I can't have been the only one thinking that. What is world building? I don't mean what is it in a technical sense, I mean what makes good world building? What makes a fictional place feel real? There's a lot of people who would say detail, or scale, or size, but, eh, disagree. Don't get me wrong, if you planned out your fictional city all the way down to its tax system, 100 years in the past, and more power to you. But that doesn't engage me in your world. Even if every street corner is mapped out, or you have like 100 different cities, it doesn't change how much I enjoy it. Now there's a lot of people who would say creativity. My own thumbnails, don't listen to it, it's a lie, world building just gets more clicks. While creativity is entertaining by itself, and good to have inside your world building, it's not exclusive to it. Abstract ideas and animations, for instance, can have a lot of creativity without really having fictional places or even a story. You can have a little sprinkles of creativity that can last a minute or even a second. Hardly anything you could write a wiki on. There's a lot of people who would probably say realism, but eh, it's not disagree kind of. Even if you know exactly why your city became what is due to the fertility of the soil law, the defensiveness of its surrounding mountains, then, like, cool, that's better than not having it worked out, and it might result in world building. But just that knowledge alone in your brain doesn't make people see your world any differently. So what do I think it is? Well, unfortunately I would say that it's been like a long time since I've really felt that good kind of feeling a world building, so I haven't really got the chance to analyze what exactly that feeling comes from. But I did just watch Arcane. It's not really explored in popularity, huh. Not to brag, but most people in the lead community actually saw this coming. I don't know what it is, but Leak has some great writing, and they're not like working with a lot. This is a fucking moba. You try having a fleshed out world whenever a no-life is on a single map and your audience's only viewpoint is exclusively given via possessed bird. But a lot of champions, especially in the last, like, 7 years or so, have rude, like, really good characters and one-liners, like, Clad, Allowee, Brawm, Scydler's, Kindred. I mean, there are some exceptions. There's also specific champion designs who lead the pack. The design responsible for Vi, Jinks, and Echo is definitely worthy of note, and I'm very glad Arcane started with, like, most of this guy's champions. Just waiting to get to this one, though. That's gonna be fun. Anyway, my point is that there's a ton of memorable characters and a lot of really interesting lore and locations to explore, but again, it's not the size. Despite not tapping into any of this, Jesus Christ, I still get that feeling of world building from Arcane, even just from the first episode. And so here's my theory. World building is not size, or scale, or realism, or creativity. World building is connection, or maybe reuse if you don't want to sound like a wanker, but I think connection is more technically accurate. Anyway, what I mean is, so, Piltover and the Undercity both have unique aesthetics. One has a clean, white, gold, and blue steam punk aesthetic, while the Undercity is dark with green accents, with technology that's more associated with green liquids and smoke. This is very important in tying each area together. If you just saw a street, and then another street, it makes a connection so broad that you don't even notice it. Even if you see them one after the other, they could just simply be completely different streets from anywhere in the world. But in Arcane, these identifiers connect to each other to create what feels like a specific place in the world. The clothes, the architecture, all the little tools and devices, they all connect together with these identifiers to create, in this case, the feeling of a location. World building. But this idea of connection as well building goes further. It's one thing to draw a connection with the same thing in the same place, in the same context, but Arcane does much more than this. Because we've identified what's from Piltover and what's from Zorn, I'm just going to call it Zorn, even though it's technically the Undercity. When things get dragged from one area to the other, you can immediately identify what's not in its origin place and it draws a connection back to Piltover even though Piltover isn't currently on screen. Furthermore, it links this specific item from Piltover to Zorn because now that's where it's currently is. When something important is stolen from Piltover and you see inside the setting of Zorn, contrasting the two visuals, it feels like two separate places that are still relevant to each other. And when two enforcers whose garbs are clearly that of Piltover, Waltz in following the same stolen items, you get that same feeling again. The feeling of world building doesn't come from things that exist as standalone, the feeling comes from their interactions and the connections you draw between them. The more you connect and the deeper you connect, the more real your world feels. And they are constantly making these connections with the two places. When the main group escape Piltover, by going down the garbage shoot, it's green and mucky and in total contrast to the rest of Piltover, and as they slide down, it allows you to easily make another tangible connection between Zorn and Piltover, that being the way to access it and its general positioning to it. Meanwhile, the Piltover enforcers keep gas masks on them when they walk around outside in Zorn. They don't use that in Piltover, implying it's a way that Piltover interacts with Zorn specifically, again, drawing another connection. Even just the fact that the same stones are being used in two different places in the world, in radically different contexts, with