There is a distaste with worldbuilding--at least in some places--as a concept. This is my pre-thesis fishhook baseline, in particular because I think there are both a lot of self-described worldbuilders that might not realize that the entire body of work can be objected to, and a lot of lit-critics who want to grapple with the faults of bad worldbuilding without evaluating what it actually is as a practice first, community second, symptom third.
AKA setup, something like an important prelude to the Point of this late-stage structural headache: how do you build good worlds? It's not an important question, it's a fundamental. Axiomatic. If you write fiction, you must manufacture a world that is, at best, an approximation of our own. This makes a lot of rules transferable and reducible; a functioning relation between Middle Earth, O.N.A.N. and an attempted nonfictional historical account of an English town. They're all a little goofed-up.
The reason I opened with a clickbait oneliner is because it's a rolling undercurrent to how the attitude of the critics, creators and consumers can malform and misdirect the pursuit of analysis and improvement. I personally do not believe worldbuilding to be a faulty tool; it's just like any other method of composition and holds equal potential for health and hazard. It has recieved a fair share of confused partial-visibility-overexposure (in which a trope is adopted by an Author and made a particular way to suit the work; the work goes meteoric, and the trope is redefined in public conscious--or perhaps christened under mistaken first contact--to only represent how the work in question uses it) primarily at the fault of Tolkien, Martin and the orbital titans of modern-ish-to-modern fantasy writing. Note that a common theme in my 'essay writing' is that my conclusions are staggeringly unresearched. I won't feel bad if you dip out now.
I worry that we confuse the idea of writing background as a tool to help maintain coherence or generate ideas with the formal insertion of these background ideas into the final product, firstly. It's the overeager novice's symptom and realistically should not be the driving force of conversation around the mechanics of good fiction writing. Most authors worth their salt should already be familiar with pruning (I leave room for the first-draft sendoff, that shit is sick!) and will, whether instinctively or not, apply principles of structural control to how they reveal and elaborate on the setting in the same way as they would stifle leads and scenes to keep it all together.
This exercise is kind-of unconcerned with that part of the pipeline for now. It's more about the processes and value derived from degrees of unexposed elaboration: how much do you need to know, formally, about your false realities? Can we quantify points of greater risk or reward? What compromises are required? What do we mistake as requirements when they deserve to be investigated and subverted? Can you even evaluate worthiness of such processes - is it some kind of tradeoff function between the enjoyment of the author and the distraction of the work, or is that too great of a reduction?
It's a trench. If you go too deep, the outcome is neutered--you're never making it back to the top. The goal is in doing exactly as much as you need to get what you want - and that means metaplanning. Or not. Process, process.
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Broken Pivots, Reward Inquiry
Here's a bin of assumptions. I would love to hear about specific examples that challenge these commonalities.
Catastrophic Failures in Progression
While your world will not mimic Earth in terms of advancement, the discrepancies between the power-level of a world's individuals and the advancements of their society and technology will always be noticeable, frustrating and strange. This is why both the Animesphere and the paperback miseries share a common fault in worldly coherence--since they need to have popcorn-munching fights to stay interesting, they must almost always compromise the logic of their naive antipolitical super-societies. Darker fantasy (think Berserk, Dark Souls, a lot of OSR RPGs) circumvents this problem by explicitly preserving the super-fragility of the common folk and keeping most magic at arm's length, as well as by internalizing the exaggerated sensibilities of fairytale realism to insulate against issues of coherence.
Either way, I think you have to know where you land on this scale to produce a stable setting. In that sense, I don't mean you need to neurotically evaluate your setting for flawless decision-coherence and perfect logical consistency, I just mean you need to know your blindspots. Every piece of fiction is compromising logic for the sake of their plot, but you'll plot substantially better if you know about the compromises you're making. Do some homework in considering what the most ruthlessly, opportunistically normal people or groups would do in your most pivotal scenes, rather than whatever is driving the drama. Not to eliminate the drama, mind you, but to give yourself the necessary room to sharpen the drama towards realism where needed.
Cosmos as Aesthetic, Asides on Relatable Visual Representation
More visual than written. What about your setting most structurally resembles our reality - in a sensory way? What doesn't? Taking on the mantle of our existing cosmic structure is ambitious--it kind-of conscripts you into a lot of real-world mechanics. For example: how would magic mess with the formation of stars? More broadly, what does a traditional night sky or earthly standard mean for your creation myth, your justification of cosmos, the works?
There is a need to maintain the fundamental images of Earthling life to prefent emotional chafe. Choosing to set anything in a world with a starless sky (or some wildly over-modelled cosmology with totally-foreign far-external visuals) is taking on a major, major tone recovery burden. However, I also think there's a kind of growing distaste with what we take for granted in fantasy which drives the more unusual examples to the forefront.
