One thing I’ve been sitting on is trying to explain the challenges of worldbuilding when you’re coming from a culture that isn’t the “default” seen in your genre, e.g. as mine with fantasy.
I’ve mentioned before that my worldbuilding is a love letter to the Philippines. As a colonized country, the Philippines lack a unifying culture. The archipelago has so many different people of varying backgrounds and ancestries, and our own myths and legends have been tainted after hundreds of years of colonialization. I couldn’t rightfully pick a certain thing and call it Filipino culture.
It isn’t easy to show the different nuances of a culture that is vastly underrepresented in this genre. But because it’s underrepresented in the first place, I feel the need to take the extra length–to work worldbuilding into every crevice of the story. This is a stark contrast to say, someone writing in a more recognizable fantasy world, one that has the advantage of being established for decades and decades, of having hundreds, even thousands, of authors fleshing out this world bit by bit.
I’ve gone both ways. I’ve taken the lighter approach in The Agartes Epilogues, showcasing the importance and pull of family (arguably the backbone of Filipino culture) along with the epic plot. Many people enjoyed the subtlety; others scratched their heads. In Annals of the Bitch Queen, on the other hand, the overlap of family and duty and love and politics frames the narrative. Either way, I feel pressured to try to get it right. And so I feel as if I don’t have the luxury of letting people fill in the details because the vast majority of the people reading the book won’t have the necessary background. I can’t call a sword just a sword…when I describe Tali’s father’s sword in the third book, I have to make sure it looks and sounds like a kampilan because otherwise, chances are in the reader’s head it’s just going to look like an ordinary sword, and then we’ll miss out on some important details that are necessary to the plot…
A trending topic right now is the issue of people saying that you can pretend a character who wasn’t described very well can be “just like you.” Which is all well and good when you see yourself everywhere else. But when you don’t, saying these things aren’t important is just as good as erasure. Which is an upsetting thought. Hasn’t my people already dealt with enough erasure in their histories? Hasn’t others? Our culture is part of who we are, and it bleeds into our stories without us even having to bat an eye. So the things we think about (like food, we think so much about food), the things that are important to us, the struggles we face…these things all mean something. We can’t just do away with them with a snap of our fingers.
