Back when Tigers Used to Smoke -- On Worldbuilding · 12:50am Oct 8th, 2018
How's this for a dream team, fuckers.
I fucking hate worldbuilding.
Kinda.
If you have met me through chat, then—well, first of all, I am sorry for both you and your family. I hope one day you can recover. But second of all, you have probably heard me talk shit about the art of worldbuilding, the idea of “worldbuild-y” literature, or the thought that the very first thing you need to do when plotting a story is ignoring anything plot-related, and simply designed an overcomplicated world for the sake of, apparently, itself.
I fucking despise that. I find this line of thinking masturbatory at best, absolutely dumb at worst. I’m obviously biased, since I have the attention span of a coked-out monkey, but stories that simply faff around talking about a world without telling a story at all, simply going “loook at how cleeever the author waaas when he designed this seeewer syyyystem” make my skin crawl. They bore the living knockers out of me. They are the literary equivalent of pissing your pants and blow-drying them in public.
However, you don’t stay friends with Pearple Prose saying shit like this without him throwing a shoe at your face. And in this case, the shoe is the metaphorical representation of one of those annoying bits of wisdom that show you, in no uncertain terms, that he is right and you are wrong:
Good worldbuilding is great. You just hate shitty worldbuilding. Saying all worldbuilding is bad is like saying all words are terrible just because you read Majin Syeekoh’s poetry.
Ah, fuck you, Pear. Now I have to add an asterisk to my usual statement, because, yes. Good worldbuilding is great. I only hate shitty worldbuilding.
That said, what is good worldbuilding?
I’m not an expert on it, to be absolutely honest. When I write, I worldbuild a lot, but I tend to be subtle. Any worldbuildy element exists solely in service to the story, is explored fully, and then thrown away once the story is done. I see worldbuilding as what you do to make a story happen.
Reading through the works of people who manage to create entire worlds from scratch and not make me puke my brains out, I realized that that is part of what makes a good worldbuilder, actually. I was just doing it on accident out of pure repulse to the bad kind of world-related exposition, who would’ve thought. I’m like a literary steam engine that works solely on spite.
Anyway. So, what are the keys to good worldbuilding, from the eyes of a reader, rather than from the eyes of a writer?
Well, in my experience:
Keep it Weird, but Not Overcomplicated
As a kid, I fell in love with a book written by Jorge Luis Borges, named The Book of Imaginary Beasts. It scared the living shit out of me. I was six at the time.
The book is a series of entries detailing a different monster each. The monsters are weird. Sure, you have entries that just talk about mermaids, or dragons, or minotaurs—but there’s one about An Animal Dreamed by Kafka. There’s one about the Ictiocentaurs. It talks about The Fish with a Thousand Heads, and about a white hippo that predicted the Buddha’s birth. It’s fucking out there.
But that’s precisely part of its charm. You’ve never heard of half of these monsters—especially if you’re six-years-old Aragón, because six-years-old Aragón was a dumb-ass kid who didn’t even know who Buddha was—and the fact that they’re so wild is what gets you.
I always like worldbuilding when it’s odd. When it’s strange, weird, original. A fucking high-fantasy world with dwarves and wizards is kind of tiresome—you can try to wank about your elves as much as you want, Christopher Paolini, but it’s still going to be either forgettable or obnoxious, and nine times out of ten it will just be fucking dumb.
But, a world entirely built on the innards of giant living beast? With houses in the eyes and rice fields along the brain? That’s a new one. A world where the eyes of the citizens are gouged out after birth because only the royal family is allowed to use their sight. A place where Destiny is an animal, and creating stories is how it feeds, and killing heroes is how it mates.
Odd shit. Shit that makes you go ‘uh, wha?’ I’m not the best at worldbuilding, so these examples might be odd, but you get what I mean. These stick in your memory better. Not saying you can’t do dwarves and elves, but I am saying it’s going to be hard not to immediately feel like you’re tracing Tolkien yet again.
But here’s the thing: sometimes people confuse weird with complicated. A simple yet strange abstract concept, explored in an elegant way, is another thing. A completely boring-ass world that takes half an hour to explain because you just keep adding shit to it is not that. This is where my personal biases come to fruition, and I am fully aware: I have no idea if a cyberpunk dystopia where the fucking specifics of the slums’ architecture are as detailed as the cyborgs’ Operating System. I just know that I’ll tab out soon enough.
