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Worldbuilding vs Character Development
4 years ago
Scribbling nonsense all across the board like jaguars leaping from trees of leather bodices encasing aged withered corpses whose eyes dazzle with the light of one million and three silver satellites flying over Los Angeles hiding illegal immigrants from Irish potato farms built atop the golden ruins of El Dorado filled with demonic Ewoks hurling tremendous tankards of tons of Tylenol at the panda bear ninjas that hide around every corner of the magic square building trying desperately to pull up its skirt and set roots on another cubic square inch of the board upon which I am scribbling nonsense.
I recently finished reading Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo.
It’s a fairly neat introduction to a fantasy world. I haven’t seen Russia used as a point of inspiration for a setting like this before and I appreciate seeing how that culture and history are translated here. Ravka is a bleak place, cold and barren and ravaged by war from hostile neighbors on all sides, suffering under the rule of a careless and self-indulgent monarchy, and the presence of a sea of darkness full of horrific monsters cutting the country in half is practically a drop in the bucket. The Grisha and their abilities are like a meeting of bending from Avatar: The Last Airbender and alchemy from Fullmetal Alchemist, with a strong emphasis on high-class elegance. The protagonist, Alina, is forced to confront her long-standing inner doubts to open up to the world and recognize her potential while she explores these new avenues that have been opened up to her. I had some qualms with the plot but I was overall really engrossed in the ideas that this story had to offer and I’m really curious to see where the story goes from here.
My only hope is that the characters will actually get a reasonable amount of development from here on out.
Despite the attention that is lavished upon the setting, the characters of Shadow and Bone leave something to be desired in my eyes. Aside from Alina herself, the only characters who leave a distinct impression of being reasonably well-rounded are Mal, the Darkling, Genya, and maybe Baghra. The others are mostly limited to a few basic traits and little else. Ivan is a gruff asshole. Zoya is a petty jealous bitch. David is quiet and obsessed with his work. Botkin is a mildly sus Asian stereotype. The King is Nicholas II and the Apparat is Rasputin. Alina has four named classmates at the Little Palace who are occasionally mentioned, Nadia, Marie, Sergei, and Ivo, and I don’t think I could tell you anything about any of them other than that they’re catty and vain—Nadia and Marie are practically interchangeable and I don’t think they ever appear separately from each other. Even Mal’s character mostly revolves around his relationship to Alina, his person outside that being about his position as a tracker and not much else, and despite being a vital lynchpin of Alina’s arc he’s absent for more than half of the book.
I could talk about other problems I have with the book but the main thing I want to focus on is the dichotomy of development as it is applied to the characters and to the world of a story. I feel that worldbuilding is kind of a hot topic in sci-fi and fantasy stories these days, readers really want to see that you have an expansive setting with all the details about how the characters in it go about their lives and the struggles they have to deal with and what the economy and politics and religion are like and so on and so forth. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, I certainly enjoy seeing all these aspects myself, I like seeing what people can come up with as a reflection of the world around them, I like seeing how creators can take a concept and examine what kind of broader impact it would have on its world. But I don’t think that means much of anything if that setting doesn’t have any interesting characters to follow. I want to see arcs, I want to see change, I want to see struggle.
Some of you reading this may recall that a while ago I read the Spliced trilogy, another YA series which I felt had a similar issue in regard to its focus. I thought that the author put a lot of work into developing the setup for the world in which the story takes place. There was a lot to show how run-down the future has become between disease and climate crises, in some ways closely paralleling real life. There are great lengths to demonstrate the processes involving in splicing and what culture has sprung up surrounding chimeras. It was clear that a point was being made of how the logistics of discrimination don’t make sense with how much time is spent ruminating upon the details of the Genetic Heritage Act—e.g. if chimeras aren’t legally considered people then they can’t be arrested and charged for crime. All these details go a long way in elaborating on how dark and grim and ultimately fairly realistic the setting is, which helps make the story feel believable.
But I can’t say that I felt much of anything for most of the characters, even more so compared to Shadow and Bone. Jimi is a milquetoast teen girl protagonist and Rex is her big beefcake boyfriend and neither really has to evolve much beyond that. The side characters who come along for the ride in the first book don’t get much elaboration beyond their initial appearances and quietly fade into the background in the sequels, and the majority of the other characters who get introduced as the scope of the plot expands are given similar barebones treatments. Del/Tamil/Cronos had the most potential to have complex growth over the course of the series, but he was completely out of focus for more than half of it and his story arc ends in a wet thud with little having been accomplished. From beginning to end I am just given the impression that these characters are being ferried from one plot point to the next so they can see further elucidations on the nature of the world in which they exist.
