Why Fantasy Worlds SHOULD Be Stuck in Medieval Times

This is Skyrim, a game set in a fairly archetypal

fantasy

world, complete with a largely

medieval

-inspired aesthetic, but if we travel back in time, say a thousand years, what would this world be like? I'm talking about a solid stone castle like the castle in Skyrim, for example. a staple of the late

medieval

period and quite similar to something like the real-world Bodium Castle in England, so logically speaking, if we're in the Thousand Years era, you'd think Da Castle's predecessor would look more like it. or less to The first Bailey castles, also known as a rickety hubel on a mound of earth surrounded by some wooden palisades that only emerged in Europe about 500 years before Bodium Castle was built poorly because it turns out that's how seen in Elder Scrolls Online, which is actually set a millennium earlier isn't that big of a change, huh?, but this lack of progression in the world raises the question of why the medieval period seems to last thousands of years longer.

That in the real world, the phenomenon of

fantasy

worlds

seeming to be perpetually

stuck

in medieval

times

is not unique to the Elder Scroll series, but quite the opposite; in fact, it is a fairly common trope in fantasy that is often referred to as has given the name medieval stasis. Some other examples of this that you would probably recognize would be the Lord of Jr Token. of the Rings or George R Martin's song Ice and Fire, perhaps better known by the name of its television adaptation Game of Thrones, going through the history of these

worlds

, you will find that several thousand years before the events of the stories they had place in them. society seems largely unchanged, let me take a moment and flip my previous Skyrim example and look into the future at George AR and Martin's westros the oldest parts of Winterfell The Stark ancestral castle is called the first turret with which this Tower is adorned gargoyles that were commonplace among Gothic architecture that was popular in the High and Late Middle Ages and in its current form the tower was probably built about 6,000 years ago.

Do you have any idea what something built 6,000 years after a late medieval castle would be like? It seems like I don't either because we're still about 5,000 years away from discovering it, but if I had to guess, it probably wouldn't even be built on Earth and it'll probably look more like this than this while I've only done it. I just scratched the surface of this topic. I think you probably already understand what I'm talking about even if you're not a connoisseur of the fantasy genre and, although the title of this video has already betrayed me, this is where I do my little bait and switch and change the script instead of arguing over that medieval stasis is pointless because, let's be honest, it's kind of a free slam dunk at first glance anyway.

I'm going to present my best arguments for why I actually believe it. it makes a lot of sense so hello my name is person it's grim and that's why fantasy worlds

should

be

stuck

in medieval

times

forever okay let's get straight to the point imagine being attacked by a deadly disease say the bubonic plague and you have two paths To look for a cure, the first option is the typical medieval doctor who tells you that you need to get the most damned head you can imagine from a bunch of slimy leeches that he fed in the same river where you emptied your waist bucket down the Tomorrow because?

Well, according to that doctor it is because you have too much black B in your body that is making you melancholic and to cure the plague your four humors must be perfectly balanced all this and at the end of the day your chances of survival do not change or, frankly, maybe even worse, the second option on the other hand is a type that will snap your fingers and explode, you will be cured immediately, so be honest, is there any reality where you would willingly submit to the first type over the second ? To be fair, I'm sure there is at least one person who would choose option A over option B because it's no secret that there are real people in our non-fictional world who would fly to the other side of the Earth and pay their entire life. savings to get a supposed miracle cure from a quack who's really just a homeless man selling a sample of his perpetual stew that his grandmother started cooking during the Great Depression, but if you think about it, isn't that just more evidence of I mean those people are essentially putting their faith in magic, so if they had lived in a world where magic was actually real, their decision would be perfectly logical assuming they were looking for a real magician and not some guy in a boiling alley a freshly captured Rat King anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that there are a few things I can think of that magic can't just work better needs food, the local druid community can make the field sprout More crops than the entire city could eat. in one year you broke your leg oh the CL at the temple down the street can fix you in a housing crisis don't worry an expert team of magicians is conjuring all the stone and wood you will need and you are using . his telekinesis to assemble it into beautiful new housing developments.

