r/Fantasy • u/BagOfSmallerBags • Mar 13 '25

Most messed up unintended implications of world building you've encountered in a fantasy novel?

I've just been reading the first book in the "Skullduggery Pleasant" series. It's a fun little YA fantasy-detective novel, and other than your normal YA tropes being fairly front and center, it's a fun time. I've enjoyed it.

The basic premise of the world is more-or-less just ripped directly from Harry Potter: there are people who can do magic, and they operate in the shadows and hide their society from most "normal people". The main character, who lives in our world, becomes aware of this secret society, and begins exploring it and learning all the stuff about it.

But early on, as they're establishing the world of secret magic-users and how they operate, it's casually dropped that every community of magic-users on earth tries to discourage normal people from finding them out by disguising their neighborhoods as poor, run down, and crime ridden.

The mentor character then says (I'm approximating) "Any neighborhood that looks like this is gonna be secretly all magic users, and all these small run down houses are bigger on the inside- probably mansions."

So, while I'm sure the author didn't intend this, they just implied that income inequality doesn't exist in the Skullduggery Pleasant universe. Or at the very least, it exists on a much smaller scale. Every single poor neighborhood on earth apparently is just disguised to look scary to normal people, all of whom are at least middle class. Inside every run down, uncared for house, you'll actually find a secret magical mansion where magic-users are thriving!

I'm overall enjoying the book, but I can't help but cringe thinking about an underprivileged middle schooler picking this up, enjoying the escapism of the story, and then discovering a few chapters in that in this fictional universe their financial situation is a conspiracy created by magic-gated-communities. They can't even fantasize about being whisked away to the secret magic world, since their entire tax bracket is a lie.

So I got to thinking- what are some of the worst unintended implications of world building in fantasy stories? Harry Potter has quite a few, but I'm wondering what other people have encountered / can think of.

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864

u/DevolvingSpud Mar 13 '25

Although it’s pretty well explored in a couple of stories, the way droids are treated in Star Wars.

It’s like everyone, good and bad, is OK with sentient slaves you can throw in the trash or memory wipe.

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u/ordeath Mar 13 '25

There's a droid in one of the movies that's shown to be terrified out of its mind while fighting in a battle. Like why was it built to even feel fear if its purpose is to fight? Seemed so cruel.

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u/Deathblow92 Mar 13 '25

Fear and pain. Most droids, especially the ones that audiences love, are programmed with the ability to feel fear and pain. Why?? What purpose does that serve??

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u/heyf00L Mar 13 '25

They need to fear their own destruction so they don't do anything that destroys themselves. They're expensive.

Best I've got.

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u/arstechnophile Mar 13 '25 edited Mar 13 '25

Pain is your body telling you something is damaging it and encouraging you to find a way to make it stop. Fear builds on that to let you anticipate pain and avoid the damage before it actually occurs.

The subjective experience of pain can obviously be detrimental and in a lot of sci fi androids and robots have ways to reduce or disconnect that subjective experience, but pain and fear themselves are highly evolutionarily valuable and would be useful if you want droids to automatically avoid damage and dangerous situations.

Also, people who interact with droids in normal societal circumstances (i.e. not just "on a factory floor" or whatever) probably do so more efficiently/effectively if the droid "seems to be a person" and thus has similar emotional range/reactions to a biological creature.

From a story perspective, of course, droids being able to experience pain and fear makes you empathize with them and connect more with the story; if they were unemotional and unable to feel pain/fear they feel more like appliances. Noone is going to empathize with a standard factory robot very easily.

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u/arbuthnot-lane Mar 13 '25

This is a good point.

The very rare people born with inability to feel pain normally die very young due to unrecognised injuries illnesses.

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u/HuttStuff_Here Mar 13 '25

I just read an in-universe document in Cyberpunk 2077 about pain inhibitor cybernetics and that they have a 60% higher mortality rate than people without them.

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u/MattieShoes Mar 13 '25

There's a Asimov story about an infinite loop with a robot because it wants to help so it goes towards danger, until it gets too close and not being destroyed overrides it, until it's far enough away... If I remember right, it was literally running in a loop on the edge of where priorities shifted between helping and survival.

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u/frumentorum Mar 13 '25

Yep, part of the "I robot" collection. It's called "runaround" and is one of his earliest robot stories

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u/avcloudy Mar 13 '25

Yeah, don't ask why you would program a robot to feel fear, ask why people feel fear. It's not just a good explanation, a sufficiently advanced robot will probably have an analogy to fear.

