Writing | Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding at the Intersections
How interacting perspectives draw us in
Characters are as compelling as their perspectives on the fictional worlds they inhabit. Those fictional worlds are as compelling as the perspectives they house. By attending to the intersecting forces shaping and comprising the perspectives of characters, worldbuilders can craft rich, layered worlds that draw audiences in to imagine new possibilities within the fiction.
Perspectives draw us in
Common advice in improv theater — where the performers play characters they’ve never embodied before doing unplanned things — is to take a strong position on whatever the scene is about. If the scene is about strawberries, your character might love strawberries — more than anything in the world — or hate them, and have a strong reason for either. Why does the character feel that way? Perhaps her mother made strawberry pie each Friday. Why does that matter to her? Perhaps there’s something she desperately wants to express to her mother, who recently passed away — while picking strawberries.
Half the rationale for this advice is that it’s much easier to play a character when you have a defined vantage point from which to view a scene. The other half is that the audience loves to watch scenes where characters have strong positions and emotions, especially outsized ones in comedy. We care because the characters care. With the initial position, and then with subsequent rationale (why), it becomes clearer how to play the scene, while that scene simultaneously takes on a deepening, absorbing emotional logic, however silly.
The enchantment of perspective extends far beyond improv — to stories of every kind I’ve encountered. We love the pure-good hero and the always-cheerful sidekick because they see — inspiringly or hilariously — an alternative to evil and despair when others cannot (e.g., Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings). We love the petty grifter and the antisocial criminal because they view the world with an uninhibited audacity we don’t dare to embrace (Newman in Seinfeld or Walter White in Breaking Bad). We love decent people barred from happiness and goodness by their character flaws because we root for them to grow a little less limited in their view of things — or for their downfall when they can’t (e.g., Amy Lau and Danny Cho in Beef or the entire cast of Succession). We love the youth exiting naivety for maturity because we feel satisfaction when they at last grasp their world with nuance and wisdom (e.g., Scout Finch in To Kill of Mockingbird). And most of all we love when characters with opposing perspectives collide.
Perspective isn’t everything, of course. Plots, action sequences, dialogue styles, and visual aesthetics can all be engaging in their own right. But insofar as characters themselves are compelling, I think it’s because we know some of how they relate to their world, including themselves, and why. Once the window onto a perspective is opened and a character begins looking through, we see the character right back and connect. A shut window shows us nothing, and we walk on by.
Story-worlds are made of perspectives
Worldbuilding, in the broadest sense, is the process of creating frameworks — worlds — for stories and other designs to spring from and inhabit. Here, we’re interested specifically in worlds designed to generate stories. Unlike storytelling, where success means telling a particular story well (whatever that entails), worldbuilding succeeds when the fictional world provides fertile ground for stories that have not yet been told, that is, when it offers a space that audiences eagerly enter to imagine and play out what else could be so. Hence, the mountains of fanfiction and forum discussion set in the worlds of Star Wars, A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), and certain tabletop RPGs are the quintessential testaments to good worldbuilding.
Now, I believe — and this is the key jump — that what makes story-worlds so fertile is in large part the same thing that makes scenes compelling: we understand where the actors are coming from. We know the perspectives at play and can engage with them. Compare Brandon Sanderson’s “First Law of Magic” in his advice to writers designing magic systems in fantasy stories:
A writer’s ability to resolve conflicts in a satisfying way with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
The reader must understand the rules of magic to know what its limitations are, recognize when the rules are used creatively, and — moving now from the story level to the world level — imagine what other situations and stories the rules could support.
I offer a similar principle that does for story-worlds what Sanderson’s rule does for magic in plots:
The Perspective Principle of Worldbuilding: A fictional world’s potential to inspire new stories is directly proportional to how well the audience — the imaginer of those untold stories — understands the interacting perspectives that exist in that world.
A clarification: I’m assuming here that the world (1) has stories and thus (2) characters that can have perspectives. Sci-fi worldbuilding that focuses on alien geology, speculative biology, or constructed languages, such as that of the work of the influential worldbuilding YouTuber Artifexian, does not hinge on the rich perspectives of the speculative creatures or peoples but rather on the appeal of the thought experiment, its rigor, and any attached aesthetics (the coolness). Such worlds aren’t usually built with stories front of mind. They’re also compelling mainly to niche audiences. Likewise, worldbuilding in education or sci-fi prototyping often involves creating designs other than stories, and so this principle does not apply to them.