You know how I do cyberpunk dystopias? I say, y’know what, there’s a series of well-dressed assassins for hire that specialize in following people and killing them with a needle when the chance arises. They’re called ‘The Tailors’. They live in The Sewers.
See what I mean?
Handle the Exposition Well
This is the main reason why I “hate” “worldbuilding”.
I don’t. In reality, I don’t—how could I? To hate imaginary worlds is to hate fiction as a whole. What I dislike, however, is clunky execution. And you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about Fongli, the fucking dwarf prince or whatever, walking the protagonist down his fuckass stone castle and detailing the history and minutia of every bloody fucking thing that they stumble on, in a scene that lasts three pages but reads like it lasts for thirty-eight. I’m talking the narrator starting a chapter with a seven-pages-long detailed description of a city and everything that happens in it. I’m talking about clunky dialogue where the main character’s childhood friend goes “Oh, Johnny, as you know the Elders were an ancient race that disappeared centuries ago and left us all these steampunk-ish artifacts we can use but not reverse-engineer in any way. Let me tell you the legend of Zanriel and Zunthiel!”
I’m talking shitty exposition. Sometimes people like to sit down and plan the entire structure of a city, or a country, or a world, before they even start writing. That is perfectly normal, and kind of cool in its own way. If you’re a DM in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I’m gonna go and guess that you’re one of the cool ones. And sometimes, yes, giving the world some consistency is important, and you have to plan ahead.
But just because the world has a lot of detail doesn’t mean that you have to shove it all down the reader’s throat. Even if the world is much bigger than what the story is showing us, only explain the details that directly affect the story. Maybe a few extra ones for flavor? But don’t overdo them.
Because here’s the truth: nine times out of ten, unless you’re dealing with a HUGE nerd, readers don’t care about the world. They care about the characters. The plot, the twists, the relationships, the arcs. The world's a stage for the story, and most readers will only give a shit about it in that capacity.
In other words: anything you describe that doesn’t affect the story is seen as wasted space in the reader’s mind. It’s filler. It’s exposition. It’s fucking annoying.
This is why I described worldbuilding as “masturbatory” earlier, and why Pearple Prose threw the shoe at my face. Because this is not how you’re supposed to build a world. This is the fantasy equivalent of farting on a salad and calling it dressing: a clunky mess that nobody likes, except maybe Majin Syeekoh.
But this is just shitty worldbuilding. It’s absolutely dumb to think that anybody who makes up a fantasy world is going to write it like this, and this very website is full of examples of the contrary. We can do better. Even I can do better.
So pepper details as they organically appear. If it’s necessary to explain something about the world for the story to continue, do so (if possible without making it look like an asspull; foreshadowing exists for a reason). If it adds flavor, or character, or context, make sure the reader is familiar with it. Give out details when they’re needed, and when they make the story better. Don’t share them when they do nothing except assure you that you did not waste your time when you spent three weeks naming every fucking member of the Thieves’ Guild instead of actually sitting down to start your book.
Logic Matters
Here’s the best advice for writing fantasy I ever read:
- Good fantasy works by saying, here are the rules of how magic, and here’s how my character works around them.
- Bad fantasy works by saying, here are the rules of magic, AND MY CHARACTER IS IMMUNE TO THEM.
When you have a magic system—and lord fuck, do I hate magic systems—at least be consistent. If you’re vague with it, a la Harry Potter, great. We can be friends. Call me up any day except for Fridays, I’ve got plans on those. But if you’re detailed, a la Brandon Sanderson, who can’t be my friend, then please make sure the readers know the rules as they go by.
Because good worldbuilding is just a subset of good storytelling, and having an explicit set of rules lets you do things that surprise the reader, but seem obvious in hindsight. Isaac Asimov wrote three (plus one) fucking Rules of Robotics, and he wrote books about those for decades because no robot could break them. They could find loopholes, they could find their way around them, but at face value they’re unbreakable.
In other words: if you have hard rules, fucking follow them. That’s the fun part.
(I keep talking about robots and magic and stuff, but this is obviously something that applies to worlds in general. Explain how something works, and then play with it. Supsense and twists are much more effective when the reader has the necessary information, and things that are impossible in-universe only register as such if you have taken the trouble to properly establish what counts as ‘normal’ or ‘possible’).
