The Two Types of Fantasy Worldbuilders
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- čas přidán 25. 12. 2023
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String Quartet no. 3, Op. 66 - I. Andante elegiaco by Felix Draeseke
George Street Shuffle Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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#fantasy #writingcommunity #worldbuilding #booktube
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Magic is a bandaid for all issues
My favorite _Far Side_ of all time was "Inside a Nuclear Reactor."
"RUN!!! The canary has _mutated!"_
what is cal tools?
The worst part about the "Cow Tools" argument is that LITERALLY NO ONE GOT THE JOKE and Larson had to issue a public explanation
What was the joke?
@@piotrwisniewski70That it makes no sense. The text literally scrolls across the screen for you to read
@@DeathnoteBB aha, alright, makes sense lol
@@piotrwisniewski70, no, it doesn't :v
@@truthseeker7815 that's the joke
At the end of the day, it all boils down to the "Once, mighty dragons ruled the land" and "Where the fuck do all these dragons come from?!" dualism
I'm the type who will say "So, all the dragons came from the same common ancestor, a quadruped reptile lineage who survived multiple mass extinctions. In the millions of years time period, those proto-dragons evolved to fill various ecological niches and..."
I think the internet is probably the best sort of connection to “These once great dragons hath existed, and we lay forlorn until their arrival”, and “WHO THE FUCK BROUGHT THESE DRAGONS HERE!?”. The internet connects so many people, and ideas conflict and clash as we excessively ponder over these meanings that fall into these subsections. These sects, as almost. For instance, man hath not only the knowledge pertaining to what they have learned outside the realms of the internet, but hath also retained information from their privy indulgences into the internet. Their folly. Hath only desiring more become Man’s definition? That hath only been commonplace in times of yorn, and persist as the tempest it is. Clashing ideologies, and their desire to achieve their zenith. Man is laid in a never-ending waltz with death, met with the “great equalizer”, before able to escape the plight of the information’s plateau. With people split into sects, and information practically impossible to indulge fully into, Man hath the privilege of boasting their own intelligence amongst their peers. Juxtaposed, hundreds of people can be, unitied by one, singular, shared idea, and hath millions of other different points of views. Arguments arise conflicts arise battles arise wars, until the great equalizer once again silences the outcries of millions, wishing for bloodshed, or wishing for peace, both meeting Death at [the] end. Man cannot lament either way, preoccupied with their indulgenced! Henry Thoreau’s “Walden” hath predicted such conundrums existing, which hath existed in his time, in yorn, and cometh still. To reject what in simplicity and diverge from complacency become his morales, which hath worked with Mother Nature for billions of years. Yet, that hath not remained, His ideas juxtaposed with the complacency of not only his peers, but even those who admire his works. Peradventure this may not have happened if Humanity remained complacent, which yet falls upon against the morales of the Walden, in a sort of manner. Further split. When prosed by fictionality with mythical beasts, oftentimes these works juxtapose, clash, and hate eachother. How could one world honor such dragons, and another hate and torment? Nations may never always share common interests, such is forsooth. Yet, conflict between scribes lead to their pens jotting on their paper to contradict and oppose others. Letters hath been written, in arguments. Then messages in the forms of emails and DMs eftsoons when admiring the scope of the world. Then, letters hath veen written, to praise and to confess. Eftsoons people hath opted for easier, more viable options. Ideas clash. Because seriously, who the FUCK let all these dragons just show up, and when does the hero show up outta nowhere and shout at them until they “die”, absorb their soul, and then actually die?
@@TivlimeXYZwtf
"How the fuc do we get rid of these dragons?"
"Idk they just existed from the beginning" - Dark Souls lore
"Absurdism is not the same thing as incompetence" is a fantastic quote.
Sadly 98% of fhe world, including probably you, dont really use their brains enough to ever notice even when it happens. Thats shy we got shit stories getting shittier for the past 2000 years.
Type III: "The main character looks exactly like me but it's totally not a self-insert. Everyone except the villain loves them and they win every time and have whatever awesome powers I need them to have at any given moment."
Mary sue
A Mary sue can actually work as a villain hilariously
The villain is hard to get*
Umm so just Keeper of the Lost Cities..
The Disney Star Wars trilogy?
As someone that looks at a wall and thinks to himself how a world where people live in a giant wall would work... I feel called out
solar opposites has a sideplot about that
@@vstrI thought the alien stuff was the sub-plot at this point?
the wall over all@@vstr
If you write it, I'll read it
that sounds amazing. You should write it! Send me the first chapter chapter when it's ready! You are the champ, man!
“absurdism is not the same as incompetence”
i’d even say they are opposites
So you’d say absurdism is the absolute height of competence?
@@Sir_TophamHatt obviously
@@ChBrahm That's absurd
@@1d10tcannotmakeusername exactly!
@@ChBrahm you're very absurd. (Haha)
Honestly less “grounded” worldbuilding can still work as long as you remain internally consistent. You don’t have to explain everything or even have everything be scientifically accurate, you just have to make sure you’re not contradicting yourself. Personally I love both styles but i have a particular soft spot for “soft” worldbuilding like in Ghibli, where things are strange and magical and sometimes absurd, but they work in tandem with each other still. Although I think it’s also funny if you accidentally contradict yourself and then just come up with an explanation and stick to it. For example, in later “Wizard of Oz” books, it’s said that ANY animal that enters Oz can speak. Children sent letters to the author asking “If all animals in oz can speak, why couldn’t Toto speak in the first book?”. He went “oh he could. He just didn’t want to.” And then Toto spoke in the rest of the books.
I think the writing to make your books consistent after the fact can be good if you do it right. Calling out JK Rowling for making an absolute mess of her world after adding more and more and trying to patch her errors along the way.
true, I saw the point as people who just throw constant ideas into a story without thinking logically, contradicting themselves narratively and refusing to acknowledge it at all in a narcissistic way. using cow tools as 'the ultimate excuse' like they're just 'freestyle rapping' and think so highly of themselves that everything they write HAS to be gold, the first time.
Aww. 🥹
@@JLRPGS. I’m on an indie video game team with a main writer who’s pretty close to this. I’m an editor on the team. And basically I have given up editing the main writer’s scenes. I only edit the secondary writers scenes now.
Because the main writer would literally rewrite the scene completely new if I made ANY suggestions to it. I mean even if it was grammar corrections-complete rewrite with complete change in character tone and everything. It was terrible. I literally did 5 revisions on one scene because they kept rewriting the whole thing.
We’re making a game for a jam BTW. Has to be turned in by July 1st.
They have voice actors, artists, programmers still waiting on the writers today to finish the scripts.
But the main writer also is the head of the writing team and basically this writer does exactly what you said.
The story in the game is a detective murder mystery and the dang main writer literally had no plan. Other people, including me who’s supposed to be just an editor, we were the ones who gave the writer the major plot points needed to solve the detective story. Yet we’re not getting any credit for that work either.
But the writer even after we gave the necessary clues on a silver platter-the dang main writer just keeps creating more and more plot holes and characters.
