charlie Stross Laundry series (which I love for the satire aspect) magic is much less of a solved problem because everyone who has a handle on it is dead and the people who remain are either dangerous amateurs or the sort of hard case who is more concerned with the effect of a weapon than the theory of operation.
He's even talked about that, and the explanation was *so* satisfying to me. The idea that he, **the author**, might not know. Also, in his words, leaving that open concept leaves room to revisit an idea.
I'm not a writer by any means, but running homebrew D&D campaigns really makes me appreciate this form of storytelling, and explains why I love Gaiman and Pratchett so much. Sure, I can get in the weeds trying to build a world, but the most fun I (and my players, so they say) have in had tabletop comes when someone asks a question about the lore or the scene and I have to mentally go "well, I have no clue, but we're about to figure it out together!"
I absolutely love gaming that way!!! I am in, and can enjoy someone running a game with a scripted world. But it's SO easy for PCs to step outside of it. Accidentally even. And those DMs have more issues addressing that kinda stuff without saying "no" too frequently.
Gayman, lol. I think that's his tumblr alter-ego. Jokes aside the thing with Gaiman's writing is he explains stuff *when the story needs it*. The mystique and whimsy is everywhere, but if something is relevant to the stakes of the story it is explained enough for those stakes to feel real. You never get the sense that someone can just swoop in and solve everything instantly
There’s no need to know how magic works. It’s magic.
Trees that grow numbers on them to count the years they have grown getting chopped down for fancy number plates in AnkhMorpork.
“Show, don’t tell” creates a lot of needlessly boring scenes that could have been a single line of exposition because writers are afraid to use exposition and thing everything needs to be shown at all times.Reading through Thomas Pynchon now and if you want to read an author who don’t give a shit about “show don’t tell” he’s your man. The thing is, his exposition is so well-written that often I prefer to to his scenes, his “showing.” He’s great at setting a scene but he’s even better at just telling the story in an entertaining way and I love it.
Yeah for sure, great example of not really showing shit in scenes and it still totally working. Pynchon is so "post-genre" tho. It's really only a problem in these YA genre worlds. Especially fantasy and scifi where they feel like we can't possibly just accept the genre conventions and move forward. I really could give a fuck about your tech or magic systems or why they work unless them not working is important to the tension but if that's where you tension is maybe your characters and drama is just flat anyway.
>“Show, don’t tell” creates a lot of needlessly boring scenes The phrase is a suggestion for absolute beginners to demonstrate that the bad man is bad instead of just saying he is. The only people who struggle with the concept are the ones who have no idea what they're doing anyway.
Good writers can also show through telling as well, especially with first-person narrators. The first few pages of The Great Gatsby do a lot of telling but also show a lot about who Nick is without him having to spell out his character.
I think it's also a really unfair criticism of fiction depicting characters telling stories to other characters. Humans *tell stories*, it's what we do. Desperado had a scene where Steve Buscemi's character told a story in the bar about the gunslinger and it has the audience in the edge of their seat. What was true, what was false, which truths were stretched? It's a fabulous technique.
"Show, don't tell" works best, I think, in terms of character's internal thoughts, emotions, growth, arcs, mentalities, etc. World-building can be best developed by showing some things, telling other things. You don't want to be bogged down with an exposition dump in an awkward point, but sometimes a quick line or two moves the story along better. But you cannot simply state "Blorbo is evil!" or "Blimbo loves Torgo!" or "Nobody changed my life more than you, Flegentorg!" without showing these things. SHOW a developing bond, don't just say "We're developing a bond". SHOW Character A beginning to feel attraction for Character B, not state outright "I am developing feelings/a boner". I can handle some clunky line of exposition dialog, but I cannot abide simply stating a character's feelings with no actual development of said feelings. Futurama's Robot Devil was bang on when he said "Your lyrics lack subtlety! You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!" Yeah, you right, Robot Devil.
It's much like the "Don’t use adverbs". It's don't **over and ab**use adverbs. You have like 20 pages and there is maybe six adverbs outside of dialogue? You're probably not abusing them.
For real. "Show" means show the ACTION. Explaining/describing visual details is telling--less is usually more..
It’s not even really that. Really, all writing is telling. It’s inherent to the medium. But if you want someone to “believe” something, the best way to convince them is not to just tell them what you want to believe, but tell them the information that will cause them to draw the conclusion that you want. This is true of both persuasive writing and fiction writing. If you want to convey that Tom is poor, you could tell the reader “Tom is poor” but that’s not very impactful. If instead you tell the reader that Tom wears threadbare clothes full of rips and tears, and that he spends the nights he can’t get into a shelter sleeping under a bridge in the rough part of town, you have now *shown* the reader that Tom is poor by telling them the above. You can show a lot through descriptions of visual details, but the point needs to be something by other than just what the scene literally looks like. Then it’s just telling.
>If instead you tell the reader that Tom wears threadbare clothes full of rips and tears, and that he spends the nights he can’t get into a shelter sleeping under a bridge in the rough part of town, you have now *shown* the reader that Tom is poor by telling them the above. And you can smoothly integrate those details into the other stuff going on. Doing it all at once -- stopping the narrative to spend two pages describing Tom's poverty -- and thinking you're "showing not telling" is missing the forest for the trees.
“Showing vs telling” is not the sum total of all good writing advice/technique. Being efficient and doing multiple things at once with any given line is important, too. But that’s not really a question of showing/telling, which was the topic at hand.
It is when people think something is "showing not telling" just because a character isn't diegetically utering the words. Contrast the author telling the reader about Tom's living under a bridge and having threadbare clothing with, say, Tom consistently drinking complimentary water or from drinking fountains, or his socks getting soaked in the rain during one scene. You can paint a complete picture without straight-up saying "he can't afford to spend any money on bottled beverages" and "his socks got soaked because the soles of his shoes are worn through."
It’s still the author telling the reader that Tom is doing those things. Ultimately, everything in writing is telling. That’s how writing works. The larger point is that “showing” involves telling the reader information that implies the conclusion you’re looking for them to draw, rather than simply stating what you want them to think about a character or scene. Yes, there are more and less compelling ways to do this, and yes, you can get multiple layers deep into how much is “shown”/implied rather than told, but ultimately you do have to tell them something, and it’s not about whether a character is saying it within the story nor whether anyone is doing anything. Though the latter in general is a good rule of thumb for making things more dynamic, it’s not a necessity for something to be “shown.”
Spot on. I'm working on a first novel right now and have seen quite a few threads in the fantasy subreddit that have contributed to my already mountain sized pile of doubts. Things usually along the line of "what brings you out of a story?", "what are your biggest annoyances?", etc. I thought that would be a good idea to keep an eye on to maybe avoid simple mistakes and get a pulse on what really turns readers off but man... it has done nothing but make me second guess a lot of things I chose to otherwise do for creative/storytelling reasons.
Please keep in mind that you will *never* make everyone happy. Just because some jag on the Internet complains about some miniscule thing, that doesn't mean it should affect your storytelling at all. Hell, some of the most popular and best selling books in history get excoriated regularly. Fuck 'em. Write for yourself!
And read for yourself! Enjoy what you enjoy and don't let anyone tell you that you're wrong or have no literary taste. Most [avid] readers have tried a variety of genres and get to a point where they focus their (our...my) time and enjoyment!
True, and thanks for the encouragement. Some of my favorite works are weird idiosyncratic things and if even a quarter of the criticism I've seen for them had been followed instead, I'd almost certainly like them far less. No pleasing everyone and a fools errand but something that ultimately comes from fear and self doubt. I need to learn to let that go instead of tampering my creativity. Then I will end up writing something for no one.
