Bad worldbuilding is an ever-present problem in speculative fiction. Storytellers craft all kinds of setting elements that don’t make sense, cause plot holes, or reinforce bigoted ideas. But sometimes, authors go a step further. Rather than adding something that doesn’t work, they add something that simply doesn’t need to be there. Such mistakes not only make a world less immersive but also add to the audience’s cognitive load for little or no benefit.
1. Guns Making Laser Sounds: Firefly
As a space western, Firefly has a mix of high- and low-tech aesthetics to choose from. The heroes have a spaceship, but they also ride horses on remote worlds. They visit bars with holographic windows, but they use modern-style firearms when it’s time for a fight. Also, the guns make laser sounds. Specifically, they make the “pew pew” type noises that scifi has taught us to associate with advanced energy weapons. Alternatively, some of the guns make an electrical whirring sound when they’re loaded or when a round is chambered, like something is charging up.
From a technical perspective, this is pretty much impossible to explain. Way back in the day, the old Serenity RPG forums were flooded with posts that tried and failed to do so, some of them going on for dozens of pages. Every possible explanation was explored, from the guns actually being laser weapons to using some kind of electromagnetic rail system instead of an explosive charge, but nothing held water.
We know the guns in Firefly aren’t actually lasers, as we can see the bullets, both when the guns are loaded and when characters are hit. We know they’re using a chemical propellant because the cartridges have a clearly visible area to store powder and the guns still have hammers to set off said powder.* The show also has dialogue about how guns can’t fire in a vacuum, which indicates that combustion is required. Of course, modern guns actually can fire in a vacuum, but it was a pretty common myth that they couldn’t before Mythbusters came along.
The only remaining explanation is that Firefly guns work just like modern ones do, except there’s some extra machinery in there to make the laser sounds. That doesn’t seem very likely. Even more importantly, the inexplicable laser sounds undermine a major theme of the setting: the rich/poor technology divide. In Firefly, most really advanced tech is reserved for the wealthy, while everyone else gets by on whatever they can scrounge up. Our heroes might be stuck using guns, but their rich enemies often have advanced laser or sonic weaponry, not to mention hovercraft. Making the good guys’ weapons sound more futuristic undermines that contrast.
From a behind-the-scenes standpoint, it’s not clear why Firefly’s guns make laser noises.* There might have been some kind of production constraint that made normal gun sounds unworkable, but I suspect it was an effort to make the setting more futuristic. If so, the effort was unnecessary. Firefly is already as futuristic as it needs to be, thanks to all the spaceships.
2. A Second Werewolf Pack: Teen Wolf
Teen Wolf’s first three seasons focus on a small pack of werewolves – along with their assorted allies – in the town of Beacon Hills. This pack goes through several iterations, with characters joining and leaving based on which actors were available, but it’s always small. When a new supernatural character arrives in town, it’s a big deal, whether they’re friend or foe.
Then season four arrives, and the writers reveal there’s been a second werewolf pack in Beacon Hills this whole time. This pack is led by a woman named Satomi, and it’s huge. Every other pack we see in the show has around four to six members, but Satomi’s has dozens. This raises questions not only about why her pack is so big but also about how none of the protagonists noticed them before. It’s established that werewolves can sense each other if they’re close, and Beacon Hills isn’t that big.
Then we’re told that some of the existing characters knew about Satomi; they just hadn’t mentioned her before. This is even harder to believe. Satomi is established to be very powerful, but no one thought of asking her for help against the show’s many villains? For that matter, we also see a lot of flashbacks to Beacon Hills’ past, but Satomi isn’t in any of them.
It could not be more obvious that this second pack wasn’t planned in advance, and despite seeming like a big deal for a couple of episodes, they basically disappear after season four. They’re referenced in dialogue a few times, but Satomi herself never appears again, and we’re eventually told about her offscreen death in the final season.
So what is this second pack even for? A few extra bodies. I mean that literally. You see, one of season four’s villains is a mysterious figure who’s trying to assassinate all the supernatural beings in Beacon Hills. Since the main characters mostly have plot shields, the writers had to introduce new characters who could actually die. And die they do. In fact, our first real introduction to Satomi’s pack is a screen full of dead bodies.*
This did not require adding a secret pack to the show. All season four needed was a handful of supernatural characters who lived in Beacon Hills but had stayed hidden until their names showed up on a villain’s hitlist. In fact, the writers actually did this a couple of times, but then decided to introduce a whole bunch of supernatural extras at once through Satomi’s pack. All they needed to do was stay their current course.