Jason Victor trying to stabilize it and Jinx trying to specifically make use of the fact that it's unstable, makes these places and scenes feel connected. Unlike a lot of Muguffins in storytelling, the stones themselves don't feel like this one-off thing to serve a single plot point, they feel fleshed out and multipurpose because they're being reused. And when you get to the time skip in Arcane, these connections explode. Both Shimmer and Hextech change everything about their relevant areas. The same Hextech now connects to a landmark in the world, the Hextech Gate, which has its own ramifications in the plot, and will even reappear to play symbolic visual elements in different scenes. Even Vise Gauntlets aren't just things made specifically for her. Not only do they have a connection to the Hextech, but they are also a tool created as part of the first wave of Hextech that was specifically meant to be a tool rather than a weapon. But in Zorn, it's Shimmer, it uses a recreational drug, it's used in this weird nose thing, you can see it side effects on people, and it's used in a lot of technology like Savika's arm. And as the series progresses, both Vise and Jinx will make use of it to recover from injuries. Shimmer even branches outwards, the council members mentioned it as like a potential threat, and the Fireflies introduction, Fireflies, no it's like the Firelights isn't it? Like already written in the script, it's the Firelights right? Even the Firelights introduction is them interacting with Shimmer. Often the new places you'll go to in the setting hell have a direct link to the world building already set up. Like the Shimmer Ward, which is what I was calling it until I remember that's from Critical Roll, it was never called that. Places in general return constantly, the council, the last drop, the bridge to top side, like is used in the opening, it's used when Vander talks to via about her choices, fights their council policy influences it, and fucking the last drop, it goes through, it isn't just dropped after Vander disappears, or yeah Vander disappears I guess, but like it's taken over by Silco instead. So it's like places will always be reused. Adventure stories often have this like big problem with this where like each new arc will take place in a totally different new place with totally new world building, and it makes things start to feel disconnected. The good stories will always keep the outside world relevant to the stories told, even if it's not the main focus. But it's not even just places and big mcguffins like Hextech, even a lot of small stuff in Arcane gets reused to create that link. Silco's eye stabbing thing gets reused in entirely different contexts, first to show how much he trusts Jinx and then later to demonstrate that that trust has been broken. This even happens with the masks that the enforcers use instead being used by Silco to show the assembly that they've grown used to top side air. There's almost a feeling of object permanence whenever something is reused in a story. It's a connection between two scenes. I think most take stories for granted, assuming that just because our media has its own brand and intended watch order that people will innately feel like it's part of the same thing. But what is a story? It's not real, it's just images on screen played in a certain order that we interpret as a story. If you erased every connection between each image, it would cease to be a story. The idea of world building is just to do the opposite direction of that by adding more and deeper connections than simply just connecting each new image to the previous. When something feels as if it persists past its initial inception and reason for being created, it makes it feel like not just one image in a series of images, it feels like a world. But therein lies the challenge. The more you reuse something and the more differently you use it, the bigger the chances are of creating a contradiction. If I establish Hextech as blue and glowy in one scene, I can't make it purple and liquidy in the next. If I establish Shimmer as a drug with side effects, I can't reuse it another scene on someone without side effects or at least not without explaining why. This creates a really interesting snowballing problem with world building. The more you connect your world together, the deeper it feels, but there's a breaking point. Because you also increase the number of things you have to keep track of so it increases the chances of you accidentally breaking your world and cuts your flexibility for how you can reuse things in future. If you're not cluely, you might not have even realized that you've retroactively contradicted what you were doing with it in the past. But I think it's worth it. A lot of the issue with how people world build is that they'll make a place fully fleshed out with lots of different things but never intertwine them. And then when they move onto the next place, they don't intertwine the new place with the last place either. So what you end up being left with isn't a world, it's a list of ideas. You might say you wrote it on a map so it's connected via its positioning, but your audience won't experience your story through a map. They experience it seen by scene, line by line, image by image, and if they can't see the connection through that, then there is no connection. But hey, perhaps that's the smarter route, or at least the simpler one, the easier one. God only knows it's going to be way easier to hammer out a story like that because writing like arcane does, it begs a question, where do you stop world building? How far do you go? Because the more you link your world together, the better it feels. So you can hypothetically do this ad infinism. But that breaking point exists somewhere along the line, and I don't know where. What I do know is if arcane does it into weaving like this, but for this, we might very well find that breaking point. I say this honestly, good luck season two.