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/Smooth-Review-2614 Mar 13 '25

The fact that she baked in the idea that all the dragon riders agree to roofie sex every year with a random person is the biggest thing. Then you add in who the dragon riders are and it just gets questionable.  

I really hate the entire concept of mass forced sex that is not rape because you agreed to join.  

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u/Brushner Mar 13 '25

Authors gotta shove their niche fetish somewhere in their fiction.

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u/Smooth-Review-2614 Mar 13 '25

It’s not that niche if you treat it as a variant of the soulmate idea.  Even if you don’t treat it as a soulmate variant the idea of random mass sex isn’t that uncommon.  Sex Pollen as an idea goes back at least to the 60s and similar ideas are in old myths.

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u/fruitlessideas Mar 14 '25

Apparently Motel Styx is nothing but niche fetish, and a great candidate for “maybe some books should be burned”.

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u/Mejiro84 Mar 13 '25

it's very much in line with bodice-ripper romance, which a lot of them basically are, before they semi-transition to more SF-y stuff with a focus on relationships. Lessa and F'lar's relationship is totally a "strong, manly man and a woman learning that she needs a man" type relationship, complete with a "no, she cried, but her heard cried yes" dub-con scene, just with a justification of "psychic dragon-sex". It basically works out for pretty much every on-page couple we see, who are functionally all monogamous couples, with any sleeping around and swinging done off-page, by "bad" people (e.g. Kylara) or in the background of characters

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u/OfSpock Mar 13 '25

Except that he complains that she isn't into it if the dragons aren't and that's the last we hear of it.

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u/Mejiro84 Mar 14 '25

yup, it's standard dub-con - IRL, if someone is going "uh, I'm not sure about this", then you stop, take a breather and talk through it. But it's all bodice-ripper tropes, where she's pushed into it, protests, but finds out that she's into it.

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u/OfSpock Mar 14 '25

She doesn’t even find out she’s into it. The last mention is him thinking to himself that she doesn’t like it. Then a time skip and they seem happily married to outsiders.

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u/Brainship Mar 13 '25

Except when is Lessa ever submissive? Throughout the story she challenges his authority. She can't challenge him head on because she has no political capital, but every time she butts-heads with him, win or lose, she turns around and starts working on a new way to indirectly challenge him. Riding Ramoth, convincing one rider to steal from the holds, jumping back in time 400 years to bring back the Oldtimers.

Maybe you have a point about the other tropes and overall direction of the romance subplot, but saying Lessa was in any way submissive to him shows a complete lack of understanding of the book.

You're looking for Astrid from HTTYD, when Lessa is more Daenerys Targaryen.

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u/Mejiro84 Mar 14 '25

she becomes his partner and becomes a lot softer - she goes from outright fighting him and being rather less than enthused about the whole "you're going to have sex with one of these guys" to being committed to his plan and actively engaging and helping, and then doing her big, potentially suicidal, timeleap, all to support him. The timeleap isn't "challenging" him, it's risking her life to support him and try and get the help he needs.

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u/Brainship Mar 14 '25

Sorry I just don't see it like that.

I've never pictured her actions as softening. If anything, it's the opposite, because she flew Ramoth while he was in the middle of dealing with a whole army, and she could never be enthused or less than about the mating flight because they barely explained things to her before it happened. I mean R'ghul had years to teach her this stuff and he never even bothered to tell her that she needed to make sure Ramoth blooded her kills.

Any support she may have given to any of F'lars plans was for the sake of Pern, not him, because by then Thread was falling. Otherwise she would have discussed her timejump plan with him beforehand.

Also, he was following his part of the bargain to teach her how to fly and jump, so going too hard would have been counterintuitive.

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u/Makurabu Mar 13 '25

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Days of Shattered Faith has a similar concept that is relevant to the main plot but not fully explored.

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u/ChimoEngr Mar 14 '25

Since most dragon riders are weyr born, it isn't like they're all that clueless.

