Part 2 - On Deliberately Sidestepping Reality
10 years ago
First journal here http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5637365/
This thought is less of a rant but I do want to lay out some thoughts for consideration.
Because there's two things that come into play whenever anyone builds a world in which to tell stories. When it comes to worldbuilding I personally like to get *insanely* detailed. Not necessarily in small things, but in big overarcing things--mechanics of government, economics, the way people interact with one another. And, in fact, I personally get bothered if other peoples' settings aren't sufficiently detailed in certain ways, MOSTLY if small details leave huge gaping plot holes in the larger setting.
This sounds kinda funny coming from the guy who made the Housepets world, which has a zillion billion world plotholes, but I'm getting to that!
The first thing to keep in mind is--nobody's model of reality will ever match the real thing one-to-one. We're constantly interpreting reality.
The second thing to keep in mind is, we're all personally attracted to some things and repelled by others. If we were to stick to one unified vision of reality, we'd never get to a point where we have the fun stuff--where we're playing off certain ideas we find in reality, but the way we play off them don't need to be built from the nucleus up like reality itself is.
When we're worldbuilding or reading stories, we're usually not playing in a true alternate reality with true realistic consistency, but in a realm of ideas. These ideas key off of reality, but are not beholden to it, because in the end they are simply interpretations.
Constructed worlds are variants on the theme of reality OR other ideas/myths/stories.
So when I create something like Housepets, to construct the world from the ground up would be one way to maintain consistency, but the physical consistency of the world is not nearly as important as its situation-as-commentary. Housepets plays on the idea of funny animal worlds, which are a less-realistic idea that already exists, and imposing some elements of reality to them. This creates a deliberate dissonance, especially in the areas of the world that I purposefully do not explore (but do poke at, because it's funny) because doing so would reveal the man behind the curtain.
The question then is, why was it interesting to impose any reality at all? Because, from my viewpoint, whenever I read funny animal stories growing up, I always wanted to dig just a LITTLE deeper. It's a fixation on anthropomorphism that, admittedly, we all have, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
But to impose a little reality is not to impose all of it. The truth I wanted to poke at was more of a social truth, not a scientific one. Certainly, some sciencey handwaving can make certain aspects of the setting more palatable, but they're not the point--if I were to impose scientific reality in order to evolve all species from the ground up in order that they may talk, I'd have to compromise a HUGE part of the world--American suburbia, owner/pet and man/animal relationships--which is kind central to KEEPING so that I can riff on the same kind of society that most funny animal stories also riff on.
In the end, the worldbuilding is messy and not entirely precise, and sometimes I ignore specifics of my own invented world in order to tell a certain story, and it probably raises MORE questions than the seed ideas ever had. But it still does pretty much what I intended it to--tell the kinds of stories in this setting that explore the ideas that I'm drawn to, and do so in such a way that the audience doesn't need chapters and chapters of primer in order to "get it".
Because the only reality I NEED to adhere to is a social one--everything else is deliberately artificial. But if everything can be made up, what real use is it to have ANY reality?
It's because when we have those ideas we recognize as applicable, we recognize them as applicable no matter where they are. The unreality of anything else is usually just for fun.
Similarly, with A&H Club, I have a very simple world bible that, if you were to apply reality to all of it, would fall apart almost instantly. That's because the world bible mostly consists of ideas that I'm deliberately imposing which are a mixture of realistic and non-realistic in order to create the look I want for the situations I'd like to explore. A&H is not about world realism--but it IS about economic and class realism.
So, in order to tell a weird fantasy story that can actually make comments on real economic and class issues, the non-real elements, which are otherwise just for fun, only need to stay out of the way. If they can't, they either should be handwaved, justified, or winked at. The only reason this NEEDS to be done is so that the verisimilitude can be maintained, even if it's not in any way realistically plausible to get here in the first place.
If, for instance, I tried to tell this same story in a world where everyone could magic cupcakes out of the air, the entire basis for economic reality would screw with people. Because even if the world itself is not rational, those we identify as people ARE rational--it's kinda impossible to be starving when you can create all the food you need.
Would it be possible to tell a story with this setting? Yes, but there's a huge dissonance going on simultaneously--it looks like everyone is acting like an idiot instead of behaving rationally given their circumstances. It's hard to overlook--and in general, any setting that has unreal elements, something or other like this is going to be a dealbreaker.
But if it's what you WANT, then there's not much stopping you otherwise. However, I wouldn't tell a story of hunger when people can magic cupcakes from nowhere--but such a system wouldn't get in the way of other stories.
TL;DR Deliberately sidestepping reality when building settings and worlds doesn't mean you're only ever going to make pointless or self-indulgent stories--it's allowed to be just for fun, or to play on other ideas you can't otherwise justify organically. It's okay to sometimes paint an area vaguely and say "the justification happens here" and then never speak about it--if the ideas you do focus on are sound, we can usually play along anyhow.
