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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9731647" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah I think a lot of this comes from authors coming at the issue of worldbuilding "backwards" as it were. I.e. instead of thinking about the society they envision and how it would work, and how things would come to be from that society, and just building things up, they decide on the characteristics of certain organisations/groups and then just slap them in regardless of whether they actually fit with the overall worldbuilding. In longer series you often see some shifts as they gradually backwork the group into the setting more. I think it's fine to have some fixed points you want but it's really good if you can like, work out how they'd naturally exist, rather than just slapping in clunky stereotypes. Definitely agree this is more common in YA but the line between YA and mainstream fantasy has been pretty blurry for a while now.(This is very common RPGs too, you can see it at every level, from dungeon design to setting design. I.e. people decide they want some set-piece room in a dungeon, immediately slap it in, and don't think about how it doesn't actually fit with the rest of the dungeon, nor make sense in the context of the history of the dungeon they've provided. Rather than starting with the concept of the dungeon as "this is an old demon-cultist lair, now held by a faction of undead monks" and thinking "What would be in that?". Hell the entire Mystara setting is just this approach and basically nothing else lol, stereotyped societies where basically everyone acts a certain way "because" and where they don't really fit organically into the world.)This is a symptom of the same "backwards" approach to worldbuilding - i.e. the author just thinks "What do rich people do for fun?", doesn't even really think historically beyond like, the 1920s very often (let alone do historical research to get any ideas - I mean you don't have to then follow those ideas, but it's good to know), and then puts it pretty much straight into their setting and works around that, rather than the actual worldbuilding approach where you think about the society you've created, and what resources and traditions the nobles have, and what they might be doing because of that (what social benefits and so on).I'd say it's pretty notable how different and more diverse and organic and complex the societies of people who use "forwards" worldbuilding (like NK Jemisin, when I think of "proper" worldbuilding in a modern fantasy novel, I think of The Broken Earth trilogy) are to authors using more "backwards" worldbuilding (though being everyone does a bit of both) but I think there's a real question as to whether most audiences care about this or even notice the issues.</blockquote>

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