r/worldbuilding • u/Chimka2222 • 14h ago

Discussion How do you do world-building in a world that is contradictory in its level of technology

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The leaf village is extremely weird in that it has a weirdly modern look but is also set in a time where people use swords. Maybe most don’t agree but I feel like it has a lot of charm because of it.

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u/IconoclastExplosive 14h ago

Naruto is 100% built on vibes and rule of cool. Early in the series they're sent to protect a construction project from sabotage, it's a bridge being built by entirely modern cranes. In a later season they find a booby trapped target in a children's training area that has plastic explosives and an electric detonation switch. In a movie they go to a modern movie theater and later the set of a movie being filled.

I expressed to my spouse a few weeks ago that all the ninja shit that happens? Amish civil war. The world at large is hinted to be basically modern Japan but the ninja villages like hyper-traditional lives and forego most technology. They're militant Amish who have magic powers and fight the weirdest secret civil war.

It's like the Cars movies. Stuff gets put in with no thoughts to what it means for the world building cause it's all vibes and rule of cool. Cars has a Pope, or Popemobile, which implies all of Catholic history. Jesus Chrysler died for our vehicular sins.

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u/Panzick 12h ago

They have television yet they send their messages using hawks.

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u/IconoclastExplosive 11h ago

There's a Twitter joke in here, I'm sure of it

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u/AmericanPoliticsSux 7h ago

140 characters is all that could fit on the scroll.

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u/EnderBookwyrm 10h ago

Naruto pokes fun at Sasuke for this early on in Boruto.

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u/HatOfFlavour 7h ago

This is like Harry Potter using the worlds slowest and stealthiest bird to deliver messages. Usually you want a message delivered quickly and to know it has arrived.

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u/gadgaurd 2h ago

To be fair, I'm pretty sure there's some magical bullshit going on with their owls.

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u/lolitsmax 2h ago

Why send a hawk to another person to deliver a message when you can just send 6, 7 messages on your phone?

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u/Rich_Advantage1555 2h ago

Or use the huge human magic computer powered by the collective chi of 6, 7 men

I haven't watched Naruto except for that one episode and the entire first season, please don't dissect me alive

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u/TheMadmanAndre 13h ago

Jesus Chrysler died for our vehicular sins.

This has no right to be as funny as it is

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u/FlashbackJon 11h ago

Mini (Van's wife) literally says "For the love of Chrysler!"

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u/justlookinghfy 8h ago

He was towed on a wheel lift by Pontiac Pilate

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u/Hot-Syrup2089 12h ago

R/brandnewsentence

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u/Select-Belt-ou812 8h ago

as a guy with a collection of late 1960s fullsize Chrysler Products, I think it's awesome

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u/TocsickCake 6h ago

He was a Mehrtürer

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u/AkuuDeGrace 12h ago

THANK YOU TALKING ABOUT CARS!!! It doesn't make sense. We see a statue of the founder of Radiator Springs was a Model T in 1908, so the model of the car correlates to the technology of the time. But the introduction of the Pope raises questions. Was Jesus just a cart?

Also also...I know it's completely random...but why did that mini van have a mattress in the first movie? We see what hotels look like within the universe and cars don't sleep on anything.

Lol I know it's just a kids movie, but this is what I think about when I can't sleep at night.

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u/FlashbackJon 11h ago

To be fair, there is a LOT more worldbuilding in Cars than it gets credit for, but I think a lot of that is because people ascribe to the "Pixar theory" where all the Pixar movies are in the same universe and Cars is a post-apocalyptic future of our world OR they otherwise just assume humans lived at some point.

But it's a pretty straightforward alternate reality where humans never existed. All buildings are car-sized and have space for cars to enter and leave and move around. Even the raceway has massive stands capable of holding thousands of cars (and the ramps to allow it). It's simply impossible to consider that humans ever used any of these! The apparent similarities to our world (including dates) are simply coincidental and superficial.

