Matt's Top Five Fictional Pet Peeves # 1, Poor World Building

Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my month long countdown of some of my greatest fictional pet peeves. Or, at least, what should have been a month-long countdown, but craziness of all sorts (in both life and writing) have delayed this final entry a few weeks more than it should have been. Sorry for whatever inconvenience this may have caused.

Back to the list front, already we have taken a good look at why I'm bugged by "perfect" characters (# 5), characters whose life revolves entirely around coincidence (# 4), characters who refuse to evolve with their series (# 3), and plot hoops (# 2), but today I'm going to focus on my biggest pet peeve of all: poor world building.

A little history, first, namely that my background is in history. I majored in history in college and very nearly pulled the trigger and studied to teach it. Although I didn't go that far, I am glad for the education, because it's given me a lot of perspective I wouldn't otherwise have (including a constant need to play devil's advocate, which can get pretty annoying sometimes) and a need to see where everything logically fits. Every story element that is introduced has to have some history and internal logic to it that will fit with other story elements, otherwise, well, it takes me out of the story and the last thing I'm generally looking for when I'm in a story is to be forcibly taken out of it.

Much like being taken out of The Matrix against your will.

There's a lot of different ways that poor world-building can go horribly awry and not enough article to put them all in, so I've narrowed it down to some of the ones that bug me most in what I'm calling my Seven Deadly Sins of Poor World Building. So, in no particular order...

1) Oversimplification

Welcome to Tatooine, home of deserts, scum, villainy, and not much else.

Particularly common in genre fiction, whenever characters are introduced to a new planet or race, it has to have some universal traits that can be used to easily describe it in a moment. This is the warrior race. This is the scientist race. This is the desert planet. This is the forest planet. This is the planet that inexplicably rains toads every 23 minutes (okay, maybe I'm the only one who's ever really wanted to see that one. In small doses, this is actually pretty acceptable, as you want your audience to be able to remember this somewhere down the line. However, this is a trend that tends to fall apart most when significant time is spent developing a story element.

Sorry, Star Trek.

While I love Star Trek and the way it has handled its many races over the years, it gets particularly egregious how oversimplified a lot of their races are the more they're focused on. My beloved Klingons, for example. While years of development have shown them to be a deeper, more varied race than on initial appearance, their culture is still pretty monochrome. They have one religion, one language (despite occasional mentions of other dialects), and one form of martial art, for an entire planet that identifies itself as a warrior race, none of which have really changed in centuries. The same problems can be found across every other major race that the series spends time on, and instead of making the universe seem larger, it manages to make it feel substantially smaller.

2) Underthinking "Cool" Elements

So you've got a world, why not fill it with a lot of cool elements that'll make it even more colorful and vivid? Fine. So long as you can properly rationalize them and make them fit into your world and make it seem reasonable that they can exist, this is fine. Introducing an element that sounds awesome but makes people take pause to try to sort it out, well, that teleports you out of the fantastical world you've put them in. For example, let's go back to Tatooine.

We're introduced to the Sarlaac as Jabba the Hutt's preferred method of execution. A giant, stationary terror beast in the middle of the desert that waits for its prey to fall into its mouth? Fine. Cool even. Then we're told that it digests its prey for a thousand years as if this is some great threat. This is where things get fuzzy. How can an animal live this way? How can they know this? No, it doesn't make any sense, and in the time it's taken me to think this through, three redshirts and an unnecessarily popular bounty hunter have fallen in, and I have to rewind to actually enjoy myself.

Sorry, Boba Fett, you're just not that important.

3) Problems of Scale

In line with the last problem, a lot of artists have trouble understanding scale in their fictional universes. You get this all the time in space opera stories, where distances between planets and stars are casually handwaved away with technobabble, but they're not the ones that I tend to have a problem with. No, it's often the smaller scale stories that tend to have this problem.

An exact population of Hogwarts is never stated in the books, but Rowling has stated in the past that she expects the school has about a thousand students. Stretched across seven years, this figure not only makes Harry's class look ridiculously small (being one of forty students sorted in his year), but it makes the school look more negligent than usual, given its limited and oft poorly trained faculty of perhaps 20 people. Magic can only account for so much here.

