Every author has a different approach to world-building or lore in story. I got the chance to talk to NeilKapit about their thoughts on it for their fantasy/romance comic, The Imp and Her Knight!
SHARON: Hello! Are ya ready for some questions?
NEIL: Yes, thank you.
SHARON: What made you build the world of Imp and Her Knight the way you have it configured?
NEIL: I made the world because I hadn't really tried a high fantasy world before (instead sticking to science fiction/superheroes ) and wanted to play around with that. It seemed like an interesting new challenge but it was also one where I could play around with a similar set of familiar tropes, and use that familiarity to build out a different kind of world than you'd expect from those tropes. A lot of The Imp and Her Knight is based on JRPGs I've played all my life like the Final Fantasy and Tales Of series, and the different Classes assigned to characters and how they influence their relationships to each other.
with Penny the Imp, the loss of this role on account her shrinking curse drives a lot of the story, being a Knight herself who'd spent her entire life training for something she now no longer has the strength to do, while relying on a friend (and eventually more) who now has physical power beyond anything she could've achieved.
SHARON: That’s a really fun concept, I love that you take the different classes further than just fantasy and explore how that would work in a specific relationship, setting it apart.
And this actually reminds me a lot of what I wanted to do with my second comic by switching to fantasy for the first time!
The arc for Penny is heartbreaking but unique, I feel like it could easily be a metaphor for some people in real life while still having that fantasy twist that makes it fit well into this world, while still being accessible for us.
Do you build a world around a story, or build a story around a world?
NEIL: Generally I build a world around a story, although here I'm doing both. It used to be I didn't really care about world-building because a lot of the lore of series I've seen tends to just read like trivia and data without the context of the characters to actually react to it, and if the characters weren't interesting, it felt hollow. But people don't exist without the context of the society they were raised in, and the same is true of characters. So it was interesting to work out from Penny and Jean's personalities and develop a fantasy world facing a more contemporary apocalypse (i.e. daemons as an environmental disaster resulting from industrial pollution by an indifferent ruling class), and how the valorization of strength needed to fight back weighs on both of them.
SHARON: That sounds like a really balanced view of world building. I’m similar actually—characters always come first for me, otherwise the world doesn’t matter. But I should never discount the world they live in either.
I like the context of the mutations here, that’s fascinating and brings up a lot of good questions we could ask about this society.
What do you think the role of a constructed world is within a narrative work?
NEIL: The setting is necessary in the same way that the background is necessary; otherwise everyone's just floating through the ether. It's the context that grounds all the characterizations and makes them feel real. Even if they're characters who were made in a lab instead of born and raised, their personalities are still defined by how they react to the world around them as well as to other characters. When they have interests in things outside the main plot, that makes them more relatable, and that in turn defines the world around them--they feed into each other.
I've also come to think that settings (plural) are important to the endurance of a longform series, because either you have a setting that is vast and diverse enough that your characters can always find new stuff in it, or you move your characters somewhere new before things can get stale. If you read Hirohiko Araki's "On Manga" he talks about how important setting is and why he's moved between times and places so many times over his long time doing Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and that's one of the things that makes it so much more engrossing and enduring than many of its shonen peers.
SHARON: Those are very good points—I find familiar settings and formulas endearing, but not if depended on too much and not if this confines character development. Anything can become stale, so setting is no exception!
How do you prioritize where you put detail in your world?
NEIL: Since I'm relatively new to prioritizing world building period, I try to think of it as a map I'm uncovering as I go, while noting down every new thing that occurs to me about the world as it goes. Generally it's planned one chapter at a time, building off of everything I put into the previous chapters, and trying not to contradict anything previous. The detail I put in is what's immediately relevant to where the Imp and her Knight are at the moment, with some extra information about the world's lore at the beginning to set the tone. But I try to keep it relevant to the present, while taking note of what it says about the past for writing the future of the story.
SHARON: That sounds like a very solid method.
I think the problem some stories come into is trying to dump all the world info in a narration at the beginning, when it’s actually more interesting to learn it with the characters as you go (and far less annoying).
I try to re-read my world to keep track of everything, but it’s hard.
Do you operate with creator certitude within the worlds you make? IE, do you leave things as mysteries even to yourself? Or do you flesh out every branching path you can imagine?
NEIL: I leave plenty of mysteries for myself, because while I like to be thorough—I don't know everything about the world I'm making, because the world feels more authentic if it's not fully understood by its inhabitants. Knowledge is always a work in progress, and the sum total of all of human science and research results in the most educated guesses we have about the nature of our universe. So in making a fictional world I'm discovering its secrets as I go; that's part of the fun.
SHARON: I would like to take a moment to emphasize that one statement for the blog readers: the world feels more authentic if it's not fully understood by its inhabitants. Let that sink in, folks! That’s really good, I’m gonna try to remember that.
I only had one more question, which was really a freebie for open discussion:
What else would you like to share about world building from your own perspective?
NEIL: I'm not sure what else there is for me to say about world building, except that I'm deep into fleshing out the world of The Imp and Her Knight, including concepts for what may be a prequel story...
SHARON: That sounds very exciting! Good luck with everything, and thank you for your time!
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