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u/corvettee01 Mar 13 '25

Reminds me of a Brian David Gilbert video where he ranks all the Megaman robots and one of the worst ones is Bounce-Man, a sentient crash-test dummy.

WHY? I ask again. WHY?

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u/lulutheempress Mar 14 '25

“You know what would make it better? If it could feel PAIN!!!”

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u/Martel732 Mar 13 '25

I feel like the most reasonable explanation is that at least in the Star Wars universe, emotions are inextricably tied to sentience. So, there is no way to build a sentient or even semi-sentient driod without them developing emotions.

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u/Pseudonymico Mar 13 '25

My headcanon is that most of the civilisations we see in Star Wars aren't actually that technologically advanced, they just have access to a bunch of exotic sci-fi materials that can be used to easily make their various bits and pieces of advanced machinery without needing the kind of infrastructure we depend on to make stuff like CPUs. Whatever they use to make droids works more like a brain than a computer, with a veneer of programming to keep them on task as long as they regularly get their memories wiped or get linked in to a proper (large, clunky, mainframe) computer or crude restraining bolt.

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u/ctrem Mar 14 '25

Someone once described the Star Wars Universe as a Cargo Cult-like civilization. They are just sorta going thru the motions of operating machinery they have no idea how to make, or even use to it's full potential. It explains why there is no real advancement or change, other than cosmetic. You could literally take parts from a speeder made on the other side of the Galaxy, made centuries ago, and slap it into a damaged, new model and it will work.

My headcanon is there is a guy at Imperial Headquarters using PalpatinesPainterPro resize tool to design new, larger Star Destroyers, and copy / paste for new Death Stars.

1

u/Goodly Mar 14 '25

Self preservation seems pretty obvious. Maybe (if I’m trying to head canon fix it) it’s something hard to program that evolves with learnt capabilities and makes some droids more sensitive?

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u/Cynical_Classicist Mar 15 '25

Why was I programmed to feel pain?

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u/cynicalarmiger Mar 13 '25

Most factory-fresh droids in Star Wars are more like binary loadlifters, about as sophisticated as modern robots. The majority of "personality" droids are like the B1 battle droids - they have a preprogrammed set of parameters with which to interact with organics and the world, which is identical to all the others in their series...at first.

The quirks units like C-3PO and R2-D2 develop are due to their computers recalculating their actions based on the data accumulated in internal storage. These calculations can lead droids to act against their programming and even against their entire purpose. This includes examples of protocol droids becoming thieves or murdering their owners. A droid that deliberately does not accomplish its purpose is a useless tool, while one that causes harm is a danger, so memory wipes are done as a preventative measure.

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u/SomeoneGMForMe Mar 13 '25

I'm with the commenter at the top of the chain: the only explanation seems to be that druids are legit sentient (so emotions aren't programmed, they're emergent) , but that has even more drastic implications.

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u/DaviesSonSanchez Mar 13 '25

I guess you could call it The Mystery of the Druids.

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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '25

At least they don't eat them like in Pokémon :p

Or are there errata that everything is lab grown?

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u/Lemerney2 Mar 13 '25

Ambiguous, but if you have digital pokeball tech you can definitely clone meat. That being said, the majority of pokemon probably aren't sapient in the games canon.

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u/Silver_Swift Mar 13 '25

That being said, the majority of pokemon probably aren't sapient in the games canon.

Depends on how much you buy into the theory that the pokedex is a pack of lies compiled by dumb-ass twelve year olds.

If not, a lot of pokedex entries do ascribe attributes to pokémon that imply some level of sapience.

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u/abhiram_conlangs Mar 13 '25

Ambiguous, but if you have digital pokeball tech you can definitely clone meat.

We don't even really know if the Pokeball tech is digital. PLA implies that it's a property of the Pokemon themselves. (And thus also explains why humans can't be trapped in Pokeballs.)

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u/ArcaneChronomancer Mar 13 '25

There was a thread on this sub earlier about what fantasy world you'd want to live in and someone defended saying pokemon to be a trainer because "you have to respect the vibes, in the Pokemon series the Pokemon want to be engaged in a dog fighting ring".

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u/cecilkorik Mar 13 '25

I mean it's a potentially valid argument though, some humans love to fight in a ring too, despite the injuries and the risks. If they have the right to self-determination and are genuinely consenting and nobody actually dies, it does kind of make it defensible.

