smallcreature

slowly recovering from birdsite

autistic queerthing from france. kitty fighting the puppy allegations. Asks welcome!

Icon: Komugi from Wonderful Precure
Header: Whisper of the Heart



Iro
@Iro

J.R.R. Tolkien did the world a disservice by making every single fantasy writer think that they need to chronicle every goddamn minute of their world in order for it to be legitimate. I don't give two shits about a king who lost a war 700 years ago. [Snore]! Get outta here!

-Brian David Gilbert, I read all 337 books in Skyrim so you don't have to | Unraveled

Plenty of smart people who are not me have posted plenty about Lore already around these parts and you should read what they have to say. I'm just a guy, but hey, why wasn't I consulted?

I'm extremely guilty of everything I'm complaining about, and it's not like I've produced an actual finished work yet myself. But as someone who tangentially hangs out in certain genre fiction writer spheres, gosh, people are just obsessed with their worldbuilding to the point that it's an unspoken measure of prestige or something. Like, mainstream heavy-scare-quotes "successful" fantasy (within the spheres I tend to see, so, mostly white, western spheres) are inspired by Tolkien and Martin and Sanderson, big ol' universes with intertwined installments and Lore, and I get it, right? I was into Fate for a decade; I understand the appeal, the scent that tickles the nose of a Lore Hound from three leagues away.


More pertinently, I understand the anxiety of feeling like you have to compete with that if you want to write fantasy. We live in the social media era now, and most of us are not Great War Era academic linguists or part of 19th-century American cults or what have you. It might be sour grapes talking, but I'm not sure how possible it is for a normal person to build that stuff without major backing or just being part of a media conglomerate like Star Wars or some shit. But fantasy writers especially, still sort of feel like they have to, because that's just what (again, mainstream-white-western) Fantasy is right?

So again, the end result is the vibe that "More Lore = Good" and it's almost some kind of sick arms race. There's a weird amount of, I guess, humblebragging? About how much research they did over all these minor details because they just had to know it for the history of their constructed world. I've seen posts of people talking about the thousands and thousands of words they wrote fleshing out the founding of cities, history of nations, the primordial forces that shaped the very universe. People saying they spent days researching iron deposits because they had a scene around a campfire and there was an iron pot and where did they get the iron from, the worldbuliding implications everyone.

Sometimes I ask them what the book is, the story. They often don't have an answer.

Like, I personally reckon that these are the main merits of having an original setting:
(aside: none of these are necessarily limited to original settings, historical fiction and narrative nonfiction and whatnot exist too, it's just a rant folks)

  • You can more closely intertwine the story's milieu around its core themes
  • You can create a sense of narrative weight around how the plot affects the setting
  • You can create those "aha!" moments when stuff was secretly connected all along

The first is the most important, IMO. It's sort of the platter upon which fiction exists at all; creation myths and Just-so stories and whatnot informing cultural ethos. Why is this story being told, and what elements, real or not, are necessary for it to be told? For example, maybe you want to tell a story about how capitalism ruins lives, so you create a setting that has corporations controlling every aspect of human existence.

The second sort of naturally arises out of a desire for verisimilitude. This is the meat of "worldbuilding" as a concept, I think. You want things to make logical sense in ways that we understand from our own lived experience. In the real world, this is called "history".

Then that third one is the chocolate sundae, right? When you spot Melshii in Andor #8 and the neurons converge and you go "that's the thing from the other thing!!" and get that dopamine rush. That's what drives the "10 Things You Missed in Episode 4!" listicles, the fan wikis, the lore theory videos. This can arguably only happen when a setting hits a certain metatextual size threshold, and it's a proven way of getting people invested.

