Willow 2022: Fantasy Worldbuilding Lessons

I tried watching the WILLOW streaming series, and got so annoyed with it I gave up after the first episode.

I couldn’t quite articulate my annoyance at first, so I thought about it, and then I realized it connected with one of my favorite topics – fantasy worldbuilding!

So, buckle up! We’re going to spend the next several thousand words discussing it. 🙂

My annoyance with the WILLOW series reminded me of an email I got when DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS came out in October 2022. A reader was annoyed that I used the phrase “lean in”, assuming I used it in the modern parlance of “giving additional effort” to a certain task. The phrase was popularized in a 2013 book called “Lean In” written by former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, where she argues that women can succeed in the workplace by simply 1.) leaning in to the work, 2.) working for one of the most unscrupulous companies in the world, and 3.) having the personal wealth to hire domestic servants.

But perhaps I am snarking somewhat.

Anyway, back to the point! In FURY OF THE BARBARIANS, I didn’t use “lean in” in that sense. The actual sentence was “Gareth leaned into his momentum, attacking a second muridach.” I wasn’t using the phrase in its idiomatic sense, I meant it literally – Gareth was literally, physically leaning into his sword blow to lend it extra power while fighting a muridach. Probably I should have phrased it better. However, I understand my reader’s annoyance – it would be massively jarring to have a cliched concept as so stereotypically 21st century and as trite as “leaning in” appear in a fantasy novel.

But the WILLOW series does that constantly.

The plot of the first episode revolves around an arranged marriage for the Princess. I have to admit the Princess was basically every Plucky Rebellious Tomboy character trope mashed together, and the result was so bland I can’t remember her name. But the Princess is betrothed to a foreign Prince, and isn’t at all happy about it.

This should have been an excellent set up for a conflict. However, the concept of an arranged marriage in the show is so removed from anything connected to reality that it just becomes pointless.

One of the keys to understanding medieval history (and, indeed, most pre-industrial history) is the idea of food scarcity. One of the great blessings of living in the 21st century west is that we’re more likely to die of obesity-related complications than of starvation. This was most assuredly not the case in the Middle Ages and most pre-industrial civilizations. One bad harvest could set off a chain of events that could lead to famine and civil war, along with lowering the overall health of the population, which could contribute to a plague. Medieval Europe from about 1100 to 1300 AD didn’t have that many famines, but after 1300 or so the weather got cooler and wetter, which caused several crop failures, which in turn directly contributed to the many wars and overall political instability of the 1300s. Especially since a chronically malnourished population did not have an immune system capable of fighting off the Black Death from 1347 onwards.

So what does this have to do with arranged marriages? Life in the Middle Ages was often very precarious. Nobles and royals arranged marriages to produce heirs and secure alliances. This seems primitive to modern sensibilities, but remember the concepts of “will of the people” and “democracy” were still quite nascent in the Middle Ages, and most people strongly believed in the ideas of “kingship” and that the king was the anointed of God. A king or a noble not having a viable heir was an invitation to civil war and other catastrophes. A war could also disrupt the planting season and destroy crops, also resulting in famine.

So an arranged marriage between royals was a massively serious business, with potentially disastrous consequences if it went wrong. Like, for those nations whose fortunes would be tied up in it, an arranged marriage between royal families was as serious as a meeting between the President of the United States and the head of the USSR during the Cold War.

Examples are manifold – Henry II of England ended his reign at war with his sons because he fell out with his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry I of England’s son drowned in a boating accident, which directly caused twenty years of civil war. King Edward the Confessor died without an heir, but had apparently promised the English throne to three different men, which led to a year of war. Philip IV of France died without a son, which directly contributed to the Hundred Years’ War that devastated much of France. King Edward IV of England marrying Elizabeth Woodville in a fit of passion caused the Wars of the Roses to restart after Edward’s early death. Henry VIII’s relentless quest for a male heir didn’t cause a civil war (Henry had the ultimate long-term survival trait for a monarch, ruthless paranoia), but it did set off the English Reformation and all the social chaos and upheaval that it brought. By contrast, his father Henry VII brought an end to the Wars of the Roses by marrying Elizabeth of York, which helped him secure a mostly peaceful reign.

Now, wars obviously have many causes, but the failure of marriages and heirs was a significant cause for all the conflicts and loss of life above.

But the WILLOW series doesn’t have any of this. All the characters are basically 21st century people dressed up in fantasy clothes. There’s no reason for the Queen to force the Princess to marry. You get the impression that if both the Queen and the Princess died suddenly, the characters of Willow would decide they were ready for 21st-century parliamentary democracy and maybe put those Co-Exist bumper stickers on their ox-drawn wagons. The Queen is forcing the Princess to marry for no other reason than to be a Mean Mom, which allows the Princess to be a Plucky Rebellious Tomgirl and generate conflict for the plot.