Ten Excuses for the Dominant Biped
You are going to enshrine the Human Form. I'm not even sure if that's overreaching. How do you justify it? This is a question I have no good answer for. It's ludicrously-hard to write something sensible wherein all of your characters are "evolutionarily justified", ergo probably not bipeds at all, let alone the hairless apes that we're familiar with.
Embedding metafictional justifications is a risk, but so is leaving it unquestioned. This is good at indicating the biggest problem with fantasy in general, which is - if we're uprooting all the rules, why are we also importing so many of the real-world concepts which depend on those rules we're trying to ditch? Contradiction! This is not really advice, just food for thought. Maybe you can come up with a more compelling wrinkle here. Me, I think it isn't worth running too far away from the human constant. This might be the easiest one to just leave alone.
The Inverted Table / Resolution of Scientific Psychopathy
At the last step on the ladder of practical reality, does this universe even have the same elemental makeup? We need to make some compromises here (basically any move away from our understanding of physics, chemistry, etc... would catastrophically change too much to make any real fiction out of, but our existing laws of physics are not very permissive of anything fun or interesting) but you should be careful of how fuzzy you get. The hazard here is cuts both ways, but is far more weighted in being overly-specific: if you try to illuminate your own pseudoscientific chemical makeup, you will probably just make more holes than you fill.
Generally-speaking, this idea of scientific justification is a bad gamble on all fronts. It's a measure of reader expertise versus author's time (specifically because I can assume that an Author has probably dedicated more of their time to writing, which is less towards other disciplines, whereas I know nothing about the reader) and requires us to kinda half-ass it if you'd rather write a narrative than a fictional encyclopedia. You can't really half-ass it though, but full-assing it is also impossible. I think the most reasonable strategy here is one of minimization, considering that you're mostly working against the sensibilities of the reader as a potential expert of a field you are not. If you're operating on bodies of knowledge that you know you're not an authority in, you have some amount of responsibility to do the required reading to avoid obvious pitfalls, obviously, but if you're also *altering* any core concepts within that practice, you need to do some more thinking when it comes to the aesthetics of expertise. You're not actually going to build most of the foundational principles of the New Reality, but you want it to take on the 'look' of a body of knowledge for whatever thematic time period you're mimicking. This is why I consider the concept worth mentioning at all - most of the fiction I've read is so ignorant of basic, fundamental principles of reality that it kinda cripples the drama. If you don't think you can sell it (and you almost certainly cannot sell it), avoid mentioning it. If you can't avoid mentioning it, go do your homework.
Anime works with this concept a lot - I think of Hunter x Hunter as a compelling example of how one can make a somewhat-stable system of 'magic' that is aesthetically reasonable, because it is scathingly practical in how it implements it. There are broad rules that can be explained easily, but all of the experts of this practice appear to know it far better than we do (obscure some of your rules to produce this discrepancy in your readers), and so as we watch these Nen professionals do bullshit, a part of us assumes that it's probably legit because we've seen stable competence elsewhere. Capiche?
Pseudoecology
How much do you love the sciences of living category? Genetics? A sliding scale of obsessive-to-disengaged can drive heavy the face of Mother Nature in your composite work.
In general, there's this kind of tone that sticks to any premise you write about, the differentiation between "hard scifi" and "soft scifi", "grounded fantasy" and "high fantasy". A lot of it is actually in how you treat the natural world - if your tone is more specific, structural and accurate, you get hard and dark (lol). If it's broader, more RoC, less careful, you get soft and high. This isn't an entirely exclusive decision, but it is important - if you want to make a fantastical world, you need to know how to avoid being too grounded.
The language of information and knowledge is an important facet of worldbuilding - the manner in which you express aspects of the natural world is going to drive a lot of how your setting is felt by the reader. Technical-to-fantastical is the dominant spectrum here - the more technical you get, the more you will suffer towards that spiralling-well of overdetailing, but also the more trust you will inspire in your readers when it comes to the reliability of setting - and subsequently, the less likely they will be to notice what you're doing structurally. This actually does reverse on you eventually - if you become autistically-hyperfixated on the elaboration of world detail, eventually, people are going to notice. Same goes for overly-fantastical nonsense. Dark Souls only works because it keeps all concrete reality at arms length, but future entries in the series incrementally lose in impact by both specifying too much while remaining this obscure about the rules which allow such absurd architecture and society to flourish - being a tiny, meek part of the dark forest of reality was how that game emplaced you, but later entries fixated on the power-fantasy and as a result made more obvious how weird and silly the rest of it is.