Are you late for a business meeting on the other side of the continent? Good thing the company bought you a ticket for the teleportation service, so what's the point of concentrating your efforts and resources on technological development, especially when you've already mastered magic to such an extent that it can do anything, even technology. science fiction might do it, it's just not very reasonable to go out of your way and invent an alternative to a problem that already has a solution, sure we create electric motors for cars even though we have perfectly functional gasoline powered cars, but Unless magic is powered by resources as finite as fossil fuels or causes the environment to degrade from prolonged exposure to the Arcanum, I don't see why magic would do it. be replaced in a similar way.

If anything, it would be better if we could replace our own technologically produced cars with haunted wagons because, unlike a Tesla's autopilot, a magical vehicle probably wouldn't veer out of its lane just to hit a family. of pedestrians. four for fun and if we continue with the example of the electric car, have you seen how stubborn some people are when it comes to their beloved combustion engines? There is simply no way for people to voluntarily switch to technological vehicles when they have grown up. Accustomed to magical modes of transportation now I know what you might be saying, most medieval fantasy worlds don't have magical vehicles available to everyone and you're right, but considering how much magic is used in many high fantasy worlds I suspect they are closer to figuring out how to make a magical car than a gasoline one, sure we don't know how long it would take to make the first one, but we do know that it took our world almost 400 years after the end of the Middle Ages before we could make the second one. .

I started driving cars and it's not like the first cars were much better than the horong wagons. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that you need to invest a lot of time and effort to go through the entire chain of technological development before you can actually get to the point where you start replacing magic to feed an entire society that is becoming has accustomed arcane magic with equivalent technology, you will need a lot of electricity and if they invent the steam engine first, that will not be possible. enough, then you will have to invent nuclear fission and maybe even nuclear fusion, which we still can't do properly in our world, meanwhile, if magic has been explored since times in Memorial, when you reach an era where great civilizations begin to magically flourish.

The knowledge might already be advanced enough to the point where leading arcanists could begin work on the magical equivalent of a nuclear power plant, but behind every invention, whether scientific or magical, is a person or a team of people. people, but who are these people and how are they different. between reality and fantasy, well, let's take a closer look. It is a well-known fact that many fantasy worlds are filled with various races of people who are incredibly long-lived. With that in mind, I'm going to assume one's position. Of you dirty little medieval stasis deniers for a moment, I'm sure you're probably thinking to yourself that the vast amount of additional knowledge and skills a single scientist or engineer could possess over his or her vastly improved lifespan would fuel society towards the future at rest. next speeds because instead of having to spend decades constantly repeating what is already known simply to train the Next Generation, the greatest Minds could continue to advance beyond the frontiers of the unknown for much longer. they could have done it if they had been immortal like the Token elves or even lived a couple of centuries like some of the humans of Middle Earth looking at you Aragorn, your hands are a smooth faced octogenarian, it really makes you wonder, doesn't it ?

We could have sooner mastered the understanding of mathematics and the mechanisms of nature if the myus tees were immortal. Could Leonardo da Vinci have managed to create a functional flying machine centuries before the Wright brothers if he had been given another hundred years of life each 1980? Homes would have been equipped with high-speed Wi-Fi if Nicola Tesla was still alive at the time or perhaps they would have just given him a thousand years of life. Elon Musk might one day come up with a viable construction of an Elden ring, sorry that may have been a bit too far, I understand if he needs multiple shields to keep his thin skin protected from the bad guys on Twitter.

Oh well, I've already reached my quota of how many Elon jokes I can make in a single video, but he really feels that way sometimes. You've found Esmeralda, uh, gold like you've found gold with jokes like these. Surely the world's greatest minds would achieve even greater things in the fields of science and engineering if they lived for hundreds of years. Right, my answer. Maybe it's not necessary to go back too much to the last section of the video, but again, why would you research the natural sciences in the first place? Do you really think Benjamin Franklin would care about electricity if he could shoot lightning bolts from the tips of his fingers?

I think that, after all, these great minds would be better off focusing their efforts on studying the Arcane if you had to dedicate your life to a single discipline, whether magical or technological, in a time when you could try to invent the first mechanical watch. that's something accurate to tell time or you could create a spell to manipulate time itself. Is it really a difficult choice? Furthermore, I suspect that having this generational reset can be a great benefit for development, since with each passing year the world changes, the borders between countries fluctuate, the language evolves, the culture advances, etc., but that is what people are born with. and they grow up in different landscapes than their ancestors and can therefore approach any given situation with a different perspective, let's say a scientist has been researching the same niche of his topic for his entire adulthood.

