JMuns on worldbuilding

A/N:

IDK WHY AUTHORS NOTES ARENT WORKING. YOU KNOW WHO TO BLAME.

Yo idek. Take what i say with a grain of salt BC IDK IF MY ADVICE IS EVEN GOOD ALSO I DIDN'T EDIT THIS ALSO I JUST HAD THE LONGEST DAY EVER I CAME HOME FROM MY FLIGHT from MEXICO AND MY DAMN CAT PISSED ALL OVER MY BED (don't worry MY NEIGHBOURS WERE FEEDING HIM IM NOT A MONSTER) nad while my LAUNDRY is in the wash I decided to write this okay bye

Hello everyone, I decided to take a stab and publish my own chapter!

This time, I'll be talking about worldbuilding! Super niche topic, but not really.

I know most people associate worldbuilding with fantasy, hell that's why I chose to write about worldbuilding, but it's not exclusive to it. In fact, I'd argue it's one of the least exclusive things in writing.

Your fic has to take place somewhere. Worldbuilding is setting really. Even if that setting is just a bedroom. Whatever plane your characters exist on, whether it's earth as we know it or the Discworld, you're building a world.

Your characters will always experience a world. That's why, for this chapter, I don't want to focus on imaginative worldbuilding. There are plenty of videos on YouTube that cover the intricacies of worldbuilding. I won't bore you with the 'your city has to be near a body of water!' or 'make sure your rivers are flowing down from the mountains'. So, go wild. Create whatever world you can dream up. That's all I'll say about that.

For today, I'll go over some of my philosophies on how to present the world you worked so hard on creating, through the lens of ksmut.

I think one of the most important things to note is: POV. Most ksmut is written in 2nd person. This makes things a little tricky; who is the you? Is it the reader? Is it an MC you've created? For a heavy fantasy setting, I suggest viewing them as an MC. I'll talk more about why later, but viewing them as an MC will help you figure out how you present the world.

So, think about what this world you created is to the MC. Did your MC go through a wardrobe and end up in Narnia? Has he been there his whole life?

Take this example: you're walking through a forest filled with fairies - they're woodland fairies, dressed in green leaves. One of their names is Momo and she has fat tits, but that's not important.

You have to adapt your way of presenting things. If the MC has lived there their whole life, they might think "these fucking fairies again. Can't wait to get out of the forest. Unless I meet that one fairy with the fat tits".

But if they're new, they might think "Wow. This is beautiful. They line up the pathway so nicely. Hey companion, what are these creatures?"

Maybe you've created this rich history on why the fairies are there, maybe there are hidden villages in the canopies. Maybe you've created this whole idea that honey badgers eat forest fairies, and there are these huge wars.

If that has nothing to do with you plot at all, it's probably best to leave it out. Maybe the companion hints at these wars, maybe they see a honey badger and think "oh, we should hurry along". But getting sidetracked for the sake of showing off your world can make a story feel unfocused.

This is ksmut! People are here to read Chaeyoung get plapped!

Listen, you’ve worked hard on creating your world. No one is denying that. If you’ve created a fantasy world that sits on top of 4 elephants which sits on top of a turtle, and want to tell people that, tell them! It’s fucking interesting! But keep it interesting. Don’t go on to then tell them about why whichever God created the world did that, and all of that God’s motives, just because you’ve mapped it out. That has nothing to do with Chaeyoung (Twice) being plapped in ungodly ways. Ugh. She’s so hot.

On leaving things out, I want to clarify something. There's this rule, the 80/20 rule when it comes to worldbuilding. Leave 80% of your world off the page, only reveal 20% of it. It's a great rule, but I don't necessarily think it applies to ksmut. You don't even need to create 100% of that world. Again, people are here to read idols getting slaptackled in ways that make them goon HARD. You're not writing an epic here. Keep it simple! I don't want to mislead you with this advice in thinking you NEED to have this all mapped out. You don't NEED to think of the history of these fairies or whatever. Just, worldbuilding can get fun, you may run away with ideas, and think you have to include them.

I think that letting your reader, even yourself, ask questions about the world is one of the most important things in creating vibrant worlds. Moreso the reader, of course, but hey.

Leverage curiosity to foster engagement with your world as a whole. Let's use the fairy vs. honey badger thing again. If you just lay everything out, about the canopy villages and wars, in 7 long winded expository paragraphs, your reader may think "I guess that's cool, but weren't we on a grand adventure to plap the King? Yeah, we plapping Kings now cuz we moved up in the world.

But, if your companion hints at it with the "Oh there's a honey badger, we should move along", your reader will think "honey badger? That's weird. I wonder what fairies and honey badgers have to do with each other. Companion didn't seem too stressed but, wonder if they have a history."