Don’t be Afraid
Worldbuilding sometimes implies trusting the reader. That can get very scary, very fast.
MrNumbers once told me that writing drama is about learning exactly when you can afford to bore your readers ever-so-slightly, so that you can set up a proper payoff later. Don’t be mistaken: nine times out of ten, even if your prose is great, worldbuilding will be seen as filler. This is because, even if the worldbuilding is necessary for the story and all the details are relevant (which, again, they SHOULD BE), the reader doesn’t immediately know this.
Because readers don’t trust you, as I said once already in this other blog. What you’re writing when you worldbuild explicitly will have a huge payoff later, but payoffs only work if the readers don’t know they’re coming.
They’ll think you’re stalling, or wanking. They’ll be as much of a an ass as I am, and I am a terrible reader, who always rolls his eyes when worldbuilding happens and wishes for the writer to go back to the actual plot already, jesus.
But here’s the thing you gotta tell yourself:
I keep reading.
Maybe it’s just me; I like to think I’m not. When you’re writing, there’s this pressure sometimes, on your shoulders. “Am I wasting their time?” “Is this even interesting?” “Is this fun?” “Will they keep reading?” There’s the temptation of foregoing the worldbuilding, of skipping details. Don’t properly set up anything, go straight for the jugular. Give the readers what they came for, as fast as possible, and as much as possible.
But that’s just the devil on your shoulder speaking.
Readers are patient. They might not notice that something is a setup, and the dumbest ones might skip it—but that’s a minority. They’ll stick, and they’ll read the payoff, if you’ve proven that you’re good enough. And you only do that by taking risks, and pulling them off.
I don’t hate worldbuilding. In fact, I like it a lot. I’m just kind of afraid of it. Because I fear my readers will stop reading.
But there are ways to go around it.
Last Writeoff round, horizon wrote an entry that was mostly just worldbuilding. More than that: it was a direct homage to Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. The book that scared six-year-old Aragón to death.
I saw it, and I remembered it all. horizon is not just a talented writer—he can blow me out of the water any time. He’s one of the best creators of this website, and if you don’t know him already, then you need to read better stories. So I wrote, this is a good entry, but you know how it could work better?
As an anthology.
A series of entries on weird, imaginary beings that live in Equestria. Odd as balls. Be as fucking surreal as possible. Not only that, one step beyond—tell a story through them. Have a metaplot that unfolds through the entries. It’ll be tough to plan, but I’m sure we can do it; I’m more than willing to join.
Julio Cortázar wrote in 1947 that the writer is the enemy of the language. I have always seen myself as the enemy of worldbuilding, because I hate it, and I fear it, and I try to use it to the best of my capacities.
Maybe with horizon’s help I can make it work. I spoke big of good worldbuilding, of necessary details, of payoffs and setups and not being afraid. I’m putting my money where my mouth is. You should join, if that sounds interesting to you. Here’s horizon’s blog on the anthology, where he explains that we’re accepting submissions from other authors to make it as good as possible, and how the whole process works.
horizon is one of the main editors, I’m the other one. We already have some of the best writers in the website—GhostofHercalitus, MrNumbers, Pearple Prose, to name just a few—collaborating.
You can join too, if you want. If not, you can just read it once that's sorted out.
But how’s that for a dream team, fuckers?
Aragon also counts the time it takes to breathe as an awkward silence in a conversation.
It just hadn't come up as a problem before I explained this to him, because he can make every line a punchline. Even in real time. Actually astounding to watch. It was liking having to explain you can take all your clothes off before swimming to a guy like Michael Phelps.
I was gonna debate the whole world-building thing, as I spend inorndinate amounts of time world-building down to working out what gradient of ramp the female alien spider-robots use in their Space IKEA so they can push the shopping trollies up (no, I'm completely serious), but then I realise that almost all the world-building I do is or roleplaying and wargames and thus, as you said, has a different criterion.
And also it is too late at night for more coherent thought.
Carry on...
(Though personally, I am also the sort of person who will read a thing of world-building for its own sake, so rhere's that too...)
Butt Shoes
Funny that you mention Brandon Sanderson, as he's a great example of ... well, weak worldbuilding.
(Mild disclaimer: from everything I've heard, Sanderson is a super nice guy, and his writing lectures on YouTube are solid).
