The place of worldbuilding has always been a matter of debate in the genre fiction scene. On one hand, it’s absolutely the main appeal of fantasy and science fiction to many. Novels like The Lord of the Rings and Dune are successful not just because of their characters and themes, but because the authors set so much time aside in order to explain every aspect of their world in detail. Days of the week, stories of the past and present, the workings of the economy are all dissected at great length across author-written appendices. Fans and scholars have continued debating this trivia long after these novels moved from the zeitgeist to canonical status. Do balrogs have wings? Why don’t the cast of Dune use computers? These points don’t necessarily matter to me, but they definitely matter to somebody.
On the other hand, worldbuilding can also be a writerly limitation. “It is the great clomping foot of nerdism,” said M. John Harrison. It’s impossible for any one person to understand the world in its entirety, to build one from the ground up. So why should anybody even try? After all, reading is participatory, and some of the most popular stories there are (whether they be good or bad) have big gaping holes in them. The audience is compelled to fill in the blanks themselves if the surrounding structure is good enough. But then again, Brandon Sanderson became one of the most popular writers in the epic fantasy scene for obsessively spelling out every small detail in his big novels. So who knows, really?
When I read a novel and am left swimming in a soup of factoids and proper nouns, I ask myself: what is the author trying to accomplish? Passion is an acceptable answer, but novels benefit from an additional reason. The Name of the Rose fleshes out its historical period (1327) as part of its greater rhetorical gambit regarding the mystery as its core. Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles uses period-appropriate references to further obfuscate the motivations of the characters, and heighten the sense of classical melodrama. Le Guin wrote The Dispossessed to explore the contradictions of the world we live in, and imagine what a different status quo might look like. She also gets points for turning a critical eye back on her earlier work, and asking “what if I fixed The Wizard of Earthsea?” Even then, she leaves blank spaces.
The first episode of The Fire Hunter, which aired on January 15th 2023, presents another approach to worldbuilding: documentary. The show is adapted from a series of novels written by Rieko Hinata which I have not read, so I can’t say how much of its approach stems from the novels. I can say that the first episode takes care to show the viewer every aspect of how life is conducted in this world, even over showing us the characters and what they are feeling at any given moment. We see paper being made, golden liquid bubbling in the engines of great transport machines. The narrator, only introduced later in the episode, fills us in on the small details of a world where fire is uniquely dangerous: parents name their children after fire to ward away its curse.
These all double as practical considerations, because The Fire Hunter is made at a time in history in which animated fantasy shows are quite hard to make. The more time the series can spend panning over still images while explaining things to the audience, the less it spends having to animate things. On the other hand, I can’t help but find it fascinating how much the series cares about the workings of its setting. No matter how ludicrous its central concept might be, director Junji Nishimura and scriptwriter Mamoru Oshii doggedly render the central premise naturalistically. The wilder flourishes, like a beast attack in the woods and the sight of people spontaneously bursting into flame, are rendered as surrealistic deviations from the mean. It reminds me of how Andor utilized practical effects and location design to transpose the dramatics of Star Wars to a more grounded, literal world. Not necessarily a better or more effective one, but a world that offers new creative opportunities.
The state of fantasy in Japanese anime right now is quite bad. The majority of shows began as webfiction or light novels, intrinsically bound to MMORPGs, Dragon Quest and porn games. Their characters, creatures and construction are all functionally the same. Even deviations from the norm, like villainess stories or kicked-out-of-the-party stories, all stem from that source. The remainder stem from other properties, like how the first season of animated Garo transposes the cliches of tokusatsu to a fantasy kingdom. They riff on fantasy tropes, but are more fantasy pastiche than anything else.
The Fire Hunter is unique among recent offerings for its ambition: to create a world, and dramatize it on screen. It lets its cast of characters speak for itself, introducing a narrator only after those characters have laid out the stakes. It dramatizes the workings of its bizarre society while leaving questions hanging in the air. Best of all, it’s a world inhabited by people who don’t simply come from someplace else–the world they inhabit wasn’t built to be their power fantasy. It’s very possible The Fire Hunter will struggle later in its run, but right now I can only wish that we had more shows like it.
Isn't It Electrifying? 