Trope Talk: Precursors
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- Опубліковано 19 вер 2024
- A long time ago in a galaxy that may or may not be this one…
MUSIC: "Passing Time" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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I’m surprised Red would cover this trope given…
“Society peaked with my birth and subsequent existence” - Red, Shadow of the Colossus stream❤😁
It had to reach there first, and thus precursors created the ground for Red to be the peak of society.
what a quote. Something to live by fr fr
This, of course, just means that Red IS the precursor.
Even that quote of Red’s is her quoting the lost precursor that is Calvin and Hobbes.
The Precursors crawled so Red could talk.
There’s a ruin of a tiny ancient Byzantine church on the islet of Daskalio, right off Keros in the Lesser Cyclades. It was probably used in the 7th or 8th century, one and a half thousand years ago. Being so ancient, it’s completely fallen apart since, an almost incomprehensibly old structure that it would be absolutely surreal to stand within.
It’s built on the very top of a steep hill, and it’s made out of marble from the nearby island of Naxos. But the Romans didn’t import the marble: they pulled it out of the ground from the barely visible ruins that were _already there._ Because in the Bronze Age, _three thousand years before them,_ Daskalio was inhabited by a thriving Cycladic religious settlement.
Imagine being a Roman stepping onto that hill and beholding the abyss of time and feeling so, so small.
Ancient Precursors are my absolute favorite fictional trope because they’re _real._
One of my favorite footnotes in that vein: Sardinia used to be a major military power in the Mediterranean. Yeah, SARDINIA... the ancient ruins on Sardinia make even the Pyramids look easy to build.
This is but one example. Xenophon wrote in the Anabasis that as the ten thousand were marching north, they came across two ruined cities. Xenophon describes them as bigger and greater than any city still standing, and thus, overcome with curiosity, he spent the next few days asking the locals about the ruins. But the locals had no knowledge of who built the cities or why they were destroyed.
It took more than two thousand years before we found the answers to Xenophon's questions.
@@user-bi7xd8ry5p Arabia has that a lot. ruined cities buried in the desert, who built it? why is it dead?
Yeah, Bronze Age Collapse and later Fall of Rome both had an "Ancient Precursor" effect on Post Mycenaean Greeks and Medieval Europeans respectively.
@marhawkman303 Yes, but these questions will probably remain unanswered considering the attitude of the locals towards pre Islamic Arabia.
"Remember us. Remember that we once lived."
I would kill for Red to breakdown FF14
If you know, you know… and it hurts….
@@InRealTime769I think she once mentioned in a live stream that there were certain types of games she doesn’t enjoy playing…. And unfortunately ffxiv falls under one of those types….
The future is now, old man.
Makes me think of a quote from an SCP short story called _Document Recovered From The Marianas Trench_ :
“Don't let them hide us. Try and find more, I know there's got to be more people who tried to leave something behind. Don't let the world die in vain. Remember us.”
This line from jak and daxter goes hard: “I have spent my life searching for the answers that my father, and my father's fathers, failed to find. Who were the Precursors? Why did they create the vast monoliths that litter our planet? How did they harness eco, the life energy of the world? What was their purpose, and why did they vanish? I have asked the plants, but they do not remember. The plants have asked the rocks, but the rocks do not recall-even the rocks do not recall.”
JAK AND DAXTER MENTIONED🔥🗣️🔊🔈WTF IS A BAD GAME
Turns out the Rocks did know and told the Plants, but the Plants thought the Rocks were pulling a fast one on them and didn't tell Samos what they said.
That is some HP Lovecraft type lore right there. Reminds me of him describing the nameless city, where he says it's too old for Babylon to remember or something like that.
@@TheFirstLaughingFool I have completed all the games apart from lost frontier and I genuinely have no clue what you’re talking about
The precursors from the Jak & Daxter series have always fascinated me. Even when a face is put to them, the game does a good job of maintaining their mysteriousness.
For it is said that in the distant past a woman of crimson did sit up on a throne before an inferno and speak upon great tales.
What reference is this?
@@MagnustheDemon71look at the video
@@MagnustheDemon71 Nothing specific, I was just casting Red as a precursor herself.
@@MagnustheDemon71homie not everything's a reference to something 🤦♀️
@@GriffinPilgrim ooooh okay
I don’t think there’s a UA-cam series I get as excited for consistently when a new episode drops than Trope Talk. This is a fantastic series.
Yes! I've been watching this series for AGES. This and detail diatribes.
Big facts
This and their Journey to the west videos. Ive been watching theses videos since i was in highschool and can safely say they have drastically helped me in my writing endeavors.
IKR
honestly OSP and Tale Foundry are the two best channels on youtube. absolutely love red and blue tho, been watching them for YEARS. love em
Love me some Mass Effect
The Reapers: Not only did we wipe out your precursors, we wiped out your precursors precursors back through infinity.
Shepard: *dabs in RGB*
But the real precursors are still there, millions of years later, chilling in their waters
The Reapers' Precursors: Yeah, they didn't get us all, but as far as we're concerned they actually deserve to do their thing, so we're just gonna sit down here in this puddle for the rest of time and watch the cycles go by.
And also: All that cool stuff you found? They didn't even make that, we did! They just discovered it. As did their precursors and their precursors and so on.
And whenever the time comes to wipe out all those pesky organics, we just have to go where we left all the space travel things to find them.
I love that the Reapers are so terrifying because they're essentially the answer to the question of "what if the Bronze Age Collapse happened on purpose"? They are the very death of civilizations, embodied in robot space squids. Granted, the given reason for WHY they do this is rather unsatisfying, but the very idea of them is still one of the reasons why Mass Effect works so well. "You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."
Just imagine being a medieval peasant seeing the ruins left behind by your Roman ancestors and by the time you came along all the history and knowledge had been lost leaving you to piece together what happened. Really gives you plenty to work with when it comes to storytelling
Image even 100 years or so, many bulding, and homes that have survived will become that. Hell image what the internet would be in future archeological studies
@@compatriot852 Being in Britain in the early Dark Ages must have been incomprehensible.
