On Discworld & Opening

 This has been a bit of a strange week, but not a bad one. I’m apprehensive for the future though. But on Monday is that most wonderful of holidays, Waitangi Day! I’m sort of excited for that.

I had an idea for talking about grief in fiction–about how it’s better when characters don’t forget when their friends have died. This was inspired by me sitting and watching a butt ton of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood recently. But given that Waitangi Day’s coming up I didn’t want this to be a sad notes this weekend.

So Discworld and worldbuilding it is, as I recently started my re-read of that series. I don’t care that apparently Stephen King hates the term ‘worldbuilding’!

Discworld & Worldbuilding

So I’ve been keeping track of ACOUP’s series of posts about the worldbuilding in Rings of Power, and thoughts of how different fantasy stories approach worldbuilding have been on my mind. Have you noticed that Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series has fantastic worldbuilding, in general? The city of Ankh-Morpork has a lot of moving parts, and Pratchett goes to lengths to explain how those parts work. It’s very extensive considering it’s a parody fantasy series.

I was also thinking about the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy and other stories which sometimes utterly fail to really work on worldbuilding. Plenty of stories nowadays don’t bother with it in the same way. And how many times this typical criticism is met with a reply of something like, “You don’t actually need those details about how the factions in the setting interact or function, they’re not important to the story. What’s important is the theme/message/nostalgic feeling” (that is, if they aren’t lazy and tell you to go read supplementary material, which is terrible advice). And again, Discworld is a parody yet it works out a guild system, a magic system, an economy, and how different countries interact with each other.

To be fair to Discworld, it’s not as if Pratchett can explain in-detail how every little element works. There is quite a lot that’s handwaved with “magic” or “belief,” or, in the latter books, “quantum.” But some of the institutions? Pratchett knows how they work, and we know that he knows how they work. There are some continuity issues, but overall once the series gets going, it fits together remarkably well.

So what’s going on here? Why does the parody series understand that this needs to be done when a lot of more “serious” fantasy and science-fiction works don’t, especially since a lot of those have a lot bigger budgets to have people working on these things?

I think the answer lies in the fact that it is parody. Hear me out:

Part of why Discworld works as well as it does is that it’s not JUST a parody of fantasy tropes and storylines. It’s also got a lot of parody of the real world and the absurdness you find in it sometimes. And because he’s making jokes about things in the real world, like the education system, or the post office, or banks, or government, it’s got to be fleshed out to an extent because otherwise the joke doesn’t work.

If you’re going to comment on a real-world system in fiction, you have to have some reflection of the real-life counterpart and how it works. That’s true even if the story isn’t parody. Part of why a story like the original comic Marvel: Civil War doesn’t work for me these days is because one side’s argument is that superheroes should be held accountable to the people they serve, like police and government agencies. Except more and more these days, it’s obvious that police very often aren’t held accountable for people and property they damage, and government agents sure as heck aren’t. Likewise, the Arrow episode on gun control felt bogus because in a city that’s attacked by armies of terrorist ninjas every May, and supervillains all year long (many of whom inexplicably prefer melee weapons), yes, I think it’s not unreasonable to assume everyone in Star City should be packing heat to protect themselves.

There’s also bad parody, that tries to make statements about the real world by just spouting buzzwords and jokes. Kill the Farm Boy! by Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson comes to mind here, which in the author’s note says it meant to deconstruct the white male power fantasy of a lot of heroic fantasy as a genre. This would be an interesting thing to do, but the novel doesn’t actually do that–it just kills off the random white male fake out protagonist and the characters move along with their lives, while the story parodies real-world things by having light-hearted shoutouts to real life, some of which work, most of which don’t.

Pratchett understood that to make statements or jokes about the real world, you need to use elements of the real world. And yeah, a lot of his villains aren’t exactly that complex, but very often represent real-life problems that people run into. Much of the satire of Discworld is built from anger at injustice, after all. Off the top of my head, I know that Reacher Gilt of Going Postal displays the naked greed of businessmen who care much more about milking as much money as possible out of a technological advancement than about whether that technology consistently works or if the people in his company are safe and financially secure. And this is a problem we are constantly facing with big businesses–for example, Disney parks now cost more than ever and yet are less keen on fixing rides and animatronic malfunctions.

I’m not a huge fan of when people look at deceased authors and say, “What would they think about X issue in the Discourse right now?”, mostly because they tend to just think the author agrees with them and darn any evidence otherwise. But so often in his books Pratchett just nailed it pretty clearly that it’s hard not to look at his work and look at real-world issues and draw those entirely intentional connections.

The reason Pratchett’s worldbuilding works is because he’s not just cracking jokes with his series–he’s trying to say stuff about the world. And if you, as a writer, want to do that too, you’d better do some work with the worldbuilding in your fiction as well.

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