Buuuuut. The dude has a tendency to get too clever. Like, he will go on and on and on about the complexity and interconnectedness of his magic systems, to the point where his books come with charts at the end. And yet, he tends to make really dumb mistakes on the normal, boring stuff. For example, I just finished reading The Bands of Mourning (something of a guilty pleasure, I'll admit), and it features a bunch of people from a frozen wasteland country ...
... that somehow grow chocolate. Yeeeeeep.
Really though, the best advice I've heard about worldbuilding is to just think about where things come from. Not just the magical McGuffins, but who brews the ale your protagonist is quaffing? Then, think about where THOSE things come from-- like, where does the brewer get the grain? This is a mundane detail, yes, and likely isn't relevant to the story ... but if the magical McGuffin can, say, control weather, than that can change the way that people grow food, which changes how they eat, which changes how they live, and so on.
And, in turn, one of the best things you can do for that sort of thing is to get a head for how ACTUAL stuff is produced-- at least in the general sense. Not to mention a vague idea of just what technologies were used at certain points in history. Like, in a fantasy writer's critique group I was once in, I once read a dude's story that was about a Roman Legion officer going about his business in his staff tent ... during which he had tea. With whiskey in it. I can't remember much else from the story, except for that glaring mistake, so ... uh, that's something, I guess.
But yeah, neat blog post! I might even check out the anthology thing myself if I can cook up a neat idea.
4949919
... on the inside or the outside of the butt? Or shoes made of butts?
4949921
Yes
4949920
I tried to read Sanderson once. Couldn't finish it, even ironically. There's a reason I said he's not allowed to be my friend.
And yeah! Check the anthology, it'll be cool. The more the merrier, and I like your stuff.
(huge nerd coughs awkwardly)
I find myself in an awkward situation. I'm a huge sucker for long tracts on how the world works, which should probably be expected from someone who studied physics. Basically, I'm the one time out of ten. Also a big Sanderson fan.
Thanks for the reminder that not everyone cares about the wave-particle duality of the thaum.
Also, definitely going to participate in the collab once I decide what to actually write about.
ITT: Shitting on Majin Syeekoh.
4949919
Poetry.
Yet another person who reads Brandon Sanderson really differently than I do, since from what you've been talking about it seems like the way his magic works and exposition works is exactly what you'd like. In fact, I was literally thinking 'oh so like Brandon Sanderson' before you specifically pointed him out as a bad example. So now I'm curious what trips your gag reflex about it. Because for me 'really surprising but obvious in hindsight' is exactly what he's good at.
>inb4 someone submits an anthology pitch of a creature called, like, "The Sun Sander" or something, a successful and photogenic apex predator which is notable for getting paralyzed by its obsession to detail whenever you point out something to it about the world around it.
4949931 Still, he has an AWESOME video series on YouTube on how to write SciFi/Fantasy for his 318R class at BYU.
Hm. Now I'm tempted, if I could pry some real world time out for this.
Not quite the same thing but nothing breaks the tension or absolutely spoils a horror movie for me when it takes 5-10 minutes near the end to explain the spook, especially when it has no bearing on the final actions in the movie. Like, this exposition dump isn't gonna make it scarier, you're just wanking about how clever your spook is, or setting up some shared universe crap no one cares about while that spook is bearing down on our plucky heroes. I'm pretty sure most of the greats do that shit subtly, like you talk about.
Either you're Korean or you're a Redditor. Or maybe it's just Baader and Meinhof laughing at me
4949931
Out of curiosity, what'd you try reading?
As some of his books are ... decent. Ish. Others, however, are just plain awful (The Way of Kings is a slog to read, and Steelheart is even worse).
The part that I like about this is that, because it's italicised, obviously they're not actual sewers but a really shitty set of apartments with owners who've died overseas and a building manager who's not only not doing any maintenance, but is also keeping the rent money for themselves until the whole inheritance business is sorted out.
This means that nothing's being fixed and nobody cares that the people in apartment 451 are running their damn sewing machines at 4am, but on the other hand the rent was cheap before the owners died and it hasn't been increased in the four years since and the building manager also doesn't care of you fix stuff yourself.
4949992
Huh. Again. Except about Steelheart, that wasn't my favorite. Elantris could also use some work, but it was his first book so *shrugs* But Way of Kings is one of my favorite books out there.
