Worldbuilding Terminology

I am out of town, but hopefully I can get this to go up on time. I have finished Thief of Time this week. I have a few other books (perhaps, too many?) for this trip, so I should have read another volume or two by the time I get home.

Gamescom was this past week, which included an announcement for a new LEGO Batman game, and it looks AMAZING? I’m also getting towards the end of the main story of God of War; a bit weird to be playing a new game that’s not a bajillion years long.

A bit of a short one, since I have less time to write it this week.

Worldbuilding Terminology

Sometimes, I think about the Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks.

I used to see it all the time browsing Barnes & Noble. For years, I thought about picking the books up, those massive fantasy volumes, which featured a kid in a hoodie wielding ninja weapons on the cover. One day, I finally did try it out, and read the first book over a series of visits to B&N. The Plot is about a young man pulled off of the streets to apprentice to a mega special wizard ninja assassin. There are politics, depraved villains, an abusive mentor–you know, all that grimdark stuff! I’ll admit that I couldn’t get into it because it was fairly heavy in its grimdark fantasy tone. There is one massive thing that I found a baffling writing choice, though.

The mega special magic ninjas? They’re called ‘wetboys’.

WETBOYS

I’m not kidding. It’s not a joke. The mentor character is very insistent on the term. Which is weird, because it sounds like some kind of dirty euphemism, though for what I’m not sure. When the mentor character tells our protagonist, “We’re not assassins, we’re wetboys,” I’m staring at the page in confusion and embarrassment, muttering, “Please stop saying that,” at the text, much to the confusion and concern of the other patrons at the bookstore.

I think this is drawn from the term ‘wetworks’, which is an expression for assassination. It doesn’t change it from sounding ridiculous and strange.

I am not someone who insists that fantasy needs to be serious. You can be silly sometimes. You can make silly words and terms. Absolutely, do that. At the same time: you have to think about words, terms, and how they sound, when you’re building a fantasy or science-fiction world. If you want me to take your magic assassins seriously, you must come up with a better term for them than wetboys. It feels a bit as if you were writing a fantasy story with a fearsome monster attacking our heroes, and it’s called ‘The Schmoopy Poopy’.

[Except worse, because again, ‘wetboy’ sounds like some kind of euphemism.]

Just… look at the words you put into a story. Say them out loud. Say them out loud in front of a middle schooler or a small child. See how that goes.

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