3. National Sailor Dialect: Wheel of Time
In Robert Jordan’s very first Wheel of Time novel, our heroes meet a riverboat captain named Bayle Domon. That’s very fortunate for them, as they just happen to require a riverboat’s services. Domon is an experienced captain who seems to know what he’s doing, and he’d be an unremarkable character except that he talks like this:
- “Did I no warn you the last time, Gelb? At Whitebridge, off you do go!”
- “Well, if it be no, it be no. But Bayle Domon no give free passage, not to his own mother.”
- “And if that no be bad enough, the people be all saying it meant the Dark One be stirring, that the Last Days be come.”
These are direct quotes from the book, and they mean our captain friend is one “arr” away from being a kids’-show pirate. That’s more than a little silly for a serious fantasy epic like WoT. What’s next, a chimney sweep who talks like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins?
Whatever, it’s just one character; I’m sure that… wait, he’s from a country called Illian, and they all talk like that? What the heck? Beyond the obvious silliness of an entire nation talking like cartoon sailors, this is the only time Jordan spells out anyone’s dialect or accent. Every other group has their manner of speech briefly described and then rarely mentioned again. They mostly fade into the background, except for the Seanchan, and that’s only because they’re described as samurai with Texas-style drawls.
Writing out the Illian dialect in textual form draws extra attention to it, and for what? At first, I thought Illian would be a nation of sailors, and the accent was a way of emphasizing that. That would be a heavy dip into the planet of hats and not very good worldbuilding, but it would at least be something. Except Illian isn’t any more nautical than most of the other nations. So… why this dialect?
As best I can tell, the process happened like this: Domon was a sailor, so Jordan unthinkingly gave him a cartoon sailor dialect, not considering how it might affect the rest of the setting. The early WoT books are full of odd choices like that, as Jordan didn’t originally know if his series would be long or short. Then, when the answer was clearly “long” and Jordan wanted to introduce more people from Illian, he looked back at Domon’s dialect and decided that everyone else from that country should speak the same way.
To be fair, one of WoT’s big problems is that its various cultures are so generic that it’s often difficult to remember which is which. The bizarre Illian dialect definitely makes them memorable, but not in a way authors usually want.
Editor’s note: This section has been revised to clear up the difference between dialect and accent.
4. Slugthrowers: Star Wars
Just about everyone in Star Wars uses blasters as their primary weapon. If you want to commit violence and aren’t an overpowered Jedi with a lightsaber, the blaster is your best option. And, other than the occasionally mentioned stun setting, blasters work pretty much like firearms, which is convenient for choreographing shootouts.
That’s the whole story as far as the movies are concerned, but then a number of secondary sources* introduced the slugthrower. Where blasters are extremely similar to guns, slugthrowers are literally guns, complete with a metal projectile propelled by a chemical explosive. In some cases, they’re presented as simple single-shot rifles, while in others we see more complex weapons like shotguns and machine guns.
The slugthrower’s role changes depending on where it appears, but it’s most commonly portrayed one of two ways. First, as a cheaper but less effective alternative to blasters. Second, as a specialized anti-Jedi weapon, since a lightsaber supposedly can’t deflect a metal bullet the way it can a blaster bolt. Neither of these roles fit well in Star Wars.
For one thing, blasters appear to be everywhere in the Star Wars movies. The characters are practically tripping over them. There’s exactly one time when getting a blaster is portrayed as difficult – when Finn and Rey first meet in The Force Awakens – and that’s mostly a function of their being constantly on the run. Even with limited funds, it’s difficult to imagine that blasters are too hard to come by. If the goal is to portray someone as low tech or poorly funded, just give them less capable blasters: weapons that are unreliable or have a low rate of fire.