Not trying to get after you, I know people just have different tastes and all, but what about it rubbed you the wrong way? It can be pretty bleak at times I admit, viewpoint character with depression and in a genuinely shitty situation will do that. But Kalladin's my hero, I find it incredibly hopeful how he just keeps trying and eventually succeeds.
I do think that, given the ones you didn't like, you might enjoy some of his novellas a lot more. Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell or Sixth of the Dusk, for example. And for novels, maybe something stand alone like Warbreaker.
Wise.
Worldbuilding is WHY the people (in the story) do like they do.
Anything else is wank.
4949920
Gonna be that guy. Those people weren't from a frozen wasteland. Originally, their bodies had been altered by the Lord Ruler so as they could survive in a climate of extreme heat. When things happened, and the world became temperate, their bodies perceived it as freezing, unlivable cold.
This. Exactly this. Just a few days ago I came across a story that did this and it was so fucking dry, I was literally parched. I couldn't finish it. Dropped out around 1k in, before the first line of dialogue
I feel like collabing with Aragon woupd the
bestworstmost insane craziest thing ever.4949948
It's not just his worldbuilding, to be honest. The way in which he writes in general annoys me, I suppose?
Look, I tried reading Warbreaker, and the characters were so stereotypical I legit thought it was a parody for the longest time. Lightsong in particular comes to mind, as the snarky smartass 'funny' guy who became unbearable approximately three seconds after being introduced. The plot was also extremely basic, in that you legit can't get more predictable if you try. I'm sure by the ending some surprising shit might even happeen, but if a book takes more than half its length to do something that isn't utterly boring, the book is kinda bad.
I got told Sanderson's strength is on his worlds and magic systems. I found the one boring and unoriginal (less in concept and more in execution, because I remember everything feeling like a cliche three seconds after being introduced, even though the whole deal about colors can be neat in theory) and the second kinda weird in this overcomplicated fashion that screams "boy I have thought of so many magic systems in my lifetime that at this point I'm just throwing shit at the wall for variety's sake".
I have no idea if his plots are good or not. Lotta people like him; maybe they are. I just couldn't stomach the thing for the million little things it did that annoyed me to no end.
4949992
As I said, Warbreaker. I found the audiobook, it was good quality, and I would listen to it while going to the gym. Thinking that maybe the audiobook formar (which I had never tried at the time) was the reason for my disliking, I tried reading the actual thing on paperback next.
Nah. Format wasn't the issue.
4949988
It's based on the Korean saying, yeah. We found it catchy. No clue how it relates to reddit though, iirc Horizon just found it in a random tweet.
4950178
There was a TIL (Today I Learned) fact about it on Reddit recently. It just seems like too niche of a thing to pop up simultaneously without a common source. Oh well, cool.
I can agree. I recently read Scarlet Letter, and Stars above, that first "chapter" was just worldbuilding. It took until the final few chapters with Pearl to actually start enjoying the book. I couldn't even read "Tale of Two Cities".
"You have not kicked us, therefore you eat babies."
A bit heavy on the world building at times but it is done through character dialogue for the most part.
First thing I thought of from the starter image.
4950143
Fair enough, if you don’t like the style you don’t. I am curious exactly how far you got since there’s a point where new information makes things flip, but that might be what you found predictable. Anyway, shame you didn’t like it.
4950063
Yep, heat ranges for proteins is a thing. Too bad it wasn’t modeled on vent critters, then they could have adapted. But, as established, the Lord Ruler wasn’t actually very good at the whole ‘god’ thing.
Mind you any chocolate at their native temperatures would be liquid, but that’s not actually a problem.
This is an interesting rant. I may need to consider some of this on how I proceed with my stuff.
The Alabaster Palace? What's to say? Poets have spent gallons of ink failing to describe it, painters acres of canvas failing to depict it, and kings oceans of blood failing to conquer it. It rises from a fertile crescent of land made as the great Lhui river changes its course in the arid plains of Lhan. It stands alone dominating the horizon. Tall. Graceful. Heartbreaking.
Some say that the Valir the Builder paid the architect his weight in rubies, others that he had him blinded so that he could never exceed the splendor of the palace. Others yet, say that the designs were the work of an ancient ifrit who dwelt alone in the sand wastes for longer than the pillars of Urd have been standing. They say that the ifrit showed the emperor the vision of the palace in a dream: not as a building but as the world.
