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Re: Comic World Concept
Posted By: Sam, on host 206.152.189.219
Date: Friday, December 1, 2000, at 10:41:34
In Reply To: Re: Comic World Concept posted by Speedball on Thursday, November 30, 2000, at 21:58:07:

I have to put my voice with others in RinkChat. Mixing religions, myths, and legends of assorted cultures and time periods into one hodgepodge world has been done before, and I can't really say I'm fond of the approach in the first place.

What's missing -- and what inevitably will get lost in such a humongous setting and backstory -- is that what makes a world interesting is not the particulars of what happens to whom when but what single restricted set of ideas you're attempting to communicate through that world. Combining divergent myths in a seamless way is a curiosity. There is a degree of interest inherent in it: divergent myths were seamlessly merged, and that is interesting because they were seamlessly merged. But there's no basis for progressing further with that yet. The world makes itself worthwhile, but it doesn't make it worthwhile to tell stories in that world.

Stories are worthwhile when you have (1) characters, (2) plots, and (3) ideas, all of which are individually substantial and original enough to suffice on their own. The world itself is a backdrop and should remain in the background. If an element of the world is not relevant to the story, it has no business existing in the first place, and elaborating on it anyway will wrongfully bring the world into the foreground. This is where I think Tolkien made his one single mistake with Lord of the Rings.

I'm not saying the story has to come first and the world constructed second. It's often easier to construct the world first, as that is what enables stories to be constructed in the first place, and often a developed world suggests a number of "natural" story lines that can be told within it.

What I *am* saying is that your world description is insufficient for us to do much evaluation, because it's not the world that matters but what you do with it, and not the particulars of the world that matter but the ideas you employ those particulars to communicate. Good stories can be made in your world. Bad stories can also be made in your world. *shrug* Just look at almost any movie series in which the first one or two movies are good, and the rest of the sequels are not.

Where you need to go from here is come up with a story that takes place in that world. Come up with solid characters involved in that story, and come up with some ideas to inject into the story that make it interesting. And -- this is very important -- chop away any aspect of your world that isn't directly involved in the particular story you tell. If you don't, the world will be a distraction. Of course, telling multiple stories will allow you to focus on different aspects of the world and build it up that way, so it's not like you have to make one all-encompassing story (and if you did, it would probably suck).

To wrap back to the beginning of this post, I don't think the fact of merging divergent religions and myths together is in itself a substantial core idea to sustain a series of stories. It just establishes the facts of your world. Where you progress with those facts, what you do with them -- that's what counts.

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