I want to clarify first that I’m not responding to this comment because I’m trying to start a fight or a takedown. I’m responding to this one because I don’t agree with your comment but think you are getting at something useful, and because I think about the ethos of fantasy writing more than I think about most things in the world.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I think in making your point you are conflating my writing in this joke post with the writing that I’m making fun of in fantasy novels in a way that does not square. The ‘joke’ of my post, if you will, is in the interplay between deliberately lofty and vague fantasy language and specific, mundane, often unglamorous locations on the U.S. East Coast. For people who are from the area, the joke lands as recognition; for people who are not, the difference between registers is still funny and the use of generic fantasy-worldbuilding terms gives necessary context.
But outside the context of a joke, neither “I gather coin for the road west” nor “I gather quarters for the Downtown Expressway toll” would be especially useful or compelling sentences for building the world or any sense of feeling around it, not without further context.
If I was writing a novel set in the real-world U.S. state of Virginia and I wanted to make people care about Richmond, the state’s capital, it doesn’t really matter whether I call it Richmond or The Capital if I’m not establishing the setting in an interesting way. You’re absolutely right that the aim of such a story would be to write about Richmond as if the audience had never been there before, to populate it with the specific textures of the city as it is or was in whatever time I’m writing about, and with characters that care about and have real relationships to these textures. In this way, when you do it well, setting a story in a real-life city works as a more large-scale and impactful version of making tumblr jokes about it: people who are from there think, “Oh, that is what the Fan looks like in the fall,” and people are not from there are effectively introduced to a new place that they have not been to or read about before and – if the writing is effective – drawn into caring about it for the length of time they’re reading the story, and perhaps even afterward.
In contrast with the writer setting their story in a real-world city, the fantasy writer faces the same basic challenge of getting their audience to care about their setting, but with two key modifications: 1) the author has never been there, and is making the whole thing up, and 2) nobody else has ever been there either. There are no shortcuts – there is no such thing as someone who grew up in Middle Earth and is therefore automatically inclined to smile at the mention of the Anduin or the Shire. We know these names because Tolkien placed enough effort, thought, detail, and description in the story that we as readers remember them and form emotional attachments to them.
In the context of this task, calling your currency “Coin” and your capital “The Capital” and your war “The War” can be called nothing else but lazy. Names are not the be-all-end-all of worldbuilding but they are a critical starting point. To get back to real life for a moment – I do not get my water from the River, I get it from the Potomac; I do not visit my parents on the Highway, I take 95; I do not take a Train into the Capital, I take the Yellow Line on the Metro into Washington DC. These are not inherently interesting places to people who aren’t me, and they are not places that you have an obligation to care about just because I’ve named them. In some ways, introducing too many names and too much jargon at once is certainly an unpleasant and overwhelming demand on the reader; ask the guys at r/worldbuilding. But if I were to set out on the task of writing something that made you care about the city, the river, and the trains, names are the critical first step. Few novels read for pleasure have an unnamed protagonist; names, including place names, are a critical tool our brains use to form connections and attachments.
So where I think you are completely right is that the mere act of throwing names and history and other world-details at the reader is not sufficient to achieve effective worldbuilding. But naming things is a critical first step to making your audience remember and care. To return to Tolkien, we as readers don’t care about the Shire or Rivendell or Gondor because they have names; we care about them because the protagonists of the novels have established attachments and relationships to these places, attachments that drive and motivate them for the entirety of the story. But names – and, yes, sometimes long descriptions – are critical to making those attachments seem real and concrete. Does “Sam, I miss our hometown” land the same way as “Sam, I miss the Shire”? Do we feel the same way watching Faramir ready to die fighting for Gondor as we would if he had been laying his life down for The Capital? When Gondor calls for aid, would we feel the same sense of relief and triumph if Theoden’s response was “And the Horse-Kingdom will answer”? And – most critically – would any of these characters’ stakes feel as desperate and important and emotionally resonant if they were not fighting for and remembering and reclaiming concrete locations with texture and a real sense of place and real inextricable ties to their identities?
I’m not holding tolkien up as the be-all-end-all here; there were things about writing setting that he did exceptionally well, and things that he overlooked to a comical degree, lazy shortcuts that he also took that were detrimental to the story. But I think he understood the critical nature of creating a real and textured setting and, most importantly, making that setting not only a contextless piece of Worldbuilding! with Lore! but something that genuinely moves and motivates and shapes the characters that come from it. I think both readers and writers of contemporary fantasy fiction often treat setting as the ‘eating your vegetables’ of a book, with characters and their relationships playing the role of dessert. I hope that in this response I have gotten across not only that it is absolutely lazy to write a whole-ass fantasy novel and never name your fictional country’s capital, but a little bit about why this is such a sticking point for me.
Thank you for your response, genuinely, for driving me to articulate all this in a slightly less silly context than a joke about interstates!
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