dramatic-delirium reblogged
In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.
What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)
Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.
The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.
Random things that influence culture
- Staple cropppp
- Times this place has had drastic changes of who's in power ie conquerors, colonizers, settlers etc. zero times is a little rare, and multiple times does happen
- Average number of children in a family, btw this shows quality of life
- Awareness and attitude towards queerness eg. is boys sitting on each other's laps and sharing cloths gonna come off as 1) boys being boys, boys can only be friends of course 2) look at those faggots 3) aw they're in love etc.
- Humidity
- Are boobs explicit content™, what exactly is considered modesty for women ahem ahem and was it influenced by the colonizers or similar
- Staple protein source? Fish? Livestock? Only milk?
- When does children leave the house? Eg upon turning an adult, upon marriage etc
- How accessible is education? How does it work? Eg free classes weekly by a religious head, daily classes by learned teachers which cost lots, bording school type free education but only if the teacher likes and choses the student, etc. multiple forms can exist together
- Landscape. Baby try putting that fantasy story on the plainssss
- Popular modes of travel, and how accessible by that is the current location
- Number of languages, and how much each language is integreted into society Eg. Everyone knows both languages, Native tongue only survives in spoken way and second language fully integrated because the settlers burnt all documents of the native language, Native tongue fully integrated but Merchants commonly know many foreign languages because this is a trade center etc.
How to take this forward, eg you pick rice as the staple crop, so which all people prepared rice, did the rich prefer rice? Did the poorest get to eat rice? Storing rice changes the house layout so how did it affect the games the children played etc etc.