[ SECRET POST #3238 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3238 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 043 secrets from Secret Submission Post #463.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

I'm sorry, what are you babbling about? You comment re: Tolkein, etc., makes no sense to me at all.

You can have the most 'compelling' character ever, but if the world they live in just *does not work*, the story is lacking, to me, and you have failed in your job of world-building. Simple as that.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

What does it mean for you for a world not to work?

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

For it to not makes sense. I'm not talking about magic, which does not exist in this world and which is something that is purest escape fantasy.

I'm talking about sci-fi worlds or fantasy worlds (without magic) that are patterned on Medieval Earth, or post-zombie-apocalypse worlds, things like that. If you have five hundred people living off canned beans for ten years, well...that just doesn't *work*. If you have Medieval farmers who spend most of their day trying to woo someone rather than actually *farm*, that doesn't work. If you have a space station where there is no recycling and no conservation of resources and no worries about radiation that just doesn't *work*.

Obviously, this is subjective and a lot of people won't care, but I really hate a world written by an author that wants so much for 'specific thing' to be prominent that they completely ignore how incredibly unworkable and weird the scenario is.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Tolkien's worlds do not work. Lewis's worlds do not work. Le Guin's world do not work. Moorcock's worlds do not work. Pratchett's world gloriously does not work.

If you have elves, your worlds will not work. If you have dragons, your worlds will not work. If you have magick, your worlds will not work. Ifyou halve alternate universe, your worlds will not work, and let's not get into how large chunks of fantasy has treated theology post-Gygax.

Unless you treat their stories as fucking stories, then they do work.

In fact, unless you're some sort of omnipotent scholar, your worlds will not work because the humanities are too fucking complex for generalists.

You can have the most 'compelling' character ever, but if the world they live in just *does not work*, the story is lacking, to me, and you have failed in your job of world-building. Simple as that.

Perhaps you should get the fuck out of a genre which has always put story first, and find something more your speed like census data or actuarial tables. Or perhaps just read Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics on how putting history or language ahead of story is a big mistake.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

Well, you got nasty quick. So, bye-bye, any kind of discussion.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

With all respect, I'm not sure your earlier line about "babbling" reads as particularly friendly.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

Perhaps not, but it certainly isn't openly hostile. And the comment *did* seem like babbling because it made no sense to me.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

All of the authors mentioned were story-first writers. Quite explicitly so in the case of Tolkien. Lovecraft's fantasy is openly surreal and isn't supposed to make objective sense.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

If you're saying 'the story makes no sense because Elves' or 'the story makes no sense because Eldritch Horror' then I disagree. Those are fantasy elements inserted into worlds that *do* work.

Tolkein's worlds are basically earth worlds, with peasants and farmers and blacksmiths and cities with universities and armies and whatnot. A world he was probably very familiar with because of his studies and interest in history. The elves had magic, and magic, of course, is a made-up thing that doesn't 'work' so to speak, but the world didn't *run* on magic. Bilbo didn't use magic to keep his house clean, the Elves didn't (as far as i remember/that we can see) didn't use magic to feed themselves, they had actual food, wrapped up in leaves, they had arrows that needed fletching and knives that needed sharpening.

Lovecraft set his stories in the modern world quite often, with the 'Eldritch Horror' or whatever coming through from *some other world*. One so different it caused ruin in ours. But his world - of the university, the academic circle, etc. - were all working worlds that didn't hinge on Cthulu to work.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

But the details of how the peasants get their food, where the farms are, how the armies are organized, etc in Tolkien are essentially left blank, except where it intersects with his concerns as a storyteller or his linguistic play. Where does Rivendell get its food? We don't really know. We can supply the answers, and assume they're going to be broadly comparable to the state of affairs in the societies that Tolkien was drawing from, but that's a long way from saying that Tolkien was building a world that was realistic and worked in that sense. What it means is that his world was for the most part not flagrantly unrealistic & that we're willing to fill in the lacunae.*

And I'd argue that side of things does not have any relation to the qualities that make Tolkien a worthwhile writer. Tolkien left them blank because none of them mattered; they would have mattered just as little if they had been 'unrealistic' in comparison to our world, because those were not Tolkien's concerns - Tolkien's concerns were with the story. But on the other hand I don't suppose its possible to argue against your subjective enjoyment of its perceived sensemaking.

