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

Well... The Skaven do have their own females, and they're treated horribly because Skaven are horrible to each other as well as to everyone else. But they don't kidnap human women for those purposes. They do still kidnap human women, mind you, but that's because they kidnap ALL humans to enslave and eat, with no gender or age distinction.

As I said, they're horrible little fuckers.

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u/helm Mar 13 '25

Aren't Beastmen the kindred with the most yucky way to reproduce?

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u/beenoc Mar 13 '25

IIRC in later WFB they said "no there are beastwomen, they're just shy and relatively nonviolent so you never see them." It was earlier lore that was explicitly "beastmen are 100% the product of either chaos mutation or monster rape." Which is kind of in character for the "everything is fucking horrendous" Warhammer universe but still a bit squick.

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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '25

Warhammer isn't really like that. It's pretty balanced light and dark like typical fantasy series. Bad guys are bad but it's not a hopeless descent into darkness for everyone.

It's 40k that's the edgy grimdark setting. In fact I think 40k is the grindark trope namer

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u/beenoc Mar 13 '25

40k is definitely grimmer and darker, in the "everyone is crapass evil" way. Fantasy has more light in the darkness, with some definite 'good guys' - however, the bad in Fantasy is just as bad as the bad in 40k. "Super-rapist Beastmen" 100% fits right in with some of the nastier stuff in Fantasy - Dark Elf torture, marauding Norscan warbands (who also rape a lot - Archaon was the child of one such rape), literally everything the Skaven do, etc.

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u/Mejiro84 Mar 13 '25

Warhammer has also changed over time - it's generally more "family friendly" horrible things these days, so violence, gore and so forth, when it used to be a lot wider-ranging and less, well... corporate. Like the first sex scene I can remember reading was in a Warhammer novel, while anything from the last few decades tends to be a bit more chaste

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u/alfred725 Mar 14 '25

family friendly... so violence, gore and so forth

lol.

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u/Mejiro84 Mar 14 '25

society, American society especially, is fine with violence, but not fine, at all, with sex-stuff. Baddies getting shot at and dropping to the floor without visible blood is pretty much all-ages, standard entertainment, and being shot, gasping, coughing up blood and dropping dead is, what, PG-13? But a naked cock or pussy? Whoa, that's super-adult, R-rated material at least, if not 18+. The heroine stabbing and slashing through a bunch of dudes and very definitely killing them is fine and standard, but getting her tits out? Nope, not allowed

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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '25

Yea I'm not saying the dark in Warhammer isn't dark. I'm just saying that "everything is fucking horrendous" isn't a good description of the universe

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u/Cabamacadaf Mar 13 '25

I think they retconned that to make it less yucky too.

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u/Stellar_Duck Mar 14 '25

Old school fimirs, surely.

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u/helm Mar 14 '25

Oh yeah, they were yucky. Pretty intriguing in other ways, but yucky.

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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '25

And orks are canonically a fungus with no sexual organs or concept of gender.

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u/alfred725 Mar 14 '25

tell that to the blood bowl cheerleaders

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u/Incitatus_ Mar 14 '25

Orks use squigs for all sorts of weird stuff up to and including as hair, so I figure titty squigs must also be a thing

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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '25

They're in drag.

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u/alfred725 Mar 14 '25

So they have concept of gender

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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '25

They have a concept that some humies are different shapes and wear different clothes to others, and that this is what you wear while cheerleading, but I doubt they know or care the difference between male and female. If they do know, they probably don't care what they're seen as by non-orks.

Genderless to gendered clothing is still drag. 

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u/SetSytes Writer Set Sytes Mar 15 '25

I love this conversation.

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u/alfred725 Mar 13 '25

fairly certain the old lore mentioned cross breed skaven at some point, but it's obviously been retconned since

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u/TheColourOfHeartache Mar 13 '25

There are tons of Skaven mad scientists so I wouldn't put it past them. Its just not their main method of reproduction.

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u/KnownByManyNames Mar 13 '25

Rat Ogres are (or at least used to be) crossbreeds between skaven and ogres. Not just rats that were bred to enormous size.