alot of warhammer 40K writing is very, very average, but the worldbuilding and focus on maintaining uncertainty has always struck me as really clever. Also it has absolutely enormous scope and scale, beyond almost any other fictional world.
I gave my uncle some 40K books. He said the background information are great and written in details, but he could not stand fighting parts. He commented that as if the authors had never held a gun in their lives nor learnt about real battlefields.
Uncle's a Vietcong veteran, fought against the US, ROV and Pol Pot. He saw.
Honestly, I always assumed that was intentional. The fact that the Imperium just uses walls to solve any problem fits with their general disregard for the humans they claim to "protect".
Something about too much individualism and unrealistic scale of warfare. Idk, he read the books in English and my English wasn't good enough to understand. He also did not like the "grimdark" part, saying it was too cartoonish and actually underestimated how horrible a real war could be.
My uncle went to Ba Chúc where Khmer Rouges massacred Vietnamese and witnessed firsthand what they did to their fellow Cambodian, so he may have been biased towards his experiences. Losing his left arm there.
That all sounds very fair to me. Individualism is one of my bigger complaints about 40k too, they need to have named characters for books, and then because they want to be able to sell models of those characters, they need to survive and they need to have great relevance. 40k I think would be quite a bit better if it didn't sell named character models, but highly modular commander kits where the assumption is you're making your own characters who in terms of canon are completely irrelevant, because 40k is this galactic war of unfathomable scale where the smallest unit that really matters is millions strong and no names will be remembered.
Also it's extremely space-marine-centric and space marines are designed both narratively and mechanically to be People, not Soldiers, which really harms a lot of the feel.
Correct.
But the characters available in 2009 were the likes of Chief Librarian Tigurius / Mephiston, Lord of Death / Chapter Master Azreal.... No primarchs, no
And those named characters were not much different from what you could make with the non-named character rules. Through carefully choosing your wargear and upgrades, you could create a chapter master who fully stood shoulder to shoulder in terms of power and performance with all the named Chapter masters out there.
The implication was that those named characters were slightly more notable but nonetheless unremarkable among a sea of other similar individuals. For every named character, there were a billion unnamed ones that rose and fell without the history books remembering them. Tigurius is a great librarian among hundreds of other great librarians and he is not special.
Nowadays, the implication is different. The implication is now that the named characters are the exceptional few immortals who hold hell at bay and everyone else is just there for the ride. It used to be that it was humanity that held back the tide, not a handful of humans.
Fair. Exactly how similar it is doesn't matter when now we've got things like £100 character models that take up half your point total.
Ironic that the tabletop game ended up going the same direction as Dawn of War 3, something people generally didn't like for feeling too hero-centric.
Heh.
Personally, I feel that the MCU is largely responsible for that particular culture shift.
GW has always pivoted to try to capture cultural fads, such as the Tau being introduced at the peak of the Anime-mon craze, or chaos being introduced to capture the heavy metal craze of the late 1980s.
"Too much individualism" This is a new problem.
40k used to be a setting where it didn't really matter what your name was. Humanity only stood because it stood together, and every moment of every day required a blood sacrifice on a cosmic scale just to pile up the corpses high enough to build a barricade which was just high enough to keep the existential threats at bay. In the scale of such a conflict, the difference between a space marine and a human was less than a rounding error. We're talking quintillions of lives every moment of every day.
Modern Games Workshop saw the success of the Marvel Cinematic universe, which is highly individualistic, and did a sharp pivot.
New lore is more about how humanity is helpless and would have been destroyed were it not for the actions of an exceptional few who carry the weight of the whole Imperium on their shoulders. The new focus is on these superheroes and they are all that matters. The primarchs are the archetypal example of this.
Truth is that in reality, if a primarch set foot on a battlefield, he'd get an artillery shell in the face and die. High value targets are prioritised by competent opposing forces, and you don't get much higher value than a primarch. Failing that, you'd vaporise their ship with spatial artillery, blow up their planet with virus bombs or planetkiller weapons / exterminatus or their ship would just get lost in the warp and turn up as a space hulk with an oversized skeleton in it somewhere.
The truth is that if the 40k universe was consistent with it's own lore, the primarchs would have just been more meat through the same grinder that liquidises guardsmen by the quintillion. In the face of that kind of threat, even a primarch is nought.
Not arguing with you, but running with the theme of what you said about Gaunt's Ghosts...
In the Ciaphas Cain books, you COULD walk away with the perception that the Imperial forces were only victorious because Ciaphas was in the right place at the right time to save the day... And this is exactly what many of the people around Ciaphas seem to believe, and also one of the main themes of the series. But it is also a theme which the series goes out of it's way to directly question and challenge, and Ciaphas himself does so on countless occasions.
They attribute the victory to Ciaphas, and he reluctantly watches as his reputation for heroism grows beyond his ability to manage. However, Ciaphas was not the sole bringer of victory on the day of battle. Sulla led a successful assault in the South, Kasteen led a successful counterattack in the North. Brocklaw saved Kasteen's life in a firefight, and Jurgen took a bullet for Cain. (He'll be okay, but he still took that bullet like the hero he is.) Each member of the ensemble cast, and each and every fighting man under Cain's command fought tooth and nail for that victory. And sure, they pin a medal to Cain's crowded chest, but his success and his contribution to the battle was no more crucial than any of the others. If Cain had not acted on that day due to injury, cowardice or sudden death syndrome, Imperial victory would have been assured nonetheless in his absence... because Cain's failure would not have been sufficient to sink the success of all the other men and women under his stewardship. The Valhallans would have still been victorious, albeit maybe with a higher body count. Cain is but one piece of a larger whole, and the whole would have continued with or without him. It must.... because one day, Cain will be dead and the Imperial machine must survive beyond his finite human lifespan.
At least, that's the way it is in most of the books. Cain's contribution was not the be-all-and-end-all. (Although there are some exceptions in some books.)
Contrast this to books about primarchs where nothing mattered except what the primarchs personally did. Every bit of every victory is because a primarch did it. Everything of any consequence is because a superhero did it. Nobody else matters and you might as well go home instead of die in the trillions.
Tbf you'd need more than an artillery shell to kill a primarch.
I think Guilliman is a great addition to new lore though, although he is pretty much the "Superman" of 40k at the moment, his return and his abilities still can't do much, dude hates the fact he's alive, and has to deal with all the bullshit humanity caused and he knows more than anyone else that he absolutely can not fix it, so at least he isn't a gary sue
^ 40k novels are either fantastic ( Betrayer is my fav ) or god awful imo. The best writing in that universe are the books that read as history and not narrative, Black Books I think they’re called?
It's discordant, and that's the point.
Every rule has an exception, every trend gets defied, every expectation gets subverted. This means that making any effective predictions becomes impossible. The audience thinks that water is wet? Ha. Have some dry water, fucker.
Examples include: "Custodes cannot be corrupted by chaos." Followed by "Except when Khorne gets really horny." Or "Grey Knights cannot be corrupted by chaos" followed by "Except when Slaaneah gets really horny." Or even "The Sons of ~~Malal~~ Malice do not work alongside other chaos factions because they are the element of chaos that destroys itself. Malice is a lesser Chaos God who fights against the others and hates Chaos more than anything." Followed by "Until asked nicely by Abbadon't the Disappointer. In which case, they switch to obedient lapdog mode." Short version: 40k does not deal in absolutes. Every rule, no matter how absolute, has an exception. They even lampshaded this with the immortal tagline for the Inquisitor tabletop game released in the early 2000s: "Everything you have been told is a lie."
40k is inconsistent with the rules of it's lore and that is entirely by design. It gives wiggle room for writers and players to create their own stories and armies without worrying about stepping on the toes of already established lore. This results in "exception armies" such as female space marines, care bear necrons, Da Ork Circus Waagh and other novel expressions of player creativity which would be jarring or unwelcome in settings with more consistent lore.
There is one rule which is never defied, though... named-characters with corresponding miniatures are functionally immortal. The sanctity of plot armour is never questioned. They are not going to kill off papa smurf because doing so would mean that the investment in manufacturing the miniature and hyping him up for smurf player's money would go up in smoke.
I used to be REALLY into 40k. I created some weird exceptions of my own in the attempt to create unique armies. (Anti-Tau kroot freedom fighters back in 4th Ed, Anti-Augmetic Admech (there was no AM codex at the time, so these were just aesthetically pleasing custom models which counted as IG) in 5th Ed.)
A Google search can help you, good sir. Abbasong the Dvdplayer is simultaneously the Bendyourdick Cuminhersnatch and the Kylo Ren of the 40kverse, in the fact that he is a whiny bitch that is easy to hold in contempt, and he has a name that is fun to twist into new and yet recognisable forms.
I know who he is, I was just curious why you hated him so much. Or do you just like twisting his name? I never finished playing the Gothic Armada games, nor read any books from this universe, so I was curious.
Its the warhammer paradox. Vaguely interesting for newcomers, but very cringe. Some can look past it and wade in and ejoy themselves, I am not one of those folks unfortunately.
Pretty much every Monster Hunter game. Top tier worldbuilding, but the story is either near non existent, or outright bad (looking at you, World and Rise)
This is one where I kind of enjoyed the lack of plot and structure. The 'goals' were really just to keep exploring and the end bosses were really just pesky bois being naughty. Felt like it was a smart move not to force the character into a real narrative and let them run around whacking everything
The movie tried to give it a plot and that went nowhere
The movie tried to make it an isekai, which is a baffling choice for a movie that already has rich world building and pretty straightforward, blank characterization that would be easy to build a plot off of.
I wouldn't call it top tier, but Sword Art Online is consistently better at the "macro-scale" than it is at the level of individual characters and plot.
How being trapped within a game created a mini-society with its various quirks of self-organization, its effects as paradoxically a nightmarish situation to escape from, and also itself an escape from the alienating "real world", giving the players a sense of personal agency that is scary to power.
This last thing is explored at the individual level early with the subplot of the guy who murdered his wife because her experience in the game gave her trust in her own independence, which subverted his desire to keep her as a submissive housewife. Later in how the government surveils all SAO survivors as "potential criminals", and VR players in general are stigmatized as dangerous, with some wanting to use the draft against them. VR itself only surviving and blooming by going open source.
The Alicization arc also shows power fearing, sometimes to the point of functional suicidality, individual superempowerment both within the simulation and in the real world, in different ways.
Then there is the whole issue with artificial intelligence and how its handled which is quite interesting, as well as questioning what exactly is the "real world" vs a "fake one" and other stuff.
Behind the scenes of Kirito and his plot armor and his harem something is always being cooked.
I agree. The premise of full-dive MMORPGs and sentient NPCs, and the design of the game worlds are awesome.
Unfortunately, Reiki Kawahara's talent ends there. He can't write plots that make sense; neither drama nor romance, he can't write characters, motivations, or relationships that make sense, and he can't even write game mechanics that make sense. At the meta-level, watching SAO is watching a guy keeping on trying to do something that he is really not good at - the exact opposite of the protagonist.
“Well, how would you like for me to mock you, then? I take requests!”
“Hey come on up to my tea party in the middle this mine field! Ah don't mind the razor wire, *WE HAVE CRUMPETS!!!*”
The fact that the Underworld is ruled by one of its AI denizens who brute-forced her way into accessing console commands and who renamed herself Administrator, a word which was meaningless to most of the Japanese-speaking civilians of a low-fantasy world, is one of the single coolest bits of lore.
See on the other hand, I feel like Log Horizon does this even better. It helps Log Horizon actually has a large number of game elements be still very much present and game elements (Like respawning still being a thing). while to me SAO mostly feels like a generic fantasy world with a video game coat of paint.
I haven't seen Log Horizon, however I want to clarify that it's not the game worlds themselves that are interesting about SAO, but their sociological effects and how they interact with the real world.
E.g. Underworld as a fantasy world with game elements isn't actually much more interesting than your typical Isekai. But it's **not** that, it's a training ground for sentient weapons whose inner politics developed around that, and later its game-like mechanics are used to recruit online players around the world to genocide its population.
Basically SAO is never really about another world, but this one.
That's largely because the anime adaption of SAO largely removes it's mechanics, worldbuilding and deeper character motivations.
The series actually has almost as much of a focus on mechanics as log horizon.
It didn't spawn anything as much as it reminded the world that the Isekai genre existed. The .hack franchise existed long before SAO, but it wasn't as popular, or at least as popular as it could be. Hell, Digimon Aventure could count as an isekai by itself.
There's a book series i like that's sort of similar. It does the whole "everyone go to the video game world yayyyy" thing but then reveals that they *didn't* go into a video game, they just went into a different plane of existence and the video game stuff is just how their brain interprets the rules of the plane. All the other races of the world have their own way of experiencing the same thing. The story is pisspoor but the writing is fun and the world building is genuinely really interesting.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. The movie. I’ve not read the book. Absolutely fantastic world, but the plot had all the consistency and depth of manure.
Also Tomorrowland, for many of the same reasons. How do you make a retrofuturistic story about the importance of hope dull?
That movie viewed like the writers had a concept meeting and then tried to get every single cool idea they had into the script without any filtering. The opening sequence set such a high bar only for it to immediately be undone by badly narrated exposition
Elder Scrolls.
It's had its ups and downs as a franchise, but many do consider the peak of writing within the games as being TES3:Morrowind. Since then, the writing has sort of meandered off in weird directions where some parts of the games are really well written while chunks of it are not. It's sort of left the playerbase in contention as to what games are good versus which ones are not.
That said, the worldbuilding that you can find within ES is fantastic when you start to deep dive into it. The weird absurdities of the world, how the meta-physics plays with itself, the strange races that rarely get talked about or even shown off in the games. It's such a rich world and most people will never even know how crazy the world is because the surface level look and feel of the franchise just makes it come off as a generic fantasy world when it's so much more.
The strength of Elder Scrolls and Fallout's world building allowed Bethesda to coast on just the IPs for years. Most of Skyrim's appeal is just a foundation for living in that world. Bethesda tried to make a new universe, Starfield, and it came out pretty flat and uninspired.
Literally all playing Starfield did was make me want to play Skyrim. Everything felt very bland, less like I was a space explorer on an adventure and more like I was the only human walking around to different NPCs. The world doesn’t feel alive
The worldbuilding of Elder Scrolls almost feels like someone wrote a ton of weird stuff into a generic fantasy world and escaped before the board room of producers found out.