Anyways July can’t get here soon enough. Because I am leaving this mess as soon as the jam is over.
I had no idea that there really were people who “solve” plots by creating random brand new characters. But…there really are people who do that. And no, I can tell you that they do not care if it’s logical or not.
I’ve had a discussion with the main writer about this and basically the writer was frustrated with me-literally saying “Why does it matter?” And this was about the plot about a murder and a detective trying to solve it…I just…had nothing much more I could say after that. 😅
Why does it matter? For real? This is a detective mystery game-of course it matters how the detective will solve the case.
@@narnia1233Wow. I have a feeling that writer has not seen a good story before.
type 1 and 2 combination leads to the most organic and lively feeling
YES, this is literally me and my sibling
Tom Bombadil
And then the third writer: sitting for hours staring at an empty word page
By definition, you aren't actually a writer if you don't write.
@@scienceface8884 You write 1 line, then you spend another 10 hours looking at the almost empty page
That writer is me
...listen here you lil-!
Oh oh me! That's me! I'm that one!
And then there’s big budget Hollywood.
“What’s world-building?”
"Lol fuck that"
“Idk man I’m not even a writer.”
world-building is when you need to watch 4 movies, watch 2 series on two different streaming services, and remember a character's plot beat from 35 years ago to Consume the hottest new CGI-fueled redditor chow
"Somehow, Palpatine returned."
they don't need worldbuilding they know their clueless viewers will lick up every single scrap you give them.
Or at least they think because I wonder why anime has gotten more popular... could it be that they're actually trying to tell stories and not sell action figures?
Type 3: Have a niche interest like "horseless-carriages" or "Airships", have a setting which makes them really cool and reverse-engineer the world so that your niche interests are at the forefront of the story. Everything regarding your niche interest is well researched while the rest is just whatever and kinda falls into place^^
Hayao Miyazaki
Reminds me of moving cities series
Or "highly developed civilization where everyone is naked and super sex positive and sex is no more censored than our kissing", basically bonobos with tech
a thinly veiled fetish
I feel called out because this is exactly me and it was airships.
I like how in both scenarios the writer sounds smart for like a grand total of 2 seconds
i mean i was expecting a "eh who cares if the giant floating island dont make sense, rule of cool bro" but that works also
i know i’m a type 1 bc i spent damn near a year constructing a world with floating islands and figuring out how to make a magical floating rock realistically work and figuring out atmospheric cells and how they would affect the movement of the islands in the air and how the rain shadow would probably turn most of the land continents into barrens and deserts and how this ore would be used in technology like flying ships and flight suits 💀
@@asher7535 I feel that, when you say "magical" floating rock, it circumvents almost any reason to explain it realistically.
@@khymaaren i know, the thought process behind it for me is that if i give it one magical property that’s able to defy the laws of physics, then the rest of it i need to figure out a realistic way it interacts with the world. So the magical property makes the rock incredibly buoyant to air pressure, and its natural resting point is somewhere in the stratosphere. Objects on top will weigh it down as long as the mass is proportional, so if it’s a sizeable ore in a large body of rock it’ll rest a few miles above the surface. The only thing I haven’t quite figured it out is how it generates in the world, if it had some divine influence or if it forms naturally with the magical force of the world in it or something.
@@asher7535tvtropes calls this "phlebotinum"
It's quite a useful trope
To me good science fiction (and certain types of fantasy alongside it) should be about exploring the ramifications one or more extraordinary aspects would have in a world and the lives of characters within it
If you need magical rocks to perform that exploration, go right ahead
@khymaaren not really. Depence on the setting. If that world already have a technology based on magic then its not circumventing anything.
I often find myself to be the type of writer that becomes disappointed when fiction lacks internal consistency and doesn't abide by either real world logic or its own universe's logic, but I must admit, there's some part of me that admires the boldness of certain writers to simply say "Iunno, I thought it would look cool. Lmao, suck it, nerd."
There's a charm to the "It works very well, thank you." type of answer to more granular worldbuilding questions if one can do it without being rude.
This is why One Piece is great. We can have an arc focusing on the sociopolitical struggles of Merfolk, then a few arcs later Luffy regrows a missing tooth by drinking milk because Oda didn't want to draw him toothless for the rest of the series.
@@danielzakgaim2764 One piece is infested with deus ex machinas in almost every arc and some tiresome repetitive unfunny comedy. I wouldn't say it's great, even though i enjoy it to an extent
@@elfascisto6549Yeah, I love One Piece. It does alot really well. But it also has quite a lot of flaws.
@@elfascisto6549 I don't think you know what a Deus Ex Machina is.
i believe there are three types
type 1:
"hmm yes, i have created the perfect plot, and my worldbuilding has been crafted to work in tandem with this plot to create a beautiful tale"
type 2:
"okay so character 1 and character 2 go to mars-"
"wait they go to mars? how? why?"
"so the plot can happen"
"but isnt it important to establish how theyre able to travel to mars so the reader isnt confused"
"look ill figure out the worldbuilding stuff later. whats important is the characters and what theyre doing"
type 3:
"uhhhh okay so hear me out. oil doesnt exist, so humans just keep using coal for thousands of years-"
"wait, wouldnt this massively affect the plot???"
"idk"
"what do you mean you dont know? wait, what even is the plot? who are the characters?"
"idk ill figure it out later. anyways theres all this coal pollution, right?"
Coal pollution 😭
that incidentally leads to the grimdark implication of spaceships needing gigantic city-sized mines where people live and work and entire armies worth of people to constantly fuel and manage the spaceship, and that way mantain interplanetary travel,
...which would only get mentioned a couple times, probaby as the backstory of a single character, with maybe the vague revelation of a clean energy source to solve the issue a couple books later.
Im so called out with the type 3
"No matter how many sleepless nights it takes, no matter how much pain it brings me... My mind is a ravenous beast, and I must feed it."
That is such an unbelievably metal way of putting it
Type 1: The landscape was formed over thousands of years of careful and minute transformations. The mountain that was located between the two villages was known as Mount Hill originally, but the simplification and evolution of language meant it was presently known as Mouthill. It was a spiritual place to the two villages, a common myth being that two lovers, one from each village, first met on the summit. Of this pair, there was a man named K’arll, and historians often interpret him to be the same K’arll from another myth in which…
Type 2: Suddenly, their path was blocked by a mountain!
"Secret tunnel! Secret tunnel! Through the mountain!"
the question beeing, which one is better? i do would say nr.1 but specifically if all the lore behind it is optional for those thst want to look into it, for casual people judt walking by it would just seem like nr.2
@@mischi9203 Probably the former in practice, since thought and interconnection are what form a coherent world, whether it's realistic or not.
But I kind of want to say the latter, because it evokes the idea that a mountain just sprang out of a bush to block their path, and that's funny.
is type 2 in this example the author of journey to the west by any chance
World building itself there
I was expecting 95% of the video to be the first author monologuing, and then Author 2 is just like “oh that would be cool.”
