Is Worldbuilding Cringe?

A hastily-formed response to MemeAnalysis' video.

I’m not really a Warhammer fan—I tried playing Total War: Warhammer III and it fried my aged laptop—but this map is incredibly intriguing to me. Even with my extremely limited knowledge of Warhammer, this map tells a fascinating story all on its own.

Introduction

This isn’t my usual kind of article, I know. I’m still working on Fallen Continent, and I also have some other opera-related articles in the works, but something has caught my attention and, since I’m sick this weekend, I’d like to kill some time by writing about it. If this article seems hastily-written or ill-formatted, that’s because I wrote this in the span of a few hours before I doze off from the Benadryl.

The account DALKR just shared this video by YouTube channel MemeAnalysis, titled: “Worldbuilding is Cringe.” As a writer and novelist who takes a very comprehensive and detailed approach to worldbuilding, one would naturally expect for me to feel very offended by this scathing remark. The truth is that I don’t feel very upset by this video, although I certainly disagree with its message. Maybe that’s just because I’ve been focusing on manually breathing and clearing away the mounds of tissue paper that have accumulated throughout this bout of sickness, or maybe I’m just le epice stoic yeschad cooljak and nothing gets to me. But the video did make me think, and not for the reasons that the creator might want me to. I have issues with the video’s message and also with the presentation of the video itself, which I will go into here.

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The Video

To be quite plain, and I mean no offense to the video’s creator himself, but the presentation is pretty bad. The lighting is fine, I like the outdoor location, but I can’t really say much good about anything else.

First thing’s first, the edgy 2000s internet atheist look doesn’t inspire confidence. I have a hard time taking someone seriously about what is and isn’t “cringe” when they look like this. But that’s a very surface-level criticism, and I’d be willing to overlook it if the video had greater merits to stand on. Heh, nothing personnel, kid…

The narration is also bad. It takes him five times longer to say anything than he really should. I hate to sound like one of those Gen Alpha “brainrot” tiktok-addicted kids with no attention span, but this video was a painful slog because he speaks so slowly and has weird gaps between every clause and sentence. I had to watch on x2 speed and the video still felt more than twice its length.

“You see, a guy named William Shakesman once said: brevity is the soul of wit. That means ‘stop wasting my time.’ Stop it!”

Much like the narrator’s personal appearance, the awkward narration itself could be overlooked if the content of his narration was more coherent and put-together. Basically, this guy’s speech is a jumbled mess and it takes him way too long to say anything meaningful. You see, worldbuilding is like the gods… imprisoned in the images… the Coca Cola can movie tie-in with the Thor comic book… the days of the week… He only starts to actually say anything related to his main point in the last minute or two of the video, and everything from the previous eight minutes is either only tangentially related or not relevant at all. The pagan gods surviving as the days of the week, what does that have to do with Star Wars being cringe and gay?

I had to say all this because presentation is key to making your point. 97% percent of communication is nonverbal (idk if that statistic is actually true, but whatever), and people are going to take you a lot more seriously if you take the time and effort to effectively get your point across. This video would have been way better if he didn’t waste the viewer’s time by dilly-dallying and being speaking unnecessarily slowly.

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The Message

After wading through this video and paying close attention to what he’s actually trying to say, it seems to me that the only thing MemeAnalysis is really saying is that worldbuilding is bad because it’s rejecting reality for make-believe. That’s the same thing your dad tells you as a kid when you spend too much time playing video games. It’s not profound then, and it doesn’t sound any more profound after dressing it up in esoteric, gnostic-sounding language.

There is, to some extent, a point to what he’s saying, and I certainly wouldn’t deny that escapism, when excessive, is harmful and should be avoided. People caught too deep in imaginary worlds and fantasies need a reality check. The question is when that line gets crossed and when it’s time to put the maps and flags away and get back to the grind of reality.