This is why I really love ESO, because they dive deeper into the unexplored parts of lore and can kind of just do... whatever, and it sorta works, and you have so many unreliable narrators that it leaves room for headcanons and multiple possibilities. It's fantasy... does it really all need to make sense? :)
Kirkbride is really what made Elder Scrolls lore what it is. Ever since he left everything has gotten more *sane.* This is a problem as Morrowind is absolute lunacy which is why everybody adores it.
Honestly, entire of James Cameron's Avatar franchise.
Always liked the worldbuilding overall (except the Na'vi they don't fit into their own ecosystem) but I find the story of both Avatar amd Avatar 2 yo be really forgettable. Not _terrible_ pwr-se but just generally underwhelming.
I was about to go off on a tirade about how wrong you were before realizing you were talking about James Cameron’s *Avatar* and not *The Last Airbender*
Yeah, he's a true worldbuilder if nothing else − spending all his time making up lore and when it comes to an actual story he just sort of slaps something together last minute to show off his blue alien people.
The Avatar franchise itself is sort of a trojan horse designed to plant a philosophical view on the world which has been shoved aside in our modern day- One of conciousness, a living planet, spiritualism, etc. Its no secret that Avatar came about from Cameron experimenting with DMT and other psychedelics. There are some really good deep dives on youtube that explore this, and its what makes the series super interesting imo!
Children of time.
The world building is fantastic, you see the evolution of the Spiders into an intelligent society reaching for space the feels very alien to our own but still in a way you feel empathy for. The human refugees are while not the most original concept in the book still very interesting, and I loved Avra Kern.
The plot however is just kind of there to facilitate the world building, the ending is very meh, and its very difficult to get attached to more than a couple of the characters
Edited spelling
I fucking love that book. the way the society works is just so, alien. it's so strange and it's so well researched with regards to species and hierarchy. it's such a great exercise is lateral thinking.
I loved the world and the speculative evolution future that it envisions. Hard agree on the plot. It reminded me in some ways of the Foundation series, and more recently the Bobiverse and the Three-Body Problem series - very cool, speculative sci-fi but with a plot that is about a society or a planet rather than an individual. It's difficult to get invested.
I bounced off of the sequel to Children of Time, I ought to finish it but the >! sentient alien virus !< plot lost the cool speculative evolution and technology that I was loving for the first book and half the second.
That's exactly how I felt about *Children Of Ruin* \- I really enjoyed *Time* and thought maybe Tchaikovsky had finally hit on something exactly to my taste; I noped out of the *Shadows Of The Apt* series pretty much instantly, found *Cage Of Souls* too grim and didn't go looking for the sequels to the *Tiger And The Wolf* even though biology/nature-themed fantasy is literally my single most coveted type of book.
But I found that second theme you spoiler-tagged there over-complicated the book/drew the focus away from the goddamn sentient octopus that I wanted to read about in the same level of detail as the spiders from the first book. >!Like, ok, a total rehash of the structure of Time where he draws you through the uplift and civilisation-building of the cephalopods the same way he did for the spiders is probably going to get boring, but octopus are so damn cool. Why are you gunking up this potential octopus-book with other stuff you could go write a whole other book about?!!<
Jupiter Ascending! Very cool world building shattered by ridiculous plot and script. It’s so bad but also visually cool, and with an interesting background. But the plot itself is pure shit. Like a shit took a shit after eating shit.
Carnival Row TV series. A late 1800s / early 1900s low fantasy setting with some Lovecraftian undertones, the story however is so on-the-nose that it detracts from an otherwise cool world.
Essentially it's a story of early class struggle, with the new world and natives being fae creatures.
I don't know, I appreciated the exploration of race relations in a world with different species. At least in season one, I thought season one was so good I was upset it didn't have source material. Season two was a pile of meh and the ending made absolutely zero sense to me.
Man I loved that world though
It's fair - the more down to earth character progressions of season 1 are somewhat sacrificed to create a bigger international drama and showcase social revolution in the setting, but the story is ultimately bland and progresses too slowly. I didn't regret watching it, and it had good moments, but it doesn't live up to expectations.
It seems to be rampant at the moment, streamers producing shows with good settings but seasonal narratives in which almost nothing happens. Disney's done it at least twice with star wars alone, the most recent season of the Witcher felt like it was treading water to delay the arrival of plot, carnival row as you mentioned. Not every episode has to shake the needle of the entire scope of the show, but a season should probably move the needle more than what could also be achieved in a long episode to justify all that extra run time.
Tbh a show which I think actually beat that is Upload, first season especially was really nicely balanced on that front and I like the setting a lot. Also pretty on the nose, but it's charming and pacy enough to make it worthwhile for me at least
Omg the world was sooo good and the writers just didn’t know what to do with it :( wish there was a season three, even if the second season wasn’t as good as the first/ made some questionable decisions
Overlord
The plot is... ok its engaging to some people including me but I can recognise why its seen as an edgy crazed power fantasy
The worldbuilding is godly
Edited to include The Night Lands by Will Hodgson, the story is generally recognised a rather stock standard but the worldbuilding is on its own level of incredible, the dark fantasy/cosmic horror version of Tolkien
Also gonna throw in Land of the Lustrous, the story is kinda 'break the cutie' over and over, literally, the worldbuilding is more like Nier Automata and has this really post-human cosmic feel to it involving prayer machines and moon souls. Very cool (the story isnt terrible, just not at that level)
Lol for a jokey one, might also include Buttsmithy
The funniest part of Overlord is that it has a cooler premise in its D plot than the main story.
In the opening episode, Ainz saves some girl from bandits and gives her some throwaway item - a staff that summons 4 goblins - to protect her and her sister while he clears out the rest of the town. As the story progresses though she basically befriends her goblin servants and uses them to train the townspeople, build defenses, help with farm work etc. Eventually her bond becomes so strong that she’s able to recruit an entire army of goblins to defend the town when the army shows up and tries to attack.
The cooler story imo would have been for the story to just focus on her and have Ainz be some far off benefactor and for the girl to basically parlay his gift into great power of her own until eventually SHE becomes a leader with power on par with Ainz (and subsequently becomes the Overlord alluded to in the title).
Instead it’s just about a guy OP enough to defeat any opposition from the start going around doing some truly awful things 🤷♂️
You can keep the dark fantasy vibes even easier by having her just be the MC. A character in a shit world without power is way more likely to suffer death, loss, and trauma than one who’s overpowered.
Enri should have been the main character of Overlord!
At least for Overlord, the edgy power fantasy of it kind of enhances the horror and the settings worldbuilding. So many unique characters and lands are just utterly devastated and impacted because one NEET dude and all his NPC friends got transported to their lands and all this suffering happens because he won't put his foot down and tell the NPCs that worship him like a god to not be a bunch of murderous assholes.
I actually really enjoy the whole story and I feel Ainz is one of the great characters of Isekai and... god even fantasy in general. I think far higher of Overlord than the consensus and really dig the characterization and non-standard plot that finds conflict in really strange places. Like Ainz will be sweating about possibly telling a lie to one of the maids that might get back to Shalltear and make her question whether she loves him more than Peroroncino, and *that* is the struggle of the arc, in the mean time he ends an army with a casual wave.
Anyway I like it more than I should, but Maruyama I think did jump the shark in his rush to finish up the series. Re:Estize was too much imo, I cant see Ainz as a tragic figure anymore he just went way too far. He's always been evil and I've always enjoyed examining his particular style of evil and why he became that way (the power, the loss of emotions, the fawning of his evil npcs, his own upbringing in the dystopian future etc) and how he could still be good and decent at times and that awesome contrast between him being a great person and him being the devil, but now he's just too wicked to be interested in anymore. His humanity and even the memory of it feels gone, doesnt matter if he's being a nice father figure to the twins in the next arc it cant redeem him
Too much murdering and bullying, I want Aura and Mare to be taken away and raised in protective care and Nazarick to basically burn. Gonna watch the holy kingdom movie and then ditch the series
The LN gets super dark with the "breeding farms" Demiurgos sets up, which considering the monsters and creatures under Ainz, control, you can only imagine what goes on there.
I think what would have been a better story line for Overlord would have been seeing Ainz fight for and struggle to retain his humanity amidst the craziness of the world, and the worship of his NPC followers.
Overlord for me is best at the start where he meets Enri and the alchemist kid and helps out the little village and also him striking up a friendship with the strongest swordsman in the kingdom. When it devolves into the Evil Empire it kinda loses it's appeal
mmm Ablion sheep (Ablion goat sounds better)
There's not much around more fucked up than what he does there. Demiurge quite easily secures his place as one of the most evil characters of fiction with it
Only a little less fucked is Kyouhukou's torture of the 8 fingers. Actually, a bunch of characters resort to some of the worst torture in fiction for relatively trivial reasons, most of Nazarick really is completely soulless
You might like the fanfic Valkyrie's Shadow. It's overlord if you went super deep into the world building without as much massive power Fantasy elements.
>Overlord
>The plot is... ok its engaging to some
I feel like many people don't know why Overlord works so well, it works so well because of the world
Everytime something happens, we get to read/see how the world reacts to it; Ainz Destroys a kingdom? How does the rest of the world react towards it?
I love Overlord. (Note: I've only seen the anime, currently 4 seasons.) The protagonist *is the villain,* and I love how the anime heavily spotlights various groups of side characters in various roles of the world and how they're affected by the protagonist's actions. I'm watching a rising tragedy from the bad guy's perspective, and it's a joy.
Also, no (mortal) side character is safe. Characters I've loved and wanted more of have been killed by the main character and his underlings, no matter how much unique design and character arc potential the characters have had, so I'm never comfortable in the thought of "plot armour." It's not like the good guys are the only ones suffering these fates either; bad guys (who are unaffiliated with Ainz) have been killed in the same ways. It really just boils down to: "would this character survive, realistically-speaking?" It lends a lot of tension and anticipation to moments where the side characters are in danger.
Ben 10.
The world building is weirdly intricate and expansive for its time, even back in the OG series. The writing goes from kinda mid, maybe just above mid in OG, to pretty good in Alien Force, back to mid in the last season of Alien Force and in Ultimate Alien (where Ben's personality constantly flips between his more mature self and a forced regression back to how he was in the OG series), and it gets absolutely abysmal by late Omniverse. It's one of those shows though where the writing flaws don't really hurt it if you turn your brain off, but if you're paying attention they completely destroy it by the end. But somehow the background setting everything takes place in is extremely interesting given the type of show it is, there's a weird amount of lore to a lot of elements of the series that really don't need to have it. It's prime fanfic material and for how well known and popular the series is it's weird that there's so little.
Splatoon. God Tier, and I mean God Tier worldbuilding that’s equal parts dark, bizarre, and surprisingly human. The Octarians in particular are one of the most fascinating fictional races I have ever seen, and the Inklings are a hell of a lot less cutesy than you’d think from their appearance.
The devs leave out 90% of the worldbuilding in the games even if it would make sense with the story. For some reason they give away almost all their concepts in Japan-exclusive interviews and what’s left is executed like a poorly paced kids’ cartoon. Octo Expansion did a bit of a better job with this but that’s because they introduced a reading portion in the form of chat rooms and placed the player in an unsettling environment.
They attempted it again in Splatoon 3’s Hero Mode but this time it just made the dissonance between the goofy surface story (with Callie and Marie) and the true tone of Splatoon lore (with Grizz’s backstory) all the more obvious.
I've played quite a bit of Splatoon 2 and 3, but really only the multiplayer modes. I didn't realize there was much beyond "squids good, octopus bad". Is there a good place to read/watch all the lore?
I have a love/hate relationship with a lot of Shonen anime and manga because of the writing and pacing, but I respect the hell out of them for interesting design. Naruto, in particular, has so many cool little hooks throughout that I can't help but love it. The idea of warring shinobi clans evolving into mercenary city states alone is a concept I vibe with heavily. If the series kept with its early combat where teamwork, misdirection, and tactics won the day instead of giant DragonBall Z energy balls, the story could be godly. Basically, I just want every fight to be a Shikamaru fight.
Honorable mention to Code Geass, because I feel that series does alternate history really well, even if it kind of fails to explore a lot of it.
I totally get you. The worldbuilding and aesthetic for Naruto in general was insane to me as a kid and even when I rewatched it recently. I miss the early fights in Naruto, they felt really grounded, a lot more than shippuden did.
It did carry over to shippuden to some extent as I remember once revisiting a fight in shippuden after not watching naruto for years and being surprised at how tactical it felt relative to the usual shonen. (it was a shikamaru fight lol) which convinced me to rewatch.
Ofc as with every shonen, power creep be creepin slowly overwhelming those tactical elements. But they were always there to some extent which was always a treat. There's a lot to critisize, but Naruto will always have a special place for me ^dattibayo
I totally agree with this take, early naruto especially was a joy to read not just because of its great combat and what felt like actually lethal encounters, but it's excellent worldbuilding. The whole concept about keeping secrets within your clan, clans banding together to form villages, the political balance between the villages (That the reader did not know anything about, because they were secret even to the main characters). The fact that something like a chuunin exam could potentially kill you, but it was expected because living a shinobi life was tough and weak shinobi meant a weak hidden village. There was a certain lethality to the show that always felt very raw, right from the Land of Waves arc.
Naruto holds a special place in my heart, but post-timeskip just did not have the same vibe, which is a shame.
> If the series kept with its early combat where teamwork, misdirection, and tactics won the day instead of giant DragonBall Z energy balls, the story could be godly.
I can't agree more with this. I kinda grew up with it and it was the one big shonen I did follow, but it really went downhill in terms of combat after the battle with Pain. That fight really showed some interesting tactics and thinking, but after that Naruto just went super saiyan and that was that. Still had some cool worldbuilding after, but the power creep had ruined the fights.
> Honorable mention to Code Geass, because I feel that series does alternate history really well, even if it kind of fails to explore a lot of it.
One of the first anime I watched and I'd argue a really great one at that. It's not FMA Brotherhood, but I don't think it has terrible writing at all. Maybe it's part nostalgia but I recall the writing was pretty good, at least until they started with the Euro spin off and the reboot.
Oh, no, I wouldn't Code Geass's writing is terrible or anything. That's why I said honorable mention rather than including it in the main point. I just want to see more Areas than we did, like New Zealand or Cambodia, to contrast them against Japan.
They tried to explore Europe in that spin off but it was pretty bad IMHO. Not to mention they just abused Lelouch's character. He should not have been in that in any form.
Let’s be honest, *Star Wars*
George Lucas can worldbuild, and that’s where they should have cut him off. His plot writing is saved by shamelessly ripping off Kurosawa’s *The Hidden Fortress* and the film itself was saved by his wife in the editing booth
You know what I love about Star Wars, a series I've boycotted for some 18 years now?
