On Worldbuilding — Island Civilisations! [ GoT | Japan | Ghibli ]

there are so many fictional islands out there to talk about tolkien's numenor lapita from castle in the sky new zealand which as we all know doesn't exist but let's talk about world building the civilizations that live on them this video was actually picked by my patrons and if you would like to support this kind of long-form educational content that takes a lot for me to research and write and i want to keep absolutely accessible and free then please do so at my patreon at the link down below there's also access to the discord and supreme leader momo is very pleased with their subjects there part one culture one of the things that i feel george r martin did really well and were built in the greyjoys and the iron islands is how their island environment informed their culture the islands bear the brunt of terrible ocean storms and the ocean around them is tumultuous and deadly because of this the islands are inhospitable they've got little room for farming or growing livestock and to survive they need to raid and pillage the westeros coast life as hobbs might say is nasty brutish and short one facet of culture here is their value and belief systems and i think that these pressures contributed to why the drowned god religion centers around answering a particular question why is the world so hard and cruel ah well harold over there had the answer but uh he died a painful death their answer being it's a dog-eat-dog world and being strong means taking what you need indirectly their island environment justifies their seasonal raiding practices because the drowned god is forcing people to be strong by making them fight to take what they need to survive hence the greyjoy words we do not sow instead they reap but not all islands are inhospitable hellscapes like australia we have the fertile and green hawaii in the pacific these environments will inspire different philosophical questions and value systems hawaii's mythology for example puts a lot more emphasis on caring for the environment especially the ocean that they rely on because where the ocean is harsh for the iron islands the ocean is warm and full of easy to catch food in polynesia in philip braves the mortal engine cities themselves become kind of like islands in this dystopian wasteland world the ocean per se is just the endless wasteland of the world and it's a source of death and unknown constantly competing for and asking who deserves resources they come to believe in a philosophy called municipal darwinism a kind of survival of the fittest for cities and they revere explorers like valentine who venture out beyond their island and come back with stories and knowledge because they don't know much about it consider how your island's relationship with the water might shape the questions they ask and thus the values they hold the second facet of culture is language and metaphor how we speak about and analyze the world around us in my home country new zealand which of course doesn't exist maori sayings are full of metaphors and similes that use island and ocean imagery this phrase likens a lazy person to someone who waits on the short eat fish while ejada koe iteringa hutipunga likens someone who contributes the most to the one who pulls up the anchor robert jordan draws on similar ideas we're building the sea people in his wheel of time series where the ocean becomes a metaphor for power and divinity in their stories and language ruling the ocean is equivocated to the greatest power a civilization can have the metaphors and imagery that civilizations use is so often drawn from the challenges that they face and the tools and resources that they rely on for your island civilization what do they fear or hate or value and which resources do they rely on this might give you a basis for the imagery that they would naturally use the idioms and sayings that they might employ when talking what all this has in common is their relationship with water positively and negatively i will note that it's probably best to avoid the planet of hats trope where oh they live on an island they must all be swashbuckling pirate types who want to plunder the world for gold and bury their treasure ah their relationship with the water is just a factor in how they developed and the larger the island the less it'll matter part 2 the mythical island i think it's worth considering not just what your island civilization is like but what the rest of the world thinks of them because islands and island civilizations have held a strange place in the cultural zeitgeist people have imagined them as divine idealized or magical places tiernock and celticmyth atlantis turtle island and native american myth hawaiki and polynesia almost all of the greek gods were born on a different island while the dead are often separated from the living on an island philip pullman draws on that mysterious island trope in describing his land of the dead and the amber spyglass when you die you go with death in a boat out across the lake into the mist what happens there nobody knows no one's ever come back hayao miyazaki explores how this kind of world building can play into a tense story in lupita castle in the sky miyazaki plays on our tendency to mythologize islands as these distant magical places that we cannot reach with a floating city called lapita that few in the world have seen the belief that the city will bring power and riches and domination to those who reach it creates the conflict and the story between different factions at war with one another two things to keep in mind here firstly it's the distance and difficulty of reaching some island civilizations that allow us to mythologize them as well as being vastly different because they may have evolved independently in our technologically advanced era we don't mythologize as much because we can pretty easily find out what they're really like there's far fewer gaps in our knowledge and not nearly as much imagining to do consider the ease of movement level of technology and the key differences between the island and other nations to find out how they might mythologize them either as demons or angels or something else entirely part three island politics it might surprise you to learn that over half the island civilizations today are archipelagos rather than just one or two islands and this really affects their political setup dag echna's paper archipelagos and political engineering found a number of important things one islands are prone