Rule of Cool / Law by Texture
The power of creative license and alternative lanes of appeal in gimping pedantry ft. most of the anime industry
Most of your juice comes from back-justification and theme coherence. In that sense, a lot of detail-oriented worldbuilding is counterproductive. There's a way to make these parts fit, and this segment is actually not a generality, but rather another spectrum of behavior which layers atop other mechanisms of plotting and themeing. The Rule of Cool is, in a sense, how much you're letting yourself get away with contradiction to preserve cool bullshit. Axiom to this is Code Geass, a show that makes absolutely no sense at any point and is perfect anyways. It's fully living within the texture of grand politicking and conspiratorial schemeing that it feels unnecessary to even examine how anything would actually work. The reason for this is, in my opinion, almost entirely a function of presentation, trope and texture - the show takes place in a tacitly-absurd hyperdystopia which eases the burdens of ill logic, it is structured and paced to move as quickly and energetically as possible so as to discourage scrutiny, and it's more plotted for fun than anything else so that identification of flaw tends to lose to the generally-entertaining structure of every individual scene and plot beat.
Point here is that all of the above were intentional measures (and not the only reasons C:G works as well as it does, but I think they're structurally significant) of offsetting natural criticism's of C:G's premise, which seems to fall over when inspected. That's worldbuilding, too, but moreso a method of helping guide your detailing. Everything in C:G is unified by this hyperactive, overdramatic political absurdism, from the visualization of this weird mecha-meets-future-Victorian-colonization-cyberpunk world to the overdramatic direction of all voice performances. It devours a number of influences and works its way to a completely illogical place in pursuit of a central theme, but that kind of unity typically triumphs over more meager criticisms of specific missteps.
Granularity and Hazard Probabilities
Can we measure how much detail is reasonable? At what point have you crossed the threshold and introduced more problems than you've solved by elaboration?
It may be better to inspect settings that don't overdetail here. It will also become obvious very quickly that my frame of reference is mostly isolated to games and anime - sorry about that. Let's take a look at BLAME!, a practically-nonverbal manga about a cyborg walking around.
BLAME! is a series with virtually no 'narrative detail'. It provides almost zero information or justification for the actions of the main character beyond a single-sentence motive, with the same sentiment roughly covering everything from setting to situation to the items of narrative relevance. The detail in this series is entirely visual, and subsequently partly assumed - we deduce a lot about the megastructure within which this series is set just by looking at it, the way it co-opts and malforms style at scale. This silent characterization uses a single facet of skilled expression to backfill almost all other relevant details of the plot and world, relying mostly on the reader's internal understanding of reality to do the work for it.
In contrast, the universe of Warhammer 40,000 is so lavishly overdetailed at this point that you could likely locate a specific description for any individual part of a piece of promotional art within ten minutes. We're hundreds of books into this thing at this point, and while there's lots of good, a more interesting side-effect is born of this broader effort at elaboration - incoherence. There's this constant fight between authors, portional setting and the historical record as the accumulated detritus of fifty years of specificity eats away at the original satire which drove the aesthetics of the setting in the first place.
This isn't even solely a multiple-authorship problem, either. Not even the academics of Tlön could defend against the encroaching issue of anti-theme, because it is also how real world history works. Multidisciplinary maximalism will eventually produce a world that is both compellingly-diverse and entirely incapable of maintaining coherent theme or direction, because it appears that theme is generally reliant on the reduction of reality. This is not me encouraging you to narrow the scope of reality in pursuit of messaging, because that's pretty much advocating for propaganda. I want us to instead respect what appears to be a kind of narrative inertia you get once your world becomes too big, too indebted to detailing. At the right level, people will generally fill blanks in as they need to in order to keep a work coherent, and so you can better control the parts which exist in direction with your thematic ambition. At scale, you must do constant battle with both yourself and your readers to maintain coherence against a mounting wall of specifics which, while originally written in direction of a particular theme, may eventually betray future ambition.
Much of this post, generally, but also this segment in particular, is in opposition to more conventional pursuits of literary composition. Many writers have and will continue to prioritize evaluation through language and structure over these ultra-literal angles of analysis. This is an important consideration to weigh against as well - there are measures of absurdism and tone which can counterbalance a lot of advice about the literal dangers of information.
The ultimate reason for this is that every individual component of a work is entirely individual. Nothing actually complies 100% with anything else, specifically or otherwise. Detailing unnecessarily may lead you into traps with respect to that concept, given that you're committing to all of the baggage that concept has when you add it to your work (or the responsibility of lying about it later). The painterly image of a sci-fi dystopia is one thing, but in attempting to explain exactly who manufactured every ship, gun, wall and relief in it, you may be taking on more than you can handle. Be careful!
Radioactive Bottles
When a self-contained narrative is waylaid in the next step, but the details seeded start to fuck with future desires--and how to mitigate your contradictions...
