World Construction Zone - wear silly hat at all times

Writing a world is a bit like choosing the surface for a painting. It can intensify a story or make it moodier and slower. It can makes characters totally reasonable or utterly ridiculous. When it works, it brings out the rest of the story while being interesting on its own.



Take, for instance, Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It initially appears to be
set in a bog standard magical girl universe, complete with school, love
interest, a lead and her best friend, one of which is impulsive, the other more reserved and sensible. But there's also a hint of a darker underbelly, which really shows in the first plot twist, arguably one of the best I've seen and made all the more dark by the initially vanilla presentation of the world.


A good world is interesting, but not so much it detracts from the story or characters. Many of the old-school science fiction books suffered from this pitfall, in their slavish devotion to plot above all 
 

Seriously, one of the darker

worlds I've seen