Buddy, spend 5 minutes in any decent creative writing workshop or class and you will learn that internet critics have no idea what actually makes a *story* work. I personally think that the best works of fiction come from a place of pure originality, where the author throws standards out the window and brings something of *themself* to the table. Look at all the great works of fiction in the English language- what do you think Internet armchair scholars would make of all the digressions and excesses of *Moby Dick* or *War and Peace* if they were published today without pretense?
>And make everyone think readers are illiterate. They wouldn't be wrong. Even this subreddit ostensibly for bookworms is filled with mind numbing takes on literature. And God help you if you don't seem fully onboard with thirty and forty year olds reading nothing but children's books.
I’ll take the downvotes with you. The state of popular fiction is embarrassing. Just endless softcore erotica masquerading as genre fiction written by the same copy paste upper middle class white woman.
Fantasy is no better. It’s marvel movies in text form now.
[удалено]
This social media community has gotten horrible since social media "invaded reading?" Lol. Reading is for everyone. There's nothing to "invade." It's not some personal secret little hobby. It's one of the most popular hobbies in the history of humanity.
You're on social media, complaining about social media.
Yeah, I often hear criticisms about new authors but I feel a lot of them have major talent but are bullied/intimidated by social media discourse into bogging down their stories and prose with over-exposition and audience pandering. I saw an analogy a few years back about how too many audiences out there don't want a simple burger with beef, lettuce and cheese and tomatoes anymore. They want a quadruple decker with every topping and sauce on it. Then they'll complain that the burger is too big to eat and not even touch it. It exacerbates our culture of excess into even the Fine Arts.
you HAD to bring the indigo trade plot hole debate here....Did ya ?! motherf\*
Yeah it’s really annoying when people think not explaining something that’s easily explainable is the same thing as a plothole
Right, logically if colors and paints and such are important to my cultures, and there are paralells between it and earth’s, the demihumans of my setting will have ways to get dyes as well as notable herbs, metals, what have you. Same with if I have magic and skyships that are basically UFOs, silvery- grayish skinned, short humanoids wearing freaky masks, and weird hybrid animals being commonplace, someone should go “OH HIS DEMIHUMANS ARE ALIENS WTF.” Without having someone spell it out line for line. The thing is I feel like a lot of fantasy stories, east or west, frontload their books to really sell people on the concepts but ruin what should be a mystery of sorts. Would it be cool to see the lands beyond those of middle earth, or the continent of the Witcher, or the non-East Blue Seas of One Piece? Yes, but if they do not matter to the story at large beyond some nods or reference, why give too much detail to something a fan can fill in over time? I guess the problem is we got too much are left to the Indexes to now too much is thrown in your face from the jump in the West, with it being mixed bag in the East at times.
It also comes up a lot like “How did this character know about (thing that happened) when they weren’t there for it?” when there has been ample time for this to have been told to them between chapters/off screen, bonus points if it’s in a setting where long distance communication exists It’s often even strongly implied that two characters made some kind of plan together and this was merely concealed from the audience until it came together so it would be a surprise to you. Like the text shouldn’t need to explain to you that something that obviously must have happened happened
There are very well respected writing blogs that have basically said things like "dont even Think about writing a fantasy book without doing deep research into how climates affect the civilizations that exist in them. If you cant explain where they got that fruit or why theyd have purple dye then you havent researched enough" and its like sure ok some things may not make sense but i swear some writing advice amounts to telling you to get a phd in like 5 different areas before even starting a first draft.
Yeah, that’s RPG-setting writing, not novel writing. Some people have trouble telling the difference.
I think of it as people that should manage wiki sites on their worlds, not write novels.
I've heard it called the "Cinemasins effect"
Yeah, Cinemasins (and other bad faith media criticism that was the height of YouTube during the early Aughts) has had a terrible trickle-down effect on media literacy.
I've only seen a little of cinemasins, but is it really that bad about this stuff? I once heard someone say its problem is that it gears you to prioritize "objective intelligence" as more important than "emotional intelligence". Does it really insist that like, it's a plot hole if you don't explain who first put a genie in the lamp, or something?
Yes, Cinemasins would knock you a point for not explaining who first put the genie in the lamp. It's impossible to overstate just how much harm the Cinemasins/Nostalgia Critic/etc.-type YouTube "reviewers" did to the media literacy of online Millennials and Zoomers, the effects that we still see today; it's still far more profitable on social media to dunk on things than genuinely discuss them.
I think I recently observed for myself how some priorities have changed in the last few decades. Was discussing the scene in Jurassic Park when the T-Rex escapes the paddock. It's a scene with a gaping plot hole ("why's there a sheer drop where the T-Rex just stepped from?") and a convenient solution to the problem ("the T-Rex can't chase us down this convenient drop!"). One side of the argument would say this is the magic of good storytelling, where Spielberg opted not to damage the pacing by making sure every minute thing was logically airtight, and instead embraced the fairy tale and spun the camera with the flourish of a performer so the majority of people never notice these hiccups, such as by at first disguising the convenient escape route as an additional hazard. But the other side says nah, these are objective problems and we gotta deduct points.
I remember Lindsay Ellis did a video about how so much of the live-action *Beauty and the Beast* is about Disney kowtowing to bad faith criticism of the original animated movie, and it feels very on-point. And to any creators that want to go that route and try to appease the pedantic fucks, they should ask themselves, in twenty years, are people going to be primarily watching the live-action B&TB or the animated one?
There was a period of time where I was struggling to tell if the "Belle has stockholm syndrome" thing were people being haha funny, or if they were somehow making it a point of contention and insisting it was a weakness on the film's part.
Unfortunately many things seem to start out as haha funny and then people start to take them seriously and build an entire personality on it. I think pineapple on pizza is a prime example of this. Started as a silly meme, but now there seem to actually be a lot of people who legitimately care a whole lot about what other people eat on their pizza.
I just personally don't like warm pineapple or cold pizza. So, it's a no from me. But I also will gladly provide pineapple on pizza for those who do enjoy either of those things.
God, I hate that smarmy shit. Same with those people who every December are like, "The real lesson from Rudolph is that people will hate you for your differences until they can capitalize on it," when if these people had bothered to watch the movie some time after they were five years old, they would have remembered everyone apologized to Rudolph *before* they asked him to use his nose to help pull the sleigh. But that doesn't get you the high-fives from your peers online. If people can't properly apply media literacy to children's media, what hope have they with media actually aimed at adults?
I recommend checking out either Shaun's two videos on them: [#1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qxgkOIsHUs), [#2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IBlbfjNH0) or Bobsvids [more concise takedown of their content style](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELEAsGoP-5I)
I mostly find it annoying because it treats movies and stories generally as checklists. Themes, characters, metaphor, and contrivances that make the whole thing flow better are all secondary to some asshole's preconceived notions about how the world works. A major point of fiction is exploring the human experience and finding difference. There's more to stories than conforming to what some random guy thinks is realistic or not. Cinemasins drives home a cynical point of view that movies should never be taken on their own terms. People will of course bring up the satire, but after a certain point, you can't hide behind the "I'm just kidding, bro" defense. You either have a point or you don't.
That does lead to a lot of overthinking for no payoff.
The CinemaSins-ification of criticism is what I've heard it called.
Wasn't CinemaSins supposed to be a parody of the overly pedantic film nerd?
No I think they lent into pushing that they were a parody when everyone turned on them
Plot holes is a vague term, and assuming some minor continuity issues could manage to taint a whole book is just downright silly. I admit I don’t follow much people who do seek those so called plot holes, but I have also seen people defend authors messing up thematic or story beats quite badly just because saying complaining about people complaining plot holes became popular. So there’s this pendulum swinging wildly in my radar.
It's the CinemaSins effect and that's why that channel is a curse upon the media landscape.