To my eye, MemeAnalysis seems to be fixated on a very idealistic view of the world as something fundamentally good that must always be engaged with, and to do otherwise is to be a gnostic who rejects the world as evil and lives in fear of the demiurge. I’m already going to disagree with this because I am a Christian, but let’s look at things from the Orthodox Christian perspective instead. In my case, a similar problem would be the zealous ROCOR convert of less than three years, who, in a state of triumphalist fervor, denounces all secular media as sinful. There are people like this who will reprimand you if you recommend they listen to a certain song you like, because that time could be better spent saying the Jesus Prayer 300 times.

Should Orthodox Christians pray? Should people appreciate the world that God has created for them? By all means! But we are, by nature, good, yet fallen beings who live in a good, yet fallen world. We cannot live up to all of our idealistic hopes, nor does God expect us to; He wouldn’t have died and been resurrected for our sakes if we didn’t need Him to make up for our shortcomings. The Righteous King Solomon, a wiser man than any of us alive today, did it all, lived through it all, and saw through it all. He was, in the course of his life, both the wise ascetic and the hedonistic pleasure-seeker, and everything fell short of the standard of perfection that man strives for. Through the divine inspiration of God, he concluded that “all is vanity” and that there is a time and a season for all things.

There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every matter under heaven—
        A time to give birth and a time to die;
        A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted.
        A time to kill and a time to heal;
        A time to tear down and a time to build up.
        A time to weep and a time to laugh;
        A time to mourn and a time to dance.
        A time to throw stones and a time to gather stones;
        A time to embrace and a time to shun embracing.
        A time to search and a time to give up as lost;
        A time to keep and a time to throw away.
        A time to tear apart and a time to sew together;
        A time to be silent and a time to speak.
        A time to love and a time to hate;
        A time for war and a time for peace.

For those of you who are not Christians, I don’t know what to say that will speak to your hearts on this matter. But I am sure that your own worldview has some sort of idea about man’s falling short of living up to his ideals, and learning to accept what he can and can’t do.

There is a time to grind, to keep one’s head out of the clouds and to focus on grounded, objective reality. There is also a time to dream, to fantasize, and to escape from the world. I hate to be a downer here, but it’s a hard world we live in, and I believe that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. This both means that we have to take steps to improve the world, and that we need to find some sort of coping mechanism to not go insane from dealing with its cares and troubles all the time.

Maybe you disagree with me, and you think everyone should be dedicated 24/7 to austere self-improvement or trying to Save The WestTM by whatever means necessary. If so, there’s nothing I can say to change your mind, but you would do well to read Layne Jackson’s excellent article on the matter.

Including the iFunny watermark was a necessary detail.

If you still insist that having fun is degenerate and that real Aryan men should only pick up sticks and watch paint dry, then all I can say is good luck with that. I’m obviously not recommending that you should stay inside, binge watch anime and play video games 24/7 while gooning and eating junk food because life is hard sometimes. I do think that people with names like SolarAryan1488 and KaiserWilhelmOrthoGroyper and the attitudes that come with those names should calm down, get some perspective, and ease up on soul-crushingly excessive idealism. I tend to find that people who are excessively idealistic and insist that people should always be giving 110% for vague metaphysical causes like this haven’t been beaten down by life enough yet. Once you weather a few storms, you’re better off for it and can better order your priorities in life. I think that people need to take a few risks, suffer a few failures, and get stuck in a daily grind to test their beliefs and prove that they’re genuinely holding them.

The best Christians aren’t the online RadTradBasedChadJaks, and they often aren’t the men in robes and cassocks standing near the altar. They’re the “normal” people who bring steaks and sausages to grill out for the agape lunch, park their SUVs on the grass to let newcomers have a parking space, and have good, light hearts with the kind of deep humility that you don’t even consciously think about until someone else says, “man, I love that guy, I wish he was here today” on the one week he misses church.

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Closing Remarks

Some people, I suspect, will say to me that “oh, MemeAnalysis isn’t talking about dreaming and creativity in general, he’s just saying that you shouldn’t be the soyjak star wars man and sperg out over warhammer or funko pops or something thoughbeit o algo.”

