Відео

There are so many things wrong with this "essay".

Forsooth! Nostalgia. Romance. Anachronism. Sweet dreams are made of this and TTRPGs, too. The problem with most fantasy fiction and games are that they build on top of contemporary basic physics, chemistry and biology. The fantasy worlds are Earth with some other stuff. Have the setting take place in a world that is governed by the elements, humors, alchemy, and where the current limits of knowledge are fixed. Suspending disbelief is difficult and the only way to demonstrate that is by example and broken reality. Regression actually happens to human civilizations and cultural evolution doesn’t always progress. Societies are organisms and all it takes is one cell to disrupt or suppress.

Remember ancient Greece, Rome, Chinese kingdoms. For thousands of years, technology did not develop. Apparently, the limit was what a person could achieve, with the support of family and friends. Fantasy worlds simply chose the most developed stage of what was achievable alone, without turning your village into workers of a highly specialized factory.

idk, I think that the medieval time is ideal simply because there's a lot of war so you just need military rule. Also, power is possibly pretty random, so someone like da vinci wouldn't live in a city where magicians would come for him. I'm making an eastern fantasy and basically competition of resources and the ability to gain benefits from the gods is what keeps the world in stasis. There's essentially no change of ideas. I think what makes this world different is that everyone can do a type of magic, but it takes practice and knowledge to get good. Stylistically there's a mix of roman and the dark ages aesthetically depending on how uppity your region is. Powers do not change by region because some regions make better magicicians, so strong ancient civilizations don't fall unless a god smites them directly, and someone will take their place and try to be exactly like them.

You’re not gonna believe this…. Lets just have a talk in about 10 years time

This is an idiotic take that just swallows master narratives of the past whole.

This was nice, felt like a John Michael Godier video but for the realm of medieval fantasy instead of futurism

The issue with the video is that it assumes all technical progressions happen at the same rate, there are certain events that if they didn't happen we'd still be back in more medieval times currently.

I remember years back someone asked the creator of Archer what year the shown was set in and he responded 'all the cool ones'.

as a kid, i thought the medieval stasis aspect was the most unrealistic thing about lotr lol

Seems similar to the wizarding world in Harry Potter being depicted as constantly behind the times technologically. Magic existing would hamper or stop a society’s technological progress

Star Wars, Harry Potter, Warhammer 40k, Marvel & DC Movies, Pirates of the Caribbean and Narnia are Fanatasy movies all set after the medival period.

sorry, but this makes no sense, there are two cases, magic starved scenarios were technology would pretty much benefit all, so no point in not developing it. And magic rich scenarios were magic would drastically change society to a point were it become "the future", a place very distant from medieval stasis. Tech is magic if you live in world were magic is real, it is just an extension of conventional nature. Engines would still exist, but instead of being powered by combustion cycles it would be powered by a rotating magic shaft or whatever. We would still melt metals in magic furnaces to create magical weapons that shoot magic of some sort. We would still AUTOMATE stuff. Magic would completely intertwine with every aspect of our lives, because the purpose is to solve our problems, be with magic or conventional tech. Medieval stasis makes no sense and your analysis even less. But I think its great you brought up the theme.

5:40 ha! Cool, never would I have imagined seeing my parents house on a random youtube video. Fun fact: The castle you see there is called "Burg Kreuzenstein" and was built in the 19th century out of other medival catle parts/structures. So it's both younger and older then one expects :D. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burg_Kreuzenstein

All in all a pretty interesting video, interesting premise, but quite poor argumentation. Felt like all the arguments were made to fit instead of being properly analyzed, a ton of wrong assumptions were made. Take a look at something like Sanderson's fiction, or even Herbert's Dune(arguably science fiction but still) to see prime examples of works not bound to the medieval stasis. Also, this video assumes all fantasy to have a singular, all powerful magic system for the basis of the argumentation. Dont get me wrong, I love medieval settings, both Tolkien and Martin are amazing, buut saying fantasy SHOULD be set in medieval stasis is a stretch. I also get that it might be kind of clickbait, but I'd forgove that more if it were well reasoned, which it's not

I have a story thats set in the past and has been for ages. The reason the world is that way is because they're basically stuck in a permanent armageddon type scenario. They make any major progress and it'll just be destroyed so they're forced into a fairly primitive and rudimentary way of life. The main story follows the main character actually successfully ending the unending disaster.

Science happens on accident.

Two things. One technology doesn't just grow. It is developed to meet a need. A sad truth is well thought out self sustainable societies stagnate. They don't need to change so they don't. They may grow in knowledge but it doesn't go anywhere. The steam engine was invented in ancient rome but it was never useful for anything until the need for faster automated machine was pushing on society. Also culture is a hige thing. We don't always see it in the west but Christianity was the major factor in the development of the world. They are they ones who built schools and hospitals fostered philosophy and was the main funder of science. Many of the parts of the scientific method were developed from theological principles in the bible. A world without this would not have the aame results.