You and your family live humbly among the dead wealth of the old world. Ruined villas that your great-grandfathers witnessed alive now crumbling, with their marble walls stolen away by time and hungry new builders, miles of fields lying fallow for a century. A city, grander than you can possibly imagine, rotting at the end of the Thames. A city so eldritch that even the German invaders seem to fear it. A city that may be great again, but for now is only a corpse.
There's an absolutely fantastic game about just that! It's called Pentiment and it's by the people who brought us Fallout New Vegas. It is set in a small fictional village of Bavaria in the early to mid 16th century, with some immaculate Name of the Rose vibes and an art style to die for.
Its actually pretty sad, unless the place was declared a holy place/church (aka coliseum and despite this you can see how it looks like a cheese in the present) the most common thing was that those ruins ended up used as in the best case a refuge for outlaws, hunter and etc, as free wall for you new house (in the case of city and castle walls) and the worst free building materials for houses, churches and etc.
Sadly people just started to care about the past recently
13:20 Aw man, my favorite detail from the Lord of the Rings is that we get a bunch of monologues about how the descendents of Numenor are of a purer, fairer, morally superior character which has alas been slow-dwindled by contact and intermarriage with non-numenorians, but everyone who says that is Gondorian, one of the ancestor peoples of Numenor, and all of the characters alive during the Fall like Gandalf and Elrond give some varient of "Moral race my ass, they live longer than other humans and that's about it". Just a great contrast if you're paying attention
It gets even better when you look at the history of Numenor and realize that they were slowly starting to get hubristic and ethno-centric about halfway through their runtime, loyalty to the Valar and friendship with the Elves started turning into a small cult rather than the norm, and Sauron's whispers were only the straw that broke the back of their survival.
Also when you consider that the lifespan of Gondorians were on a steady downward slope largely unaffected by that same intermarriage they're so scared of. Just look at the king who was born to a woman of Rohan. His natural lifespan was no different from his cousins, yet the assumption sparked an entire civil war that had the end result of everyone (in high society) being scared to have more than 2 children or risk another "Kinstrife", as if a high birthrate was anywhere close to the reason for it.
Elrond especially gives off "disappointed family member" vibes when it comes to Numenor, which is fitting because he's the *insert number of greats* uncle of their entire royal family.
Ancestor people of Numenor?
@@anjetto1 I think the group that founded Gondor is the same group that became the Numenoreans, but I could be remembering wrong and they just meant descendants.
"Could God create a rock so heavy he couldn't lift it?"
"Yes, AND IT KILLED HIM!"
~ OSP, 2024
God is dead, for the unliftable rock killed him - Red Nietzsche
Nukes in a nutshell
Outer Wilds is my favorite example of a precursor civilization, because all the Nomai are individuals and you can track their personal arcs rather than them all being faceless ancestors
spoilers:
It's also an interesting case of the 4th type of precursors, those that get struck by a huge calamity. The Nomai weren't really hubristic, in fact they were survivors of a crash. The rest of Nomai civilization is still alive at the end of the game, and it's only the ruins of one clan that we explore in game. They had highly advanced tech, but they never got anywhere near where they were before and had to rebuild everything from the ground up. Their tale is one of survival and persistence that nevertheless got trumped by the cosmos. It wasn't their fault. That's just how things go.
I think their story is even anti-hubristic. If Eskall had just waited like five minutes before warping to the signal they would never have crashed and subsequently wiped out by the Interloper but then they would never have given us the tools to observe the Eye to make a new universe. In a sense, their "hubris" was the right thing to do in the end, even if they never knew.
Science compels us to (redacted)!
Exploring the homes of the Nomai, learning the context that they're all dead and them learning about the end before perishing makes listening to their theme hit harder. It's all very sad. Allthough (SPOILER), you can find a suviving Nomai who were stuck on a hidden planet. She even joins you during the end.
Spoilers for both OG Outer Wilds and the Echoes of the Eye DLC:
This all makes a very great deal of sense, because one of Outer Wilds' themes is that all things end, but each end is not *the* end. Each participant can (and should!) pass the torch to the next, and make something beautiful, despite the individual's not surviving to see it.
There's two moments that made me love the Nomai as people.
One is a terrible joke made by one of the apprentices in Timber Hearths core mine.
The other is a Nomai grieving over the loss of their partner in Brittle Hollow.
Both of them made them so relatable, even with such advanced technology. And I can't think of any other game that does that.
"...Sometimes (the lesson) is to unbury (the past), take notes about the arrangement of its body, and then try not to die the same way."
That's another OSP quote going into the increasingly crowded rent-free spaces in our heads.
The main contribution of this video to my crowded free rent head space was the Leopards-eating-people's-faces Device
So in this way, ancient ruins could be considered as the civilization-level equivalent to a Dark Souls bloodstain.
I feel like it would be interesting if you did a trope talk episode on the "Heroes don't kill" trope, just because it's a trope that I feel everyone has opinion on and it's one that as a very wide history to it.
Absolutely. This needs to happen.
I think "I don't like to do that/I'm afraid to" and "I hold unto personal ideals I want to uphold for myself" are reasons enough that should be understood.
I think a more appropriate trope talk would be one personal codes or something
Here’s my stance: If a dog has Rabies, no amount of love or compassion is going to make it better, and refusing to put down a rabid dog is a danger to yourself and everyone nearby.
But with that being said, you shouldn’t take joy in putting down a rabid dog, this was a creature that through no fault of it’s own has lost control of faculties and communal instincts and is now violently lashing out people that could have been part of its pack or family. So putting down a Rabid dog should be done with dignity it deserves, because putting down a rabid dog is about keeping people safe, not a hate of rabid dogs.
With that being said, a dog that bites isn’t always Rabid and hopefully with time can be made better. If you’re actively looking out for dogs to put down and getting upset when a dog doesn’t have rabies and was trained by an abusive owner, and gets taken away by animal welfare to be rehabilitated, maybe you should check if you’re not foaming at the mouth yourself.
Also, if you’re dealing with a rabid dog, call animal control, because they’re professionals and are supposed to handle rabid dogs, not you, rabid dog hunting vigilante.