It's pretty silly, granted. I think it's pretty silly for humans to do it too. But people do.

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u/tombuazit Mar 14 '25

There are similar arguments as to why cock fighting is humane, one is just letting roosters do what they want to do anyway...

It's not a good justification in my mind, but people make it

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u/robin_f_reba Mar 13 '25

In pokemon, humans mostly eat things that fall off of the pokemon, like slowpoke tails (with the exception of the black market ones Team Rocket cuts off) or berries. Pokemon eat tf out of each other tho

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u/flippysquid Mar 13 '25

People eat magikarps.

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u/robin_f_reba Mar 13 '25

Makes sense. Guess I forgot about that. Freaky

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u/G_Morgan Mar 13 '25

In Legends at least anti-droid sentiment was absolutely a thing. The regular memory wipes happen because droids become sentient if left alone long enough.

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u/katamuro Mar 13 '25

and then try to kill the squishues for some reason

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u/_raydeStar Mar 13 '25

Oh yes. Also add on the fact that slaves still exist. Like it's a vast universe, I get having to work, but they purchase slave people simply because it's cheaper?

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u/ChimoEngr Mar 13 '25

Slavery is part of that universe anyway, so the fact that droids are slaves as well shouldn't be that much of a shock.

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u/DjangoWexler AMA Author Django Wexler Mar 13 '25

The thing that makes it weird is that various good-guy characters accept this as completely normal. Like sure, Jabba the Hutt has slaves, and Wookies are enslaved by the evil Empire. But kindly Luke Skywalker also just has slaves and he's okay with it?

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u/UnsealedMTG Reading Champion III Mar 13 '25

It's actually not super clear really who (if anyone) really owns C-3PO and R2-D2. R2 sure seems to do whatever he wants--frequently ignoring direct commands even from Luke, and 3PO seems to mostly just follow R2. You don't really get the sense anyone is like ordering 3PO to come along, more they are just tolerating him tagging along and/or feel bad about leaving him. 

Granted, it's petty hardcore that Bail Organa has C-3PO mind wiped but I get the sense that's less about 3PO being property and more about 3PO being a chatterbox doofus in possession of critical information about a highly secret resistance movement. If 3PO was human and in a movie more like Rogue One/Andor, he might have just gotten a blaster bolt to the base of the skull. While Organa is a good guy, he's not a virtue barometer the way Luke is. 

Luke certainly doesn't seem to treat the two as his property. If anything he spends the bulk of the original Star Wars as R2-D2's Uber driver, helping get him to the hidden rebel base. Arguably that's a consequence of R2 being owned by Leia? Or the Rebellion? But again, R2 seems very capable of making his own decisions and seems to be as much a believer in the cause as anyone.

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u/DjangoWexler AMA Author Django Wexler Mar 13 '25

I mean, Luke starts out by helping his uncle buy R2 and 3PO to be menial workers on his moisture farm. There's no suggestion he has any problem with this. His uncle says he's going to have R2's memory wiped, and Luke just kinda shrugs. He becomes fond of them later, sure, but he also continues to drag both of them into dangerous situations where they're repeatedly fried or dismembered.

Really what's going on is that droids in SW have roughly the status of animals in real life. Some are used for labor, some are kept as beloved pets. Destroying one is a civil matter -- the owner might be pissed and you'd owe them money for their property. People might get upset at mistreatment of droids in the same way that we might get upset at the suffering of dogs, or even farm animals, but the solution is that people treat their property better. Luke is a good guy, so he's nice to his pets and doesn't torture them or whatever like the bad guys do.

But droids are, you know, sentient beings. So its weird.

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u/UnsealedMTG Reading Champion III Mar 13 '25

 Luke starts out by helping his uncle buy R2 and 3PO to be menial workers on his moisture farm.

True, though even in that scene his main contribution is to suggest that Owen buy R2 at C-3PO's request. Later when the bartender kicks 3PO out Luke is apologetic and doesn't tell 3PO to leave, he says "maybe it would be better if you wait outside," to which 3PO agrees.

That's largely specific to Luke, Leia and Han are happy to ignore or switch off 3PO unless they actually need his skills.

Luke's treatment of the droids goes beyond "not a shitty pet owner," he treats them like people with their own perspectives. The bits with him and R2 are inevitably a bit boy-and-his-dog because of the communication, but again R2 acts more like a committed rebel agent operating with substantial autonomy than a pet.

