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

7/26/2014

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!

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-- 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!)

4 Comments

Meredith link

8/4/2014 02:41:56 am

Glad I'm not the only one who wondered what happened to the rest of the world while reading "Hunger Games!" And also, why every planet in "Star Trek" is so homogenous. And also, what about non-British wizards in "Harry Potter."

low tech scifi fan

8/9/2014 06:39:12 pm

Oh please, first of all if I had to pick my #1 pet peeve of fans who refuse to watch this or don't like that based on some minor, minute detail, it would have to be fans who over think things, completely misunderstand the aim of the author, director, story creator.

Take your bemoaning of over simplification, either you picked poor examples to illustrate your point or you miss the thematic, visual relevance that Tatooine depending on which star wars movie cluster you are talking about, prequels or original, is to show us where Anakin came from, the fact that it is an isolated piece of the galaxy where republic credits don’t work, slavery still happens, a criminal element thrives and yes it happens to be a dessert. If you’re talking about the original and scenes with Luke, the point is to show us how isolated he is, the undercurrent his aunt and uncle are trying to protect him from something but that not only does he want to see the rest of the world, the galaxy, want to help fight in bettering his world, the sense he is meant for a bigger destiny. And we do see in both sets of films details of a larger landscape, society watto, subulba, pod races, huts; the city obi wan and Luke go into where he sells his speeder, imperial influence, the scene in the bar. The whole feel being this is the star wars universe’s version of bum f*ck Egypt; no wonder Luke wants to get away from it, once we understand obi wan was essentially exiled there that makes sense too. Not to mention from a practical, reality standpoint sets are hard to build and enormously expensive; just take a look at the commentary footage from TV creators like Brad Wright (stargate sg1.) Filming locations, access and rights to those locations are a pain in the a** to negotiate, even when your name is George freaking Lucas, episode 4 was a hit and your trying to cobble together episode 5 (everywhere can’t be like New Zealand accommodating Peter Jackson and the “real life version of middle earth), CGI doesn’t solve everything, still takes time, look at how long it took for the prequels to be made, their reception once they were. Authoring a book, you can’t spend 20, 40 pages describing the physical aspects, in depth social structures and so on for an area people will be in for a max of a week; then you have another problem with realism.

As for races being oversimplified, homogenous you may be right in one way but again have picked a poor example, or perhaps are limiting your commenting exclusively to the 1980’s, original series movies judging by the picture. But if you look at the whole of Star Trek, TV series all of them including the vilified enterprise and the dull voyager, the mediocrely received DS9, the next generation movies, you see much more particularly about Klingons; Worf struggling to be one, struggling to find who he is, his place in the galaxy, a big portion of that being his race, dealing with the stigma of a traitor father in a society that values honor, courage, loyalty above all else. Worf eventually finding the Klingons supposedly lost at (I believe it was Khitomer) who chose a different life of peace after being lost in space, landing on a planet whatever; turning their back on the singular warrior race and striving for something else. We see their legal system as Captain Picard defends Worf at a tribunal, we see him make a family with Alexander, by the time we get to DS9 Jadzea Dax makes the comment Klingons are just as diverse and complicated a race as anyone else in reference to Worf and Alexander’s relationship, the latter’s attempt to join a warship, make his father proud, find his place in the galaxy. The reason their culture is so monochrome is a combination of government control that makes entities like China and North Korea seem absolutely liberating and they haven’t made the strides humanity has since it’s 3rd world war, in the original series movies they are not a federation planet and hold contempt for the federation, by the 6th film in that arc the federation is willing to extend a humanitarian hand to prevent species extinction, by next generation there is 1 Klingon serving in star fleet and he (Warf) was raised by humans, DS9 saw the dissolve and reinstatement of the Khitomer accords establishing them as a federation ally not necessarily a federation member. Similarly in DS9 we see an in depth look at Bajoran culture, Ferengi culture, family dynamics making them out to be much more than greedily, solely profit seeking and otherwise generally stupid people; you see Nog defy his species’ traditions on xenophobia being friends with Jake, choose a different path besides business and Rom ridiculed for his supposed lack of intellect finally stand up for himself, earn respect as an engineer, marry for love rather than the contractual agreement it is on his home world even become grand Nagas as his planet makes the monumental shift to a b