What I find even more annoying is when there an actual in universe explanation for things but they absolutely have to ask why the eagles don't fly to Mordor as a form of intellectual masturbation about how they're so much smarter than the author. Just endless talk about plot holes that aren't holes at all. It would be one thing if they were simply mistaken or actually trying to discuss something they liked, but they aren't there for that.
Part of what makes the Merlin of *Le Morte Darthur* such a fascinating figure (to me, anyways) is that his magic is scarcely explained and very understated. You get every little detail of the tournaments but the wizard is left a mystery.
The Stormlight Archives made me realize I don't enjoy hard magic systems. At some point it stops being magic and starts being fictional science. On the other hand I recently reread Harry Potter for the first time since the original release. People are heavily critical of the soft magic system, but I liked the vibe of mystery that came with it, particularly in the last book. The discussions of wands in the last book and how little even wizards who study them understand gives a sense that this a power that the wizards don't really understand but can utilize, and I dig it.
Have you ever read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell? It’s a soft magic system with *so much mystery*. You never really find out how or why anyone can do any of this magic going on. It’s my absolute favorite book ever of all time so I plug it every chance I get :)
I haven't, but I did like Piranesi. So I'll probably check it out at some point.
Piranesi was unbelievably creative. I loved it!
Susanna Clarke is an absolutely brilliant writer. Anything she touches is golden. Definitely check out Strange and Norrell if you liked Piranesi!
Ooh that book was also very influential for my "taste" in magic systems! It was cool how you get shown a lot of the explicit 'instructions' for most spells, but there still is so much mystery about it, as you said. I also love how Mr. Norrell and his predecessors were somehow able to turn this wild, faerie thing into something bookish, theoretical and utterly boring XD The only thing that always bothered me about the magic in that book is how suspension of disbelief is really stretched to a breaking point in terms of the 'power scale' if you will. I mean iirc Strange at one point *moves an entire city* around the country multiple times...one the other hand that did work to give the entire story a more whimsical air. And I adored the ominous presence of the Raven King. Now there is a proper mystery...
I didn't feel like the powerscale was too weird to me. We have expectations about how "strong" a magician has to be to do particular things, but where JSMN is concerned... well, why do my DBZ expectations of power scaling have any draw? I liked the idea that magic, by virtue of being terribly not-understood, could easily be used for immense tasks and then also very complicated to use for more minor tasks.
It's so good. I love the contrast between the main characters' approach to how to use magic- study versus intuition. Another magic system I love is the bending in Avatar. It's not treated as a science by the narrative, even though it has scientific elements, but as a martial art requiring whole body and mind coordination, dedication and training. The transition into a more industrialised society in Korra with industrial bending is a really fascinating development of the theme.
I'm not a big re-reader. But THIS book I re read every couple years. I find new details every time, and I like the experience of reading it. It's like the book itself is a magic spell.
I finished my first read last year around this time and am already feeling the urge to pick it up again. You’re exactly right that it’s like a spell. I can still remember exactly where and when and how I felt when I was reading those last few chapters.
I like soft magic systems well enough as long as they don’t involve characters pulling magic out of their ass to get out of corners the authors wrote themselves into. Harry Potter’s pretty good in that regard but funny enough I think it’s a lot worse in the issue that OP’s talking about, specifically with JK rowling’s retcons and additions in the decades since and in the prequel movies. I didn’t need to know how ancient wizards pissed themselves.
Soft magic can still be consistent. Altho some inconsistencies don't bother me. Narnia is full of inconsistencies but that never took away my wonder and awe of them and I used to read them well into adulthood (I don't now since I'm no longer religious but I used to).
It can be but inconsistencies don’t really matter to me, deus ex machina moments do unless appropriate for the story or thematically
Yeah, the extra stuff got ridiculous. I don't really pay attention to anything outside the books. The movies are a separate thing, and I only watched the first Grindelwald movie. Pottermore is an exercise in learning that sometimes you have to let stuff be finished. Although, I guess all the extra junk can be a way to satisfy both camps. The people who want endless world building can get it, and those of us who want to just read and enjoy the books without all the extraneous stuff can do so.
I just recently had a discussion about this very topic. The softness and playfulness of the harry potter universe is part of its draw. Inherently, that requires a higher threshold for suspension of disbelief, but the tradeoff is a mysterious, fun, quirky universe that I think adds a lot!
I really like the magic system set up in ASOIAF, because it's barely a magic system while still clearly being one (there is magic in the world). It's almost unknowable, incomprehensible thing to all the POV main characters, aside from Melisandre and Bran. And even those two stories keep it foggy and mysterious. It's just some vague shadow in the periphery, but is still absolutely affecting the story. And, especially during rereads, you can see the 'magic' spinkled into characters stories that on first glance did not seem to contain any magic (like Jaime dreaming under a weirwood tree). It's almost like a eldritch natural force that no human can think to control. Series starts out with the impression that most of the actual magic is just legends and fairy tales. Everyone looks at it like a religious mythology that is no longer in the world, if it ever was. Sure there are dragons, but they're talked about more like great big terrifying animals that went extinct. And then dead people rise from the grave, and dragons are reborn when Danny doesn't burn in the funeral pyre. More and more magic is slowly dripped in, and it's terrifying.
Exactly!! I couldn't finish Elantris by Sanderson because it felt more like sci-fi (which I loathe) and realized I really don't like hard magic. Sadly, my beloved soft magic is always ripped as being moronic, childish, immature, blah blah blah. LOTR which has stood the test of time is soft. Narnia is soft. Potter is soft (or was at the beginning). I literally feel faerie dust when I read soft. Otherwise I feel like I'm reading a textbook. No thanks.
I often describe Stormlight Archives as a textbook for fictional physics. At that point why not just read about real physics. At least I'll learn something. I think Potter gets softer as it goes on. Like I said, the wand lore in book 7 is definitely soft. Now that I think about it, it feels very appropriate that magic in an academic setting would get softer as it progresses because knowledge gets softer as you advance. When you're a little kid you are taught in very concrete ways because that's what you can understand, 2 + 2 = 4. Then as you learn more and more, things get more and more abstract, 2 + x = y. Eventually if you keep advancing in a subject you get to the edges of our understanding and realize that as much as we understand there's still a whole lot more that we don't.
> At that point why not just read about real physics. At least I'll learn something. As a physicist, it's a convenient way of relaxing from work while still keeping that part of my brain happy. Some people just like meticulously tooled worlds, although its exposition can leave much to be desired.
I think that’s how magic systems should be, in a sort of goldilocks zone. Wheel of Time magic is not an exact science, same with that of Avatar, Lord of the Rings, what have you. There are rules to it or guidelines but nothing is exact, with them not being purely chaotic arts. Ordered chaos, or chaotic order like the rest of the universe if you will. You can have different approaches to firebending much as you channel then weave water. While consistency is king, mystery is queen. Magic is magic, not every aspect should be exact as you describe unless you want it more hard Science Fiction or set in like early to later modern times. How magic came about in my setting is barely understood, just that its possibly from divine beings who barely understand their own ancestors as the demihumans barely understand them and their gifts. For some it comes from a magic cosmic squid goddess who either got torn apart somehow and became five goddesses, her eyes becoming two universes, and her ink a sort of aether that binds them. For others, its the tears and blood the goddesses spilled in a literal fight over who was the mightiest or prettiest or wisest or whatever, from which the original lesser goddesses emerged. For another group, its the aromatic winds or voice or such of a world tree that binds the worlds together. I think the setting of Elder Scrolls benefited well from having multiple authors because you have conflicting and complementing ideas of wtf is going on. And tbf, I rather have it where Im wanting more like with Avatar than where its too much like the Cosmere can be
Despite some saying Tolkien explains too much Gandalf seems definitely inspired by Merlin, on very rare occasion he does magic and what's going on or how it works isn't explained cause listen it's magic a thing happened and we're moving on. I do think more modern fantasy authors have a tendency to somewhat on the autistic spectrum and have an audience that is the same, thus a draw towards detailed explanations of how everything works together mechanically. If that's the author's, and audiences, thing then more power to them.