And oh boy, fanfiction. It’s only relatively recently that I’ve actually been investing a decent amount of time in reading big MLP fan stories, but I have to imagine that it was a big part of what led to the fandom becoming as large as it did in the first place. With a setting as loose and open as that presented in Friendship is Magic, especially during the first few seasons, there was a lot of interest to expand upon what was presented, for each fan to offer their own interpretations on how the world worked. And from what I’ve been seeing I can’t help getting the impression that sometimes writers are just so damn desperate to think about all these details that they forget about everything else. I read a story called The Fishbowl which presents an interesting take on the nature of the Equestria Girls world and the impact it might have on one who becomes aware of it, only to become progressively bogged down with random fluff that doesn’t add anything to the main story arc. I read a story called Pandemic (not written in 2020, surprisingly) which goes into great detail about what would happen if there were interdimensional contact between Equestria and the real world and how humans would have to cope with transforming into ponies, but the characters were flat all the way through and most of the conflict came from bickering over logistics, and the ending just seemed to be for the sake of setting up sequel bait. I’m currently in the middle of reading a story called Myths and Birthrights, and while I am for the time being very impressed with the expansion upon the world and its inhabitants and its ideas for how alicorns work, I can’t keep down my doubts for how some of the characters are noticeably fading into the background, Twilight Sparkle’s massive extended family may very well end up only being brought up for the sake of backstory with many of them not appearing after their introduction.
How did this end up happening? I can’t say I’m exactly an expert on such matters. I suspect Game of Thrones was likely a big influence on a lot of people, especially after the TV show began and made the idea of gritty fantasy worlds more popularized. In the YA crowds, everything probably goes back to Harry Potter, everyone wanted to have their own wizarding world or what-have-you.
But a fair amount of it may just be that writing character development is a really fucking exhausting process.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from writing it’s that adding characters significantly increases the scope and length of a story. More characters means you need to have more dialogue and more description and more back-and-forth interaction, and the effect that this has on how many words it takes to convey properly is often exponential. The sections of Rising Tide with more than two characters had a tendency to spiral out of control as I fumbled to come up with things for everyone to do, and I dread getting to the parts of Stains that will have all of the Mane Six and more present at once. There’s only so much that you can fit into the span of the average 100k-ish word novel. The best examples that I can think of for stories that balance the setting and the characters are Stephen King books like Under the Dome and It, stories where even the smallest characters help inform the reader on what the setting is like and build toward the ultimate climaxes, but those are behemoths with word counts extending well into sextuple (ha, sex) digits, something which isn’t the most feasible thing to do. Therefore, if you want to put a lot into worldbuilding, characters are going to have to be largely condensed.
I’m not entirely sure why I decided to go to the effort of saying all this. I guess it’s mostly me coming to the realization of how difficult it is to fit any decent amount of character development into a short passage while still juggling other narrative elements. Not everything needs to be ultra-detailed in every story. In Shadow and Bone, I can at least acknowledge that the limited characterization serves to further illustrate how much of a loner Alina is—if she can’t stray far enough from her personal bubble to get to know others more, then of course the audience isn’t going to have the opportunity to learn such information either. It makes me realize how having a large core cast can make a story more interesting for a reader, but it can make it more difficult for the writer to create the story in the first place.
It’s a fairly neat introduction to a fantasy world. I haven’t seen Russia used as a point of inspiration for a setting like this before and I appreciate seeing how that culture and history are translated here. Ravka is a bleak place, cold and barren and ravaged by war from hostile neighbors on all sides, suffering under the rule of a careless and self-indulgent monarchy, and the presence of a sea of darkness full of horrific monsters cutting the country in half is practically a drop in the bucket. The Grisha and their abilities are like a meeting of bending from Avatar: The Last Airbender and alchemy from Fullmetal Alchemist, with a strong emphasis on high-class elegance. The protagonist, Alina, is forced to confront her long-standing inner doubts to open up to the world and recognize her potential while she explores these new avenues that have been opened up to her. I had some qualms with the plot but I was overall really engrossed in the ideas that this story had to offer and I’m really curious to see where the story goes from here.