And then Neville Longbottom knocked time travel over
This is also what I expected, and it would have been much better than what we got
@@Kale-ki8xu eh, while not as funny as I hoped, I'd never heard of cow tools before so it was educational at least
@@Kale-ki8xuyeaaaah
@@mikec1222, I agree
Yeah, they really fumbled the punchline
I was talking to a friend once about the world I'm building
I mentioned how I first established what the continents looked like, what the talk of the planet was on its axis relative to it's own star, the length of a year for it, what the jet streams and ocean currents looked like, tectonic plates and where volcanoes were most likely to be located, and how big and far away from the planet it's moon(s) were, and just how large the planet itself was
He asked me "So should I figure those things out too?"
"Oh god no, absolutely not, this is the worst way of going about this"
I like the fantasy novels where 90% of the time the characters are describing their surroundings
And then the other 10% of the time the author is describing the surroundings 😎
Not shown: Type 1, pondering the finer points of shrimp ethics so long that he never actually _writes the gosh darned book._ Source: Years of arduous experience as a Type 1 Worldbuilder.
Type 1 here, currently pondering the appropriate level of laconic snark for a bunch of kinda-sorta ant-people living under the Americas who popped their heads out of their rarely-used surface tunnels and went "The hell is going on up there?!" after the Trinity test in '45. They will most certainly have acidic social commentary on the Soviet Union being bad parody of a _real_ economic system (their own) and the wasteful and chaotic West alike... although the West would probably take that less badly since they're also happy to trade precious metals and gems for what the West regards as junk, not realizing that their larvae can and will eat almost anything and that the "junk" is rapidly accelerating technological progress underground. They will also throw a wrench into the notion of MAD - It goes from the panicky but accurate claim of "Human civilization could be wiped out in a nuclear exchange!" to "Yes... _human_ civilization."
Paradoxically, they become a potentially stabilizing influence if MAD cannot be applied to them too, since they don't actually want to fight large-scale wars on the surface out of general principle, just like we don't want to fight the same scale of wars in caves, and they aren't very good at it over open ground, either. In close quarters and limited visibility, though, they hold all the advantages.
@@crowe6961 Those are my favourite types of settings for modern-era novels. Just insert a different civilisation/race/etc. and play out what the hell happens. Very satisfying to write. Still not ever gonna finish even one novel.
Type X worldbuilder: The one who actually builds his world IRL or in a simulation before writing it down
@@ThSadomasohista Yeah, the trouble with writing truly inhuman but compelling characters into a novel is that you have to stop thinking like a human. This can be migraine-inducing, in a complex story.
This is partly true, but only for your teeny experience. Pondering the ethics of shrimp is fine if it's effective for the story, which it can be. And naturally, many more people start not with “let’s create a business plan for my writing career,” but with dreams of “higher things”, therefore, it seems to me that you are somehow extolling your own subjective opinion.
Type 3: "It's a tree wot's got a beard, innit."
When I was young, like school young I wrote a small story about a tree with a moustache, it was a it was a psychological horror thriller
@@rubededcii2395 Sounds hilarious and interesting. I mean the premise is hilarous, a tree with a moustache.
@@oz_jones I dont exactly recall all the details, but it was centered in the confusion and fear of a lumber when he saw the tree, just a tree with a moustage
That's not even fantasy, that's just lichen.
Type III is when you just throw your friend C.S. Lewis into your story as a talking tree with zero explanation.
The type II one remembered me of an episode of El Chavo where all students had to make a drawing, and Quico gave a blank paper to the teacher, then he asks what Quico drawed:
-It's a cow eating grass
-Where's the grass?
-The cow ate it
-Where's the cow?
-It got to the bathroom
Fellow Latino, I see
A man of culture
Chavo del ocho mentioning?
That's literally hard sci-fi versus space fantasy that disguises itself as sci-fi.
Type 1: Works tirelessly to invent new languages and alphabets to base a culture around, something so complex that some colleges eventually start to teach classes in your fictional language.
Type 2: “Gra! Glarbl blargk bargh! Ooogilly doogle schmoo! Fleepshee boopity floop!”
“The master says that the enemy will soon be upon us! Thank you master! Goobily floobly thwunkit to you, Master Dumpy McKrungle.”
The Silmarillion vs Rick and Morty, basically.
I'm going to start asking people if they're a silmarillion or rick and morty worldbuilder now
I love how I have started reading Dune (almost done with the first book right now) and it seems like a Type 1 but half the things existing just aren't explained. For some context, I am reading the English version of Dune but I'm not a native speaker - there has been more than one occasion when I googled a word, thinking it was my lacking English knowledge, when really it was an invention of Frank Herbert, that was just never explained.
@@boosteddrimmsuthere's an appendix at the end of the book explaining a lot of the terms.
@@TheAtomkilla Oh shit. I didn't realize that. Now that's just embarassing...
or then there are thoe who go in between and make languages that seem super detailed and fleshed out on the surface until you finally realize its just English with the words replaced with fantasy BS for example every book written by christopher paolini
Small brain: "I just think my worldbuilding is cool like this."
Big brain: Type 1 fantasy worldbuilder
Galaxy brain: "I just think my wordlbuilding is cool like this."
That typo means something I just know. Therein lies the key of all universal creativity. We just need to parse it.
@@Manas-co8wl What typo? /genq
wordlbuilding lol they said wordlbuilding instead of worldbuilding in the 3rd line xP@@catbatrat1760
@@catbatrat1760 Wordlbuilding instead of Worldbuilding.
ascended worldbuilding avatar "lets take something cool and push every single string to make as real and inevitable as the taxes we must pay."
I think the best type of worldbuilder would be the mix of this two.
definitely. It's a very delicate balance
I'm pretty sure that might be the point of the video, it shows the problems with both ways of writing and also the benefits
@@doubleaabattery7562 You're absolutley right my man.
I think this would be incorrect, the type of worldbuilder necessary to a story is different to each story, a balance of both would only serve some stories.
@@strangedogg5068 I think you may have a point, but I will analize it; thanks!
Me and my younger brother are both creating fantasy worlds.
I find something I think is cool, and throw it into my world. If I can't find a simple explanation, I usually just go 'a wizard did it' and call it a day.
My little brother calculated the distance of his planet from its sun, and classified each species he created, giving them each a Latin name.
Edit: but I have got a lot more stuff done, so checkmate little bro ✨
Scientific names are a fire idea tho
I spent three days studying sea currents and drawing them on my planet's map, afterwards drawing maps of winds and precipitation.
When I realised that this meant none of the biomes I was planning on made sense, I looked into *why* sea currents are the way they are, found out about it being linked to planet rotation, and I thought "what if the planet rotated the other way".
I couldn't find any results on Google, so I asked my high school physics and geography teachers. They were both stumped, but a few days later one of them gave me an answer: this is possible, there is no inherent reason for a planet rotating one way or another, it's just about how it starts.
So, of course, I did this, which flipped all my currents, and I was blessed to learn that almost every single biome now worked as intended. The few outliers were easily fixed with "a god decided to make it like this".