low tech sci fi fan

10/12/2014 11:07:12 pm

better society for its citizens. One of the reasons all this is possible is because it takes place on a space station not an exploration star ship like enterprise whose mission is first contract, preliminary, cursory, beginning investigation, answering distress calls, ambassadorship where and when required, threat management (Romulan neutral zone, Borg watch); meaning they are not in a place long enough, in a position to learn the things about these worlds you want to see. Implying enterprise makes its reports to Star Fleet and then they send out the long term survey ships, science vessels where most appropriate. Also for an analytical person you seem to be oblivious to how species are used in conjunction with story plot; for example, again in DS9, one of the final season’s episodes is where Ezri Dax summons a previous host Joran to help solve a series of murders. One of the victims happens to be bolian and part of the dialog mentions him having a wife and co-husband back home; it is not an exposé on bolian culture rather basic personal detail about the dead being on the floor. This type of thing is seen earlier too in Next Generation when Wesley Crusher took his Star Fleet entrance exam he runs into a confrontation with a blue being and other human; he immediately begins rude, aggressive behavior causing the alien to eventually laugh and relax, actually making an acquaintance if not a future friend, it explained that the what we would term rude, aggression is to the other a sign of honesty, forthrightness and how you handle issues with that species, Crusher doing so well because he recognized who and what he was dealing with.

Under thinking cool elements huh, and true to form by now, what you came up with was the Sarlaac from Star Wars, easily the 1970’s 1980’s reject anyway, then there’s what you say about it; you’re upset that it’s unrealistic it survives the way it does, digesting it’s prey over 1,000 years and that’s implausible to you. Never mind for a moment it’s a space age variation on the Venus fly trap which could easily survive on unsuspecting lost dessert beings falling into its cave/hole and almost directly into its gaping mouth or that Jabba got this one for the sole purpose of using it as a horrifying method of death, a threat to keep staff and slaves in line; speaking of which yes we can possibly know that (how long it takes to digest things) based on quite frankly what’s sh*t out the other end, enzymes residues and other markers that say yes a Sarlaac ate this, carbon or other dating method to tell how old it is, how long it’s been out of said beast, a method similar to counting the rings in tree stumps, logs to determine age. And now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…but here too you miss the forest for analyzing the trees; the whole point in telling us about Sarlaac, giving us that detail is to enhance the horror of what is about to happen to Luke and company. A fact underscored by the information being relayed through C3PO the one being who, despite his translation skills, has no business in the middle of the action because he is virtually scared of his own shadow. Look again and hell for all we know the digestion habits of the Sarlaac were made up by Jabba so he could laugh at the fear and begging of the people he put to death, making it before you say it, a plot device of the character, keeping in line with Jabba’s ruthless reputation, than a plot device of unimaginative lazy authors/creators.

Problems of scale; this is one I happen to agree with you on but only in relation to Harry Potter(can’t comment on the Hunger Games as I have neither seen nor read it) and that’s because I have so many problems with JKR’s work post book 5 not the least of which is her annoying habit of making interview comments about the potter verse that don’t actually line up with the story she’s written; outside her estimation of the school’s population her explanation of Serverus Snape as a complex, complicated multilayered and supposed to be intriguing character vs. the singular most vivid personification of real potential evil mirrored in reality, the fact the death eaters are based on the IRA leaning them toward not so much bad guys and more freedom fighters of a sort, Dumbledore’s A circumstances of death and B sexual orientation and his purported one great love just to name a few of the issues with what up until HBP had been a wonderful book series.