Wait, didn't they already make something like that? Actually, I think it might have just been mentioned as part of their batman detail diatribe. If I'm remembering right.
I love the references to the dwemer of elder scrolls. "Incomprehensible bull" is very succinct in describing them, especially when the most widely supported theory is that they all simultaneously thought themselves out of existence immediately after flipping the on switch of their artificial god.
I refer to population wide whoopsies as "pulling a Karsus"
"thought themselves out of existence immediately after flipping the on switch on their artificial god" makes me immediately think about the death of art because of a flood of AI plagiarism machines. XD
It's not _necessarily_ any more supported than them ascending or being transmuted into the skin of the Brass God. From what we -- and notably, basically none of the actual characters in the Elder Scrolls universe itself -- can figure, if they had actually zero-summed (the term for that kind of "thinking themselves out of existence") then they would have been erased from existence a whole lot more comprehensively. (And yes, that _is_ actually possible, from also erasing all memory of them, all the way to making it so they had never existed at all.) Elder Scrolls lore gets weirder and less certain the deeper you dig. So... yeah, pretty incomprehensible. A very large part of the point of the Dwemer is that we don't and can't know exactly what happened to them, I'd argue. There's not actually a definite answer, on purpose.
The Fallout series has an odd kind of twist on Precursors -- they're us. Or at least, they're the alternate timeline version of us, in a world that diverged when the Bikini Atoll h-bomb test never happened and the world never fell out of love with the power of the atom (hence, also, no Godzilla, because Godzilla is basically America in a lizard suit and was directly inspired by the Bikini Atoll test). Most of the lessons learned in the game are about how bad an idea it is to try to cling to or reclaim the past, because the path the past was on led to the atomic destruction everyone is trying to survive in. The tagline of the games is the key lesson: "War; War never changes.". Human beings, given the ability to wage planet disrupting war, will do it over and over and over again, because in the Fallout universe, they never learn the lesson.
I've been toying with a spin on the Precursor trope where their downfall turns out to have been a memory wipe inflicted upon them in a war where even their allies decided they were taking things too far.
The precursors aren't "gone"; they're all still there, they just don't realize that the ancient abandoned ruins they've been studying, dismantling, and reverse-engineering for the tech and magic on which they found their civilization belonged to them to begin with.
In a lot of ways, this is what Halo did. The deep lore of Halo gets really weird.
Not to discourage you. This is still a really fun idea and definitely a good one to explore
a lot of ancient precursors are the writer putting an appropriately themed glove on before reaching down with the hand of god and shaping the setting the way they see fit.
Ah, just in time for my Legend of Zelda hyperfixation phase. First we got the detail diatribe, and now a reminder of how old everything is
I was JUST watching the archelogical exploration of TOTK on the Stream playlist last night lol. This is aptly timed.
-Ah , so the Necrons/Techo-mummies are the precursors ?
-No , that would be the Old Ones , the Necrons are like , , that grumpy grampa of the galaxy that yells to us to "Get off there lawn" , wielding de-atomizing shotguns .
To be fair 40k is basically oops all precursers all the way down. The aeldari and drukhari have the old eldar empire to look to, the necrons are as you said precursors themselves, and the imperium is unique in that they precursored themselves twice, the dark of technology humanity and then imperium of the 31st millennium.
God I sure do love when a Sci-Fi series goes on too long and we start giving the Precursors Percursors until we eventually reach the point where the most Precursory of precursors is Humanity.
That'd be some xenofiction type thing
And occasionally the precursor of a precursor is officially named “the precursors” because at some point writers lose the ability to come up with creative names
@@mariustan9275Or Halo. 😂
@@Beanie28i dont know which series besides HALO did the most of "Precursors of the Precursors of the Precursors..."
@@madkoala2130Warhammer 40k sort of does it with the Old Ones and the Necrons and to a lesser extend the Eldar
The "First Ones" from Babylon 5 are a great example of mixing and matching every aspect of this trope into one story. They're the ones who stepped aside, but also returned as antagonists, but also left dangerous technology behind, but also left some immortals among us, but also became arrogant and fought a war against each other, but also a bunch of other stuff. And on top of that, there's an even older First One who preceded the other First Ones!
And all it took to make them f*** off was two people saying “get off our lawn”
@@A-Legitimate-Salvage and at least one ship worth of dead aliens, who took the hit for the two people.
SDF Macross has a rather good precursor idea. While gone they sealed their great enemy that destroyed them, left a living relic in the soldiers that are the immediate threat of the first series and ultimately it's about the other successors ( the species that are born from their backup plan) to study the tech of the previous civilization and the ramifications of their own problems compounding it.
All Tomorrows has multiple precursors in various roles
Halo has a couple of examples as you showed with the Forerunners and Flood. The Flood are essentially the corrupted DNA of the original Precursors, who were nearly wiped out by the Forerunners in a classic case of 'what could go wrong with trying to wipe outs the gods out of spite.'
And the strange thing is that in 1 way or another, they all survived. The Flood are some the biggest antagonists of the first 3 games and a lot of literature or spin offs like Halo Wars 1&2, the Forerunners tech is nearly in perfect condition and their monitors carry on the legacy, and there's even at least 1 still living; uncorrupted Precursor running around in the EU.
“There had been uncountable kings, empires, inventions, billions of lives lived in millions of countries, monarchies, democracies, oligarchies, anarchies, ages of chaos and ages of order, pantheon upon pantheon of gods, infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings, innumerable horrors and triumphs, an endless repetition of unceasing novelty. What is the use of trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History” -Ursula K LeGuin
In a mind blowing facts thread on reddit someone pointed out that ancient egypt lasted so long that there where egyptian archaeologists and historians studying early ancient egypt during what we consider to still be ancient egypt.
My world history class was terrible. Facts like that really put time into perspective.
Cleopatra is closer to us than she is to the building of the Gaza Pyramids. The Pyramids were to the Romans as the Romans are to us: ancient history, works of a "dead" civilization, ancestors to the current.
Egypt is old, VERY old. One of the cradles of civilization..