Many months later, my friend later made another world map and asked me to do the currents on this one. I almost ended up crying. I tried and tried but I could no longer do it.
I never want to look at a sea current again.
@@konstant_ly sounds like a SKILL ISSUE!!!
@@cheesemanmaster I want to wish the worst upon you but you're right.
@@konstant_ly One time I looked into quantum physics and my brain just stopped working
My friend and i are writing a story together, ive always felt like i was supposed to be author 1 and that everything in my stories should be intricately crafted and meticulously planed and connected. Then my friend pointed out that we really can do whatever we want and I've never felt more free
edit: I may have not been entirely clear, I don't mean I can "do whatever I want" like the second world builder type, I mean I can do things like put a sky pirate docking bay on a cliff face because it looks cool and not have to justify it with a long winded explanation or something, and I don't have to explain how the ships fly because it doesn't matter, all that matters is that they fly. This isn't an "engineering of the future" book, lol
Worldbuilding doesnt make a good story in itself anyway. Overthinking it can do you know no good. Every reader will like some mystery. Forget about all the star wars Lore and watch Star Wars IV for instance. Force isnt really explained, lightsabers arent explained, space travel isnt explained and the list goes on. Still it makes an excellent movie.
I'm the meticulous crafter who loves the detailed and advanced and interconnected worlds but I also don't let that take away from my creative freedom as I still express a numerous quantity of information and emotions and ideas that expand out to vast extents but are also understandable and not too over detailed.
That's just what happens when one has 17+ Years and lots of free time to work on a story.
@@CerealExperimentsMizuki good for you i guess
Free only from quality.
Think of it like this: Instead of just following real life physics, use it as a *guideline.*
Because it *_is_* your world. You can just say, "that's how it works here" and then just make up a new element or law of physics that allow that thing to work.
That's what I did with mine.
"Idk dude dragons are cool"
Same
The first one has 100s of existential crises and creates 10,000 of unique animals for a complete ecosystem that could exist in the real world in their mind. And says it to no one.
2nd one: ROUND BIRD
Sir Terry Pratchett played The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion and hung out in goblin caves to make notes and gain inspiration for his 2011 book, "Snuff." 2 years prior, in 2009, he was knighted for his services to literature.
At one point I wanted to write a novel but then I realized that I just like the world building part
You need one good story to make people care, then you can spend the rest of your life writing fictional in-world tomes and clerical documents about lineages and towns and histories and tax policies and stuff
see: Fire and Blood / World of Ice and Fire
If you just like the world building then you should get into smth like DnD
Check out the sort of ttrpg / D&D adjacent game Microscope. It’s pretty much worldbuilding : the game.
@@PabbyPabbles yeah that's the bad part, I am unable to come up with a plot
@@naolucillerandom5280 Go into D&D. If that doesn't interest you then use this technique I be doing sometimes.
Mix 2 or more of your favorite shows together like a terrible abomination before cherry-picking the things you like about each fused-idea you made. If you like an idea, keep it. If you don't, fuse the fusions. Do it until you got something you like to write. This technique probably don't work with everyone though so do as you will with it.
I feel that we have neglected here Type 3: The obsessive compulsion of Type One for everything to be internally consistent and logically fleshed out combined with the Free Spirited incorporation of every single new and cool idea into the mythos without ever fully explaining to the audience the very real internal logic and sometimes just forgetting to bring it back entirely because the plot never demands it.
Fellow Type 3s, were you at?
I alternate between "oh this idea is so cool, lets put it in" and "oh shit oh fuck none of this makes any damned sense what do I do, time to rework everything and build some semblance of coherence out of it" every few months, so, kinda type 3 ?
I'm just happy enough building a small glossary and a bunch of 1 paragraph bios (and they're kinda just more elaborate versions of "she's like Genghis Khan, but a hot Asian chick")
plus Tagalog is my native language, so I just follow its syntax rules if I want something spicier than "Thenameus Yslatinus" or "Crack O'Caigne" for like conlangs and names and shit...
Yeah, pretty much every time.
i think everyone is fixated on being type 3 as if everybody did something wrong if someone doesn't go by some rule of internal realism
i think it limits everyone's imagination to a degree where nobody can't think of anything anymore
it makes magic and fantasy a lot lot less... magic and fantastic
I add whatever i can think of and then find a reason why it exists and flesh everything out like that
He did the first part and I was like "This is me-uhhhh, DAMN, I'm not THAT bad, maybe I'm the second type." Then it got to the second type and I am GLADLY in the first type
Me, writing sci-fi: There needs to be a believable medium in which ftl travel is possible, I'll just read a bunch of papers to try and understand a bit more.
Also me, still writing sci-fi: AND THEN THE GUY IN COOL ROBOT PUNCHES BIG ALIEN MONSTER YEEEEAAAAHHH
I'm really into the detailed world building in many aspects but at a point you have to acknowledge that in a work intent is vital, otherwise it might accidentally just become a glorified simulation... Artistic intent in inevitable in fiction. And also we must remember that not all soft world building is just excuses for incompetence, sometimes we make stories about topics that only get more boring when you attempt to overexplain them, like the supernatural, ghosts, visions, prophecies or just plain magic and soft world building can very much be well made and work!
I personally love adding these ”cow tools”-like elements when describing the spirits in my world as the bigger of them are simply incomprehensible to both the characters and ourselves in many ways.
Yep, intent is something that most writers fail to think about, unfortunately. Like, Tolkien's Legendarium, he absolutely had a _reason_ to make all that shit up. Of course part of it was just worldbuilding exercise, but on a grander scale he wanted to re-contextualize Christian mythology, focus on specific elements of it he found interesting, and explain how other lesser "deities" might exist within it without going against the One True God thing. How the world was once a mythical, magical place and became less so over time. In his mind most worldwide mythologies had some shared elements and he believed they were all echoes of what "really happened", which human beings could never comprehend, so they turned it into stories.
...Or The Elder Scrolls. Sure TES didn't start out with a "point" but when Kirkbride gave it one it became a far, far more interesting world. A milennia-spanning story about a world where the fundamental ideas of qaballah and some Hindu philosophies are _literally true;_ where there's a Godhead which can't reconcile it's orderly / chaotic, light / dark, anima / animus (whatever) sides. The story of that Godhead's within-universe emanation AKA / LKHN, fighting with itself over whether it wants to allow some other living thing the experience of dreaming a universe for itself. The story of the poor mortals plopped onto the world they created, cogs in a giant universe-building machine and the question of whether any of them will _ever_ really figure it out. Because, like, it's just about loooove, man. Those two halves are still embodied in them and they're still beating each other up. Can they figure out that they're being deceived, and who really wants what's best for them? (They can't, the half who wants what's best for them got his heart ripped out and now he's been replaced by some jackass scheming, lying, statutory rapist old emperor everyone decided to worship.)
Too many fantasy and sci-fi stories are actually stories you could've just placed in the real world without changing anything. If you _can_ write your story in the real world just _do_ that, unless you can come up with novel enough ideas that they actually add something through pure childlike "shit, that's cool" which most writers can't, actually.