The second role is a bit trickier. Lightsabers are effectively magic, so it’s difficult to debate whether or not they can stop a metal projectile. It doesn’t really matter, though, as Jedi superswords are already powered entirely by suspension of disbelief. Even though blaster bolts are fully deflectable, blocking more than a few of them from different directions would be impossible, as the lightsaber simply can’t occupy that much space at the same time. You’ll notice this almost never happens in Star Wars. Introducing a new weapon to get around Jedi deflection just undermines a conceit that the setting depends on.
At the same time, introducing regular guns into Star Wars raises a further question: Why doesn’t everyone use slugthrowers instead of blasters? We can see onscreen that blaster bolts only travel about the speed of a fast baseball, making them much easier to avoid than supersonic bullets. Blasters also seem to be light on features like automatic fire, which puts them at an even greater disadvantage. It’s possible to argue that Star Wars armor is more effective against solid projectiles, even though blaster wounds don’t seem any worse than gunshot wounds, but it’s a moot point because almost no one in Star Wars wears armor.
It’s really not worth raising those questions just to introduce an anti-Jedi weapon, especially when there are plenty of other options. All a character needs to fight Jedi are explosives or a flamethrower, two things that are already prevalent in a galaxy far, far away.
5. One-Scene Aliens: Chaos Walking
It’s still surreal that 2021 saw Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland star in a big-budget scifi movie and somehow almost no one heard of it. But we must soldier on, for beyond the strangeness of this movie’s origins lies an important revelation: it is very bad. Nearly everything about it is bad, but today we only care about the aliens, who are called “Spackle” for some reason.
The story starts in a low-tech space colony that’s all men, and we’re soon told that the women were all killed in Spackle raids on the colony. That’s a pretty obvious lie for two reasons. First, it doesn’t make any sense. Unless the Spackle have gender-calibrated radar, it’s really unlikely they would have gotten every single one of the colony’s women. Second, the men telling us this are obviously evil.
It doesn’t take a film degree to guess that the Spackle story will turn out to be a cover, and the evil human leaders are actually responsible for the women’s deaths. The natural choice would then be for our heroes to team up with the Spackle against the evil humans, or maybe the Spackle would turn out to be entirely fabricated. There isn’t really any sign of them at the beginning, so they could just be another lie.
Nope. The Spackle are indeed real, and they didn’t kill the colony’s women, but they also don’t play any significant role in the plot. Instead, we encounter a single Spackle in one scene. Tom Holland briefly tries to knife fight it, Daisy Ridley convinces him not to, and then the Spackle leaves. That’s all we see of them for the entire movie, as all the other conflicts are between groups of humans.
This gives the entire movie the feeling of something missing. Surely they wouldn’t create an entire alien species just for a single minor scene? You keep waiting for the Spackle to show back up, and when they don’t, it’s like the movie didn’t end properly. Plus, the movie ends with more humans arriving to continue colonizing the Spackle’s planet, which is a really awkward plot thread to leave hanging. Also, no one ever explains why they’re called the Spackle!
All this awkwardness could easily have been avoided by simply cutting the Spackle out of the story. The lie could instead be that a plague wiped out all the women, and the rest of the movie could proceed virtually unchanged. I’m 99% sure they would have done something like that, except that Chaos Walking is based on a book where the Spackle are more present, and the book’s author is also the film’s screenwriter. Hollywood, I’m begging you, please stop hiring novelists to write your movies and TV shows. That isn’t what they’re good at!
The most difficult part of an editor’s job is figuring out how to revise one part of a story without messing up some other part, so it’s a bit surreal to find published stories with worldbuilding that just doesn’t need to be there. “Why didn’t they take it out?” my editor brain asks. “It would have been so easy!” On the bright side, the more often we see this problem in the wild, the easier it is to identify such problems in our own work. Then we can greatly improve things with a few quick edits.
P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?
I support your number 4.
The Star Wars galaxy has droids aka drones and you just need about ten, equip them with SMG or MG, enough ammo and let them attack a Jedi from ten different directions and heights. The Jedi may block / escape one or two of the drones but not more. And if those guns fire full auto (600 to 1800 rounds a minute) the entire time, the Jedi is toast.
