The Ethical Questions World-building Demands from Us

So, I haven’t written an essay in a while, and I wanted to do something on what writers call world-building. World-building was first introduced into the world as a term in through the British magazine the Edinburgh Review 1820 by Arthur Eddington, where he discussed the alternate laws of physics that could exist in science-fiction.

World-building is particularly important in Science fiction because it sparks inquiry. We’re made to ask questions about our own world if things were different in another. Some science fiction has even lead to science realty, like Jules Verne’s conception of the submarine before such a thing existed on an industrial scale. To me, the value of inquiry within Sci-Fi world-building is obvious, so I won’t be asking why people spend time on that.

But then there’s the more whimsical side of world-building that gets opened up to far more scrutiny. The fantasy worlds of magic, wizards, fairies and monsters. This includes even the less flamboyant realms of folklore and urban legend, which often leave us asking “was some of this real” or “was there a grain of truth to that?”

A video game I think about on occasion is one from my favorite lines of tactics games, Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance. The story in this game is about a group of school kids who get sucked into a speculative world (what we identify in the west as “a portal fantasy”) where magic and talking fantasy creatures are real. But more important to these kids is the fact that some of their lives are markedly better: one girl who was made fun of for the lack of melanin in her hair has the permanent hair color of her desire, and a paraplegic child can now walk. One of the least changed of the children, our protagonist, knows that fantasy world can’t really be real (the plot reinforces this multiple times as the truth) and that he, his friend and his brother need to get home.

Marche calls this world escapism- and he’s technically not wrong, even diagetically. His sprite and his dialogue has been invoked so often as a criticism to the purported wish-fulfillment in the fantasy genre that he has become a meme in the zeitgeist of internet reaction images.

The very nature of larger-than-life fiction makes a certain subset of pragmatist revile large swaths of it, and I don’t always think the disdain comes from a place of malice.

We have to face that we live in a real world where fantasy and delusion are often insisted, from places of power, that these things are the truth: that vaccines are ineffective; that pandemics which kill and permanently injure millions of people are mythical; that CO2 emissions have no impact on a globally rising temperature; that biological sexual expression is only revealed by the number types of chromosomes a person has. These delusions reinforced daily, which we have already proven false through scientific methods and inquiry, do not go away despite being fictive. And that, to me, proves a very disturbing point.

We live in a world where speculative realities have real power over our lives.

Look no further than the Salem witch trials where innocent men and women were burned at the stake knowingly for seized property. Look no further than Palestine where indigenous people are murdered and brutalized in their own homes in the name of “condemning Hamas” for the transparent purpose of implanting a colonialist ethno-state shadow-run by the United States of America.

Look at even the less overtly harmful things. How many people do you know have self-identified as a “Gryffindor?” Maybe not within the last two years after Rowling’s fall from grace in the public eye, but how about the last five? Were you one of the people who shamelessly identified with a Harry Potter house?

“No, I’m not a shit-eating neoliberal,” you might say. Okay.

How about I ask about your Meyers-Briggs personality type (or is this conversation getting too INT-J for you)? What about your zodiac sign (it’s just for fun and it’s not that serious, right?) How about your birth stone (why do you hate on aesthetic so much George)? How many home remedies have you tried knowing that they probably won’t work but that little voice in your head tells you “but wouldn’t it be neat if they did?” How about drinking ayahuasca or partaking in other psychoactive stimulants to pursue derivatives of spiritualism stripped from their cultural settings, people, or original contexts?

How about that fast food burger that always looks more colorful and neatly put together on the image than what you get in the box? How about that outfit you got online that doesn’t have quite the same cut or quite the same vibrancy of color?

I don’t even need to touch religion as a whole because I’m certain every person reading this article has seen atheists ranting (sometimes justifiably) about the control organized religion exerts over populations through the usage of fiction.

But the truth of the matter is that religion isn’t the only player to ever blame. I could go on and on and on about things that are fabricated, which influence our real world behaviors, which we have accepted collectively as an inescapable part of our lived experience. For instance: ever revisted a friend or a relative you haven’t seen in ten years despite the picture of them still being perfectly clear in your head? They won’t be the same person anymore.

All of these examples are objectively false versions of reality fabricated for the purpose to give human beings comfort. It becomes Escapism when that comfort delivered also causes harm, which is what makes escapism a lot more manipulative and pervasive than we think it is.

