Senses of place as character

[magistrate]

One thing I enjoy is fictional spaces – especially those limited, self-contained and set-aside-from-public-life spaces – that have a distinct sense of character and life to them. The Hub in Torchwood, for example, or the SID Headquarters from 镇魂 | Guardian. (Or even, if I think about it, the Taskmaster House and caravan from Taskmaster. Always check the shed.*) In computer games, too, I often gravitate toward places where I can create and maintain a self-contained but complex and multifunctional space: building elaborate solar-powered scavenger havens in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or a walled garden rife with advanced automation in the Minecraft: Crash Landing modpack. And some games come with those complex, palpable places premade: the gang hideouts from Red Dead Redemption II come to mind, with their individual quirks and personalities and the implied stories in how they're organized and arranged.

*To be said to the tone of Always Read The Plaque.

My sense is that this is something easier to do richly and immersively in visual media like TV shows and video games, because so much of how we interact with a space is visual and movement-based. (And tactile, but I don't consume that much tactile media. I suppose I could start going to escape rooms?) But I'm sure it can and has been done in prose fiction.

In trying to think of examples in fiction, I didn't, initially, come up with any – but, to be fair, it's not something I'm in the habit of reading for. Thinking a bit longer on the topic, I thought of Redwall Abbey from the Redwall series, and the rabbits' warren from Watership Down, both of which I read a long time ago.

Does anyone have examples in books or short stories that they've found particularly effective? I'd love to see how people approach the task.

Comments

[sholio]

Oooooh, I think you're onto something with the relationship aspect! I think in every example that comes to mind where it really works, there is a relationship there between the protagonist and the place - it might be love or more ambiguous feelings (I don't think the Torchwood characters really love the Hub, or working there, but there are strong feelings regardless), and in turn the place, while it might not have feelings about them per se, acts on them and shapes them. In Watership Down, they designed and built the warren, so it feels more meaningful than if it was just there, and good set design incorporates a bunch of personal touches from the characters. And in a bigger setting, characters in something like the Red Dead Redemption frontier are going to have a very different relationship with their environment (and feel like very different people) than if they're in, say, a seedy noir city or a small town.

I can totally see this subconsciously affecting the way the reader feels about the place in the same way that relationships between characters do.

[magistrate]

The Hub does a lot of work with visual complexity and idiosyncrasy and curiosity, and they have a lot of fun with the camera angles, but I think a lot of what makes it work is also... like, the moments where characters are inhabiting the place in a way that makes it clear that they know it blindfolded. Playing PteranodonBall, or when they're tossing tools or guns or whatever across the space while they're moving. (Now I think of the pedeconferences in The West Wing, and am amused.) So, yeah, they might not love the Hub, but... it does feel like the Hub is part of the family. XD

I'm also wondering if there's an aspect of moodiness that can be played with to make a place feel more alive. Not just mood as an inherent quality, but changeable mood. If sometimes a space feels more welcoming or more threatening or more sullen. One of the things that lends the TARDIS to being characterized as a person in so much DW fic (or, at least, so much of the DW fic in the extremely narrow slice of fandom I ever engaged with) is how it sometimes just decides "No, this is where we're going today," and then bits stop working until you coax and coddle and argue with it for a while.

So there's a fun thing. How do environments have agency?

(And now I feel like I'm back at the kuai kuai culture thing I know I've linked you to before, which I'm mostly linking here in case Future Me comes by and wants the context back. ...we have all sorts of weird things at work which stop working on their own capricious schedules, and we definitely do have our own little superstitions about how to deal with them, and the building does feel capricious and slightly haunted. Maybe I should start working some of those details into my fics.)

[sholio]

(Also, can I just say that I've missed having these long conversations about writing process! ♥)

So there's a fun thing. How do environments have agency?

I actually feel like something like the TARDIS, which does have some sense of free will, agency, and motivation in a way that most environments don't, falls into a different category for me - like an AI or a magically sentient tree, it (she?) is more of an actual character than an environment that doesn't have that quality. I think I would put it more in the same category as spaceships that are represented to the viewer by an actual AI ... though YMMV, it's obviously not a clear-cut line.

Now that I think about it, though, even though the Hub isn't self-aware in the same way as the TARDIS seems to be, it does act on the characters with the random Rift incursions. And you also often get that sense of the environment pushing back in a lot of settings - maybe most settings where it's really dealt with and taken into account as a factor, e.g. animal attacks, snowstorms, red lights halting a getaway, etc: the sense that the setting has a life apart from the characters, and it does its own thing even when they're not there.

This makes me think about how one thing that readers really like is a (semi) random encounter aspect to the plot - that is, anything that's not wholly predictable from the setup, but still draws from a limited set of options, the kind of thing that would be determined with dice in a tabletop game. It might be "which card will they flip over" or "will a creature attack" or "will this bridge break under the strain" or "will the engines hold out for the trip" or "what weird thing will the Rift spit out THIS time?" - lots of different kinds of things, but basically, it's extremely riveting when you know something might happen, but not for sure that it will. So maybe this is another way that an environment can have a sort of agency in acting on the characters who are interacting with it.