But Master Jedi clearly bend the force so that drones only attack from the frontal cone, and they take turns firing. Haven’t you seen the prequels? Like, geez. :)
Happy (I hope!) new year. And Mal’s pistol probably had an internal hammer, much like a Glock. Hence, we wouldn’t see one. Of course, it also had an internal “pew-pew” sound generator…
The only explanation I can think of for Firefly is that they use ETC guns. This is a fairly neat means of using an electrical/plasma primer to ignite the propellant faster and more cleanly than a chemical one. Surprisingly they could theoretically have muzzle velocities approaching that of a railgun because they can use hotter propellants that are being ignited faster. The technology is currently being slowly developed for tank guns, but in principle with future tech it could be used for handguns as well.
There is just one problem. When firing, they still sound essentially like regular guns because they basically are. While they require electrical power, you can’t hear this when they are firing because any electrical element is drowned out by the otherwise conventional firing. It’d be like trying to listen to mechanical action of the hammer before a regular bullet is fired.
Lots of people seem to find the cartoon sailor’s accent endearing, so I’m guessing that’s why we get an entire nation that speaks it in Wheel of Time. It’s a crowd please apparently. As long as they don’t start singing Proud Mary for some reason, it’s fine.
One thing that I find really unnecessary in fantasy tv shows and movies is the tendency to give everybody British accents of one type or another. I guess the reason is that people would find different types of Anglophone accents out of place because they would seem too modern, so they go with the British accent instead. It is overdone though.
With the disclaimer that I haven’t read Wheel of Time myself, and so am going solely off what you’ve said here: I’m really confused by #3, unless the example you quoted is unrepresentative of Illian speech – as far as I can see, the text isn’t spelling out an accent phonetically (contrast the cringe-inducing Hagrid dialogue in Harry Potter), it’s just using a slightly non-standard word order, in a way that isn’t that uncommon in various British regional dialects.
You link to the BBC article with the statement “this accent has no historical precedent”, which is strange when the article itself says that the accent is an exaggerated Cornish/West Coutnry accent and Newton drew language and phrases from Cornish sailing communities. Yes, the pervasive cultural idea that “all pirates now have exaggerated West Country accents” is silly, but like… a Cornish accent isn’t intrinsically silly, a non-prestige dialect isn’t intrinsically silly, and I’m not sure why it’s bad to give different nations noticeably distinct speech patterns in a written work?
The more I think about this, the more uncomfortable I feel with this portion of your analysis. I realise this might not be apparent to an American writer, but in the UK, a West Country accent and/or Cornish dialect is strongly coded as rural working-class, with a bunch of negative stereotypes, and is associated with a marginalised social group – the American comparison which springs to mind for me is the Appalachian accent/dialect. Given your committment to intersectionality, I’m sure you wouldn’t describe a fictional nation with Appalachian-influenced speech patterns as “a land of people drawling like cartoon hillbillies”, so it feels very strange to see you scoffing at the obvious absurdity of “an entire nation of people who talk like cartoon sailors”. Cornwall _was_ an independent nation at various points in history before being enfolded into the British Empire, Cornish people are a recognised ethnic and cultural minority, and while the generic “pirate accent” is an exaggerated version of Cornish speech, it’s… actually not at all absurd or inconceivable that there’s a whole country of people who speak in broadly that way.
TL;DR I don’t blame you for not having all the context, but there’s real-life history and ethnic/class-based power structures which make #3 quite uncomfortable reading.
(And just to be entirely clear about my own position, for you and for anyone else reading – I am a long-time fan and reader of Mythcreants, this is not a bad-faith trolling attempt and I don’t think you should be “cancelled” for not knowing about the history and/or stereotypes attached to this accent. I was initially just going to comment with my first paragraph about not understanding why the character’s slightly non-standard dialect was so laughable, but in the course of writing/thinking I realised that it bothered me on a deeper level. Also, I am absolutely not making any claim along the lines of “white people experience discrimination just as badly as POC” by mentioning the existence of white ethnic minorities.)
For reference in case useful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_Americans
Hey Robin, thanks for letting me know about your concern. Do you have a source that suggests Cornish accents (or any other real life accent) sounds like the quoted text? No example I can find sounds even remotely similar.