Below, icy waters and a dark sea, above that peerless gardens, and sun-dappled copses of fragrant trees, above that the palace itself, dancing in the air, insubstantial as a mirage, real as death. And above that a burning light. Fire from on high.
The emperor spent a hundredweight of treasure seeking out the ifrit, and when he found him he dispatched slaves laden with gold, dancing troupes, and prancing animals, and on a silk cushion a sword of starfall steel of such virtue that lesser blades perished at its touch. The ifrit refused all gifts but offered to design the Alabaster Palace for a single boon, to be repaid by the Emperor's descendants ninety-nine years hence.
No matter its origin, it is without peer, its delicate spires reaching to the very zenith, and its deep, dark cellars, like the roots of a mountain, reaching all the way to the nadir. Thus it circumscribes the Earth and the Heavens, an axis mundi far fairer than a tree of ash.
Its walls are slender and shimmer, unreal, above the sprawling gardens, but admit no foe, and do not break under any assault, magical or mundane. It has a thousand and one rooms, each more splendid than the last, and its great chamber is roofed with sapphire, pearls, and gold in the day, and ebony and diamonds in the night: always a perfect image of the sky above. Deep underneath it has rooms filled with treasure, and rooms whispering with a thousand flowing streams, and rooms, too, with doors barred in silver leading to places with no sun and no moon, lit only by stars without number and inhabited only by moth-whales, numinous with holy radiance.
And deeper still, at the outermost extension of its roots that gnarl through the world and gnaw through living stone in places that have never known the touch of sunlight there is the lightless sea, where nameless things swim in the silent, inky depths, visible only as gentle ripples on the millpond-surface of the Sea Without Wind.
It is said, too, that this sea is so deep, so hidden, that Death herself dares not descent that far for fear of being trapped by the enormity above and the emptiness below. It is said that those who dwell on its shores are safe from death's touch, and that the current emperor, may he be both blessed and wise, has caused a great chamber to be built there for himself as final refuge from the common fate of us all.
But that, ah, that's a story for another time.
I could think of no revenge more fitting than to leave this worldbuilding here.
.
4950010
Oh. Oh boy.
Sorry, Sanderson is one of those authors I can just dig into-- if not in the best way.
Obviously on account of my own jealousy of his success and the fact I'm just writing magic horse stories.It's just that he's stupidly prolific, so he has the chances to make the same mistakes over and over and over again.So, this said, The Way of Kings is, like, peak Sanderson. Which means if you like the guy, you'll love it. But if you're not so enamored of his stuff ... well, there's a lot to get through. For one, the book features a lot of Sanderson's go-to themes: barren wastelands, meticulously overthought magic, and weird business about 'servant' races.
(Sidenote: A lot of Sanderson's 'roguish characters come off stiff and contrived, because while they always go on about drinking and flirting and what have you, I get the sense that Sanderson doesn't know how any of that stuff actually works. Which is less a thing in The Way of Kings but I digress) .
The whole Lighteyes/Darkeyes split just struck me as too heavy handed, for one. I mean, there's a place in the Fantasy genre to deal with real world issues (go read Daniel Abraham's A Shadow in Summer, or just about anything by N.K. Jemsin). Buuuuut, Sanderson reeeeeeally isn't the guy to deal with it. Especially in a book about dudes with magic power armor and giant lightsabers. And that's BEFORE one gets to the big reveal at the end that the dark-skinned Parshendi are descended from the Big Evil Horde that tried to kill everyone years ago, at which point they got split into the weirdo crab-people guys for the protagonists to fight, or 'naturally docile' servants with broken souls. Or ... something. It struck me as inadverently colonialist, distinguishing between 'civilized' people and 'savages.' Which, I'm told it gets explained in other books, but it still looks REALLY BAD in the first book in a series, and I kind of doubt I'm gonna read another couple of 1000+ page doorstoppers anytime soon.
But hey, let's look past that bit, and dig into the rest of the book. Of which like 75 percent is about Kaladin.
And Kaladin sucks.