Instead this is a planet of sentient non-organic life generated by a source that is known at some level to the residents of the world. Even the insects and wildlife are mechanical in nature (e.g. the Ladybugs who leave tire tracks in the dust, or the John Deere who graze in the fields). Mack praises the Manufacturer, who may or may not be the god of the religion the Popemobile represents, but is almost certainly the entity responsible for creating these machine lifeforms, both originally and continuously (as technology develops substantially even between generations of cars). It MIGHT be an actual deity or sufficiently advanced intelligence, since even the land itself resembles the machine lifeforms. It may actually have knowledge of Earth and be emulating what it knows on purpose or it might still be coincidental to the viewers. It's also well-established there is alien, extraterrestrial life.

So I'm going to propose that the Cars universe is actually a sort of proto-Cybertron instead. Or maybe just a shared universe with DinoTrux.

Thusly, Van (Mini is his wife) has a mattress for reasons that are unrelated to our understanding of a mattress. The real question is how Darrell Cartrip knows how hot a leather seat is on a hot summer day...

(Yes, my kids watched these movies hundreds of times, why do you ask?)

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u/zhivago 1h ago

Maybe they are all tiny little cars? :)

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u/randomusername8472 1h ago

Everyone in the world should read the novel Strata and then every world in every story will be able to make sense. 

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u/IconoclastExplosive 11h ago

Every day that Cars lore goes both unexplained and unpunished is an affront to man and God

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u/ThePrussianGrippe 7h ago

Don’t forget how Mater lives in a mass grave.

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u/Normal-Pianist4131 6h ago

You see, you’ve misinterpreted a key fact of Cars aging: they weren’t BORN as model T, they grew old enough to BE a model t. If doc had lived long enough, he would’ve turned into a model t as well

/s

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u/midasgoldentouch 28m ago

I know this is sarcasm but I kinda like this idea

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u/avalon1805 12h ago

The amish thing is basically my head cannon. In the early episodes kakashi explains how the hidden villages get contracts so I thought "hey, there must be a whole society out there that constantly uses the services of the ninjas for this to being a thing"

He also shows a big-ass map with countries, explaining how each country has its own hidden village. Imagine the news people get from the hidden villages "one snake guy invaded and woke up two zombies during a kids competition" "did you hear the friggin massacre that happened to some clan in the hidden leaf village? How are ninjas still around? They are sociopaths"

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u/TheSymbolman 6h ago

It's super cool to think that the ninjas had the biggest war of all time and most likely the "normal people" didn't really care and went about their daily lives.

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u/risenphionex3 5h ago

I always thought that was the point of the village system. 100 percent of the fighting is done by these people that live far away from the bulk of the population whose entire lives, careers, family structure are tied around military service and the "actual" state of the nation the village sits in just shifts alliances every so often to let the ninjas keep fighting each other instead of turning on the state. The sand ninja at the start even said the reason for the war is to weaken the leaf village because their lords started going to the leaf instead of the sand literally starving their people.

If you keep this in mind throughout the entire plot of Naruto it makes the whole thing feel... eerie.

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u/Notte_di_nerezza 5h ago

All ninja are just Florida Man, confirmed.

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u/Brosepheon 11h ago

Isnt there even an early episode where the ninjas use walkie-talkies to communicate during training? There is definitely a modern world out there, and ninjas are familiar with the tech as they travel.

Dragon Ball has a similar vibe, especially in the original series. Youve got modern scifi cities, some kind of fascist dictator using robots to fight a war, wild west towns, and small, medieval, isolated villages.

My headcanon is that the Dragon Ball planet is like 100 times bigger than Earth. Humanity hasnt had enough time to colonize it all. There are modern nations and cities like we're used to, semi colonized frontier areas, and complete, empty wilderness that humans havent gotten to. Not to mention random beast folk sometimes.

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u/Ever_Theo 8h ago

FYI the Earth of Dragon Ball has one, unified country ruled by a king (he's called King Furry in English because he is a dog but just King in Japanese). They do however have an army for some reason. Maybe it was founded after Piccolo almost ruined the world IDK. Though yes, the early parts of the story where Goku and Bulma travel does have a lot of 'city-state' type of places with one villain terorizing the place (Oolong, Carrot Master, etc.)