Now, I’m not saying that all fantasy needs to be filled with GAME OF THRONES-style grimdark. But you can get a very tense plot with just, like, say 15% of the reality of the stakes of a medieval arranged marriage. Indeed, if you’ve been reading this blog for a long time, you know that I enjoy taking cheap shots at GAME OF THRONES, a petty vice that I try not to indulge too often. But I will say this for THE HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, the spinoff series of GAME OF THRONES – HOUSE OF THE DRAGON does get the very serious stakes and the lethal dynamics of a medieval succession crisis mostly right. Perhaps we should count ourselves as fortunate that Henry VIII did not have access to dragons.

Another dissonant note in the show is how pointedly egalitarian everyone is.

We live in a very egalitarian age, where billionaires and politicians feel the need to make gestures to show that they are part of The Common Man. Like, the President of the United States and the President of China are two of the highest-ranking people on Earth, and they both dress in somber black business suits most of the time, suits that would not be out of place in a variety of professions. Compare this to the way that, say, Louis XIV dressed, where his clothes were so magnificent that helping him to dress in the morning was considered a great honor. If the President of the United States gave a press conference dressed as Louis XIV one day and proclaimed that his rich garments reflected his authority and status, both his allies and his rivals would assume that he had lost his mind and start plotting to remove him under the 25th Amendment

So egalitarianism is so ingrained in modern life that most people assume it’s the natural order of things and take it for granted. (Overall, I think this is better than the sort of society where, for example, you could be executed for accidentally making eye contact with a social superior.)

Anyway! What does this have to do with Willow? The Princess’s brother, the Charming Roguish Prince, is conducting a romantic affair with one of the servants in the kitchen. This, of course, is so common as to be unremarkable. Even today, it’s fairly common for a married CEO or a high-ranking politician to have an affair with one of the staffers in his or her office. Hardly commendable, but that’s true of a lot of things.

What’s odd is how the Charming Roguish Prince’s affair is treated exactly like a modern teenage romance, complete with bouts of squabbling and hurt feelings. It’s treated like the Poor Girl From The Wrong Side Of The Tracks dating the Richest & Most Popular Boy In High School.

A Prince who had a commoner as a mistress could (and often did) behave very badly. But the sword could sometimes cut both ways. If the Prince acted in a way too far outside of his station, his peers could react badly. Remember Elizabeth Woodville from above? She was technically very minor nobility, but she was of low enough rank that when King Edward IV married her, several of his most powerful supporters turned against him and nearly deposed him. (It didn’t help that Elizabeth had a large and very greedy family that immediately began enriching themselves as fast as possible.) For that matter, the Prince’s mistress could have been cast off at any time with no recourse. But remember the food scarcity we mentioned above? Being the Prince’s mistress was a lot better than working in the fields or in a tavern.

Now, it could have been a reflection of Charming Roguish Prince’s character that he acted courtly and chivalric towards his paramour from the kitchen in defiance of social convention and the pressure of his peers. Or the rest of the servants could have turned against the paramour, both scornful and jealous that she was acting above her station. That would have been a potentially interesting plot. But there’s nothing like that – it’s just a teen romance in the background while Mean Mom forces Plucky Rebellious Princess Tomgirl to marry for ill-defined reasons, and the only backlash the girlfriend gets is a vague warning that her heart is probably going to get broken. Given that the Charming Roguish Prince’s girlfriend isn’t who she appears to be, there’s a potentially interesting plot there, but I got too bored with the show to continue on.

Even in the modern egalitarian-esque age, romantic affairs between two different people of drastically different social standing can have very bad consequences for both participants. We can all think of many, many, many, many, many, many examples of married politicians and business leaders who got caught having affairs with people who worked for them, which often winds up destroying the careers of everyone involved. For that matter, there are numerous situations where single people entering a relationship would have harsh consequences. A college professor seeing a student, for instance, or even both are technically of age, or a military officer seeing a subordinate or someone higher in rank.

So, what lessons can fantasy writers learn from this?

I think one of the appeals of most fantasy fiction is that it’s a different and alien place from Earth. Conan’s Hyperborean Age, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, the Forgotten Realms, Earthsea, the Dying Earth, all of them are fantastical places that aren’t like 21st century Earth. Even in urban fantasy that takes place in something like the contemporary world, there’s an element of the fantastic – your neighbor might be Harry Dresden, or an exiled elven noble living in disguise because Earth is neutral territory between the elven courts like Switzerland or something.

So there needs to be an element of the fantastic, the alien, the eldritch, and it can’t just be the characters throwing CGI magic-swirly things at each other. I think that’s why the WILLOW series didn’t work for me. (And given that it was canceled without a second season, and Disney is pulling the show from its streaming service as a tax write-off, I don’t think it worked for a lot of people.) All the characters were basically 21st century people LARPing as fantasy characters. Even that could have been interesting – you could have a 21st century character transported to a fantasy world and find himself baffled by monarchial bloodline succession, only for the local characters to sternly (and perhaps condescendingly) explain to him that the gods instituted bloodline succession, and if the rightful heir is not seated upon the throne, famines and plagues will visit the land, and the orcs will come down from the frozen north seeking manflesh to devour. And since it’s a fantasy world, all that might even be true!

So, if you are a fantasy writer, maybe it would be a good idea to “lean in” to making your setting unlike the modern world. 🙂

-JM