to unitary democratic governments because of small populations but two archipelagos naturally foster decentralized power structures like a federal system with islands within the archipelago governing themselves they're also more prone to bicameralism where you have two houses of parliament and multi-island nations are especially prone to quotas where different groups are legally required to be represented in parliament this fits with how different islands within a country may view themselves as culturally distinct peoples that need representation and it speaks to how they're more culturally diverse in general ursila gwen's a wizard of earth sea is an interesting case of the difficulties in establishing centralized governments and island archipelagos and their propensity for secession and independence movements or just chaos earthsea is an archipelago with a history full of kings queens and warlords trying to establish a long-lasting multi-island empire and struggling and failing to do so a period of 300 years saw nobody ruling much of the archipelago at all while there are at least six different examples of incredibly short-lived empires which fall apart because they didn't have the ability to maintain lines of communication resources and military influence even with the technology or widespread magic the technology is medieval and while there is magic in earth sea it's restricted to a few not enough to bridge the gaps between islands politically most of our archipelago nations only solidify during the colonial era while single islands go way back consider how technology magic and how environmental elements make central governance more difficult or easier as well as whether the island is federalized by camera or users quotas it's worth noting that archipelagos are also far more prone to cultural diversity with different practices religions and even languages developing on different islands because of that geographic isolation the clearest case of this is in indonesia malaysia and it's why earth sea is so full of wildly diverse cultures despite their closeness and one of my favorite and weirdest examples of this is in greg egan's diaspora humans are digital beings who all live in these sort of giant hard drives but each hard drive is pretty isolated from the others kind of like an island they develop vastly different cultures in that digital sphere one city decides that they all want to experience time 10 times faster than everyone else so they code themselves to do it another chooses to have physical robotic forms that they inhabit to emulate old humanity don't just think in terms of our cultures today think about the unique elements of your world and how they interact with being an island in ways that we don't have consider just how geographically isolated your islands are from who and what their major differences might be though i do want to note that ethnic linguistic and cultural diversity is more influenced by other forces that you should not forget trade religious proselytization colonialism war and so many others we can't just reduce it to environmental determinism part four law as we all know pirates of the caribbean is an absolutely true story hello poppy but it is worth noting the struggles of policing an archipelago or a series of floating islands or a series of structures in space or even bayer a series of disparate planets it's true that during the golden age of piracy pirates were especially strong in archipelagos the caribbean and philippines in particular and today one of the pirate capitals of the world is indonesia it's because you can't easily blockade or control movement around a series of islands there aren't highways in the way there are on continents making it perfect for a criminal underworld shannon brooks's shadow of the conqueror addresses this world-building idea exactly in a series of floating islands being a haven for pirates and lowlifes unable to be purged because people simply hid fled or escaped and it's a huge resource experience to exert force over somewhere like this in the first place this is also why the other floating islands in everfall have remained distinct political entities secession movements or rebellions are simply easier to pull off when you've got a natural border like this related to this is how islands and archipelagos are naturally more democratic and by that i don't mean that they're naturally democracies in a paper by henry schrepnik he found that nations like this were more accountable democratic and free even if they had a monarchy or ruling class of sorts the smaller populations meant people have more direct access to government and the difficulties of maintaining control across an archipelago encourage accountability even if your world building includes a monarchy or ruling council of nobles look at features that might make them more accountable maybe the monarch is more beholden to advisors though we did also find that they were more likely to be democratic in the first place so maybe if your world is entering an age of enlightenment where democracy is flourishing an island civilization might be the first one to do it all of this also means that it's pretty rare for islands to be world superpowers neil stephenson's snow crash has a really interesting bit where he talks about how corporations have become so powerful in this corporate dystopia that they're able to manipulate small governments or islands even to give them favorable regulations given corporations can operate and earn money worldwide while countries cannot when thinking about how the great powers of your world interact don't just think about countries and armies and kings but about corporate economic powers does your island civilization rely on a certain import of resource and how does this affect their labor laws or regulations with the companies that import them the clearest example of this is that in a shocking twist of events an oil company was evil shell oil controls over 20 of nigeria's petroleum resources and they used this influence to flaunt state laws regarding oil spills and at least a huge environmental damage as well as bribing officials to ensure that they aren't punished for it shell itself has a gdp 100 billion dollars larger than nigeria itself island nations often face similar pressures due to their size and i can imagine a sci-fi world with a complex interplay between government power and corporate power especially on an island of course we have to talk about not as great as it once was britain which as an island