Escapism is something we don’t necessarily get to choose so much as it gets foisted unto us through culture, through fandom, and through capitalism. Words describing broad systems like these can wash over us just like the tide does, but it becomes harder to ignore that they’re here every day, just like a Beach-front condo subsiding into the sea.

The prevalence of escapism is criticized more and more each day in our global media and our public conversation, often, ironically, while also being shipped and marketed with the aesthetics of nostalgia. The decade of the 1980’s of the United States in particular, many who identify one of the grossest violators of mass-marketed comfort and waste in the history of the United States, has, in an ultimate statement of irony, become mass commodified as a nostalgia product itself. Fun hair. Neon Lights. Synth and Vapor wave.

These aesthetics, these short hands and symbols of culture in an era in time, are manufactured and re-manufactured through the processes of world-building.

We obviously do not have a time machine which lets film crews go back to the 1980s. We do not even have the same physical props to use for time-accurate fashion or products, because most of these things disappeared from shelves and, in many cases, the process for physical reproduction of the product became lost technology.

So world-builders are hired to bring lost worlds back from the dead. A world which was once real, a 1980’s America, becomes fictive in pop media like Stranger Things and Black Mirror’s “San Junipero.” In the latter example Gugu Mbatha-Raw says, in my opinion, one of the series’ strongest lines: that she doesn’t want to be “like all those lost fucks at the Quagmire, trying to feel something.” Lost, trying to feel something as literal ghosts, in a factually dead time, in their 1980’s nostalgia simulator.

I’ll later address how San Junipero dismisses the idea of nostalgia as inherently toxic, but I don’t think this line is meant to be discarded entirely.

We come once again to this very paradoxical state of media criticism where we both openly criticize world-building as a tool kit for producing escapes from the real world while also expressing our love for the comfort it brings us. We love the fun hair and the robotic toys for the joy and the whimsy they bring us, but we also blame them for our detachment of the real world; the comfort they bring us is often identified as the part of the festering wound they leave in us.

There are many works about how escapist nostalgia can be destructive and ruin lives. Sometimes they’ll state that they make you prioritize fictional characters over real relationships, like the Anime Club in the comic Gunshow. Sometimes they’re tragic tales of dependency like an artists’ relationship with their own art in What Dreams May Come. Western nerds and their Otaku counterparts are generally considered the poster boys of toxic nostalgia, often lampooned, sometimes to near-cartoonish degrees like the main cast of the Big Bang Theory or “the comic book guy” in The Simpsons. The furry subculture is also often lampooned for their investment in nostalgia and comfort, often dismissed as poorly adjusted adults with unhealthy delusions rather than queers navigating a hostile heterosexist macroculture through safety networks and aliases.

Quizzically, patriotic action and war films, which often present worlds just as fictive in their aesthetics and cast mannerisms as Back to the Future, very rarely get labelled as escapism despite their overt appeal to nostalgia nor for invoking a desire in their target audience for a world that never existed.

Works by Tom Clancy and Cormac McCarthy are no less fantastic than works by Tolkien or Frank Herbert. But accusations of escapism often come much easier from the mouths of audiences for the fantasy genre than the action or “hard” sci-fi genres. The romance genre has the worst of it from audiences, despite most often depicting the most believable and realistic scenarios (two people arouse one another, get into a relationship, and try to make it work). I suspect part of a reason for this is that audiences sometimes conflate indulgence and pleasure with escapism, and the same can be said for or materialism. This is perhaps because escapism often entraps audiences with pleasure, comfort, and indulgences through materialism; but this does not make any of these individual things inherently bad!

San Junipero addresses that getting to partake in the pleasures of life is not a luxury that everybody gets to have through the experiences of its bedridden protagonist. Yorkie experiences dancing and late night walks on the beach for the first time through the means of accessibility tech– something its other protagonist, Kelly, has taken for granted for the majority of her own life.

The Barbie Movie, one of the most world-building intensive productions I have ever seen (which has won it many major awards for its set design alone) address overtly shallow attacks on aesthetics: you can’t call Barbie a fascist because she’s pretty, plastic, and wears pink because she “doesn’t control the trains or the flow of commerce.” She is a reflection of somebody’s idea of a woman, and how that changes throughout time. Greta Gerwig uses worldbuilding to condemn the notion that aesthetics are inherently authoritarian tools when often authoritarianism is only concerned with power. The message that Gerwig presents is that we can’t get angry at the concept of a doll or the concept of a painting when works of art and aesthetics are merely a reflection of humanity. These aren’t inherently good or bad things. Gerwig is just stating that the truth behind the choices of aesthetics is considerably more complex than we might first assume.