I read about the "Kaladin is clinically depressed!" thing after I read the book, and ... well, Kaladin still is a chore to read about. Just every chapter is more and more misery getting piled on top of him, to frankly ludicrous levels ... yet at the same time it takes him forever to DO anything about it. He doesn't rebel, he doesn't escape, he doesn't resist-- he just decides he's gonna do his cannon fodder slave job SO WELL that he's going to survive. Oh, and then he inexplicably gets magic powers, at which point his reaction isn't "oh hey, how can I use this new advantage to fight my way free?" but rather "OH NO I AM SO CURSED AND SAD." He just feels too much like an edgy angsty protagonist you'd make up as a teenager.
Really, I just wanted to read about Shallan doing magic-crime, but Sanderson decided he was in love with Kaladin, and there ya go. Which, again, I've been told Shallan takes the spotlight in later books, but my to-read pile is pretty tall already.
Oh, and the nonsense fantasy vocabulary doesn't help much, either. Like "spren" is a fair enough word for a little fairy thing: windspren, firespren, that sort of thing makes sense ... but then Sanderson went and used the word "anticipationspren" somewhere early in the book, and I honestly couldn't take it seriously after that.
So yeah. The Way of Kings is a slog of a novel, deliberately constructed to set up a bajillionty-volume-long series ... but its biggest weakness is the fact that it doesn't make me want to read more about its world or characters.
But hey, at least it's better than Steelheart.
4950395
Fair enough. You're definitely right about it being peak Sanderson, for better or worse. For me that's better. And Kalladin's kind of my hero so we're just going to have to disagree about him. Will say he must have talked to Howard Taylor about depression alot because yeah, that's exactly what it feels like. Which, yeah, I can see why that isn't necessarily fun to read about.
Actually now I think about it, I think we might have talked about this on rpgnet before. But yeah, most notably, everyone is VERY wrong about the Parsh. Even Jasnah, though she's closer to the truth than anyone else. And trying to paint the Alethis as 'civilized' when a good chunk of them are entirely literally addicted to killing is a bit of a stretch
The Thrill is seriously creepy. Actually something I think the series approaches in an interesting way is contrasting the Alethi and Parsh, and mixing up the expected tropes about warrior/soldier, strategy/tactics, peaceful/violent, and culture/barbarism in complicated ways once we finally get the whole picture. Not to mention the whole colonialism thing, since humans aren't even native to Roshar.
It's funny you mention not knowing how drinking and flirting and roguing goes. Shallan winds up trying that later, and fails hilariously because she doesn't either. I think that might have been recognizing his flaws in that regard. Similarly Wayne of the Mistborn sequels doesn't do that either: he's just really good with people and disguises.
Oh, one other thing since I'm talking about it. Roshar actually isn't particularly barren, though the Shattered Plains are on the surface. Not so much in the crevasses though. There's no soil, but most regions have all kinds of coral trees and grass and such that hunkers into the rock when it's disturbed.
Anyway, not trying to convince you to like the book. It's probably just not to your taste. But there's alot of things I like about it.
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With Sanderson and Magic Systems, I still think he has yet to really exceed the original Mistborn trilogy in any way.
Because what made that work so well is that magic had rules, yes - but magic was also very very limited in what it could do. Like, Allomancy does a good job with 'Set up the rules so you can find clever ways around them' and does lead to cool stuff like - well, coinjumping being the coolest.
But on the other hand, while I enjoyed both Elantris and Warbreaker, both definitely felt like they spent too long on things. Still fun books, but noticeably weaker. The Wax & Wayne trilogy to continue Mistborn was also cooler - especially the idea of Mistings of both types of Allomancer - but...well, it definitely never quite came together as well for me.
Stormlight...it's definitely a mix. I like it, have had fun, but it definitely drags in areas. Once it gets really going, yea, it's fun, but it takes way longer to get invested.
Like, for all the slog it would later become, Wheel of Time was actually decently tightly written in Eye of the World, and it definitely sucks you in quickly, wasting little time before Rand & co are forced to flee in the night after the attack that sets the main story in motion. Had he managed to maintain that level of pacing and tension, and not get bogged down in massive unnecessary subplots and even more unnecessary slogs about how men and women were just so different and also bondage fantasies, the series would probably have been half as long and he'd have finished it before he died.
Like, seriously. There's one book that you could basically cut out everything but the final section where Rand and Nynaeve channel the giant statues, and the series would be stronger for it. And hey, he'd have finished it while still alive, too, then.
