.webp?h=8 "Merry Fistmas!")
warning] The worldbuilding ick The Foundation thread earlier reminded me that Asimov had regular newspapers existing thousands of years in the future in a galactic empire. When I saw that, I felt like a foid getting hit with the green bubble. 
But is this actually ridiculous? It doesn't feel dated to me that there's no internet. I don't think a civilian internet is an inevitable (or necessarily desirable) aspect of a technologically advanced society, and if I wrote an advanced civilization I might not include it at all. So what then? Maybe newspapers will exist in the future because people will want to have them. I don't fricking know. I'm fine with, say, humanoid ayylmaos, but if you described them, say, eating with forks, that would feel too "normal" to me.
Instead of trying to neurodivergentally reverse engineer a bunch of rules, let's just talk about our feefees. "The ick" is something small, subtle, and subjective. So I'm not talking about obvious gaffes, plot holes, or general laziness. Rather, what are seemingly insignificant little details that take you out of a setting? What do you think causes this to hit sometimes but not others?
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I thought you were talking about the modern tendency of authors to world build first and write story second. You can tell because the story seems less detailed than the world
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JRR sends his regards
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you can't tell me that for The Hobbit JRR wasn't just winging it. And honestly it made a fun compelling story which provided the backbone for the worldbuilding of LotR. There is simply no way he was thinking "Yeah there is an evil demon called Sauron that is gonna frick up the world" while Bilbo and the gang were off on their adventures
you can really see this clash between worldbuilding and story in The Hobbit movies. They wanted The Hobbit to make sense within the world of LotR so they added all sorts of grimdark LotR window dressing. but the hobbit books really aren't that grimdark
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The charm in the Hobbit was how vague and magical the settings were. Goblins in the misty mountains, the necromancer in mirkwood. You read it, immediately understand and no futher sperging is necessary.
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The Hobbit is just a children's book and the somewhat terrible and camp animated movies unironically did a better job of portraying the story than the feature movies did lol.
If they really wanted Grimdark in LotR they would be better off making movies based off of stories from the Simarillion (Fall of Gondolin and Children of Hurin are probably the two obvious ones) but the lore would be wtf convoluted to normal people and the Tolkien Estate is (probably rightfully) protective of that book too because Chris Tolkien worked a lot on it after his dad died.
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He was always winging it in the sense that much of the world was only developed when the story reached it. This is even true in the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien hadn't mapped out Gondor or Rohan for his first drafts of Book 1. However, Tolkien did include elements from the world he had already written (what would become the Silmarillion) in the Hobbit (animosity between elves and dwarves, the necromancer was actually Sauron, but Sauron was not yet the Lord of the Rings),
Also, despite what Peter Jackson thinks, you can have stories with different tones set in the same world.
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im unironically
ing right now so good job
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JRRT was not fat wtf
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Frick him, he writes like a fatty. Second breakfasts is fat-fat talk.
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That's just Brits.
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Yeah, the focus on "worldbuilding" itself is a trap for a lot of nerds, but you can't actually escape the need to evoke a plausible setting. That usually comes through minor throwaway details rather than top level "three thousand years ago blah blah blah" type stuff. I tried to make this about capturing the right feelings, instead of whether the "magic system" is gay and r-slurred enough.
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Gay people in mediaeval fantasy acting like modern gay people. "Gay people" organised and acting like a minority was only a thing during the 60s. Particularly popularized by Harry Hay (libertarian rights queer theorists btw)
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Minorities organizing for their own benefit has plenty of precedent in medieval settings though they're usually economic in nature (guilds, Jews)
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Right but gays weren't a minority in the Middle Ages. They weren't a socially distinct group, it was something you did besides your normal life. You could be married and have children and still have illicit gay orgies, in the same way people had illicit straight relationships too.
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Heterosexuality is aberrant.
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Just don't contradict yourself. That's it. You can put whatever absurd details into your world you want, just so long as they're consistent.
Max Landis (yeah, I know) had a good bit about this in his short film The Death and Return of Superman.