In life it is then easy to become blinded by tunnel vision or to become hung up and subsequently held back by old and outdated information from your youth. There is even some data indicating that older, more experienced doctors may actually have worse outcomes compared to their younger doctors. counterparts, however, this is certainly an oversimplification and even if these clever old men invented something new. What are the chances that their equally ancient contemporaries will accept these advances with open arms? It's no secret that older people tend to be quite skeptical when it comes to new technology, be honest, how many times have you met someone over 50 who gets excited about all the new technology flooding their homes?

Yes, exactly, the older you get, the less excited you'll probably be about all the rapid and constant changes brought about by the development of technology, so if humans start to get tired of having to relearn how their remote control works after only a few decades into his life, how fed up do you think an elf would be after a thousand years of that nonsense? you're dealing with people who are extremely long-lived, if not simply immortal, will probably only astonish society even more and that goes doubly true for the political side of things, sometimes what you really need to get over a hurdle in history is a little instability. y Generational changes are probably the healthiest and most natural form of instability as they age, people become more set in their ways and politically they tend to become conservative or even regressive,to the point where I firmly believe you are lying if you say you haven't.

I heard most of the old Boomers complain about how things were better before and how terrible it is now that society has been flooded with new technology and immigrants like a proud Zoomer. I believe that children these days are precisely what we need to see real change in society for the better. o To make matters worse, that applies equally to a world stuck in medieval times. If you want someone to challenge the status quo of medieval feudal society, it will be the energetic and passionate young people who strive for betterment, you can call the youth movement.

Naive or foolish, all you want, but real change doesn't exactly come from geriatric husks in Congress and if we're talking about revolutionary ambitions, if someone hasn't reached their breaking point after being bossed around by an inbred Noble for 50 years, then I will probably never prefer that the real revolutionaries who are most likely to bring change to society, whether society is ready for it or not, are those who have just tasted injustice and immediately decided that they will not accept it. These are the Visionaries and architects of the new age who will not kneel their overlords who see people as nothing more than gears and a great productivity machine, why settle for mediocrity when you can strive for greatness and, So why settle for being a peasant at the bottom of a feudal food chain when you can rise up and destroy the oppressive hierarchy that keeps you in the mud all together a specter is a haunting fantasy the specter of medieval stasis unless you wish an indefinite stasis a time bubble preserved and unchanging then let people die at a young age or be stuck with millennia old elves who refuse to change their ways, if so their lives depended on it or something.

I think we

should

probably move on now. This is not so much an argument for why it makes sense from the point of view of the unclean, but rather why it is a logical choice. On behalf of the author, let's be honest, the Middle Ages lend themselves very well to the fantasy genre. Just look at some famous medieval works of fiction set in his contemporary era, like the Divine Comedy Beowolf or the Arthurian Legends, and you'll find stories that fit. The fantasy label fits like a glove The Middle Ages were simply filled with myths and fantastic tales that have inspired countless authors over the following centuries to write their own stories about magic and monsters, while there are a million ways to write a traditional narratological fantasy story The concept of the hero's journey is the quintessential format that has laid the foundation for the genre as we know it today and, just as the hero's journey fits perfectly into fantasy, Medieval Times fits perfectly with the hero's journey, making it a better one. fantasy tale about a medieval knight who travels through uncharted lands on a quest to slay an ancient dragon or a pompous 18th century aristocrat with a white wig and a face full of powder, leaving the comfort of his silk-covered Chong for the first time and what makes for a better lair for a powerful dark lord is a castle that has been damaged and rebuilt a dozen times over the centuries where every little scar on its battlements tells the story of a siege or a palace newly built that can be penetrated by a single man by throwing a stone through one of its 100 glass windows.

