Worldbuilding and the Origin of Fandom -- Part I: The Fans

Blade Runner Cosplayers

This post originally appeared in 2012, but disappeared due to a glitch.

Some years ago, during the heyday of the Harry Potter craze, there was an interview with Rowling going around the internet where she revealed that the snake Harry freed from the zoo in the first book was actually Nagini, the bad guy's pet snake from the later books. Fans went crazy over it: here was yet more evidence of the intense amount of planning that went into Rowling's series, sure proof of the complexity and depth of her books.

Yet all I could think was that this was a meaningless detail. The whole thing turned out to be a hoax--but even if it had been true, why would it matter? Would it have added anything to Harry as a character, or to the villain? Would it have added meaning or direction to the plot? If Rowling revealed that Harry wore the same underwear the first night of class his second year as he did the first night his third year, that would technically be a connection within her world, but it still doesn't mean anything.

There are a lot of badly-written fantasy books out there, and for a long time, I was puzzled to see every flaw in these books defended as being 'part of the world'. An author with no poetic skill writes a three page song? It's not boring, it's worldbuilding. A chapter that is nothing but troop movements, despite the fact that no matter what the army does, the bad guy can only be killed by the Plot Coupon of Seven Parts (which also conveniently destroys his army)? Fans call it 'depth'. A lengthy explanation of how magic spells work, despite the fact that none of them are ever used? It's not a symptom of maladjusted autism, it's proof of many-layered writing skill.

How Hard Can It Be To Make One Of These?

And that's the problem with worldbuilding: any detail an author drops about their world, no matter how meaningless, is still technically worldbuilding. It becomes a Ship of Theseus problem: the construction of the globe and its map are worldbuilding, the magic and technology, the culture, the politics, the economics, the myths, the history--so where does it end? What detail cannot be included under at least one of those categories?

Writing is the process of deciding which details to include, and which to leave out. Books skip through time from scene to scene, we feel no need for descriptions of eight hours of nightly sleeping. At some point, we draw the line and state 'this detail is an important part of the world, while this one is not'. Worldbuilding is only as useful as its ability to provide meaning to the story. Writing that is unfocused and superfluous is always bad writing, and increasing the complexity and length for its own sake just amounts to more pages of bad writing.

The whole point of worldbuilding, the reason to have a world, is because we need somewhere for the story to take place, a stage on which the author can explore their ideas. As in theater, you need a set, you need props, you need the things that facilitate the characters' actions. Even roleplaying guidebooks, which are ostensibly all about the details of a world, are constructed and laid out as tools for the telling of a story, giving only the pertinent information.

I've read a few, in my time

This doesn't mean that an author should get rid of everything that doesn't contribute directly to plot and character--you can set mood, pace, and voice when describing the world, too--but those are still important parts of the story. They modify the characters, the plot, and the ideas, and how we see them--they aren't merely filler. Whether or not Han shot first is not an extraneous detail, because either way, it tells us something about his character.

But it's completely different to talk about whether Dumbledore is gay, or what color the inside of Boba Fett's helmet is, or what type of stone was geologically formed in the mountains of the neighboring kingdom, because none of that is meaningful to the story. If the old wizard's sexuality were a central part of his character, then it would already be in the book--if the story works completely without that detail, then it is extraneous. Yet the fandom seems to be obsessed with these sorts of pointless details--why is that?

On the surface, fandom resembles other obsessive interests--like literary critics, they comb through books looking for connections; like historians, they want to collect various facts about a world and develop an understanding of it. But unlike those activities, fandom is insular and self-contained, which for many fans is precisely the appeal.

Unlike the unsure messiness of history, in fandom, there is actually one right answer. You don't have to read a dozen conflicting accounts of a war from both sides, then try to put together an understanding based on that--even in an absurdly complex and messy canon like Star Wars', there are still central tenets and absolute authority on what is correct. As large as it is, it's still easy to tackle compared to real history.

For literary criticism, the point is to study and understand how written communication works: how we tell stories and create meaning. The whole process is built around developing an overarching theory, a philosophy of human communication. Pure fandom, on the other hand, has no purpose but itself. It is a cyclical, cannibalistic process where details are considered valuable only because they can be memorized and known.

We all want to be right, we want to be informed, and as the internet demonstrates, a lot of people just enjoy being able to prove others wrong--but what's the point of being right about something that simply doesn't matter? The point of course, is to be right, no matter what. It's not about improving one's own understanding, but winning a game which, on the surface, vaguely resembles actual debate, all for the sake of an ego trip: 'See! I told you I left my hat on the second peg, not the third one! Now come on, I want to hear you say I was right.'