My favorite version of this is Bug Fables where bugs have a sprawling society in what is just a backyard of an abandoned house and the humans, known to the bugs as Giants, are just gone with no real knowledge on what happened
9:30 Metroid Prime had an interesting take on the “ascended to a higher plane” precursors. The Chozo colony on Tallon 4 foresaw a “corruption” befalling the planet, and ascended to a higher plane. When said corruption, a meteor full of Phazon, landed, it actually brought several of the Chozo back into the physical world and drove them insane, leading to the Chozo ghosts you have to fight later in the game.
I had this same thought! Most Chozo in Metroid have simply died out or disappeared without explanation, but Prime explains the Tallon IV chozo disappearance exactly like this.
@@Treebohr Honestly, the Chozo are also unlike most precursors because their mass disappearance happened fairly recently in-universe. The Tallon IV Chozo ascended around 50 years ago, the Zebes Chozo that raised Samus only died around 10-15 years before Zero Mission, and the Thoha and Mawkin tribes in Dread were similarly wiped out around that time frame.
And sometimes the precursor has a precursor! And the shattering of the first race was because a guy gave a bird depression so hard she started to purge life
Remember us. Remember that we once lived.
My favorite with precursors is when they have beef with each other :) (Kwa vs Rakkata, Necrons vs Old Ones, Dragons vs Giants, Netheril vs Angry Plant Folk)
I do like the idea though that gamma radiation was wayy too intense for life to form and that the second it relaxed, life formed on Earth. We’re probably in the first generation
I do love the "we are the precursors to be" whole thing, havent seen anywhere where its done though
@@hughjanes4883i mean… that’s reality. I bet one day, if we can make it the next two centuries, our descendants might try some fucked up experiments by seeding random planets to see what happens
@@hughjanes4883 The Lancer setting does that, technically, but we're not exactly a _good example._ And at the timescale during which the game occurs the descendants of old humanity have already surpassed their tech, so the vibe isn't there _anymore._
Finno-Korean hyperwar....
@@hughjanes4883Stargate Universe did that in season 2
Props to Mass Effect's use of this trope, not only that when you actually find a Prothean to ask about the before times he's great at reflecting a cultural worldview which isn't always great and thus makes them feel more real, but he mentions the before before times, that the Protheans had their own precursors, the Inusannon, who basically served the same purpose to the Protheans which the Protheans serve to modern galactic civilization, highlighting the cycle the Reapers have forced galactic society into. I guess I thought of this because the background music in this video made me think of Vigil's theme.
Also yeah, no way Laputa wasn't getting a shoutout.
Well, we knew that the Protheans were just the last part of a cycle in the first game, but more we get to meet the originals in the third game
I also liked that the protheans ancient-aliensed the Asari. Like humans developed agriculture on their own, but the Asari didn't, lol
@@nebulan Is that so surprising though ? If we were those few scientists who survived on Ilos, and knew our species was doomed, you bet your arse we'd chose the planet of blue alien-compatible beauties to spend the last years of our lives !
I also appreciate that Javik essentially deconstructs the romanticized image of the Protheans from the first game by illustrating that they were essentially the Roman Empire, with "Prothean" being less a singular species and more akin to calling oneself a "Roman" - part of the empire. They were conquerors and slavers who studied "primitive races" with the expectation that those they didn't help to guide & foster wouldn't actually be able to emerge as space-faring civilizations of their own ("The lizard people [evolved]? ...They used to eat flies"). Javik himself only finds purpose in avenging his people for their destruction as the last surviving Prothean, possibly even going off to **** himself because he finds it the only fitting fate for him. He's the nihilism Shepard must resist, or perhaps even convince to change his mind, characterizing the thematic struggle between the Star trek-like optimism of the first game with the peaking despair of the third game, the possibility of a Reaper-less future v. the many graves they filled throughout history.
@@thirdcoinedge While the Protheans really weren't as good as assumed before we get Javik's testimony, it's important to remember that Javik still isn't exactly a reliable narrator. He makes no attempt to hide his biases, and the fact is that he never knew what the Prothean civilization was like before the Reaper's came. He was born nearly 2 centuries after the Reaper invasion, and raised from birth to be a weapon of vengeance. He's been "normal" (as opposed to Reaper based) indoctrinated his entire life to be the way he is, which is to either reestablish Prothean dominance after the Reapers are gone or to go out taking as many Reaper forces with him as possible.
“This day cannot get any worse”
-Random Kryptonian, about to be proven wrong
I think the Nomai from Outer Wilds is my favorite example of this trope. Their mark is left ALL over the world and the whole game is basically finding out “what happened to these guys?” The have both advanced tech and ancient looking murals all over their ruins. Also both their swirly text and the translation device you use on it look sick.
"...and try not to die in the same way" I'm sure you know, but one of the greatest theories on why we don't have contact with other intelligent species in the cosmos is... Because they're dead, something something mass extinction and we are headed that way aswell. Not the most comforting of theories...
If it makes you feel any better, there’s good reason to believe that the reason we’ve never contacted the folks two star systems over is that… well, right now they’re the alien equivalent of primitive proto-bacteria. We’re potentially the first technological civilization in the Milky Way, which means we potentially get to be the hyper-advanced lost civilization serving as an object lesson on hubris for FUTURE alien civilizations!
Of course, I’m pulling for more of a future where, when the intelligences we might one day create are asked “where are your creators?” they’ll be able to respond with “oh, awesome, let us introduce you guys to our parents!” It’s important to remain optimistic, I think.
I love how FFXIV hits (almost?) Every. Single. Point here.
I mean ffxiv had like 5 different precursor civilizations thanks to the calamities. And that's just the ones we know about
Oh hi Allag and Mach and Amdapor and Nym and the Ancients and...
Jokes, pets, and souvenirs are a perfect way to see that people never change
"I was there"
Horizon Zero Dawn's ancient precursors ended up being several flavors of this trope at once when it turned out that some of them developed a sci-fi drug to make themselves immortal. Not only were they responsible for most of the bad stuff that went down in the first game, but they're still around and they've managed to accidentally create a superpowerful evil AI that not even they know how to stop (and that, naturally, will now be Aloy's problem because it's coming to destroy Earth). Thanks, Far Zenith.