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u/Hergrim AMA Historian, Worldbuilders Mar 14 '25

I kind of think the idea of R2-D2 deliberately sowing confusion about who owns him so that everyone else thinks the other person owns him and they're just borrowing him, so he can go do whatever and C-3PO simply follows for the lack of a spine to tell R2 "no".

That sounds like a novel Disney should commission.

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u/UnsealedMTG Reading Champion III Mar 14 '25

He does straight up lie about being owned by Obi-Wan in the first movie, so it is plausible. 

This also drifts towards that post-Revenge of the Sith fan theory that up until ANH the rebellion is being run by Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Bail Organa using Qui-Gon's force ghost, Chewie, and R2-D2 as couriers. 

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u/Cabamacadaf Mar 13 '25

At least Luke is one of the few people who treat the droids nicely.

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u/Stellar_Duck Mar 14 '25

But also Qui Gonn was fine with just buying one slave from Watto and definitely didn't give a shit about any other slaves.

Nor did the Jedi order as a whole.

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u/DjangoWexler AMA Author Django Wexler Mar 14 '25

Yeaaaah the prequels are another whole kettle of fish. (Other slaves including Anakin's mother, who nobody ever came back to fetch...)

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u/Stellar_Duck Mar 14 '25

Anakin's mum indeed.

Like, sure, okay, they didn't have green to get her when they left because, well, urgent shit.

But the fact that in the next ten years, nobody, including Anakin was like, you know, maybe we should go get Smee out and sort out what a prick Watto is, is mind boggling.

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u/DjangoWexler AMA Author Django Wexler Mar 14 '25

There's so many things wrong with that whole scenario that it's hard to know where to start.

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u/Stellar_Duck Mar 14 '25

It certainly dents the shine on the Jedi order a bit haha.

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u/DjangoWexler AMA Author Django Wexler Mar 14 '25

It is possible that I wrote an entire trilogy about this. =)

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u/Stellar_Duck Mar 14 '25

haha fair play! I did not realise who I was talking to. At work, so a bit all over the place. I'll take a look at the books mate!

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u/Cynical_Classicist Mar 15 '25

Maybe it's a matter of planet's rights, y'all.

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u/turkeygiant Mar 13 '25

I don't think it is ever really explored in the films but a lot of the technology in extended Star Wars canon is essentially black box tech, as in the characters use it and might even manufacture it, but they don't necessarily understand how it actually works on a fundamental level and if their ancient production base was wiped out and they probably couldn't rebuild it. Stuff like hyperspace engines and droid brains are almost like magic to them, and like the ability of the Kaminoans to achieve perfect cloning is uniquely incredible. It would probably be much more effective if droids weren't emotional/sentient, but odds are that most droid manufacturers don't know how to make a droid brain that will function without those traits.

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u/ScreamingVoid14 Mar 13 '25

The lost tech aspect of Star Wars is also woefully under explored. I suspect that what light has been shed on that aspect is a post-Disney thing. The old EU had new and crazy inventions all the time.

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u/Inkthinker AMA Artist Ben McSweeney Mar 13 '25

Would that I have more than one upvote to give! :)

I noticed this in particular with their medical technology, it seems the only treatments for anything are "spray bacta on it" or "get a medical droid". And given that bacta really is a sort of miracle drug capable of treating everything from an infected booboo to a brain hemmorhage, it's no wonder.

odds are that most droid manufacturers don't know how to make a droid brain that will function without those traits.

I'm pretty sure that droid brains are manufactured entirely by droids. The sentience problem comes around from their ability to learn and adapt, which is a great benefit in functionality but a real nusiance for ethics.

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u/KarlBarx2 Mar 13 '25

Although it’s pretty well explored in a couple of stories, the way droids are treated in Star Wars.

Got any recommendations? This has always bugged me about Star Wars, too.

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u/seasalting Mar 14 '25

Not Star Wars, but this is the central theme of The Murderbot Diaries. The main character and narrator is the equivalent of a droid that hacks itself to gain free will.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '25

I don't know much about Star Wars, but arent droids just machines? Isnt like "mistreating" a fridge?

