Hard Worldbuilding vs. Soft Worldbuilding | A Study of Studio Ghibli

what is it that makes a studio ghibli film so enchanting undoubtedly it's the stunning visuals and complex characters but it's also the world's crafted through Hayao Miyazaki's unique vision fantasy and science fiction writers have long distinguished between hard and soft sci-fi as well as hard and soft magic systems but I want to expand on these ways that we look at the fantasy and science fiction genres by contrasting two very different methods for crafting different types of worlds and stories that immerse the reader in different ways and it helps explain why JK Rowling's clarifications let's call them full flat this is an essay on hard world building and soft world building co-written by myself and my friend Ally Gordon [Music] you [Music] see world-building is in just creating a fictional world in the abstract it's also about what you consciously choose to convey to the reader or viewer in the text you will build as you write that's what builds the world that they know at one end of the spectrum the textbook example of hardware building is probably J our tokens the Lord of the Rings Tolkien created elvish with not just random words translated from English but a whole alphabet phonetics grammar its own syntax Gondor and Rohan have complex and detailed histories and Tolkien goes out of his way to communicate those things to the reader throughout the story hard world-building is about immersion through giving the reader or viewer detailed a logical and even realistic cultures languages geography and elsewise with an eye for how they all work together this is probably the style that you're most familiar with then it goes back to authors like arthur c clarke writing stories that take account of time dilation across space or how sound and matter travels through space when creating his worlds the style of world-building is aimed at immersing the reader by placing them in a world as believable and grounded as possible with its own web of logic and it works it allows the reader to more easily visualize the world you create and buy into the more fantastical elements that you introduce it's a great way to craft a world what then is soft world building in the absolutely beautiful studio ghibli film spirited away eight million spirits bathed that you Baba's bathhouse in the middle of an endless ocean made by rain with a train running through it like an artery and about halfway through the film you Baba detects something terrible approaching a monolithic spirit with a foul stench arrives and shishio has to clean it herself as she's doing it she finds what she calls a thorn in its side and after pulling it out a mess of disgusting rubbish and rot fills the room a being they call the river spirit then emerges from the water leaving behind gold as payment and they treated with great reverence almost worship like before Rush's off it's a subtle scene for world building but it's defined by how little miyazaki actually tells us miyazaki leaves it up to the viewer to imagine and interrogate just why what happens in this scene happens the river spirit is only cured when Chihiro pulls out the masses of trash hidden inside it from this we imagine a world where spirits are corrupted by the waste of mankind hints why the first thing we see pulled out is a bicycle we could go even further and tie this to how they hate the smell of humans a major point earlier in the film and we see later on that the healing but that the river spirit leaves behind has some loosely defined power and no clear logical world building connection is ever drawn between the river spirit and that bud finally we can infer from how they treat the spirit with a reverence of swords if only fleetingly that there is some kind of social hierarchy to the spirits that we never see explored beyond us you Baba's social place as a sorcerer among spirits as never truly explained and no justification is given for the bizarre way spirits look and sound like the hoppin Lantern and the sitting is all intentionally peculiar and unconventional and it's beautiful in 2002 an interviewer told Hayao Miyazaki that what strikes me about spirited away compared to your previous films is a real freedom of the author a feeling that you can take the film in the story anywhere you wish independent of logic even in reply he said this everybody can make a film with logic but my way is to not use logic at a certain moment in their process the lid is opened and very different ideas and visions are liberated I should not handle a scene in a certain way for the sake of the audience for instance what for me constitutes the end of the film as the scene in which she wrote takes the train all by herself I remember the first time I took a train alone and what my feelings were at the time to bring those feelings across in the scene it was important to not have a view through the window of the Train like mountains or a forest because they are so focused on the ride itself it's while working on that scene I realized that I work in a non conscious way there are more profound things than simply logic that guide the creation of the story these more profound things as he puts it are exactly what software building aims to capture and harness Miyazaki is known for having an incredible grasp of the themes and emotional thread of his stories and it's those that come through vividly in the world building and grip us never letting go I want to be clear though here software building is a different method here that prioritizes different things to hard well building that's the difference it's not an inherently better method which is a mistake I do not want you to make see it's the mess of gaps that Miyazaki leaves in the viewers knowledge of the way this world works that creates an otherworldly mysterious and foreign feeling to the world of spirited away with the Lord of the Rings drags us in through explicit depth in the economic cultural and political details of middle-earth spirit away has imagined depth that comes from the viewer or reader themselves wanting to know more it's a place full of questions telling the viewer explicitly just what all of this means would detract from that enchanting otherworldly feeling of the spirit world especially when the story is very intentionally framed from the perspective of a ten-year-old child that feeling of being lost being spirited away is crucial to the tonal atmosphere of the story the soft we're building here makes the story more immersive by putting that Emma spheric film first without it being wholly logical if hard world building is a world that immerses us through consciously using concrete rules consistency and transparency to create a sense of grounded realism and depth then soft world building immerses us through consciously using the unknown flexible roles and the readers imaginative involvement to give depth and other worldliness this could be on the level that you choose as a world builder to not have all the answers to just not know or you could withhold the answers that you do have for effect intentionally there are two ends of a spectrum hard and soft here though the methods can be used together in crafting a fictional world other examples of stories that the software end of the spectrum include boone jang-ho snowpiercer and Terry Pratchett's Discworld series both of which have a profound disregard for logic as nebula winning sci-fi author Nancy Kris puts it even the harder sci-fi involves some speculation or else it would not be science fiction the first real strength of software building is it arguably gives you more creative freedom because the story is not constantly justifying itself to the viewer Howl's Moving Castle spirited away nor seeker of the valley of the wind could have whales flying through the sky midway through the film of Miyazaki wanted and the film would be no less for it we wouldn't think so Miyazaki stories are so constantly full of unexplained strange moments like the bug style planes and castle in the sky the hopping lenten in spirited away even if he does have answers to these questions he never gives them to us and intentionally so and none of his worlds are worse off for it it's just a thing that happens and adds something to the story on a different level allowing itself to be strange