I'm not saying that one of them is going to be inherently a better fantasy story because both can be done equally well or poorly, but I do think it's clear to see which is the most natural time. As for these types of narratives, not only do feudal societies and general aesthetics fit the genre, but more importantly, the Middle Ages are already encoded with fantastical elements in the way we view those times. I also understand that the view we have of the medieval era is heavily distorted with anachronisms and misconceptions that romanticize and demonize different aspects of the era;

This is, of course, a result of how popular the Middle Ages are as a setting for fantasy fiction both today and in centuries past, which in turn has caused By combining these fictional reconstructions of the period with real history, we imagine Knights as these invaluable paragons of virtue and we see medieval cities as gray, drab slums covered in mud, when the reality is somewhere in between: medieval common people actually had decent hygiene and the knights were as human as you. and I, that is, they had as many vices as virtues, but even if our image of the Middle Ages is distorted or even combined with elements of antiquity or the Renaissance, that pseudo-historical era that your favorite books, movies. and the games are set in great stories, of course, you can also go back in time and find an equal number of fantastic tales with the mythologies of ancient Greece and Egypt as the main examples of this.

Ancient Greek and Roman mythology, for example, was not for anyone. surprise, a very common source of inspiration for Renaissance authors, many of whom wrote stories that could be considered proto-fantasy. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is an example of this, as it is set in ancient Athens and presents the thesis of the Greek hero along with a colorful cast of magical fairies, perhaps not so Greek, without a doubt, a quite fantastic story. eh, but the further down the river we float beyond Antiquity into the Middle Ages, the less epic fantasy stories tend to become, the Renaissance still maintains a safe fantastic air. but we go even further, to the Enlightenment, and find a time that thematically is the very antithesis of fantasy, yes, as I hinted before, a skilled author can easily make an interesting fantasy story set in any time in human history , especially if you play with a dichotomy. that is created when the supernatural meets an age of rationalism, but there are certain obstacles you must overcome, there is simply no inherent call to adventure in the age of Enlightenment, the world was already largely explored, science was evolving faster than ever and hard work was being done to eliminate the outdated myths of the Old World, for lack of a better word to enlighten people soon after, as we approach the industrial age, we instead see new ways appearing of transportation, mainly trains and more reliable ships that effectively helped drink the world. and suddenly a trip like the odyssey would no longer make sense, and even less so once we reach the modern era as such, the Medieval Era and to a lesser extent the Renaissance was the last point in the history of humanity that invited it to take place. truly epic fantasy It is also worth noting that medieval stasis does not implicitly mean that society has never progressed, only that it cannot advance beyond the Middle Ages, even if a world has been stuck in medieval times for, say, 10,000 years. ;

There may have been a time before that when the world was more like the Roman or Neolithic era, so let's assume that a fantasy world may have started before the Middle Ages, why then do so many authors choose to make it? Did the entire history of your worlds look the same as the present? Personally, I think it's mainly due to In addition to wanting to maintain a more cohesive and simplified tradition while also giving it more epic proportions, there is something amazing about imagining a dynasty of monarchs going back thousands of years, all of whom lived in the same old castle if we go back to a song.

Ice and Fire, for a moment, one of the main strengths of the series is the noble houses of the world, for example, the Starks were founded by Bran the Builder, who also began the construction of Winterfell considering that he lived between 8 and 10,000 Years before the events of the book, realism would dictate that the only thing he was building was a thatched hut with the use of stone tools, just to put things into perspective. 8,000 years before the end of the Middle Ages, humans had not yet begun to make any type of medal tools. and the British Isles were still part of mainland Europe plus, as I mentioned earlier, the scars on the world tell the story of the rone, a castle that has seen thousands of battles and withstood the rise and fall of a dozen empires, each one of whom abandoned the Mark himself is excellent for a work set in that world, since such an author can take advantage of the fact that he can extend the Middle Ages indefinitely into the future without having to worry about the world ending in a state that could be intrinsically hostile to the world. kind of story they want to tell again, if you want to create a medieval themed world of truly epic proportions to accompany your equally epic fantasy story, you'll just have to extend the time a bit, but there's also one more explanation for medieval stasis and for this We're going to have to get a little conspiratorial, so put on your 10 big helmets and get ready because we're about to uncover a conspiracy so massive it'll make Epstein's death look like a legitimate suicide.