But the Barbie movie, and the production process that its world-building demanded, itself isn’t immune to criticism. The was a global shortage in particular shade of pink for a while due solely to this movie’s set design. That pigment had to come from somewhere, and I can only imagine the production line stressors introduced to increase production and handle demand. The mass production of plastic toys like Barbies, as well as Mattel’s desire to infinitely grow as a business, also play a part in global dependence on oil. I don’t think this is the fault of Gerwig or even the mere conception of Barbie dolls having a right to exist, but it’s impossible to untangle these ethical problems from the subject matter of the film: Barbie.

The ethics ramifications of reader/writer relationships to worldbuilding, which haunt me, is the central topic of this essay. It makes me ask, again and again,: “if we know that the tools of world-building can, and often does, enable the most toxic elements of escapism, why is it a worthwhile to produce fictive worlds in fantasy at all?”

I’ve already answered that sci-fi worldbuilding inspires inquiry, which I think is critical to the advancement of human technology. But for the rest of speculative fiction, I think I have two answers; one for creators and one for readers and viewers.

My answer for readers and viewers is that it can engage people with art who might otherwise have little to no creative experiences in their lives. I don’t think that merely consuming media makes a person more creative or a more critical thinker. But I do think interest in art is the first step somebody has to take to begin the life-long process of self-reflection and creative thinking. One has to care about something to think about it in any capacity, and worldbuilding is a crucial step to building that relationship with the viewer.

My answer to creator is that practicing world building makes you develop an understanding of systems in your fictional works. You become more considerate about details, both in your fictional worlds and the real one. Paying attention to how somebody dresses, how those clothes are made, and where the materials come from might seem an exercise in tedium for questions the majority of people will never care about- but if you’re a curious thinker, it leads you to other questions that could be far more relevant to your fantasy world. “If this armor is made from dragon scales, are there dragon poachers? Do dragons just shed their scales harmlessly or are they killed for their skins? Did a lone artisan make this, or was it akin to real-life fast-fashion industries? What might a production line of dragon armor look like? How might it harm their world?”

Readers who get invested in your fantasy world like to be rewarded for their inquiry just as much as sci-fi or historical fictions readers do. Sometimes a valid answer is “it doesn’t matter where the dragon armor came from because this story is about the person wearing the armor, not the dragon it came from,” but sometimes an equally valid answer can be “the story is about the person wearing the dragon armor because of where the armor came from.”

World building frequently makes you analyze your own comfort zones and patterns. For instance: does your fantasy always take place in a European town with castles (Alternatively: is it always a desaturated steampunk world with goth and punk aesthetics)? Does your non-Christian fantasy order always look like Catholic monks? Did you do that as an intentional choice, or was it just short-hand for something you didn’t want to think about too deeply? Do the people with non-western features or darker skin always partake in the villainous roles and so the handsome light-skinned characters always partake in the heroics?

Or maybe you reactively reject all or some of these old tropes, but do you something where all architecture is modern and indistinct, every character is extremely diverse in a melting pot setting, and every character is an individualist to the point where it can be hard to identify any sense of cultural hegemony in the setting, (which, in some cases, can make it harder for viewers to navigate an unfamiliar setting).

When we as creators make more intentional world building choices, we’re deliberately setting tones and revealing parameters for the reader. And we send messages in our work when we see characters uphold these parameters or defy them.

Yet, what frustrates readers and writers time and time again is the limits of the influence of fiction in the real world. We can see a relative root for the rebels in star wars one minute and then see them vote for a fascist governor the next day. We can see somebody love the messages of acceptance and finding a home in people that aren’t your blood family in Harry Potter and then see the writer lobby against trans people around the world.

The messages in fiction that can feel very clear and on-the-nose don’t always translate to a person’s sense of real-world ethics. They don’t always internalize the logic of these messages into their interior moral compasses, if they even have one.

But that doesn’t mean the messages of fiction are lost to everybody. In a worst case scenario where all of the messages and ethical considerations of a work get lost to somebody, at the very end of the day, you made them pick up a book and read something.

The chance that somebody is willing to read means that there is always a chance for them to think, a chance for them to reflect, a chance for them to make their own decisions, and a chance for them to change their mind about something.

That’s not something a writer will ever have control over. But the writer’s job is to build worlds- not to make others live it in a preferable fashion. The reader alone is responsible for that.