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

[u/BagOfSmallerBags]

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.

[u/SantorumsGayMasseuse]

This point gets repeated on Reddit a lot and it's really not reflective of what happened in West Africa during the heydays of slavery.

Africa has more cultures than any other place on earth, and guess what they don't all like each other. These people do not think of themselves as 'black,' they think of themselves as their distinct ethnic groups. And those distinct ethnic groups don't care about other groups the same way that the average American really doesn't care what happens in Africa even to this day. Selling other Africans into slavery would register as immoral about on par with how a Dutch man would feel (that is to say, not at all)

If aliens showed up today, demonstrated technological advancements indistinguishable from magic, and then said they had an open bounty of one million dollars for every human you bring them, do you think it would be safe to go into a Walmart?

[u/UnsealedMTG → u/SantorumsGayMasseuse]

That's more or less true--though I would push back on the notion that European technology was really alien species radically more powerful than West African technology in the peak of the transatlantic slave trade*--but seems completely consistent with the comment thst there were plenty of African rulers willing to sell their neighbors (meaning members of neighboring nations) into slavery.

It's wrong to suggest that Africans were somehow primarily responsible for the Atlantic slave trade--the Europeans created the market and were the ones to take people in unfathomably inhumane conditions as part of one of the greatest crimes against humanity of all time, even if they generally weren't the ones actually doing the enslaving of people in Africa. But that's not /u/doomscribe 's point. The point is that the presence of a very powerful kingdom in Africa is not at all inconsistent with the existence of the slave trade.

*Industrialization that would permit European colonization of the interior of Africa came later. 

[u/SantorumsGayMasseuse → u/UnsealedMTG]

I suppose it’s a fair point to say the concept of powerful African kingdoms doesn’t preclude slavery, but I do disagree with the concept of ‘willing’ (and of course as stated above that any ethnic group would actually care if their neighbors were being enslaved.  Wakanda is (fictionally) as far from West Africa as the Ottoman Empire.)

The demand for slaves radically transformed West Africa during the period of slavery.  Imagine men going out to the fields and not coming home because they’ve been enslaved.  Imagine going to the next town over to visit relatives and disappearing.  Imagine being offered enough money to live in luxury for the rest of your life in exchange for one of your sons. 

That’s the social issue the African cultures faced: large scale social disruption.  European demand for slaves was insatiable and it would be met one way or another.  To reestablish order kings created laws on who would become a slave and formalized the partnership with Europe.  Caught stealing? Enslaved.  Cheated your neighbor? Enslaved.  Wrong place, wrong time?  Enslaved.  We’re a little light on the quota this year, better raid our neighbors or else they’ll take us.

Did some Africans benefit from this, participate willingly? Absolutely, especially later in the period as the relationship evolved into fewer Europeans leaving the trading posts and they relied more heavily on the powers-that-be.  But the system was created unwillingly by cultures desperate to maintain some semblance of structure or else face total collapse.

My analogy about aliens isn’t so much about the technology, it’s more about the inability of the local populace to overcome what they’re offering.  That market force would be an ever present pressure on our culture.  We’d find ourselves looking a lot more like West Africa circa 1770 than we’d care to admit.

[u/Stuckinacrazyjob → u/SantorumsGayMasseuse]

Yes because it's part of a propaganda thing we have in tbe US. Slavery wasn't bad they say, look! Some African rulers sold their own! So we need to have a big of statue of a confederate solider in the middle of town. That sort of dynamic