Last week our own Charlie Jane Anders gave us someexcellent adviceon the difference between good Worldbuilding and great Worldbuilding – but sometimes creators of some of our favourite man run afoul of a few tiresome Worldbuilding tropes . Here ’s seven clichés that need to stop cropping up in Sci - Fi and Fantasy .
https://gizmodo.com/the-difference-between-good-worldbuilding-and-great-wor-1658543247
Header Image Credit : Dragon Age Inquistion Concept Art byMatt Rhodes . It gets a few thing wrong , but overall Bioware ’s Fantasy World is pretty well put together .
7. The Evil Empire of Evil Evilness
Bad instance : The Leaders of Valkyria Chronicles ’ Empire , who are totally not Anime Nazis you guys . No wait , they are .
Look , we get it – we English people were kind of monumental d - old bag as we gad our way across the world colonise stuff for our Empire . A sizeable misgiving of self-confidence is occasionally a beneficial thing . But why is it every Empire we make out across always some giant conglomerate of absolute , totalistic evil ? Why is n’t a Federation ever the dick , or a duchy , or an coalition ? Nope , always an Empire . There might be some inherent douchiness to the procedure of create an conglomerate , but please , if you ’re writing about one , do n’t make them this funny mess of mustache - twirling badness . Give it some layers . Make some conflict . Anything but another Evil Empire .
6. Faux-Medieval Europe
spoilt representative : Dragon Age ’s Thedas skirts around this one . It ’s not geographically Europe ( although if you flip it upside down you kinda get something like it ) , but you ’ve have your vaguely English Guy , your vaguely Spanish Guys , your vaguely French Guys and your periodic vaguely Irish / Welsh guys .
But if you ’re not mesmerised with it , if castles and rolling hills are simply all you ’ve get wind lately , if you ’ve watch the Lord of the Rings motion-picture show and want to make your own – then do n’t compose another Medieval Fantasy . Fantasy ought to be a non - denominational cathedral to the imagination , where any idea , no matter how impossible in world , can expand and enliven us . It ’s not about Modern hoagy - writing style , but about use of your pages . China Mieville ought to be one colorful brick in a photomosaic of newfangled materials .
Fantasy can encompass so many different themes and environs . Yet another round of Ye Olde Europe - e is getting awfully tiresome .
5. Insert Apostrophe Here For Exoticness
tough Example : Stargate both messed up and used this one correctly – Apostrophised name like Teal’c and Rya’c where the apostrophe is used to refer an honorific or surname are all right , but then you get the Goa’uld , Tok’ra , Zat’nik’tel guns and Tau’ri …
Unless you ’re using an apostrophe right , keep them out of your names . There ’s nothing more clichéd than fibre t’alk’ing li’ke they ’re ( see that one ’s postulate ! ) bl’oo’dy id’iots . Like all linguistic tools when you ’re make new worlds , punctuation mark should have a full stop , and not be liberally sprinkled over every humankind just for some visual genius on something that ’s written down . That is , unless you ’re writing about a backwash of perpetual stutterer .
4. The Single-Use World
speculative Example : Almost every Star Wars planet ever . Forest Moon ! City World ! Ice World ! Desert World ! Water World !
Although you might have a world that ’s been terraformed for one specific function – see the Tea grove satellite of the excellentAncillary Sword – but it ’s not instinctive or smart to have a world that is made up of a single ecosystem . The universe you make should be diverse and interesting places , not singular masses . This does n’t just go for ecology and environments , but the race that inhabit them too ( more on that later ) .
3. Common Nouns out the Wazoo
Bad Example : Destiny , Bungie ’s latest gun . You bed , the one where The Guardians must wield The Light give to them by The Traveller at The Tower ( where you could talk to The Traveller ’s emissary , The Speaker ) to press The Darkness and go to The Black Garden because The Stranger tell you to , and … ugh , you get the point The Point .
call things is fun , and while yes , referring to it with an unspecific Common noun ( usually prefaced by a ‘ The ’ ) to it can give a a setting or a conception a form of grandeur to a name , but if you over do it – like the examples from Destiny above – it just make you sound rote and unoriginal .
2. The Homogeneous Race (That’s never Humanity)
spoilt deterrent example : A raft of unlike race in both sci - fi and Fantasy can fall into this trope , but let ’s go with the classic granddaddy of them all with Tolkien ’s Elves , who are all snooty nature lover , or his dwarves , who all love atomic number 79 and live underground , or his Hobbits , who are all simple agricultural folk .
A standardised deficiency of diversity that lead to exclusive - habit humans can also hap to whole species too – this can be especially usual in sci - fi when a whole major planet are seemingly populate by one homogenous mountain of the same citizenry without nations or alliances or any sort of diverseness , but it can bear upon anyone . A subspecies without different political identities or religions or state or any sort of pigeonholing is one without much culture to it or any variety of interest . If everyone is all the same or of the same disposal and all concord about something , where ’s the the interestingness in that ? wash should be multi - dimensional and nuanced , not sweeping generalisation made chassis .
Bonus indicate if this is contrast with Humanity being exalt and portray as a diverse and multi - ethnical raceway and are special because of tell multifariousness . If you could spell diverse humans , why not any other diverse subspecies ?
1. The Precursor Civilisation
Bad Example : Halo ’s Precursors . They ’re not even Halo ’s only Precursor race , there s another called the Forerunners ( seen above ) . Precursors for everyone !
require some crying Worldbuilding ? Bam ! Someone ( unremarkably super forward-looking ) was here before , did everything before , served as the basis for all the engineering that present races have , and are usually involved in whatever the current secret plan is for some reasonableness ( usually because they were probably taken out by the current Big Bad in an endless bicycle of everything that has materialize before , happening again ) . Not only is it a sort of flash stenography to immediately sum up depth to a world , it also seems to have been the raging new thing in the past few years that ’s seen several property latch onto it and try their hand . Not everything has to have befall before !
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