Limited Nouns

Think of a castle. Not, like, the concept of a castle but an actual castle. Picture it, give it those castle-y details.

Alrighty, this castle of yours. Did it have walls? Did it have gates? A nice tall keep? The castle stuff?

If you’re like me, chances are you thought of a castle looking like this, the castle of the fairy tales and fantasy stories. The classically European one that inspires LEGO sets and theme parks. The archetypical castle, the Platonic ideal of a castle, the castleiest of castles.

But what about Himeji Castle? It’s got walls and gates and a keep and it’s called a castle, but it’s not the image evoked when the word ‘castle’ is thrown around. There’s not really a better term. Wikipedia categorizes it as a Japanese castle, which, fair. But it feels incomplete, hyper-specific and reliant on its country-based adjective. The European castle is still the ‘normal’ castle.

What about crowns? Are you thinking of the European crown? Or a Korean crown or the Indonesian jamang? Is a sword a longsword or a katana?

It gets even more complicated when translating it into a science-fiction or fantasy world. If you’re writing a fantasy novel, how do you evoke the image of a Japanese castle without describing it as a Japanese castle? Creating the image of a castle that doesn’t conform to the western-centric view of one takes several more steps.

Storytelling is a collaborative effort: the background of the reader (or player, viewer, listener) informs their takeaways of the story. But this also means that stories that strive to exist outside of the conventional frameworks (think Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty or Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death)have to do a lot of legwork to create the author’s desired imagery. Words seem to fall short of a true description, to be too vague to say the right thing.

There’s probably more to say on this topic, more about the work needed to confront conventional paradigms and the inherently eurocentric nature of genre works due to the eurocentric gaze of much of pop-culture. But for now I’m thinking about castles, and how to describe a castle that’s not what’s usually thought of when a castle is described but it is still a castle.