Meanwhile warhammer fantasy: THE TALKING RAT HAS A GUN! BY SIGMAR!!

I find fascinating the need some people have for conjuring up elaborate justifications for their imitations of imitations of nth degree. One might assume that eventually such mental acrobatics would result in a novel synthesis of ideas through brute force if nothing else.

I do love some good medieval fantasy, I just wish it wasn't always the High to Late Middle Ages, the Early Middle Ages are so much more interesting imo, and less is known about them so it leaves even more room for imagination.

Counterpoint: Arcanum of steamworks and magic obscura (i wrote this in the begining)

in my own worldbuilding, real life physics just dont apply, magic IS science of that world, you cant make a combustion engine because its simply impossible, not that the gods would allow pollution anyway as humans are no more important to them than any other living thing, they value all their creation and arent willing to allow the mass environmental destruction that comes with industry and gods of crafts certainly would find mass production insulting, also many advancements are good, but i dont believe humans were when this stuff was invented or ever will be ready for the responsibility of using guns and more advanced weapons, it’s to easy and allows people to kill without thinking about the consequences of their actions, i imagine the gods would agree

There are some rather glaring issues for the whole “stuck in medieval times” thing. And it has three main factors: Our modern understanding of the universe we inhabit and the construction of the fictional realm we made; as fantastical as the world could be- the reality and complex functions, most of the time are not equal to the narrative of any story we put in this realm. Secondly is the adaptation of philosophy, mystic, legend, religion and mythology. This is what I find to be the most fascinating portion of fantasy because it’s very introspective of how the storyteller sees their own existential dilemma. Whilst the reality we create in this fantasy can have whatever limitations we want to make it easier to inquire the world or provoke thought about pushing understanding of the realm we live in beyond the limits we currently understand. Last up is the adaptation of societal function. This is often the most difficult thing to do in most fantasy worlds because of reason #1 and #2. Trying to encapsulate aliens basically. Sometimes fantasies even straight up ignore huge societal flaws that don’t align with what we have observed and studied on our planet for thousands of years; like in Harry Potter where the Wizard race could basically be the illuminate and can traverse through time and space and other dimensions possibly but knowledge of anything not of “magical” origin is deemed worthless to them so nobody knows or cares about humans- when that is literally impossible. It’s a true test of inference and bias to make the world feel more than just a “story” or lesson. A great example of that is 1984 by George Orwell. It’s clearly not meant to be fantasy. But it does all of the things about societal function and philosophy to be a true “what if” scenario- blindly leaping into the unknown to explore the balance of probability and determination.

I do find extremely amazing that the history of the old Egiptian civilization was in fact in Ancient History stasis for thousands of years. They learned to build massive pyramids with amazing engineering skill and precision but their path never went to industrialization. What could have been their "magic" so to speak?

Having the gods be the ones who fancy the mideval setting kinda makes sense, i like that idea and might use it in my next dnd game

One of my favourite Brandon Sanderson story beats is regarding the world of Stormlight Archive, Roshar. Roshar is maybe the most "magical" planet in Brandon's works, magic _quite literally rains_ on the planet on an almost weekly basis, enough magic to create visible representations of thoughts, concepts and feelings that walk around bothering people. Yet, roughly 4.500 years before the story of the Stormlight Archive begins, humanity lost their capacity to use magic altogether. Magic in this planet depended heavily on people creating symbiotic bonds with the aforementioned visible representations of concepts, once you created a bond with one of them they'd give you the power to manipulate 2 of the 10 "fundamental forces of nature" (they're weird like that on Roshar, they think the fundamental forces are Gravity, Friction, Adhesion, Tension, Transportation, Illumination, Transformation, Growth and Cohesion). Humanity lost all access to this type of power, and was left alone for 4.500 years. When we catch up with them for the start of the story, Rosharans are _quite literally_ in the middle of an Industrial Revolution. They have started creating things like fridges airships and clocks, their medicine is advancing enough to be on the cusp of Germ Theory, substantial areas of the planet have progressed in politics enough to be leaving Monarchy in the dust in favour of more complex and advanced systems... The best part for me is that 99% of what they have is still magic. Magic still _quite literally rains_ on them every other week, and they have a culture of scientists who have started to find ways to capture and use this magic to come up with these inventions. Someone somewhere along the line figured they could shove a _spren_ (the visible representations of thoughts) into a gemstone. Someone else eventually realised that if you left a gemstone that has one of the _spren_ trapped inside of it out when it's raining magic, the gem would be filled both with the magic _and_ the _spren._ Someone else then eventually figures out that if you touch a gemstone that has both magic and a _spren_ inside of it with a small piece of pewter, the spren will consume the magic inside the gem to "force" its concept around it. Did you trap a flamespren in a gem and did all of that? Well, touching it with pewter will cause the area around the gem to start heating up. And then someone else went "okay, time to test all metals and figure this out" and look, if the metal bit is made of Tin instead of Pewter, touching the gem has the opposite effect, a flamespren now drawns in heat instead of causing it... They "science out" the magic, and its fascinating that by the time we start following the story of the Stormlight Archive, they are actually about to get rid of Medieval Stasis: they've been cut off from easy and direct use of magic for so long that they're about to no longer need it. So much so that, when supernatural powers start coming back, the enemies of humanity are shocked to find out "holy shit these people are insane, they haven't had magic for so long and they know jackshit about it, we thought this would be easy but they've advanced enough in other areas that this is actually quite a hard war to fight now."