Things get even stranger in The Hunger Games universe. Much time is spent in District 12, which seems roughly the size of a small town (given the fact that the entire population can show up in a square on reaping day). While this is fine on its own, it gets a little confusing when we start seeing maps that indicate the districts (including 12) to be the size of at least one current US state and seeing the massive populations of other districts (including the Capitol) when compared with 12. Given the high mortality rate from starvation, mining accidents and the evils of Panem, its amazing that District 12 has anyone left alive for the games. Either the Capitol doesn't care much for coal, or it's going to need to shuffle in some new breeding stock ASAP.

You know, assuming the story didn't end as it did.

4) A World Without Consequences

This one is most common in superhero fiction, but can expand to pretty much any story that's liable to be made into a summer blockbuster. In the never-ending battle for cooler setpieces, we're seeing more and more senseless destruction in fiction, with characters smashing through private property instead of avoiding it, even when they should know better. You never see any aftermath, no people's lives ruined due to losing their homes and businesses, no periods of mourning, no years of rebuilding and governmental investigations. You just see characters looking on in a brief moment of awe before moving on to the next setpiece. The next day, people barely look like anything has happened, even if the scale of destruction would be best called a national tragedy.

This is further baffling in fiction where this sort of thing happens all the time in one particular place, with people refusing to move out even though the likelihood of being crushed to death is somewhere around 100%.

You'd really think Tokyo would've given up after at most it's 5th kaiju attack.

5) Ignoring Superman

I call this one Ignoring Superman, but really, it comes down to ignoring any fix-it-all device that may exist in fiction. So often, in the course of creating awesome universes, you create plot devices to save the day. The problem with this is that rarely are these plot devices actually destroyed, meaning that once it's been used, you often find yourself asking, "Why didn't they use X to save the day this time?"

There are so many problems we could fix with this Time Turner. Now let's never use this again.

But fine, set some restrictions on this plot device, and you may be OK. Where this really gets bad is when there is literally no good reason to ignore the existence of a fix-it-all and artists have to try, clumsily, to explain why it is being ignored.

Yup, back to these guys again.

One of the more memorable Batman comic book storylines was No Man's Land, where a devastating earthquake had cut Gotham City off from the rest of the world, and the government decides to make it no longer part of the United States due to some weird combination of religious mania and no longer wanting to foot the bill for this hell on earth city. Batman is doing his best to keep the peace and restore the city. Fed up with seeing part of his beloved country being ignored, Superman breaks into the city at one point to set it to rights, and is kicked out! Not because he's a terrifying god-like being or because he did something terrible, but because Batman doesn't think that Superman 'gets' the problems with Gotham, and can't fix them, and Superman agrees! Yes, this is a unique situation, and yes, Batman does get Gotham more, but for f***'s sake, can't you at least borrow Superman for a bit to, you know, maybe help deal with the massive supervillain problem and bring in much needed medical supplies?

6) Ignoring the Outside World

A lot of fictional worlds are fairly insular places where we only really get a perspective from a particular location, usually a small town or country, and this is fine. Oftentimes it's probably for the best to create a well-developed small world instead of hastily putting together a massive one. That said, there are some stories where a greater perspective would add a lot. I'm probably not the only one curious to see what the rest of the world (assuming, there still is a rest of the world) in The Hunger Games and The Purge universes thinks of the United States' new perspective on murder. These, however, are just cases that I think would be interesting. There are some where it feels like a vitally missing plot point.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Voldemort and his Death Eaters violently take over the Wizarding World in the British Isles, creating a pretty awful place to be overall. While this is thrilling and creates a stark, scary final chapter, it does fail to mention one thing, namely that the U.K. doesn't contain all the wizards in the world. Throughout the series we see a massive subculture of wizards existing throughout the world, and I have a really hard time believing that none of them were interested in stopping an evil, genocidal dictator's rise to power in Europe (since the last time that happened, things didn't go very well). Voldemort has England for close to a year, and not once do we hear of international intervention. While this makes for a better story of 'La Resistance', it does stretch credibility and rob us of seeing the awesomeness of a Wizarding World War.

7) Introducing World Elements, Then Completely Ignoring Them

Seriously, Lost, f*** you. I love you, but f*** you.

In Conclusion:

I probably take world-building too seriously. (Wait, who am I kidding, probably?)

Beyond that, though, it's like I've been saying for the better portion of this list. Artists: Just take a little more time, put a little more thought into the story and its universe, and you can make something truly special.

So dear readers, are there any pet peeves in fiction that have always bugged you? Sound off in the comments below!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)