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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48555
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48555
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The new cultures stimulate the imagination. The problems are new, the ways of solving problems are new, what the culture allows is new. Perhaps the technology is new, or so old that we cannot use elements of real-life technology that would solve the problem instantly. Maybe there are no guns, maybe there is no steel or weapons.

Solving the same problems in present-day America just gets boring. It is not a great place for heroes and lethal villains; the Hunger Games movies require ruthless overlords willing to kill children, and a culture that finds this fun entertainment, without being primitive but extremely high-tech. That is a combination you will not find on Earth.

New settings add both restrictions and freedoms to our characters options, new dangers we don't face in present-day, and force the reader to puzzle out a premise (or follow along as the MC does) of new rules and tools. It is an adventure, like an actual trip to someplace you have never been. Also like that, it is an **escape** from the present-day world. It stimulates the imagination in ways no description of the present-day world can, because the present-day world is so familiar, and the fantasy world is not familiar at all; a great deal of new stuff working by new rules exists in the fantasy world.

Reading (or consuming) fiction is an **escape** from your everyday world. Making it unfamiliar facilitates that feeling of an adventure, it stimulates the imagination.

Moving from the left side of your living room to the right side is not an escape, or an adventure.

The stories themselves tend to have a large human emotional element, but that is to make them relatable. Setting is more like a character in a story, in that it can restrain or aid the MC or villain. In some stories, the setting IS the "villain", in The Martian the setting is what the MC has to conquer to return to his normal life.

We invent exotic cultures and new worlds as settings to **change the rules** for the MC and make her problem _interesting,_ we want the reader to feel the adventure of navigating life in a new place with different rules.

A writer's job is assisting the reader's imagination. In a way, what readers are buying IS our imagination, putting together a plausible world with new rules, like Harry Potter, or Star Wars, or Star Trek, or Mad Max, or Zombieland, or Game of Thrones, or Lord of the Rings. They want an adventure. The easiest way to create an adventure is to create a new and exotic place to visit and absorb.

Original score: 6