Even before then, the precursors died because one of them decided: "Hey, let's build a line of warbots that can eat biomass for fuel and ammunition, is unhackable, can hack anything, and can self-replicate."
It only takes one of the 'gods' to create the rock. At least the others figured out a way to stop the rock after it had killed off their civilisation.
On the plus side, Ted himself spent the last millennium as a cancerous mass growing on the side of a geothermal reactor, hopefully conscious and in horrible pain the whole time.
Shoutout to The Stormlight Archive for one of my favourite takes on the precursor civilisation. The mystery isn't so much about what ended the tenure of the mystical, insanely powerful Radiants (we find out how it went down fairly early on) as it is about why it went down like that. Moreover, the Radiants weren't a civilisation, just a very specific organisation within a broadly normal society. Plus, the series lets people in the past actually be less advanced, save for the occasional miracle brought on by the Radiants themselves. Yay, bronze weapons!
Edit: I'm only halfway through Oathbringer; I must ask for you to refrain from spoilers.
Seconded and we can add Yolen from the cosmere as another greater scope example of a somewhat similar set-up currently, in the same universe by the same author. Vague spoilers ahead I guess: if you’ve read just a little of the cosmere, you know what the rest of us know; 17 people decided to shatter the big God which also probably shattered their planet. They took various shards of that power for themselves and became as gods.
That is what, two sentences and I’ve summarized most of what is known about that event. The rest, why, who and so on is mostly unknown even if you’ve read as much as is available. (Including the non-canon prime versions of the Dragonsteel book since it didn’t really get far enough to answer that question.) That answer we have to wait for for a long long time.
@@mangagori love the fossile scene
Although its pretty heavily implied that the civilisations on Ashyn were much more advances than the current human civilisations across Roshar
I just found this video inside an ancient cave; it's crazy how much you ancestors knew about narrative tropes! I bet this discovery will have no consequences on my simple little life and society as a whole
The "What Happened? Option 3" brought to mind the exchange between Sakai and G'Kar at the end of the Babylon 5 episode "Mind War".
*Catherine Sakai:* Ambassador! While I was out there, I saw something. What _was_ it?
*G'Kar:* [Points to a flower with a bug crawling on it] What is this?
*Sakai:* An ant. So much gets shipped up from Earth on commercial transports it's hard to keep them out.
*G'Kar:* Ah, _'ant'._ Oop, I have just picked it up on the tip of my glove. If I put it down again, and it asks another ant, "What was that?" [laughs] how would it explain? There are things in the universe *_billions_* of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless, and if they're aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants, and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know, we've tried, and we've learned that we can either stay out from underfoot or be stepped on.
*Sakai:* That's it? That's all you know?
*G'Kar:* Yes, they are a _mystery._ And I am both terrified and _reassured_ to know that there are still wonders in the universe, that we have not yet explained everything. Whatever they are, Miss Sakai, they walk near Sigma 957, and they must walk there _alone._
And later in the series Ivanova verbally castrates the Walkers in to helping fight the Shadows and Vorlons.😊
One of my favorite tropes is when characters get handed something from a _much_ higher level of tech than they should have access to, and proceed to... bumble around with it. Fail to understand its functions beyond the basic stuff, use it in all kinds of unintended ways, and generally have no clue what they're doing. That has so much potential for both comedy and drama that it never fails to make me smile. Bonus points if there's a precursor or similar still around to facepalm at the mess
Reminds me of a line from one of the Ben 10 movies.
"What have you been doing with the omnitrix? Smashing rocks?"
I love how that feels in Caves of Qud. It's a VERY junk-punk world and even though Relics from a Before Time are everywhere, you need to study them to have any idea what they are or how they work.
Like, sometimes you pick up a relic and it's called a "Bunch of pipes" and it looks like a gun.. Nope, it's just a collapsible taser rod.
Or the reverse "Oh, man, this thing is just a folding chair, I mean look at the sprite... WAIT, what do you mean it's a bazooka?!"
One thing I've noticed with this trope is that it generally deals with one super precursor society.
And then there is Final Fantasy XIV, whose history is stacked with so many super precursors that it could compare to a cartoon sandwich.
To be fair, we finally have one definitive precursor that’s before all the other precursors, it just turns out they exploded so hard they shattered reality, creating space for more precursors.
All Tomorrows takes place over So long time scale it manage all those tropes
I love how may times we saw Dwarven Ruins from Skyrim as background footage, the Dwemer really do fill so many roles with this trope.
"sometimes [the point of the past is] to unbury it and take notes about the arrangement of its body and then try not to die the same way"
that's one hell of a line.
"Could God create a rock so heavy he couldn't lift it only the answer is yeah and it killed him it's kind of the worst" thats great one😂
13:24 lets also not forget Sauron achieving one of the greatest player-hater moments of all time by fooling the Numenorians (who literally defeated him and Morgoth in battle) into making him their religious leader and then basically allowing him to gaslight the entire civilization into thinking God had abandoned them. Truly an aspirational hater.
The only flaw in his plan not considering God would intervene directly. Internalized his own propaganda too much it seems.
@@merrittanimation7721 truly a pyrrhic victory
@@merrittanimation7721 Well, he got Numenor to be destroyed, so I'd say that is a win.
Kirby somehow has the same precursors have two different endings depending on how you look at it.
because Forgotten Land puts them squarely in the 'ascended' territory, with them abandoning their planet after not only winning when the eldritch horrors come knocking, but then using said eldritch horror to unlock fast travel.
flash forward an unknown amount of time, and those exact same people who ascended somehow manage to still die off and leave behind cool things to explore and occasionally beat up.
As a FFXIV fan, the Allagans come to mind. It's even been lampshaded on multiple occurrences that half the stuff that's going wrong in the game can be traced directly back to the Allagans (who admittedly were being manipulated by an even older precursor....)
Alisae even lampshades it during Dawntrail.