For reference, this video contains numerous example of people from Cornwall speaking in their native accents and dialect, if folks want to know what it sounds like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcMJWZBzYjU
I don’t think the quoted text “sounds like” any accent, because (as I said) it doesn’t seem to be spelling any pronunciations phonetically, it’s just using a slightly non-standard word order, in a way that doesn’t seem out of keeping with various regional dialects – hence my initial confusion that this quote sounds ridiculous to you. I still don’t understand why it does.
I made the connection with Cornish / West Country accents because you say that this character, and the Illians, speak “like cartoon pirates”, and then you link to an article about the “pirate accent” you’re referring to, wherein it is described as an exaggerated Cornish accent. Since the quoted line isn’t phonetically representing an accent, I inferred that there were other Cornish dialect indicators in the books which led you to read the Illians as talking “like pirates”? Have I misunderstood something? I’m genuinely still confused by #3 and by your response here.
Thank you for the link, I’m sure it will be useful for people reading this thread. I am already familiar with Cornish accents. I’m English, have spent a lot of time in the West Country, and my partner of 10 years lives on the Cornish border.
Ah, okay, so I think the issue might be that I’m using the word “accent” in the post when I should be using “dialect.” That could explain the confusion. I do get the two mixed up sometimes.
The Illian dialect appears in the book precisely as I show in the quoted text. It’s described in the wiki as:
*The dialect of Illian is distinct in that Illianers use the emphatic tense of nearly every verb, shun the progressive tense, and use “no” in place of “not.” Thus, “He had not made sure every stick of bread went to the army” becomes “He did no make sure every stick of bread did go to the army.”*
This is, as far as I can tell, not a real dialect, and instead sounds like the way pirates talk on TV. I linked the BBC article to show that the this particular pirate accent/dialect is *not* representative of the way real people talk. It’s gone through so many distortions and iterations that it no longer sounds like anything from the real world.
Given that, would it address your concerns if I corrected “accent” to “dialect” in the post?
Or is the issue that this dialect *does* sound like real people and I haven’t been able to find it?
(Sorry for the delayed reply)
Aha, that makes much more sense now – thank you for clearing up the accent vs dialect confusion, and providing more detail about how the Illian dialect is written. (For anyone else reading in the future, – TL;DR accent is about pronunciation, dialect also includes grammar and vocabulary). Having seen the wiki example sentence, I can now understand what seems weird about it to you!
The line you originally quoted in the article (“Did I no warn you the last time, Gelb? At Whitebridge, off you do go!”) didn’t strike me as especially strange, because:
1) “no” substituted for “not” is pretty common in Gaelic-influenced dialects – you definitely see it in Scotland, and I think sometimes in Ireland too, though I’m less certain there!
2) “off you go” is a totally standard phrase, and “off you do go” sounds like a plausible way of adding further emphasis/feeling to it – it’s not “standard English” and it’s not a construction I’ve previously encountered, but I wouldn’t bat an eye if I heard someone use it in the context of a non-prestige dialect.
I’m not aware of a dialect of English which hits all three of the Illian listed features (“no” for “not”, no use of the present progressive tense, exclusive use of emphatic verb forms), and honestly I don’t have the expertise to judge whether a dialect with all three features would be implausible or not. On general principle I feel rather twitchy about dismissing or ridiculing non-prestige dialects (“the obvious silliness of an entire nation talking like cartoon sailors”), because understanding and enforcement of ‘correct’ forms of English are almost always linked to wider power structures (e.g. the treatment of AAVE speakers). But of course, it’s different when looking at a fictional(ised) dialect, since there’s an added layer of examining what stereotypes and (mis)understandings the author was potentially drawing on.
But either way, I… don’t think that those Illian grammatical constructions _do_ sound especially like TV pirates? Particularly the one about never using the progressive tense, since “be + present progressive” is a very West Country construction which IIRC shows up quite often in “pirate talk”? And as I said, the “no/not” replacement pings as Scottish dialect more than anything else, and the use of the emphatic form feels archaic rather than regional (IME it mostly lives on in folk songs and other instances where it helps with rhyming/scansion). But I’ll accept that we may just have very different frames of reference here, and I don’t know anything about Jordan’s background or what reference points he was working from.
