8 - that's not a real place
For MicroBlogVember
I've written on this previously, and don't necessarily have much to add to that, but it's been on the mind a bit lately due to the writer discord server I'm part of hooting and hollering about NaNoWriMo and because of certain questions that friends had while we were watching Frieren.
The current arc in the Frieren anime involves the main characters fighting demons who recognize and previously battled the title character from her adventures with the Hero's Party 80 years ago. The questions of "why didn't she just kill them back then?" and "why did the demons wait until now to come back?" came up and I found myself getting a bit frustrated, because I felt like the answer was obvious: because then the story wouldn't happen this way. It's fiction, after all.
Everybody hates a so-called "Idiot Plot", but a lot of media inherently relies on absurd coincidences or people making bad decisions. Is this a failure of the worldbuilding and storytelling? IMO, a story only really needs enough consistency to prevent the entire premise from collapsing in on itself - making emotional sense is more important than the logical sequence of events - but the weight limit for suspending disbelief is different for every individual and nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a big ol' review talking about how your plot makes no sense.
In a Game Informer interview, on the subject of extended universe lore, Japanese game developer Yoko Taro says:
It may add a little bit depth [sic] to the knowledge that you have, but you don't necessarily need to have it. I do understand the otaku mentality that you want to know everything, you want to have everything answered, you want to collect everything, but I don't see the value in knowing everything. For example, just in real life, you might not know everything about the politics that surrounds the world or even in your own country, and there's really no point in knowing everything that happens in the world. Maybe a lot things [sic], but not everything, right? What's more important is how you interact with people around you, immediately around you, and I think that's the same with video games. You don't really need to know everything that happens in the world to enjoy it.
Much of what I learned about writing fiction is from the Writing Excuses / Brandon Sanderson school of thought, which has a large emphasis on worldbuilding and capital-l Lore, and the fans will never let you forget it. Fantasy writers in general are obsessed with creating complex histories for their not-real places, endlessly grasping for that fabled Verisimilitude as though a perfectly logical and fully-formed story connected to a half-dozen other installments within this detailed world will emerge as a criticism-proof butterfly from a meticulously constructed chrysalis. I find the entire artifice increasingly exhausting, but I also cannot free myself from it.
I've got plenty of "ideas", but how many of them are "stories"? There's a part of me that keeps thinking I've got to build a solid base of logical worldbuilding or else I'll be proverbially torn to shreds by The Sorts Of People Who Are Into The Cosmere. If I don't have perfect verisimilitude and a rules-lawyer-certified magic system, then clearly I've got nothing. Sure, it's the anxiety, but the way we've learned to look at media over the past couple decades - always ferreting out "plot holes" and "inconsistencies" - doesn't help matters.
Coming at it from this canted angle, anime writers are the bravest people on Earth. The reason that the worlds of Gridman and Dynazenon collide during the movie simply isn't as important as the fact that they do. The city gets repaired after kaiju fights because Gridman has the Fixer Beam what fixes things; problem solved. It doesn't matter why Frieren didn't kill Aura the Guillotine 80 years ago, it matters that we are fighting her now.
In Archipel's excellent Ebb & Flow, Japanese game developer Yoko Taro (yes, again) says:
There was a time in our history where we had to sell games to the global market, so we mimicked titles developed in the West. Those games really prioritized the aspects of reality and believability. But in Japan, we had had Gravity Daze and The Last Guardian which didn't focus particularly on reality, but rather an overall image and delivering an atmosphere. Considering art forms like anime and even ukiyo-e, the Japanese people have never really focused on realistic portrayals. I think we prefer this kind of surreal and unclear world, and personally I think that's a big difference between Japan and the West.
I think sometimes there's a lot of value making it seem like it is, but it's also important to remember that fiction's not a real place.
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