My hottest take

Odradek

Most(but not all) “worldbuilding is boring/bad/always unimportant” takes contain some level of crypto-ableism against autistic people

Crystal

Do elaborate, I am a curious birdy.

Crystal

I mean not that I can't grok it but I do like hearing your thoughts on lit stuff and whatnot.

Odradek

See M. John Harrison's rant about it, particularly the last bit 

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

Klinotaxis

i was going to say that seems too crypto for me to believe, but that's a pretty revealing quote right there

Crystal

Yeaaah, that's pretty fair.

Obā-san

see, i dont exactly, disagree

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

Odradek

Well yes, but that doesn't mean it isn't still shitty

Salix Babylonika

Obā-san said:

see, i dont exactly, disagree

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

Obā-san

Ok but how often do they think about it

Salix Babylonika

fairly regularly if my family is anything to go by

Calica

fuckin' autism speaks posts fuckin' ads

Sredni Vashtar

Jane said:

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.

Bee

Klinotaxis said:

i was going to say that seems too crypto for me to believe, but that's a pretty revealing quote right there