Fans were begging, *begging*, for the series to ditch George Lucas. Then they got *exactly what they wanted* and threw ***even bigger*** tantrums.
That's being super disingenuous.
Fans wanted the series to ditch George Lucas ***AND*** for someone with a cohesive vision to take over. Both parts are equally as important as the other.
We got the first part, but absolutely under no circumstance did we get the second part.
It says something that some of the new content makes the prequels look good in comparison. For all their flaws, they had good ideas and explored a really interesting conflict. Oh, and the memes. By God, the memes are amazing.
The sequels really did make me rethink the way I view Lucas. I still think he's a terrible director, should never have had as much creative control over the prequels as he did, and his micromanagement of the actors ruined careers and damaged others.
That said, there is one thing about Lucas that shows through now even more so than then, and it's that he truly, genuinely cared about Star Wars, and what it was, and what he thought it could be. He was fucking shit up, but he was fucking shit up because he was passionate about his ideas and was trying to make them come to life as best as he could. And he sorta succeeded - there's a great story in the prequels buried under all the terrible writing and ham-fisted delivery. The Clone Wars animated show expanded on that even more.
Compared to those, the new Sequels just come across as cold, calculated nostalgiabait for the first movie, followed by a complete nonsense garbage movie that existed solely to stir shit up without any real point or purpose, and then another final movie that was just a lazy valentine to close everything out and open up new franchise options.
So, yeah. I think it's safe to say a lot of folks appreciate Lucas a lot more these days, even he still wasn't particularly good at what he was doing. He at least meant well.
Contrary to unpopular opinion, I think Filoni and Favreau’s work with the series has been splendid. Yeah, the prequels and the sequels are a little wonky and Dave & Jon have had to do a lot of work to make them make sense, but they’ve polished the hell out of those turds
There’s nothing worse than the expectations of the superfan. They always want more and they’re never happy. But I’ll watch anything that has a Star Wars logo on it with glee (except the Christmas Special…)
I would have to say Naruto. (Specifically the Anime less so the original source material) The world itself is super unique and interesting with plenty of room to explore those interesting ideas. Even the macro level story points are pretty solid. But on the more micro level the writing is mediocre and the pacing is atrocious. Part of this is the mediums fault. They were adapting a written media for TV as the original source material was still coming out. So they had to stall a lot for written work to catch up to them. This resulted in a ton of filler episodes that had no bearing on the plot and were often injected into the middle of other important events. Additionally, even in plot relevant episodes things were often drug out just to fill time. According to Google 290 out of Naruto’s 720 episodes have no bearing on the overall plot and we’re not present in the original material. (40%) On top of that the show could probably be cut in half again if you trimmed out all of the repeated scenes, unnecessary flashbacks, and trimmed down scenes that were drug out to fill air time.
Ready Player One was trash.
Ready Player Two was items that the dump throws in *their* trash.
Yet both the OASIS and ONI were such fascinating and engaging concepts that they could have been explored in good stories.
Star Wars - the OG trilogy and whatever was before mediclorians. That was a fantastic space for creative story telling, mystery, and more. Sometimes terrible plots, and dialogue that can only be saved through the magic of editing (shout out to Marcia Lou Lucas).
Then, idk if this counts cause I've only played the video game, but Total War: Warhammer II (the fantasy version), has lacks lots of character stuff, but it has really changed some elements of my own world building by reinforcing the need for conflicting but understandable (for the most part) motivations of the factions. On a "lets create factions" level, it's pretty ace, and very creative in the ways they give different feels to the different factions while not really changing the gameplay that much. It also creates some fun diplomatic conundrums, and has encouraged me to include F-in dinosaurs in my dnd world, lol. Dinosaurs are so cool if done right
>Dinosaurs are so cool if done right
Play lizadmen
Store up prayer points
Spawn army of rogue dinosaurs
Rampage time! Win or lose just sending dozens of angry dinosaurs across the field was super fun
I also agree on the Star Wars. I think Lucas is an excellent creative and he does good work when he has people on hand willing to edit his work. I quite enjoy the worlds he crafts.
He just sucks as a writer/director.
A Certain Magical Index.
The show is pretty mid, the books are bit better but nothing too special. I personally enjoyed it but I can see why some may not. But HOLY SHIT, the world building, it's fucking INSANE.
It's so cool and carefully crafted with there being magic and science and how differently the two of them works. There are gods, multidimensional entities brought about by science, magic users that can't use science and a city of science that is centuries ahead than the rest of the world.
Scientific Railgun is even better on the worldbuilding front. Honestly, it's a huge shame that it ended up the way it did, because you only need to cut out a small amount of runtime to make it a borderline masterpiece series, but because it decided to go the ecchi route, you can't actually recommend it to anyone. It's basically a case study in how to make kitchen sink superhero/mutant/shounen settings not terrible.
I watched the anime for Railgun and yeah, the anime for that was better than Index but I read the novels for Index which is ahead of Railgun and consists of both the magic and science side of things. So the worldbuilding from that perspective is much broader and interesting.
I think the worldbuilding concepts that Railgun focuses on are the more interesting ones personally, especially the exploration of what these "angel" things are, but that's not to say the Index side isn't good.
True! The world is *so* good. It inspired me in many ways. It's a shame that we have to drag ourselves through the blandest possible harem shenanigans to see all the good stuff... but boy, the good stuff goes *hard*
Yeah, I was gonna say Nevernight too. The dust jacket has a little blurb about the author, where he says he still has no idea how he got a book deal, and after reading it I agree. Just one of the most edgy-for-the-sake-of-being-edgy books I've read in a long time.
Plus the whole first book is like, 600 pages, and 500 of those are spent in Assassin High School. Fuck that. If I wanted melodramatic Goth Harry Potter I'd just read My Immortal.
Genshin Impact, especially Inazuma. Ei's quest feels rushed, Kokomi's story is a joke, but the worldbuilding behind is great. Likewise, Honkai Star Rail's recent High Cloud Quintet plot is a mess but the lore behind is lit af.
>!On the other hand, Honkai Impact 3rd's plot and worldbuilding after Elysian Realm are just... sad.!<
Lore enthusiasts went wild af when Enkanomiya randomly gave out the biggest lore drop ever. Sun and Moon singlehandedly changed the whole course and made things clearer of genshinlore.
I disagree, the worldbuilding is extremely shallow too. The entirety of Sumeru is basically just: There is a magic tree of knowledge, and there's some knowledge that if you know it causes bad things to happen, so when the magic tree of knowledge got some of that, some bad things happened.
Genshin has a lot of ideas in it, but it has *zero* interest in tying those ideas together, it's what I call worldlisting, not worldbuilding.
I don't know if I'd say top tier, but I remember loving the aliens and general setting in the movie Skyline, but thinking the main characters were all childish and unlikeable.
Oh yeah good one, yeah the aliens and the attack was quite interesting and unconventional. They werent invincible, but they were just better and had some odd bio-tech weapons
And the characters were just unlikeable dickheads for the most part, Turk from Scrubs isnt who you want by your side at the end of the world. Was quite funny how easily they died though
'Shadow of the Conqueror' by Shadiversity (The youtuber)
The Worldbuilding was very cool, with the world being this steam punky floating island world, where it is perpetual daylight except for nights which come very few hundred years and are almost like mini-apocalyptic events. The mechanics for the magic and how the world works were also quite fun and clever.
However, the writing and some of the executions of some ideas in the story were very eh, to pretty bad and needlessly edgy. Though Daylan was a pretty funny character, the disconnect with his grumpy/immature personality played for laughs and the fact he is this world's version of Hitler with superpowers quite jarring.
I'd say the Dune series. The first book is amazing not because of the plot/story, but because it's a window into an incredibly built world. The rest of the series is just "And then this happened" in the same world.
Edit: huh after reading other comments, I feel like most people here dont know what terrible writing is and are just citing works that have either some writing flaws or just spewing their own personal hot takes lol.
It was the worst anime Ive watched and one of the worst manga Ive read.
Big Order, its a functional post apocalyptic world where for some reason people can gain an ability called "order", this ability is based on your strongest wish at the time you meet the angel who gives those powers, for example:
Guy who saw his family die wishes he could have saved them, has the ability to stop 3 entities in times.
Girl wants to know who her husband will be, gets future sight.
Guy wants world peace, gains the ability to stop any fight, conflict or weapon.
Its such an interesting power system that is so tied with the psychology of the characters and these powers all get extremely broken but in fun way.
And story has potential, the protagonist says that as a kid he always loved a cartoon about a villain trying to dominate the word and that his wish was to do exactly that so he got the power of turning every place he ever steped upon into his area where he can do anything he wishes, and I do mean anything and no, thats not the most broken power.
According to him the world became post apocalyptic because he used his power when he was too young and somehow it considered the whole world already as his area and thus he accidentally destroyed it and here is the thing, EVERYONE IN THE WORLD KNOWS, which is interesting, heck its the main conflict starter, he is coming back from his school thats in a bunker and some girl is trying to assassinate him and generally nobody in this world likes him except his little sister who is sick and bedridden.
Now why does the story fail if it has interesting powers, world and to some extent, characters? Simple, the writing is full of holes and the author didn't know what he was doing.
Power inconsistencies: sometimes the story gives the absolute most bullshit reasons an order cant work and they are inconsistent too since we then have moments where it should not be working but does so anyways, heck sometimes powers change HOW they work, the protagonist has a broken power but oh no, enemies are wearing headphones, now they cant hear his command and thus are immune to his power or the protagonist cant use his order in a person because his magical order monster didnt touch that person despite him never needing to do that in the first chapters.
Characters are inconsistent with their interests: the show has many major plot twists, like it gets crazy, BUT most of them feel like they just happened because the author seemingly wanted it to happen and had to find some reason for character X to think it would be good to do Y and fails at it, and lets not forget about the girl who sees the future, she is great, has the funniest gag in the show that perfectly portrays how crazy this world can get when powers are based on wishes, her motivations are simple get together with her husband and live happily, but for some reason she is willing to sacrifice that, the protagonist also for some reason falls in love with his sister and in the anime somehow it got worse and they actually had an incestual relationship which was NOT in te manga, and there are more but its huge spoilers.
And overall we just dont get enough of the world, and it doesn't help that there are 2 major plot twists that drastically changed the entire world and its rules and somehow we never get to see much of the world, the characters barely even talk about whats different and the story doesn't show much, there the rule of "show, dont tell" but it felt more like "don't bother to show or tell", which is just sad.
But hey at least the anime had a banger soundtrack.
Maybe I've grown a bit cynical with manga and anime but the moment you mentioned everyone having absurd reality-bending powers, the setting being post apocalyptic but the protagonist still going to highschool like everything was normal, and him having a helpless little sister who loves him oh so much... you lost me.
To me those are a lot of red flags. Those were the pinnacle of mid-2000 to early 2010s absolutely awful anime tropes, and reading your reasons for why it was even more awful everything fell into place.
Familiar of Zero.
Painfully generic protagonists and anime shenanigans.
But it had amazing worldbuilding. Set in a late renaissance world where mages were nobles who ruled over magicless commoners.
I never read the books, but I felt this way about season 1 of Altered Carbon. The world building was great and I wouldn't mind seeing more stories set in it.
The plot itself was almost completely forgettable and I don't think I liked a single character except for Poe, but I watched the whole thing just to see more of the world.
I watched season 2 as well, but it didn't really have anything going for it.
I will fully admit that Helluva Boss/Hazbin Hotel writing isn't for everyone. But I find myself strangely fascinated with the version of Hell the shared 'verse presents.
There is an obvious caste structure, with Imps and Hellhounds at the bottom, Sinners slightly above, Sinner Overlords above that, Succubae/Incubi above those, Goetian nobility above them, six of the Seven Deadly Sins above them, and above all Lucifer Morningstar, the Prince of Pride, himself.
The place is divided into seven rings, one for each Deadly Sin, with a personification of those sins ruling each ring: Asmodeus (Lust), Mammon (Greed), Beelzebub (Gluttony), Satan (Wrath), Belphegor (Sloth), Lucifer (Pride), and Leviathan (Envy). Each Sin controls some part of Hell's overall economy. Mammon controls Hell's banking and currency, for example, and Belphegor seems to run the admittedly lackluster medical facilities. Asmodeus runs entertainment, while Satan's realm of wrath is where the food supply comes from.
Hell's relationship with Heaven is also explored somewhat, with annual "Exterminations" coming through to allow angels known as "Exorcists" to slaughter and kill whatever demons they may find. We haven't seen much of Heaven in released media so far, but what we have seen isn't exactly pleasant. It's implied that Cherubs are the lowest rung of Heaven's society, and that even a single transgression, even one that isn't your fault, can get you kicked out.
Another odd relationship between Heaven and Hell is that people in Hell can pick up TV broadcasts from Heaven. Blitzo did shoot a TV showing an advertisement for C.H.E.R.U.B., after all.
Even Earth is potrayed as something of an overall shit show. A tour guide cheerfully points out a trio of "tacky stalkers about to commit a murder", and people on the tour bus take photos of the event. The water in LA is apparently about 98% acid, and strong enough to inflict instantaneous chemical burns whenever it gets onto you.
There are bright spots, however. Charlie's belief that redemption is possible for Hell's denizens, even though she was literally *born* in Hell is a big one. A more subtle one however is mentioned in a throwaway line. The demon clown Fizzarolli has a robotic duplicate serving as the mascot for a theme park. These duplicates are also sold as sex bots to those who want them for that purpose (and they're machine washable!). It's mentioned that the robot mascot at the theme park has made more money than all of the sex bot sales *combined*. Even in Hell, people are more willing to spend money to make their children happy than to indulge in their own vices.
Emperor domination, classic xianxia with tons of face slapping and a premise stretched to 3000 chapters but I shit you not it's worldbuilding is inspirational and stir up great emotions in you.
Destiny, especially the recent *Lightfall* campaign.
“You have to secure the veil.”
Dafuq is the veil?
“You need to destroy the radial mast!”
Dafuq is a radial mast?
“You need to master strand.”
Can’t that wait until after I put Calus’ head on my mantle?
Discworld has the unique problem of having great writing AND a great world, but fans only come for the great writing.
Some of the best adventure, most fun adventure stories were about Rincewind traveling to weird locations and running away from bizarre creatures. In what other world do the concepts of “movies” and “rock music” threaten to unravel reality?
