Is World Building an Omnipresent trope?

Any work that has a fictional settling has a degree of Worldbuilding to it. Even if a work is set in the real world, it does have to develop fictional aspects of its setting. So would it be fair to say that Worldbuilding should be classified as an Omnipresent Trope?

Huh. Yeah, I don't see how world building is anything other than omnipresent. It's less of a trope by itself and more of a really broad concept. It's sort of like saying "plot" is a trope. Sure, but it's not useful to create individual examples.

A lot of the examples on the Worldbuilding page are just "world building exists".

Right.

Why does this even have examples? Any story that has any sort of setting and development is going to have worldbuilding. Even if the story is limited to someone's backyard, the fictional "rules" (or lack thereof) that can be observed as the story progresses still counts as worldbuilding.

Edited by Adept on Jun 4th 2022 at 9:13:06 PM

If anything I can see this as an index.

In school they talked of "establishing the rules of the universe", which meant anything from showing that they are going to be focusing on the small, oft ignored people to explaining how the premise of "leaping" works so the audience can go along for the ride. That concept is omnipresent, and is more intertwined with the idea of "tone."

Worldbuilding as we define it and as used elsewhere is slightly more specific, which is a continuous exploration of a fictionalized world and all its intricacies. This ranges from Alternate History to Fantasy to the future to Xeno Fiction.

I agree it is a pretty broad subject, but not quite to the level of "plot" or "protagonist" and there are many works where the express appeal is the Worldbuilding. I am not sure we really have enough subtropes to make it a comprehensive index (Magic A Is Magic A, Cryptic Background Reference and a few others), at least without making it redundant with Speculative Fiction Tropes.

Edited by EmeraldSource on Jun 4th 2022 at 2:13:39 AM

I like the idea of making it a Definition-Only Page with an index of tropes relating to the concept. The image also doesn't make much sense to me?

Edited by good-morning on Jun 4th 2022 at 8:55:18 AM

I think the problem is that Worldbuilding is not only a broad concept, but also one that uses other tropes to accomplish. You can describe a Constructed World or whatever and explore the inner workings of it, but a lot of it would fall under specific tropes or would fit better on an analysis page.

The one thing that keeps me from agreeing with this is the fact that a lot of fiction takes place in the "real" world, with little or no effort put into creating a setting from scratch. Taking that into account, Worldbuilding, defined as creating a setting or world distinct from reality, is not omnipresent.

World-building is a much broader concept than you are describing it as here. It includes almost all setting tropes and all uses of plot and characterization tropes that provide insight into the background of the work.

Elements of the setting that are assumed to be like the real world are Like Reality, Unless Noted, which is still world-building, since it establishes what we should expect to happen and what the characters are expected to believe and know.

The reason we shouldn't use it as a trope example is that nearly all of the individual elements of world-building are themselves tropes. If we treat it as a supertrope or concept index, then the rule of subtrope precedence applies.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 5th 2022 at 6:12:09 AM

I agree; in the internet, it is often used to mean the background information and story in fictional fantastical universes, but something as simple as establishing character relations or develop personalities is part of the concept. Speaking of that, I made this thread to discuss a new image for the page.

I think this is better off as an index or at the very least definition-only for all the reasons Fighteer has covered. It's one level above "Characterization" in terms of story creation (since characterization is a form of world building and currently on site we have Characterization Tropes and its many sub-indices to cover it.

Edited by amathieu13 on Jun 21st 2022 at 7:08:51 AM