Brian Martin, professor of social sciences. at the University of Woolen Gong outlines the concept of intellectual suppression by the elite in his essay, aptly titled Elites and Suppression, his thesis assumes three conditions under which such oppression is possible when there is a group that seeks to maintain its power and its associates. two privileges: there is a set of ideas or practices from which intellectual descent is possible and three: there is a counterpower that can threaten the first group with the use of an established intellectual descent. If we operate under these assumptions, it is clear to see that the first group responsible for intellectual suppression would be represented in this case by magicians and other beneficiaries of magical power, while the intellectual offspring in this example comes from natural sciences and engineering. , which in turn threatens to create a counterpower in the form of ordinary people equipped with more accessible alternatives to Magic On the more innocuous side of things, what this means for the magic class is that they will be forced to compete with science and technology, while on the more severe side of things, it could threaten their existence if modern weaponry were to prove.

With this in mind, it should be obvious by now that the magical class in fantasy society would probably become would oppose the development of technology, while these worlds sometimes flirt with Renaissance ear attacks by implementing, for example, very early forms of firearms. The typical rigid cut-off point for worlds in medieval state stagnation tends to be drawn in the Enlightenment, considering that it was an era defined by intellectual revolution. It is not surprising that stagnation occurs before these times. Perhaps the only weakness of magic is the lack of availability, although I hinted that magic can solve all kinds of needs, from curing diseases to allowing you to teleport around the world in an instant, it is likely that there are not enough magic seekers with the ability enough to provide these services to everyone, but if we look at the basic economic model of supply and demand when supply is low and demand is high, prices tend to skyrocket and before enough time has passed to allow the technology to catch on up to date because, let's be honest, the medieval ages are still centuries away from proper medical care or mass production of food, the wizards will probably have gained so much financial and political power that they could easily maintain their monopoly on almost everything by suppressing the masses as such, just the things that magic users would want, probably wouldn't see significant developments, for example, it wouldn't be surprising to find more sophisticated forms of waste disposal could come to these fantasy medieval cities, as clearing out the shelters of other people is not a glamorous or desirable job, especially for someone like a wizard in a world of magical technology, it is a great power equalizer because, as soon as a new technology is invented, it can be used by almost anyone, while the magician might have to spend decades learning to shoot a beam of fire from the palms of his hands.

Any Joe Schmo with a gun could probably kill him, sure the wizards could have. some passive words to deflect normal 9mm bullets, but could it withstand a .50 caliber fired from a sniper rifle so far away that they wouldn't even see or hear it coming, and even if they could survive, I have a feeling that their average Arcanists couldn't do much against a thermonuclear warhead attack on their city. Consider that now Merlin new inventions will surely occur, but this is precisely wheresuppression comes into play. Say, for example, someone invents a prototype of a sufficiently sophisticated weapon. that they could threaten a wizard once they find out about it, which will prevent the central agency of Wizards from knocking on the inventor's front door and that that same inventor could soon be discovered having blocked them with three crossbow bolts in the back out of his head and with no remaining traces of his prototype type or his blueprints.

On a more serious note, an interesting example of technological suppression occurring in a famous work of fantasy literature can be found in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series, while Mbor begins closer to a Renaissance-inspired setting than a medieval setting. one, it gives us a very interesting case to prove my point at the beginning of the series. Society has been trapped in this type of stasis for almost a thousand years due to suppression by the ruling Lord, a seemingly unkillable tyrant who has reigned over Empire for so long, however, as we move forward a few centuries further of the original mbor trilogy and we look at what is known as the second era of the franchise, we find that the world has actually progressed at a normal pace in Era 2, the world of Mistborn looks more like the Victorian era of the century 19th century, complete with industrialized factories and, you guessed it, guns, coin tosses, and stalkers, i.e. people with magical abilities to telekinetically push or pull metal.

Ain are the best in combat because they can manipulate bullets, there is a Capture the development of aluminum bullets and so-called Haze assassin bullets made specifically to kill these people has greatly leveled the playing field and the Democrats monopolized the supremacy of combat magic, so while that doesn't morally justify the ruling Lord's suppression of science and technology in Hindsight, it also validates his fears, even if he himself could survive being shot in an Empire, It cannot be maintained by a single individual and its super-powered magical minions definitely wouldn't be as powerful or dangerous if the average citizen kept a gun under their pillow.