*(this is much less true with regards to the Shire and the Hobbits, but the Hobbits are unrealistic in a much more specific sense, IE being essentially a profoundly idealized version of English rural life, so I am willing to regard them as simply an exception)

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

And ...I have never said anything about Tolkein being a 'worthwhile' writer. He didn't dwell on the mechanics of where Rivendell got its food from, but he was drawing (even with the Hobbits) on a world that *did* exist, and *did* work. And yes, we fill in the blanks, so to speak, on that, because it's not an important element of the story for him to give us details on.

The *important*, to me, part of it is that they *didn't* rely on magic. They didn't rely on some kind of weird trade with Elves for everything they needed. They didn't have to sneak into some other realm to get sewing needles, if you see what i'm saying. He put the perfect English village down into his world and populated it with Hobbits rather than Brits, but the framework was the same, and you can assume there was a wheelwright and a cheesemaker and a blacksmith and everything else the ideal English village would have, because that's what Tolkein was writing.

He didn't substitute regular work/abilities/talents for magic, or for mysterious elven 'machines' that magically made linen or something.

I dunno if I'm explaining my point clearly or not.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

But that's my whole point! If it's not an important element of the story, then why does it matter whether those details have coherency in an our-worldly sense? They're unimportant whether they make sense or not. So why does it matter at all? What is the practical difference between details that don't work right, and details that are left unspecified so we just assume that it all works out, when it doesn't matter to the story either way?

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

The story makes sense because elves and eldrich horror have been part of our literary history for thousands of years. The *world* doesn't make sense in terms of history, geography, and economics because they're largely irrelevant.

To use Tolkien for example, the story is about Fall, Mortality, and Machine (and ultimately Faith which is the rejection of Machine). So things like the Stewardship of Gondor are stable just to set up Denethor's loss of faith and flaming fall from the ramparts. The Ride of Rohan so that Theodin can be a useful contrasting character who puts his duty in front of his life. In any realistic historical analysis, regencencies usually become kingdoms in under a century, and treaties tend to be broken after a few generations in the face of a few generations.

But the economics of Middle Earth are almost entirely opaque, and the issue of how a Horde of Orcs are adequately fed in the barren plain of Mordor is treated with a handwave in the appendix, and how they're hydrated is completely left in the dark.

"they had actual food, wrapped up in leaves," is an example of missing the point because Lembas has many parallels to the Catholic sacramental Host, and that becomes significant in a couple of conflicts involving Gollum and Orcs who find the stuff. It's one of those things that doesn't make a lot of sense unless you run with the idea of the Elves of Lothlorien having something akin to divine grace.

Lovecraft's horror plays fast and loose with science and geography. Vast landmasses come rising out of the Pacific Ocean and vanish with only the narrator's lurid testimony to describe what happened, never mind that such an event would be a disaster across the entire Pacific Rim. His fantasy is almost entirely surreal, which is reasonable considering that it happens in a dream state. It doesn't spoil the story one bit that these things happen.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

Like I said, the worlds don't *run on magic*. Though significant parts (the rings? the giant eagles?) are obviously not 'real'.

I have *no* clue about Lembas and the Host, am not a huge Tolkein reader and therefor cannot say one way or another what it represented in his books. And since Elves are not *human* - they may very well have something like 'divine grace', who knows. But if they do, Hobbits don't, and still have to plant crops and hoe the weeds out.

I guess I'm not explaining myself very clearly and you're very intent on making the magical/fantasy parts of these books the test for 'real' or 'not real', which in my mind isn't the point. They are the unreal elements that you work around in the story to make the fantasy, but you don't have people plowing the corn field with a dragon.