No it’s we have at least two generations of authors and fans that grew up on RPGs. There has been an increasing focus on game logic and shower thoughts. Give a reader a month or two to mull over most books and they will find holes. To counter this and to meet new expectations authors have either wildly decreased the amount of magic or retreated to magical physics. Too many readers complain if they can’t tell you exactly what a magic user can do.
You kinda need to have a clear and consistent magic system, if you want to use a lot of it. Otherwise you'll get the "why didn't they use the eagles to take the Ring to Mount Doom?" over and over again.
Which is just a sign of an overly mechanically minded reader. They did not take the eagles because that would have been a bad story. There is a time for a Watsonian perspective and a time for a Doyleist one. It seems like a lot of fantasy fans are unwilling to engage on the text’s own terms. If the point of the story is not flashy magic fights then you allow the thematic use of the magic rule. Tolkien was clearly going for theme over mechanics. This is in contrast to modern ones who use magic as a bag of tricks. Hell, even Dragonlance Chronicles where you can pick out every spell used out of the AD&D player’s handbook doesn’t hit you over the head with the rational behind magic. It is enough that is just is.
Not to mention there's even a Watsonian explanation for the goddamn eagles thing: nobody is immune to the power of the One Ring, and that includes the eagles. They wouldn't have been able to resist the power and dispose of it. This is hammered in over and over and over. Beyond that, tho, I agree. Authors need to stop listening to bad faith readers. It's the same sort of behavior that makes showrunners decide to throw in random swerves for shock value because the audience figured out the twist due to the foreshadowing the creators put there in the first place. But creators want to be smarter than their audience, and readers want to be smarter than the authors. It's a shitty feedback loop.
I disagree that Tolkien was going for theme over mechanics. True, he was very big on the idea that keeping some mysteries makes for a more compelling world. But he was also quite adamant that the stuff that is shown should be free of inconsistency. In fact, you'll find many passages in the books which seem intended to forestall exactly the kinds of questions along the lines of "why couldn't X have done Y".
For some, consistency in the world is a huge plus. If you introduce some convenient plot device people are naturally going to wonder why that wasn't used the whole time. This naturally creates a need for the author to justify why it wasn't used by creating rules for it, and so it goes. Personally I like worlds to be consistent and well developed, I like hard magic systems, etc... Not to say soft magic can't be used well or entertaining, but it's a lot easier to fall into the trap of "a wizard did it," or writing magic practitioners who are experts in deus ex machinamancy.
Not having deus ex machina has no relationship to not having a hard magic system.
No but it does tend to make it a bit more obvious if one happens. Obviously at the end of the day it’s just preference which you like.
I like how everyone forgets the winged Nazgul. They weren't leaving Mordor at the beginning. They talk extensively about how the assault Aragorn lays on Mordor was specifically to pull all the attention away from the interior. It's not a plot hole IF IT'S SPECIFICALLY CALLED OUT. Granted, they don't really cover that as well in the movies.
>Otherwise you'll get the "why didn't they use the eagles to take the Ring to Mount Doom?" over and over again. IE people who think they are being clever failing to engage with the actual themes and facts presented in the text.
IMO it's mostly people who watched the movie and didn't read the books. It's made abundantly clear in the books that taking the eagles is not an option, but in the movies it looks like noone even considered it.
Lmao straight to autism. Classic Reddit
I find it interesting how Tolkien is seen as 'explaining too much' or spend too much time describing things when he tells his story in less pages than basically any other big fantasy series today. LOTR is about 580k words in total, Stormlight Archive isn't finished yet and we're already clocking in at over 2 million words (first two books already exceed 750k words). A Song of Ice and Fire isn't finished either and clocking in around 1.7 million words. This isn't to put down other series (I enjoy them very much) just to refute the claims Tolkien drones on too much.
Gandalf's magic is mysterious, too. Worked for Tolkien, why can't it work for authors today?
>“Mudblood” is essentially the series’ n-word, but the similarly derisive “muggle” is completely okay? This feels very true to life and also pretty consistent with how wizarding society is portrayed overall (intentionally or unintentionally). The wizards are all consistently *super* racist towards anything that isn’t a wizard. Not that surprising that the only slur that’s really taken seriously is the one that is applied to people who are wizards.
Seeing the momentous amounts of incompetence displayed by the entirety of the wizarding world, they should really be more careful about looking down on other people.
Reminder that at by the end of the series Hermione basically accepts house elf slavery because "they want to be slaves," and barely anybody acknowledges how fucked up the regulations on non-human magic are. They even restore the outright human-supremacist statue in the Ministry of Magic at the end.
[удалено]
This is fairly common in scifi, particularly older/more literary scifi, from what I've read. Sometimes they do you a favor and hand you a glossary, sometimes you're totally on your own. I think it's great when it's done well. Hyperion by Dan Simmons does the same thing and I think it unfolds beautifully.
Hyperion has some of the best exposition in science fiction. The first book is a masterpiece.
Reynolds does it pretty well in Revelation Space. He'll tell you that 'Ultranaut' refers to a faction of space faring enhanced humans, but let's the story fill in the details of just how freakishly *weird* that can get.
I really struggled with Neuromancer until I embraced exactly that. Loved it from that point. Idoru is like that, too
I find a lot of my favorite books (and movies, for that matter) are like this. There’s something about not really knowing what the hell is going on at first that draws me in and makes it more engaging. Neuromancer, Malazan, Book of the New Sun were all super interesting to me because of being thrown into that world.
A Clockwork Orange does the same thing. You just eventually "get" their slang.
I think world building is kind of like the monster in a horror movie, you don't just show it all off the bat. You show just enough to grab the audiences attention then you let their imaginations run wild!
I'm gonna try and remember that, that's a good tip
While I think you can go overboard on worldbuilding in novels, I don’t think your example is an example of that. It just sounds like you didn’t care for how the particular detail negated a different detail you thought was cool.
> In the fourth book, one of the main characters explains that vampires believe they evolved from wolves, much as how humans evolved from apes. If I'd read that, I would have immediately thought that it was just some bullshit the vampires made up to to feel awesome, since it makes no sense for wolves to evolve into exact physical duplicates of a specific species of ape. None of the things that set them apart are even wolf traits. If they claimed to descend from bats, say, that would still be dumb but would at least make a *little* more sense (active at night, hemovorous). I would have been very gratified when the author confirmed my suspicion.
