Flight of Fancy

I feel like world-building is something that can often be overwrought. Plenty of fantasy/science-fiction writing resources offer guides and rubrics where you can figure out language, cultural histories, religions, foods, and political systems; creating a world with a Tolkien-esque detail for your story to play in. It’s Hemingway’s iceberg theory: for everything on the page there’s so much more that’s known but not told.

And sometimes, I don’t think it’s needed.

Elemental has paper-thin world-building. There are different kinds of people who are one of the classical elements — you’ve got fire people and water people and so on. And there’s a city where they all live and fire people are also the newest immigrants to arrive. That’s really all there is to it; sure, some things sprout out from there, bits of culture and details that make the world feel delightfully lived in, but there’s not much more depth to it. There’s no real consideration of how a city would even work with people made of water and earth interacting, let alone how food, an economy, or whatever can exist.

Which is fine! It doesn’t matter!

Getting bogged down in minutiae can work, but Elemental just wants to exist as a delightful flight of fancy, an almost child-like world where the imagination can soar and things can exist just for the fun of it. And the fun-of-it in this case is a fantastic story about the immigrant experience. It’s all dressed up in the fantasy of elements that lets it dazzle as it digs into what it wants to say.

At its heart, Elemental is essentially a parable, a fable, a story that uses its fancy to communicate something beyond its surface — and Elemental is an immigrant story without precise analogues. The water people aren’t anyone in particular, and the fire people aren’t analogous to any immigrant group in particular, like Zootopia before it, it avoids direct allegories to so much more specific and universal. The characters are the literal embodiments of elements, but that lets its deeper Truth ring out all the more. The end result is a wonderful, heartfelt story that remains affecting even if its world-building is admittedly shallow — the world exists for the story, and man, what a great story it is.