“Muishizen” is a Japanese reading that roughly points to something that feels wholly natural, as if it came into being on its own. The phrase traces back to the Chinese idea of wu wei: not forcing, not over-handling, letting things become what they are without human interference.
What interests me is how far creative work often moves away from that ideal.
In high school, one summer assignment required ten different essays. I had no desire to write ten separate compositions, so I filled the notebook with a horror novella instead. I threw in every eerie thing I had carried since childhood: haunted incidents, subconscious fear symbols, long corridors, staircases with no exit, upside-down rooms. It ended up much longer than ten 800-character essays put together, and my teacher even praised it. But they also asked a fair question: in a story like that, why did the protagonist never seriously try to escape?
Because if he escaped, then either the story would simply end—his courage would have defeated fear—or his temporary victory would need to trigger something even more terrifying afterward. And at that age, the most frightening things I could imagine were still just those buried childhood symbols.
When a creator lacks technique, there is often a tendency to compensate with scale. If the work is big enough, dense enough, packed enough, then surely the sincerity will show. But the result is that plot and character get squeezed down so that setting can occupy a larger stage.
I once worked with a scriptwriting team that was especially invested in worldbuilding. Their strength was in setting, so they cared deeply about making things feel grounded while also wanting to interpret familiar frameworks in clever, unexpected ways. At one point I used a phrase they clearly disliked, a phrase they had probably already spent a lot of time explaining away to outsiders: historical nihilism.
If a story wants its background to feel “rooted,” does that mean it must remain answerable to some existing historical narrative? Must the events of the present plot be justified by that inherited history? If, for example, one insists that Chinese people have always been fundamentally kind, then do plot and characters also need to uphold that kindness, and anything else becomes a betrayal of history?
This resembles the logic behind certain Chinese disaster narratives. In an apocalypse, the Oriental Pearl Tower may be destroyed, because that can function as the collapse of a symbolic monument. But Tiananmen or Zhongnanhai cannot be touched, because those are treated as foundations of nationhood and political authority. By the same logic, if Chinese science fiction moves into wasteland aesthetics or floating continents, does the rebuilt regime on that land still need to explicitly retain the presence of “the Party organization”?
The difficulty of constructing a human landscape lies here: you can rarely ignore history altogether without inviting punishment of another kind—interpretive, political, moral. A few years ago, I wrote a novel and got so tired of trying to justify the “reasonableness” of its sociopolitical setting that I placed it in a future state under some kind of united government and simply skipped over the concept of regime almost entirely. Even that kind of move, though, invites ridicule. A Chinese writer creates a sci-fi novel and gives characters foreign names—people will say that shows a lack of confidence.
Then the question becomes: if you are writing “Chinese” science fiction, do you first need to decide whether the ruling structure has changed? Or whether the presence of centralized power should be softened—unless the story itself is explicitly born from that kind of system? The novel I wrote at the time was in fact built on rules shaped by centralization. If I then layered overtly Chinese humanistic markers on top of that, would the direction of the work become too obvious, too loaded?
And so, when the human landscape becomes too difficult to build, creators often return to the easiest and most intoxicating territory: natural landscape.
The appeal of building natural settings is not limited to fiction. You can find the same mechanism in real life, especially in the way people explain their own background stories.
In conversation, I am very sensitive to background. Sometimes someone tosses off certain details in passing; sometimes they repeat and elaborate on others endlessly. Either way, those choices always correspond to gains and losses elsewhere—in plot and in character.
Human memory is not a reliable archive. It edits. And the memories people retell most often, confess repeatedly, revisit and rework, gradually shift toward versions that are more favorable to themselves. Whether they realize it or not, this unconscious revision is a form of self-protection.
If I discover that a tragic story earns me comfort and attention, then my story may become more and more tragic each time I tell it. If I was actually the one who set a harmful event in motion, but I want to reduce my guilt, I may start adding more accidents, more unfortunate timing, more “it just happened that way” to wash some of the responsibility away.
The richer the background story, the more “unavoidable circumstances” it often implies in real life. In fiction, that becomes more rules.
The more artfully a situation is built—especially one that minimizes a person’s guilt through layers of coincidence—the more it appears that they had no agency at all, that they could only stand there and accept what unfolded. This is not very different from a protagonist who stumbles into another world in a fantasy script. That world has too many rules. Those rules operate with such precision and elegance that the creator, though supposedly responsible for the plot and the protagonist, becomes above all the god of the system. They understand every mechanism of the world they built. Its structures, metaphors, and chains of logic all feel too clever not to display.
And once that happens, the creator no longer wants anyone to break the rules. Even if the protagonist has the power to do it, another, larger rule must arise to punish them for the transgression.
That is what I referred to elsewhere as a tour guide handbook.
Back in the old blog relay-writing days—a detail that probably gives away my age—I once joined a “novel relay,” where each participant simply continued the story however they wanted. There were no real requirements for plot, character, or setting. Naturally, the story branched into all kinds of incompatible directions and eventually dissolved.
That was inevitable. A game like that is mostly self-entertainment. Without structure, neither plot nor character can sustain any meaningful line.
Later, this relay format evolved into many other forms: observational diaries, wandering notebooks, Theseus’s ship exercises, Backrooms-style collaborative creation, and so on. But these newer variations began to insist on rules. Large groups of people would even voluntarily maintain those rules. If one level of the Backrooms is supposed to have 45% humidity, then it must be 45%. To violate the rule too aggressively is to show “disrespect for the rules.”
This is exactly why background fascinates creators. It works like a sandbox game. It can almost completely bypass the craft difficulties of plot and character. All you need is to place one person inside the world, let them move through it like a tourist, let them “witness” what is happening, let them interact with the massive entity that is the setting itself, and receive the corresponding response—sometimes even a predetermined one. What gets presented is the rule, and the punishment that follows any attempt to resist it.
In real life, those “rules” are the external causes embedded in people’s background stories. The reason they cannot break free, they say, is because those external forces have tied them down. But if you actually try to talk with them about how those constraints might be dismantled, they retreat. Once those external causes are stripped away, would they then have to confront everything still unresolved underneath?
That is part of what makes background so seductive in the real world too.
This connects to another subject I have thought about before. The urge to “reshape nature”—especially to build a world dense with rules and logic, where one gets to play god over an alternate reality—is also one form of the pursuit of power. It is the building of a garden of power.
Whether it is the imperial gardens of China, the bonsai cultivated by elites, or the musical fountains of medieval Europe, each is a case of human intervention into natural landscape. In that act of intervention, people place themselves on near-equal footing with the divine. They rearrange mountains and streams, trees and water, according to their own will, in pursuit of what they regard as ideal proportion and beauty.
Nature is altered by force, and then that altered nature is made to resemble, as closely as possible, the version of natural beauty they believe in. But can that still be called wu wei, the unforced natural state?
A person creating a work—especially while weaving the exquisite rules of some dazzling other world—also becomes a kind of god. That is why such creators are often even less willing to allow a protagonist who can casually destroy the world they made. Some works therefore end up carrying the atmosphere of tourism. I do not mean that such works are wrong. Different people are drawn to different things.
But in real life, when too much attention is devoted to constructing those external causes, then character is inevitably weakened. Sometimes it loses its subjecthood altogether.