We have no idea what technology will be like in thousands of years, so who cares if it's wrong? Sci-fi predictions usually are. You're writing for an audience in 2024, not 4024. Just keep it consistent, and if people b-word, they b-word.
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In Hyperion series by Dan Simmons at some point a character travels in a flying canoe through the upper atmosphere of a gas giant (oxygen rich!). It takes several days so the author describes how the guy pees overboard and the golden stream disappears towards the denser clouds below. Dan Simmons has never peed from a high place lol.
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t. someone who's never been on a gas giant
Just say you're hard stuck on Earth, gravitycuck.
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That's not the point, highplacecuck. The stream doesn't go down peacefully, it LITERALLY EXPLODES like fifteen feet down.
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Just read a few history books and how deadlocks in knowledge were breached
Then apply that to whatever moral stragging you are going to do in your book (Jurassic park -hubris leads to fall/ Clockwork Orange -Authoritarianism bad/ Dune or Avatar - Colonialism bad etc etc)
Sci fi is such a circlejerky genre i think you're overthinking just by thinking about it
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Scifi
is now, bar none, the most cucked 
lit genre. Worse than actual cuck fiction.
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Worldbuilding should either be so neurodivergent that literally everything can have its origin pointed out, or it should be so bare bones that basically everything is made up on the spot. Also don't make a "magic system", its magic it should not follow a system or ruleset, don't explain it more then god lets me do this or the "insert force of nature" lets me do this.
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I don't like it when a fantasy story is too "diverse", the ethnic makeup of a city is a part of the worldbuilding and in the real world often tells a story of war, trade and colonialism. I am not saying that it can never work, but I want there to be a bit of an explanation for why this human city has such a big dwarven population for example. Like, I am not saying the author has to spell out the reason of course, part of the fun of a setting's worldbuilding is facilitating speculation from the audience. Puzzling together myself why there are so many dwarves is more fun than having it spelled out, but if every city has a perfect ratio of every fantasy race I obviously can't do that as the author clearly does not care, there is simply no information to be gleamed.
I think Americans have a hard time imagining a place where most people look similar and communicate with only one or maybe two languages.
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We've had a couple about diversity so far. I definitely understand this in a more realistic setting, where modern cultural biases start to seep in. On the other hand, I don't really mind that some popcorn fantasy is more of an aesthetic than a serious attempt to construct some fully realized sub-creation. If you want to create a fantasy NYC I don't really mind as long as you signal the tone/purpose clearly.
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Fantasy worlds with elves and dwarves are an ick honestly, Orcs are fine because usually people like to put their own spin on them. Either make a bunch of near humans or do your own fantasy races.
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But America is a place where everyone looks somilar
and only speaks one language?
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In Do Androids[...] the protagonist having to take his flying car to a payphone
Also the futher from the 80s we get the more ridiculous payphones seem in sci fi settings
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My city put up a few pillars that display ads or news. There's also a charging port built in. One day I saw a person talking on his phone, plugged in to charge, leaning against the pillar. "Why does this sight feel so familiar?" I thought to myself. Then it hit me, neighbor that's a payphone.
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If anything I think there's ample evidence that free and open internet is counterproductive to developing an intelligent and advanced society
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To protect us from a world of digital chaos, we called upon a new breed of hero... The Moderator.
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It's simply easier to absorb information in a physical medium.
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Related to what you've brought up, I kind of like sci-fi stories that give reasons for a certain technological aesthetic. The new Battlestar Galactica for example has intentionally dated and analog technology within the spaceships because the Cylon main antagonists can hack anything networked and computerized. There's a built in explanation for anything that seems too “dated” for an interstellar setting.
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Yeah I like this. I also think a past-like scenario can feel more realistic than a present-like one because it shows you're aware of the possible anachronism. For example, if I depict feudal lordship, strict gender roles, and no computers in the future a la Dune, I'm at least somewhat exploring whether things that seem like progress might just be temporary deviations that people could choose to reject. Whereas if I depicted a future closely resembling the present, that would seem like declaring the present as the end of history.
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Dj khaled stormpeepee
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