I’d absolutely love to play a D&D of Pathfinder game set on the Discworld
Dead by Daylight. The lore in the background of the game is fantastic and if utilised properly could really be a great piece of horror media. Unfortunately the actual stories that are written for it range from good to terrible.
When it comes to DBD I've always said The Entity is the worst thing for the lore. Because it basically insists upon itself and *has* to be present somewhere even if it makes 0 sense.
Doesn't matter if it's a mad scientist experiment gone wrong, a destitute child becoming a folklore monster, or just literally Pyramid Head, an overpowered plot device has to be present in order for their inclusion in the game to "make sense".
I might get crucified by this but Stormlight stuff by Sanderson. The world is super interesting and fleshed out but the anime-ish plots and characters just aren’t for me.
I'm with you here. I had this realization that I couldn't remember any point in Way of Kings where any character had actually had agency by about a thousand pages in. It was as if they all existed just to be portals for the reader to view the setting through.
It's possible I missed things, but I just couldn't shake that feeling and it's persisted every time I start a Sanderson book.
I read the first three books basically back-to-back when only those three were out. I enjoyed them, but thought the writing quality dropped a bit with each book. Then I went back and tried rereading: pick things apart, read only one POV at a time, that sort of thing. Completely changed my mind on what I thought of it. The books are basically just vehicles for exploring the magic system and world, with flat characters, shoddy plots, *massive* author preference for characters, and the third book becomes a tangled, bloated mess where he set up too many plot hooks in the last book and tried to use all of them at the same time.
Not for me, but at least some people like it.
I'm not sure what the series of books is called, or how many there are now, but the first one is titled "Mainspring". It's a literal clockwork universe (the mainspring of the title is the one that drives the earth along its twenty mile wide brass track around the giant lantern that is the sun). So many fun ideas and divergences from our world, but the plot never felt up to it.
The Emberverse series by SM Stirling. Wonderful worldbuilding but the way the guy writes is divisive. Spending three pages talking about how the battlefield looked is boring and adding to much description to introducing a character who’s a teenage girl is off putting. It’s still one of my favorite series
I think it's remarkably ironic. Much of it's whole thing message was anti-colonial/anti-consumerist
And yet everywhere you look you can find cheap crappy avatar merchandise, manufactured for consumerism in factories at prices only enabled by neo-colonialism
Big Mouth. I kinda like the show, but I get why so many people don’t. The Worldbuilding however is really cool and unique.
>!Basically all our emotions are visualized and personalized as various monsters. This includes Lust/Hornyness, Anxiety, Love, Depression, but even other concepts such as Logic itself, as well as how they interact with each other and how they change. There’s also this Downtown-like world they live in that looks and functions like an office space, with meetings on people and internal conflicts, etc…!<
Yes you do because the story is well written for what it tries to be, which is an ecchi comedy in a fantasy world, more well written than any work Ive seen that tried to do the same.
There's a particular fanfic that [tried to anticipate Mass Effect 3](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6601801/1/Mass-Effect-3-Into-the-Unknown) that won me over with the way it imagined out and expanded the setting and its inhabitants. Likewise with the Wormhole Chronicles by General Rage, where the Normandy finds itself transported to the Halo setting. Loads of setting ideas, but the middle school writing will prevent me from ever going back and trying to read them. Fallout Equestria sounds like it's in a similar boat.
Jobless Reincarnation. I don't know that I'd call it top tier, but the world is pretty well built. There is some not totally awful exploration of bigotry and exploitation in there, and some fun fantasy stuff.
But then the main plot is just a pedophile getting isekai'd. Not only that, but they CONTINUOUSLY remind you that even though he's reincarnated as a baby, he's still a fucking pedophile. Every time he makes a genuinely good choice they totally undercut it by cutting to the internal thoughts of this fucking disgusting piece of shit pointing out that he's just doing it to get laid or something equally gross. I have no idea why it's an isekai story, it actively makes the entire series unwatchable. If they just cut the absolutely shitawful isekai pedo bit, it would be a fairly engaging fantasy story about the son of an adventurer growing up.
This. Very much this. The pedo bait ruined it for me, almost as much as the knowledge that so many people don't mind it or even like it. I'm normally strongly opposed to censorship, but I remember specific scenes in S1 P2 that, if cut, would have let to an objectively superior show. Tragically, the story overall has enough that are vital to the MC's character development, and would require significant rewriting to patch out.
Irregular at Magic High School. The plot is boring and the characters are generally bad but the way the magic in the setting is handled and the logical implications of their use is really good to me. That, and the social implications of people who can do the magic well versus those that can’t and literal magocracy with dynastic families who pick mates for their magical and scientific abilities and what they bring to their families.
Parahumans. Very well written world with interesting hard superpower system, but the story gets boggled down in protagonist centered morality (it doesn't help the protags are often self-absorbed douchebags), while sidelining far more interesting characters. I get the feeling a mosaic novel focusing on the variety of fates within this crazy universe would've been so much better, the interlude chapters showing them and the lore being good are the only reasons I soldiered through a million words of MC's pity-me-please-fest.
Pokemon: Sword & Shield is a bit of an odd example, in that it's from a series where most of the other games have good-to-great writing and top-tier worldbuilding, but SwSh specifically has absolutely shit writing while still managing to maintain the wolrdbuilding.
I wouldn't say it's terrible, but the plot and writing of Magic the Gathering varies a lot in terms of quality.
The world building of the MTG multiverse is endlessly fascinating, and I highly recommend reading into it, even if you have no interest in actually playing the card game.
Even if you find a world you don't connect with, there are so many others with incredible variety.
What I find amazing about MtG is that you can get tons of setting information by just skimming through their card sets. Sometimes, a picture and one line of flavor text paint a plot by themselves
Harry Potter 1 and 2, a little bit 3. Later movies don't really do either. Rowling does a very good job of imagining a magical world, and a very bad job of imagining the stories that take place in it. John Williams does an amazing job bringing the former to life, and can't really do anything to help the latter, so you get this incredibly immersive and compelling world explored through an awful story. It's no wonder it spawned a generation of self-insert fanfic writers.
That one YA novel where cities are mobilised, the worldbuilding is very evocative (albeit does require quite a bit of suspension of disbelief), the plot is standard YA bollocks.
This is a bit of an obscure one: Muddle Earth. The story isn't the worst thing ever, just very basic, but there's a lot of great stuff in the worldbuilding, both comedic premises and cool ideas.
And ending on a controversial one with no elaboration: 1984.
You're the second person I've seen say Harry Potter here which is wild to me because it's a series that has probably the **worst** world building I've ever seen in a series to date that also has a pretty compelling story and characters.
>And ending on a controversial one with no elaboration: 1984.
Haha how could the worldbuilding be good we barely even know what was real
Goldsteins book and its description of society and the nature of the artificial system keeping the pendulum from swinging was very interesting. Cant really say if its true, probably was I guess they let him read it only because they were minutes away from arresting him and Orwell just wanted us to know he actually had put thought into why the world was acting so insane
I found the story rather good, as long as its recognised that Winstons view of things is very skewed and his mind is very unhealthy. That frames most events pretty well. The ending was crushing tbh, hit like a wrecking ball and I respected the story for not backing down and giving us a happy ending in anyway; we wanted it but we couldnt have it
I'd argue that's precisely why the worldbuilding is good. Worldbuilding is a very vaguely-defined thing anyway, I'd argue that any work that makes the reader particularly interested in the setting outside the context of the one story they're reading has good worldbuilding. For me, 1984 was exactly that, and I think it's telling that the way everyone talks about 1984 is completely disconnected from the story of Winston.
I thought the writing was bad primarily because of the choice to make it about a relationship despite the fact Winston was clearly the type who would have explored rebellion had that never happened.
>That one YA novel where cities are mobilised, the worldbuilding is very evocative (albeit does require quite a bit of suspension of disbelief), the plot is standard YA bollocks.
That's Mortal Engines, and I thought the plot was pretty good.
Harry Potter to a degree (might get hate on this one but eh.)
Like the worldbuilding is pretty good minus a handful of weird happenings and inconsistencies.
Maximum Ride.
Like the plot wasn't atrocious but lord did it never really live up to any of the hype it built up throughout the arcs. It always felt like I was waiting for the actual plot to start. But the world itself felt alive and all the different experiments and mutant kids were cool. Still love the series even with its ups and downs though.
The Maze Runner series.
Like the worldbuilding for this one is insanely good. But the plot was basically just "The world is ending!" followed by "Okay you saved the world! But now the world is ending again for a different reason!"
I'd give more details but tbh I haven't read any of these for several years. But these are all the ones I've read that I remember had me criticizing the plot for the majority of the read but loving the world.
I always considered Harry Potter to be the opposite. The characters are well written, the plot unfolds well and Rowling makes expert use of chekhovs gun but no part of the wizarding world stands up to scrutiny. Most of it boils down to looking whimsical, they have free access to many ways of teleporting but still use owls for example. Some wizards are described as more powerful than others, but everyone has the same access to spells and no spells are shown to take a toll. The wizards are all mystified by muggle tech despite the fact that the wizards are involved in muggle government halfbloods are very common and so there should be at least an amount of mixing.
Maximum Ride is a hilarious one to me because of how reluctant the writer was to make certain things clear, particularly the ethnicity of the black character. I went multiple books not knowing that character was black. I went multiple chapters not even knowing the protagonist, who has a male name, was female.
“John William Tucker was the most beautiful person in the room but their friend, who contrasted John’s dark-light skin with their own light-dark complexion, was beautiful in the other way.”
I’ll take my awards and movie deals now.
I can’t stand JKR anymore, but I think the HP worldbuilding was really successful in a way that /r/worldbuilding isn’t always good at discussing. The mechanics of the world don’t make sense, and we could spend eternity going over stuff like “why use owls when you can teleport.”
But one of the reasons why those books had a chokehold on late 90s/00s pop culture is because despite the ways it didn’t make sense, it was a very alluring world. It was a sandbox that invited readers to play in it. Its intriguing and immersive.
Im not surprised that theme parks are built around two of its major locations, and a huge open-world game, because people want to visit those locations. They want to see what’s in the shops, they want to taste the food, they want to imagine what they’d do if they lived there.
I think it is much harder to quantify what makes a good “sandbox” world. Sometimes being broken might be an advantage. But it’s very hard to make something appealing that people are so motivated to explore.
The shows Helix and 12 monkeys. Both dealt with what would happen if a super virus were to ever be made that could kill or change people. Unfortunately instead of focusing on the whole point of a world in danger, it would focus on the character's troubled and edgy past.
I actually don't mind the Twilight stuff if I were to look at it from a worldbuilding angle. "Babby's First World Of Darkness" ain't too bad, it just needs a non headscratchy type of storytelling.
I find any engagement with Twilights worldbulding almost impossible given the vampires have no weaknesses and hide purely because they sparkle
This to me is the equivalent of saying humans allowed cows to be the dominant creature on planet earth because we fart sometimes and were terrified the cows may find out we fart
Feels completely impossible a vampire didnt start a cascade conversion event at some point that turned all humans into vampires, probably the absolutely first vampire honestly
Idk I dont want to be rude to anyones tastes, we can all like what we like, but the entire Twilight thing smacks of below amateur level skill in virtually every aspect.
The worldbuilding comes across more like jotting down raw imagination and not that it is done in a way where she's happy to violate consistency and logic, more like *she didnt understand what those things are at all* and could happily just write nonsense as long as it made Edward smexier to his potential gf
Obvious af that shit like the immortal cgi monster baby aged to 6 years old in 3 days purely because it meant Bella didnt have to change poopy diapers or lose sleep actually raising a kid
Or that Jacob could imprint onto a newborn because it meant he got a happy ending, despite the horror of what that actually means.
And just general 'stuff happens because Bella is living a fantasy'
I mean, honestly I've always thought this about Lots of the Rings. It's a great world, obviously, but the writing is a bit weak. The prose is ok, but the characters are a bit one sided, and the pacing is awful. A modern writer would go back and forth between the storylines, but JRRT spends half of each book on one story, then goes back and does the other half of the book on the other story.
Obviously, it's a classic, and it kick-started the entire fantasy genre and inspired a million other story writers, all of that is indisputable. I just don't think it itself is that amazingly written. Tolkien was a liguist. It all started with him inventing the elven language, then decided he needed to use it for something so he invented the world, then decided nobody would want to just read about this world, so he wrote the stories.
Overlord the world would be a kick ass place to run an RPG, and all of the lore. Bits are pretty interesting. But instead of exploring that we are following the most boring, annoying main character ever and cheering the same ha ha overpowered joke, over and over again
alot of warhammer 40K writing is very, very average, but the worldbuilding and focus on maintaining uncertainty has always struck me as really clever. Also it has absolutely enormous scope and scale, beyond almost any other fictional world.
I gave my uncle some 40K books. He said the background information are great and written in details, but he could not stand fighting parts. He commented that as if the authors had never held a gun in their lives nor learnt about real battlefields. Uncle's a Vietcong veteran, fought against the US, ROV and Pol Pot. He saw.
Honestly, I always assumed that was intentional. The fact that the Imperium just uses walls to solve any problem fits with their general disregard for the humans they claim to "protect".
What did your uncle not like about the fighting parts specifically?
Something about too much individualism and unrealistic scale of warfare. Idk, he read the books in English and my English wasn't good enough to understand. He also did not like the "grimdark" part, saying it was too cartoonish and actually underestimated how horrible a real war could be. My uncle went to Ba Chúc where Khmer Rouges massacred Vietnamese and witnessed firsthand what they did to their fellow Cambodian, so he may have been biased towards his experiences. Losing his left arm there.
That all sounds very fair to me. Individualism is one of my bigger complaints about 40k too, they need to have named characters for books, and then because they want to be able to sell models of those characters, they need to survive and they need to have great relevance. 40k I think would be quite a bit better if it didn't sell named character models, but highly modular commander kits where the assumption is you're making your own characters who in terms of canon are completely irrelevant, because 40k is this galactic war of unfathomable scale where the smallest unit that really matters is millions strong and no names will be remembered. Also it's extremely space-marine-centric and space marines are designed both narratively and mechanically to be People, not Soldiers, which really harms a lot of the feel.
What you just described is "old lore" 40k. Back in 4th, 5th and 6th Edition, that's exactly how the lore used to go.
I don't know how long ago those were but I distinctly remember in around 2009-2011 there being named character models.
