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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