@@colbyboucher6391 I don't think there's anything wrong with exploring cool ideas because they're cool, I think the keyword though, is exploring. If you want to add ghosts for fun with no greater purpose, go right ahead, just make sure that you thoroughly think about how ghosts might genuinely affect the world and a story.
That said, even if you don't, I really don't think it's all that bad. Harry potter is a good example of a story that just has a ton of cool shit that isn't explored in complexity at all but it doesn't matter because many aspects of the books are good and the world is fun even if shallow.
@@colbyboucher6391This is a really good point, I think I've been looking in the wrong directions in developing some of my ideas. You're totally right, part of the appeal of fantasy is the "what if" factor that comes alongside things like dragons, monsters, mages, etc. What WOULD that be like, and how would it prove similar and different to our own world? ASOIAF is my favorite book series, and was very formative, I appreciate the realism of it's people but at the same time it's good to refresh that that story is still very much fantasy and many aspects are dictated by extraordinary circumstances
I agree, however you need to make room for there to be a reason that makes sense, even if the reader, or you as the author never know it.
@@colbyboucher6391>Too many fantasy and sci-fi stories are actually stories you could've just placed in the real world without changing anything.
I've been reading sci-fi for decades and haven't noticed this being a big problem, so from my perspective that's quite the statement, to be honest. May I ask you to provide some examples?
Can’t wait to read Shrimp and Truth
RIP Katak :(
And its sequel Of Crustaceans and Consciousness
As someone who has lost several hours of sleep thinking about plate tectonics, yea. First guy is pretty relatable.
I've been readin up on how objects with 4-dimensional directions would possibly interact in a 3-dimensional world so I can undertstand what could be possible and what couldn't with no intention of ever actually explaining this to the reader. I felt so called out by the first one.
use Theory of Relativity. Basically the universe is 4D aka 3D space + 1D time
according to theory of relativity.
3D characters can stay at 4D and 5D space but can't interact with them
Okay, so to clarify, I do realize this is a spectrum, and I don't literally think all worldbuilders fall into one of these two categories. Everything here is exaggerated, and nothing is really meant to be "accurate." It's just a silly video; please don't take it too seriously!🙂
Well too bad because the first part of the video was literally me in a mirror. I think I still have some Wikipedia tabs open on astrophysics. I was trying to calculate the rotation speed of my fictional planet in order to make an accurate calendar XD.
no. stand your ground, king. you are merely making people uncomfortable by revealing the truth, as all greats have done. will they burn you at the stake for unveiling these truths? perhaps. will their descendants condemn them for the way they have treated you? certainly.
there are only two kinds of worldbuilders. and, moreover, there are no silly videos.
Lol, it was fun!
I'm a lot more like Type 1, though.
they're definitely on a spectrum
I think the best response to all those who need clarification of the vid is - "Cow tools!"
I (Type I) haven’t been called out this hard in a long time, lmao. That monologue was all of my anxiety as a worldbuilder condensed into a Shakespearian soliloquy. Well done.
Me too, Type 1 is literally me 😂
If it helps... accurate plate tectonics has never made a single story worth reading. If that sort of stuff inspires you, great, but it's ultimately completely irrelevant to a compelling world or story.
how much of it do you ACTUALLY use in your stories though? Its always good to learn and i won't knock you for that at all, but i had myself convinced i needed to be type 1 in order to be a respected author, and then i did some reading research and i was like wait, literally none of it matters and no one cares LOL. As long as your made up shit isn't like a one and done thing thats awful convenient in that moment, do whatever the hell you want and anyone that complains can go eat a textbook tbh
@@katierasburn9571 I'd argue it probably makes writing good stories harder, actually, because you end up trying to fit the story into your world, rather than build the world around your story, and that's going to be limiting.
@@seigeengineit's not, there's a balance. Details of everything that's relevant are required. For example i don't care about food so never once have i mentioned eating habits, just once a peculiar food item. So no food research. However for action, weapon and armour research is necessary. You need the story before the research as a thumb rule for consistency
I’m type 2 definitely. I see a concept, like it, write it in, then forget about it.
Same, then I go back to make sure it all makes sense but I forget why I added that idea in and take it out then I come back a few days later forget what I took out and why and the cycle continues
I’m writing a story currently that centers around a couple of characters that live just a state away from one another who live vastly different lives, and it’s fun to toy with tonal consistency between them.
One character lives in a fantastical zone affected by a reality-distorting machine and must journey through an absurd yet very real world to achieve the mundane goal of delivering a package, while the other lives in a state that is perfectly normal and outside of the machine’s influence, slowly unraveling a massive conspiratorial rabbit hole about the initial construction of the machine responsible.
It’s fun to sort of bat back and forth between their distinct tones, and explore how the fantastical Connecticut Exclusion Zone can sometimes feel more normal and humdrum than the “””real world””” beyond its borders, despite the inherent impossibility and absurdity therein.
There’s a lot that’s kind of “because it’s cool,” but there’s nothing in there that I haven’t very thoroughly considered.
Every element of the world must feel believable or at the very least grounded in a consistent internal logic.
That actually sounds really cool
So basically one guy lives in Ohio and the other somewhere else.
@@elnacho657 I knew it was only a matter of time.
@@sleepy-fc6rf Well, it took two weeks. I was surprised to be the first one pointing this out.
That sounds awesome.
It’s sorta like the problem between hard sci-fi versus soft sci-fi; hard sci-fi is often criticised for being more interested in being scientifically accurate than in telling a compelling story
the funny thing it isnt even accurate
I really wish people would divide soft scifi away from space/future fantasy. Yes, they have shared roots, but I always felt that scifi ought to have the element of “science has made miracle possible and so stuff changes”, whereas Star Wars has [mundane literary structure], and there’s also sentient robots and space ships and lasers.
BTW, Gary Larson said Cow Tools was just a silly gag he thought up. People just interpreted it as something else.
how ironic
i have an entire google doc dedicated to explaining the attitude and traditions every culture in my fictional world has about skirts
And type three, the one who improvises everything and is still more detailed and more vague than either, you ask them any question about their world and whatever answer they come up with at that moment will be massively detailed and completely consistent
This is probably meant to be an intentional misunderstanding on the part of worldbuilder 2 and part of the joke, but wasn’t there an issue with people not getting cow tools? Like people thought there was more depth/meaning to it, but the joke was just that cow tools would be bad? Am I overthinking or over explaining this? Probably.
Edit: also I feel like mentioning that the cinematography/editing for the worldbuilder 1 section was excellent.
Yeah apparently Gary Larson knew the joke wasn't clear enough when his mom called him up after it was published to say she didn't get it.
the issue is that the joke was that if "cows had tools, they would probably be lacking in sophistication", being just meaningless shapes - the issue is, not all of the tools were meaningless shapes. One of them was distinctly a weirdly shaped saw, which implies that the other tools are weirdly shaped tools, but they *weren't*, all of the tools were just supposed to be meaningless shapes, Gary Larson just accidentally drew one that looked like a saw.