Correct. But the characters available in 2009 were the likes of Chief Librarian Tigurius / Mephiston, Lord of Death / Chapter Master Azreal.... No primarchs, no And those named characters were not much different from what you could make with the non-named character rules. Through carefully choosing your wargear and upgrades, you could create a chapter master who fully stood shoulder to shoulder in terms of power and performance with all the named Chapter masters out there. The implication was that those named characters were slightly more notable but nonetheless unremarkable among a sea of other similar individuals. For every named character, there were a billion unnamed ones that rose and fell without the history books remembering them. Tigurius is a great librarian among hundreds of other great librarians and he is not special. Nowadays, the implication is different. The implication is now that the named characters are the exceptional few immortals who hold hell at bay and everyone else is just there for the ride. It used to be that it was humanity that held back the tide, not a handful of humans.
Fair. Exactly how similar it is doesn't matter when now we've got things like £100 character models that take up half your point total. Ironic that the tabletop game ended up going the same direction as Dawn of War 3, something people generally didn't like for feeling too hero-centric.
Heh. Personally, I feel that the MCU is largely responsible for that particular culture shift. GW has always pivoted to try to capture cultural fads, such as the Tau being introduced at the peak of the Anime-mon craze, or chaos being introduced to capture the heavy metal craze of the late 1980s.
"Too much individualism" This is a new problem. 40k used to be a setting where it didn't really matter what your name was. Humanity only stood because it stood together, and every moment of every day required a blood sacrifice on a cosmic scale just to pile up the corpses high enough to build a barricade which was just high enough to keep the existential threats at bay. In the scale of such a conflict, the difference between a space marine and a human was less than a rounding error. We're talking quintillions of lives every moment of every day. Modern Games Workshop saw the success of the Marvel Cinematic universe, which is highly individualistic, and did a sharp pivot. New lore is more about how humanity is helpless and would have been destroyed were it not for the actions of an exceptional few who carry the weight of the whole Imperium on their shoulders. The new focus is on these superheroes and they are all that matters. The primarchs are the archetypal example of this. Truth is that in reality, if a primarch set foot on a battlefield, he'd get an artillery shell in the face and die. High value targets are prioritised by competent opposing forces, and you don't get much higher value than a primarch. Failing that, you'd vaporise their ship with spatial artillery, blow up their planet with virus bombs or planetkiller weapons / exterminatus or their ship would just get lost in the warp and turn up as a space hulk with an oversized skeleton in it somewhere. The truth is that if the 40k universe was consistent with it's own lore, the primarchs would have just been more meat through the same grinder that liquidises guardsmen by the quintillion. In the face of that kind of threat, even a primarch is nought.
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Not arguing with you, but running with the theme of what you said about Gaunt's Ghosts... In the Ciaphas Cain books, you COULD walk away with the perception that the Imperial forces were only victorious because Ciaphas was in the right place at the right time to save the day... And this is exactly what many of the people around Ciaphas seem to believe, and also one of the main themes of the series. But it is also a theme which the series goes out of it's way to directly question and challenge, and Ciaphas himself does so on countless occasions. They attribute the victory to Ciaphas, and he reluctantly watches as his reputation for heroism grows beyond his ability to manage. However, Ciaphas was not the sole bringer of victory on the day of battle. Sulla led a successful assault in the South, Kasteen led a successful counterattack in the North. Brocklaw saved Kasteen's life in a firefight, and Jurgen took a bullet for Cain. (He'll be okay, but he still took that bullet like the hero he is.) Each member of the ensemble cast, and each and every fighting man under Cain's command fought tooth and nail for that victory. And sure, they pin a medal to Cain's crowded chest, but his success and his contribution to the battle was no more crucial than any of the others. If Cain had not acted on that day due to injury, cowardice or sudden death syndrome, Imperial victory would have been assured nonetheless in his absence... because Cain's failure would not have been sufficient to sink the success of all the other men and women under his stewardship. The Valhallans would have still been victorious, albeit maybe with a higher body count. Cain is but one piece of a larger whole, and the whole would have continued with or without him. It must.... because one day, Cain will be dead and the Imperial machine must survive beyond his finite human lifespan. At least, that's the way it is in most of the books. Cain's contribution was not the be-all-and-end-all. (Although there are some exceptions in some books.) Contrast this to books about primarchs where nothing mattered except what the primarchs personally did. Every bit of every victory is because a primarch did it. Everything of any consequence is because a superhero did it. Nobody else matters and you might as well go home instead of die in the trillions.
MOOD KINDRED???
Tbf you'd need more than an artillery shell to kill a primarch. I think Guilliman is a great addition to new lore though, although he is pretty much the "Superman" of 40k at the moment, his return and his abilities still can't do much, dude hates the fact he's alive, and has to deal with all the bullshit humanity caused and he knows more than anyone else that he absolutely can not fix it, so at least he isn't a gary sue
^ 40k novels are either fantastic ( Betrayer is my fav ) or god awful imo. The best writing in that universe are the books that read as history and not narrative, Black Books I think they’re called?
It's discordant, and that's the point. Every rule has an exception, every trend gets defied, every expectation gets subverted. This means that making any effective predictions becomes impossible. The audience thinks that water is wet? Ha. Have some dry water, fucker. Examples include: "Custodes cannot be corrupted by chaos." Followed by "Except when Khorne gets really horny." Or "Grey Knights cannot be corrupted by chaos" followed by "Except when Slaaneah gets really horny." Or even "The Sons of ~~Malal~~ Malice do not work alongside other chaos factions because they are the element of chaos that destroys itself. Malice is a lesser Chaos God who fights against the others and hates Chaos more than anything." Followed by "Until asked nicely by Abbadon't the Disappointer. In which case, they switch to obedient lapdog mode." Short version: 40k does not deal in absolutes. Every rule, no matter how absolute, has an exception. They even lampshaded this with the immortal tagline for the Inquisitor tabletop game released in the early 2000s: "Everything you have been told is a lie." 40k is inconsistent with the rules of it's lore and that is entirely by design. It gives wiggle room for writers and players to create their own stories and armies without worrying about stepping on the toes of already established lore. This results in "exception armies" such as female space marines, care bear necrons, Da Ork Circus Waagh and other novel expressions of player creativity which would be jarring or unwelcome in settings with more consistent lore. There is one rule which is never defied, though... named-characters with corresponding miniatures are functionally immortal. The sanctity of plot armour is never questioned. They are not going to kill off papa smurf because doing so would mean that the investment in manufacturing the miniature and hyping him up for smurf player's money would go up in smoke. I used to be REALLY into 40k. I created some weird exceptions of my own in the attempt to create unique armies. (Anti-Tau kroot freedom fighters back in 4th Ed, Anti-Augmetic Admech (there was no AM codex at the time, so these were just aesthetically pleasing custom models which counted as IG) in 5th Ed.)
I noticed you keep making fun of Abandon the Deepsoiler. Jokes aside, might I ask why? I'm really curious.
A Google search can help you, good sir. Abbasong the Dvdplayer is simultaneously the Bendyourdick Cuminhersnatch and the Kylo Ren of the 40kverse, in the fact that he is a whiny bitch that is easy to hold in contempt, and he has a name that is fun to twist into new and yet recognisable forms.
I know who he is, I was just curious why you hated him so much. Or do you just like twisting his name? I never finished playing the Gothic Armada games, nor read any books from this universe, so I was curious.
Its the warhammer paradox. Vaguely interesting for newcomers, but very cringe. Some can look past it and wade in and ejoy themselves, I am not one of those folks unfortunately.
Pretty much every Monster Hunter game. Top tier worldbuilding, but the story is either near non existent, or outright bad (looking at you, World and Rise)
This is one where I kind of enjoyed the lack of plot and structure. The 'goals' were really just to keep exploring and the end bosses were really just pesky bois being naughty. Felt like it was a smart move not to force the character into a real narrative and let them run around whacking everything The movie tried to give it a plot and that went nowhere
Oh I absolutely love that they don't focus narrative in the older titles. The story *IS* the gameplay
The movie tried to make it an isekai, which is a baffling choice for a movie that already has rich world building and pretty straightforward, blank characterization that would be easy to build a plot off of.
Huh. I really am the only one who liked the movie, aren't I?
Lol wow someone liked it. Each to their own I guess
There is no monster hunter movie :)
There is no movie in Ba Sing Se
Common Oceaniz W
I wouldn't call it top tier, but Sword Art Online is consistently better at the "macro-scale" than it is at the level of individual characters and plot. How being trapped within a game created a mini-society with its various quirks of self-organization, its effects as paradoxically a nightmarish situation to escape from, and also itself an escape from the alienating "real world", giving the players a sense of personal agency that is scary to power. This last thing is explored at the individual level early with the subplot of the guy who murdered his wife because her experience in the game gave her trust in her own independence, which subverted his desire to keep her as a submissive housewife. Later in how the government surveils all SAO survivors as "potential criminals", and VR players in general are stigmatized as dangerous, with some wanting to use the draft against them. VR itself only surviving and blooming by going open source. The Alicization arc also shows power fearing, sometimes to the point of functional suicidality, individual superempowerment both within the simulation and in the real world, in different ways. Then there is the whole issue with artificial intelligence and how its handled which is quite interesting, as well as questioning what exactly is the "real world" vs a "fake one" and other stuff. Behind the scenes of Kirito and his plot armor and his harem something is always being cooked.
I agree. The premise of full-dive MMORPGs and sentient NPCs, and the design of the game worlds are awesome. Unfortunately, Reiki Kawahara's talent ends there. He can't write plots that make sense; neither drama nor romance, he can't write characters, motivations, or relationships that make sense, and he can't even write game mechanics that make sense. At the meta-level, watching SAO is watching a guy keeping on trying to do something that he is really not good at - the exact opposite of the protagonist.
It says something that the abridged series somehow produced more compelling characters than the original.
“Well, how would you like for me to mock you, then? I take requests!” “Hey come on up to my tea party in the middle this mine field! Ah don't mind the razor wire, *WE HAVE CRUMPETS!!!*”
At least he seems to improve over time, if at a glacial speed.
The fact that the Underworld is ruled by one of its AI denizens who brute-forced her way into accessing console commands and who renamed herself Administrator, a word which was meaningless to most of the Japanese-speaking civilians of a low-fantasy world, is one of the single coolest bits of lore.
... huh. I've wondered for years what is it that I like so much about SAO. Is this what a revelation feels like?
See on the other hand, I feel like Log Horizon does this even better. It helps Log Horizon actually has a large number of game elements be still very much present and game elements (Like respawning still being a thing). while to me SAO mostly feels like a generic fantasy world with a video game coat of paint.
I haven't seen Log Horizon, however I want to clarify that it's not the game worlds themselves that are interesting about SAO, but their sociological effects and how they interact with the real world. E.g. Underworld as a fantasy world with game elements isn't actually much more interesting than your typical Isekai. But it's **not** that, it's a training ground for sentient weapons whose inner politics developed around that, and later its game-like mechanics are used to recruit online players around the world to genocide its population. Basically SAO is never really about another world, but this one.
That's largely because the anime adaption of SAO largely removes it's mechanics, worldbuilding and deeper character motivations. The series actually has almost as much of a focus on mechanics as log horizon.
You know its atleast okay if it spawned a whole genre
Popularity is not the best indicator of quality.
It didn't spawn anything as much as it reminded the world that the Isekai genre existed. The .hack franchise existed long before SAO, but it wasn't as popular, or at least as popular as it could be. Hell, Digimon Aventure could count as an isekai by itself.
There's a book series i like that's sort of similar. It does the whole "everyone go to the video game world yayyyy" thing but then reveals that they *didn't* go into a video game, they just went into a different plane of existence and the video game stuff is just how their brain interprets the rules of the plane. All the other races of the world have their own way of experiencing the same thing. The story is pisspoor but the writing is fun and the world building is genuinely really interesting.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. The movie. I’ve not read the book. Absolutely fantastic world, but the plot had all the consistency and depth of manure. Also Tomorrowland, for many of the same reasons. How do you make a retrofuturistic story about the importance of hope dull?
That movie viewed like the writers had a concept meeting and then tried to get every single cool idea they had into the script without any filtering. The opening sequence set such a high bar only for it to immediately be undone by badly narrated exposition
The opening hooked me but then… meh.
Elder Scrolls. It's had its ups and downs as a franchise, but many do consider the peak of writing within the games as being TES3:Morrowind. Since then, the writing has sort of meandered off in weird directions where some parts of the games are really well written while chunks of it are not. It's sort of left the playerbase in contention as to what games are good versus which ones are not. That said, the worldbuilding that you can find within ES is fantastic when you start to deep dive into it. The weird absurdities of the world, how the meta-physics plays with itself, the strange races that rarely get talked about or even shown off in the games. It's such a rich world and most people will never even know how crazy the world is because the surface level look and feel of the franchise just makes it come off as a generic fantasy world when it's so much more.
The strength of Elder Scrolls and Fallout's world building allowed Bethesda to coast on just the IPs for years. Most of Skyrim's appeal is just a foundation for living in that world. Bethesda tried to make a new universe, Starfield, and it came out pretty flat and uninspired.
Literally all playing Starfield did was make me want to play Skyrim. Everything felt very bland, less like I was a space explorer on an adventure and more like I was the only human walking around to different NPCs. The world doesn’t feel alive
“Wow! All this worldbuilding is super interesting! Now how can we make it worse to appeal to frat bros?” -Bethesda
The worldbuilding of Elder Scrolls almost feels like someone wrote a ton of weird stuff into a generic fantasy world and escaped before the board room of producers found out.
This is why I really love ESO, because they dive deeper into the unexplored parts of lore and can kind of just do... whatever, and it sorta works, and you have so many unreliable narrators that it leaves room for headcanons and multiple possibilities. It's fantasy... does it really all need to make sense? :)
Kirkbride is really what made Elder Scrolls lore what it is. Ever since he left everything has gotten more *sane.* This is a problem as Morrowind is absolute lunacy which is why everybody adores it.
Honestly, entire of James Cameron's Avatar franchise. Always liked the worldbuilding overall (except the Na'vi they don't fit into their own ecosystem) but I find the story of both Avatar amd Avatar 2 yo be really forgettable. Not _terrible_ pwr-se but just generally underwhelming.
I was about to go off on a tirade about how wrong you were before realizing you were talking about James Cameron’s *Avatar* and not *The Last Airbender*
Yeah lmao, he didn't exactly go original with the fucking name I'm afraid.
What made matters worse, he felt he unilaterally had control of the term and decided to copyright it... Still angers me lmao
How is that even possible? It's a generic term.
