Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
We usually you'd do ot as a discussion where three or four characters hash out what the problem is and why X, Y or Z doesn't solve it. Which can matter if the problem is one the protagonist can directly solve, but a lot of the time this sort of thing just comes off as padding and worldbuilding to keep nitpickers online from being all "why didn't they do X? Plot hole found!"

Indeed. Leaving things for the audience to imagine on their own is a good thing!
Definitely agree with that last statement! And as for the "overexplaining to pre-empt nitpickers" -- I dunno, sometimes depending on the work I understand and appreciate why they explain it. But usually, I don't want the nitty-gritty logistics to interrupt my flow of the storytelling or characters, and I often just straight-up respect any author who's clearly not insecure about plotholes. "Yeah my setting does XYZ and it all barely holds together if you push hard enough, but if it feels right, then who the **** cares? Deal with it, continuity nerds "

Of course this only works if you can get audience buy-in! If your world isn't charming and interesting, or if it doesn't even hold together enough to build stakes around, then those gaps are going to become a structural integrity problem.

I think quite a bit. For the Mars example, pretty much all planetary romance/sword and planet is some sort of Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche, and IIRC A Princess of Mars does a pretty good job of describing stuff in reasonable detail. And that of course drew pretty heavy on Percival Lowell's whole Martian canal theory, which was pretty well known. Anybody reading C.L. Moore or Ed Hamilton or Henry Kuttner or Leigh Brackett probably had read Burroughs already, or was familiar with old, dying Mars out of sheer cultural inertia.

Which means that a story set on Mars has a built in sort of atmosphere and expectation. But because it isn't a concrete setting actually shared between authors, it isn't like three different people all writing Star Wars novels where there's definitely an empire and Luke and all that. All that's shared is the high level idea of the setting. This works brilliantly for adventure stories because you know the big picture more or less, but like a shape in fog, there's only a silhouette based on your expectations, and no particular detail or feature can be assumed.
The Mars literary stuff is so interesting to me. I've had people explain the ERB canon to me and it's totally alien (pun intended), I'd just never heard any of that lore or aesthetic ever before. To me, Mars is a dusty red rock completely devoid of all life -- my first media depictions of it were the Calvin & Hobbes strips where they go to Mars in their wagon and prank the old Viking landers. I think I completely missed the "secret society living underground in decadence" thing.