to be unique to be wholly outside the bounds of our usual rules without justification creates that enchanting feeling that Ghibli films seem to have but it also means and this is a really important point that the world is flexible enough to adapt to create settings and obstacles needed to tell the story however you want rather than fitting the story to an established world this is what we see and perhaps the most famous example of a software build story ever the Harry Potter series JK Rowling has discussed how were building elements were added with each book as she wrote them like the Department of mysteries in the order of the Phoenix all to better support Harry's emotional arc there was only possible because she left so much room for possibility and strangeness in her world even within a single book that flexibility is really for a second strength is that soft world building stories also don't tend a struggle as much from pacing lols and the first and second acts because they spend so little time delivering exposition in watching spirited away the only real moments of exposition early in the story include Haku telling Toshiro what happens to humans in the spirit world and the vow that you Baba took to give anyone a job both of which are fleeting moments this is a market strength compared to Hardware belt novels which sometimes struggle with pacing because we need to understand so much of the world for the story to work so we spend more time on it it's because of this that soft we're building excels at character-driven stories in Kiki's Delivery Service virtually nothing is communicated about how this world works we almost every town or city has its own witch with powers like foresight and flight these would change a lot of things but this is because it doesn't matter for the story nothing in Kiki struggles or decisions come from interacting with those world building elements it's all about how she wants to prove herself she works incredibly hard then burns out and has to learn to let herself rest we can spend all of our time on that meaningful personal character driven story I think JK Rowling really nicely captures a third strengths of software building and saying that those characters belong to the readers as well as to me and each has their own life in the heads of those who have read them sometimes the inner lives of characters as imagined by readers are not what I imagined for them but the joy of books is that we all make our own mental cast while this is still true for hard we're building to an extent this is where software building excels as well where Hardware building means we dictate to the reader or viewer what the world is like software building invites them to give their own input consciously and subconsciously making it an imaginative exercise as they read or watch and that's fun that is immersive it's literally you putting yourself into the world that's because world building is not just about the reader understanding the world which is a mistake a lot of people seem to make will building is about crafting an atmosphere a tone a mood in your fictional piece all of these constitute immersion just as much if not more than detail you can of course still create these things with hardware building absolutely but it's a different method with usually different results so it depends what you want you can still create a grim dark world with soft world building but that might come from a sensation of Lovecraftian powers bearing down on the populace rather than deep knowledge of just how little food and water there is available the crucial thing is this while hard world building stories can absolutely have a lot of depth token once again is renowned for this the fewer requirements to rationalize software building choices means you can prioritize and be more flexible with that meaning that you want to imbue your world with the Harry Potter series is full of some of the most bizarre and incoherent world building I have ever seen and I love it from the way money works in inconceivable exchange rates to the use of freely available love potions among children yeah but the Wizarding World was not created to immerse through grounded detail and intricate consistent rules but to immerse through a feeling of whimsy and opportunity into mirror the oddball characters of the Wizarding World making it feel like the world and the characters all fit together really nicely all of this creates a light-hearted atmosphere that has slowly lost as the books go on and grow darker this is why perhaps these strangest things in the Wizarding World world building I mentioned in the first four books before Voldemort's return to power in the Goblet of Fire and this is also perhaps why JK Rowling's repeated clarifications of how her world works full plant that Wizards just crap on the floor and magic it'll Dumbledore's long-lost magical bro my knee and Ron had a troubled mayor said Rick Diggory was a brony genious an Indonesian yeah and only one of those was a lie see it's trying to rationalize soft world building that was never meant to be rationalized the result is that the answers just feel off like random conclusions mean you don't agayn that immersion through detail like we do with middle-earth and you dispel much of the magical atmosphere by clarifying these things it also undermines the readers involvement by dictating to them parts of the story they were previously encouraged to imagine though I don't necessarily think that people were wondering how Wizards went to the bathroom in the eighteen hundred's at all yeah the bottom line is this when world building you don't need to feel compelled to justify everything you create especially not things that are irrelevant to sit up and pay off things can just be bizarre strange or even nonsensical provided the reader sees that more profound as Miyazaki puts it meaning to ask questions to create a particular atmosphere vision or characterization for your world all of which are important for immersion too because ultimately viewers of spirited away Kiki's Delivery Service and Howl's Moving Castle don't need to understand all of those things to follow the characters story that is the thread we follow now none of this is to say that having strange or bizarre world building will work and achieve these things nothing guarantees your readers will see you the same way you do and you may just end up with a bad illogical weird world building that no one can see themselves in however if you want to try software building as an experiment then find a character-driven story you want to he'll and figure out what law is absolutely essential for the reader to understand about your world like that you Baba took an oath to give a job to everyone who asks then build the rest of your world with those more profound things in mind using whatever bizarre strange or otherworldly imagery and setting you like that fits that atmosphere tone character and meaning that you want to convey just see how it pans out you might like it and others might too this is just a thing a theory that I find interesting in how we make fiction like with everything else there are trends in the way we make art and sometimes it's useful and interesting to question why those trends are the way they are ultimately it is absolutely best that you do it however the way you want but this is a fun intellectual exercise and hey if you want to talk more about this sort of stuff then I would love to have you join us over on the patron discord there are tons of writers and woe builders talking about this kind of stuff and I am so happy with how the community has grown and to be a part of it if you want to support this kind of content which may be a little bit more niche I don't know how this video is going to really turn out to be perfectly honest hard to explain you know just how much your support really matters but I can create stuff that is entirely independent of any sort of worries about ads sponsors I can just make it for you guys as an audience that's really what I want to do because that's where the most meaningful content is going to be found so thank you so much anyways links were down below social media etc blah blah blah you guys are cool let me know about your work building your thoughts down the comments below stay nerdy and I will see you in the future

