The funny thing is, the primacy of worldbuilding was once quite hotly debated among fantasy writers - the best known fusillade probably being the 2007 essay by M John Harrison which furiously condemned worldbuilding as ‘the great clomping foot of nerdism’. He went so far as to say:
But much of it is a matter of ideology. The whole idea of worldbuilding is a bad idea about the world as much as it is a bad idea about fiction. It’s a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world’s a watch & God’s the watchmaker. It reveals the bad old underpinnings of the humanist stance. It centralises the author, who hands down her mechanical toy to a complaisant audience (which rarely thinks to ask itself if language can deliver on any of the representational promises it is assumed to make), as a little god. And it flatters everyone further into the illusions of anthropocentric demiurgy which have already brought the real world to the edge of ecological disaster.
We probably don’t go quite as far as Harrison, who was certainly writing to provoke - the link he draws between fantasy worldbuilding and the ecological catastrophe seems rather tenuous. But worldbuilding advice really has become the dominant paradigm in fantasy. Allegedly poor writing decisions are in popular criticism condemned as failures of worldbuilding. Is the problem with the netflix movie Bright, as critic Lindsay Ellis titles her video, that its worldbuilding is lazy? Hardly - it’s that it’s horrendously conceived and deeply muddled allegory for racism that’s excruciating to watch.
I do think, as a self-indulgent exercise, there’s nothing really wrong with dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of a fantasy world if that brings you pleasure. Why else do we write? There’s no shame in it, any more than writing down your sexual fantasies.
But I also think this is basically orthogonal to like, ‘literary merit’. Would NieR Automata be improved by saying, “well, there’s no way the desert area and the forest area would be so close together, this makes no geographical sense?” Hardly - it’s irrelevant to what the story is about. And this is, as argued above, the key.
One example I find illuminating is that my favourite fantasy authors Seth Dickinson has also frequently condemned ‘worldbuilding’ (mostly on their now-deleted Reddit account), despite honestly writing some of the most grounded and historically informed fantasy fiction out there. Baru Cormorant has plenty of the expected elements of ‘worldbuilding’: elaborate constructed cultures with their various linguistic traits and cultural mores, a carefully worked out history driven by geological and economic factors (circulating winds in an enclosed sea), fantastical elements that take care not to stray too far from science (e.g. transmissible cancers, natural nuclear reactors).
The thing is perhaps, as suggested above, in a book like Baru Cormorant the 'worldbuilding’ elements all exist to reinforce the book’s thematic interrogation of the 'why’ of empire, and its critique of the existing frame of grimdark fantasy like A Song of Ice and Fire. Creating a variety of diverse, characterful cultures in interaction is quite important for a book that is in part about modes of existence being destroyed by genocide. And it accomplishes a great deal with suggestion: we should never forget that nothing outside the text is ultimately fixed (and even then, there’s usually some slippage!) and I’m sure at many points during writing, Seth used this freedom to change things up drastically as the needs of the book demanded.
Which perhaps provides a guide to when and how worldbuilding can be worthwhile: your story is about something. (Well, usually many somethings.) I don’t believe in a minimalism where everything that isn’t 'useful’ should be cut, flavour is important, but you should understand the purpose behind your fiction, and not take for granted that any element like 'worldbuilding’ is necessary.
One of the big concerns of the old TTRPG forum I used to inhabit was the old warhorse of verisimilitude, a word that actually turns out to be due to Ayn Rand (really!), though I think most posters didn’t really know its genealogy. This would be invoked in a fairly standard argument: fantastical elements like dragons may be unrealistic (because dragons aren’t real), but in portraying them you should still strive to be like reality, i.e. veri [real] simili [like] tudinous. Everyone pat themselves on the back, we’ve solved this tricky conundrum that someone somewhere presumably once worried about.
Of course the obvious retort to this is… why? Why should we strive to be 'like reality’? The argument rarely progressed this far, but I would guess that the answer would be something like that it helps 'immersion’.
Oh, well, can’t argue with that then, surely we all want to be 'immersed'—uh-oh, I think we woke up Bertolt Brecht!
One of Brecht’s most important principles was what he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as “defamiliarization effect”, “distancing effect”, or “estrangement effect”, and often mistranslated as “alienation effect”).[73] This involved, Brecht wrote, “stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them”.[74] To this end, Brecht employed techniques such as the actor’s direct address to the audience, harsh and bright stage lighting, the use of songs to interrupt the action, explanatory placards, the transposition of text to the third person or past tense in rehearsals, and speaking the stage directions out loud.[75]
Not to say that Brecht’s approach is the only right one, but hey, perhaps we shouldn’t take that for granted then. (Interesting, to me, that many of these devices appear in Yoko Taro’s works.)
