 Why is fantasy stuck in the dark ages? When we say fantasy, that conjures images not just of wands and wizards, but also of swords and shields, of horses, gowns, armor, royalty, cloaks, daggers. In short, by default, we think of a historical setting. This is not going to be an exhaustive history of the genre. This is going to be extremely abridged and skewed for the purposes of this video. So before fantasy was the genre that we recognize today, stories about magic would have been predominantly fairy tales, fables, legends. Fairy tales and legends were conceived of long ago and passed down. Stories sort of outside of time and place with no particular reference to specific kings or specific places or specific geopolitical markers. Fairy tales often begin once upon a time, which seems to suggest that it was a time long ago. How long ago is unclear? In fact, the era in which the story is to take place by this opening is largely rendered irrelevant. A time is all we are given. All it can tell us is that it is not this time. Enter Tolkien. Okay, I'm skipping over a lot here. Certainly before Tolkien, we had things that would be regarded as fantasy. There were Elizabethan plays such as Midsummer Night's Dream or The Tempest. We had books such as Let in the Mist. There were authors such as Lewis Carroll and J.M. Berry who are definitely playing with fantasy in their work. So while there were magical and fantastical stories before Tolkien, the literary genre, as we know it today, a whole section of the bookstore dedicated to fantasy, capital F, awards dedicated to the genre of fantasy, capital F. The origin of this can mostly be traced to Tolkien. And Tolkien's books, unlike some other examples, were unexpectedly popular. Tolkien inspired imitators for decades. If one was writing fantasy, Tolkien was the guide, the gold standard, and still is for many. So in essence, Tolkien's ideas and preferences were what shaped the genre as a whole thereafter. And Tolkien was inspired specifically by Legends and Myths. Indeed, the project of Middle Earth and the stories that take place within was in essence to provide England with a mythic tradition of its own because Tolkien felt that there wasn't one really that that was lacking. He wanted England to have a mythic tradition that was akin to the mythic traditions that he so admired from other cultures. So this being the origin, the granddaddy of them all, it's unsurprising that all of fantasy thereafter has, whether consciously or not, likewise followed in this sort of mythic tradition. So let's talk about tropes and narrative conventions. What does it mean to be writing something in a mythic tradition? Is that necessarily built into the tropes that we associate with fantasy? Is it inextricable? What are some essential fantasy tropes? What I'm going to call necessary fantasy tropes, and I'm sure people will disagree with this list, but the function of this list is to kind of essentialize what is necessary for something to be regarded as fantasy at all, like the most core definition. So I think magic that is regarded as given in the world of this story, people know of it and expect it in the world of the story, magical creatures. There's something, there's nothing inherently magical about a horse with a horn or a giant lizard with wings that can fly, but these creatures don't exist in our world, so they are the very least speculative and oftentimes authors will also attribute to them other speculative magical properties. A magical object or artifact, so swords, necklaces, rings, wands, etc. Objects that are imbued with magic, either by a magic user or by the universe, some like vague unknowable magical force, something like that, and magic users. In stories where magic is not necessarily universally accessible to everybody, which is kind of a newer idea in fantasy anyway, you have a subset of characters or people, or a particular race that has access to magic, individuals like wizards or witches or mages, as well as entire species like fairies or elves. So those are what I regard as kind of necessary tropes for something to be regarded as fantasy. You don't need to have all of them, but you I feel need to have at least one of those things in some way for your work, for the work to be regarded as fantasy. But there are a ton of tropes associated with fantasy that go beyond that. So I have made a list of what I'm calling adjacent tropes that are non-essential, but nevertheless prevalent in fantasy. The chosen one. Many fantasy stories have a protagonist that was born in obscure mysterious circumstances, and they discover that the fate of the world actually rests upon their shoulders. Now obscurity and mystery of this kind is not as realistic or believable in an age where births are documented and tracked so meticulously, and one's birth entitling one to great power also is not as realistic in an era in which we at least purport to value meritocracy, which leads me to royalty. It seems rare to find a fantasy world that doesn't have at least something similar to, if not outright named as a monarchical system or some kind of hereditary power structure. Fairy tales tended to have royalty, often as a mechanism for reward. You know, you did the Gidead, you get a princess. Myths often also served the function of justifying the existence of this hereditary rule. So this royal family is in fact special because you see great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great granddaddy was given this magical sword, and therefore he's worthy and therefore so is everybody that came after him. And magic is often hereditarian stories. So a world built around the existence of magic might tend to link that with hereditary power. So you inherit the magic power, you also inherit the structural power. Quests. Many fantasy stories involve long, long journeys where a character