The Perspective Principle holds for the most popular fictional worlds. For example, a huge part of Star Wars fan theorizing centers on conflicts between the major perspectives embodied by representative characters and fundamental to the major conflicts in the world of Star Wars — Light Side/Jedi vs. Dark Side/Sith, Rebels vs. Empire — and crucially on how individual characters navigate these multiple world-perspectives. What if someone who was a Sith joined the Rebels? Why would she do this? What if someone were a rebel fanatic, taking things too far in the fight against the evil Empire? What could drive them to this point? This is the good stuff, the questions brimming with untold stories. World-perspectives don’t have to be nuanced (e.g., they can be essentially good vs. evil) to have this power, as long as they’re clearly defined and understood. (On the other hand, fans love to dive into or devise elaborate explanations when these are absent: how do Sith come to their dark and selfish views of the world?)
Something similar is at play anytime the audience delights in taking Buzzfeed “personality” tests to place itself into categories or onto sides within a world. Take Magic: The Gathering’s “colors,” for example. Each represents a category that characters (and quizz-takers) can fall into, an identity as well as an outlook: Blue-Green people are like so. For better or worse, we love thinking in such categorical terms. Moreover — and crucially for our purposes — the simplicity of these systems turns their well-defined components into discrete, manipulable building blocks with which dramatic conflicts, character archetypes, and compelling misfits are easily envisioned and assembled.
This “combinatorial” aspect of world-perspectives is a general phenomenon and, I believe, the key to deep, endlessly generative worlds. To build such worlds, we should attend to the intersections.
Perspectives emerge at intersections
Before we take up the role of intersections in story-worlds, let’s consider a similar phenomenon in stories themselves, and in life. John Truby wrote in The Anatomy of Story that
…a simplistic opposition between two characters kills any chance at depth, complexity, or the reality of human life in your story. For that, you need a web of oppositions.
Truby’s solution: give the protagonist more than one opponent — three in the traditional “Four Corner Opposition” — each of which falls on the opposite side as the protagonist on one or more dramatic or thematic conflicts.
For example, this excellent video essay by Just Write argues that the film Batman Begins implements the Four Corner Opposition model to a tee. The film has four core characters:
- Batman, the protagonist, who uses fear against criminals out of altruism and his three antagonists
- Falcone, who uses fear against civilians out of selfishness
- Scarecrow, who uses fear against criminals out of selfishness
- and Ra’s al Ghul, who uses fear against civilians out of altruism.
Together they form the matrix of oppositions below. Each cell of this matrix — each of the core characters — corresponds to a unique perspective on the film’s central theme (fear) as well as on the film’s world.
Incorporating a second dimension of conflict dramatically increases the depth and richness of a story’s core conflict in at least two ways. The first is simple math. In a one-dimensional conflict (e.g., altruism vs. selfishness), there are two core characters representing the poles of the conflict, the protagonist and main antagonist, with one relationship between them. Meanwhile, in a two-dimensional conflict, each of the four characters has a unique relationship to the other three, for a total of six relationships, each exploring a different part of the larger conflict and not all purely conflictual. Thus, the potential for both conflict and common ground are radically expanded, and the space for nuance along with it. It’s easy to see how the web of relationships would further complexify with each additional dimension of the conflict.
Second, and more interesting, notice that the perspectives captured in the matrix have a peculiar emergent nature: it’s the combination of positions that makes each perspective, not the components per se, whose meanings depend on one another. Targeting criminals, for example, doesn’t mean the same thing morally when it’s done out of selfishness as out of altruism, nor does it serve the same story function. Only an antagonist who is both on the side of selfishness and targets criminals could teach Batman the lesson that Scarecrow does. The whole, in other words, is different, and perhaps more, than the sum of its parts.
This whole-is-different pattern isn’t restricted to the four perspectives in this example. It’s a fantastically general phenomenon — and not just in stories. There’s a whole body of academic theory under the umbrella of intersectionality that studies a similar pattern of emergence in a different domain: real people’s lived experiences, and thus their perspectives on their worlds.
The key observation underlying all intersectional thought is that people’s experiences, including the power dynamics they face (forms of empowerment and oppression) but not limited to these, depend on how all their identities intersect and are not reducible to those identities’ independent effects. For instance, the experience of gay men is not simply a composite of the experiences of being gay and of being a man because the anti-gay discrimination targeted at gay men differs from that targeted at lesbians, there is a distinct culture of gay men, and so on. To get an accurate picture of someone’s lived experience — and thus their perspective on their world — we must consider how multiple social forces interact (along with individual characteristics).
