Rant About Amnesiac Worldbuilding
So what is "Amnesiac Worldbuilding" and why do I want to rant about it?
We've all seen it before -- usually in TV/movie SF, though it isn't limited to that. The author needs a quick fix, either to solve a problem or to set up a situation which they need in order for the plot to work. So they toss in some technology, or instant cure, or magic, which will solve the immediate problem, and then promptly forget about it and its implications.
There isn't a good phrase to describe the phenomenon; I'm choosing "amnesiac worldbuilding" as the least-worst I could think of. Other phrases I considered: "deus-ex-machina worldbuilding", "worldbuilding without consequences", "you can do THAT and you didn't use it earlier?", "you can do THAT and you used it for something trivial?".
There's really two versions of this, now that I think about it:
- A quick fix to solve a problem. Classic Trek was infamous for this, and later Treks carried on the tradition. In some ways this is understandable, writing under pressure, not having time to figure out a better solution... or you could just call it lazy writing.
- Something needed to set up a scenario that the author thinks would be cool. I've seen this more often in fanfic.
And I think it's the second one I really want to rant about, because plenty of people have already ranted about the first one. What makes me want to bang my head against the wall the most about some of these is where the deus-ex-machina has implications which then renders the scenario they want to set up... impossible. Guess I can only rant about specific examples. I'm not going to say which stories these were, not just to protect the guilty, but because some of them have come up in more than one story, so I wouldn't know who was originally to blame anyway.
One:
Tony Stark is not only Iron Man, but he is secretly a mutant, and a reserve member of the X-men.
Dude. If Tony Stark has a mutant power which is useful enough to make him a member of the X-men, he could have used it to escape from the Ten Rings, and he would never have needed to build the Iron Man suit in the first place, and thus he would never have become Iron Man. This scenario is impossible.
Two:
The Avengers from the future use magic/tech portals to kidnap the past Avengers through time and space, in order to... make them sit in a room and watch the Avengers movies (in order to change the past).
Um. Look, folks, if you could kidnap specific people from the past, why not kidnap Thanos and teleport him into the sun while you're at it?
Two-and-a-half:
Indeed the whole idea of "make the Avengers watch the movies" requires such a magnitude of magical abilities or tech to bring it about -- you have to get them all together, force them not to leave, prevent the wrong people from seeing or copying it, let alone having enough omniscience to create the movies themselves -- if you can do that, why waste your godlike powers on something so trivial?
There's only one story along those lines that I've read that was remotely plausible, and that was one where the movies were somehow (never explained how) picked up as broadcasts from our universe to theirs.
There's still a problem even with that one, though: why the heck should any of them believe that these "foretellings" are accurate? And yet they always, always believe them.
(Related but inverse problem: fan-insert stories where someone from our universe gets zapped into their favourite fannish universe, and all the canon they've seen is 100% accurate. Just consider how many liberties the movies take with biographies and historicals, and you'll be less sanguine about that.)
Three:
"Oh, Loki's all reformed now. We popped him in an accelerated-time bubble universe for a hundred years making him experience all the suffering of his victims, and he's sorry now."
Dudes. If you had such a "foolproof" (I'm not so sure it's foolproof) method of making someone repent, why didn't you use it on Laufey, the king of the Frost Giants? And if you had the ability to create bubble universes, there's so much more that you could do with them than just punish people.
Have you got any juicy examples of "amnesiac worldbuilding" to suggest?
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