This is a riff on the prior segment, kind-of. A lot of anime rots itself out from this premise, building isolated arcs that don't really contribute to a broader setting as much as they devalue it. The idea here is that your isolated arcs always have effects on the rest of the narrative, so operating on some amount of cohesive plotting is necessary. More importantly, you're going to make contradictions in pursuit of drama and coherence, so how do you properly build a world that is resistant to these kinds of accumulating failure?
The Rule of Cool is the biggest help here, but general strategy isn't just about covering your ass like that. In TTRPGs, one of the best techniques a gamerunner can employ is the deference of mistake as intention - raising an "Oh really? That's interesting." to your player's "This doesn't make sense, you said this before!" You can typically justify any oversight ever, though the more detailed a setting is, the harder this becomes. The most valuable skill to preserve, especially in serial media, is one of knowing how to know what you don't know - of leaving yourself 'structural openings' so that when an oversight is caught, you can justify it. The most dangerous kinds of mistakes are typically the most specific - a character manages to do or say something that doesn't make sense - and the only real way you can avoid those is just with more studious plotting. The ones we're trying to work with here are mistakes of broader setting texture, wherein you say "No Witches wear blue hats!", make a character with a blue hat, then make them a witch later.
Single-Digit Influencers
When the world is so latched to your own capacity of character and plotting, it seems to be almost entirely driven by whatever the main series can permit...
This is a problem common to almost all fiction, the great Crisis of Convenience, wherein a conflict which could never ever be resolved by a small group of people in real life is somehow handled. I don't know of many stories that aren't fighting this fight.
It isn't an issue, it's just an incurred cost. Reality has been irrevocably altered by people who happened to be at the right place or the right time, but you don't necessarily want to replicate the absurdity with which realpolitik fucks up the historical record. Rather, you want to find a healthy way to show that your superhumans thematically fit with the world around them, to construct a justification-blinder that prevents your readers from worrying so much about the nitty-gritty.
Lots of little tricks work for this - a lot of the time, it's best to incur consequences of some kind. Readers are sensitive to the Hand of the Author, the sense that something is protecting the interests of the plot, so introducing doses of real absurdity can go a long way. This goes for structural worldbuilding too - you don't need to construct a thorough political justification for why a single person can kick a building down and how that isn't a problem, you just need to posture like you have. This means anecdotal scenes about the conseqeuences of power in your setting, random historical artifacts relating to how different groups have worked with and around the nature of power. This kind of texturing is almost always useful as long as it is naturally utilized - carefully seeding your stories with little asides about how stuff totally makes sense can go a long way, but you can never ever devolve into anything even approximating lecturing without reason. It comes up casually and carefully or it doesn't come up.
Life, Material, Sex, Knowledge and Death - or All We Really Have
The real world is ultimately not a very complicated place. We're rooted beasts, we just ride a wave of emergent complexity. If you swing too far out of orbit and lose one of these pieces, you're binning a lot of real people with it.
This is most important to understand as a measure of omission-as-adoption - when you leave something out, you typically take on more burdens because your art is an approximation of reality, and leaving a part of reality behind may impress in weird ways upon the reader. It's why a lot of fantasy can feel fake - if it is sexless, it lacks the emotional edge of life as a measure of the formation and destruction of relationships. If it is inconsequential or deathless, it struggles to form compelling drama, which really only exists in terms of our relationship with life and survival.
This is so structurally-broad as to be obvious, but pay attention to it at all scales. Your work can be subsectioned infinitely, and any given segment may suffer an inconsistency of utilization on these fronts. There isn't a stable scoring function for "how much saccharine emotional content I should include in a 100-page stretch of writing" or anything like that - everything here is infinitely-relative, but you should be thinking about the consequences of it. Are you generally avoiding death because it's integral to the kind of story you're telling and feeds properly into your intentions, or because you are dependent on it to protect your plot? Is your writing typically sexless and free of intimacy because it isn't important to the kind of story you're telling, or because you don't have a good subconscious relationship with it right now?
Logistics and Ambition (Transit Authority)
Who moves stuff, and why are they as powerful as they are? Measuring the impact of groups, the collection of power, common political architecture and how it naturally frustrates plotting and storytelling is important - and a great majority of how systems thrive and survive is in how stuff moves. It is also profoundly uninteresting and generally irrelevant to the majority of your text, but also necessary as it's easily-detectable if you slack on it and bake great operational conveniences into your plotting without justification.
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As a living post, I'm not totally sure what is above this. I just wanted to sign off with something approximating a conclusion. I think that there's a lot of contradictory advice here, and that's because whenever I think too much about worldbuilding, I typically just confuse myself. It's a gut practice, really, and this is more a collection of things you hopefully think about from time to time than any kind of dogma. Good writing doesn't actually exist, and interesting writing is only ever produced by people who are actually interested in what they're writing. Directed strategy is a good way to make this happen.