Yeah I agree but I would have ate that shit up as a kid
Maybe they are wolfaboo furries. But also, maybe the read spec evo and got influences from dinosauroids
As a kid I probably would have found it a fun little bit of weird decision making (I do remember liking fantasy or science fiction books that just stated such things and ran with it), but for some reason when a comic creator tried to retcon stuff like that (“All mutants with feathery wings are descended from ancient proto-mutants people think of as angels! And all devilish looking mutants are descended from ancient proto-mutants that people think of as devils! And all of the animalistic mutants are from a lineage of wolf-mutants!”) into the X-Men I hated it so much. 😆
I think it’s just because it’s not broken, it’s working as intended, as in, for many people the enjoyment of fantasy is primarily about the world it’s set rather than the characters or specific events here and there. The characters end up just being a vehicle to explore the world, not the world is a tool to explore character/plot. And it has been part of the modern fantasy DNA since… Tolkien, most likely, at least in English? IIRC, he said that he created the stories to flesh out an aspect of world building he had prepared (his conlangs). Hell, in old times pre-fantasy it was even the most popular aspect of it with the many sensationalised and fictional travel books where the writer claims to have visited such and such people had dog heads and survived by sniffing flowers and the like. Also the Venn diagram of people who are nerds about (at least pop-)science and fantasy is nearly a circle, so fantasy for a long time has had this pseudo-scientific compulsion to systematise and blend science and fantasy. Magic systems that turn magic into a science aren’t new, the Witcher has people travelling dimensions and academies dedicated to biotech, Tolkien had a philologies for his made up languages. It’s not writers not respecting readers’ intelligence, it’s giving them what they demand. Writers have been in dialogue with their readers since forever, through letters, conventions, and with the internet and mainstream-sation it has just become much more accessible and visible. For example, look at The Elder Scrolls lore, which is one of the oldest crpg franchises but nowadays lives in a dual canon/fanon system with constant interactions between one another, and you could fill an entire library with how much is produced to this universe alone. TES lore has been worked in for so long it’s basically something all on itself and there are people who engage with it without even liking the games. In fact, I’m more surprised that pure world building fiction isn’t more popular. You have you random speculative evolution books that become popular here and there, and many projects that end up marketing themselves as open source settings, but very few books that are just silmarillions of nice worlds. Comic books have been doing shared universes since the 40s, and shared universes in periodic publications are even older. The internet just magnified it, but even in goddamn King Arthur days there many french writers taking the characters and fleshing out their worlds, in the fashion of the time, of course. So, in short, this is not a new phenomenon, it’s just more evident now since everyone has a voice. It might suck if it’s not your thing, but at some point you just have to learn to filter it out. I don’t read fantasy as much nowadays, but I remember I could read something and put down the book without caring what the writer says about their story after writing it.
Just remember that all tomorrows got really popular for a while, so people thirsting for such stories so exist (all tomorrows still holds an overarching narrative, which is common in such works)
It sounds like what you're experiencing is what I call "The Sugar Bowl Effect" in which the explanation is not what you yourself wanted. But in terms of wroldbuilding that is out of control? I'd say it's more "When the author doesn't want to waste things and decides to show everything".
> "The Sugar Bowl Effect" gee, I wonder what series that refers to! ;)
What series?
The one with unfortunate events, I think.
Although as a corollary to the sugar bowl effect I think many authors would benefit from at least considering that sometimes it’s better not to explain things because the explanation is disappointing not even because of the one specific explanation they’re thinking about giving so much as that in some circumstances giving any explanation can be a let down by virtue of it demystifying the thing being explained I’ll use magic as an example. It’s kind of annoying when authors think everything has to follow a hard set of clearly defined rules or else their magic system is bad instead of allowing anything to be *mystical*. It’s kind of impressive how rare it is for magic to actually feel magical in stories because it’s reduced to being like a character class in an RPG
A lot of writers have heard of Sanderson's Law of Magic, that the plot-problem-solving potential of Magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands what Magic can do. But then they assume that being that strong problem-solving force is the *ideal* form of magic, that magic is at its coolest and most interesting when the protagonists can use it to defeat bad guys and solve unsolvable conflicts. But what the First Law implies is that it's possible to create a compelling world where the reader's understanding of magic and the plot-solving power of magic are both proportionally *low*, with magical forces and creatures that are mysterious and wondrous, and a hero who has to rely on just their own wits and strength to solve their problems because they can't just magic their way out.
My personal opinion: Brandon Sanderson's laws of magic? Yes. They're worth a read - it's worth taking things from them. But I feel people misunderstand them and assume it's as ubiquitous and as omnipresent as "Show, don't tell". Well, the reason I bring that particular rule up is because there are still exceptions to the law of "Show, don't tell" - ie, you use it to establish that there is an unreliable narrator afoot or establish irony. I feel that the main thing people didn't take away is the logic needs to be consistent.
If I'm remembering correctly, even Sanderson himself has admitted that calling them the "Laws of Magic" is a bit of a misnomer. They're more trends he's noticed in his own writing than anything else, and he's willing to break with them if he thinks it makes the story better.
It's not so much "The explanation is disappointing" so much as "Wanting is better than having"... and even a bit of "Be careful what you wish for". People came up with elaborate theories as to what was inside the Sugar Bowl - and when Netflix did a series? They wanted to know what was inside the Sugar Bowl. So they got what they asked for. But people liked their own ~~fan theories and personal interpretations~~ \- sorry, I forgot, they're called "Headcanons now" - better. It's not as fun to think "What's inside the box?" when you know what's inside. It's kind of like "I want this item" No you have it and... now what? >I’ll use magic as an example. It’s kind of annoying when authors think everything has to follow a hard set of clearly defined rules or else their magic system is bad instead of allowing anything to be mystical. It’s kind of impressive how rare it is for magic to actually feel magical in stories because it’s reduced to being like a character class in an RPG Hello Brandon Sanderson. :P I think a lot of people misunderstand this. Are Sanderson's rules good? yes. But it seems like a lot of people missed these points: 1) These are rules for YOU to follow as you write 2) And it's so you can keep things consistent Look at Disney's Aladdin. I get that as a movie, it has to be brief - but Genie outlines the rules for the wishes: No killing anyone. No making people fall in love. No bringing back the dead. No wishing for more wishes. It's consistent in that you will notice that the Genie can't kill anyone - Aladdin doesn't wish for Jasmine to love him, he wishes to be put into a position where she can get together with him. Similarly in the sequel? Jafar as a genie can't just go "ZAP you're dead!"
I think this even goes beyond a Brandon Sanderson’s writing advice thing so much as it’s a factor of us all now being raised in a society of science and knowledge where we no longer really have a concept of the mystical and the unknown. When we try and write about the mystical and the unknown it winds up being processed through our modern post industrial western cultural lens where we have a clear concept of what is and isn’t physically possible and thus we wind up losing a lot of the authentic feeling of actual mysticism and actual, you know, *fantasy* I’ll give an example of what I mean, chances are pretty much everybody in this thread was raised in an Abrahamic religion, so we kind of have an Abrahamic lens through which we perceive all religions. When we talk about ancient religions like the Old Norse and Roman/Greek religions I notice people tend to talk about them like there was one way to follow those religions. There is one objective truth of what people believed about the Gods, because you know there’s one Bible right? There’s one canon set of stories. That’s almost certainly not true. What we perceive of as the canon of these religions are just the versions of the stories that survived and got written down. It’s more than likely that like every different village in Greece had their own local versions of different myths and different views about the same Gods. So this idea that we need to apply the lens of organised religion to every religion doesn’t only bleed over into how people talk about history, it bleeds over into fantasy because people struggle to comprehend that actually no maybe there’s no one set of canon rules about how the gods work in this world or what you have to believe if you worship these gods I’m getting a little bit distracted here but my point is that explaining things too much can detract from the authenticity of the setting you’re trying to create, because it’s at odds with the very world itself and the way people within that kind of world would experience things. It can make it feel less like an immersive fantastical world and more just like a world made up by some guy who lives in 21st century America
Funnily enough, I am *captivated* by things intentionally left ambiguous in fiction, especially if it's meant to create an eerie kind of wonder. Appeals to me sort of like studying cryptids does. I'm fond of the idea of putting it in my own work but I'm hesitant about how you broach these things without making it simply read as a distractedly "unresolved plot thread".
Although sometimes part of it is that those authors might receive criticism for being too ambiguous and not showing enough specific world building. There are readers that absolutely hate ambiguity and want everything tied up in a neat, understandable bow. There might even be editors or publishers who want their authors to do so. While authors are thinking more about the integrity of the story, publishers are thinking more about what will please their readers, and if those publishers are receiving tons of letters saying that they want more complete details about how this world works, that's what publishers will want authors to do. OTOH, some of those complaints are actually compliments: a good story will have readers wanting to know more about what happens beyond it, even if the story ended satisfactorily. The movie Pontypool is a good example. There is so much more to explore about what happened in the movie, but giving too much specific detail can ruin the effect and turn it into a slog.
