Late tea ramblings, saws in summer or why I don't like the term worldbuilding
I don't like worldbuilding. No, I don't like it.
Not the term, not the concept, not the technique.
I love fantasy, sure. Hell, I even would say that I have a very weird approach to reality at times. And still I don't like the idea of worldbuilding.
I once heard a quote in a radio-interview that stuck with me (sadly I can't remember neither the context nor the name of the woman, who said this):
"Kunst kommt zwar aus der Realität und richtet sich an die Realität, aber sie ist nicht die Realität."
"Art comes from reality and addresses reality, but it isn't reality."
Fiction, no matter how bizarre or estranged it might be, is always a reaction to reality. You interact with your surroundings and your brain recieves information based on that interactions and based on which of your senses are involved. This information already isn't reality anymore, but a virtuality. But it doesn't stop there. Your brain starts to take apart the information, rearranges it and connects it with other virtualities to build associations.
Wanna hear an example?
I associate the distant sound of circular saws with calm summer evenings.
Why is that?
The house of my parents is a few streets away from a construction yard and always when we were sitting on the terrace in summer, we could hear the saws out there. Subtle enough to not disturb, but loud enough to be perceived.
The saws were real, the terrace was real, the sound was real, my biological abbility of hearing was real. The connection between the sound and the feeling of summer-evenings on the other hand is fiction, an association. That fact gives it it's specific emotional power. An idiotic secret that my own brain whispered to me and that I haven't been able to forget ever since.
Where am I going with this? Is worldbuilding bad, cause it isn't realistic?
No it is bad, because it creates a requirement for fiction to be realistic. The requirement for fiction to be consistent.
Another story:
I dabbled in the "The Elder scrolls"-fiction for some time. Got hooked in the series by Oblivion (Yes, I'm that generation) and after some encounters with Morrowind i took some dives into the huge ocean of background info. I read C0DA, sure. Visited the Imperial Library way more often then I should have. Took a lot of input from Lady Nerevar and read everything in the New whirling school.
Had I become one of the mysterious Lore-Buffs? Fuck, no.
But it was an interesting time nonetheless. And it makes me happy that so many people took this setting as a primer to gear up their own creative momentum. This franchise would be nothing without it's fanbase.
On the other hand this was also a really shocking time. I had close to zero experience with online communities before and the amount of gate-keeping and "I'M THE EXPERT!"-screaming was ... something else.
Fiction can easily be used as a means to project accumulated emotions. This almost always doesn't end in dialog, but in discourse. And discourse, having the goal of moving someone towards your point of view, is the worst tool for communicating emotions. Especially if you're projecting said emotions into an inept discussion about the rights and wrongs of a fictional franchise.
But I digress.
The problem that I see with the pop-cultural weight that is put upon the term "Worldbuilding" is that in all this inept discussions many people begin to expect a certain amount of consistency from fiction. A consistency that fiction just cannot have.
One time I was reading the blog of a fantasy author, who described how they got input from a geographer to design their fictional island setting as realistic as possible. And then he listed some other approaches that do it "wrong".
That made me very angry.
The author can do whatever they want with their fiction, of course. And I don't think they had any bad intentions. But still they are contributing to the pressure of consistency with that.
Same as with genres, the term of Worldbuilding, though originally functional in its intentions, will grow beyond that functionallity and become an obstacle.
Put it into any search engine ad you'll be drowned in recommendations such as "Worldbuilding done right", or "Don't make these common mistakes, while building you fictional world", or "Thirsty builders want to turn your world upside down, oh gawwwd!" ... wait, ignore the last one.
All these posts, though created with the intention to help others create, bear the risk of hindering them in finding their own approach to creativity.
The demand for a common continuity, the demand for a "realistic" fiction undermines the diversity of creative acts.
It will stop people from share their own, their special associations. The secrets that their brains whisper to them. Because they might fear that they won't meet the standarts that the community has carved out for them.
That is a road that I will never accept to go. Never.
And I don't talk about people who do creative stuff for a living. I can understand that you might aim to reach certain standarts to expand your range of customers. No shame in that. We are all prisoners of capitalism, baby. (Until we finally can escape and live as hags in a lovely bog. Sighs, one day ... one day)
No, Im talking about everyone else. About you and me.
I want you to create. All of you. I want you to write, to draw, to sculpt, to act, to cut-out, to collect, to deconstruct, to change ... to find. your. thing.
Without anybody telling you how it is done right or wrong.
I want to hear the things that your brain whispered to you. I want to know about your circular saws in the summer.
Not because it makes me marvel about the worlds you could create, but because it tells me something about your reality.
And I would love to hear about that.
I really do.
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"But think about ALL those thirsty builders! Oooooh, nasty!"