I think the part that bugs the heck outta me is seeing people sort of, approach worldbuilding in a way that feels backwards I guess? There seems to be some kind of belief that once they have the perfect world, the story will arise naturally from within; that constructed history has the same fundamental momentum as real history. They want that universe where they can write forty-seven books that are all on different planets but are secretly part of the same universe so they can blow your mind when you recognize a character from Book 3 in Book 9, but they haven't figured out what the books are actually about.
(by the way it's fine, maybe even better? if you do this stuff chiefly for your own personal amusement, hell, that's what Tolkien basically did until other people convinced him to send it to a publishing house, but presumably worldbuilders want to actually have a finished work)

We experience media we enjoy, and the more surface elements are always the things most easily imitated. We say "wow, cool robot", and make things with cool robots in them, without necessarily interrogating why the robots are in there in the first place. Swords and sorcery, neon and chrome. We see the little interconnected strings of our favorite franchise's web and we want that. And really great, amazing stuff can come from that, there's no denying it.

But finished product or work in progress, it feels sometimes like the substance has drained away, and all that's left is Lore. And I want a bit more than that.

-Monday Oct 31 2022


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Iro's post:

Note: I'm still not sure about the cohost etiquette of comments vs reshares with comments, so I'm sticking to comments for now because the audience is more focused. My thoughts are a little all over the place, but there's lots of interesting things to talk about here, imo

I agree with a lot of what you're saying - I think lore should be used as a way to support a story for media like TV/Movies/books, (tabletop games might be an edge case for me, but we don't need to get into that) rather than trying to discover a story from a compendium of facts about the world. I find it so much more interesting for a story to have a message than be necessarily and fractally consistent down to the smallest grain of sand. It's part of what I appreciate about poetry, which seems to rarely be backed by a wiki in the same way.

That said, I think that there are definitely times when lore and researching or compiling it for a story can be more like using reference in art: its something that's not 100% necessary, especially for folks with a ton of experience on a subject, yet it helps the extremely vast majority of those who do use it, so long as they don't get too bogged down in the details.

To make the metaphor a bit clearer: if I want to write a story where one of the themes is exploitation under capitalism, it's possible that I might come up with a couple examples of exploitation from experience (e.g. personal history or copying ideas from other media), but if I'm trying to set this story in a fantastical world that doesn't conform to the present, then the assumptions about what could precipitate this exploitation may not land as well for the hypothetical audience.

From this perspective, lore in the sense of establishing factions and forces and conditions from which I can tell a story that's believable may help me to share a stronger opinion about how exploitation under capitalism happens and the multifaceted ways that its cruelty expresses itself.

Where the idea of "lore as evidence of research and due diligence" breaks down for me is the sort of "objective reference frame" that seems to be assumed about the camera filming the scenes (whether a literal camera or 3rd-person perspective writing). It seems like the "lore-backed wiki" media has a baseline assumption that "all stories told must fit within the lines," and that "seeing something cross any of those lines means a failure on the writer's part." These failures can then get tallied by the likes of content creators counting "fails" or "sins" or whatever. When every piece of the story "must be true because it was seen on screen, or else the entire plot and theme come into question," I find lore is at its worst. That's the lore-lawyering of "well, I saw an iron pot, which means that there must be iron deposits" too. It assumes that everything on screen must be the truth and that with enough objective truth, you can fill every gap about the world.

In my opinion, it's ok and maybe even preferable for plot details to be hazy or murky in terms of truthiness, and that doesn't detract in any way from the themes or the overall theses of the story. After all, what we experience in real life is similarly hazy because we are not getting perfect information and we are lousy at retaining it as well, yet we can hold stonch beliefs about things like exploitation under capitalism without those beliefs being invalidated by our lossy biological sensors or memory.

yeah this is a good way to put some of the stuff i was attempting to grasp at, i've spent a lot of time with people who champion verisimilitude as the most important element of a work (especially in genre stuff) and while it is something i do personally value quite a lot, i no longer think it's the be-all-end-all

i think your example is what i would describe as worldbuilding with the themes in mind which is what i was trying to say is a good thing compared to just like, worldbuilding to worldbuild i guess