Either way, I think the BBC article obfuscates the point you’re trying to make about the Illians sounding unnatural, because the article isn’t saying “nobody ever talked like this”, it’s saying “pirates did not have a monolithic single shared accent or vocabulary, and what we think of as a ‘pirate accent’ is actually an exaggerated version of a specific regional accent”.
Correcting “accent” to “dialect” would definitely be helpful in addressing my concern here. It’s pretty common knowledge (at least in the UK) that a “pirate accent” is a stereotyped West Country accent – it may have been popularised internationally by Newton’s portrayal of Long John Silver, but Cornwall has a longstanding association with smuggling and piracy. So, without the clarification that you’re talking about unusual grammar unique to the fictional Illian dialect, the tone comes off (to me at least) as sneering about a real-life accent associated with a rural working-class community with a history of marginalisation. (I know Mythcreants cares about intersectionality and that you wouldn’t knowingly pull that kind of thing, which is why I felt able to leave the comment – I hoped you’d engage in good faith, and I’m really glad you have :) )
It might also be helpful to add a clearer example of what you found jarring about the grammar – the quote you used in the article really didn’t seem that silly or strange to me, whereas the example you gave in the comment thread here was a lot clearer.
Looking back over the article and this thread, I think the core of what you’re saying is: Jordan gave this one seafaring character a grab-bag of unusual speech patterns which (vaguely kinda-sorta-ish) evoke a stereotypical sailor/pirate character because they’re archaic and/or regional. And then when he expanded the world, he decided that in order to justify this one character’s idiosyncratic speech, he needed to construct a national dialect to match it, rather than just let that character be an anomaly. Which is a fair point – it’s a lot more legwork on his part, it sounds like it doesn’t enrich the world or the reading experience, and it’s in keeping with your usual position about streamlining and theming and the like. (It even sounds like it has the potential to be a shitty and patronising thing for Jordan to do – even if he isn’t writting accents phonetically like J K Rowling with Hagrid or (shudder) Brian Jacques with the sparrows and moles, he’s still throwing random dialect signifiers together.) But that core point gets kinda buried in (what seemed like) laughing at regional accents.
My comment has become extremely long and it’s now very late over here so I’m going to tap out for now and check back tomorrow, but once again, thank you for engaging with this and listening, I appreciate it very much.
sounds good, it’s bed time for me too so I’ll reply in the morning.
Hey Robin, so I’ve made some edits to the post, mainly three things:
1. I’ve clarified that this is referring to dialect rather than accent.
2. I’ve included more examples to give a more complete picture of how the character talks.
3. I’ve removed the confusing BBC link and replaced it with a link to the WoT wiki instead.
I agree with you that real accents and dialects shouldn’t be mocked, and I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. I do believe that fictional ones like what we see here are fair game though, as they typically play on stereotypes and distortions of what the writer thinks other people might sound like.
>a lightsaber supposedly can’t deflect a metal bullet the way it can a blaster bolt
This is the worst idea in Star Wars since midi-chlorians
I watched a Firefly behind the scenes special a million years ago when everyone was still angry the show had been cancelled, & many still believed Joss Whedon was a good person. As I recall they stated that they changed out the sounds of the guns in post with the altered sounds effects of more obscure guns.
So what looks like a weird revolver in the show has a slowed machine gun sound put through a filter, & so on. The idea being that it sold that firearms tech had advanced without having the budget to do anything different with them in the show.
There’s a lot of the show’s rustic feel that actually just boil down to budget constraints.
I agree with you that anti-Jedi guns seem pointless, at best (especially anti-Jedi through… inferior?… technology). But I don’t think it’s fair to assume everyone can get working blasters. We’re mostly privy to the high echelons of power, even in the inner workings of low-end gang turf. A low-tech people might well not have the technology to easily (and safely) replicate blaster power cells (or whatever the non-video-game canon on that is). So even having the blaster might not mean they’re worth anything.
A firearm, on the other hand, is trivial to maintain indefinitely, and presumably requires a lot less working tech to make reliable cartridges for. I don’t know that I’ve read any of the books with “slugthrowers” in them, but I don’t inherently hate the idea. Just like the Ewoks used literal sticks and stones (though it was pretty ridiculous when they beat a bunch of high-tech ATs that way), an intermediate society with firearms seems fine to me.