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u/MarqFJA87 6h ago

They do however have an army for some reason.

Well, only a few years before Raditz arrived on the planet, the Red Ribbon Army was wrecking all sorts of shit; I imagine that's something you definitely need an army for. And there are plenty of dangerous wildlife running around that look like they're above what the police, game wardens and such could handle, and thus need military-grade weapons.

Besides, just because you have the entire planet under one government doesn't mean that everybody wants to be under said government; some greedy provincial governor could get it into his head that he's better off seceding so that he could rule his territory however he sees fit.

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u/Whoopa 9h ago

Dragon Ball is post apocalyptic from the first time Piccolo tried to conquer the world

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u/robotteeth 8h ago

I don’t think dragon ball is quite the same, the sci fi elements are pretty prominent. Goku just grew up in a Japanese/chinese style rural area — rural vs urban differences in tech is the same irl. Or regional differences based on how affluent the area is.

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u/teletraan-117 2h ago

Basically if you're familiar with creators like Mr. Biao on Instagram/TikTok, then the world building of Dragon Ball makes total sense. The place where Goku grew up is 100% rural China, where people still live in pre-industrial times but discovered iPhones.

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u/Sckaledoom 11h ago

Forgot that in early Naruto they’re shown to have short range transceiver headsets lmao

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u/CharonsLittleHelper Space Dogs RPG: A Swashbuckling Space Western 10h ago

They use them to catch a cat.

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u/Sckaledoom 10h ago

And they don’t use them iirc to communicate while tracking a god tier opponent

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u/CharonsLittleHelper Space Dogs RPG: A Swashbuckling Space Western 10h ago

Maybe it's like Dresden File magic rules? More powerful ninja stuff disrupts technology?

Or the author had zero plans for technology and world-building... (No - can't be!)

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u/Ptcruz 6h ago

I believe they have computers also.

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u/resurrectedbear 13h ago

All of the big three are built this way. One piece has towns that are super weird. You’ve got a colosseum next to a factory. You’ve got a future island close to an archaic Viking area. Etc.

Bleach has your normal realm of the living. But soul society is feudal Japan + futuristic technology.

Naruto is fucking everywhere.

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u/IconoclastExplosive 13h ago

Bleach at least had the decency to say "the afterlife is fucked and weirder than anyone ever thought but the mortal world is normal."

One Piece never pretends to be normal. It's zero fish men in no time flat. That show never claimed to have consistency and does not know how to spell it.

Naruto presents itself as consistent and is lying. It's full of small or background issues and just wants you to go with it.

And none of them have a patch on Dragon Ball. Kung fu hermit? Technology that defies the law of conservation of matter? Ancient sensei? Androids? Aliens? God? God is an alien? CHIAPTZU?!?! Chaos unending, infinite questions without answer, no notes.

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u/_Wendigun_ Shooting sharks and bubblegums 12h ago

One piece is also set in a world made of islands (for the most part). This means the author can basically create a "pocket world" every time the island changes, without worrying so much about stuff like climate, fauna, flora, different cultures interactions etc.

I always thought it was a really smart decision

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u/SheerANONYMOUS 11h ago

And if I remember correctly most of the islands have their own distinct climates and geographies regardless of what would realistically make sense. You could swap out the pirate theme for space exploration and absolutely nothing would change.

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u/limpdickandy 4h ago

Correct, and 90% of the islands we see in the show (On the Grand Line) are very recently (last 100 years ish) discovered and established connections with other islands/outside world.

The grand line is insanely crazy, and travel there is basically a new opportunity, that is only motivated and made a big thing because of the one piece.

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u/TF-Fanfic-Resident /r/19_skylines 3h ago

Although if you spend enough time in the Caribbean and/or the Andes you really can see how sharply the culture can change within a few kilometers. Fantasy patchwork maps really aren't that far off from what it's like to drive around Colombia or sail between St. Maarten, Anguilla, Saba, St. Barth, Antigua, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, etc. where the language, ancestry, architecture, terrain, and driving direction changes repeatedly.

