All right I finished the main Hunger Games movies
After posting about it, I just thought, "why don't I simply finish these as fast as possible? This is getting silly," and stayed home several nights in a row to just watch all the remaining Hunger Games movies in the main series.
This is old media, so my observations about it can't be even remotely special or important, but I do gotta say that these stories drive me kinda nuts. I am glad to have seen them and to have finished the series, but the lack of consistency with the technology level made me weep for Hunter X Hunter. If you are going to be weird about tech level in a story, you may as well try at least as hard as Togashi does. Give me a world where people use simple medival-era weapons alongside machine guns. Give me a world where there's one country ruled by magical vore creatures and another country which is just New York City. Have people driving around in SUVs in the same timeline as tallship ocean travel and airships and stuff. Just be maximalist, and I'll be forced to forgive you.
Throughout my time with Hunger Games, I kept wishing for something that crazy to happen. Instead, it's content to leave the different regions in its world totally disjoint. The central government has the ability to instantly create a magical dog, resize the dog, summon it remotely into an arena using a holographic gestural UI, and control its behavior from afar. This society's strongest technologies can also generate mass amounts of swirling fog that kills you instantly... this fog can be controlled with extreme precision using force fields.
However none of this stuff is ever deployed in open combat until the very, very end of the series, when it's used only to set traps. Soldiers use conventional arms. The bad guys have access to an army of Pan's Labryrith Guys, big naked pale critters with spiky teeth, but the bad guys only use them as an absolute last resort to defend the imperial core. There's no insane sequence where the army rolls up for a battle with a platoon of dog-puppeteers. There is no scene where a bunch of naked Pan's Labyrinth Guys attack a small town and eat a bunch of helpless kids, or whatever.
I'm just saying: Togashi would have been brave enough to write those scenes!! We know this because there's 10-15 scenes just like these inside pretty much every single plot beat in his story, haha.
Outside of things like tabletop settings, I hate to think of "worldbuilding" as a specific discipline. It's asinine, in my opinion, to do "worldbuilding" for storytelling media independent of the traditional narrative writing labor of building a specific plot or cast of characters. Even a lot of tabletop worldbuilding is done alongside this work - the characters are provided as playstyles, and the plot is guided by a ruleset. Plot and character and setting should serve one another and depend on one another directly, and setting is nothing on its own. This even goes for the big IPs which corporations treat like playgrounds - Star Wars stuff feels the way it does because it was built to serve the plot and characters it began with.
My one concession to the brutal obsessions of "worldbuilding," however, is that if you are not doing what Togashi does, if you are not being maximalist in the most unhinged and enthusiastic way possible, then technology levels should be consistent and logical enough to support the choices your characters make.
For example: if your world lacks mass production, then it should not include technologies that require mass production, and your characters should not rely on the kind of things which mass production makes possible. I once worked on an IP which did not include mass industrialization, and someone wanted a character to have a polaroid-style instant camera. I blew all my social cred in one long, painful meeting explaining the difference between mass-produced film stock and the daguerreotype process.
Conversely, if your setting DOES contain mass production, factories, industrialization, etc, then you will need to show these things penetrating regular society in logical ways. If your setting contains a factory where people make guns and bullets, you will probably need to show that this society is abandoning swords, crossbows, and spears as primary combat tools. If you keep this stuff around, you'll just have to accept that the setting feels fake and silly.
It's okay to be fake and silly! You just have to embrace it. A lot of anime-aesthetic properties willingly embrace this silliness. Hunger Games doesn't. Its characters are stuck in their traumatic war epic, wearing relentlessly serious scowls, while they hold medieval arms and armor and march into battle against guns, rocket-propelled grenades, tanks, an entire airforce of VTOL machines, and Pan's Labyrinth Guys.
If your IP contains super-science shit that can kill you instantly, like instant-death fog or enormous resizable dogs and Pan's Labyrinth Guys, your characters need to act with awareness of these things. If they do not... they will seem stupid. And so will all the world around them! The only thing that can save you is going full Togashi!!!