Worldbuilding doesn't and shouldn't matter.

I’ve increasingly come to feel there is nothing people should care about as an “objective criticism” less than “Bad Worldbuilding”. 

When the Worldbuilding in something is genuinely well thought out and holds up under scrutiny that’s a neat bonus, I love watching YT videos about the hidden depths of the lore in ASOIAF as much as anyone else who only watched the TV shows. But it should not be a requirement and certainly not an end in and of itself, and I kinda feel like what’s happened to that very franchise proves my point. 

Tolkien was a worldbuilder like none before him because he spent 20 years writing about this fantasy world just for himself before he actually published anything set in it. And even then he still had to partially rewrite The Hobbit later when he fully integrated it into Arda’s overarching history. Chances are you have not read the book that was published in 1937. 

I don’t care whether or not the world of a story makes sense, I care whether the characters are people I like spending time with and then if the story being told with them is compelling. And if anything related to worldbuilding as a concept affects my ability to enjoy a story, it’s not how detailed the history is, or how unique or unlike other fantasy worlds it is, or whether its internal logic really makes that much sense. As I explained in my post on why I couldn’t get into Magic Knight Rayearth it’s whether or not the world actually feels alive and lived in, like the people playing specific roles in the story are not the only real people in it. 

I saw someone say how a particular Urban Fantasy Pet Peeve of theirs is when the Economy doesn't make sense, and then went on about all the math they did regarding some story's Economy. The fact that you put more thought into this silly thing to even care about in the first place than the author did doesn’t make you a better writer than them. 

Update June 3rd 2026: Premise

So I watched a Video Essay titled How this Cabbage almost DESTROYRD Anime by I don't mind rotting (UOYKAHNTON). And their plot description of the 2005 Visual Novel Yoake Mae Yori Ruri Iro Na shortened Yoakena and translated Brighter Than the Dawning Blue, got me to thinking. 

The setting is centuries in the Future where a catastrophic war between The Earth and The Moon caused technological development to revert back to 2005, or as this video theorizes it originally plunged society back further and the present narrative is just when they caught back up to 2005.

Like a number of VN premises, it's a transparently contrived premise, the worldbuilding is only there to create the setting the writers want. It's a way to get a setting that they can in large part write as if it's set in the present but still have some Sci-Fi stuff going on.  And it's that kind of worldbuilding that critics of "Bad Worldbuilding' so often call lazy worldbuilding. Because no you realistically you can't get almost the exactly cultural conditions of 2005 Tokyo from a different history leading up to it just you wouldn't get something resembling 2017 Los Angelus with a point of divergence that starts 2000 years ago.

Yes I'm really defending Bright right now, I haven't seen the movie itself yet, but I feel bad about having ever passively agreed with Lindsay Ellis's video on it.

The people who made that movie wanted to make a movie that's a modern LA Buddy Cop Movie but with Orcs and Elves, I think the correct thing to do when criticizing this movie whether you like it or not is to simply accept that premise instead of being mad that they didn't create a completely different alternate history.