: Re: Is This a Bad Infodump? I’m kind of in a dilemma. If I was to write a prologue to a fantasy story about the history of the kingdom and the political scope of what is happening there,

@Yeniel532

There's a much better way to handle backstory you want your reader to learn. Handled appropriately, you can make learning your backstory not merely tolerable - you can make it something your readers are hungry to find out! The key is, as other answers have mentioned, to drip feed the backstory and context throughout your story.

At the beginning of your story, you don't want your readers to know what's going on. You want to give them just enough that they know you know what's going on. This makes the backstory a compelling mystery, and every little drip you give your readers from then on sheds light on why the main character's story matters.

It's a bit self-indulgent, but anime shows pull this off all the time. In Spirited Away, the main character Chihiro suddenly finds herself trapped working in a magical bathhouse. For the entire first half of the movie, she understand absolutely nothing about how the bathhouse or the magical world it exists in works, and neither does the audience. She eventually learns just enough to break a curse on her family and escape, but even that information is never infodumped. She, and the audience, learn all of it by reading in-between the lines of what happens and inferring how things work. As another example, the show Full Metal Alchemist has an incredibly rich magic system and elaborate world, but the only thing we know after the first episode is how wrong alchemy can go when used carelessly. The story ultimately includes elements from grudges from old wars that have never been forgiven, shadowy cabals that have been using dark magic for generations, desperate wizards willing to throw away their humanity for a taste of more power, and the horrifying implications of what powers alchemy - but we know none of this at the start of the show, and all of it is revealed very gradually.

This approach is also used by master writers. Terry Pratchett uses this all the time in the Discworld novels. The Discworld is a fully developed world that's reused across the entire franchsie, and Pratchett doesn't shy away from explaining how the overall world works at the beginning of his novels. But most of the individual novels are focused on one specific mystery. He consistently introduces the question of the mystery at the beginning of the novel, then very gradually chips away at it until one specific and compelling aspect of the Discworld has been explored in detail. In Going Postal, an all-powerful despot finds himself forced to strong-arm a petty criminal into running a post office that's been abandoned for decades. The question at the beginning is, why in the world does the despot need to pull so many strings just to get the mail to go out? By the end of the novel, we learn about a power struggle between the most powerful men in the city, with the post office at the heart of it - but there are only the vaugest hints of this by the time the protagonist shows up at the post office. And in Soul Music, Death becomes caught up in the surreal case of a musician who is simultaneously dead and very much alive, playing the best music anyone has heard in generations. It turns out that the poor bard is being possessed by an ancient entity so powerful that even Death is pushed to his limits struggling against it - but we don't learn exactly what this entity is until the climax! The entire book gradually gives us more and more information about this mystery, so that the reveal feels like meeting an old friend. But the full context isn't given to the reader until the very end.

In Life, the Universe and Everything, Douglass Adams writes about the galaxy being threatened by a violent race of aliens who aim to revive an ancient war using a superweapon that will wipe out all life. We don't find out about the evil aliens, let alone their history or aims, for about half the book. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe takes us into Narnia and carries the children through the beginning of their adventure before we meet Aslan or learn the full extent of the White Witch's despotic rule. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone doesn't begin any worldbuilding infodumping at all until Harry escapes the Durselys, and the mystery of the titular Sorcerer's Stone isn't fully solved until Quirrel and Voldermort explain the final missing pieces to Harry in the climax.

In all of these cases, by withholding context and backstory at the beginning and gradually explaining it, the writers keep the audience and readers curious about what's going on. Every time a new piece of information is given out, the readers need to reconsider everything they've learned in its light, and readers are invited to guess at what's truly happening.

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