This thought is less of a rant but I do want to lay out some thoughts for consideration.
Because there's two things that come into play whenever anyone builds a world in which to tell stories. When it comes to worldbuilding I personally like to get *insanely* detailed. Not necessarily in small things, but in big overarcing things--mechanics of government, economics, the way people interact with one another. And, in fact, I personally get bothered if other peoples' settings aren't sufficiently detailed in certain ways, MOSTLY if small details leave huge gaping plot holes in the larger setting.
This sounds kinda funny coming from the guy who made the Housepets world, which has a zillion billion world plotholes, but I'm getting to that!
The first thing to keep in mind is--nobody's model of reality will ever match the real thing one-to-one. We're constantly interpreting reality.
The second thing to keep in mind is, we're all personally attracted to some things and repelled by others. If we were to stick to one unified vision of reality, we'd never get to a point where we have the fun stuff--where we're playing off certain ideas we find in reality, but the way we play off them don't need to be built from the nucleus up like reality itself is.
When we're worldbuilding or reading stories, we're usually not playing in a true alternate reality with true realistic consistency, but in a realm of ideas. These ideas key off of reality, but are not beholden to it, because in the end they are simply interpretations.
Constructed worlds are variants on the theme of reality OR other ideas/myths/stories.
So when I create something like Housepets, to construct the world from the ground up would be one way to maintain consistency, but the physical consistency of the world is not nearly as important as its situation-as-commentary. Housepets plays on the idea of funny animal worlds, which are a less-realistic idea that already exists, and imposing some elements of reality to them. This creates a deliberate dissonance, especially in the areas of the world that I purposefully do not explore (but do poke at, because it's funny) because doing so would reveal the man behind the curtain.
The question then is, why was it interesting to impose any reality at all? Because, from my viewpoint, whenever I read funny animal stories growing up, I always wanted to dig just a LITTLE deeper. It's a fixation on anthropomorphism that, admittedly, we all have, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
But to impose a little reality is not to impose all of it. The truth I wanted to poke at was more of a social truth, not a scientific one. Certainly, some sciencey handwaving can make certain aspects of the setting more palatable, but they're not the point--if I were to impose scientific reality in order to evolve all species from the ground up in order that they may talk, I'd have to compromise a HUGE part of the world--American suburbia, owner/pet and man/animal relationships--which is kind central to KEEPING so that I can riff on the same kind of society that most funny animal stories also riff on.
In the end, the worldbuilding is messy and not entirely precise, and sometimes I ignore specifics of my own invented world in order to tell a certain story, and it probably raises MORE questions than the seed ideas ever had. But it still does pretty much what I intended it to--tell the kinds of stories in this setting that explore the ideas that I'm drawn to, and do so in such a way that the audience doesn't need chapters and chapters of primer in order to "get it".
Because the only reality I NEED to adhere to is a social one--everything else is deliberately artificial. But if everything can be made up, what real use is it to have ANY reality?
It's because when we have those ideas we recognize as applicable, we recognize them as applicable no matter where they are. The unreality of anything else is usually just for fun.
Similarly, with A&H Club, I have a very simple world bible that, if you were to apply reality to all of it, would fall apart almost instantly. That's because the world bible mostly consists of ideas that I'm deliberately imposing which are a mixture of realistic and non-realistic in order to create the look I want for the situations I'd like to explore. A&H is not about world realism--but it IS about economic and class realism.
So, in order to tell a weird fantasy story that can actually make comments on real economic and class issues, the non-real elements, which are otherwise just for fun, only need to stay out of the way. If they can't, they either should be handwaved, justified, or winked at. The only reason this NEEDS to be done is so that the verisimilitude can be maintained, even if it's not in any way realistically plausible to get here in the first place.
If, for instance, I tried to tell this same story in a world where everyone could magic cupcakes out of the air, the entire basis for economic reality would screw with people. Because even if the world itself is not rational, those we identify as people ARE rational--it's kinda impossible to be starving when you can create all the food you need.
Would it be possible to tell a story with this setting? Yes, but there's a huge dissonance going on simultaneously--it looks like everyone is acting like an idiot instead of behaving rationally given their circumstances. It's hard to overlook--and in general, any setting that has unreal elements, something or other like this is going to be a dealbreaker.
But if it's what you WANT, then there's not much stopping you otherwise. However, I wouldn't tell a story of hunger when people can magic cupcakes from nowhere--but such a system wouldn't get in the way of other stories.
TL;DR Deliberately sidestepping reality when building settings and worlds doesn't mean you're only ever going to make pointless or self-indulgent stories--it's allowed to be just for fun, or to play on other ideas you can't otherwise justify organically. It's okay to sometimes paint an area vaguely and say "the justification happens here" and then never speak about it--if the ideas you do focus on are sound, we can usually play along anyhow.
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Merch Store
It's... I mean...