Doré's Fall of Satan

I'm not against reading books carefully and thinking about them, nor am I against paying attention to detail. Books say a lot about how we live and think, and reading can teach us about ourselves and the world. If someone wants to talk about how Milton's Satan and Adam present opposing views of what is morally important in life, that's great, because that has an impact on how we all think and live. The ideas in books inspire scientists, philosophers, artists, and musicians, they provide a great place to explore our world and our own minds.

But once they start bringing up details which have no bearing on any actual idea or experience, that's just talking to hear yourself talk. Imagine debating someone about social welfare when they suddenly respond 'Oh yeah? Well, you have black hair!', as if all details were equally pertinent.

But then, there are people whose brains rank importance in different ways. One of the chief causes of hoarding is an inability to judge the value of objects. If you show a hoarder a sapphire tie pin and a torn up old paperback and ask 'Which one of these shall we throw away?', they simply won't be able to make that decision. For them, there is no clear distinction. Both are objects which can be collected and possessed, both have a purpose, and both, once lost, are gone forever.

If their inability to choose sounds incomprehensible to you, let me ask you this: how many people you know with a drawerful of expensive jewelry they never wear and a stack of torn-up used books they read constantly? Now who's judging value inaccurately?

The world is full of information, more than could be consumed in a hundred lifetimes. There will never be a shortage of things for you to experience. This is why you have to choose what information you want to take in, to decide what's important to you--you have to draw the line somewhere. For many people, this isn't even something they consider, but in the words of Neil Peart: if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

For me, I want things that are going to make a difference in my life, that are going to change how I think. This doesn't mean I'm going to avoid fiction or adventure stories, because they can be just as informative as anything else (indeed, nonfiction can be just as pointless and removed from life as the worst genre trash). But it does mean that after watching LOST for a bit and seeing the same conflicts, character types, twists, and messages about faith come up again, I lost interest. Once they started to repeat themselves, there was nothing new to be gleaned.

"Be seeing you . . ."

But for a show like The Prisoner, where each episode has its own theme and concept, its own way of telling a story, there's something new to learn each time you watch. So, I've decided it's of priority for me to focus on taking in new and unusual things that help me to think in different ways. Sure, I've fallen into the trap of obsessing over a world's details now and again, but then I realize that, at best, I'm just treading water, not getting anywhere--and at worst, I'm training myself to argue with people whose only purpose in life is to be correct about insignificant details.

Of course, it's up to each of us to decide where to draw that line. I don't want to spend my time reading things that have nothing new to offer, or reading things that are just poorly-written. I get no pleasure from doing it, or from writing negative reviews afterwards, or from the scree of angry comments that inevitably follow. Sure, it can be instructional to look at what authors do wrong, but I would never read a book if I thought it was going to be uninteresting or just bad.

Of course there are people out there for whom reading is an end in itself, people who tell me 'you really have to get to the fifth book, when it starts to get good', people who are happy to fill their heads with details that have no bearing on their life, details which they will never use outside the deepest depths of a forum. Many do this because it is a known thing, it resembles the study of literature or history, but without the vastness, without the unknowns.

But for me, when it comes to living life, the vastness and the unknowns are precisely what make it all worthwhile. I'd rather read five different books that might be good rather than the next five books in a series when I know book one is shit, because I want to read as many good books as possible, and as few bad ones as I can manage. If you're interested in history or geology or astrophysics, then read about them instead of investing that time in a simplified substitute.

 

I'm No Stranger to the Occasional Sport

Of course, there are also those who get into fandom for social reasons. They want to belong, and one way to do that is to find an insular community and school yourself in its jargon and collection of factoids. It creates commonality, something to discuss. This is something that can be witnessed in every group, from role-players to juggalos to sports fans. Again, to me, there seems to be a better option: school yourself in something meaningful, something that has an impact, which creates meaning and understanding in life, then join that community. That way, you gain not only commonality, but personal understanding of the world.

I'm not saying a fantasy reader or role-player or sports fan can't approach their interest with an eye toward understanding the world and self-improvement--there is no field of study or activity that is outside the human sphere, that cannot be turned into a tool for understanding ourselves--I'm just saying that for many, if not most, when knowledge is secondary to status, or fitting in, or being right, or some other symptom of insecurity, we all suffer. There is no status great enough, community large enough, or argument of sufficient vehemence to overcome insecurity. The only thing that can oppose it is greater knowledge of the world, and of the self.

Thanks for reading Part I, the fans' side of obsessive worldbuilding, next up is Part II: The Authors.