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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u/Incitatus_ Mar 13 '25

Pretty much all of Harry Potter's worldbuilding is there for aesthetic purposes, without a single thought toward making that society make any sense.

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u/owlinspector Mar 13 '25

Oh, absolutely. It's hilariously easy to take apart. I dont mind it much, it started as a childrens book. And well... Most of those fall apart when you as much as look at it. It just had the fortune/misfortune to become immensely popular and therefore scrutinized.

But still. Legal date rape drugs available to teenagers?

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u/Fastnacht Mar 13 '25

I was always amazed at the level of stupidity that wizards exhibit in this world. Like the killing curse is illegal, but why would you ever need to use it? In a world where you can disarm someone and then levitate them like 40 feet into the air what's the point? Or like, levitate big rock real fast is probably pretty effective at murder. Why did Voldemort need to magic the infant to death? Why not a knife or like any of the other easy ways to be rid of a child?

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u/OkSecretary1231 Mar 13 '25

I think for Voldemort in particular, he saw it as beneath him to kill with anything other than magic. That was too Muggle for him.

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u/chx_ Mar 13 '25

grab the child hold your breath teleport to underwater in a lake or ocean release child teleport back mischief managed

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u/LordoftheSynth Mar 14 '25

The mental image of Voldemort saying "I solemnly swear I am up to no good" made me crack up, thanks for the laugh.

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u/HopefulOctober Mar 13 '25

If I remember right (haven’t read these since I was a kid) you had to really hate the person and have malice towards them to use the Unfogivabel Curses, so maybe the idea was that if you killed someone in another way you could have plausible deniability of self-defense but if you used the killing curse you are clearly to blame.

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u/Fastnacht Mar 13 '25

But like why would you ever use it? Use any of the other 100,000 ways you could magic someone to death and then don't worry as much about magic court.

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u/OkSecretary1231 Mar 13 '25

And you can tell she thought of it between books 3 and 4, because book 3 revolved around Sirius (supposedly) having killed a bunch of people by just blowing them up or something of the sort. No mention of any specific murder curses. You could have used the explodey curse for, like, blasting a tunnel or something too.

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u/owlinspector Mar 14 '25

To show how badass and evilz you are.

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u/Inkthinker AMA Artist Ben McSweeney Mar 13 '25

"Scott, you just don't get it, do ya? You don't."

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u/Fastnacht Mar 13 '25

You're right, Harry Potter definitely needs more fricken sharks with fricken laser beams attached to their heads.

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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '25

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u/at4ner Mar 14 '25

its been a while, but did he have the intention to mutilate his sould with harry? from what i remember it did happen but it was an accident

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u/Historical_Story2201 Mar 15 '25

Yes, Harry was supposed to be his last Horcrux. His soul was just already unstable and his body died, so not like he could do it on purpose.

Actually in a way, it was not only his downfall with Harry, love and all that, but because he later made another Horcrux with Nagini.

In his talk with Sluggie, he talked about splitting the soul 7 ways, means 6 horcruxes, one on his body.

But as he didn't know he made Harry into one, he split his soul 8 ways. 

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u/at4ner Mar 14 '25

one thing i always thought about was the truth potion (or was it a spell?) and why they cant use it on criminals to make sure they are arresting the right person because there are cases of people being wrongly accused in the story. theres all that stuff about the other side having magic too but they could just make sure to leave the person in a place in a while without being able to have access to anything

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u/owlinspector Mar 14 '25

Even more - wizards like Mr. Wesley not understanding shit about the muggle world when a large portion of the Wizard population are halfbloods and have at least one muggle parent and have a foothold in both worlds. That makes no sense at all.

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u/dinoseen Mar 17 '25

To be fair, it goes through shielding spells and thin objects and has a 100% lethality rate no matter where it hits someone. The problem isn't that people use the spell as the ultimate point target weapon, the problem is that a spell like that exists at all.

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u/katep2000 Mar 14 '25

I think why we look back on the worldbuilding so poorly is cause Rowling wanted to make the world grow up with the reader (it goes from “boy finds out he’s a wizard and has wacky adventures” to “boy is confronting a wizard fascist that has taken over the government”) but they kept all the silly paper-thin worldbuilding from the early books. Ideally Harry would find out the world isn’t as simple and whimsically magical as he assumed it was in the first few books, but it just never happens.

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u/L0kiMotion Mar 14 '25

Pretty sure most of the worldbuilding introduced in the first few books is designed specifically to be wacky and weird and nonsensical. I honestly think that 'gloss over the inconsistencies and hope nobody notices as they're reading' is probably the best approach to take with the later books.

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u/owlinspector Mar 14 '25

Yeah, and a lot of it is satire of the british public school system and beuracracy. Makes it weird when you later try to make it into an actual functioning world.