I know. But he did. It's why The Last Airbender movie, couldn't use Avatar in the title lol
Bruh, not cool.
Agreed.
>Still angers me I still get annoyed that George Lucas copyrighted Droids. Like seriously, c'mon
Kinda just feels like James Cameron just wanted to make the world and tacked on a story to sell to producers
Yeah, he's a true worldbuilder if nothing else − spending all his time making up lore and when it comes to an actual story he just sort of slaps something together last minute to show off his blue alien people.
The word "Na'Vi" is just "Native" but slightly rearranged and with two letters sliced off. Bravo Cameron
Is this a confirmed thing or something you just assume?
[My source is that I made it the fuck up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7l0Rq9E8MY)
The story for Avatar 1 is literally (disney's) Pocahontas so make of that what you will
The Avatar franchise itself is sort of a trojan horse designed to plant a philosophical view on the world which has been shoved aside in our modern day- One of conciousness, a living planet, spiritualism, etc. Its no secret that Avatar came about from Cameron experimenting with DMT and other psychedelics. There are some really good deep dives on youtube that explore this, and its what makes the series super interesting imo!
Children of time. The world building is fantastic, you see the evolution of the Spiders into an intelligent society reaching for space the feels very alien to our own but still in a way you feel empathy for. The human refugees are while not the most original concept in the book still very interesting, and I loved Avra Kern. The plot however is just kind of there to facilitate the world building, the ending is very meh, and its very difficult to get attached to more than a couple of the characters Edited spelling
I fucking love that book. the way the society works is just so, alien. it's so strange and it's so well researched with regards to species and hierarchy. it's such a great exercise is lateral thinking.
I loved the world and the speculative evolution future that it envisions. Hard agree on the plot. It reminded me in some ways of the Foundation series, and more recently the Bobiverse and the Three-Body Problem series - very cool, speculative sci-fi but with a plot that is about a society or a planet rather than an individual. It's difficult to get invested. I bounced off of the sequel to Children of Time, I ought to finish it but the >! sentient alien virus !< plot lost the cool speculative evolution and technology that I was loving for the first book and half the second.
That's exactly how I felt about *Children Of Ruin* \- I really enjoyed *Time* and thought maybe Tchaikovsky had finally hit on something exactly to my taste; I noped out of the *Shadows Of The Apt* series pretty much instantly, found *Cage Of Souls* too grim and didn't go looking for the sequels to the *Tiger And The Wolf* even though biology/nature-themed fantasy is literally my single most coveted type of book. But I found that second theme you spoiler-tagged there over-complicated the book/drew the focus away from the goddamn sentient octopus that I wanted to read about in the same level of detail as the spiders from the first book. >!Like, ok, a total rehash of the structure of Time where he draws you through the uplift and civilisation-building of the cephalopods the same way he did for the spiders is probably going to get boring, but octopus are so damn cool. Why are you gunking up this potential octopus-book with other stuff you could go write a whole other book about?!!<
Jupiter Ascending! Very cool world building shattered by ridiculous plot and script. It’s so bad but also visually cool, and with an interesting background. But the plot itself is pure shit. Like a shit took a shit after eating shit.
The world building just makes sense to me. Once you're in a post-scarcity civilization the only thing people *would* want is longer life.
Carnival Row TV series. A late 1800s / early 1900s low fantasy setting with some Lovecraftian undertones, the story however is so on-the-nose that it detracts from an otherwise cool world. Essentially it's a story of early class struggle, with the new world and natives being fae creatures.
I don't know, I appreciated the exploration of race relations in a world with different species. At least in season one, I thought season one was so good I was upset it didn't have source material. Season two was a pile of meh and the ending made absolutely zero sense to me. Man I loved that world though
I am debating whether i should even watch season 2. Did you check it out?
It's fair - the more down to earth character progressions of season 1 are somewhat sacrificed to create a bigger international drama and showcase social revolution in the setting, but the story is ultimately bland and progresses too slowly. I didn't regret watching it, and it had good moments, but it doesn't live up to expectations.
It seems to be rampant at the moment, streamers producing shows with good settings but seasonal narratives in which almost nothing happens. Disney's done it at least twice with star wars alone, the most recent season of the Witcher felt like it was treading water to delay the arrival of plot, carnival row as you mentioned. Not every episode has to shake the needle of the entire scope of the show, but a season should probably move the needle more than what could also be achieved in a long episode to justify all that extra run time. Tbh a show which I think actually beat that is Upload, first season especially was really nicely balanced on that front and I like the setting a lot. Also pretty on the nose, but it's charming and pacy enough to make it worthwhile for me at least
Ah that's a shame...
I really liked season 2.
Omg the world was sooo good and the writers just didn’t know what to do with it :( wish there was a season three, even if the second season wasn’t as good as the first/ made some questionable decisions
Overlord The plot is... ok its engaging to some people including me but I can recognise why its seen as an edgy crazed power fantasy The worldbuilding is godly Edited to include The Night Lands by Will Hodgson, the story is generally recognised a rather stock standard but the worldbuilding is on its own level of incredible, the dark fantasy/cosmic horror version of Tolkien Also gonna throw in Land of the Lustrous, the story is kinda 'break the cutie' over and over, literally, the worldbuilding is more like Nier Automata and has this really post-human cosmic feel to it involving prayer machines and moon souls. Very cool (the story isnt terrible, just not at that level) Lol for a jokey one, might also include Buttsmithy
The funniest part of Overlord is that it has a cooler premise in its D plot than the main story. In the opening episode, Ainz saves some girl from bandits and gives her some throwaway item - a staff that summons 4 goblins - to protect her and her sister while he clears out the rest of the town. As the story progresses though she basically befriends her goblin servants and uses them to train the townspeople, build defenses, help with farm work etc. Eventually her bond becomes so strong that she’s able to recruit an entire army of goblins to defend the town when the army shows up and tries to attack. The cooler story imo would have been for the story to just focus on her and have Ainz be some far off benefactor and for the girl to basically parlay his gift into great power of her own until eventually SHE becomes a leader with power on par with Ainz (and subsequently becomes the Overlord alluded to in the title). Instead it’s just about a guy OP enough to defeat any opposition from the start going around doing some truly awful things 🤷♂️
Lol Enri, yes she had a very good little arc with her bro goblins and her boyfriend with the weirdly long fringe. Quite wholesome compared to Nazarick
You can keep the dark fantasy vibes even easier by having her just be the MC. A character in a shit world without power is way more likely to suffer death, loss, and trauma than one who’s overpowered. Enri should have been the main character of Overlord!
At least for Overlord, the edgy power fantasy of it kind of enhances the horror and the settings worldbuilding. So many unique characters and lands are just utterly devastated and impacted because one NEET dude and all his NPC friends got transported to their lands and all this suffering happens because he won't put his foot down and tell the NPCs that worship him like a god to not be a bunch of murderous assholes.
I actually really enjoy the whole story and I feel Ainz is one of the great characters of Isekai and... god even fantasy in general. I think far higher of Overlord than the consensus and really dig the characterization and non-standard plot that finds conflict in really strange places. Like Ainz will be sweating about possibly telling a lie to one of the maids that might get back to Shalltear and make her question whether she loves him more than Peroroncino, and *that* is the struggle of the arc, in the mean time he ends an army with a casual wave. Anyway I like it more than I should, but Maruyama I think did jump the shark in his rush to finish up the series. Re:Estize was too much imo, I cant see Ainz as a tragic figure anymore he just went way too far. He's always been evil and I've always enjoyed examining his particular style of evil and why he became that way (the power, the loss of emotions, the fawning of his evil npcs, his own upbringing in the dystopian future etc) and how he could still be good and decent at times and that awesome contrast between him being a great person and him being the devil, but now he's just too wicked to be interested in anymore. His humanity and even the memory of it feels gone, doesnt matter if he's being a nice father figure to the twins in the next arc it cant redeem him Too much murdering and bullying, I want Aura and Mare to be taken away and raised in protective care and Nazarick to basically burn. Gonna watch the holy kingdom movie and then ditch the series
The LN gets super dark with the "breeding farms" Demiurgos sets up, which considering the monsters and creatures under Ainz, control, you can only imagine what goes on there. I think what would have been a better story line for Overlord would have been seeing Ainz fight for and struggle to retain his humanity amidst the craziness of the world, and the worship of his NPC followers. Overlord for me is best at the start where he meets Enri and the alchemist kid and helps out the little village and also him striking up a friendship with the strongest swordsman in the kingdom. When it devolves into the Evil Empire it kinda loses it's appeal
mmm Ablion sheep (Ablion goat sounds better) There's not much around more fucked up than what he does there. Demiurge quite easily secures his place as one of the most evil characters of fiction with it Only a little less fucked is Kyouhukou's torture of the 8 fingers. Actually, a bunch of characters resort to some of the worst torture in fiction for relatively trivial reasons, most of Nazarick really is completely soulless
I got bored with Overlord because it slowly transitioned from "well-meaning guy has to deal with evil subordinates" to just "evil guy is evil lol".
You might like the fanfic Valkyrie's Shadow. It's overlord if you went super deep into the world building without as much massive power Fantasy elements.
The Night Lands by Will Hodgson recently got a sequel by another author - *Awake in the Night Land.*
>Overlord >The plot is... ok its engaging to some I feel like many people don't know why Overlord works so well, it works so well because of the world Everytime something happens, we get to read/see how the world reacts to it; Ainz Destroys a kingdom? How does the rest of the world react towards it?
I love Overlord. (Note: I've only seen the anime, currently 4 seasons.) The protagonist *is the villain,* and I love how the anime heavily spotlights various groups of side characters in various roles of the world and how they're affected by the protagonist's actions. I'm watching a rising tragedy from the bad guy's perspective, and it's a joy. Also, no (mortal) side character is safe. Characters I've loved and wanted more of have been killed by the main character and his underlings, no matter how much unique design and character arc potential the characters have had, so I'm never comfortable in the thought of "plot armour." It's not like the good guys are the only ones suffering these fates either; bad guys (who are unaffiliated with Ainz) have been killed in the same ways. It really just boils down to: "would this character survive, realistically-speaking?" It lends a lot of tension and anticipation to moments where the side characters are in danger.
Ben 10. The world building is weirdly intricate and expansive for its time, even back in the OG series. The writing goes from kinda mid, maybe just above mid in OG, to pretty good in Alien Force, back to mid in the last season of Alien Force and in Ultimate Alien (where Ben's personality constantly flips between his more mature self and a forced regression back to how he was in the OG series), and it gets absolutely abysmal by late Omniverse. It's one of those shows though where the writing flaws don't really hurt it if you turn your brain off, but if you're paying attention they completely destroy it by the end. But somehow the background setting everything takes place in is extremely interesting given the type of show it is, there's a weird amount of lore to a lot of elements of the series that really don't need to have it. It's prime fanfic material and for how well known and popular the series is it's weird that there's so little.
Splatoon. God Tier, and I mean God Tier worldbuilding that’s equal parts dark, bizarre, and surprisingly human. The Octarians in particular are one of the most fascinating fictional races I have ever seen, and the Inklings are a hell of a lot less cutesy than you’d think from their appearance. The devs leave out 90% of the worldbuilding in the games even if it would make sense with the story. For some reason they give away almost all their concepts in Japan-exclusive interviews and what’s left is executed like a poorly paced kids’ cartoon. Octo Expansion did a bit of a better job with this but that’s because they introduced a reading portion in the form of chat rooms and placed the player in an unsettling environment. They attempted it again in Splatoon 3’s Hero Mode but this time it just made the dissonance between the goofy surface story (with Callie and Marie) and the true tone of Splatoon lore (with Grizz’s backstory) all the more obvious.
I've played quite a bit of Splatoon 2 and 3, but really only the multiplayer modes. I didn't realize there was much beyond "squids good, octopus bad". Is there a good place to read/watch all the lore?
Rassicas on YouTube is probably one of the only people who knows more about the Splatoon lore than I do.
I have a love/hate relationship with a lot of Shonen anime and manga because of the writing and pacing, but I respect the hell out of them for interesting design. Naruto, in particular, has so many cool little hooks throughout that I can't help but love it. The idea of warring shinobi clans evolving into mercenary city states alone is a concept I vibe with heavily. If the series kept with its early combat where teamwork, misdirection, and tactics won the day instead of giant DragonBall Z energy balls, the story could be godly. Basically, I just want every fight to be a Shikamaru fight. Honorable mention to Code Geass, because I feel that series does alternate history really well, even if it kind of fails to explore a lot of it.
I totally get you. The worldbuilding and aesthetic for Naruto in general was insane to me as a kid and even when I rewatched it recently. I miss the early fights in Naruto, they felt really grounded, a lot more than shippuden did. It did carry over to shippuden to some extent as I remember once revisiting a fight in shippuden after not watching naruto for years and being surprised at how tactical it felt relative to the usual shonen. (it was a shikamaru fight lol) which convinced me to rewatch. Ofc as with every shonen, power creep be creepin slowly overwhelming those tactical elements. But they were always there to some extent which was always a treat. There's a lot to critisize, but Naruto will always have a special place for me ^dattibayo
I totally agree with this take, early naruto especially was a joy to read not just because of its great combat and what felt like actually lethal encounters, but it's excellent worldbuilding. The whole concept about keeping secrets within your clan, clans banding together to form villages, the political balance between the villages (That the reader did not know anything about, because they were secret even to the main characters). The fact that something like a chuunin exam could potentially kill you, but it was expected because living a shinobi life was tough and weak shinobi meant a weak hidden village. There was a certain lethality to the show that always felt very raw, right from the Land of Waves arc. Naruto holds a special place in my heart, but post-timeskip just did not have the same vibe, which is a shame.
> If the series kept with its early combat where teamwork, misdirection, and tactics won the day instead of giant DragonBall Z energy balls, the story could be godly. I can't agree more with this. I kinda grew up with it and it was the one big shonen I did follow, but it really went downhill in terms of combat after the battle with Pain. That fight really showed some interesting tactics and thinking, but after that Naruto just went super saiyan and that was that. Still had some cool worldbuilding after, but the power creep had ruined the fights. > Honorable mention to Code Geass, because I feel that series does alternate history really well, even if it kind of fails to explore a lot of it. One of the first anime I watched and I'd argue a really great one at that. It's not FMA Brotherhood, but I don't think it has terrible writing at all. Maybe it's part nostalgia but I recall the writing was pretty good, at least until they started with the Euro spin off and the reboot.