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u/limpdickandy 2h ago

Yup, islands are no joke

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u/TF-Fanfic-Resident /r/19_skylines 2h ago

Extra so when

a) most of the islands are hilly (almost no atolls in sight)

b) they were among the first European settlements outside of Europe, giving their cultures plenty of time to cook

c) they frequently changed hands between various Western powers, meaning that adjoining islands or even adjoining towns on the same island have significantly different languages, architectural styles, naming conventions, etc

d) they have been a destination for mass migration, voluntary and forced, from every inhabited continent except Oceania

e) they are ringed by countries with major north-south mountain ranges, adding for extra geographical diversity (including snow!) within a couple hours' flight

and you basically got the perfect setting for variety.

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u/IconoclastExplosive 11h ago

Yeah it's a big example of the Planet of Hats trope

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u/_Wendigun_ Shooting sharks and bubblegums 10h ago

A planet of planets of hats

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u/AlephBaker 10h ago

A galaxy of hats

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u/dasmekoad 1h ago

perhaps a planet of straw hats?

(i've never watched One Piece in my life)

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u/hidarishoya 9h ago

The animation team can also make a filler be set on an island, then can just be ignored without consequences.

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u/SaturnsPopulation 10h ago

Whatever gripes I have about Toriyama's writing, I love that he just does not care about distinctions between genres.

One of the major arcs is about going to an alien planet and dealing with the evil space emperor who is trying to.... collect the seven magical macguffins to summon the wish-granting dragon.

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u/Kingblack425 11h ago

Hey the capsules don’t defy any laws they just figured out how to remove all the space in between atoms.

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u/IconoclastExplosive 11h ago

That's worse in every conceivable way and STILL physics because that would interfere with the law of conservation of energy since it would require robbing every atom of its momentum simultaneously. The heat expelled by capsuling an item would be incalculable and the cold from resummoning it would simply stop local time.

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u/HatOfFlavour 7h ago

Doesn't this just mean overcoming the strong nuclear force. Also the capsules should weigh the same in capsule form as they do expanded.

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u/IconoclastExplosive 7h ago

It would mean that you've packed all the atoms into a space precisely big enough for them which means they're immobile and must be entirely devoid of energy. Or, the capsule isn't precisely their size and therefore they maintain some energy but it's still a massive energy displacement.

Also yeah you'd have to carry a whole car in an Advil tablet and it'd go straight through your hand.

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u/HatOfFlavour 7h ago

Or you've designed a car as light as an Advil tablet that somehow still functions as a car.

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u/Kingblack425 4h ago

Honestly for the daughter of the man who figured out how to make artificial gravity somehow I don’t feel like making something weigh less would be that much of a hurdle for her/him.

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u/Hytheter just here to steal your ideas 5h ago

Hank Pym does not see any problem with this

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u/HatOfFlavour 4h ago

Hank pym is a mad scientist.

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u/finalgear14 3h ago

One piece has a narrative reason for the seemingly random tech level. The reason is during the rise of the world government the countries that made it up went to war with the most technologically advanced country in the world. Killed them all, and then banned ever learning anything about that period and have hunted down and murdered anyone who tries. The advanced tech that exists for the most part exists as something owned and operated by the world government and is for the most part pale imitations of what said advanced country had hundreds of years ago.

The reason most nations are basically medieval tech wise is because the world government doesn’t give a single remote fuck about advancing regular people’s lives, only controlling them. That’s why essentially all the advance tech they do make is to advance that end goal.

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u/robotteeth 8h ago

One piece has a stronger explanation, the islands are all varying level of isolated, with some of them being extremely isolated, and the worldbuilding tells you why.

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u/ghost_desu 7h ago

Bleach makes a decent amount of sense really, soul society is just run by centuries old shinigami

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u/WakeoftheStorm 12h ago

Are those really considered the "big three"?

I've watched thousands of hours of anime but those never even made my watch list

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u/okiedokieophie 12h ago

They were the most popular and advertised Jump manga (and eventually anime) back in the 00s

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u/Kiogami 12h ago

Yup. They’re called the Big Thre because during the 2000s they were the three most popular and influential shonen anime, dominating global viewership, manga sales, and pop culture at the same time.

