Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.
Even speaking as someone who agrees with a lot of the complaints of people who bemoan the cinema sins style of criticism, very few of these worldbuilding takedowns avoid some really tired sniping at an imaginary worldbuilding fan who isn't interested in the "right" parts of fiction and thus, is a bad deviant who should be ignored.
It reeks of the goony "lololololol trains amiright" thing
but ive always assumed that your average non-autistic person thinks about autistic people basically 0% of the time
and even if like, in the given example here, they're taking potshots at a type of behavior that's generally associated with autism, they think so little about it they dont even make the connection
but ive always assumed that your average non-autistic person thinks about autistic people basically 0% of the time
and even if like, in the given example here, they're taking potshots at a type of behavior that's generally associated with autism, they think so little about it they dont even make the connection
the average non-autistic person thinks that autistic people should be "cured" or should die
source: everyone I know in real life who is neurotypical
fairly regularly if my family is anything to go by
Your family strike me as something of an outlier, honestly.
Not that low-grade ableism isn't pretty engrained in a lot of our society, but I'm fairly certain most people aren't anywhere near that hostile, just ignorant.
As for Harrison, while there is more to his argument and his perspective than that—he's talking about a very specific kind of fantasy author here, albeit a fairly common one, and not ultimately dismissing the endeavour of creating a world that *feels real* in fiction—that line in particular gives his polemic a sour taste where it was really unnecessary, and I do think a lot of people who bitch about worldbuilding do wind up playing into those attitudes.
Comments
It reeks of the goony "lololololol trains amiright" thing
but ive always assumed that your average non-autistic person thinks about autistic people basically 0% of the time
and even if like, in the given example here, they're taking potshots at a type of behavior that's generally associated with autism, they think so little about it they dont even make the connection
Your family strike me as something of an outlier, honestly.
Not that low-grade ableism isn't pretty engrained in a lot of our society, but I'm fairly certain most people aren't anywhere near that hostile, just ignorant.
As for Harrison, while there is more to his argument and his perspective than that—he's talking about a very specific kind of fantasy author here, albeit a fairly common one, and not ultimately dismissing the endeavour of creating a world that *feels real* in fiction—that line in particular gives his polemic a sour taste where it was really unnecessary, and I do think a lot of people who bitch about worldbuilding do wind up playing into those attitudes.