This made the punchline unclear causing a lot of people to write into the comic expressing their confusion over what was never supposed to be a confusing comic. This has resulted in Cow Tools being Gary Larson's personal most hated comic.
Really, the takeaway you should get from Cow Tools is this: have a clear distinction between the absurdist and non-absurdist elements of your work. If you include something that appears to be supposed to be taken at face value (a weirdly shaped saw) right next to stuff that is completely absurd (a bunch of meaningless shapes labeled "tools"), it'll make the audience look for what the absurd stuff is supposed to be, missing the actual meaning of the work as a whole
@@legathar8558 That is very helpful, thanks for the explanation
how is "tools made by cows would be bad" even supposed to be funny? no wonder people didn't get the joke, its stating the obvious and then saying "haha so funny right" like no?
@@katierasburn9571 the source of all humor is "hey, I'm pretty smart, actually." Hence, figuring out the joke is a large part of why the joke is funny, and why explaining the joke makes it a bad joke. A joke can be unfunny for 2 reasons: either the joke overestimated your intelligence and was too smart (math jokes requiring you to solve differential calculus), or the joke underestimated your intelligence and was too dumb (a 15 minute setup to a punline everyone saw coming).
Bro this hit good. I’m a world builder who feels insufficient when I write. Most of the time I feel that I need to know everything and instruct my reader to know everything while unknowingly boring my reader on exposition. So you make me realize a healthy does of consistent lore and mystery are great ways to start worldbuilding.
The story always comes first
As a general rule, tell the reader nothing about the world they don't absolutely need to know to understand the story.
@@seigeengine yeah, put the extra lore in supplement books or just publish it online
this sis the one lol, if you spend so long putting all your knowledge into your book, you'll have just wrote a textbook and not a novel, and by the end the characters will have only managed to take a walk up the road lmao
the trick is: you need to be an expert on your lore, but the reader needs to feel like a apprentice
All I know is that people of the first type usually end up not writing anything. They spend years inventing the world, politics, geography. But they never get to the interesting stories.
People of the second type sometimes write short stories.
I have ADHD and I can confirm that the first one is insanely accurate, when world building for my dnd campaign, I literally spent way too long making the difference of the flow of time in an alternate dimension seem feesable in the real world. Why do I do this to myself
My struggle is I really wanna makes a "Ghibli" like fantastical fantasy world but my ADHD literally won't let me do anything other than over explaining every detail and it becomes so boring
I felt exhausted just by listening type 1 but reading type 2's book must be a neverending headache.
Right, I like that this guy understands the issue with _both_ of these mindsets rather than blindly going with one or the other.
I skipped through the entirety of type 1 because i knew exactly how the rest of the monologue was gonna play out lmao
I was hoping that the Type II guy would just be something short and simple as "Dragons are cool" or "Cuz Magic" and just end the skit there, no further explanation
thats basically what the cowtools guy is, that writer that just throws in that stuff without a second thought cause they like it.
and the first guy is the person who never finishes a book cause theyre worrying about logical consistency to every little invisible detail.
its actually a spectrum,and you want to hit somewhere in the middle and have the best of both worlds, where the absurd cool things can exist but need to keep an internal consistency, and for that internal consistency to not be so rigid as to disallow creative uses of it.
Being a first type author for me is blessing and fun. I don't know why, but I feel amazing becoming all-studying-scientist to write. At first, it treats my curiosity to a lot of new information, which is exiting. Later it makes me dive deep into things I never knew, and feeling of getting more knowledgeable for me is amazing. And in the end, you got your artwork perfect. Well, it's probably still not perfect, but you did the best you could and you are proud of it. There comes pride in myself. I think, that's how it works for me. But maybe not everybody need all this
Agreed. For me, it's a cycle of the thrill of curiosity and learning, followed by frustration and dispair due to over-ambitious goals. But I just keep doing it, because at the end of the day, I've learned something and I've distilled my thoughts and ideas. And maybe, just maybe, I'll write a masterpiece someday :P (probably not)
I am somehow both of these, the first when I’m alone, the second the moment anyone asks me a question about the world building
We exist along a spectrum. I mostly just take ideas I like and weld them together before realising implications exist and acting on some of them because thinking about all of them drove me mad last time.
This is part of why I enjoy certain ideas. Like, having a world that's generally not too magical. There can be powerful mages, but if they're fairly rare, they don't influence things too much. If you want more of them, you can have isolationist factions, like maybe elves are pretty magical, but because they keep to themselves mostly, they don't have wide-reaching impacts on the basics of the world.
Things start getting wild when you make this stuff common. Like, the forgotten realms are especially egregious here, because you practically can't walk to the pub there without tripping over an epic-level wizard. How does a world like that even function?
Editors and most SF readers: "I just hope the actual story is good. You have a good narrative, right?"
SF writing community: "Sorry, too busy expecting realism out of myself for something that is quite literally not real. Don't worry though, I'm sure the plot will come any year now."
Not sure if this is actually what you're saying but there's a huge difference between realism and narrative consistency. Of course you make some basic "X is true here" statements that wouldn't make any sense in reality. You can make as many as you want and it's the audience's responsibility to accept that stuff. "Because it's cool" is a perfectly good reason for things. BUT when people make comparisons like you are now, it's often about human beings in a narrative where human beings are _still_ just human and haven't been established as anything more, inexplicably doing something you'd never expect a human being to be capable of doing. (Or any similar inconsistency.) Now it feels like the writer pulled something out of their ass because they couldn't come up with something plausible.
(On the other hand you might be complaining about hard Science Fiction which is seriously just not what you're looking for clearly, hard SF is mostly about speculating on how our world might be actually be different in the future, in a scientifically plausible way, hence the "science" part.)
@@colbyboucher6391 Yeah, people frequently confuse "realism" and "internal consistency" to be one in the same, often to the pedantic detriment of progress toward things that actually matter; you know, minor things such as "character" and "structure".
I'm so glad this isn't just me.
@@alfred8936My personal favorite approach is coming up with something out of pocket like "What if all gingers could read people's minds" and then just rolling with it and making sure that the plot is internally consistent across the board as you say. If people wanted realism they would go outside and live real life. They want a story first and foremost
@@kajamatousek247what powers do Africans get I hope we can be able to double jump😍😍
Dang, that first part is actually quite beautifully written.
it really is
The shrimp part is literally me randomly at 3 am.
As a Type 1, I’ve never felt more called out, lmao
This applies equally well to hard and soft Sci-Fi
soft sci-fi is just a fairy tale in futuristic setting
Change my mind
As a man who cannot really swim well but has spent an obscene amount of time learning about north atlantic off-shore dive welding for a character, number 2 hurts me.
I feel healthy mix of both, but I lean more to the side of the first one.
In an effort to understand my readers, my characters, and myself, I learned psychology.
And now, I can apply that knowledge in my daily life to benefit myself and others.