I think Metroid has a pretty interesting take on Precursors. The Chozo have all the hallmarks: lived a long time ago, created a bunch of cool and/or evil stuff, the works. But, the Chozo only started their fall relatively recently. As a race of warrior bird people, they attained near immortality. However, after thousands of years, they realized that they were too old to lay eggs anymore. So, they begin taking a more passive role on the galactic stage. And they are still around, they just like staying out of the public eye.
"the ancient work of an ancient precursor civilization that figured out how gears work and then exploded" caught me so off guard I actually laughed until I had tears in my eyes.
What a trope talk to release after watching the Detail Diatribe about how old as fuck Breath of the Wild's Hyrule is
Oldness for the existential crisis!
The fact that the Numenoreans were originally Tolkien's attempt at a future sci fi story because C.S. Lewis challenged him to write one but then was retooled to be in middle earths past is so funny to me because he did the ancient alien precursor trope AND the Atlantis trope with one people. A two for one deal. I guess when in the ancient tales of the silmarillion ancient people "flew on ships in the sky" its a 50/50 shot on whether there were magic ships or space ships. Both interpretations could be plausibly correct.
I love this, I also love when you see the conflicting ideas about the precursors because no one knows for sure. And that's satisfying because it has a comparison to modern anthropology and archeology, we don't know how much we don't know.
One of my 100% absolute favourite worldbuilding tropes *vibrates about ancient abandoned space megastructures
My favorite precursors are from the jak and daxter series. That reveal was the best.
Aye. Finding out they were Ottsels, and Daxter was functionally a Precursor the whole time was great
Daxter was secretly blessed. It's such a fun switcheroo on the context.
My favorite example has to be a ttrpg called Numenéra, because it just goes completely off the rails with precursors. The game takes place in the "ninth world", one billion years in the future. Eight previous worlds and countless civilizations have left their trash all over the place. This allows the worldbuilding to handwave literally anything from FTL engines and spatial folding to time travel and sentient viruses. All of these things are functionally identical to magic, but through the lens of sci-fi surrealism. The setting is really fucking weird and I love it.
"This just a rapture in a weird hat" is my favorite sentence in this video
My personal favourite precursor race is the one from the Subnautica series spoilers ahead, it's an older game but it's so worth it going in blind.
The precursors in subnautica are a hyper advanced alien hivemind species that evolved past the need for their evolutionary bodies and made new bodies they then transferred their minds into. They came to the planet the game takes place on to find a cure for a deadly virus called kharaa that killed over 100 billion members of their species. Over the course of the game you can find several structures of varying sizes, such as vents in the seafloor, research caches and facilities made to combat the virus. The spin off game below zero delves into them in a much closer way, me can find a high priority cache, and several artifacts which we can learn the use of from the probably last living member of the species.
"Sir! The Leopards-Eating-Peoples'-Faces Device has gone haywire!"
Well, I can't stop cackling now!
The moment this trope talk came up I immediately thought of the Mass Effect Series. The Protheans, Reapers and the countless civilizations that rose and fell before and after them. It is honestly insane and truly an amazing backdrop for a deeply personal and expansive story.
And then the leviathans even older 😵
@@nebulan Damn the squids. They 100% should be the main antagonist of the next Mass Effect games
What some people(aka pseudo archeologist) think are ancient Precursors: ancient technology Atlantic people.
What are actually precursor probably were: guess we're doing pastoralism and agriculture
And before that they were gods, then Gilgamesh, then a pandemic - the bane of the Universe
My sister is building a world where dragons used to be advanced and went extinct because war and hubris. She was like "shoot, I'm ancient-aliensing this aren't i?" I told her "why not? It's a fun trope!"
Well not in the real world. IRL normal people built things. Not aliens or atlantis
Fire
@nebulan I joke that first non homes was built because people had nothing to do once the food harvest. Aka built and make shit and see what happens
Heck, on ancient tech that wud seem unimaginable... Ancient humans were able to watch moving pictures on cave walls, thanks to their use of torches and optical illusions; and this is literally a tech that is likely even older than agriculture
Like, you tell someone that ancient humans cud watch moving pictures on cave walls, and theyll think youre mistakin reality for flintstones; but tis truth, ancient humans had TV, kinda sorta
Bcuz there are ancient secrets that have been lost to time, and then refound in time, like those movin picture cave walls....
That makes ppl much more willin to believe absurd things like the idea that the baghdad battery was actually meant to power ancient tech, or that ancient giant humans had ancient giant civilisations that built the weird circle of stones out in the middle of somewhere those stones had no way to get to... Or these pyramids werent made by these clearly less civilised ppl, but instd were the work of gods, bcuz we dont know how it was done
Notably, each of those are just examples where its been disproven, theres no doubt cases more aplenty that fit this model; the lack of knowledge becomes a fertile breedin ground for absurd justifications, like sayin that some magic sky daddy had an ancient ppl march and blow trumpets until an ancient city fell (an ancient city that fell way longer back than they claim)
I love the detail of Red using Thomas Cole's paintings from Blue's episode when describing the abundance and collapse of a civilization.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Ah, Zelda. The franchise where you play as the precursors (aka multiple heroes across the timeline) while simultaneously knowing Jack squat about what is going on because a fraction of important stuff happens off-screen:
•Goddess Sword Creation by either the Sages or Hylia or both?
•Golden Goddesses relation to Hylia and entrusting her with the Triforce (and now the Secret Stones)
•Zonai, nuff said
•The Barbarians
•The Shadow Temple
•The Ghost Ship housing a piece of the Triforce of Courage
•The Depths
•Dead Hand
•The Triforce in the Wild Era
•The Ancient Hero 10,000 years ago
•The recent ancient Sages in the Wild Era
And way, way, way more.
My favorite version of the ancient precursor is the one that destroyed themselves with superweapons that *definitely aren't* nuclear weapons, and whose fate *definitely isn't* a cautionary tale for our own civilization that has the capacity to make itself into a long-lost precursor in fifteen minutes
The intro of the video sort of gives me peace with my existential crisis, especially the part where you talk about how we have common ground with our ancient ancestors. I often worry about what the future brings but I think it's cool how we'll have some common ground with people from the future, even if I won't be around to see it by then.