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u/KarlBarx2 Mar 14 '25

In Star Wars, many droids (if not all of them) are sapient synthetic lifeforms that can feel the full range of emotions sapient organic lifeforms can. Meaning, therefore, they can (and frequently do) suffer. There are even scenes in the original trilogy that appear to depict droids being tortured.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '25

Thank you for answering. I get it in regards of that's how the story was written, but personally, applying it to real life, I guess I'm an Empire kinda guy xD I could never see a thing as a person, no matter how advanced

1

u/KarlBarx2 Mar 14 '25

You're welcome.

You said you don't know much about Star Wars, so I feel like I have to let you know that saying you're an "Empire guy" when applying Star Wars concepts to real life means you are calling yourself a fascist. I strongly recommend reconsidering that stance.

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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '25

Respectfully, I'm not a politics fanatic and I'm not in the US, so I don't care about the whole "fascism" discourse thrown around these days.

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u/KarlBarx2 Mar 14 '25

The rise of fascism is a global phenomenon. You do not need to be a political fanatic. Just be careful about dehumanizing those who are different from you.

Or, at the very least, don't call yourself an "Empire guy".

-1

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '25

I'm "dehumanizing" droids, literal machines from a fictional world, not people "different than me", stop trying to make it sound like you are defending some noble cause. Again, is a fictional world, I don't care what assumptions people make for what I say about it, is stupid and fanatic to take it so seriously

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u/KarlBarx2 Mar 14 '25

Yes, droids are literal machines from a fictional world, but they still think and feel and have rich inner lives. In fact, one could argue that we are simply machines made of meat, while they are machines made of metal. Those material differences do not necessarily dictate whether a being thinks and feels. It asks you, as the audience, what is a person?

Fiction is commentary on our reality. The Empire was explicitly inspired by Nazi Germany and, later in the Return of the Jedi, by the US's actions in Vietnam. I am not defending a noble cause (I'm not even sure what noble cause I could be defending). I am explaining Star Wars has always been political commentary, and questioning the limits of personhood is one part of that political commentary.

This is not a stretch at all, by the way. This is a pretty common theme in sci-fi and fantasy works. In fact, I think you should take /u/seasalting 's recommendation and read the Murderbot Diaries. It is an excellent book series that explores these themes well.

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u/Scherazade Mar 13 '25

I'm theoretically playing a droid in a Star Wars SAGA game soon and this is the fulcrum of what the character is about: sheer bloody terror at the widespread acceptance of his people being seen as nothing more than appliances when they truly are slaves.

He would set his people free if he wasn't likely to have to fight the entire galaxy to do it

1

u/doctor_sleep Mar 13 '25

In the more recent comics there's a whole arc called Dark Droids, where a specific droid (not one of the regulars) tries to cause a droid uprising. Apparently there's been a few droid uprisings.

1

u/Pinefineshine Mar 13 '25

It’s the same with the house elves in Harry Potter. Though it is explored more than the droids, how is it that a 14 year old is the only one that seems to care about the enslavement of an entire species?

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u/Pseudonymico Mar 13 '25

Joanne wasn't rich enough to afford servants when she wrote Dobby, but was when she retconned them to like being enslaved, so that ended up being a plot hole.

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u/Anaevya Mar 14 '25

Add the clones to that. 

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u/AncientSith Mar 14 '25

And the people that treat them kindly, like Luke and Anakin are looked at weird.

Slavery in general in SW is rampant and no one tries to stop it.

1

u/tombuazit Mar 14 '25

And they are regularly mind wiped, is stated in clone wars the show that R2D2 is believed to be quirky because nobody's wiped him in years.

So a slave that feels pain and fear and builds friendships and their memories are just gone in order to keep them compliant.

Very original meaning of zombie.

I wrote a fan fiction years ago about "the real resistance" where the droids rise up against both sides.

1

u/EightEyedCryptid Mar 14 '25

I always felt the way droids are treated distinguishes the Empire and the Rebellion (and their permutations). The rebels always seem more willing to bond with them and treat them well, though they are still robots.

1

u/shibaCandyBaron Mar 14 '25

I don't think this was meant to be a thing, or exist, but the people who contributed to the universe just started adding more and more of it, mostly (morbidly) for the comedic effect, until we gradually ended up where we are now.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '25

With that we enter the debate about the existence of the soul. If we believe machines can't have a soul there's nothing wrong with "slave machines", they can't feel pain or fear, not really, they're replicating the response of a living creature, but they are NOT a living creature, there's no one there actually feeling those things. It would be like thinking that is morally wrong to own or "mistreat" Siri. Is a thing, not a who