There’s a very old graveyard next to my uncle’s house that happens to have (apparently rare?) Pokémon. As caretaker of the lot, which has a LOT of cool texas history associated with it, he doesn’t see a ton of people come visit because it’s out in the middle of nowhere.
But recently, there’s been truckloads of college kids, teens, families, and grandparents all coming by to catch Pokémon. Some just pass through, but many accept his offer of a Coke and a lawn chair to sit and talk for a while. Once pokémon have been successfully acquired, he starts to tell them the cool history of the area, and the visitors are fascinated.
People have sent him emails and called him later, asking for more details and doing their own research on the battles fought there and the people who died. There’s now a Facebook page about it? It’s a thing-catch pokémon but more importantly ask the caretaker about Texas blood feuds.
And like, you see so much negativity about how games distract and people are mindless drones because of them. But a video game brought dozens and dozens of people to my uncle’s plot and gave him an audience of interested listeners who are taking that knowledge back to their own communities and spreading the word to come visit.
Like, y’all. This is honestly the coolest thing.
The possibility of this kind of thing being on offer is the first thing that’s made me really want to play the game.
One of my favorite phrases my Creative Writing professor had for when you’re writing fantasy is ‘giving your story a Flux Capacitor’.
Because it’s not real, it doesn’t exist. But the way it’s thrown into Back to the Future, at no point does it throw the audience off or suspend any more disbelief than time travel would. You believe Doc when he says he created the Flux Capacitor – the thing that makes time travel possible, because the universe never questions him.
So it essentially means like, there are going to be elements to your universe that are just not gonna make any sense, even if you set up a whole system based on it. And the only way to make it work is completely own it. You cannot second-guess your system or else the reader will too. You can give it the strangest explanation, but write it like you own it.
Either you’ve got to follow the rules of reality and physics and shit TO THE LETTER, or you have to say “naaaaaah” and fuck off with your magic/sci-fi/whatever to have a marvelous garden party where reality isn’t invited.
This is also known as a “Star Trek approach”, in which the science and technology in a fictional universe aren’t explained but their existence seems plausible given the context of the universe.
This also articulates excellently why I think Welcome to Night Vale works so well. It’s weird, but even where things are inconsistent, that in itself is a consistent factor in the show’s worldbuilding, so just about everything fits.