See the engagement? What your reader WON'T think is: "awww, I really wish he went into more detail about those honey badgers!" I know, as a writer, it can be easy to fall into these moments where you think, the reader isn't even going to know what I'm talking about! Those moments are okay!! It's totally fine, even immersive if your reader has questions.

Also, another note, maybe your MC doesn't even mention the fairies. Maybe it's just in passing, they look at them in awe, and move along. That's totally fine too!!

One fic I love is called 'Delicacy', and it's by a good friend Prael. The fic does a lot of what I talked about here extremely well. It walks that line between creating an immersive and colourful world without overexplaining. It also leaves you engaged with the world, because it allows you to question things. I have the absolute HONOUR of being able to present a FANPROSE EXCLUSIVE #ad #adprose #fanprose interview with him on that fanfic!.

Read the fanfic here: https://www.tumblr.com/prael/763863850995105792/delicacy?source=share

Guys IDK what to tell you. I just did an adprose and linked tumblr. Blame prael. It's not on fanprose.

Without further ado, the interview:

Delicacy takes place in a rich and imaginative fantasy world. What was your process in choosing this as the fics setting? Did you build the world around the story you wanted to tell? Or vice versa?

So first off, shout out to Defmaybe in his chapter, where he talks about structuring his fics around moments, because that’s exactly what I did here. I took a piece of low-hanging fruit with the whole moka/mocha thing and thought, “Hey, what if Moka was chocolate?”

As always, from this initial idea, I asked myself, “So what’s the point?” which had a very easy answer in this case: Sex Moka.

Okay, so, for what narrative reason? Then I thought of those classic stories, where the frog is a prince and a kiss makes them human, and made a spin on that.

So, I have my building blocks. My hype moment, my reasoning and justification. And I needed a world. Something you will have seen a lot of writers mention is how they reference or pull from other media to make their own settings/plot. Some people may have realised that I pulled the inspiration for this whole universe from 2008’s Fable II. Yep. A game over a decade and a half old. I thought of fantasy worlds in other media that featured magical objects, and my mind landed there.

All that was left from there was to tie the threads together. I placed the reader into the world, right into the inciting incident that thrusts the reader into the ‘moment’ I built around, and then from there it’s all about writing some smut.

I don’t always follow this ordering, but the majority of my fics are built up by these same blocks. I find the moment(s) to build around, I pull from other media sources (games, tv, books, other fics), and I create the world from there

You baked both the smut and MC's relationship with Moka into the setting. They all mesh extremely well to make the setting vibrant. How important do you think this is to build interesting worlds?

I think, in the cases where you’re writing a narrative that is very setting-neutral, it does lose some importance, and that’s why you see so many fics, including most of mine, existing in some very vague real-world setting (particularly for one-shots!). However, if you are making the decision to focus on the setting, then the world itself becomes another character, and you have to treat it as such.

I would think of Delicacy as a fic that focuses on three main characters: the reader, Moka, and the world. Both the reader and Moka need to interact with this third character almost as much as they do with each other.

The reason the world feels vibrant is that the reader interacts with it in meaningful ways. There are magical objects in this world, and people who sell those objects as well as fakes; there are naysayers of the magic and true believers. I give the reader the opportunity to have opinions on the world as a character. Do they believe in the magic? Would they trust Murgo?

Moka herself interacts with this world, partly through the reader, partly through how the magic affects her being and her end.

Throughout the fic, a lot of things go unexplained. What the chocolate is, what happened when Moka faded away, other things. How do you choose what to explain, and what to keep vague?

My general rule in any fic is to only explain what is absolutely necessary to the advancement of the plot and the understanding of the reader. Everything that I can leave vague without damaging the narrative or character, I will. I think the most important thing to building a world is intrigue. If your entire world is spelt out in detail, then I wonder what reason a reader would have to continue if there is nothing else to learn.

If I focus on the chocolate for a moment. I didn’t even confirm if the chocolate contained any magical properties until Moka appeared. Building the world to include this trader who sold mostly junk and lied to his customers creates more intrigue than me spelling out, “Here is a magical chocolate, and it will make Moka appear, and she will be real or a ghost or a vision.”

And the same then applies to Moka. Leaving it ambiguous as to what her existence actually is and how she can exist within the world creates interest in reading further and reading any sequels to find the answer.

Of course, you cannot leave everything vague, so the things I decide to share directly with the readers are things that the reader-insert characters can discover and evidence for themselves. In this case, he doesn’t know for sure if the magic exists, right up until Moka appears. He doesn’t know for sure in what capacity she exists or what is happening to her.

If I allowed the reader to know more than their inserted character, then they would feel a disconnect and not be fully immersed. The same would apply if the character knew more than what the reader does. Keeping those two banks of knowledge as close as possible to each other is key to creating immersion.