Worlds without consequences; by this I assume you mean no consequences seen on screen. Here directors are employing what was seen as far back as Shakespeare most notable in Hamlet there stating that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the turncoat friends were dispatched to England to be killed for their treachery and aligning themselves with the corrupt, murdering Claudius, items handled off s

low tech sci fi fan

6/25/2016 08:38:59 am

FYI got a message in my e-mail saying someone Reacon had replied to my comment yet i don't see it here so i'll post what they said and then comment- author of the post if you know what going on and can fix it please do- site admin dido

Reacon said:

I'm afraid I must rebuttal on points under thinking,
the main example here is Jabbas pet, this creature is ludicrous, it evidently needs vastly more food than could realistically be supplied and even if it somehow ate invisible blind buffalo herds, fact is it couldn't actually have evolved. This being would die far to often to continue, and what would it evolve from, we see next to no plant life on Tatooine and on a planet held by armed bandits I doubt any giant carnivorous animals would live for very long. Star wars lore does tell us that the universe has been inhabited for thousands if not millions of years. Similarly we know its digestion is simply insane due to the fact it has moving appendages, in the real world appendages need vast amounts of energy usually supplied by eating once every day or to as an actively migrating creature to once every 2-3 weeks for a stationary being still prown to bursts of movement, question is, how often does Jabba feed this thing? Did he genetically engineer it?

Again on under thinking, name me one big plot point in star wars that makes any sense. The rebels fight for liberation? Space isis. The death star? Why not put 20 nukes on a star destroyer and be done with it. The entire basis of their energy weapons, If that's a laser then I'm breathing super heated plasma and my body is made of antimatter.

Next on matters oversimplification, Yes, I agree star trek was a terrible example, however I feel that star wars would have functioned far better with a plot akin to a child's bed time story and about as much depth as most comedy shows.

And, to clear this up, other world powers not intervening in a major rebellion with unclear goals overtaking a nuclear superpower? No outside intervention is BS. It's as if Europe had a rebellion which occupied the entire country and took control of all stationed nuclear weapons and nobody batted and eyelash.

On most other things I do very much agree, Thanks for a most intriguing subject of discussion.

my comment

And we're back to the Sarlaac again; I said it was a plot device at least once so was the might as well have been put up on blocks 'pirate ship' banked in a sand dune where Jabba makes them essentially 'walk the plank' yet no one commented on the un-originality in that. Whole point being something dramatic to get them out of

Your comparison to the 'real world' is ludicrous precisely because this isn't the real word it's the star wars universe; that's like saying you dislike star wars because when you walked out your door in your neighborhood, here on earth you don't see beings like Chewie or that flesh colored thing with black eyes playing music in the bar scene or you actually believe George Lucas' sarcastic comment Yoda is the illegitimate child of Kermit the frog and Ms. piggy

As to your plot points comments I can barely understand them and that's by no means because I'm particularly stupid besides starting at episode 5 feels like we're coming into something started already, where not everything is properly clear-you seem to think from what I can understand they should have nuked the death star and every empire ship they came across, assuming they could get such a thing, handle it safely without killing themselves from radiation exposure, exposing huge sections of the galaxy to radiation poisoning. Imagine that praising people for not going nuclear

I did catch the sarcasm of the plasma anti-matter comment( isn't the latter something from star trek not star wars) but lasers is exactly what they are supposed to be well beyond nuclear anything by the look of it; world immersion anyone.

As for why the other planetary, galactic powers don't either help in the rebellion or counter what they are doing you forget this isn't like Europe by a long shot in size or composition; the galaxy is split into about 3 sections people living under the empire the dominate sweeping power, the rebels always on the run and in hiding, lone Jedi in exile, force sensitives unaware of their true power or how to use it and outer rim, edge of the galaxy places where neither the republic reached when there was one, and the empire only cares about in track rebels.

Average people don't intervene, get involved because life is hard enough, the empire his instilled that much fear and what small child wouldn't fear Vader in that mask? And what fear like that wouldn't last, coupled with the disappearances and killings by the empire?

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

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