Now, the analogy between intersectional theory and multiple oppositions isn’t exact. The intersectional framework sheds light on the experiences of real people. Its categories are real social identities. In contrast, the oppositions in stories are designed by the author or storyteller, often to communicate a message, and are more frequently dimensions of individual motivations or goals that set characters in conflict than social identities per se. Afterall, a traditional narrative, even one about larger societal themes such as war or racism, must ultimately focus on the individual choices of its characters, rather than on the structures they exemplify.
This imprecision notwithstanding, intersectionality provides a powerful vocabulary for articulating just why Truby was right to assert that it is through a “web of oppositions” — beginning merely with a second dimension — that “the reality of human life” comes into view. Perspectives, in stories and in life, emerge at intersections.
The key practical takeaway for worldbuilders is that creating a palette of fictional perspectives ripe with compelling stories requires two steps: first, creating multiple dimensions of conflict (multiple oppositions), and second, fleshing out specific positions within the conflict and the relationships between them (particular intersections) to bring life, concreteness, and emergent depth to the fiction. For some simple stories, a single, powerful, and well-executed opposition may be enough. But for worldbuilding, where a story-world must provide a scaffolding for many more stories yet to come, these steps create a richness all but essential to the task.
Great worldbuilding attends to the intersections
An example is in order.
The Lord of the Rings and JRR Tolkien’s other works are so thematically rich that they have sustained an entire community of Tolkien literary scholars. But one important level of conflict in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I believe, can be boiled down to power vs. weakness and good vs. evil, the latter opposition being very close to a desire for personal power/weakness to temptation vs. a lack of that desire/resistance to temptation.
The matrix below illustrates these oppositions, with two caveats. First, unlike in the clear-cut Four Corner Opposition in Batman Begins, in this matrix, some relationships are not substantially conflictual (e.g., Frodo and Aragorn). Second, that some characters fall more neatly into these boxes — the extreme “corners” of the conflict — than others. Gollum, for instance, is caught between evil and good, temptation and resistance to it (which is why he is a uniquely compelling character).
It might seem strange that I continue to use the language “perspective” here to describe these core positions because “power” is an external (physical, social, cultural, etc.) attribute, not a component of a worldview per se. But power matters here not in itself but because it gives a character a different position within their world and therefore a different perspective on it. What makes, say, Aragorn a compelling character and sets him apart from those I identified above as relatively powerless, is not primarily that he is a master warrior or has the royal right to command armies. It’s how he sees the world and his place in it while wielding such power. It’s who, in other words, that power makes him: a rare king entirely worthy of the throne who desires to rule not for himself but because the world would be better if he did. This is his primary function within the story. It’s also why we love to imagine more stories about people like him. A mix of internal attributes (desire for personal power/lack therof) and external forces (power/weakness) intersect, but in each case, it’s the emergent perspectives at the intersections that generate rich characters and endless story potential.
The magic of perspective in the world of Middle Earth comes from how Tolkien realizes these core positions within the larger conflict. Most notably, Tolkien represents the perspectives as fantasy races (and locations) in Middle Earth. For example, hobbits embody physical weakness with a boundlessly wholesome disinterest in power that gives them the greatest moral strength of all. Orcs embody physical weakness as well as a moral weakness to the temptations of power. Elves usually embody power as well as a fundamental goodness or resistance to evil (compare elves to men). And semi-divine dark lords, such as Sauron and Saruman, embody great power and a desire for more of it. Hence, the core perspectives become specific and concrete. Middle Earth’s greatest moral strength and optimism, for example, is married to literal smallness in hobbits, who cannot and never would wish to wear a crown or reign in great halls. Their home is the slow and uncomplicated Shire, which also embodies their outlook.
But it’s when Tolkien specifies the relationships between each core perspective that the whole system of perspectives truly becomes something more than the sum of its parts. How do heroic, relatively powerful figures like Aragorn, Boromir, and Gandalf relate to the weaker yet morally incorruptible hobbits? How do hobbits relate to those just as weak as they are, like Gollum, yet corrupted by evil? Each perspective has a role to play in defeating evil, certain things each must do for the other, revealed through narrative and worldbuilding.
Returning from the story to the world level again, the core perspectives function as archetypes or tropes. Imagine pitching a new movie, TV series, or other piece of media set in the world of Middle Earth. What would the characters’ core motivations be — why would the plot happen? Probably, there would be a powerful antagonist — a dark lord-type — hellbent on gaining more of it. Probably, there would be a much weaker, essentially good protagonist. And probably, there would be various allies and enemies who either succumb to the temptations of the antagonist or resist them to do good. I say “probably” because we could of course tell other kinds of stories set in the same world — perhaps a love story about elves whose motivations have nothing to do with the broader fate of Middle Earth. This would be consistent with the concrete worldbuilding elements — fantastical creatures, magical landscapes, and so on. But this isn’t the first kind of story the fictional world suggests to most of us. Instead, we would probably reach first for the most accessible tropes — prominent elements in the world’s canon — followed by broader genre tropes. This is the imaginative, generative power of worldbuilding: it changes what we can imagine and how easy it is to do so.