Ugh... I am NOT doing well with words today. Basically, I was just trying to say, "Yeah, I see where you're coming from here." So we'll go with that.
I know what you mean. It comes down mainly to the human desire for order. A little chaos every now and again is fine, but everything has to have a reason, everything has to have a cause. Barring that, the answer is typically 'because I said so'. People embrace order - even false order - before admitting to the unknown or chaos factor. And as regrettable as it is that it is so necessary to our continued perseverance as a species, there stands the fact that it IS the reason we are so intelligent as a species. We not only notice patterns in the chaos of nature, we search for them and create them where none exists. This is the reason we have governments, because societies need a sense of order or everything falls into (greater) chaos. While control is never absolute - there is a chaos factor in everything, something unexpected could happen at any time - we nonetheless strive for it in our day to day lives. That is why we cling to absolutes and 'reality', however vague and undefined, in books, and that is one reason why things like The Walking Dead are so popular: the element of (human) order dominating chaos.
For instance, The Avengers movie has a lot of disparate elements--superscience, aliens, shadowy government organizations--but in the end the story is basically about war, one of the most engaged and least understood human activities. It's "recognizable" in this sense even if all the pieces put together seem like they ought to be dissonant in proximity to one another.
But if we harp of the same themes too long they become a cliche--yes we had fun, but I'm tired of ignoring THIS bit of reality and its absence from this discourse annoys me--even if we don't actually want to impose strict reality on the setting, adding reality rounds the setting out more.
It's sort of like, why should I read A History Of Warfare in order to write about war better? Well, because my experience with war itself is really only through the lens of two systems--the "realistic" national military organization, and the "unrealistic" superpowered paramilitary organization. But military organization is a lot more complex than that. Realizing this doesn't restrict options so much as open them up--I don't NEED to organize armies through a nationally funded organization, because there's also non-conscripted militias, and slave armies, and permanent mercenaries and the like.
We tend to be bound by systems because we do need to have SOME realistic justification for them, and learning about how these systems interact, even more than just thinking "there is only one way for this to be structured" frees up the details from relying on cliches, and simultaneously makes these more real than the cliches are.
But we're never going to connect all the pieces together; more detail can help us diverge from cliche and still keep verisimilitude, but those too aren't the ultimate end of storytelling--it's just some of the building blocks.
What this comes around to, inevitably, is that notion of building blocks. Stories are akin to Lego: as you grow and learn, your collection expands until you have a relatively operational, yet still incomplete, understanding of reality. As you build your tower - or city, or map, or whatever - you have a vision in mind and you realize that even though you have access to all these blocks that could make for a more realistic structure - perhaps you can even borrow some from your friends (research) - the structure itself becomes fascinating on a basic level, but it doesn't feel as interesting as your vision. There is too much structure here; nothing is pop-out, nothing is captivating. So you remove some pieces and add in others, discarding certain aspects of reality in the interest of the greater whole. Eventually you look at your work and, though you aren't entirely satisfied (few artists worth their salt ever are), you see something that looks...actually pretty sweet! Not perfect, nowhere near real, but you realize that it doesn't -have- to be entirely real, just sufficiently recognizable with a creative flair.
It is, to me, the hardest part of writing. Figuring out which blocks go where, which ones to keep and which ones to toss. In the context of this discussion, I think reality is one of those things that is difficult to really measure: not only is it impossible to completely represent in a fascinating, entertaining, or thought-provoking manner, but it is HIGHLY subjective. Obviously the sky is blue in our worlds (or was it green...), but we have differing perceptions, priorities, values, etc. which skew our understanding of an objective reality and create bias. A lot of this is attributed to culture and religion (they are not the same), but ultimately we tend to not be entirely satisfied with another person's representation of reality unless it directly coincides with ours. This relates back to your original point from the previous journal as well: people have interpretations of different things (in this case furry and anthropomorphism), and they are most entertained or pleased by interpretations which most closely match their own. This is also why there is such a vast divergence on human rights, especially between the East and West, and why you will always have differing interpretations on whether or not something in your writing is cliche. Remember, a cliche isn't a cliche if it's the first time you've come across it!
There is some feedback the other way too, though
Of course, that loops back to your concept of adding in some reality to tell the story. We need some reality in our stories, no matter how farfetched their telling might be, so that we can understand them. Otherwise, they're just gobbledygook.
Sometimes, it's fun to start with the world-building, to begin with a weird premise and try to follow it logically to the end, and to see what kind of stories emerge from it. But doing it the other way that you discuss here, by starting with the kind of a story you wish to tell, and then doing just enough world-building to support and enhance that story, is also fun and perfectly legitimate.
As a whole lot of furry fans are geeks of some sort -- especially RPGers and SF nerds -- we can lose sight of the latter and fixate on the first possibility. World-building in and of itself can be fun, but when you're working for some end, whether you're making a gaming setting or a background for a comic, world-building for its own sake is at best distraction and at worst a liability.