One thing I'd correct in this is that Tolkien's universe isn't in Medieval Stasis. Ëa is a world that, by the time of Lord of the Rings turns about, is in a perpetual state of "futuristic decline." Ëa was written as a "mythological origin" of our very universe, with things like The Lord of the Rings being events that happened some few millions of years ago. That's part of what irks me when people complain that there aren't dark skinned people in LotR, since we're talking about a universe where humanity was divinely created in the region of Europe, and events that take place "merely" some 4 thousand years after that, dark skinned people quite literally hadn't had the time to evolve yet in Ëa when LotR happens. The height of futuristic society created by people who knew every single detail of science to ever exist in Ëa happened not as a cumulative effort of humanity sharing knowledge through hundreds of thousands of years, instead it happened an untold amount of time before a single human being existed: the Ainur created that perfect civilisation. Then it was destroyed. They built it again, in Valinor, and the elves who came into existence during that time got to live there for a while. Then it was destroyed _again._ Elves come back to Middle Earth to get vengeance for their lost utopia and meet humans who finally started existing by then. Humans, then, create the closest thing to a perfect scientific society this world yet knows, Numenor... And it gets destroyed _again_ when Sauron convinces them to go to war against the Valar. In Tolkien's universe, we _start_ at an endpoint our society may never reach. The Valar are "magic," true, but they are also science, because their "magic" is in fact the magic that comes from knowing literally every single detail of every law of nature. They _invented_ those laws, they created them, and they know them deeply. As time passes, the world of Ëa is in a permanent state of decline, losing knowledge and technology it once had as things grow more and more mundane. If you do the example of Winterfell with Ëa instead of Westeros, you'd find that "four thousand years before" something impressive like the city of Minas Tirith, what you actually had would be _even more insanely impressive_ things like Gondolin or Doriath. Go back 4k years before those, and you have _even more absurdly futuristic perfect utopic impressive things_ like the perfectly symmetrical world the Valar created.

Games like Arcanum, Thief and even Dishonored did a good job of mixing both magic and "technology" as you define it outside of the medieval era. Outside of video games settings like Fullmetal Alchemist do a great job of mixing "magic" and 20th century technology.

What about fantasy stories yet in times BEFORE the medieval period? Like Rome or Mesopotamia or ancient Mayan or Aztec hell what about steam punk or cyberpunk fantasy?

Just started the video but will he mention Final Fantasy? Where elves and other races command airships with gun blades and magic? Or Warhammer where fantastical elements are thrust into sci-fi space opera? Honestly Final Fantasy is so genius with its constant subversions and twists, with mixing elements from western and eastern mythologies. Problem with these types of UA-cam infotainment videos is that they only look at their own aisle and don't ever cross over. Like I can already predict most of this video will be 90% about Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings examples. All western, with no mention of fantasy tropes that appear in many different time periods in most of east Asian media. For example China has hundreds of Journey to the West adaptations, some of which are told as metaphors in colonial or modern periods

You presuppose constant progress. Your mid-evil castle doesn't look that impressive compared to coliseum in Rome. With a song of Ice and Fire, there were winters that lasted decades, might retard technological progress.

Future has sci-fi label?

There’s also no interesting stories to tell after the medieval period that aren’t boring & dreary. There’s no wonder afterwards; everything has an answer, we just don’t know all of them. That’s why everything now is gritty & grounded realism.

31:18 Oh man, Geralt would have a field day here... at least until that Chort shows up.

28:30 I prefer the Tower of Babi myself, but to each their own.

9:33 The richest "tech-bro" in the world, and it doesn't even know how to take a proper screenshot.

5:05 What sorcery is this? I maxed out every school of magic I had, along with every skill, became Thane of every hold and master of every underground guild, literally owned the entire economy of Skyrim and Solstheim, been to Sovngarde and the Soul Cairn and back, but I still have to mine my own clay.

