Baker is entirely correct about the financial reality of modern publishing and Hollywood. Tightly wound, single-volume stories with absolute finality are difficult to monetize over a decade. Media corporations desperately want open-ended intellectual property that supports merchandise, spin-offs, and theme parks. Instead of dismissing heavy worldbuilding as just “bad writing,” Baker gives it due credit. Recognizing it as a distinct, participatory art form akin to music or community theater helps explain why otherwise poorly plotted media can still have incredibly passionate, dedicated fanbases.
His structural breakdown of how settings function differently is highly perceptive. Pointing out that a story world exists purely to serve a personal character arc, whereas a legendarium treats individual stories merely as a means to explore a vast history, clarifies why certain books feel so fundamentally different in pace and scope.
However, Baker presents plot and worldbuilding as being in a state of constant conflict, implying that a focus on one naturally degrades the other. However, exceptional fiction often uses profound worldbuilding to directly drive deep character transformations. Baker asserts that a character can only realistically undergo two or three major internal transformations before their personality hardens, making long series literary dead ends. This ignores the reality of long-form storytelling. In deep, multi-volume narratives, characters don’t just keep repeating the same lesson; instead, one transformation strips away a layer of defense, forcing them to confront a completely new, deeper flaw in the next book.
His critiques of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and modern historical fiction can read as slightly dismissive of modern narrative complexity. He overlooks the fact that massive fandoms often obsess over lore precisely because they care about the characters caught within it. Furthermore, long-form storytelling allows for gradual, realistic psychological deterioration and growth that a self-contained 300-page novel simply doesn’t have the space to explore.
Using The Lord of the Rings as an example of worldbuilding choking out the narrative is highly debatable. Tolkien famously claimed that the entire point of the deep linguistic and historical worldbuilding was to give the story a realistic sense of weight, sorrow, and ancient history, making the final, quiet personal changes in the characters (like Frodo’s permanent trauma) feel earned rather than hollow.