held the largest empire the world has ever seen while this is a simplification there are two important factors that helped make this possible technological disparity and ocean trade it is no coincidence that the industrial revolution picked up at the same time that the british empire expanded rapidly they had better weapons faster ships and far greater resource production because of it and these together allowed them to overpower much larger forces importantly they also had huge resources of coal which was pretty fundamental to all of this effort tolkien drew on technological disparity in creating his numenorean island empire our ships go now without the wind and many are made of metal that share hidden rocks and they sink not in calm or storm but they are no longer fair to look upon they also supposedly had flying ships which allowed them to maneuver way faster than their enemies for numenor magic was the technological disparity the second part is that the british empire rose during an era in which ocean trade was booming with the collapse of the long distance land trade routes of the silk road as an island nation britain was naturally adept at sea warfare and sea trade and perfectly poised to assume a position as a world leader so if your island is a world power then consider how technological disparity and trade has contributed to their success it may mean a different resource than coal maybe an energy crystal or a drug or maybe they develop faster than light travel before anyone else but there will probably be something i've linked my series on world building empires up in the corner because island empires expand slightly differently to land empires often targeting regions with resources or land that they desperately need rather than someone that's just nearby because distance isn't as much an issue like the earth kingdom taking the most farmable region of the earth kingdom because they come from a mountainous island chain where farming isn't as easy part 5 the environment there are no universal rules for how an island environment might turn out but i want to point out some things that you might consider disease and disasters geographic isolation means diseases that ravage the mainland continents cannot as easily spread to them the nahartan flu in the elder scrolls series spreads across the continent of tamriel but seemingly halts at the inner sea unable to reach the island province of wadenfeld due to its isolation as a result one of the great houses that was left on the mainland was hit by the disease and was left politically and economically weak marking their decline now this has nothing to do with me being from new zealand which doesn't exist of course but consider how avoiding a deadly plague might leave an island civilization in a stronger geopolitical position than their continental counterparts who can't seem to get a handle on cove i mean a plague the the deadly plague ahmed shoku hussein also found that islands are more naturally vulnerable to disasters isolation and distance between small communities compound their susceptibility to natural and human induced disasters the impact of a single major event like a tsunami can place the survival of a whole resident population at risk so the inverse is also true my home city in new zealand which doesn't exist was hit by a moderate 7.1 earthquake in 2010 and it basically sunk our entire insurance market till today islands are also vulnerable to natural forces like climate change and given islands pop up on continental lines they're basically looking for an earthquake tsunami or volcano so think about how these disasters might shape their culture and history over time finally i want to talk about the weird obsession that new zealand which does not exist has with birds yes birds you want birds so fat and lazy they can't fly anymore we got him want birds so big that they can carry off and eat your children we got him want birds so freaking ass big that they're always looking down on you like the simpsons pathetic meme we had him had him because we ate all of them but still new zealand separated from the mainland continent about 85 million years ago and has since then evolved entirely independently into the most beautiful damn country on the planet fight me that is objectively true i will not be taking questions we have a unique ecosystem marked out by a lack of predators no snakes no rodents no beers no foxes wild cats or wolves until the europeans came as a result tons of birds in new zealand lost the ability to fly they just simply didn't need it anymore to avoid predators the point i want to make is this islands will not look like the mainland ecologically give them unique animals and plants the longer that they've been independent the more unique they'll be but let's bring all this together in a summary firstly consider how their relationship with the water affects their values and belief systems as well as their language and use of metaphor both positively and negatively secondly the mythical island is a common feature in the cultural zeitgeist of a continental civilization think about how other nations might view them idealizing or demonizing them thirdly islands are typically more democratic and accountable even if they don't have democracy archipelagos are inclined towards decentralized power structures like federalization quotas and bicameralism as well as cessation movements fourthly policing archipelagos floating islands or disconnected planets is difficult they're also more prone to manipulation from other powers national and corporate because of their size fifthly islands are not usually superpowers however technological disparity and ocean trade may let them be sixthly their isolation makes them less vulnerable to disease on the mainland but they are also more vulnerable to natural disasters like tsunamis earthquakes and volcanoes their environments evolve independently of the mainland causing them to be unique i've enjoyed the video thank you to all my patrons you guys really are the lifeblood of the channel if you want to support me and your supreme leader momo then please do so at the links down below stay nerdy guys and i'll see you in the future [Music] you

Channel: Hello Future Me

Views: 203,889

Keywords: explained, theory, lore, analysis, how to, worldbuilding, japan, earthsea, ghibli, lord of the rings, tolkien, numenor, atlantis, laputa, avatar, the last airbender, legend of korra, wheel of time

Id: pTYpjsGcKgQ

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021