I'm a little fed up honestly, I want fantasy to innovate with new scenarios

You can see Skyrim 2000 years ago in the Elder Scrolls Online Skyrim is part of a series it's full title is the Elder Scrolls V Skyrim.

from around 4000 bc to 1300 +/- you have pretty much the same level of technology on earth - with the major advances being... going from bronze to steel and the period doesn't really come to an end until the RE-invention of the steam engine so you have at least 5000 years of mostly static technology for your fantasy world crafting

Along the lines of the conclusion, more or less.... I don't know if I can give a strong argument for why fantasy worlds should remain in the Medieval times, but I would rather give a question: why assume that progressiveness is the "default" to begin with? At least progressiveness in the human, ever-accelerating way. No other animal (or other organism) on Earth is changing their whole civilization within less than a generation. It's not like other species never change and progress - and no, not only by evolution but also by cultural shifts - but it seems to be happening much more slowly. Their life is more like a harmonious cycle, while humans are obsessed with theirs being a straight line that goes ever further. But that straight-line obsession is tightly entwined with the catastrophe which the progress in question is currently causing because the pace of natural evolution cannot possibly catch up with this pace of technological advancement. If you go further in time, you probably won't find super fashionable sci-fi cities. You'll find a desert, because the species ate itself by its technological advancement. So yeah, I'd question the very premise of default progress. Judging by the rest of the species in the world, that simply isn't the "normal" way Life is - so why should it in other worlds?

I think the view that “of course a civilization would advance to current levels” is also very revolved around developed countries. There are many places in current history that never had a medieval period or beyond. Some people are still tribal and choose to stay that way. There were places that were colonized and forced to jump forward in technology. They went from tribal to modern in just a few years. A lot of places have a mix of traditional living with the benefits of modern life like medicine. Not everywhere is going to develop like Europe did.

The best argument really is ESCAPISM (as Tolkien meant it): our modern and post-modern world sucks all the enchantment and adventure out of life. A fantasy story is meant to have pre-modern virtues of heroic companionship, adventure, supernatural reality, etc etc. if you want to enjoy pre-modern virtues, you need to travel to a pre-modern reality, away from the flat, boring, secular materialism.

This is a cool video but I have to quibble with the political square pictures at @12:20. Zoomers are split, some being libertarian right and others being authoritarian left. Whereas boomers are literally the generation that were libertarian lefties in the 60s and 70s .

FMA

This is amazing!

I both see magic as part of science (it is coded in most fantasy settings as discreet spells an enchantments), and as an alternate solution.. while some tech emerges from underestanding, many inventions come from solving an issue.. be it moving things and traveling faster (vehicles), improoving farming output, or manufactoring "stuff" in large quantities... if you have a spell that can do X, you need not have a tech that do the same, there is no pressure for that... and if magic so happens to solve most if not all of ones problems, then when it is mostly, if not fully underestood, shall "halt" technology at whatever time period it so happens.... just my 3 cents on the matter.

You know, people become worse and worse at learning stuff as they age. This, in turn, leads to them not wanting to learn new stuff, because most people don't like to do stuff they're terrible at. This is a dumb quirk of human aging and something that needs to go. Whoops, tangent. Anyways, what's to say that the magic keeping the elves et al perpetually spry doesn't keep their brains young? What's to say that they don't have that dumb quirk whatsoever? What's to say they don't have Greater Raise Neuroplasticity or Increase Memory Capacity? My point is, they're already different from us, and pretty overpowered too - what's to say they can't have an extra starfishy quirk?

I disagree and the best game I can think of that would make a great example of magic in a nonmedieval setting is 'Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura' and yes, it is a long name they probably could have shortened it. In Arcanum technology has progressed to the industrial age with magic but the catch is they conflict. Magic warps the physical laws to achieve something and machines, like a train, kind of REALLY needs those laws to not change to function. Because of this there is a big divide between the magic world, with people that are very powerful but few in number because not every one can be a mage and the industrial world. Anyone can learn how to operate machinery so it's much more available. Taking this back to the original example of skyrim, the setting could benefit from technology just as much. It seems clear that not everyone is a skilled mage if they were they wouldn't use swords they would use bound swords because they'd never break and are stronger. Even having a firearm would be a huge boost because mages rely on wards and not armor, bullets would pierce right through their defenses. Even the simple addition of helve hammers, a device from the medieval age that assisted with forging iron blooms into ingots, would be a huge improvement. So many soldiers rely on swords and not magic so helve hammers could boost sword production. You could probably make any setting work with magic if it's done right. 40k is magic but set in the year 40,000! (Wow! who could have guessed?) Contrary to your video, the addition of advancing technology could open the door to many interesting innovations the least of which are the conflicts that would arise between people that are magically talented and those that aren't.