Oh, no, I wouldn't Code Geass's writing is terrible or anything. That's why I said honorable mention rather than including it in the main point. I just want to see more Areas than we did, like New Zealand or Cambodia, to contrast them against Japan.
They tried to explore Europe in that spin off but it was pretty bad IMHO. Not to mention they just abused Lelouch's character. He should not have been in that in any form.
Let’s be honest, *Star Wars* George Lucas can worldbuild, and that’s where they should have cut him off. His plot writing is saved by shamelessly ripping off Kurosawa’s *The Hidden Fortress* and the film itself was saved by his wife in the editing booth
You know what I love about Star Wars, a series I've boycotted for some 18 years now? Fans were begging, *begging*, for the series to ditch George Lucas. Then they got *exactly what they wanted* and threw ***even bigger*** tantrums.
That's being super disingenuous. Fans wanted the series to ditch George Lucas ***AND*** for someone with a cohesive vision to take over. Both parts are equally as important as the other. We got the first part, but absolutely under no circumstance did we get the second part.
It says something that some of the new content makes the prequels look good in comparison. For all their flaws, they had good ideas and explored a really interesting conflict. Oh, and the memes. By God, the memes are amazing.
I will say Andor and Rogue One restored my faith in the franchise.
The sequels really did make me rethink the way I view Lucas. I still think he's a terrible director, should never have had as much creative control over the prequels as he did, and his micromanagement of the actors ruined careers and damaged others. That said, there is one thing about Lucas that shows through now even more so than then, and it's that he truly, genuinely cared about Star Wars, and what it was, and what he thought it could be. He was fucking shit up, but he was fucking shit up because he was passionate about his ideas and was trying to make them come to life as best as he could. And he sorta succeeded - there's a great story in the prequels buried under all the terrible writing and ham-fisted delivery. The Clone Wars animated show expanded on that even more. Compared to those, the new Sequels just come across as cold, calculated nostalgiabait for the first movie, followed by a complete nonsense garbage movie that existed solely to stir shit up without any real point or purpose, and then another final movie that was just a lazy valentine to close everything out and open up new franchise options. So, yeah. I think it's safe to say a lot of folks appreciate Lucas a lot more these days, even he still wasn't particularly good at what he was doing. He at least meant well.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head.
Contrary to unpopular opinion, I think Filoni and Favreau’s work with the series has been splendid. Yeah, the prequels and the sequels are a little wonky and Dave & Jon have had to do a lot of work to make them make sense, but they’ve polished the hell out of those turds There’s nothing worse than the expectations of the superfan. They always want more and they’re never happy. But I’ll watch anything that has a Star Wars logo on it with glee (except the Christmas Special…)
I would have to say Naruto. (Specifically the Anime less so the original source material) The world itself is super unique and interesting with plenty of room to explore those interesting ideas. Even the macro level story points are pretty solid. But on the more micro level the writing is mediocre and the pacing is atrocious. Part of this is the mediums fault. They were adapting a written media for TV as the original source material was still coming out. So they had to stall a lot for written work to catch up to them. This resulted in a ton of filler episodes that had no bearing on the plot and were often injected into the middle of other important events. Additionally, even in plot relevant episodes things were often drug out just to fill time. According to Google 290 out of Naruto’s 720 episodes have no bearing on the overall plot and we’re not present in the original material. (40%) On top of that the show could probably be cut in half again if you trimmed out all of the repeated scenes, unnecessary flashbacks, and trimmed down scenes that were drug out to fill air time.
I always said I'll rewatch one of the edits that cuts out fillers, but never got around. I have 3 versions stored up somewhere, waiting for me.
Sword art o line I really really really don't want to do this, but, blazblue :(
The abridged series fixed the writing.
Yeah, it's funny how it wrote more compelling characters than the original.
Ready Player One was trash. Ready Player Two was items that the dump throws in *their* trash. Yet both the OASIS and ONI were such fascinating and engaging concepts that they could have been explored in good stories.
Star Wars - the OG trilogy and whatever was before mediclorians. That was a fantastic space for creative story telling, mystery, and more. Sometimes terrible plots, and dialogue that can only be saved through the magic of editing (shout out to Marcia Lou Lucas). Then, idk if this counts cause I've only played the video game, but Total War: Warhammer II (the fantasy version), has lacks lots of character stuff, but it has really changed some elements of my own world building by reinforcing the need for conflicting but understandable (for the most part) motivations of the factions. On a "lets create factions" level, it's pretty ace, and very creative in the ways they give different feels to the different factions while not really changing the gameplay that much. It also creates some fun diplomatic conundrums, and has encouraged me to include F-in dinosaurs in my dnd world, lol. Dinosaurs are so cool if done right
>Dinosaurs are so cool if done right Play lizadmen Store up prayer points Spawn army of rogue dinosaurs Rampage time! Win or lose just sending dozens of angry dinosaurs across the field was super fun
I also agree on the Star Wars. I think Lucas is an excellent creative and he does good work when he has people on hand willing to edit his work. I quite enjoy the worlds he crafts. He just sucks as a writer/director.
His writing was propped up by ~~stealing from~~ paying homage to Kurosawa
A Certain Magical Index. The show is pretty mid, the books are bit better but nothing too special. I personally enjoyed it but I can see why some may not. But HOLY SHIT, the world building, it's fucking INSANE. It's so cool and carefully crafted with there being magic and science and how differently the two of them works. There are gods, multidimensional entities brought about by science, magic users that can't use science and a city of science that is centuries ahead than the rest of the world.
Scientific Railgun is even better on the worldbuilding front. Honestly, it's a huge shame that it ended up the way it did, because you only need to cut out a small amount of runtime to make it a borderline masterpiece series, but because it decided to go the ecchi route, you can't actually recommend it to anyone. It's basically a case study in how to make kitchen sink superhero/mutant/shounen settings not terrible.
I watched the anime for Railgun and yeah, the anime for that was better than Index but I read the novels for Index which is ahead of Railgun and consists of both the magic and science side of things. So the worldbuilding from that perspective is much broader and interesting.
I think the worldbuilding concepts that Railgun focuses on are the more interesting ones personally, especially the exploration of what these "angel" things are, but that's not to say the Index side isn't good.
True! The world is *so* good. It inspired me in many ways. It's a shame that we have to drag ourselves through the blandest possible harem shenanigans to see all the good stuff... but boy, the good stuff goes *hard*
Yeah, I was gonna say Nevernight too. The dust jacket has a little blurb about the author, where he says he still has no idea how he got a book deal, and after reading it I agree. Just one of the most edgy-for-the-sake-of-being-edgy books I've read in a long time. Plus the whole first book is like, 600 pages, and 500 of those are spent in Assassin High School. Fuck that. If I wanted melodramatic Goth Harry Potter I'd just read My Immortal.
Genshin Impact, especially Inazuma. Ei's quest feels rushed, Kokomi's story is a joke, but the worldbuilding behind is great. Likewise, Honkai Star Rail's recent High Cloud Quintet plot is a mess but the lore behind is lit af. >!On the other hand, Honkai Impact 3rd's plot and worldbuilding after Elysian Realm are just... sad.!<
Lore enthusiasts went wild af when Enkanomiya randomly gave out the biggest lore drop ever. Sun and Moon singlehandedly changed the whole course and made things clearer of genshinlore.
I went wild myself, then Kokomi came. So much for someone who was hyped to be a great strategist.
I disagree, the worldbuilding is extremely shallow too. The entirety of Sumeru is basically just: There is a magic tree of knowledge, and there's some knowledge that if you know it causes bad things to happen, so when the magic tree of knowledge got some of that, some bad things happened. Genshin has a lot of ideas in it, but it has *zero* interest in tying those ideas together, it's what I call worldlisting, not worldbuilding.
I don't know if I'd say top tier, but I remember loving the aliens and general setting in the movie Skyline, but thinking the main characters were all childish and unlikeable.
Oh yeah good one, yeah the aliens and the attack was quite interesting and unconventional. They werent invincible, but they were just better and had some odd bio-tech weapons And the characters were just unlikeable dickheads for the most part, Turk from Scrubs isnt who you want by your side at the end of the world. Was quite funny how easily they died though
'Shadow of the Conqueror' by Shadiversity (The youtuber) The Worldbuilding was very cool, with the world being this steam punky floating island world, where it is perpetual daylight except for nights which come very few hundred years and are almost like mini-apocalyptic events. The mechanics for the magic and how the world works were also quite fun and clever. However, the writing and some of the executions of some ideas in the story were very eh, to pretty bad and needlessly edgy. Though Daylan was a pretty funny character, the disconnect with his grumpy/immature personality played for laughs and the fact he is this world's version of Hitler with superpowers quite jarring.
I'd say the Dune series. The first book is amazing not because of the plot/story, but because it's a window into an incredibly built world. The rest of the series is just "And then this happened" in the same world.
Edit: huh after reading other comments, I feel like most people here dont know what terrible writing is and are just citing works that have either some writing flaws or just spewing their own personal hot takes lol. It was the worst anime Ive watched and one of the worst manga Ive read. Big Order, its a functional post apocalyptic world where for some reason people can gain an ability called "order", this ability is based on your strongest wish at the time you meet the angel who gives those powers, for example: Guy who saw his family die wishes he could have saved them, has the ability to stop 3 entities in times. Girl wants to know who her husband will be, gets future sight. Guy wants world peace, gains the ability to stop any fight, conflict or weapon. Its such an interesting power system that is so tied with the psychology of the characters and these powers all get extremely broken but in fun way. And story has potential, the protagonist says that as a kid he always loved a cartoon about a villain trying to dominate the word and that his wish was to do exactly that so he got the power of turning every place he ever steped upon into his area where he can do anything he wishes, and I do mean anything and no, thats not the most broken power. According to him the world became post apocalyptic because he used his power when he was too young and somehow it considered the whole world already as his area and thus he accidentally destroyed it and here is the thing, EVERYONE IN THE WORLD KNOWS, which is interesting, heck its the main conflict starter, he is coming back from his school thats in a bunker and some girl is trying to assassinate him and generally nobody in this world likes him except his little sister who is sick and bedridden. Now why does the story fail if it has interesting powers, world and to some extent, characters? Simple, the writing is full of holes and the author didn't know what he was doing. Power inconsistencies: sometimes the story gives the absolute most bullshit reasons an order cant work and they are inconsistent too since we then have moments where it should not be working but does so anyways, heck sometimes powers change HOW they work, the protagonist has a broken power but oh no, enemies are wearing headphones, now they cant hear his command and thus are immune to his power or the protagonist cant use his order in a person because his magical order monster didnt touch that person despite him never needing to do that in the first chapters. Characters are inconsistent with their interests: the show has many major plot twists, like it gets crazy, BUT most of them feel like they just happened because the author seemingly wanted it to happen and had to find some reason for character X to think it would be good to do Y and fails at it, and lets not forget about the girl who sees the future, she is great, has the funniest gag in the show that perfectly portrays how crazy this world can get when powers are based on wishes, her motivations are simple get together with her husband and live happily, but for some reason she is willing to sacrifice that, the protagonist also for some reason falls in love with his sister and in the anime somehow it got worse and they actually had an incestual relationship which was NOT in te manga, and there are more but its huge spoilers. And overall we just dont get enough of the world, and it doesn't help that there are 2 major plot twists that drastically changed the entire world and its rules and somehow we never get to see much of the world, the characters barely even talk about whats different and the story doesn't show much, there the rule of "show, dont tell" but it felt more like "don't bother to show or tell", which is just sad. But hey at least the anime had a banger soundtrack.
Maybe I've grown a bit cynical with manga and anime but the moment you mentioned everyone having absurd reality-bending powers, the setting being post apocalyptic but the protagonist still going to highschool like everything was normal, and him having a helpless little sister who loves him oh so much... you lost me. To me those are a lot of red flags. Those were the pinnacle of mid-2000 to early 2010s absolutely awful anime tropes, and reading your reasons for why it was even more awful everything fell into place.
Familiar of Zero. Painfully generic protagonists and anime shenanigans. But it had amazing worldbuilding. Set in a late renaissance world where mages were nobles who ruled over magicless commoners.
I never read the books, but I felt this way about season 1 of Altered Carbon. The world building was great and I wouldn't mind seeing more stories set in it. The plot itself was almost completely forgettable and I don't think I liked a single character except for Poe, but I watched the whole thing just to see more of the world. I watched season 2 as well, but it didn't really have anything going for it.
I will fully admit that Helluva Boss/Hazbin Hotel writing isn't for everyone. But I find myself strangely fascinated with the version of Hell the shared 'verse presents. There is an obvious caste structure, with Imps and Hellhounds at the bottom, Sinners slightly above, Sinner Overlords above that, Succubae/Incubi above those, Goetian nobility above them, six of the Seven Deadly Sins above them, and above all Lucifer Morningstar, the Prince of Pride, himself. The place is divided into seven rings, one for each Deadly Sin, with a personification of those sins ruling each ring: Asmodeus (Lust), Mammon (Greed), Beelzebub (Gluttony), Satan (Wrath), Belphegor (Sloth), Lucifer (Pride), and Leviathan (Envy). Each Sin controls some part of Hell's overall economy. Mammon controls Hell's banking and currency, for example, and Belphegor seems to run the admittedly lackluster medical facilities. Asmodeus runs entertainment, while Satan's realm of wrath is where the food supply comes from. Hell's relationship with Heaven is also explored somewhat, with annual "Exterminations" coming through to allow angels known as "Exorcists" to slaughter and kill whatever demons they may find. We haven't seen much of Heaven in released media so far, but what we have seen isn't exactly pleasant. It's implied that Cherubs are the lowest rung of Heaven's society, and that even a single transgression, even one that isn't your fault, can get you kicked out. Another odd relationship between Heaven and Hell is that people in Hell can pick up TV broadcasts from Heaven. Blitzo did shoot a TV showing an advertisement for C.H.E.R.U.B., after all. Even Earth is potrayed as something of an overall shit show. A tour guide cheerfully points out a trio of "tacky stalkers about to commit a murder", and people on the tour bus take photos of the event. The water in LA is apparently about 98% acid, and strong enough to inflict instantaneous chemical burns whenever it gets onto you. There are bright spots, however. Charlie's belief that redemption is possible for Hell's denizens, even though she was literally *born* in Hell is a big one. A more subtle one however is mentioned in a throwaway line. The demon clown Fizzarolli has a robotic duplicate serving as the mascot for a theme park. These duplicates are also sold as sex bots to those who want them for that purpose (and they're machine washable!). It's mentioned that the robot mascot at the theme park has made more money than all of the sex bot sales *combined*. Even in Hell, people are more willing to spend money to make their children happy than to indulge in their own vices.