Channel: Hello Future Me

Views: 1,955,085

Keywords: explained, theory, lore, analysis, how to, writing, worldbuilding, fantasy, science fiction, harry potter, JK Rowling, rowling, JK, hermione, tolkien, lord of the rings, jrr, scifi, the expanse, ghibli, spirited away, howl's moving castle, kiki's delivery service, princess mononoke

Id: gcyrrTud3x4

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/GamerAJ1025]

I love Tim, his channel is so in depth and super great. I am constantly inspired by his analyses and how he can explain the way things come to life when writing and worldbuilding.

[u/Arcaslash]

HelloFutureMe is the best

[u/LordOfLiam]

Tim is an excellent worldbuilder and an excellent content creator too. His videos never cease to inspire.

[u/Ethannat]

Excellent video.

[u/billionai1]

I really liked this video! One other example for soft world building is doctor who.

In that world is greatly implied that they have days just seeing stuff and nothing goes wrong. The episodes just show the stressful days. The rest of the universe is left for the spectator to imagine and wonder. It's pretty cool

[u/vexillonerd]

I forgot about hello future me, I used to watch his videos non stop

[u/The_Real_Mr_House]

Idk how I felt about this video, I think it's a little weird to try to systematize what, in essence, is more an authorial choice about how much information to include. It almost feels like more of a genre difference than necessarily one about the worldbuilding itself.

That said, that's just my opinion and it doesn't discredit anything Tim was saying, just a different take on how to define it. What I really disagree with was his commentary on JK Rowling and her relationship to worldbuilding. Her Twitter addendums definitely don't work very well, it would be pretty hard to dispute that, but I think that's more because they're under direct scrutiny than because they're of a different quality than what she includes in the books. In the books themselves, she loses track of details pretty often, talking at one point about Hagrid keeping werewolf puppies under his bed before later on writing werewolves who are characters and who are completely human aside from the fact that they transform.

In the context of the books, this is fine, it's a plothole that you can find, but the tiny Hagrid detail is something that's pretty hard to notice until it's pointed out to you. Where this becomes a problem with her Twitter things is details like the whole "wizards pooped on the floor" thing, it's just a bizarre detail that in the context of the story wouldn't be that out of place. I think she worded it poorly and it came across as incredibly stupid in the original tweet, but easily could have been an interesting detail. If it had been worked into a work that didn't touch on it ever again other than a brief mention. If humanity had the ability to magically vanish poop, yeah, we probably would have. Probably not "where we stood", but in principal this detail fits with the rest of the canon essentially fine if you don't take it in a vacuum.

The real problem with her addendums in my opinion, something Tim doesn't touch on (unless I missed it, my apologies if I did) is that they are used to plaster over her glaring lack of inclusivity or diversity. The shitty (pardon the pun) details she tweets out are just kind of stupid, the faux diversity is more offensive in that she tends to pretend that there was always diversity in the story, we just didn't see it because it "wasn't relevant to Harry's story". I think it's less an issue with worldbuilding, which ultimately I think Rowling is fully within her rights as an author to keep doing, but of the intention behind some of it. Rick Riordan represents an amazing counter to this, he wrote new books without even making an entirely new concept or universe, mostly just adding on to what was already there, but when he did so he purposefully included diversity and characters who weren't white/cis/straight, it made for a much richer and more meaningful inclusion that JKR's "actually there was one Jewish kid that one time, please ignore the goblin bankers who play on a ton of harmful Jewish tropes".