I loved the precursor twist in Monster Ranger, which at first seemed like a Pokemon rip off, then it hit you with the realization that all monsters were artificial weapons of war made in the before times.
I like how guild wars 2 handles this trope. There were actually 5 precursor civilizations who tried and failed to unite against a common apocalyptic threat and were nearly eliminated in the process. The handful of survivors they had a falling out and gave been slowly fading into irrelevancy ever since (there's still inexplicably at least one survivor of each race by the beginning of the game)
This was 10,00 years ago. now there are 5 new races who all entered the world stage sometime in the past ~500 years (one of which, their "firstborn" are still alive kicking and in their prime)
At first the precursors seem far off and distant but eventually you realize they're just like you and if you cant succeed where they failed you'll meet the same fate as them.
I just sat in a seminar about the murals at San Bartolo and this trope talk is amazingly relevant
"Oh wait. This is just the Rapture in a weird hat."
BRUH.
AKA the name of the ancient people from the Jak and Daxter series the whole plot revolves around.
Also for me at least its one of my favorite things to tropes through oddly intact ruins from ancient civilizations. Just gives that sense of wonder of what happend to these people. Especially if their society was clearly more advanced.
or the name of the beings responsible for the entire Halo universe who then get pet cemetery'd into an existence threatening parasite hivemind hell bent on consuming everything and anything
The worst example in modern memory of this trope is Zelda tears of the Kingdom.
The Zonai are descirbed as an ancient civillisation that existed long ago, but the player never really learns anything about them. The entire Lore of this race can be summed up with "There used to be these guys called the Zonai, they lived in the Dschungel are and worshipped dragons, but then they started living in the sky and then they all died :(".
Why did they start living in the sky, how did they all die? Nobody knows and the game is not gonna tell you. What remains of the Zonai are the shrines, a few statues, some ruins in the sky and some ruins underground. We also never get to know what they were like from a cultural perspective, they were technologically advance in some ways, but that's it. The remaining stuff is so bland on a design perspective that it also becomes hard to interpret or figure out what these people where like by looking at the things they left behind.
I think to see just how bad that aspect is one can look at a game like Elden Ring. The art and architecture of the world reveals so much about the dozen or so factions in it. Entire societies build on the corpses of older societies build on the bones of even older societies. The entire world a big onion, layers upon layers of Art and culture that influenced each other. I am not saying "Zelda should be like Elden Ring", I am trying to articulate how empty the Zonai felt, how I think there is an actual chance the Zonai are just described as "an ancient society that died a long time ago" in whatever kind of text document Zelda TotKs story was conceived in. It just kind of makes me sad, because I wanted to be invested in exploring these ruins and the history of these people, but the game was not.
I'm suprised Red didn't mention Assassin's Creed Precursors. They're literally called the Precursors occasionally.
I think the “Stop trying to restart ancient empires you god damn bastards” lesson might in fact be mainly historical. The sheer number of people who’ve been killed by maniacs trying to get back Rome and Alexander’s Greece alone might give any sane person pause.
Perfect video for me today because I also feel very old right now.
Final Fantasy 14 fucking *loves* precursors. Technically, when a new player starts the story now, they're entering a post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-apocalyptic setting
damn just hit with a philosophical punch in the face of the vastness of reality right off the bat huh
The amount of Stargate love in this video is wonderful to see
Stargate truly did every flavor of precursor, from literally atlantis, to "they ascended to another plane of existence", to "their own hubris wiped them out", to "they befell a mysterious plague / got beaten by the gods". Like the Ancients are literally every flavor of precursor
My mind went to Fullmetal Alchemist. The ancient and thriving kingdom of Xerxes was destroyed after a human alchemist created a homunculus that manipulated certain people into killing themselves and the entire kingdom's citizens in order to become a living philosopher stone, both insanely powerful and immortal. And he would have done the same thing to Amestris were it not for the intervention of several people who learned of his plans and set out to stop him, including another living philosopher stone he created along with himself in the form of Van Hohenheim.
"I don't wanna say it's aliens..." but it's just ancient geniuses! Sorry!
with hubris as the magic ingredient.
Funny thing in the The Legendary Hero Is Dead! manga. The magic system was created by ancient human civilization so advanced in science that they figured out how to bend reality to their whims & the demon world was the original human world, demons are just humans mutated by magic(very easily cured). They got destroyed when they opened portal to eldritch dimension & was saved by their ancient gods & evacuated to the current human world
The Wind Walker footage shown where Link and Zelda are going to build a kingdom that isn’t Hyrule always makes me laugh because there’s literally a sequel that takes place in the Hyrule that the two built.
I honestly think one of the reasons fantasy settings are less likely to use precursor civilizations is that they're just way more likely to have a group of people that can each live forever. In most sci fi a civilization dying out a few thousand years ago is an immeasurable amount of time for people to forget and rediscover them, in fantasy that's like two generations of elves and "oh yeah the precursors? my grampa knew one in college" is just way less mysterious
Love that you included so much Stargate clips/references, it was the first setting I thought of when I saw the video title
Reading lovecraft but replacing each “eldrich” with “old as balls”
i actually like how the Elder Scrolls games deal with the Dwemer differently from Morrowind to Skyrim. In Morrowind they were a lesson in hubris. We have people (like vivec and the tribunal) who won over them, and grew up in a world where they were an active part of the world. Fast forward over 200 years, and all those people are long dead and the knowledge of who or what the dwemer were, how they were vanished, its all gone from the populace. Here, the dwemer becomes a creepy mystery. i like the idea of how the meaning of a lost civilisation changes depending on the time away from it - in the same way a person’s death takes different meaning through the decades and centuries.
There's also the inversion of this trope, where the setting is in a post-apocalyptic future, and we become the ancient technologically advanced ones. Waterworld, Thundarr the Barbarian, Planet of the Apes, etc.
“Attempting a military takeover of heaven is stupid”
Monkey: hold my elixir of immortality
7:45 and 10:20 or worse, when the two combine: "You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."