In my mythology book, I needed to study mythologies so that I had any clue of what I was writing, and now I know about mythologies, which really helped me on my history test.
“Which Greek deity was the goddess of love? Aphrodite. Artemis. Athena. Apollo.”
(It was Aphrodite)
Eh, psychology and mythology, at least on a basic level, are relevant to storywriting as a whole. I personally wouldn't consider looking into either to be in the first camp.
Cowtools has gotta be my new favourite counter-argument
Just so you know. Don't confuse incompetence with Cowtool argument.
If the story really doesn't make sense and you are shielded yourself behind Cowtool argument from everybodies criticism your story.
Your not fooling anyone from bad and lazy story writing.
Nah mate that mindset will lead you down the road of just excusing your own incompetent world building. The world you build wont feel real or important if the rules you setup get completely ignored in favor of adding whatever dipshit gimmick you got going on in your head
@theFORZA66
Are you a type one writer? Because I've known plenty, and lemme tell you this
No one (including yourself) should give a shit about your story unless you make it. I've known too many writers so focused on this "internal consistency" nonsense they forget that ideas are completely worthless. I can't read an idea and have it have the same effect as a completed story, but sure, waste your time you could be practicing your overall craft on whether vampires are logistically plausible
@clev7989 i mean it all comes down to personal preference but personally i cant take an authors world and lore seriously if the author doesnt either. I expect established rules and laws to remain consistent, and in cases where that rule is broken, there better be a good reason or a good explanation. The reasoning is simple: if laws are broken, i'm reminded that what im experiencing isn't actually a living breathing world but rather a bunch of ideas that only exist in someone's head and the sense of immersion breaks down completely
1:08 The Parshendi(listeners, singers, you know what I mean) are right here
Type 1 will make an interesting world that might have a few dedicated fans.
Type 2 knows how to engage with the people who will talk about it, and make it into a top 10 list of bad books, to sell more of the book.
Sorta unrelated, but as a native Vietnamese i love the way you use footage from your trip in this video (At first i was quite surprised at how familiar the scenery was). It's always nice for our developing country to get some representation, outside of the Vietnam war!
Tolkien vs. Rowling
Star Wars fans vs. Star Wars sequel writers
Lucas is somewhere in the middle.
@@_Majisto_ then there's the Legends/EU writers, who are also in the middle
Tolkien elves: an etherial race of unparalleled beauty with influences of judeo Christian angels, norse pagan Ljósálfar and Tolkiens own wife.
Rowling elves: 2ft tall uncle tom's
@@_Majisto_ nah, he is the second type.
I could learn a thing or two from the cow tools guy.
ayy yess the two extremes of writing -- perfectionism and winging it
As a person who watch many of documentaries and read so many book of sociology, economy, biology, archaeology, anthropology, mythology, and long ect. The first type fells so damn relatable
What Cristopher Nolan thinks he is vs. how he actually is
And you seem to be a mind reader.
I thought type 2 was going to be someone who gives absolutely no thought or justification to their world building and just writes the most bonkers, spectacular, moment possible with the only goal of creating the most epic scenes imaginable
kind of sound likes me
I have way too many mech and heaven killing weapons in my world
The cow tools thing is actually genius. It would make so much sense and explain so many things in books and in games. If you create a fixed web of world building, given enough time, people will complete the puzzle and attain complete information. It’d be as exciting as a game of chess. When perfect information exists, everything is just planning and connecting and executing. When you leave things open ended, vague, seeming like they have meaning, the mind runs wild. So if narrative fiction is designed to stimulate the mind, then getting the mind to stimulate itself by imagining the meaning whether it’s hidden or non existent is the pinnacle of achieving that goal.
"absurdism is not the same thing as incompetence" such wise words
So, I find myself most agreeing with the guy reading the manuscript and pointing out the blatant inconsistencies. I'm not a fan of strict worldbuilding, and I too have used "Cow Tools" in the past. But there's a difference between leaving some mysteries and unanswered questions and blatant laziness and the line was definitely crossed by the horse thing (the mind-reading thing I'm more ambivalent on).
The mistake author 2 makes is that while yes, some things should be left incomprehensible to the READER, that doesn't mean the AUTHOR should be left in the dark as well. An author should always develop their world a bit more than ever actually gets shown in the story, so that you have a solid foundation to build your characters out of without relying on endless exposition, and you have an extra toolkit of devices to answer questions that might pop up later. It's okay to never explain how the mind reading works in the text, but if your editor asks, you should be able to give them an answer.
Sometimes it makes sense to say wizard did it, but you can't say that about literally everything to excuse every inconsistency you come up with otherwise you're writing by the seat of your pants
I’m genuinely mad that I won’t ever know most of common worldwide knowledge and that in 100 years most of it will probably change anyway.
ALSO, I say my biggest problem with some of these stories is that yeah the world can feel so damn realistic but like.. the characters can feel like they exist only to explain the world rather than just being in it. Like Scavenger’s Reign showed me that the world can feel real while also having characters going through their own shit AND that you can show philosophical questions all at the same time.
Im a sucker for world building, the story matters more. Instead of being like “here’s a blank character to show what the world’s like” instead have the character, flesh out their beliefs and ideals, then focus on THEIR world. What’s their job? What do they think about themselves? Do they accept having their morals questioned? What are they willing to do to get what they want- or do they feel content with their life? How do they deal with not being able to protect the ones they love? Or guilt? Do they make fun of fetishes with their friends even though they secretly have that same fetish?
You can have hints of things like war happening in the background or new laws being introduced by how it affects the characters. So like if your character works at a shop that sells a certain type of food, only for a new discovery about how an ingredient in that food actually gives people cancer, how does that affect their story? What kinda shenanigans do they try doing to get out of that situation?
Also, I love fantasy adventure as much as the next guy… but do something different. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actual fantasy crime drama. Or a fantasy psychological horror. Or a fantasy story where there’s multiple intelligent species that all try dominating the world with their technology, and it’s in the perspective of an intelligent big that really wants to build up the courage to ask out another bug. I don’t know man. Just don’t settle for the same Tolkien fantasy races, and don’t settle for the same kinda story.
some people like more character centric narratives; some people like more world centric narratives
also i'm 100% certain that there is fantasy multispecies bug romance
There's urban fantasy crime drama at least, look to Rivers of London
Eh, if you really want to write a fantasy adventure, I think there’s room if you do it well. It's not all in the premise, but the characters, the themes, and especially the execution can bring freshness and value too. You just need to put in some work beyond what it takes to repeat the stuff that codified the genre.
I think that's the moral here. Think when you write. Not too hard, maybe. But think some.
@@cellularautomaton. I've read it
As someone who made an actual phylogenetic tree of my dragon species so that i could remain consistent about ths synapomorphies of each clade, evolutive chronology, biogeography and ecological impact while also taking in consideration that the magical capacity of transforming into other beings is plesiomorphic to dragons and i needed to be very careful about such a power that is crucial to the narrative for a plethora of reasons but also has huge implications about the existence of such beings...