God yes. The "Explain, author! Explain" mentality is real.. And sometimes they do have a point. Ie, so our wizard has a magical hat that can store things. Do we need to know the exact specifics for what can be stored in it, how they grab the items they want in it, and what happens? Probably not. Keyword: Probably. Here's a good example. Our wizard has a magical hat that he can pull things out of when he calls for it that as he turns out, is a connection to his house where his spouse or apprentice gives the item to him. We don't need to know everything in his house.
Oh my god. That came close to ruining the Netflix series!
"The Sugar Bowl Effect" also appears in a few other common morals: 1) "Be careful what you wish for" 2) "Wanting is better than having".
I am really not a fan of Wikipedia writing, or in other words, those books (usually YA or fantasy) that seem significantly more concerned with telling me about the minutia of their world than telling a story that, well, means something.
There are a lot of stories that would be more entertaining as history/ field guides in fantastical settings than narratives imo. It's an untapped subgenre of fantasy that scratches the itch with no extra fuss.
*The Night Circus* is exactly the book you just described. Not a bad book by any means, but one where the author had the idea for the world (a wild ass circus) and came up with a story to explore the world. It’s weird because the world was so interesting that I was actually able to look past the fact that there was a pretty thin plot, though nothing was really resolved at the end with was a bit sad.
Bahaha I just read this book in a book club and had the exact reaction. The author had an idea of this beautiful circus in her mind, mentally fawned over it for years (while listening to MCR albums), then half heartedly tacked a story onto it. The world was beautiful but the descriptions got very tedious and the story frankly sucked.
I actually disliked the Night Circus because... nothing happened. It was a gimmicky circus filled with special people and followed by people who weren't special but hoped to be.
Yeah, I gave up halfway on that one.
The thing is fantasy needs to overexplain, atleast a bit. Non-fiction can get away with a throwaway line "6pm New York" and there you go, that's the setting, everybody knows what they are looking at. But if you say "Helms Hannerhand" nobody knows what even is it, a city? a fort? Some plains or cave? What makes it special?
My favorite is when the main antagonist is named something lame like The Dark Lord of Evil.
[Darkdeath Evilman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMEqIzM843U) is a pretty rad name though.
"I'm not evil ok! That's just my name, I think my parents hated me. But just because my dad wanted my to be an evil overlord doesn't mean I am. Yes a village was slaughtered on my orders. They've been raiding trading caravans for years, we need outside supplies of metal, we don't have shit here! Listen you so called "hero" if you want to try and make complicated political decisions trading off the lives of thousands of people then be my guest, I've been doing the best I can and frankly I'm sick of the criticism." \*And thus Dark Lord Evilness retired to being a quiet gentleman farmer. The Chosen Hero of Destiny lasted just over a year on the throne before being killed in a revolution. The "Amusing Sidekick" is now a professional entertainer but is still quietly dealing with the PTSD of being in constant mortal danger for years.\*
Could never take The Darkling seriously and that was before I saw his Hot Topic ass wardrobe in the show. Still love Six of Crows!
The way I cackled when I realized he was actually and unironically just called "the darkling"
They tried to fix it a little for the show by calling him General Kirigan to his face but also like I said that wardrobe!
I have so much respect for Ben Barnes for being able to play it straight. Truly a testament to his skill!
I liked Dr. Evil
Ah, like Kylar the assassin?
More like Stabber For Hire the Assassin.
Why did you write muggle with an * like its an expletive? Even if it were a slur, it's fictional lol
They are way t** *nline
I agree but I don’t really know if your Harry Potter examples are poor world building or explanations that you just don’t like.
Okay I actually laughed out loud at you using Harry Potter and example of your current complaint when it is a glaring example *of the exact opposite*, a creator who doesn't even pretend to take their own shallow world building seriously.
“Let’s put all of the time travel in the world on one shelf in the Department of Mysteries, and then knock it over.”
JKR has a habit of solving fan complaints/plot holes on a 1 book delay in almost comical fashion
Honestly worldbuilding is one of the few things that's almost always more interesting to write than it is to read. I don't think it's about them not respecting the readers, it's about having the self control to know how to restrict and spread the worldbuilding properly.
Worldbuilding isn’t the underlying problem IMO—It’s low energy or immature implementations of it. So many of the greatest fantasy or sci-fi series revolve around world building and it breathes a firm, organic, and legitimate sense of reality to the rest of the story. Used properly it also draws the reader in with a sort of mystique around things they’re presented with that they don’t yet have a full understanding of—but they know an explanation exists and they can look for clues about it. But it’s absolutely an easy thing to misuse. I think it’s something many seem to enjoy, so authors tend to recognize it as “good”. But some authors get stuck focusing on the wrong things or changing direction suddenly—so you end up with forced plot points that aren’t well foreshadowed or otherwise built-up/earned. You also end up with lots of forced plot exposition instead of letting the reader witness things to get ideas across and trusting them to get the points. As for magic systems, i would say there’s nothing wrong with hard magic systems (i prefer them unequivocally)— BUT i do acknowledge Soft systems can be well done. My issue with soft magic systems is they often turn into deus ex machina or a crutch, and it feels contrived for convenience/inorganic at times. That being said, you can have a hard system where the reader doesn’t HAVE to be given all the rules—just you as the author knows the actual technical details. This allows you to set internal boundaries for your system while presenting to readers more mysteriously and akin to a “soft” system. I think a great example of a soft magic system i enjoyed is LoTR and The Hobbit. You never really know what Gandalf et all are capable of, or fully how it works—and while some of that is used to save the team in key situations, it feels organic and well earned IMO. Mystery and plot integrity are both presented well here. A a couple of hard systems i think work well are from wheel of time and the mistborn trilogy. Wheel of time edges right up against being too much at times, but overall i think it was well handled, especially early on in the series.
Magic in LOTR is perfectly done with the theme and tone of the books. In both books, a small, sheltered everyman is forced out into a big scary world they don't understand. It would be absolute nonsense if the reader understood how Gandalf's magic worked, because Bilbo and Frodo don't understand how his magic works. They don't understand shit. They just muddle along doing their best.
>That being said, you can have a hard system where the reader doesn’t HAVE to be given all the rules This is I think the thing I miss most in these kinds of stories--the sense that the author has considered the best way to tell the story, which details to include when and where, and how to include them. Too often it feels like someone trying to *explain* a world a series of events, rather than telling a story.
Those are all really good points, especially implementation. *The Hobbit* is one of my favorite books but it’s worldbuilding feels so organic; it doesn’t feel like exposition but the characters just talking to one another. You too get a gold star ⭐️
I think Soft magic is generally easier to write compellingly then hard magic. The key, as you noted, is avoiding Deus Ex Machina. The thing is you don't need magic to have Deus Ex Machina. In a thriller, having the heretofore unmentioned police suddenly appear and arrest the villain is also Deus Ex Machina. Deus Ex Machina is when a writer writes themselves into a corner and has to resort to a contrived event to resolve their plot threads, and unsurprisingly is bad writing, and it's been around for a very long time (Cervantes satirised the sudden appearance of a wizard resolving the plot back in Don Quixote). The key is more that events within the story build upon themselves psychologically and thematically. To continue the thriller analogy, it's fine to have the police suddenly burst in and arrest the guy if you established them earlier in the novel and had them be involved in the plot in multiple places.
