[ 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

[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

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

Just because a fantasy story is based around a Big Idea does not mean it cannot have the occasional nod to things like farmers farming, tradesmen doing their trades, merchants buying and selling goods, countries have trade agreements and trade routes, and things like that. That's not trying to fool people into thinking it's historical fiction, it's just giving a backdrop for the story - or as you phrase it, the "Big Idea" - to happen in front of. Preferably a backdrop that does not contradict itself.

The worlds where people travel to the edge, or the brightest star in the night sky is a guy in a boat with a very shiny jewel have become uncommon. That may be sad, from one point of view, or it may make worlds easier to believe in, from another.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Yes, but are those things necessarily historically *realistic*. Note that we don't always know the details of economics within a given historical period due to lack of evidence. The wine trade in The Hobbit makes for an adventurous escape, but it seems that Tolkien put minimal thought into what that trade actually entailed (much less the buoyancy of a dwarf-laden barrel.)

Some of that can be pinned down to the fact that Bilbo is an unreliable narrator. Demands for encyclopedic realism reduce that key part of storytelling as well.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

You're still going to Tolkien for your examples here. I already know his writing skimps on how the societies in the background work. The sort of story I am thinking of is something like David Eddings' writing, where he did make some attempt to indicate that the world the main characters were traveling through on their Great Quest had a working structure to it.

If the real issue is how much detail to realism there is, then maybe I can understand. I may like the passing nods to how the world works, but too many would distract from the story.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

The real issue is what does fantasy actually *do,* on scales ranging from the drabble to the multi-volume epic. What fantasy does is tell stories about the fantastic, usually by referencing other stories in the humanities. A ten-page feminist-horror retelling of The Little Mermaid doesn't need to discuss European colonialism or the mercantile system that created the ship.

I could dive into the implications of fairies and their reality distortion field on the operation of handheld computing which depends quite critically on key proofs developed by Turing and later mathematicians. But I'm not a computer scientist or a math specialist. So instead, I focus on retelling Tam Lin in a 21st century in a 21st century context with approximately 10,000 words incorporating my own understanding of emotional and sexual abuse, and let the non-euclidean geometry and resulting mathematics happen off-stage. Tam Lin is a story about rescuing one's lover from slavery and death after all.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

LOL, if it's not one extreme with you it's the other.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I'm wondering what, exactly, do you think my argument is? As far as I'm aware, it's always been that the story comes first and everything around the story needs to be tuned to the demands of the story.

Does anyone really give a shit that Alexandre Dumas Pere played fast and loose with the biography of Abbe Faria, or that Shakespeare used two tourists to the Tudor court as patsies and drops the name of a post-Reformation university in Hamlet?

There's also a methodological argument here. History, economics, linguistics, and sociology are the Cinderella's stepsisters of fiction. You simply can't cram them into that glass slipper without cutting off toes.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

I gave up bothering to talk to you because you missed it when I said stories don't need excessive detail. Guess what! That was agreeing with some of what you've said! But it's clear to me you just want to be right in this argument, not that you really care about stories having background details or that those details make sense.

Go on your way.