or a group of characters have to travel vast distances and encounter various challenges along the way. Again, a journey like this is rendered pretty unnecessary in a world in which you have access to fast travel, trains, cars, buses, airplanes. Lastly, training in hand-to-hand combat. Often fantasy protagonists are either valued for their already great skills in hand-to-hand fighting or they are shown to be training and developing those skills over the course of the story. Again, these sorts of skills are rendered redundant in a world where one has guns, tanks, bombs, drones. Neither of these lists is intended to be exhaustive, but I think if we take a look at these lists side by side, we can begin to see where the problem lies. The necessary tropes don't really contain anything that would be a problem for a modern setting. However, the adjacent tropes would be very difficult to include in a modern setting. Based on this, it would seem it is a preoccupation with a particular form or style rather than the substance of fantasy that is at fault for this stagnation and this perpetual lack of advancement in fantasy worlds. Okay, I see you typing away furiously already. What about standpoint? What about flintlock? What about urban fantasy? Okay, so let's talk about those. First of all, the fact that these exist, that a name is given to them as like a whole subgenre that you have to specify that suggests that this is a deviation from the norm. These subgenres are titled specifically after the level of technology or the type of technology in their world, which seems to suggest that by default, fantasy means that it takes place in a less technologically advanced world. If your story takes place in a world that does have technology that advanced beyond the middle ages of the Renaissance, then it can't just be labeled fantasy, then it must be categorized by this deviation and instead labeled as urban, as steampunk, as flintlock. So flintlock, this just means that your fantasy world discovered and figured out how to use gunpowder. That's literally all that that means. Likewise, steampunk is just alternate history, where instead of progressing technologically the way that we did in the real world, rather technology went the route of steam and analog power. And urban fantasy, interestingly, this tends to indicate that your fantasy does not take place in a secondary world at all. It takes place in our real world, but with magic added. Sometimes there's a portal fantasy aspect to it where people from our modern world are transported to a secondary-ish world, but it still includes the existence of our modern world in the premise. Again, this is not meant to be an exhaustive list. There are other subgenres, and there are a ton of tropes associated with these subgenres. What I mean to highlight is this preoccupation with technology. These major subgenres aren't named after types of magic. They aren't named after the types of narratives. They are specifically calling out the level of technology in the world of the story. They tell you nothing about the type of story that it's going to be. Or do they? As I said, there are a lot of tropes associated with each of these subgenres. Could it be that these tropes arise out of the constraints and by the challenges presented by this level of technology being present in the world? So I'm planning to do a whole separate video about the topic of world building. This video is not that, but briefly, worlds do or they should define the types of cultures, the types of beliefs, the types of peoples that populate them. The fact that the type of technology present in a fantasy world is sufficient to tell you a great deal about the type of stories, the types of narratives, the types of tropes that you're going to find in them is indicative of this. Now I won't argue that that is the sole reason for certain tropes becoming prevalent in these subgenres. There are narrative conventions that crop up simply due to tradition or the success of a work leading to its replication by successors, you know, just like with Tolkien. He was so popular, so everyone imitated him. If a particular author wrote a story that was steampunk, flintlock or urban and it was really popular, people might copy other aspects of it. Preferences just sort of mutually rowing out of reader seeking stories for their tropes and then those tropes becoming ingrained because they are so popular and so then readers seeking them are creating a sort of feedback loop with the authors writing them, etc. But I do think that it is telling that these subgenres are ultimately defined by the level of technology present in their worlds. And everything else that falls under these umbrellas is convention, is trope, is tradition, but is not the defining feature of any of them. It is the level of technology. So are there any examples of fantasy books that demonstrate technological progress that aren't steampunk or flintlock or urban? The Green Bone Saga is the first that comes to mind, for me anyway. If you don't know anything about the Green Bone Saga, I highly recommend you look it up and you read it. I love it, but for context, for what I'm talking about right now, if you've truly never heard of the Green Bone Saga, because you've been living under a rock, the Green Bone Saga, by fondly, takes place in an entirely secondary world that is in its level of technology, at least where the saga begins, is sort of like 80s, 90s. Not a one-to-one, but sort of around there. And then as the story goes on, then the technology advances kind of at a similar pace as from the 80s through to the 2000s. The main protagonists are in a part of the world that is heavily inspired by Asia, but it is a secondary world. It is actually invented places that is not supposed to be a magical one-to-one comparison with an actual Asian country. It is made up just