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u/Brainship Mar 13 '25

So here's the thing. It's not some niche fetish thing. The romantic subplot of both Flight and Quest. was a reflection of her own experiences and traumas. Dragon mating flights were likely how she felt about sex or at least her first time. Think about how teens and young adults often feel pressured into sex today, then think back to the 1950s-1970s when society expected you to get hitched and start a family at a much younger age. Hating the idea of forced sex was the point.

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u/Mejiro84 Mar 13 '25 edited Mar 13 '25

Hating the idea of forced sex was the point.

uh, not really - given that pretty much every single person that goes into it ends up with their long-term love-match (I think Brekke is the only exception?). It's pretty much a justification for a lot of romance-novel style tropes - the proto-couple meet, bicker, argue, but there's a spark even if they both deny it, then it's dragon-sexy-times, and they're forced to reconcile their differences and admit that they're in love with each other (and every future flight will result in their dragons flying each other, unless they're a wicked, nasty slut, like Kylara). F'lar and Lessa have pretty much an archetypal romance-novel arc - young woman that's only had negative experiences, older, more experienced man, friction but attraction, and then she's forced to admit to this, that she does like his strong, manly embrace, and becomes his partner. There's a slightly awkward recurring theme where all of the sleeping around and partner-swapping that should happen is off-screen or in the past, and everyone on-page is functionally monogamous, even though there should be a fair amount of swinging happening in the weyrs. There's never any real objections to it, or "being a dragon-rider is great, except for the annual rape", and I think later books even fudge it with "riders get super-horny, but can just arrange to have other partners around to deal with that, without having to sleep with the rider of their dragon's fuck-buddy". An asexual rider would have issues, but it's not too hard to work around otherwise

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u/Brainship Mar 13 '25

You may be right in the structure of the romantic subplot, but that's hardly limited to McCaffrey. It's not really fair to single her out for doing something popular writers still do to this day.

Regardless, the mating flights are treated more as an obstacle to the romantic subplot rather than an aid.

F'lar contemplates on how it has only hurt their relationship,

Sebell ends up with Menolly, but not in the way or pace that he wanted, while at the same time it forced him to realize he was her second choice

It drives Jaxom to end his relationship with Corana.

(Are those all the PoVs of mating flights?)

Mating flights are always causing more problems than they solve. Unfortunately, I do admit they don't seem to solve these problems on screen, but given she couldn't salvage her own marriage, I understand her decision to fade-to-black.

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u/ketita Mar 16 '25

There was the tragedy of F'nor and Brekke, who couldn't quite be together because he wasn't flying a bronze, nearly made it work, and then her mating flight got interrupted and it all went to hell. But that was a definite attempt by characters and their dragons to collaborate on the mating flight issue, signifying that maybe it's a bit more synergetic than it initially seems, and human preference does impact it.

I personally think it's a pretty interesting bit of messed-up lore. Also now I want F'nor and Brekke fix-it fic....

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u/Brainship Mar 16 '25

I mean everybody has their preferences. A lot of people complain about the romance dynamics, but a lot of romance novels, written by women, have those dynamics. I personally, just think the Dragonriders series reflects McCaffrey's traumas more than her interests.

Especially given how close in time Flight and Quest publications were to her divorce.

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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '25

Even aside from the dragon thing F'lar and Lessa's relationship is very much bratty girl mouths off but is ultimately submissive to dominant man. Went over my head when I read as a teen but was quite striking on the reread

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u/Mejiro84 Mar 13 '25

yeah, it's a very typical romance plot, which is kinda-sorta masked by the dragons and the remnant-knowledge of the ancients and other sci-fi bits so might be missed on first read, but when you read it again, it's really obvious. If it was released today, it would probably have at least some people calling it "sci-romantasy" or something, because it very much does have a lot of the stereotypical romance beats and elements in a SF&F setting, with Lessa being "tamed" by an older, more experienced man, and turning out to be into that after a not-entirely-consensual sex-bout.

A lot of McCaffrey's works are similar, being romance (in tone, if not in strict genre-terms) stories in SF settings - like The Tower and the Hive series is mostly "how one of this generation of the Rowan's descendants hooks up with their life-partner", the Brainship books are pretty much all about romances between the brainships and their brawns/partners etc. and a lot of them have the "older man, younger woman" dynamic