Going to shout out to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Treats some of more egregiously stupid world building in Rowling’s works with humour.
and even genius fridge logic.
The first half is some of the best fanfiction that exists anywhere; the second half is kind of a slog.
I’ve had this discussion a lot over the years since the early Potter fans grew up and reread the stuff they first read as kids.
Let me start out by saying I actually love the books and movies, despite the unbelievable twat that wrote them.
And that’s possible nectar her world building does have good parts. We all know the plot holes and contradictions, and a lot of that comes from the world building coming during the writing.
So, what’s good about it?
The biggest thing is that it feels complex and saturated without much actual on paper effort. Rowling world built in sketches that gave an impressionistic sense of there being more than what’s actually described. I hesitate to say she did it intentionally, but look at how Neville’s family history works out. His parents alone give a sense of danger and menace to all of the death eaters in a way that Harry’s parents didn’t. Death is a weak world building tool.
But breaking the minds with torture spells? That’s terrifying. And then they’re in a wizard hospital. Which, along with the Hogwarts infirmary implies an entire branch of wizardry dedicated to healing and also a culture of wizards taking care of each other.
See? Broad brush strokes that allow you to almost subconsciously absorb a background world without much exposition in writing, or much in the way of on screen effects.
And that’s pretty much where the Potter world building is a huge success. It allows/forces each reader to fill in the gaps. Even up to the end of the series where she’s kinda caught up with the runaway train of its popularity and makes attempts at serious world building via the Deathly Hallows and the forces behind them, there’s still more hints than outright revelations. Some of that is just her sucking at writing, some is that she made the wise choice of not pretending to know how to make things meatier, and some is that she did know that half the battle with children’s and YA fiction is giving the audience characters they can identify with, then letting their imagination run.
One example of that is the incantations for spells. Wingardium leviosa. Avada kedavra. Sectum sempra, crucio (one of the nastiest spells and it only needs one word), expeliarmus.
She’s just making up things that sound like what a kid might yell while playing wizards in the back yard. And, frankly, she was fucking excellent at it. Every incantation in the books is simple and childishly repeatable.
And that is world building. It’s just building for an audience that isn’t exactly into intricate magical systems and complex cultures. She was going for Narnia, not Middle Earth. Mind you, I don’t think she rose to the quality of Narnia, but there are similarities in how the world building is basically pastiches and implications rather than well crafted edifices of thought.
Her world building is more akin to finger paints than the watercolors of narnia, but it’s got the same vagueness and blur to it.