My only hope is that the characters will actually get a reasonable amount of development from here on out.
Despite the attention that is lavished upon the setting, the characters of Shadow and Bone leave something to be desired in my eyes. Aside from Alina herself, the only characters who leave a distinct impression of being reasonably well-rounded are Mal, the Darkling, Genya, and maybe Baghra. The others are mostly limited to a few basic traits and little else. Ivan is a gruff asshole. Zoya is a petty jealous bitch. David is quiet and obsessed with his work. Botkin is a mildly sus Asian stereotype. The King is Nicholas II and the Apparat is Rasputin. Alina has four named classmates at the Little Palace who are occasionally mentioned, Nadia, Marie, Sergei, and Ivo, and I don’t think I could tell you anything about any of them other than that they’re catty and vain—Nadia and Marie are practically interchangeable and I don’t think they ever appear separately from each other. Even Mal’s character mostly revolves around his relationship to Alina, his person outside that being about his position as a tracker and not much else, and despite being a vital lynchpin of Alina’s arc he’s absent for more than half of the book.
I could talk about other problems I have with the book but the main thing I want to focus on is the dichotomy of development as it is applied to the characters and to the world of a story. I feel that worldbuilding is kind of a hot topic in sci-fi and fantasy stories these days, readers really want to see that you have an expansive setting with all the details about how the characters in it go about their lives and the struggles they have to deal with and what the economy and politics and religion are like and so on and so forth. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, I certainly enjoy seeing all these aspects myself, I like seeing what people can come up with as a reflection of the world around them, I like seeing how creators can take a concept and examine what kind of broader impact it would have on its world. But I don’t think that means much of anything if that setting doesn’t have any interesting characters to follow. I want to see arcs, I want to see change, I want to see struggle.
Some of you reading this may recall that a while ago I read the Spliced trilogy, another YA series which I felt had a similar issue in regard to its focus. I thought that the author put a lot of work into developing the setup for the world in which the story takes place. There was a lot to show how run-down the future has become between disease and climate crises, in some ways closely paralleling real life. There are great lengths to demonstrate the processes involving in splicing and what culture has sprung up surrounding chimeras. It was clear that a point was being made of how the logistics of discrimination don’t make sense with how much time is spent ruminating upon the details of the Genetic Heritage Act—e.g. if chimeras aren’t legally considered people then they can’t be arrested and charged for crime. All these details go a long way in elaborating on how dark and grim and ultimately fairly realistic the setting is, which helps make the story feel believable.
But I can’t say that I felt much of anything for most of the characters, even more so compared to Shadow and Bone. Jimi is a milquetoast teen girl protagonist and Rex is her big beefcake boyfriend and neither really has to evolve much beyond that. The side characters who come along for the ride in the first book don’t get much elaboration beyond their initial appearances and quietly fade into the background in the sequels, and the majority of the other characters who get introduced as the scope of the plot expands are given similar barebones treatments. Del/Tamil/Cronos had the most potential to have complex growth over the course of the series, but he was completely out of focus for more than half of it and his story arc ends in a wet thud with little having been accomplished. From beginning to end I am just given the impression that these characters are being ferried from one plot point to the next so they can see further elucidations on the nature of the world in which they exist.
And oh boy, fanfiction. It’s only relatively recently that I’ve actually been investing a decent amount of time in reading big MLP fan stories, but I have to imagine that it was a big part of what led to the fandom becoming as large as it did in the first place. With a setting as loose and open as that presented in Friendship is Magic, especially during the first few seasons, there was a lot of interest to expand upon what was presented, for each fan to offer their own interpretations on how the world worked. And from what I’ve been seeing I can’t help getting the impression that sometimes writers are just so damn desperate to think about all these details that they forget about everything else. I read a story called The Fishbowl which presents an interesting take on the nature of the Equestria Girls world and the impact it might have on one who becomes aware of it, only to become progressively bogged down with random fluff that doesn’t add anything to the main story arc. I read a story called Pandemic (not written in 2020, surprisingly) which goes into great detail about what would happen if there were interdimensional contact between Equestria and the real world and how humans would have to cope with transforming into ponies, but the characters were flat all the way through and most of the conflict came from bickering over logistics, and the ending just seemed to be for the sake of setting up sequel bait. I’m currently in the middle of reading a story called Myths and Birthrights, and while I am for the time being very impressed with the expansion upon the world and its inhabitants and its ideas for how alicorns work, I can’t keep down my doubts for how some of the characters are noticeably fading into the background, Twilight Sparkle’s massive extended family may very well end up only being brought up for the sake of backstory with many of them not appearing after their introduction.
