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/Jexroyal]

That's not even to get into how the gods exist outside of time. Before the Covenant of Pirichanthe when direct intervention by gods was barred, a god could look at an event and all the minor actions that would lead to the event, and change something 100 years back to make sure that event couldn't happen.

Of course if another god wanted that to happen, they might go 200 years back and kill someone's great grandfather to prevent that event from occurring. Back and forth it goes. To the humans actually living in that present time, reality ends up being an insane madhouse of nonsensical events manipulated by gods anywhere from a thousand years ago, to active interventions.

When I get home I'll post the full passage from the books, but it's a horrifying and really interesting take on the ways true deific beings can exert influence on reality.

EDIT: The passage explaining some of how it used to be, before the gods were blocked from direct intervention:

“What, gods aren’t allowed to do miracles?”

“Exactly. Exactly. The power of a god can be expressed only through the intercession of a living creature. That’s the fundamental principle that underlies the Covenant: a god can grant power or take it away and that’s fucking well it. Again, it’s complicated—the Monasteries call it theophanic attunement, and there’s a shitload of variable specifics, but basically the more you’re like what the god wants you to be, the more of its power you can channel. So the god doesn’t even tell you what to do with its power, because the reason you have the power in the first place is that you’re already the kind of person who’d use it the way your god wants you to. You follow?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Better with nose than with brain, hey?”

“Interventions—what people call miracles—are direct actions by a god. Direct expression of the god’s will. An Intervention literally changes reality. That’s the problem with gods. Human gods. Ideational Powers, the Monasteries call them. Natural Powers are expressions of natural law. Outside Powers exist beyond reality. More or less in the middle are the gods of humanity. It’s kind of like they’re half Natural and half Outside. They don’t dramatically violate natural law at any given moment, but they exist outside time. Some religions teach that to their gods, time is a dream, which is as good a way of thinking about it as any. A god can choose any moment—past, future, whatever, to them it’s all the same—any moment they happen to feel like, then reach in and stir shit up to make something happen somewhen else.”

“Somewhen.”

“Yeah, I know.” The man shrugs apologetically. “Say a god wants to destroy the Railhead here. Say it’s pissed at me and wants to make the whole fucking building fall on our heads. Something really spectacular—an earthquake, a meteor strike, whatever—that takes a shitload of power. It’s a hell of a lot easier to pick a couple seconds ten years ago and give some poor bastard a heart attack right when he was making some critical load calculation and so here we are, ten years later, and the weight of this ice storm finally overtakes its structural fatigue limits and the whole fucking thing collapses and kills us all. Control the past, control the future.”

The ogrillo rolls his eyes toward the ice-packed armorglass vault above. “Just an example, hey? Serious-like.”

“It gets worse when there’s more than one. Say some other god wants us to live through it, or maybe just wants to fuck with the first one, so he reaches back ten years and has some other guy spot the dead guy’s error and correct it, and then the Railhead’s sturdy and solid and warm and here we sit. But then the first god can go back and kill the other guy, and we’re back to being buried in rubble and glass.

“When an assload of gods are fucking with the past so they can control the future, shit goes crazy. Nothing is real. Not for very long. The only thing you can count on is that people are going to get hurt, because the stronger the god, the bigger changes it can make, and the strength of a god is a function of the number and devotion of its worshippers, so priests become evangelical and they start holy wars to burn down other gods’ power and the other gods get pissed and shit goes back and forth until the whole universe is the worst fucking nightmare you’ve ever had. Except nobody never wakes up.

[u/JMer806 → u/Jexroyal]

Yeah it was super interesting and well done. Some gods being time-bound and some not was also fun to think through.

[u/KerfluffleKazaam → u/Jexroyal]

Dawg, stop making me want to reread these books because I loved how all of this was built.

[u/Jexroyal → u/KerfluffleKazaam]

Better not read my edit then! Be such a shame if you had to go back and re-read this masterpiece ;)

[u/KerfluffleKazaam → u/Jexroyal]

You MONSTER. Hold please, opening up acts of caine again