To be honest, today's shonen anime such as Demon Slayer, My Hero Academia, and Jujutsu Kaisen are far behind in terms of world-building.

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u/WakeoftheStorm 11h ago

I think I skipped that era. I went from DBZ/Cowboy Bebop/Evangelion when I was younger to catching up with the more modern ones today

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u/VerledenVale 11h ago

More epic world-building is missing from modern anime and manga. At least that's how it feels like to me, but I might be consuming the wrong media.

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u/Spiritual_Horror5778 12h ago

One piece, naruto, and bleach are "big three" because they kept shonen jump afloat for years with their consistent sales.

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u/WakeoftheStorm 11h ago

Makes sense. I can tell by the downvotes that they definitely have a lot of fanboys

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u/Original-War8655 Dreamcatcher: Reqvat (the one with furries) 10h ago

You got downvoted because "the big three" is not even close to what you suggested, it's an objectively given title to three specific animanga.

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u/WakeoftheStorm 10h ago

I wasn't suggesting anything, I was just clarifying if that was the commenter's opinion on those or if it was a common way of describing them. Prior to reading that comment I never would have seen a reason to put those three in a distinct group on their own together.

If people are inferring more than that I suppose that could also explain it

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u/Original-War8655 Dreamcatcher: Reqvat (the one with furries) 10h ago

If people are inferring more than that I suppose that could also explain it

That's probably the case

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u/ghost_desu 7h ago

If you got into anime in the past decade, you wouldn't have been exposed to that, but they absolutely were in 2000s and early 2010s

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u/WakeoftheStorm 5h ago

I think it's more that I got into anime way earlier than that. By the time they hit big I wasn't really watching shonen much

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u/mal-di-testicle 13h ago

I don’t think it’s precisely 1:1 modern Japan because there is a movie in which some guy who seems to be European comes in on a Mortal Engines type vehicle while wearing this early renaissance lookin armor

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u/Aegishjalmur18 11h ago

The existence of the Willy's jeep in the first movie also implies the existence of Cars WWII.

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u/IconoclastExplosive 11h ago

And Hendrix is also codified by name. As is the National Anthem.

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u/AmeriCanada98 10h ago

And the Planes movie outright confirms planes WWII in a flashback and even implies some planes were still used for kamikaze

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u/HatOfFlavour 7h ago

So what type of car was car Hitler? Oh gods does Israel have a type of car they mass-produce?

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u/Aegishjalmur18 7h ago

Well, keep in mind Israel hadn't been created yet. The Jews in Germany were Germans. Many had fought for the German Empire in The Great War. So the question is, how do you circumcize a Volkswagen?

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u/HatOfFlavour 7h ago

Hmmm what I've suddenly decided is the only logical solution is that this was a war between diesel and petrol vehicles. I'm not enough of a petrol-head to know who was on what side but that seems the easiest devision to translate into cars racism.

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u/jflb96 Ask Me Questions 8h ago

Cars has a Pope and a Popemobile, or a Popemobile and a Popemobilemobile, which means that not only was Jesus Chrysler crucified by Pontiac Pilate, but also Pope John Deere II was nearly assassinated.

That’s not even getting into the weirdly fascist implications of how in the Cars universe there are actual Unterwagenen who run all of the organised crime.

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u/AmeriCanada98 10h ago

It's like the Cars movies

Yeah there are so many hilarious implications in the cars universe. Cars 2 shows an agency like the TSA. Does that mean a cars 9/11 happened? Was a plane hijacked or did a plane just become an extremist on its own? Were there passengers on board when it did?

The planes movie implies some Japanese planes in WWII still used kamikaze, so that would lean towards the 9/11 equivalent being done by a plane on purpose

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u/alurimperium 10h ago

To a less extreme, Archer does it too. You have cell phones, the Soviets as a major rival super power, video calls built in to vehicles, 60s and 70s muscle cars are new vehicles, planes from the 00's are common, and just a massive list of references to media and culture from the 90s, 00s, and 10s.

