The Embarrassing Worldbuilding Mistake That Changed How I Write Societies

When I began writing Seasons of Treason, I wanted realism. Not surface realism. Not decorative realism. I wanted the kind that breathes. The kind that has shadows. The kind that acknowledges people cope, escape, self-destruct, and survive in ways society prefers not to acknowledge.

So I built fighting rings, gambling dens, drugs, and underground economies. Systems that gave people something they could not get from official structures.

That part was intentional.

The mistake came later.

When I created one of my fictional plants, I believed cannabis leaves were what caused intoxication. That assumption came from having only seen images online. So I invented a plant called yeezba, with thick sticky leaves that characters dried and rolled. In my mind, they resembled buckeye leaves. Each leaf became a single illicit smoke.

The detail was botanically wrong. But the lesson it taught me about worldbuilding was not.

A luminous sphere radiates soft light amidst the serene dunes of a tranquil desert landscape, casting gentle shadows on the rippled sands.

Verisimilitude Is Not Realism

Verisimilitude does not mean factual accuracy. It means the feeling of truth.

Truth in fiction is built from emotional logic, not encyclopedic precision. A believable world is one that readers can recognize themselves in.

Real life contains contradictions:

• beauty alongside decay

• joy after grief

• virtue beside vice

• hope inside desperation

Darkness is not a dramatic embellishment. It is human reality.

To exclude that complexity is not idealism. It is artificial wish fulfillment.

The Overwhelm of Total Creation

Designing a fictional world means confronting infinity. Every nation requires an origin. Every culture requires traditions. Weather systems need explanations. Economies need incentives. Trade routes create alliances and wars. Governments have official structures and unofficial ones.

Even something as small as the price of a staple grain influences stability, class divisions, and political leverage.

The number of possible decisions is endless. But amid that complexity, I realized something important: a creator has absolute control over a civilization's emotional climate.

Designing Prejudice Is a Choice

When constructing societies, authors inevitably decide what forms of discrimination exist.

In Seasons of Treason, there is:

• class bias

• systemic inequality

• political favoritism

• concentrated power

What does not exist is racism.

This omission was deliberate.

Not because racism lacks importance in the real world. It was removed precisely because of its real-world significance. I wanted to imagine a civilization that had already outgrown that moral failure.

The Historical Logic Inside the World

This choice is grounded in the internal history of Thrae.

The story takes place long after the catastrophic era known as the Great Divide, when a war between science and spirituality nearly destroyed the world. During that period, after a massive explosion, tectonic shifts reshaped continents, populations migrated en masse, and civilizations collapsed. Survivors intermarried across former geographic and cultural boundaries.

Over generations, visible distinctions in skin tone converged into variations of a shared baseline. Once physical appearance ceased to function as a reliable indicator of status, systems built around it lost their utility.

Prejudice did not disappear. It changed targets.

In Thrae, discrimination attaches itself to factors that still hold power: access, influence, ability, and unpredictability. One of the most unsettling elements of that world is that no one can tell who has been touched by Metis. Age, wealth, health, and lineage provide no certainty. Anyone could carry it.

Uncertainty replaced visual hierarchy.

Worldbuilding as Moral Architecture

Every act of worldbuilding is an act of social design.

When creating a civilization, a writer determines not only what exists but also what no longer does. Which beliefs faded? Which customs survived? Which systems evolved? Which ones collapsed?

The past leaves scars. The future grows from their ruined form. Rather than reproducing every injustice from our world, I wanted to ask a different question. If humanity were forced to rebuild from collapse, which prejudices would actually survive?

Because not all would. Many forms of hatred depend on stable systems to maintain them. Remove the structures that reward or reinforce them, and they weaken.

Speculative Fiction as Blueprint

Fantasy does not have to function only as a reflection. It can function as a projection.

Stories can explore not just what humanity is, but what it might become if it learned from its failures. Not perfectly. Not instantly. But eventually.

Speculative fiction is not limited to mirroring reality. It can also model possibilities.

Engaging in the creative process, a hand thoughtfully pens ideas during a brainstorming session.

Why the Mistake Still Matters

The plant remains in the story.

Not because it is scientifically accurate, but because it represents something true about the creative process. Realism is not the product of knowing everything. It is the result of caring enough to ask better questions over time.

The Larger Principle

If you build a world, you are not only inventing geography. You are inventing progress.

What a civilization has healed from reveals what its creator believes humanity is capable of becoming. Every system exists because someone chose it. Which means systems can also be redesigned.

About the Author

H.L. Hines is a fantasy author known for immersive political worlds, agency-driven protagonists, and socially layered speculative fiction. Her work explores power structures, cultural evolution, and the systems that shape civilizations.

If you want to learn more, you can check out Thrae's timeline here.

You can also read essays like this on my Substack here.