How did this end up happening? I can’t say I’m exactly an expert on such matters. I suspect Game of Thrones was likely a big influence on a lot of people, especially after the TV show began and made the idea of gritty fantasy worlds more popularized. In the YA crowds, everything probably goes back to Harry Potter, everyone wanted to have their own wizarding world or what-have-you.
But a fair amount of it may just be that writing character development is a really fucking exhausting process.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from writing it’s that adding characters significantly increases the scope and length of a story. More characters means you need to have more dialogue and more description and more back-and-forth interaction, and the effect that this has on how many words it takes to convey properly is often exponential. The sections of Rising Tide with more than two characters had a tendency to spiral out of control as I fumbled to come up with things for everyone to do, and I dread getting to the parts of Stains that will have all of the Mane Six and more present at once. There’s only so much that you can fit into the span of the average 100k-ish word novel. The best examples that I can think of for stories that balance the setting and the characters are Stephen King books like Under the Dome and It, stories where even the smallest characters help inform the reader on what the setting is like and build toward the ultimate climaxes, but those are behemoths with word counts extending well into sextuple (ha, sex) digits, something which isn’t the most feasible thing to do. Therefore, if you want to put a lot into worldbuilding, characters are going to have to be largely condensed.
I’m not entirely sure why I decided to go to the effort of saying all this. I guess it’s mostly me coming to the realization of how difficult it is to fit any decent amount of character development into a short passage while still juggling other narrative elements. Not everything needs to be ultra-detailed in every story. In Shadow and Bone, I can at least acknowledge that the limited characterization serves to further illustrate how much of a loner Alina is—if she can’t stray far enough from her personal bubble to get to know others more, then of course the audience isn’t going to have the opportunity to learn such information either. It makes me realize how having a large core cast can make a story more interesting for a reader, but it can make it more difficult for the writer to create the story in the first place.
It gives me a little more sympathy in shows when I might otherwise ask why characters didn't do as much because writing everyone doing everything they'd do at the same time can be a bit overwhelming.
In regards to worldbuilding, that also has pushed me aside from some fanfictions as well, getting a little too bogged down in descriptions that the action and plot takes a backseat a number of times too many for my tastes.
Writing characters has always felt like work, a chore, while writing about the unimportant filler text that not everyone likes feels like I’ve been left alone in a candy shop, free to do whatever I want, with the only limit being my imagination. There’s this weird mod on the Internet called Equestria at War: it’s a massive fan mod of the video game Hearts of Iron 4, the WW2 military/political strategy game, based on My Little Pony, and it’s mostly if not ALL just fans exploration into lore and backgrounds and the nuances of running a country. And I LOVE it. It’s not for everyone, but this is the game that got me interested in the show; I played the fan game first, then binge watched MLP on Netflix after putting it off for so long, and here I am.
Maybe a story doesn’t need to explore the intricate workings of a government department’s bureaucracy and the totally non-plot related incident of when in the past an infamous mutiny occurred because the captain wouldn’t allow the sailors any pornography. Maybe it would make the story more thematically coherent, less tangential, and more concise. But fuck it. Not everything in a story needs to have a purpose; it can be meaningless filler, not to space things out, but because the author really wanted to write those dumb things.
I think that The Fishbowl might have been better if it had been purely about how many weird and wacky things there are in the EqG world while Chrysalis is making her plans to escape, but instead the core emotional conflict of the story is centered upon Vinyl, Octavia, and Trixie and their crisis of faith at discovering that they aren't real people, and the majority of the background details don't contribute anything to the climax and resolution of the story.
I have heard of Friendship is Optimal before and considered looking into it. It sounds like it's along the lines of what Pandemic was trying to be but also cyberpunk transhumanism which is even better.
If part of your resistance is reading the thing, there's an audiobook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCy.....VbWEPJSCy0fTI9 though there's quite a few audiobook readings, radio plays, etc. by fans. This is just the first one I listened to, there's a podcast version on spotify I just found out about, I'm happy there's more variety than when I first read it.
I can't really convince you to give it a chance, and talking it up would make the problem worse, but I will say that I put off reading it for years and eventually gave in, and I listen to the audiobook every so often since then, especially during long walks.