I feel called out
You mean I _don't_ need to have scientific names and recordings for my fictional finch-esque species?????
@@rainbowlack for me it's actually important because it would be just out of character for one of my protagonists not to formally describe the species and keep records of them.
He's a big biology nerd, wears glasses and have braces and is definitely not a self insert sona because I wanted to imagine myself as a hydrokinetic frog superhero
Love this. Especially the first type is just too relatable. I was exactly like that when I first started out writing and worldbuilding, but I guess I have shifted more towards the second attitude over the years. Ultimately, worldbuilding is a tool for storytelling and internal consistency is secondary to just having a good story.
Alternating between each type like a metronome depending on the day and coffee intake is my favorite
that's me as well haha
I'm basically the first one with the difference being that if you were to ask me to show you what I've worked on I would just hand you a sticky-note with a poorly-drawn lizard on it
"does altitude affect the prevalence of adjectives in a language" is so relatable
I thought of two examples of this situation.
JRR Tolkien vs George Lucas (Lord of the Rings vs Star Wars)
Eiichiro Oda vs Akira Toriyama (One Piece vs Dragon Ball)
Star Wars force is much more consistent than Tolkien's magic.
@@GaribaldHludwig Not really. Star Wars has quite a few things that either don't make sense or just retcon other stuff. Specifically midichlorians contradicting how the force was described, some people using mind reading once but never again, and Order 66 killing every Jedi except Obi Wan, Yoda, and Luke, only to later be retconned to have dozens of Jedi who survived. I know that last one was a Disney retcon, but how did George Lucas expect for a galaxy wide extermination to be fully successful in a matter of days?
@@MajorMilk technically speaking, the "more jedis survived" was first an invention of the old EU.
@@r4pt0r12 My bad, thanks for letting me know.
@@MajorMilk
This is a total aside, but how the hell did no one try using the force after the jedi were wiped out? I mean, I don't care that much, but like... I would have at least tried it, even for fun.
Brandon Sanderson vs Terry Goodkind, except switch the personalities
How life, the universe, and everything works is way to interesting and way to filled with possibilities to not start the all-consuming process of constructing at least one world in your head. Like eventually you're going to think to yourself "I wonder what would happen if..." and you'll be absolutely screwed from then on. You will become an architect of a world only you'll really know of, and there's no way to ecape it.
I just wanted to make a wrestler in D&D, but after one thing leading to another, I made a feudal continent abandoned by all others on a planet of my own design. 👍🏻
"you can accept dragons, elves and talking trees, but you can't accept a 2021 BMW Series 530i with optional heated seating. why are you so bigoted?" -2nd writer
Full Metal Alchemist fans when they meet Undead Unluck fans.
I love how both writers are a little stuck up, even though they have drastically different approaches.
I like to write and also DM, and so I do a lot of world building. I used to lean heavily towards Type 1 (primarily in feeling like I had to get everything exactly right or else whatever I wrote would be trash) but I've recently been learning how to embrace ridiculousness in my own writing. It does have internal consistency! But I was so worried about making things serious and not 'going overboard, and then I realized (through some of my other writer friends) that overboard is HILARIOUS.
It the 1970s in a world almost identical to ours. This character is magic. Why? I dunno. Neither does this spy agency, but they're trying to figure it out. A time traveling wizard accidentally adopted a kid who's an escaped military experiment and is trying desperately to raise him while evading taxes and time police. Emus, after winning the emu war in Australia (a actual event in our real world, please look it up, I beg you), have been granted sovereignty and are going to help them fight aliens that want to take over the world. All of this is happening concurrently.
It is even more ridiculous than it sounds and I'm having an absolute blast writing this with my friends. We're developing incredibly detailed magic systems, researching how to realistically write injuries so we don't do that annoying thing movies do where the main character almost dies and just has a cut on their lip and a dramatic smear of blood from their hairline and completely walks it off, developing societies and history and trying to learn about combat tactics so we can better write the aliens, and generally trying to make a completely ridiculous world work in a way that makes sense internally.
Now, I've learned that it's important to be accurate, but you don't need to kill your enjoyment of a thing stressing over becoming an expert, just learn enough detail to write it well and keep updating your knowledge as it becomes relevant. Learning and being curious is a big part of the fun of writing!
Showing and not telling, knowing what to leave mysterious, letting the reader interpret, are all really important tools, like negative space when making art, but it's important to use them deliberately rather than just to excuse lazy writing.
Having fun is the most important part. That said, I only write for fun with my friends. We never publish any of it, even online, so we don't have to worry about satisfying fans (I guess unless we count as fans of each other) or publishing companies to make money. It's not my livelihood, so a professional writer probably has their own sets of priorities. But I always find myself drawn to passion projects. If you genuinely love what you're making, it shows.
Also don't be afraid to make memes or jokes of your own writing. They're shockingly efficient ways to explain plot points, and make it way more fun. This is just random lessons I've learned in my very unprofessional writing journey, so different things may work for different people. But I hope everyone has a great time with their stories!
i thought type 2 will be a joke, then i thought oh it's actually amazing, then i thought it's a joke again
This was genuinely fantastic, man. Really really well done.
0:11 I love the fact that you can see the phone recoding the scene on the window. Funny hell.
As a guy who specialized in physics and decided to delve into fantasy writing for my career, I honestly feel called out. XD Love the work man
Type 1 is me daydreaming about worldbuilding while not worldbuilding. Type 2 is finally home, smackin them cultures and histories into existence.
Why did I relate to every single thing mentioned in Type 1? I have literally been unable to sleep because I wanted to learn more about abiogenesis. I was cackling about the ejectives comment, and had to explain to my wife, because I knew exactly what you were talking about. The subatomic accuracy was my most recent obsession. Every field mentioned is something I've looked into. When you got to shrimp, I was certain you were going to start talking about colours that we can't imagine, and I had to pause because my mind started wandering and thinking of those shrimp that can punch at the speed of sound.
Is this a curse? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a daydream; no escape from curiosity.
Ah yes mantis shrimps…I was just thinking about them
As a visual artist, this is an accurate depiction of my daily life. And I don't even write anything - well, outside of my head, I guess...
Imagine that first author in the middle of the “I’m everything” speech someone asks if he knows how to surf
I was expecting the second one to be a "lol wouldn't it be cool if there were vampire dragons who breathe blood fire" kinda guy, second one here feels more like an inexperienced writer instead of another type... but I guess that's the point of the skit maybe, very nice anyway :D
that would certainly be cool
Maybe this is a bit cruel, but I feel as though if the videomaker was being more honest, that's how it would've been. I kinda think he's a type 1 writer, not because he insulted type 2s (after all he did the same with type 1s), but because he spent way too long getting to a very basic joke.
As it stands it's a chariture of type 1 and 2 writers that's so hyperbolic it doesn't actually mean much.
@@clev7989yeah I feel like the number 1 type was done very well and planned out, while the type 2 was part was done very lazily and badly, not representing it accurately
Lol, maybe that's just an ironic metacommentary on the video