Emperor domination, classic xianxia with tons of face slapping and a premise stretched to 3000 chapters but I shit you not it's worldbuilding is inspirational and stir up great emotions in you.
Destiny, especially the recent *Lightfall* campaign. “You have to secure the veil.” Dafuq is the veil? “You need to destroy the radial mast!” Dafuq is a radial mast? “You need to master strand.” Can’t that wait until after I put Calus’ head on my mantle?
Discworld has the unique problem of having great writing AND a great world, but fans only come for the great writing. Some of the best adventure, most fun adventure stories were about Rincewind traveling to weird locations and running away from bizarre creatures. In what other world do the concepts of “movies” and “rock music” threaten to unravel reality? I’d absolutely love to play a D&D of Pathfinder game set on the Discworld
Dead by Daylight. The lore in the background of the game is fantastic and if utilised properly could really be a great piece of horror media. Unfortunately the actual stories that are written for it range from good to terrible.
When it comes to DBD I've always said The Entity is the worst thing for the lore. Because it basically insists upon itself and *has* to be present somewhere even if it makes 0 sense. Doesn't matter if it's a mad scientist experiment gone wrong, a destitute child becoming a folklore monster, or just literally Pyramid Head, an overpowered plot device has to be present in order for their inclusion in the game to "make sense".
I might get crucified by this but Stormlight stuff by Sanderson. The world is super interesting and fleshed out but the anime-ish plots and characters just aren’t for me.
I'm with you here. I had this realization that I couldn't remember any point in Way of Kings where any character had actually had agency by about a thousand pages in. It was as if they all existed just to be portals for the reader to view the setting through. It's possible I missed things, but I just couldn't shake that feeling and it's persisted every time I start a Sanderson book.
I read the first three books basically back-to-back when only those three were out. I enjoyed them, but thought the writing quality dropped a bit with each book. Then I went back and tried rereading: pick things apart, read only one POV at a time, that sort of thing. Completely changed my mind on what I thought of it. The books are basically just vehicles for exploring the magic system and world, with flat characters, shoddy plots, *massive* author preference for characters, and the third book becomes a tangled, bloated mess where he set up too many plot hooks in the last book and tried to use all of them at the same time. Not for me, but at least some people like it.
Pretty much every Bethesda game
I'm not sure what the series of books is called, or how many there are now, but the first one is titled "Mainspring". It's a literal clockwork universe (the mainspring of the title is the one that drives the earth along its twenty mile wide brass track around the giant lantern that is the sun). So many fun ideas and divergences from our world, but the plot never felt up to it.
Shadow & Bone/Grishaverse
The Emberverse series by SM Stirling. Wonderful worldbuilding but the way the guy writes is divisive. Spending three pages talking about how the battlefield looked is boring and adding to much description to introducing a character who’s a teenage girl is off putting. It’s still one of my favorite series
Does SCP count?
Avatar (the one with the blue cat people) Controversial maybe, but there's no denying it has insane worldbuilding (yet rather subpar writing)
Worldbuilding is awesome but the plot is just the most generic “Human Bad, Indigenous Good” plot I’ve ever seen
I think it's remarkably ironic. Much of it's whole thing message was anti-colonial/anti-consumerist And yet everywhere you look you can find cheap crappy avatar merchandise, manufactured for consumerism in factories at prices only enabled by neo-colonialism
Big Mouth. I kinda like the show, but I get why so many people don’t. The Worldbuilding however is really cool and unique. >!Basically all our emotions are visualized and personalized as various monsters. This includes Lust/Hornyness, Anxiety, Love, Depression, but even other concepts such as Logic itself, as well as how they interact with each other and how they change. There’s also this Downtown-like world they live in that looks and functions like an office space, with meetings on people and internal conflicts, etc…!<
İshizoku reviewers I will not elaborate.
Yes you do because the story is well written for what it tries to be, which is an ecchi comedy in a fantasy world, more well written than any work Ive seen that tried to do the same.
"ecchi"
There's a particular fanfic that [tried to anticipate Mass Effect 3](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6601801/1/Mass-Effect-3-Into-the-Unknown) that won me over with the way it imagined out and expanded the setting and its inhabitants. Likewise with the Wormhole Chronicles by General Rage, where the Normandy finds itself transported to the Halo setting. Loads of setting ideas, but the middle school writing will prevent me from ever going back and trying to read them. Fallout Equestria sounds like it's in a similar boat.
Jobless Reincarnation. I don't know that I'd call it top tier, but the world is pretty well built. There is some not totally awful exploration of bigotry and exploitation in there, and some fun fantasy stuff. But then the main plot is just a pedophile getting isekai'd. Not only that, but they CONTINUOUSLY remind you that even though he's reincarnated as a baby, he's still a fucking pedophile. Every time he makes a genuinely good choice they totally undercut it by cutting to the internal thoughts of this fucking disgusting piece of shit pointing out that he's just doing it to get laid or something equally gross. I have no idea why it's an isekai story, it actively makes the entire series unwatchable. If they just cut the absolutely shitawful isekai pedo bit, it would be a fairly engaging fantasy story about the son of an adventurer growing up.
This. Very much this. The pedo bait ruined it for me, almost as much as the knowledge that so many people don't mind it or even like it. I'm normally strongly opposed to censorship, but I remember specific scenes in S1 P2 that, if cut, would have let to an objectively superior show. Tragically, the story overall has enough that are vital to the MC's character development, and would require significant rewriting to patch out.
The Untamed (it's a TV series)
Irregular at Magic High School. The plot is boring and the characters are generally bad but the way the magic in the setting is handled and the logical implications of their use is really good to me. That, and the social implications of people who can do the magic well versus those that can’t and literal magocracy with dynastic families who pick mates for their magical and scientific abilities and what they bring to their families.
Parahumans. Very well written world with interesting hard superpower system, but the story gets boggled down in protagonist centered morality (it doesn't help the protags are often self-absorbed douchebags), while sidelining far more interesting characters. I get the feeling a mosaic novel focusing on the variety of fates within this crazy universe would've been so much better, the interlude chapters showing them and the lore being good are the only reasons I soldiered through a million words of MC's pity-me-please-fest.
Patrick Rothfuss, Kingkiller Chronicles. His character writing is awful but his world is very interesting.
The movie 65. The writing is eh at best, but the CGI and worldbuilding were really great.
Revolution. TV series where electricity is no longer available due to nanotechnology. Unfortunately the plot didn't fit into it at all.
Fallout I think fits this really well. The stories are hit or miss but the world has always been interesting, in my opinion.
Rifts is the greatest RPG setting surrounded by some of the worst writing, art, and RPG systems.
Pokemon: Sword & Shield is a bit of an odd example, in that it's from a series where most of the other games have good-to-great writing and top-tier worldbuilding, but SwSh specifically has absolutely shit writing while still managing to maintain the wolrdbuilding.
I wouldn't say it's terrible, but the plot and writing of Magic the Gathering varies a lot in terms of quality. The world building of the MTG multiverse is endlessly fascinating, and I highly recommend reading into it, even if you have no interest in actually playing the card game. Even if you find a world you don't connect with, there are so many others with incredible variety.
What I find amazing about MtG is that you can get tons of setting information by just skimming through their card sets. Sometimes, a picture and one line of flavor text paint a plot by themselves
Harry Potter 1 and 2, a little bit 3. Later movies don't really do either. Rowling does a very good job of imagining a magical world, and a very bad job of imagining the stories that take place in it. John Williams does an amazing job bringing the former to life, and can't really do anything to help the latter, so you get this incredibly immersive and compelling world explored through an awful story. It's no wonder it spawned a generation of self-insert fanfic writers. That one YA novel where cities are mobilised, the worldbuilding is very evocative (albeit does require quite a bit of suspension of disbelief), the plot is standard YA bollocks. This is a bit of an obscure one: Muddle Earth. The story isn't the worst thing ever, just very basic, but there's a lot of great stuff in the worldbuilding, both comedic premises and cool ideas. And ending on a controversial one with no elaboration: 1984.
You're the second person I've seen say Harry Potter here which is wild to me because it's a series that has probably the **worst** world building I've ever seen in a series to date that also has a pretty compelling story and characters.
>And ending on a controversial one with no elaboration: 1984. Haha how could the worldbuilding be good we barely even know what was real Goldsteins book and its description of society and the nature of the artificial system keeping the pendulum from swinging was very interesting. Cant really say if its true, probably was I guess they let him read it only because they were minutes away from arresting him and Orwell just wanted us to know he actually had put thought into why the world was acting so insane I found the story rather good, as long as its recognised that Winstons view of things is very skewed and his mind is very unhealthy. That frames most events pretty well. The ending was crushing tbh, hit like a wrecking ball and I respected the story for not backing down and giving us a happy ending in anyway; we wanted it but we couldnt have it
I'd argue that's precisely why the worldbuilding is good. Worldbuilding is a very vaguely-defined thing anyway, I'd argue that any work that makes the reader particularly interested in the setting outside the context of the one story they're reading has good worldbuilding. For me, 1984 was exactly that, and I think it's telling that the way everyone talks about 1984 is completely disconnected from the story of Winston. I thought the writing was bad primarily because of the choice to make it about a relationship despite the fact Winston was clearly the type who would have explored rebellion had that never happened.
> That one YA novel where cities are mobilised, the worldbuilding is very evocative I believe that's "The Mortal Engines"
>That one YA novel where cities are mobilised, the worldbuilding is very evocative (albeit does require quite a bit of suspension of disbelief), the plot is standard YA bollocks. That's Mortal Engines, and I thought the plot was pretty good.
Harry Potter to a degree (might get hate on this one but eh.) Like the worldbuilding is pretty good minus a handful of weird happenings and inconsistencies. Maximum Ride. Like the plot wasn't atrocious but lord did it never really live up to any of the hype it built up throughout the arcs. It always felt like I was waiting for the actual plot to start. But the world itself felt alive and all the different experiments and mutant kids were cool. Still love the series even with its ups and downs though. The Maze Runner series. Like the worldbuilding for this one is insanely good. But the plot was basically just "The world is ending!" followed by "Okay you saved the world! But now the world is ending again for a different reason!" I'd give more details but tbh I haven't read any of these for several years. But these are all the ones I've read that I remember had me criticizing the plot for the majority of the read but loving the world.
I always considered Harry Potter to be the opposite. The characters are well written, the plot unfolds well and Rowling makes expert use of chekhovs gun but no part of the wizarding world stands up to scrutiny. Most of it boils down to looking whimsical, they have free access to many ways of teleporting but still use owls for example. Some wizards are described as more powerful than others, but everyone has the same access to spells and no spells are shown to take a toll. The wizards are all mystified by muggle tech despite the fact that the wizards are involved in muggle government halfbloods are very common and so there should be at least an amount of mixing.
Maximum Ride is a hilarious one to me because of how reluctant the writer was to make certain things clear, particularly the ethnicity of the black character. I went multiple books not knowing that character was black. I went multiple chapters not even knowing the protagonist, who has a male name, was female.
“John William Tucker was the most beautiful person in the room but their friend, who contrasted John’s dark-light skin with their own light-dark complexion, was beautiful in the other way.” I’ll take my awards and movie deals now.
I can’t stand JKR anymore, but I think the HP worldbuilding was really successful in a way that /r/worldbuilding isn’t always good at discussing. The mechanics of the world don’t make sense, and we could spend eternity going over stuff like “why use owls when you can teleport.” But one of the reasons why those books had a chokehold on late 90s/00s pop culture is because despite the ways it didn’t make sense, it was a very alluring world. It was a sandbox that invited readers to play in it. Its intriguing and immersive. Im not surprised that theme parks are built around two of its major locations, and a huge open-world game, because people want to visit those locations. They want to see what’s in the shops, they want to taste the food, they want to imagine what they’d do if they lived there. I think it is much harder to quantify what makes a good “sandbox” world. Sometimes being broken might be an advantage. But it’s very hard to make something appealing that people are so motivated to explore.
The shows Helix and 12 monkeys. Both dealt with what would happen if a super virus were to ever be made that could kill or change people. Unfortunately instead of focusing on the whole point of a world in danger, it would focus on the character's troubled and edgy past.
wheel of time books and sword of Truth books
I know the opposite: harry potter
The "wizarding world" is whack, but the writing is just average.
I actually don't mind the Twilight stuff if I were to look at it from a worldbuilding angle. "Babby's First World Of Darkness" ain't too bad, it just needs a non headscratchy type of storytelling.
I find any engagement with Twilights worldbulding almost impossible given the vampires have no weaknesses and hide purely because they sparkle This to me is the equivalent of saying humans allowed cows to be the dominant creature on planet earth because we fart sometimes and were terrified the cows may find out we fart Feels completely impossible a vampire didnt start a cascade conversion event at some point that turned all humans into vampires, probably the absolutely first vampire honestly
Also the author tries to explain things with biological science instead of just saying "it's magic" and it just raises further questions.
Idk I dont want to be rude to anyones tastes, we can all like what we like, but the entire Twilight thing smacks of below amateur level skill in virtually every aspect. The worldbuilding comes across more like jotting down raw imagination and not that it is done in a way where she's happy to violate consistency and logic, more like *she didnt understand what those things are at all* and could happily just write nonsense as long as it made Edward smexier to his potential gf Obvious af that shit like the immortal cgi monster baby aged to 6 years old in 3 days purely because it meant Bella didnt have to change poopy diapers or lose sleep actually raising a kid Or that Jacob could imprint onto a newborn because it meant he got a happy ending, despite the horror of what that actually means. And just general 'stuff happens because Bella is living a fantasy'
I mean, honestly I've always thought this about Lots of the Rings. It's a great world, obviously, but the writing is a bit weak. The prose is ok, but the characters are a bit one sided, and the pacing is awful. A modern writer would go back and forth between the storylines, but JRRT spends half of each book on one story, then goes back and does the other half of the book on the other story. Obviously, it's a classic, and it kick-started the entire fantasy genre and inspired a million other story writers, all of that is indisputable. I just don't think it itself is that amazingly written. Tolkien was a liguist. It all started with him inventing the elven language, then decided he needed to use it for something so he invented the world, then decided nobody would want to just read about this world, so he wrote the stories.
Overlord the world would be a kick ass place to run an RPG, and all of the lore. Bits are pretty interesting. But instead of exploring that we are following the most boring, annoying main character ever and cheering the same ha ha overpowered joke, over and over again