To that, I say: no, MemeAnalysis does not seem to be employing this level of nuance. One of the earlier side tangents he goes on in the video is about how images used to be something sacred and reserved exclusively for the worship of the gods (this is actually a point commonly made in Orthodox Christian circles, as well, and to similar ends). That isn’t untrue and it’s not like there aren’t any good takeaways from this information, but you can tell by watching the video that he means this in a pretty absolute sense: all non-sacred images are, in a sense, wrong. If I’m incorrect and he does think that some fictional worldbuilding and storytelling is okay, then he did a very bad job of showing it, and it just goes back to my original point of his video having horrible presentation.

When he talks about worldbuilding as a crutch for people who hate reality because of the demiurge or whatever, he cites not only the popular, crowd-pleasing IPs that are easy to hate on like Star Wars and Warhammer, but Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings is generally highly-regarded by both Christians and pagans as an intelligently-written and morally-instructive series of books. They are captivating not only for the depth and soul of the world Tolkien has painstakingly crafted, but also for the excitement and adventure of its epic story, and the inspiring heroism and virtue of its lovable and memorable characters.

Storytelling like the Lord of the Rings is not just escapism from an unbearable reality, it is an instruction to go out into the world and make it a better place. It puts its heroes under unbelievable strain, worse than the most horrible stresses of the real world, and shows how the virtue and love of the meekest and humblest of people can shine through and overcome the mightiest of evils. MemeAnalysis said that “Lord of the Rings isn’t going to save you,” and it certainly isn’t (though I don’t think anyone actually thought that it would). But I do think that it can remind us that the world isn’t beyond saving, and that we—with all our faults—can help make it happen.

I’ll conclude with a statement from my author’s note on my article about the State of Arkansas in my book’s setting:

Additionally, while I want factions to be complex and multi-faceted, the [Kingdom of the] Ozarks are something of a “good guy faction.” […] I’ve tried to avoid outright wish-fulfillment with the Ozarks—and indeed they do many things I don’t personally agree with—but there is a degree of wishful thinking on how they’ve turned out. I like Game of Thrones, but I’m not George R.R. Martin and do not want to write a drearily grey story with no heroes. I think many of us would like to hope for a Return of the King in such a tumultuous world as the one in which we live.

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Addendum: When Worldbuilding is Cringe

I published the article already, but remembered I had a few extra thoughts on what I do consider to be “cringe worldbuilding,” because there’s a lot of it. Worldbuilding itself isn’t cringe, but the activity can become cringey depending on the presentation and the person and motives behind it. I won’t go too in-depth about this, but will instead quote an exchange between myself and opjrgdwer90 on the matter:

opjrgdwer90:

There are 4 spheres of online worldbuilding:

History and geopolitics

Geography, geologly, etc

Biology

Linguistics.

The first two are less infested but the latter are a total autism troontopia. Nevertheless I have dabbled in all of them. In general I find linguistics (conlanging in troonspeak) boring but creating your own language using scientific terms taken from wikipedia really expands your thinking. You learn to fully detach meaning from the way it's communicated and realize that it's just out there, on it's own. Also knowing the International Phonetic Alphabet is a lot of fun.

My response:

Speculative evolution, like All Tomorrows-type of stuff, is extremely libtarded. It almost always has the same message of “we’re just apes made of space dust on a spinning ball, man, we don’t matter…” and typically has a serving of “diversity good” thrown into the mix. Conlangs also feel left-coded to me, as do other attempts to build very rigid and elaborate systems that define the world’s setting. I always feel like it’s feminine nu-fantasy that wants a hard-coded “magic system,” while older, more masculine books keep their magic shrouded in mystery.

I do think the RW-autist/autist-adjacent types need to branch out more in their writing than just “here’s my map of the world if so-and-so won a certain war.” If it’s a well-known scenario like the World Wars or American Civil War, somebody has probably done it better than you already, unless you’re putting some unique spin on the story you’re telling; for example, I wrote a short story on what Wagnerian opera would look like in a German victory world, and another short story about Watchmen/Golden Age DC-style superheroes in the 1920s Confederate States. But in general, I’d like to see alternate history branch out with more original material, focusing either on the outcomes of more obscure conflicts, or on non-military history-related subjects. I know this is rich coming from someone who’s doing yet another “American collapse” scenario, though.