The film adaptation of The Hobbit offers a fascinating glimpse of this process at work. Studios introduced elements of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, including not just old characters (e.g., the elf queen Galadriel) but also recharacterizations of existing characters from The Hobbit, giving them perspectives taken from The Lord of the Rings. For instance, the films play up the dwarvish heir Thorin’s greed and his battle with the temptations of power, driven by the magical “Arkenstone” that harkens back to Sauron’s One Ring, and Bilbo the hobbit’s relative immunity to such greed, being a humble creature of the Shire. Crucially, audiences got another character driven by greed and tempted by power not because such a character was required by any concrete part of the setting (in-world people, places, things, ideologies, etc.) or source material, but probably because someone saw a need to introduce character conflict, and the worldbuilding of The Lord of the Rings suggested a character with a certain perspective: someone self-righteous and struggling with the temptations of their power. Worldbuilding circumscribes laziness and safe choices, just as it does creative and inspired ones.
Middle Earth is just one particularly prominent example of how intersecting perspectives create compelling story-worlds. In fact, I chose it in part because the matrix of those perspectives is non-obvious. In contrast, George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire takes an overtly sociological approach in which its mainly noble-born characters occupy analogous roles in different ruling “houses” or are set apart within the same house by age, gender, and their honor vs. pragmatism, weaving a sprawling tapestry of intersecting social positions in which every major character has a psychologically nuanced perspective on their world. From these competing perspectives, the plot follows — explosively. It’s easy for Martin’s readers, including a large fan-fiction community, to imagine new characters by reassembling the enormous number of building blocks he provided, already laden with multiple layers of tension. In general, if you can think of a story-world that has inspired numerous further stories, it is likely that that world contains a clearly defined system of character perspectives.
Worldbuilders can construct compelling perspectives deliberately
I would be surprised if any of the authors discussed above consciously thought about the major character perspectives and their intersections within their worlds at the outset. Models like Truby’s Four Corner Opposition aren’t usually necessary to master writers, as Shawn Coyne discusses in The Story Grid, another influential book story structure. Instead, these writers intuitively recognize stories that work and implement this understanding in their own practice. But models and easy-to-follow processes sure are helpful for those of us starting out.
Here’s such a process for worldbuilding a system of compelling perspectives:
- Begin with a premise for the world or the relevant part of it.
- Identify the most interesting thing about that world — a central what-if, a driving aesthetic, etc. If you’re setting a story or game in the world, then your answer here will be closely related to what the story is about or what the players will do, respectively.
- Imagine the key lines of conflict over that central, interesting thing, and detail at least two (but not so many that it muddies the picture; say, 3–5 max), oppositions. Some possibilities:
- Moral/Thematic: between selfishness and altruism, kindness and cruelty, freedom and order, wisdom and ignorance, love and hate, honor and dishonor, etc.
- Spatial: between regions
- Temporal: between generations or figures from different time periods
- Political/Economic: between factions, regimes, classes, etc.
- Cultural: between ethnicities, religions, ideologies, genders, generations, etc. - Detail characters who occupy the intersections of the conflict. What is unique about how a character occupying each unique combination of positions sees the world? Visualize each character’s life in as much detail as possible. What places and objects are they associated with? What is their day-to-day? What do they think of their conditions? What drives them? Why? How does their experience relate back to the “most interesting thing”?
- Describe the relationships among those characters. How do their unique positions affect how they see each other?
- Move on when you’ve described characters and relationships for all the intersections or, if there are too many intersections, all the most interesting ones. (With just 4 binary oppositions, there are 16 intersections, with 120 relationships.)
At this point, you’ll have a world alive with many competing visions of itself. In my own experiments with this method for tabletop RPG campaigns and creative writing, I’ve found that I can pick any subset of this lively web of characters, and ideas for adventures and stories begin to leap out.
And so, we return to the fundamental role of perspective in worldbuilding: in a certain sense, worldbuilding is itself a form of perspective-taking through suspension of disbelief, that is, a sustained what-if that requires looking through a viewpoint — however fantastical or grounded — that is not our own and imagining what could be so for the people, places, and things revealed there. Compelling perspectives thus pull us into a world because we want to take them and enter the conversations with other perspectives in which they participate. And in so doing, even without meaning to, we see previously hidden possibilities, new tales to be told from new angles.
