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23516746 No.23516746 [Reply] [Original]

Why do all fantasy writers insist on making maps of their settings, all they do is box the setting in and make it feel small and ordinary

Consider how grand and epic and fantastical the Odyssey feels until you look at it from above and go "oh" completely demystifying the islands, making them feel graspable

Alternatively think of all the far away mythological battlefields where heroes fought and the future was forged and how uninteresting they feel if you can point to a meadow on a map and say "it happened here"

>> No.23516760

I just think they're neat.

>> No.23516808

>>23516746
retard

>> No.23516813

because when you tell people your hero Fuckicus went from Faglandia to Assbekistan while the the necromancer Suckdicklius' army was encroaching on the borders of AIDS Tower, people want to know where the flip everything is. Also Tolkien did it.

>> No.23516817

>>23516813
People want to know the answers to all sorts of worldbuilding mysteries, but making the answers known would ruin the magic and imaginative potential

>> No.23516828

>>23516817
it certainly didnt ruin anything for Tolkien

>> No.23516834

>>23516746
Fantasy "writers" replace good prose, fleshed-out characters, and solid messages with "deep" worldbuilding. Like Skyrim, if the rest of the elderscrolls games never existed

>> No.23516836

>>23516746
the whole idea behind the Odyssey is that it took him a decade to make a normally short voyage because Poseidon hated him.

>> No.23516843

>>23516836
Also the islands where mystical things happened weren’t anywhere in the mediterrranean. After he sacks the city of the Cicones, the rest of the voyage is in a mystical netherworld place with no real world equivalent.

>> No.23516844
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23516844

>>23516746
Maps don't make things feel small or ordinary they're entrancing. So many possibilities when seeing things from such heights, what goes on down there?

Other types of authors use maps too, you know: historians, zoologists, even biographers.

>> No.23516847

>>23516813
>where the flip
Hello, reddit.

>> No.23516848

>>23516836
>the whole idea behind the Odyssey is that it took him a decade to make a normally short voyage because
pussy.

"But the one eyed giant isn't pussy."
You answered your own question.