Self-Discovery Through Worldbuilding
I’ve been worldbuilding for almost 10 years now.
It’s been an amateurish hobby of mine since I was in late middle school. I was fascinated with the idea of escapism — generating interesting ideas, tales, and fantasies at the expense of focus on reality.
It wasn’t a good habit to get into for that reason, but not completely bad. I learned a ton about myself, my beliefs, and what I value based on how I wrote.
Worldbuilding is like making someone God and telling them to start from scratch.
What that particular God prioritizes, values, and desires to see from his or her world — this sheds light on the personality behind the pen.
Take C.S Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien for example. Although the worldbuilding that the two did was very different in scale and focus (C.S Lewis essentially making a more fantastic New Testament, J.R.R Tolkien literally crafted a new language and entire civilizations), they had the ability to breathe life into an empty canvas.
The heroes win, good triumps over evil. That’s a common motif between both of their works. There is great darkness overcome, sacrifices are made, and a victory — pyrrhic or not — that leaves the reader satisfied. Evil will not return to haunt our beloved world that we’ve been sucked into.
Now take the world of Warhammer 40K.
Entire worlds annihilated to prevent the spread of Orks, which reproduce through spores and wage constant war on the galaxy. Or the threat of Tyranids that will literally melt people down to turn them into “biomass” and intake their genetic diversity for rapid-fire space-bug evolution.
These are some of the lighter themes in the very dark world that is Warhammer 40K. The ‘world’ (really, an entire cosmic universe) is built around conflict, death, and darkness. There are hardly any heroic civilizations in the franchise. Although each may have their own personal “heroes,” everyone is morally twisted in some way.
What does the world you create say about you?
Mine is a hodgepodge of things — there’s a lot of the Tolkien-esque typicals. Elves, dwarves, humans, divine and demonic figures alike. But over that world is a constant battle between the order that the Gods attempt to impose, and the Promethean individualists, who may attempt to do evil to elevate their power.
Or alternatively, the individualists that seek to do good and deny the power of the Gods.
The world I wrote was destroyed hundreds of times. Cataclysms and lengthy battles had manifested as the conscious legend called The Mystic Wars. People talk about it all the time, and the fear of starting another Mystic Wars haunts its people, spreading like a virus.
There’s magic Romans that take a jingoist stance against the nations that shirk magic in fear of returning to a cataclysmic world. There’s a secret organization that steals magical artifacts and people of interest to pull puppet strings for the world.
Death is incredibly selfish, biased, and boderline evil. Death is an amalgamation of powerful interests that have become so entangled in spiritual conquest that they are now a conflict of identities, continuously fed souls only to grow more powerful and confused.
I could go on for days about this world that has years under its belt.
But the important thing: it shows that I love motifs from our world. Civilizations, philosophical values, afterlife concepts, political philosophy, the battle between chaos and order. All of these positions within these ideas are expressed in the world I wrote.
So, if you were to write a world, what would it say about you?
