I find the inclusion of the statement "headed down a fork path" to be ignorant, not necessarily so as to say that forked paths do not exist or paths are not of any relevance, but because people focus on the peripherals rather on the essentials. Paths are already assumed and thus ignored, especially when traveling across familiar grounds. This means what comes into focus are individual plants, trees, and the topography of the terrain, especially when the latter is rough, uneven, or seemingly deformed.
Extending this further, simplifying traveling in the form of "headed to a dungeon" is better than specifying terrain dimensions, because people do not operate based on terrain, but on the logistical level. Accounting for geographic terrain makes sense, but it is not necessarily addressed. A lot of this is already assumed due to having been born and raised in the area. For that reason, when terrain does get brought up, it is not local terrain, but wider geographic terrain.
Storytellers often bring up the essentials, because they themselves are new to the world. However, this comes at the cost of characterization and immersion, because what is essential is not necessarily of importance to any significant moment. This means that someone could be dying on the street, but what comes into mind is not infrastructure. People do not think of the arrangement of the streets when someone is dying, and this goes the same for things like "forked paths" or the specific terrain. While world-building is critical, it is pivotal to avoid saying the obvious and to focus on what is prominent or relevant to a person at the moment—logistics instead of "eternally pre-established" local terrain in the case of traveling, or the emotional costs in the event of someone dying on the street in front of oneself, instead of the arrangement of the road, cultural symbols (in a self-reflexive way unless it is relevant to the character's perspective), and all sorts of things that are unspoken because they are ubiquitous, unchanging, and essential, such as cars.
To explain, people do not exist in what makes sense universally, and this is why I have a bitter dislike of the idea that witty characters are necessarily better. "Witty" often implies universal or wide-encompassing charisma or wittiness, which does not really exist in normal human relationships. Most intimate or close relationships exist in insular contexts and inside jokes, which means that they are not necessarily funny but built overtime rather than significant in and of themselves so as to be externally universally accessible (commodified and commercialized). Humans are more naturally inaccessible to each other, because on top of just linguistic ones, sociocultural lines segment and divide us, and this is not necessarily evil or horrible, because while inclusiveness is great, that should not make one think that human relationships are supposed to be "Internet-appealing and -funny." People who have gotten too used to the Internet, to social media, and to even live-streaming personalities forget that people are not made to be built for this inherently. Sociability does not hinge on universal funniness.
Rather, people will look at what does not come naturally to an outsider, which contradicts immediately universality. A person looks at a single dish, and they see innumerable memories that make them and the people they know well carry very esoteric contexts behind the interactions that develop or unfold as a consequence of such shared history. This does not translate to the TV screen if recorded cleanly like some archetype in a fiction story made for all-embracing consumption.
This is why I have a bitter dislike also of the standardized emphasis on geopolitics when bringing up the term "world-building." It is just as abstract as a syndrome is to medical experts. It is only as useful as it is a shorthand for diagnosis; however, shorthands should not be learned by themselves. And it is much more in-touch and grounded to disregard a syndrome-first policy and actually look at the contexts, nuances, and various domains, areas, fields, individuals, and perspectives underpinning the formation of such linguistic shorthand, such as those in geopolitics.
The more one focuses on the abstract, the more it makes sense and becomes predictable. Why? Because models are internally logical and thus function infinitely logically, but when they are expose to reality, one realizes that geopolitical patterns do not truly exist as we see them on statistics, geographic maps, and gradient maps. I am not dismissing models as tools themselves. I am saying that a story predicated on an internally consistent geopolitical model that does not source consistently, systematically, and comprehensively from the underlying complexities that shape the formation of geopolitical realities can end up being another story written by someone doing the equivalent of interacting with toy blocks and the way that they join together so neatly and predictably.
Things do not have to be coherent or make sense in a universal level, because people do not exist in statistics, gradients, maps (hyperreal), and labels, but in themselves by themselves.
A character is not necessarily "stiff" (so as to say that the author's writing skills in dialogue is undesirable) because they speak English straightforwardly (like someone who is conversational but not fluent) and in a way that does not sound idiomatic.
A character does not have to make choices that make sense to others. They just have to make choices that they justify. The principle to follow is that what people do is self-justify, not make sense universally. Relationships, people, dynamics, communities, cultures, traditions, rituals, expressions, creative self-expression, art styles, and all sorts of things are judged based on some so-called objective perspective, when it is just another Western English-speaking one.
This means that the world they live in does not have to described so that it makes sense universally to readers, because that would destroy all immersion. It is better to be stylistic since the medium itself is the message. Focusing on certain details and not others is stylistic and reflective of characterization. Trying to contain a standard template of everything only makes for generic, formulaic, and predictable storytelling that feels soulless. Imagine knowing when the action scene will happen, how it will happen, and what it will be because the author is clearly writing himself to a corner just to get that "plot-oriented" still up to the point of discarding quality in favor of quantity. Fattening the cow, or focusing on quality, is much more rewarding in the long run, because it is better to build up than to break a fast 5 seconds in. The milestone or reward is most satisfying when it was actually challenging. Developing the characters, the world, the dynamics, the situations, and worldviews are critical to concretizing the stakes, making the motivations clearer, and creating a more lived-in quality, which makes the plot events that do happen compact, visceral, and hard-hitting, like a wake-up punch from, a friend after one has slept peacefully for 8 hours.
Forced and contrived plot movement for the mere visual excitement of action scenes is a sign of a person afraid of the complexities of peace and obsessed with the black-and-white simplicity with which war is often portrayed. When people cannot confront themselves and their motivations, they cannot write characters that do so, because that would require self-reflection, humility, and empathy, which comes only when we go beyond heuristics, strawmen, and all manner of abusive language.
The character can blame people as their self-justification, but at least they have one. Some characters are written to be real-time plot devices, because they are not given any motivation and do not express any self-justification besides the same old action-oriented plot-driven callous murderer wish fulfillment power fantasy. Action scenes and plot developments occur out of contrivance for the sake of maintaining the "pace", when the pace is just a flow chart of numbers going up for arbitrary reasons rather than anything grounded in actual lived-in human reality, even if it is fantasy. This means that one is reading a mobile video game, which sounds great, but in hindsight, if characters are reduced to video game plot devices with generic universally (Internet-popular, social media templates, reproducible, replicable, unoriginal) witty formulaic dialogue, it is no longer a lived-in world with specific contexts that arise out of their own circumstances. What we see instead are models and formulas that have already existed in someone's mind since forever and that are removed of any real attention being paid to the grass right in front of them. It is not that people cannot be categorized for practicality, but people are not categories. I would burn the color of someone's hair down and deprive them of any physical description if it meant removing any chances of objectification. This is how I view people—as individuals. I "see" the entirety of their "souls" battling for "dominance" and for a "place in this world" by the tense interplay between conformity and personal integrity, though not necessarily restricted to this dilemma, since "conformity" and "integrity" (especially when viewed as moral integrity) can be controversial terms, especially in these unqualified forms. (My use case here and dynamic definitions of these two terms would need separate discussions.)
When it comes to the way that I've written this passage itself, I allowed the use of less diplomatic phrasing, intricately nested chains, and overall idiosyncratic and stylistic language, because I aim to push back against universalist trends that emphasize homologs of AI-generated writing.
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