Rubicon Behind the Scenes Episode 1: Hard Vs. Soft Worldbuilding, or How I Make This Work!? · 12:58am Aug 11th, 2020
Hey gang. So since the comment responses were....unanimous in favor of World-building and lore blogs, I figured I'd start off with something small. In this case, I'm talking about the actual process of World Building, Lore, and How it all plays out to make the story you guys know and love.
So a breakdown, just for those potentially unfamiliar with it, there are different styles and methods of building worlds, settings, lore, etc for anything, but they typically fall into two broad categories: Hard World-building, and Soft World-building. I won't go into a long winded explanation--I will include a video link to a youtuber who has an excellent video on the subject that I recommend. In short summary though, Hard World-building often involves a lot more attention to detail and rigid rules and construction of the universe, while Soft World-building leaves a lot more up to audience/reader interpretation and focuses more of the attention on the story/narrative/character perspectives.
So what do I use?
The answer is actually "both."
When it comes to putting together the world, taking the piecemeal things presented in canon from both Equestria Girls and Friendship is Magic as a whole, I tend to lean towards Hard World-building. I take those fragments and say "Okay, these things are shown as a fairly consistent fact" and then use that as a sort of "logic puzzle" to ask what kind of conclusions I can draw from those various "facts."
For example, we know that pony Twilight Sparkle wields the Element of Magic successfully on repeated occasions and is the channel for the Elements of Harmony, from the FiM pilot on. However, on the other end of this, we have the human version of the same character who turns into Midnight Sparkle when imbued as the focus for the magic of the Elements of Harmony (given that she drained the magic from the six others over the course of FG.) Ergo, it doesn't take much to establish that there must be something different. So I look to other examples to rule out hypotheses. Perhaps its an inherent knowledge of magic, or innate magical power? That might be so, but we see Sunset Shimmer transform into a demon when she attempts to use the Crown of Magic in the first movie. Perhaps its something about humans? Perhaps not, because Sunset literally mimics what Sci-Twi does and transforms into Daydream....( i could go on for hours in this manner, picking apart the various tidbits and examples to figure out what meshes and what doesn't.)
You get the idea. So in something like that, I use other tidbits to hunt for an answer that works for me in the world of the story to explain WHY something like that occurs--even if I change the story world from canon, the basic information is still there in my head in case the matter ever comes up. I like knowing the answers, the background, the shape of how magic works and the timeline that everything fits on. In the long run it makes it easier for me to construct the grander world at large.
However...
In a lot of cases of Hard World-building, you run into the "necessary exposition dump." *stares hard at anything by Tolkien.* This can be...tedious. Extremely so. It slows down story pacing, and can even bog down scenes with "gods why is the character babbling about this?" In addition, I find it makes foreshadowing a lot more difficult if you have to juggle the exposition just so readers will understand WTF is going on.
This is where my "both" style comes in. While I do the work of Hard World-building in the background, the presentation is somewhere closer to the middle, with Soft World-building techniques thrown in. You guys don't actually need to read in the narrative the exact mathematical formula of time in Equestria to time on Earth that I've come up with to get the idea that there's a time dilation going on. Simply learning that there is some sort of time dilation effect is enough to make the idea work. Just like I have pages and pages of pony culture, anatomy, biology, and history written in my notes, but you guys are getting it in the story a little at a time, as it becomes relevant. It allows me to control foreshadowing in a much more realistic way, especially given the use of a Third Person Limited Perspective, and it means those big reveals have a lot more emotional punch when the reader gets to them.
Anyway. That rambling bit out of the way, my thought is to use these to expand a bit on the stuff as it makes its appearance in the story, particularly my work on pony culture and psychology...Which is something I know a lot of you really enjoy--Sunset's struggles of "human vs. pony."
That all aside, I have a question for you guys about something I can answer that will not affect anything I'm setting up for.
Would you like me to answer the very common question of "What about the Human Sunset Shimmer?" that often crops up about stories like this?
Many hugs to you guys, you've all been wonderful!
- The very tired author
HelloFutureMe's video on the two basic types of Worldbuilding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcyrrTud3x4 (I really like his "On Writing" and "On World-building" videos, even if I don't agree with everything he says. Worth a watch for any kind of storyteller!)
And that's what we call, "putting in the leg work.". Another example of an author who will literally kill the mood with over description is David Webber in Honor Harrington. I tried I reeeeallly tried to like this series because I love space sci-fi with military base but he just killed the mood so many times.
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Its called skimming. A lot of Sci-Fi authors have that problem, and I've found its much more consumable if you skim the pages and pages of descriptions of complex "fake science" to get back to the story. You get a general idea, but don't have to parse through all kinds of fake math to get to it. Weber is bad for it--of course...Honor Harrington books get....weird about halfway through the series, so about the time she starts having the weird romance with the old dude, I noped right the fuck out. Tolkien is another one who overshares on exposition (man was a damned windbag.) There were also a couple of old Star Wars Expanded Universe authors who did that. There's also a bunch of fanfiction authors like that, and don't get me started on some text based RPers. Oh sweet merciful heavens. I honest to gods once watched an RP character go on for SIX PARAGRAPHS to describe scratching his damned nose. And if he takes that long to dig out a booger, imagine what happened when he wrote about drawing his sword. (if anyone reading this is one of those people, please, for everyone's sake, STOP. No one actually reads all that.)
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I always fear falling into the "extraneous exposition" category when describing my worlds or characters.
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Well, I feel like you've got it down pretty good, my friend. I absolutely love your work. (I get super excited when you post a chapter, lol.) And as I've noted, I have a limited tolerance for people who prattle on about stuff in overwrought exposition.
I appreciate this!
Also regarding your question... I'm going to go with "only if it's going to be relevant" to the story.
If the answer to the question will come up, or if the question itself will, in the story itself, even in a small way, then I'd prefer it to do so there. If the question will never be addressed at all, then sure I'd like to see what you've got for it.
Unless your answer is that she is in some way the human Sunset, cause the last time I read that I thought it killed the story. In that one, her mother was human, was pregnant when she went through the portal somehow, and got stuck there. So Sunset was conceived human, but born pony. Admittedly that is an interesting way for there to be only one of her, but I thought it ruined the message of the story the author was writing. That being Sunset's hard work learning to fit in in the human world, and finding friends and family.
Regarding Sunny's human counterpart, if she has one, only if it's plot relevant, or you want to.