in the way that Middle Earth is made up, and the people and the culture and the magic and the history and everything is made up for this secondary world, just as it would be for a swords and sorcery type world. But it takes place in a setting that is most similar to, like, again, 80s, 90s, 2000s of our modern world. And the plot contains the protagonist of the story, the specifics of this. People are going to argue about this, but it's reminiscent of sort of mob families, crime families, syndicates, organized crime, this sort of thing, in an Asian-inspired setting, which then also then the world expands to show you other parts of the world, other countries that are adjacent to this country that, again, are not any one-to-one. They aren't specific countries from our real world, but they have their own invented cultures and languages that might be reminiscent of various places in our real world. So now that we've set up what the Greenbone Saga is, an argument could be made that this is urban fantasy. However, as I said before, typically urban fantasy does not take place in a secondary world. Typically, urban fantasy takes place in a magical version of our real world. The Greenbone Saga takes place in a wholly secondary world, entirely different geography, entirely different history, entirely invented from whole cloth. Likewise, I alluded to the fact that urban fantasy as a sub-genre has its own established tropes and conventions, and the Greenbone Saga doesn't really contain these. And when the Greenbone Saga has been listed in read-alike-type suggestion videos and lists, the read-alikes given for it, tellingly, have not been urban fantasy books. They have rather been non-fantasy stories like gang and mob fiction, crime family fiction, syndicates, espionage, things like that. Greenbone defies category, because fantasy as a genre is resistant to the idea that a world in which its stories take place could be modern. Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson. I only read the first era of Mistborn, but my understanding is that Era 2 of Mistborn, which is the second trilogy or I guess Quartet now, takes place many years onward from Era 1, but still in the same world. And that the world in the interim has progressed technologically, placing Era 2 more in the Flintlock era. While I have been told that I would not like these books, I would not enjoy them, and that I should not read them, I do vastly approve of this in concept, and I wish more fantasy worlds did this. Can't go without mentioning First Law by Joe Abercrombie, my truest love. The World of the First Law by Joe Abercrombie. The original trilogy takes place in a world that's, you know, swords and shields, axes and armor, hand-to-hand fighting, and gunpowder has just been kind of discovered, and they're just experimenting with figuring out its uses. In the second trilogy, The Age of Madness, this takes place several decades after the original trilogy, and it's taking place in an era that is somewhat similar to the Industrial Revolution. So what's my point? Why am I talking about any of this? Why does it matter? Again, I'll be talking more about world building in a whole separate video, but I think the two reasons that this bothers me so much are, one, it's limiting. There's so much less variety in fantasy because the entire genre is limited to pre-industrial, pre-gunpowder environment, and frankly it gets old, reading about the same sorts of settings over and over again that can really only differentiate themselves in aesthetics. Second, it hurts the believability of the world building. In a standalone, this doesn't matter as much because you're probably not going to be covering that a huge span of years, but longer fantasy series, particularly crafted fantasy worlds and have a lot of books taking place in them, the idea that they would remain forever unchanging, that they would always be in this perpetual state of pre-industrialization. That is neither believable nor interesting. Again, the idea that the Mistborn trilogies would show significant technological advancement between the two trilogies is absolutely fantastic and should be the norm. Personally, I would like to see more authors do what Fonda Lee, what Joe Abercrombie, what Brad and Sanderson have done, namely allow their worlds to progress. If we can invent secondary worlds that largely resemble medieval and Renaissance Europe, why can't we invent secondary worlds that resemble Europe post 1900? Better yet, why not fantasy worlds that resemble any and all parts of the world post 1950? I would love to see the world of the Witcher 500 a thousand years onward. Tell me about the private companies and government institutions that are putting their ties to the legendary era of the witchers on their websites. Robin Hobb write me another trilogy about the six duchies in a thousand years, and tell me about the corruption and the bureaucracy of the mutual defense pacts and agreements that are between them. Patrick Rothes actually just finished Dorsif Stone. Don't worry about anything else. Anyway, the point is I want to see fantasy authors stretch the limits of what the genre can do and engage in the thought exercise of how magic would affect the formation of more modern governments and institutions, how magic would influence the development of technology, how magical races would and contribute to tensions in a global economy. But what do you think? Are there actually a ton of books that do this already and I just don't know about them? Or do you prefer fantasy remain in this kind of like stagnant pre-industrial state? What are your thoughts? I would love to know. And if you think that this is a problem but I have completely missed the reason why this is a problem, I would love to know that too. But in the meantime, if you haven't already, read The Green Fund Saga by Fonda Lee.