The Allure of World Building

 

Science Fiction entertainment products, whether films, video games, or television series work off of many common concepts and ideas. One of those ideas is world-building. Without world-building, many of the classic science fiction films would not be viewed the same way. Turn on Disney+ and look at every animated and live-action Star Wars television series especially The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the Book of Boba Fett. World-building provides everyday Star Wars fanatics like me the chance to dive down deep into our own heads to figure out what planets like Mandalore or Tatooine look like on a modern scale. You can also look at world-building in terms of the Avatar franchise. James Cameron spent decades going over every facet and every last detail of what Pandora would be like that way we the viewer would feel like Jake Sully and other human characters like Grace Augustine and Norm Spellman. Those humans went through the Avatar program to integrate themselves into the culture of the Na'vi people. At its essence what is world-building and why is it important on a science fiction scale? 

World-building is creating a landscape/ constructing a world that lives within someone's fantasy. These worlds need to have their own ecology, history, and geography for viewers to be able to understand what they are seeing and for writers of science fiction to know what to put in their work. Take Pandora for example. Pandora checks off all the boxes. The fictional world has its own geography, its own ecology, and its own history. Characters within the Avatar films are there to study this stuff. Every Na'vi tribe in Avatar has its own ecology, history, and geography and those elements differ from tribe to tribe. The Omaticaya clan that Jake Sully, his wife Neytiri, and their kids Lo'ak, Netayem, Tuktirey, and their adoptive human son Javier "Spider" Socorro are a part of differs from the Metkayina tribe that consists of clan leader Tonowari, his wife Ronal, and their children Ao'nung and Tsireya. Different clans have different leaders and therefore have different customs. Each tribe represents different things. The Metkayina is a water-based tribe whereas other tribes represent earth, fire, and other elements.

Star Wars does the same thing as Avatar in the sense that it creates a fictional world where after watching the films you feel like this is the world you are living in or some far-out futuristic version. In my opinion, Jon Favreau, who Marvel fans know as Happy Hogan and his creative partner Dave Filloni did a great job in creating a tv show called The Mandalorian that re-shaped the canon that makes up most of the Star Wars universe. Worlds like Mandalore and the many other worlds that make up not only The Mandalorian but the other Star Wars properties transport us to a galaxy far far away to broaden our horizons in terms of imaginative belief. We see worlds that are far removed from anything we have seen in fiction and non-fiction. Star Wars is one of the oldest science fiction products tracing back to the late 60s early 70s and like with everything else since then, technology is evolving in a way where CGI and other special effects can help filmmakers like Bryce Dallas Howard, Jon Favreau, Robert Rodriguez, and the many other directors in the Star Wars world create these distant worlds for the viewer. At times, these directors use practical effects to make many actors like Pedro Pascal and Rosario Dawson feel like what they see on the screen is what they are really seeing while filming. 

In the end, world-building is a concept made for science fiction and other fictional mediums of entertainment. In the real world, we can use that to our advantage. Science and science fiction movies are the future of cinema, and those films show us how big the realm of possibilities is in terms of what we can see and what we have not discovered yet. James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, and other visionary science fiction directors are changing how movies are appreciated and they are showing us the viewer how free we can let our imagination run. That is what draws me to the world of science fiction. The idea that I can watch a James Cameron or Christopher Nolan movie and see a world or even multiple worlds that marvel the worlds in our own universe tenfold. Movies are for everyone and science fiction is a genre that is forever changing not just in terms of the audience but also in the product that draws in that audience. Avatar is a movie that changed cinema forever. We now look at movies and tv shows including the ones previously mentioned and expect our minds to be blown. Avatar is to everyday science fiction nerds what an Avengers film is to a comic book nerd. Science fiction is the future just waiting to be created, and now is the time for us in the real world to look at the world of Pandora and see that our world has the possibility of evolving with time instead of falling apart at the seams. Pandora is not real but the concept of colonization brought up in Avatar is. We have the chance to build worlds never seen before. Let's start making a discovery.