But actually it's a good example of Sanderson, funnily enough - his takeover resulted in the series having pacing and tension and excitement again, and I will always enjoy that the final book was basically nonstop action and spectacle and the big explosive culmination of everything.
Which is to say, yea. I like Sanderson, Steelheart started out fun, but oh god the ending to that trilogy was garbage
I don't think I agree with that entirely, at least not if "story" means only "plot".
For instance, in The Iliad, battle scenes frequently make a long digression to tell you some of the history of the combatants, who's waiting for them at home, and what will be left undone when one of them dies. These histories have no effect at all on the plot, but they change the deaths from video-game carnage to more personal stories.
I could pull a lot of examples from one of my favorite novels, Crazy Weather (think Cormac McCarthy writes YA). So much of that novel is world-building, because it was written with a sharp eye to how different worlds create different people, and different people build different worlds. There's no boundary between world-building and characterization in Crazy Weather, because it's aware that worlds both shape people and are built by people.
Also, it tells us irrelevant things about the pasts of people and places, which have no impact on the story, but which give those people and places a history. They tell us they were there before the story, and will still be there after the story--provided they occur naturally, not drawing attention to themselves. This is easiest to do with first person or third-person limited POV; omniscient POV can't focus on any detail without implying that it's important to the story.
A lot of the world-building in Crazy Weather is thematic.
Calling a place "the hole where the cat had her kittens" gives it a bit of history, and also illustrates the hazy line between domesticated and wild in those parts--which relates to the book's theme about South Boy's feeling caught between the "domesticated" whites and the "wild" Mojaves.
There's a scene where a Mojave boy starts a fight with South Boy, and it ends suddenly, without malice, no hard feelings. The fight isn't important to the story, but it's one of many clues as to an important difference between the white world and the Mojave world: Both are ordered by rules, but the white world is run by contracts, which differ from person to person and can be negotiated, while the Mojave world is run by timeless rules which don't vary for individuals and aren't open to negotation. The fight ends without malice because it was triggered by rules about how a boy should respond to a status challenge, whereas a fight between white boys is less likely to be rule-based and more likely to be emotional, because the rules are less clear.
It isn't relevant to the plot for us to know this. The person he's speaking of doesn't enter into the story again IIRC. But the importance of names and dreams to the Mojave is world-building, which in turn tells us more about the Mojave characters, and also about what the decision South Boy must make at the end of the novel means.
World-building, characterization, plot, theme, emotion--they can't be prioritized. No one of them comes first; none of them are subservient to any other.
P.S.--Baby-eating's already been done.
I find it strange that people in magical worlds always know their rules of magic. We live in a world that doesn't even have magic, and we still haven't figured out all the rules! I think a real "magical" world would have a lot more disagreement about the rules of magic than we see in fantasy.
When i see an aragon blog lost ranting about something... i buckle up and strap in, because hoo boy, it's gonna be a wild ride! Jokes aside, your blogs alone read better than some of the stories I've read... okay, maybe a lot of them. They are stories in and of themselves, allowing us common scrappers an insight into the happenings of the great aragon. I still sometimes go back and look at your old blogs, simply because they pose a better alternative to a quick story - quick, fiery, and fun to read.
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I figure it's like how we generally agree on how Classical Mechanics works, or that Carbon tends to form four covalent bonds, but we still haven't quite figured out where gravity comes from.
Similarly, everyone knows that a Fireball is just a Flame Rune projected through a Kinetic Spell Matrix, but no one knows if a Flame Rune is an Elemental Rune or a Spiritual Rune, and if you were to ask the pinheads in Nortistemindon whether a Kinetic Spell Matrix is a Fundamental Matrix or composed of multiple Sub-Matrices, then you better bring some popcorn and a lawn chair while you wait for them to fight it out. That being said, none of that matters to Darkblood the Intern-Mage (unpaid, of course) when he's blowing people up on the battlefield for that sweet, sweet practical experience. He just needs to be able to say the correct incantations. You don't need to know that light is both a particle and a wave to build a telescope, and most fantasy protagonists are more about practice than theory.
So you know, basically world-building is a tool for storytelling. And in good storytelling all your words have a purpose to tell the story so avoid dumping tons of irrelevant information. Don't misuse the tool and make sure your tool is working properly.
And remember, only tool enthusiasts care to see your tool fully. Don't show it to everyone.