The Politics of World Building

Problem This Solves

World-building theory has overwhelmingly focused on formal and structural questions -- how coherent is the world? how mappable? how consistent across media? -- while ignoring the political implications of those very demands. The emphasis on canonical fidelity and narrative coherence carries ideological weight: it naturalizes a desire to understand reality itself as stable, unified, and knowable, reinforcing what Hassler-Forest calls a "post-Enlightenment metaphysics of presence." Meanwhile, the dominant commercial storyworlds (Marvel, Game of Thrones, Star Wars) treat imaginary worlds as branded properties whose "knowable" environments serve long-tail engagement and commodity circulation.

Practitioners who build only centripetally -- toward consistency, mappability, and authoritative canon -- inadvertently reproduce hegemonic cultural logic. They need a framework for understanding how world building can also operate centrifugally: destabilizing ontological certainty, sustaining multiple unresolved voices, and challenging who gets to imagine alternative realities and on what terms.

Key Principle

World building is an inherently political act, and its politics are legible in the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces. Centripetal world building seeks coherent, mappable, canonical environments -- and implicitly reinforces existing power structures. Centrifugal world building foregrounds heteroglossia: multiple competing voices, radical ambiguity, fluid identity, and the deliberate collapse of boundaries between Primary and Secondary Worlds. Drawing on Bakhtin, Hassler-Forest argues that "most of the energy deployed by writers, producers, and critics in relation to world building has been directed towards the centripetal notion of the 'authoritative'" (p. 381), while the centrifugal dimension -- where world building becomes genuinely politically productive -- has been neglected.

This does not mean centrifugal world building escapes capitalism. Neoliberalism can absorb any oppositional movement "as long as the existing economic and political systems remain unchallenged" (Zizek 2013, via p. 387). The tension between subversion and co-optation cannot be resolved -- only navigated consciously.

Good Examples

• Janelle Monae's WondaLand project: Spanning concept albums, "emotion pictures," stage performances, and media appearances, Monae builds a deliberately fluid, ambiguous storyworld. Her android alter ego Cindi Mayweather functions as a "remarkably flexible and slippery signifier" enabling identification across gender, sexuality, class, and religion. Narrative barely advances while the world constantly expands -- privileging world-experience over story-consumption. The fictional WondaLand and the real WondaLand Arts Society "strengthen and reinforce one another," linking imaginary utopia to actual collaborative community.
• Sun Ra's mythology and Parliament-Funkadelic's stage shows: Earlier Afrofuturist world building that used music and performance -- inherently centrifugal, non-narrative media -- as primary world-building vehicles, fracturing the assumptions embedded in dominant reality rather than constructing a stable Secondary World.
• Monae's heteroglossic eclecticism: Drawing on Bowie, Prince, Grace Jones, and fifty years of Black musical performance, the "world-building strategy based on heteroglossia and radical eclecticism does not result in any breakdown of meaning" (p. 386) but enriches the storyworld while reflecting genuine collective authorship.

Bad Examples

• Star Trek's surface diversity: Despite ethnic diversity in its casting, Star Trek remains "based on a thoroughly Western vision of the importance of material wealth and technological modernization" (Booker 2008, 198). Representation alone does not make world building politically centrifugal if the underlying ontology goes unchallenged.
• Evaluating worlds solely by canonical fidelity: Jonathan Gray's paratextual theory privileges narrative-coherent paratexts and dismisses commercial tie-ins like "Gotham City pizza" as mere marketing. Hassler-Forest argues this misses how even "incoherent" elements constitute meaningful world building.
• Treating "alternative" branding as subversion: Monae is signed to Bad Boy Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group, while projecting an "independent" image. As Fisher (2009) warns, "'alternative' and 'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream."

Key Quotes

"The way in which imaginary and immersive transmedia storyworlds are constructed in fantastic genres reflects a fundamentally political position." -- Hassler-Forest, p. 377

"Missing from Wolf's theorization of world building are its profoundly ontological and political implications: the ways in which the dialectical tension between Primary and Secondary Worlds can serve to destabilize absolute distinctions between past and future, subject and object, history and myth." -- Hassler-Forest, p. 380

"The desire to create, navigate, or otherwise engage with an imaginary world that is stable and coherent expresses a desire to understand what Wolf describes as the Primary World in similar terms." -- Hassler-Forest, p. 382

"By placing her contagious call to dance, enjoyment, and creative collaboration in a storyworld that frames these things as acts of political resistance, her music becomes an act of defiance within neoliberalism's 'relentless capture and control of time and experience.'" -- Hassler-Forest, p. 388 (citing Crary 2013)

Rules of Thumb

• Interrogate the politics of consistency. When a world demands canonical coherence, ask who benefits from that stability. Deliberately introducing instability and multiple voices can make world building politically productive.
• Move from epistemological to ontological analysis. Do not just ask "How far is this world from reality?" Ask "How does this world challenge what counts as reality?"
• Use non-narrative media as primary world-building vehicles. Music, performance, and visual art produce inherently centrifugal worlds that resist the closure of narrative-driven franchises.
• Deploy flexible signifiers, not fixed allegories. Figures like androids, cyborgs, or posthuman bodies can open multiple identification paths -- more politically productive than one-to-one allegorical mappings.
• Link fictional worlds to real communities. The most politically potent world building connects imaginary storyworlds to actual collaborative collectives, not just individual authorship.
• Acknowledge the co-optation problem honestly. Any world building entering mainstream commercial circulation risks absorption by the logic it critiques. Navigate this tension consciously; do not pretend it away.
• Frame joy as political. Drawing on Spinoza via Hardt and Negri, communal pleasures -- dance, celebration, creative collaboration -- are encounters that "increase our powers to think and act." Embedding calls to collective joy within a storyworld gives pop-cultural forms genuine political resonance.

Related References

• Worlds Over Stories: The Core Paradigm Shift - The centripetal/centrifugal distinction introduced here
• Fan Practices: World Projecting, Transmediaphilia, and Co-Construction - Fan practices as political acts
• Franchise Management: Battleworlds, Copyright, and Managed Multiplicity - Corporate control as political structure
• Audience Experience: Immersion to Overflow - How audiences engage with worlds politically