- Joined
- Jan 19, 2020
It's also about getting caught up in the fantasy. People want to know more about world's that intrigue them, either on an academic level (admittedly pretty rare) or because they want to imagine what it would be like if that world was real. Most Star Wars fans love the universe and all of its potential, not just the movies and characters; most Harry Potter fans love imagining all the little minutiae about if they were a wizard and went to Hogwarts; hell, people who watch MLP like to think about what kind of pony they would be and what their cutie mark would be and where they would fit in pony society.
I prefer to call "people have different tastes than you and enjoy different aspects of the same media"
Lily, as a person who writes fanfiction -- especially fanfiction with such a dense lore background as Star Wars (and even pulls up information like lightsaber crystal and fighting styles and character you would only recognize if you knew about the EU) -- fully understands this concept but still dismisses it.
I'm guessing this is because her own worldbuilding attempts have been so poorly received, either by being ignored (see: entire wikis about Poke-Madhouse and Tales of the Val'kyr) or by having people poke holes in it (see: people trying to figure out how her Pokemon universe works, at all). Obviously this can't just mean that she's shit at worldbuilding because she doesn't actually want to put effort into it; it means that the very concept of worldbuilding is bad.
Really just want to reemphasize this, absolutely. If you're making up the rules and changing them on the fly, the audience will never be able to ground themselves in the laws of your world and be able to invest in it. When things can Just Happen, there's no reason to feel tension because the author can just pull a solution out of their ass; when you can't figure out at the rough geography of an area, your audience will be confounded when one passage involves a four-day walk between cities and then the next time it happens they get from Point A to Point B in one afternoon.
Lily's examples of good versus bad worldbuilding are also hilarious. She's correct in that those are aspects you would need to know in the real world, but in a fictional setting, you don't need to be able to read road signs, you might wind up learning the history of a place for an in-universe reason, doing currency conversion is incredibly boring (although broad strokes about the economy of one place versus another might be noteworthy), and it seems utterly insane that you wouldn't hear the name of the local monarch even if you don't necessarily meet them. I'm pretty sure you'd overhear a few Brits talking about the Queen if you happened to walk down a street in London.
Not necessarily. If you're good at improvisation you can absolutely trick an audience into thinking you've actually got something really elaborate when in fact you just made it up literally as you were typing the sentence.
But doing that usually does require a profound foundational understanding of your world and your story and your intentions. I've absolutely made things up on the fly that feel like they were deep worldbuilding, but I could do that because I knew enough about the foundation of my worlds that I can do that and not skip a beat (and trick the people I was writing with into thinking I'm a genius when really, I'm just a good bullshitter). Although your foundation and what you have planned should always play to your strengths. Not everybody can do that but they can make elaborate setpieces and environments that they can call up at a moment's notice, which is something I have trouble with and really admire anybody who can yank out a solid map and timeline.
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