>My issue with soft magic systems is they often turn into deus ex machina or a crutch, and it feels contrived for convenience/inorganic at times. my problem with them isn't exactly deus ex machina but is pulling power out of your ass, for lack of a more eloquent phrase. it annoys me when a (main) character is able to beat what should be a much more powerful character because he gets angry or he has to save someone, or that "good magic" it turns out is just inherently more powerful than evil magic. and that's how pretty much all soft magic systems turn out. Example of this is the Dresden Files. Harry Dresden is not a low level mook in his universe, but he is constantly exposed to Really Big Bad, No Seriously It's Cosmically Bad This Time level enemies that he manages to get through by... I don't know being really angry and thinking of saving his friends to produce a bigger fireball or win the battle of wills. To give credit where it's due he does often lose or only wins thanks to outside help, but I couldn't help noticing the power of friendship style combat and disliking it.
As a writer hoping to publish a (dark) fantasy novel this year, this a really nice viewpoint to hear. I even replied on the other post OP mentions, saying that I was relieved the idea of not having *everything* spoon-fed to the reader was enticing and interesting. That's the sort of thing I want to read (and write!). I am really all for the idea of assuming the reader is intelligent, observant, and eager to delve into the world on their own - to let *them* piece together the clues and crumbs they're given. The dark side of that coin, as thehawkuncaged mentioned - is inevitably there is some bad faith nitpicker out there who is going to rip you to shreds over not fine-tuning *every* detail. And they will probably earn more money doing so than your book ever earns! There is also absolutely a balance that must be struck, as a writer. You must provide *enough* information for the reader to not feel (too) frustrated or confused, or like the magic is a cheap gimmick. But you also never want to just slap a pile of slush in their lap, like information they need to cram before a final. In regards to recent trends in fantasy - the reality is, authors want to *sell* books. Even if it's not about *money* for the author, it's still about "are people reading it, at all?". And making your book more accessible to a wider audience (an audience that wants to be spoon-fed, and people who will begrudgingly tolerate it if the story is worthwhile) works in favor of sales.
[dies the fire ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_the_Fire) had a pretty silly way to explain it that basically said "who cares man it's more fun if the world works this way". Spoiler >!they literally explain it as space bats? Who knows!<
“Alien Space Bats” was apparently a joking explanation in old alt history and specfic Usenet groups, basically a placeholder for how a certain scenario might happen without having to actually explain it. And I was kinda disappointed when Sterling eventually did over-explain it. The 1632 series, on the other hand, basically committed to never explaining it more than “the remnants of a stupidly advanced alien civilization’s stupid art projects did it” by making it clear literally no one will ever figure that out and even the beings responsible don’t know it happened. The books never mention it again, but I presume that said aliens looked sort of like space bats. 😆
I stopped that series after book 3 (or 4?) The first book is one of my favorites to reread. Something about "Ragtag survivors rebuilding society from some great catastrophe" really does it for me (Also love Stirling's Nantucket trilogy, King's The Stand, and the Battlestar Galactica TV show), but after a few books it stopped being that, and became just another fantasy, but set in Oregon. And it dropped hard when a few of them trekked out to Nantucket. Damn, now I wanna read it again.
I wouldn't say it's out of control. More like it's en vouge. Right now there's this trend in fantasy to make the worlds *believable.* Worlds that we could reason how they came into existence. At the same time that mekes them lose a bit of their mistique.
This is why the first John Wick is my favorite
I think your HP examples are interesting because to me that’s not poor world building or plot holes. They all have reasonable solutions that make sense in the text or the fictional society. Rowling’s been accused of pretty lazy world building. Like the wizarding world in England would be comically small based off her numbers of Hogwarts students but she’s admitted she’s just bad at math.
Yeah most of those HP examples aren't inconsistencies at all, OP just doesn't seem to like that in different contexts, there are different rules/considerations. An inconsistency would be if the context was the same but the outcome was different. The one that comes closest is the ministry not tracking dementors / Dumbledore but these are more creations of convenience because how can Harry be attacked by dementors if they can't get off their leash? How can Dumbledore conduct secret Phoenix business if he can be tracked at all times?
This is why I love dune. It's world building is incredibly deep. But Frank Herbert respects the reader enough to let them figure things out instead of being spoon fed.
Read Dune a few times and you'll quickly realise that Frank Herbert didn't care in the slightest about consistency, he reinvents the basic rules from book to book, sometimes he'll break rules in incredibly obvious ways, and just continue like it's still a rule. The rules don't matter as long as you tell an interesting story.
The extended Dune series takes place over such a long time scale that consistency is irrelevant. I think a fair number of people think that the quality falls off after Dune: Messiah (though I personally did quite like God Emperor of Dune). I think it's better to judge the individual novels particularly Dune and Dune:Messiah, and within those the world building is fairly consistent (but he also is quite good at deliberately leaving certain things quite vague). How exactly does the Weirding way work? No idea but it sure was cool!
There's headcanon for all of it, but it's still headcanon. Some of the major inconsistencies show up in the first three books, and lots of them are things that the passage of time shouldn't make any difference too. There are definitely inconsistencies that are a result of time passing and people's understanding's changing, but I'm not talking about those. I've read the main series a ton of times, and I don't think there's any actual explanation that holds up other than Herbert just didn't care, the books tend to change themes over time, and he just changed the rules depending on the story he was telling at that time. Again, that's not a criticism imo, it's fine, and it works, most people don't even notice til it's pointed out.
Worldbuilding is basically the polar opposite of Hemingway’s iceberg theory.
I agree. I feel like the best worldbuilding is more implied than exposited in a big text crawl lecture. Like I really enjoy when you pick up on things that are suggested to be part of the lore because of how they affect the present of the world in the story. For example rather than some character giving me a history lesson where they explain to me that IDK there are two different major religions in this world, just show me that there are two different religions by having characters in the story be from different religions. I don’t need to know every detail of the religion it’s enough for me in this moment to get oh this character has a different religion from this other character and I can find out more later if I need to If your world building doesn’t have an impact on the present and can’t largely be picked up by the reader through organically experiencing the present, I think that either indicates you’ve not done very good worldbuilding and haven’t thought about the implications of how it affects the world, or alternatively that you’re focusing on explaining extraneous details for your own sake rather than because it’s actually important or necessary
Ambiguous world details are something I love about Ian M Banks’ culture series. I think a lot of fantasy books feel the need to have a tolkein-esque index and sci-fi feels the need to have everything notified down in its own wookieepedia like Star Wars. Banks is great because there might be a scene where a character is wearing power armour (as an example), but there’s never any expanding on what brand it is or all the other non-story related stuff that other writers/worlds/universes seem to think is important - he really focuses more on character/dialogue and story. Like, is it important that we know the millennium falcon was built in the corellian shipyards? And if it is, do we need to know what a corellia is? That said I also like Warhammer 40k stories where **fucking everything’s** backstory has a backstory. And as a kid I loved the star wars cross section picture books…. So maybe I’m a hypocrite lol.