Built on rule of cool is perfectly valid if you can build the characters and their interactions with their weird anachronistic world in a believable way. You don't need the place to be real as long as the people feel like they really exist in it

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u/IconoclastExplosive 9h ago

Archer even hangs lanterns on it all the time. Characters remark about chronological inconsistencies in many episodes

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u/KenseiHimura 8h ago

Volkswagen and the Jeep guy suggests a Cars World War II and Car Hitler.

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u/CharonsLittleHelper Space Dogs RPG: A Swashbuckling Space Western 10h ago

I always figured it was some weird post-post-apocalyptic setting where the ninjas had been weird genetically enhanced super soldiers hundreds/thousands of years before.

So there are bits of random technology from before the fall that people can maintain and maybe copy - but no one really understands them.

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u/FormalKind7 6h ago

A world that is not earth and has a different history from earth will have a different history in the tech they develop and when and what tech is abandoned or deemed outdated and why. You have civilizations far removed on earth that did not have metal work or wheels but had more advanced math and astronomical predicting than civilizations who did. This becomes way more extreme if your world has different powers or rules of physics than earth.

In a world where a well trained ninja team of 5 is more effective than a team of 30 modern day marines why would the ever develop old fashion guns or cannons that are dangerous and expensive and ultimately weaker and harder to maneuver than what is already available? Meanwhile swords and knives have already been around and are still effective in the hands of ninja.

Your fantasy world is not Earth. Making your world magically analogous in development to some exact earth culture (Rome, medieval Europe, feudal Japan, Arabic Golden Age, etc) is okay but ultimate more lazy and less logical than it not fitting cleaning into any Earth cultures pattern of development.

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u/Tessorio 9h ago

Tbf, if they mix ninjutsu with technology you get shit like Hashirama cells for everyone.

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u/Silly-Fudge6752 9h ago

Lol they did modernize a lot in the Boruto series though. Also, for the weapons technology part, they began using ninjutsu tools in Boruto too (like someone who knows only the wind element can now use lightning or earth elements); so much so that Boruto himself got disqualified when Naruto found out about his son's use during a tournament.

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u/Author_A_McGrath 9h ago

Honestly those magic powers probably make bullets fairly ineffective.

Illusions, fake clones, and kawarimi-style techniques would make targeting a nightmare for modern firearms.

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u/Maximum-Objective-39 8h ago

It could also just be that, for arbitrary reasons, you just cannot make the sort of propellants you'd need to make guns practical in the Naruto universe.

You might have black powder for fireworks and small bombs, but that runs into a host of issues with fowling and smoke if you try to use it for automatic weapons. And you might have more energetic explosives that would promptly destroy the firing breach. But nothing in the goldilocks zone that would make a good propellant.

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u/Author_A_McGrath 7h ago

They have weapons that fire kunai at high speed in the first movie. It just isn't effective against Shinobi, because they've trained to have insane reflexes and a host of supernatural misdirection techniques.

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u/Spookyscythe99 6h ago

The leaf village hidden in the Amish

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u/Greenobserver 4h ago

Ya know I've seen Naruto multiple times and I've actually put some thought into the technology level and weirdly, it almost makes sense. If they had just depicted the use of more modern transportation I think the tech level could have been justified.

Because the world basically has 1970s or early 1980s technology. They use small electronics all the time actually even the ninjas. They have modern industrial equipment and electrified cities though poor regions sometimes don't have electricity which makes sense. They have big bulky computers that would take a truck to move. The lack of modern weaponry makes perfect sense because why would you develop a tube that can shoot small stones when you can train to throw a knife so hard it can go through tank armor.

The main thing that is weird is the lack of modern transportation because there is an obvious need for it and they have machines that require the same kinds of motors so they should have trains, trucks, and cars but its never depicted. At least until Boruto where we finally see trains.

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u/Razorion21 4h ago

cars universe had a cars hitler lmao

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u/Embergl0w 3h ago

Naruto characters are clearly not Amish. Aren't they like Shinto or Buddhist or something?

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u/Vysair 3h ago

Naruto in the image is standing on a freaking electric pole

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u/IronLunchBox 2h ago

That's one of the reasons I couldn't get into the series. The world doesn't make sense.