You will love The Qu and Gravitals from All Tomorrows
A version of this trope I dig is when we're so far past the post-apocalypse setting that our civilization has effectively become the precursors - Horizon is an example of this. It has a similar appeal to "small animal on a big adventure" in how it can comment on humanity. My favorite example of this I can't name because it's a major plot twist that the old civilization people have been talking about is in fact just earth.
It’s interesting how this video starts off with a very clear explanation of how people have always been people and no one moment in time is truly singular even when the people in that moment are wholly unique individuals, and then the trope itself proceeds to have a tendency to focus on ancient civilizations completely alienated from the modern people, either because they were uniquely hubristic and corrupt, or uniquely divine and perfect.
Man, I'd love to talk to Red about Halo and it's crazy lore about the Forerunners and Precursors. Follows a lot of the stuff she addresses.
I find it funny how the Forerunner Saga (seemingly) confirms that - unlike the Covenant species - Forerunner isn't some designation by one of the other factions but instead they're so ego driven that they called themselves that...
@@Jedi_Spartan I FUCKING HATE THAT THE BETTER PRECURSORS ARE CALLED VILLIANS BECAUSE GRAVEMIND ATTEMPTED TO RESIST
@@Jedi_Spartan I personally adored that factor from the books. It, pardon the word, "humanized" them. Every empire wants to say it was a boon to civilization, that it is responsible for the fact knowledge exists... when it fact, every empire has also survived through hypocrisy, and by subjugating and exterminating everyone that has opposed their power. It made the Forerunners complex in a fascinating way, coupled with the extensive and incredible worldbuilding they got from Greg Bear's work.
And we're not even getting into the Precursors themselves. Greg Bear made the Timeless One into one of the absolute best villains I have ever read in literature.
Interestingly, the Dwemer from the Elder Scrolls (their ruins pictured, but not called out by name), cover all those archetypes kind of at once, which is honestly kind of awesome.
They're ancient, built amazing things, then instantly all vanished for reasons no one fully understands, leaving behind the ruins and technology that set them apart from everything else then and now. The aforementioned technology is often used to do plot things, not the least of which is the integration of the Summerset Isles into the Septim Empire; the Imperials, in-universe, only managed to subjugate the High Elves by using a Dwemer superweapon.
And, the automata they left behind still exist within their ruins, and occasionally go out and 'cause problems. Some of those automata might take armies to get under control, meaning they slot into the space of 'the precursors are still around, and it's a problem'.
But, there's also one left, who's depicted in the Elder Scrolls III, Morrowind. He doesn't fully comprehend what happened either, as he was apparently exploring some outer plane when his race died, but he does have some interesting things to say about it.
But, we also kinda know what they did, and it's very much hubris-fueled self-destruction. The maniacs found the heart of a dead god in the bowels of their world, and instead of leaving well-enough alone, they decided to try and reach apotheosis with it (kind of; the Dwemer were atheistic - they knew there were powerful entities in the World that some may call gods, but to them, those were simply significant magical beings, to be understood and dealt with like one would any other intelligence, kind of like if they were Lovecraft characters that had the attitude of 'git gud, scrub! nothing is beyond my understanding' and they wanted to get on that level of power themselves). When one of them struck the heart to try and win a war, it basically popped his entire species out of existence, going so far as to leave their suits of armour standing empty in the postures they were in when it happened.
But what happened is also ambiguous enough that... maybe they ascended? They just vanished and no one ever actually learnt what became of them, so maybe they just managed to exit the world.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting that the creators of the Elder Scrolls managed to create a precursor civilisation that just... kinda fits all the roles that a precursor civilization can play. It's really an exercise in narrative versatility, if nothing else.
i love that the lesson at the end is just that even in fiction Archeology rocks
either that or most precursor ruins are actually Housing market schemes & were never really inhabited...
The Targaryens from A Song of Ice and Fire are an interesting example of "descendants of the Precursors". They do wield part of their power (dragos), but are mostly disconnected from Valyrian knowledge, so much so that they don't know how to build or forge the things their ancestors could.
Arthur C Clark handled the ancient precursor civilization beautifully with the Firstborn and the Ramans
You know it's good day when Red drops a trope talk
At least one Friday per month?
@@phastinemoon basically yea😂
In fantasy series, the Precursor architecture is either Ancient Roman ruins or Miyazaki Castle in the Sky
Czech author Miroslav Žamboch do similiar thing in his Koniáš/Bakly series with precursors civilisation was industrial revolution but instead of steam powered by advancment in understanding of magic
"Try not to die the same way" is such a wonderful way to articulate thw whole trope! I love it!
Shout out to the Witness from Destiny 2. A being made of a splinter faction of Precursors that decided to kill the rest of their race who didn’t agree to their plan to become a mind hive and try to calcify the universe.
And the motivation they have for doing so is actually quite interesting. The Traveler never speaks with the civilizations it fosters, leaving the Precursors' questions for meaning to their existence unanswered and causing them to feel scorned by the very god they once worshipped, essentially having a civilization-wide existential crisis that encouraged said splinter faction to embrace purpose in furthering the entropic death of the universe via realizing the Final Shape. And then the Traveler left upon such "blasphemy," encouraging much resentment amongst the Precursors and becoming a gestalt intelligence to set on a course of revenge against the false god & the civilizations it touched. All in all, a surprisingly good backstory for the big baddie to a FTP-FPS game.
Warhammer 40K has basically every flavour of precursor.
The Old Ones got bipped by the Necrons and the C’Tan, who are still around and only just waking up alongside their technology that is so incomprehensibly advanced it’s easier to explain how actual literal magic works.
The Eldar were created by the Old Ones, founded a massive empire after the war in heaven, then got bipped by their own depravity and decadence which created Slaanesh.
The Krorks, also created by the Old Ones, devolved into the Orks, who unlike the the other 3, didn’t leave behind any ancient cities or relics because Orks are utterly transient, and only the orkish culture remains because it’s hard coded into their biology, and their biology remains because the Old Ones made them really hard to truly get rid of.