Location Matters

I should go on vacation.

I have some weekend plans, and I’m debating whether or not to see a local production of Cat. I’m also working on future plans, including excitement at seeing that Trans-Siberian Orchestra is finally doing a different show this year from “Ghosts of Christmas Eve”.

I’ve been watching Alex Rider on FreeVee, which is good. Playing Dragon Age is going okay, but maybe picking qunari was a mistake? I know nothing about them, which makes roleplaying a bit difficult.

Location Matters

I recently finished re-reading Thomas Archibald Barron’s Great Tree of Avalon, and a random thing that really bothered me was one of the final battles (there are two). One of them is an Awesome Dragon Battle among the stars. The other, is on the ground in the Battle of the Plains of Isenwy. There is absolutely nothing significant, culturally or strategically, about this battlefield–it’s just a stretch of mud that people good and evil have apparently all agreed to meet, in order to duke it out when enough people arrive. Or something.

That’s kind of silly.

The problem is that the story hasn’t given us anywhere for the battle to take place that makes sense. There’s no significant site that the bad guys want to capture or destroy; the closest would be the Drumadian compound, and they’ve already destroyed it. They can’t do it again.

It’s a worldbuilding issue, and it reminds me that you’ve got to figure out how to place things in a way that makes sense. You do not just have a final battle in a random place; it’s got to be somewhere that is logical for people to be fighting. Thomas Archibald is usually fine with this, actually: the Awesome Dragon Battle takes place at the gateways between worlds, trying to stop the villain from bringing through his army of immortal spirit warriors. The final battle in Lost Years of Merlin is similar to that–it’s at the place the invasion force is coming through, trying to hold them back. You don’t need to have a complex reason, or have a location with a lot of Plot significance or backstory other than that: it could very well be the place where the two groups meet because one’s trying to stop the other’s advancement. It could be that one group is hunting the other, and this is where they happen to meet! Something like that.

It should absolutely not be, “Because we both agreed to wait here until the Plot picked up.”

This applies to things other than battles, of course, this mindfulness of where things are. In building a world, whether it be a fantasy or science-fiction one, or one parallel to ours, the other should think about where things are in relation to each other. I remember being baffled to find out that in Star Wars, Illum, the ice planet where Jedi regularly go to get their lightsaber crystals, is apparently marked in the Disney canon as being in the Unknown Regions. Think about that: the place Jedi regularly went to for centuries, a holy site for them where they’ve built a sprawling temple complex, is in the Unknown Regions, supposedly the unmapped part of the galaxy. That makes absolutely no sense.

Disney Star Wars also has a habit of putting stuff on Tatooine, so that every character ever goes there and something important happens. Why? Unclear! At least, from a Plot perspective. From a real world perspective, it’s because they’re desperately chasing nostalgia.

In urban fantasy, this can also be applied. In Iron Druid Chronicles, we’re told that Druids all came from Celtic cultures, and yet they’re not actually bound by it; they don’t have to be of a certain bloodline, or even of a specific religion. They just use Earth-based magic and commune with the non-pantheon-specific Spirit of the Earth. With this in mind, there’s no logical reason that Druids would be Celtic at all, especially if they have no ties to Celtic mythology. A smart author would spin something like, “Well, other cultures have Druids, they’re just called something else!” Hearne is not that clever though, and he has no answer (other than he pulled vague notions from RPGs, and only made his protagonist a Druid because he wanted him to talk to his dog).

Dresden Files seems to have this problem with every major thing going on in Chicago of all places. To an extent, some of it is because that’s where the protagonist lives, but there’s also plenty of other weird stuff going on that just happens to be there. It makes some more sense as the series goes on, especially as we learn that there’s an island nearby that is actually incredibly magically significant. Butcher has admitted that he would have liked to have come up with another reason for the city to have significance to wizards when he started the series.

If things happen in a place, there should be a reason! Other than you need something dramatic. Why, in the fictional world, is this happening here? Why doesn’t it happen somewhere else? Why is this connected to this place at all? What is significant in this moment about this place? Why aren’t they going somewhere else to do this?

‘Because Plot said so!’ is not a good answer.

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