And of course Tolkein didn't go into the details of how Orcs are kept hydrated - he probably felt he didn't need to, since that wasn't what he was focusing on in the story. When he was in the trenches, fighting, it probably wasn't something he thought about much unless he was thirsty. He probably mostly thought about the death happening around him, and the horrible noise of an approaching army, and the stink of dead bodies everywhere. Cart trains to the nearest river to get barrels full of water would be a boring and irrelevant detail unless he had part of one of the armies cutting off their supply.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

"but you don't have people plowing the corn field with a dragon."

But what if you're writing a story about people who tame dragons and use them as draft animals?

Like I'm gonna admit, I thought you were talking about internal logic and consistency. But now it seems like you basically have an arbitrary cut-off point between what fantastical elements are "okay" and "make sense" and which ones don't.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I guess I'm not explaining myself very clearly and you're very intent on making the magical/fantasy parts of these books the test for 'real' or 'not real', which in my mind isn't the point.

No, I think tests for "real" and "not real" are completely irrelevant. They reduce stories to little more than an accounting of trivial details, which strikes me as being even less adept a form of literary analysis than fundamentalist readings of scripture. Lord of the Rings works as a story, in which various characters confront various forms of temptation and despair in a world in which grace matters. Very little about the world of Middle Earth makes sense unless you assume that this conflict has meaning.

Fantasy isn't, and shouldn't be primarily historical. Tolkien was emulating a body of literature that was more moral than historical. So do many other authors in the field.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

But why *can't* a world run on magic? As long as the magic has a logic and the logic is followed, why can't Bilbo clean his house with it? If you're going for fantasy anyway, why not explore what a place like that would be like?

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

You can, of course. But the point is, Middle Earth *doesn't* run on magic, and I think Tolkein made that very clear, just with the details and inclusions of various things in his writing. He makes it clear that magic is the *exception*, not the rule.

If you have a magical world, it still has *rules*. Magic can't just come from nowhere and do everything. That's not only boring for a story, but unrealistic even for fantasy. Everything comes from *somewhere*, and magic has consequences in Middle Earth, as well.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

After reading through this whole thread, I think I generally agree with you.

I want fantasy worlds that are based on how the real world works, with magic as a highlight and an exception to those rules. I really dislike it when people dismiss realism by saying "But it has magic! It doesn't have to make sense!".

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

But that's not fantasy, that's crappy historical fiction with some fantasy elements bolted on for color.

Central to fantasy needs to be a Big Idea, and the storytelling needs to be wrapped around that. If it's Hamlet, it's entirely ahistorical concerns about the transfer of power within a monarchy, revenge, and questions of honesty. If it's Middle Earth, it's Tolkien's particular Christian moral framework. If it's Earthsea, it's Taoism (Wizard and Lathe of Heaven have roughly the same plot.) If it's Narnia, it's a fairly explicit Christian framework.

That characters travel to the edge of the world in three of those stories doesn't seem to bother anyone.

(The irony here is that I have a Muskets and Magic story that's included hundreds of hours of research, but I'm not about to bamboozle anyone into thinking that it's a story *about* the 18th century or that my insertion of that research makes that work "historically accurate." History is hard.)

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

Yes. Magic doesn't have to have a five-page scientific explanation, but 'because magic!!' is just never...satisfactory.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. This was unnecessarily belligerent.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

Holy shit dude.

She's talking about internal consistency, not a complete lack of fantastical elements. Way to take something hyper-literally and then go batshit over it.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

It's not just a question of magical elements in the story. It's also a question of what you mean by "internal consistency" and to what extent that matters for the quality of a story. And, like, this is a central and long-running argument in the genre. It is, I think, a problem of the genre that the importance of mechanical internal consistency is regarded as being of such fantastically great importance - almost to the exclusion of anything else. It is a major problem. And I think that is what cbar's post was speaking to.

I can't speak to the tone but the content of cbar's argument is extremely reasonable.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure you meant to sound this aggressive and take it to the point of a personal attack, but this was out of line.