Lastly, I want to talk about an even more potent power that looms over many worlds. fantasy and this one doesn't even require you to be a conspirator to believe and they are the gods in fantasy worlds, it's not uncommon to find gods or something like that. divinely powerful entities that actively meddle in the affairs of mortals, so in a world where the gods regularly communicate with their respective priests, champions, and perhaps even the common people, it is not difficult to imagine that they could also have certain preferences regarding how the world should look. like maybe the churches of the world have kept their gothic architectural style because the deity they are dedicated to really likes the way it looks and maybe the gods themselves also have a pension for the fantastical and adventurous stories we've already established they suit so perfectly to the medieval era that they might even have the foresight to see the end of the world in a nuclear explosion. apocalypse if mortals were allowed to pursue their scientific ambitions and determined that it would be best to nip it all in the bud before it could blossom into a horribly beautiful mushroom cloud or simply fear that an intellectual revolution like that of the Enlightenment would divert the focus of the cult people and would cause the decline of their power.

If you want a literary example of divine intervention against human technology, look no further than the Old Testament of the Bible or, more specifically, the story of the Tower of Babel according to In history, early humans were determined to create a tower as high enough to reach the sky. They didn't like the sound of it and were worried that this was just the beginning of the mischief the humans could pull off together. The Abrahamic God decided to do a little trolling. They all speak different languages, as a result, the humans involved in the tower building process were no longer able to communicate effectively, so suppressing their progress was not the most pleasant thing because you would think that you could have politely asked them to stop building. the tower since it literally is OMG, but hey, I guess it's not the worst thing that's ever happened to a tower, at least considering what happened in New York City at 88:13 a.m. of September 11.

Sorry to be convinced, but okay, so maybe it doesn't make as much sense as I think. said in the introduction to this video, but I legitimately believe that there are cases where medieval stasis is not completely irrational but of course, if I leave out the whole lawyer act for a moment, I fully admit that most worlds probably should progress beyond the Middle Ages. at least from a realism standpoint as a fantasy fan, however, I love me some magical medial worlds, no matter how over the top they may be at this point, there are probably a million counterarguments that I couldn't address in this video as much because for the sake of running time and because some of them are just pretty good counterarguments, if you can think of any.

I'd love to read them in the comments and while you're at it, maybe leave a like or dislike on the video and subscribe to the channel. Of course, all my arguments are also purely hypothesis-based and don't even apply to my initial examples, but are more suited to generic dungeons and dragons. High fantasy worlds where almost everything is possible with magic. A Song of Ice and Fire for one is a very low fantasy setting, meaning it should probably evolve very similarly to the real world, as there is no Magic available that can replace all the functionalities of modern technology in The Lord. of the Rings, on the other hand, we actually get a glimpse of Forward Progression at the end of The Return of the King while it was cut from the films.

The Hobbits actually returned to the Shire only to find that it had been devastated and industrialized by Soromon or well it is industrialized until the hobbits decide to get rid of everything and go back to their old ways maybe that's the answer anyway I'm sure There are many fantasy worlds that would be miserable to live in, but aren't all fantasy stories still inherently escapist to some degree? Even if they are brave and grim in never allowing their worlds to become industrialized, the problems the characters face remain. distant from those we face in our daily lives; Yes, the life of a medieval peasant was not glorious and it is not glorious in most fantasy worlds, but it was in the simplicity of his daily life.

The day can be easily romanticized, which is why many fantasy heroes with humble beginnings are torn from their happy lives as farmers and blacksmiths by the Ultimate Evil or go on adventures specifically because they are so bored of the same peaceful lives many of us dream of. . from being trapped in a late-stage capitalist dystopia, hobbits are in many ways the very apotheosis of this romantic fantasy existence when you get to Liv Token's Rose tinged in an anachronistic medialized hybrid of the 19th century, why would you want to progress further beyond that point? I mean, just compare the joyful, peaceful lives of the Shire hobbits to the stressful ones of ours.

They don't even really benefit from the magic of their worlds, and yet their simple lives are more satisfying than anything you could hope to have in a corporate metropolis - a tight-knit community isolated from all the evils of the world spending their days eating their six meals and tending to the crops, why then disturb the Quiet Sounds of Nature with noisy Machinery, why poison its crystal clear rivers with chemical waste and why pollute the blue Skies and its clouds with a suffocating smog because, in the words of Bill Baggin himself , it is not bad to celebrate a simple life.