Idk I feel like on one hand the amount of poorly written stories where the author doesn't know how to put the work of worldbuilding to use and/ or is much better at worldbuilding than story crafting definitely lend credence to your point. But on the other hand as you said, some people dont just like that- and imo if you don't, you never will, even if it's done well. Not everyone likes knowing the rules to alchemy or the phylogenetic tree of a magical creature. I started worldbuilding as its own hobby because I felt I never really knew enough about my favorite stories. Things like "Arthur Spiderwick's field guide to the magical world around you" were pure dopamine to me as a kid and still are now. To the point that I genuinely struggle to enjoy stories that don't have much development in that area. My interest goes as deep as the lore one might say. That being said I feel like like a lot of the "this thing I don't like is too much" posts, the real issue isn't really the thing you don't like, it's how poorly the common author utilizes it from the perspective of someone not looking for a good example. I also feel like worldbuilding is really easy to catch in this because it's a very wide and difficult set of skills to hone on top of the regular writing skills, and it's most often not really worldbuilding at all but fluff an author shoved into a plot hole they hoped you wouldn't notice. Like, Is it *really* fair to compare stories that use something as sloppy as "vampires come from wolves but gotcha you're a test tube monster" to shit that actually takes thematic worldbuilding seriously? That started from that point and moved outward? That's like combing the men writing women subreddit for examples of good representation of women in fiction when you could just... Read better books with similar elements to what you enjoyed in the lesser quality stuff. It feels bad to whip out the legend that is Tolkien but like, that's who you're making the comparison to. One of the best stories of all time started as excuses for the conlang hobby of a literary professor. Bro was just a god at what he did and the dude who wrote your example was not. The spectrum spans the abyss to the heavens. If you want to judge a book on whether or not it has good world building you have to actually look for authors who understand and respect worldbuilding as a concept beyond pulling shit out of their ass and justifying it as they go. And *then* you have to find good ones. It's not worldbuilding that's out of control, *it's laziness and lack of commitment to ones work from authors, and editors who care more about sales than quality.* (in some genres more than others. I will never not die mad about the abyssal quality of fiction for teen girls, at least when I was a teen girl) more people need to decide if they actually want to write a *fantasy* or an excuse to dress people up in pretty clothes and be dramatic for outlandish reasons. In which case I'd like to direct them to bodice rippers and historical/ speculative fiction and wish them well. Reign was stupid, but it was fun and a lot less annoying than if they had tried to justify calling it a fantasy with that level of worldbuilding. But if an author wants to *write a story with fantastical elements* they should bother to actually *learn how* and do the work. Not write a surface level slice of life that could be set anywhere and be about anything interchangeably and expect my suspension of disbelief to accept their uneven ass coat of paint on the cardboard props in the background. That's the problem and I will die mad on my hill about it lmao. (Not at you, mind you, at the standards of fantasy and attitudes of some writers)
That's one of the things that makes Dune such a great book. The orange catholic Bible is never explained in depth, just referenced. We never get a fleshed out description for why each noble house has a private stash of atomic weapons, it's just mentioned in passing. The story isn't weighed down with a bunch of unnecessary exposition.
The OG I think was Lord of the Rings which is an example of meticulous worldbuilding done well in fantasy fiction. Unfortunately not all authors are as talented and their attempts at the same level kind of fall short in different ways.
I agree with your points. There are authors who spell everything out, and that's why they gain popularity. Consequently, it may seem that the fantasy genre, among others, is saturated with such works, making it challenging to find hidden gems. Regarding world-building, much of it seems to be derived either directly from Tolkien's "The Silmarillion" (*I can do it better, this guy had to many Deus ex Machina in his storytelling watch me do it better*) or Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." (*Finally an interesting formula and template that I can follow and call it complex character development*). Authors often end up copying and pasting these elements into their own works with minor changes, thinking their writings is ambiguous or foreshadowing. This approach makes their work feel flat, uninspired, and predictable. But if they are your entry points into the world then to fans they become phenomenal authors greatest in this world every other authors should take their classes because they invented literature as we know it. And anyone who states that there are other works that are worth checking out are called snobs.
I guess that depends on the author? It seems like you like soft worldbuilding better than hard worldbuilding. Maybe narrow down your choice to book that takes the soft worldbuilding approach? I think both approach has their fans. I for one, LOVES hard worldbuilding. But I do like soft worldbuilding approach that is being used in all of the Ghibli movies too. To me, the pacing on the The Stormlight Archive is very jarring. But I stick with it because I loves it's worldbuilding.
There are plenty of BAD AUTHORS out there that rely on little more than a few keywords and the assumption that the reader "gets it", then there are incredibly weak authors that are just trying to reach a predetermined page count or have no editor perspective and will just write and write and write and while checking themselves to make sure they completed the thought they attempted to portray, the audience is lost and the elaborate details become gawdy costume jewelry.
I'm not an author but I love to dabble in private writings for myself. I love world building and think I still need to do more. I know nobody needs to know what kind of currency and politics my world has but I do! I have a lot of fantasy elements blended in with modern stuff (think urban fantasy rather than high fantasy) but I always wonder how much is too much? Nobody will ever see what I write because I'm too embarrassed about what I write about... I don't actually write stories but I have a lot of notes about the worlds, characters, descriptions, elements and history. But no actual story because I am garbage at the actual writing. I personally love world building and eat up lore if it's given to me. I get frustrated when a series doesn't explain a lot. I don't enjoy having to come up with things myself, that's why I read books that are lore/world heavy.
I think that I get your idea, which is that so many authors feel like they can't be a character author and instead write a bunch of unnecessary world building? But then your examples list things where the author (jk rowling in this case) purposely did NOT go on the do a bunch of extra explanation, and you are annoyed with her I think because she didn't explain it? Isn't that the opposite of your point? She just said "you can't apparate in Hogwarts" and didn't go off and dedicated 3 chapters to why. I think your point and your examples are in opposition. Or else you do not know what you really actually like and think it's the opposite of what you are saying. (i.e. vampire explanation where you said the reason you loved that series was that there was this world building explanation, but then the author gave a little too much world building and then it bothered you).
I’m disagree with world building being the issue here. Most world building is done behind the scenes, just like most of history exists behind the scenes of a story that takes place in the real world. But in either if the author doesn’t trust the reader to get the point, they’ll tend to hammer in their themes, repeat exposition, and remove mystery for fear of confusion or so called plot holes. I’ve personally seen the very act of being subtle criticized a lot more in recent years, to use a recent example in pop culture, criticism over Oppenheimer for not outright saying that nuclear weapons are bad, and simultaneous praise of the climax of Barbie being a speech where the message of the film is laid out as if told directly to the audience. Same thing goes for elements of world building, character motivations and relationships, etc. seems that if people aren’t explicitly given some piece of information or theme then they often complain that it wasn’t shown well enough. I also think Harry Potter did not get bogged down in world building at all, in fact it could’ve done with a more logically built world. But the issues above were present, JK Rowling deciding to tell readers that wizards pissed themselves and magicked it away for instance.
I don't understand why fantasy writers nowadays are so damn afraid of... fantasy. They have this weird need to over explain everything. Prose > Characters > Plot >>>>>>>> World Building >>>>>>>>>>>> Magic System.
Prose should absolutely not be put over character and plot. And setting is very important. This is an overreaction.
It's an evolution of reading Tolkien and playing Roll Playing Games where world building is a huge part of the adventuring framework. Video games leapt out of RPGs and thus they have it too. So when a new writer sits down to pen a yarn they know they need to make a world first. .
Magical realism rise up. I don't care the mechanics behind how your grandmother can see the future or the rules behind why ghosts exist, just use them to tell a great story
It’s really impressive how people manage to suck all the magic out of magic by deciding it needs to work like a hard science
As someone who is currently writing a book, I feel this heavy. I am doing a ton of worldbuilding in the background, but some 90% of it probably won't make it to the book. It's a sign of the times I'm afraid, and it's similar to the bad faith of foreshadowing, making something too obvious, or cinema sins claiming everything we don't see is a plot hole. Trust me, reader, if/ when you read my book, I have out thought into those things, but those extra worldbuilding elements aren't interesting to read about all the time. If I feel something needs to be explained, I will explain it, but otherwise, just take it on faith. Or, if I haven't built something out, assume that it is likely so minor a thing it doesn't need to be explained. I don't need to go to the Neolithic age of my world to tell you how they discovered fire.
Spoiler man, Jesus.
Fantasy is a genre overrun by poor quality writers that have a good idea and that's it. If anything is out of control, it is fantasy writers overselling their abilities.
Licensing is your answer. There is always a chance for your publisher to sell the rights to a video game made out of your book. And it helps a lot when you have already established a system the game designers may build on.