This question of realism is still an ongoing curiosity for me, now far removed from that old daft forum. In drawing, for example, you’re always making decisions about how to stylise, and how much - what features deserve a line - but there’s clearly a kind of drawing that’s considered 'more realistic’, i.e. closer to a photo. This question comes up in animation a lot, particularly when discussing the various 'realist’ traditions in anime, who all tried to use very lifelike, 'realistic’ animation to particular artistic effects. There’s a great interrogation of the methods and purposes of realist directors Isao Takahata, Naoko Yamada and Satoshi Kon here, by Matteo Watzky. To them we could surely also consider Mamoru Oshii, and many key animators of the realist tradition such as Mitsuo Iso.
But it’s not like 'realism’ in animation is just a particular narrow tradition of Japanese animation. Disney’s tradition of 'full animation’ - lending the 'illusion of life’ so you forget you’re looking at a drawing - is heavily informed by motivations of realism as well, trying to capture the real weight, acceleration and elasticity which the animators witnessed while poring over live action film. For as long as the medium has existed, we’ve been in dialogue with realism.
'Realism’ in animation is kind of a different beast to 'realism’ in writing, and comes in a few different strains. The dominant paradigm today in 3DCG animation for film is 'photorealism’, but here we’re dealing with realism in traditional animation - a realism that is clearly very unrealistic since, well, real things don’t have flat cel shading, nor are they ever animated on twos or threes or even ones, nor are they ever so sharp and clear - and meanwhile even the best realist animation can never capture every subtlety that a camera can see.
And nor should it. Rather, by moving in the direction of 'realism’ from traditional animation, the realist animators create a kind of dialogue - with live action film for one, but also taking things that would just be taken as 'natural’ and unremarkable, and making them deliberate and constructed. Watzky mentions the scene in Liz and the Blue Bird where a girl who is struggling to admit her feelings for another leans closer, and her hair slips down over her shoulder to hang in the space between them - and then the moment passes and she pulls away. This 'realistic’ movement, which you would hardly notice in a film, is now full of meaning: somebody drew it with a great deal of care and attention, which draws your attention to it, and now it’s saying something about these characters and how they relate to each other.
So, let’s swing back around to 'worldbuilding’ in fantasy. Realism shouldn’t be understood as a fundamental necessity of 'good art’, but rather a tool you can invoke for specific effects - in particular, to create meaningful contrasts. But there are so many ways for a work to be 'realistic’. Physical realism tends to dominate fantasy readers’ discussions, but emotional realism is surely far more important to how we view characters. (And, again, it’s a device you can choose to use, or not - you can for example instead choose to exaggerate and heighten and go for some kind of grand melodrama.)
Which isn’t to say there isn’t some highly autistic pleasure in the 'curative fandom’ impulse to understand the intricacies of a made up place. It’s not wrong to write fiction in pursuit of this impulse either. The results when taken to extremes tend to be fascinating. Indeed, a story that primarily serves as a tour of sufficiently creative and weird 'worldbuilding’ can be result in a very unusual, effective artwork - look for example at Unicorn Jelly, whose characters and central story are a muddle, but endlessly fascinates with its bizarre alt-physics universe of giant triangular plates and deterministic lifeforms.
This is because this sort of alternate physics was Jennifer Diane Reitz’s absolute passion. She loved that, and her enthusiasm is infectious. That’s a good reason to devote your time to 'worldbuilding’. In other elements, like linguistics, she fumbles, but who cares? It still broadly adds to the charm of her story, just like the open weebishness. She’s entirely unafraid of being cringe - and fear of cringe is, I suspect, part of the impulse towards 'worldbuilding’ in the broader discourse.
Ultimately what you need from a fictional 'world’ is not perfectly consistent history and geography but powerful, vivid images that draw everything together. Who cares how the Golden Throne works?
I kind of suspect the 'start with tectonic plates’ thing can actually be blamed on Terry Pratchett of all people. Seems kind of crazy given that, well, Discworld is a completely fantastical setting where nearly everything is a blatant allegory or parody. But, the anecdote goes, when the artist was drawing a map of the Discworld - something Pratchett had clearly never actually needed while writing the books! - he neglected physical geography such as the rain shadow of a mountain, which Pratchett insisted on correcting in the second draft. As a result of this anecdote, thinking about rain shadows became the symbol of doing Real Worldbuilding.
This probably goes without saying… but none of the appeal of the Discworld novels is due to the physical geography being correct. Because it’s just not relevant. Indeed, the function of the Discworld - at first just a parody of sword and sorcery novels - is largely in being a large, vague, wide-open chaotic space where Sir Pterry could just throw in whatever he wanted.
In short, do it for fun, or do it because it matters to your narrative purpose for certain things to be handled with 'realism’, but don’t do it because you think that’s the proper way fantasy writing is done. Be intentional.
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