this is Skyrim a game set in a rather archetypical fantasy world complete with a largely medieval inspired aesthetic but if we travel back in time say a thousand years what would this world look like I mean a solid Stone Castle like Skyrim's Castle da for example would be a staple of the late medieval period and quite similar to something like the real World's bodium castle in England so logically speaking if we re you around time A Thousand Years you'd think that the pred cessor of Castle da would look more or less like the first mten Bailey castles AKA a rickety hubel on a mound of dirt surrounded by some wooden Palisades which only emerged in Europe about 500 years before bodium Castle was built wrong because as it turns out this is what it looks like in Elder Scrolls on line which is indeed set a millennium earlier not much of a change huh but this lack of progression in the world begs the question why does the medieval period appear to last for thousands of years longer than it did in the real world the phenomenon of fantasy worlds appearing to be perpetually stuck in medieval times is not unique to the Elder Scroll series quite the opposite in fact it is a common enough Trope in fantasy that it has been given the name medieval stasis some other examples of this you'd likely recognize would be Jr token's Lord of the Rings or George R Martin song Ice and Fire perhaps better known by the name of its TV adaptation Game of Thrones going back through the history of these worlds you will find that several Thousand Years prior to the events of the stories taking place in them society looks pretty much unchanged let me take a moment and flip my earlier Skyrim example around and look toward the future instead in George AR and Martin's westros the oldest parts of Winterfell The ancestral castle of the Starks is called the first keep this Tower is adorned with gargoyles which was Common Place among the Gothic architecture that was popular in the high and late Medieval ages and in its current form the tower is likely constructed about well 6,000 years ago do you have any idea what something built 6,000 years after a late medieval castle would look like neither do I because we're still some 5,000 years removed from finding out but if I had to guess it probably wouldn't even be built on Earth and it will most certainly look more like this than well this while I've only just scraped the surface of this topic I think you probably get what I'm raving about by now even if you're not a connoisseur of the fantasy genre yourself and and while the title of this video may have already betrayed me this is where I do my little bait and switch and flip the script rather than arguing why medieval stasis makes no sense because uh let's be honest it's kind of a free slam dunk at first glance anyway I am going to be presenting my best arguments as why I believe it actually makes perfect sense so hi my name is perso is grim and this is why fantasy worlds should be stuck in medieval times forever [Music] all right let's get right to the chase imagine you're struck with a deadly disease say the Bubonic plague and you have two paths to seeking a cure the first option is your typical medieval doctor who tells you that you need to get the most cursed head imaginable by a bunch of slimy leeches he feted out of the same river where you emptied your waist bucket in the morning why well according to that doctor it's because you have too much black B in your body that is making you melancholic and in order to cure the plague all four of your humors must be perfectly balanced all this and at the end of the day your chances of survival are unchanged or quite frankly maybe even worse the second option on the other hand is a guy who will snap his fingers and boom you're immediately cured so be honest is there any reality where you would willingly subject yourself to the first guy over the second okay to be fair I'm sure there's at least one person out there that would go with option A over option b because it's no secret that there are real people in our very non-fictional world that would fly halfway across the Earth and pay their entire life savings to get a supposed miracle cure from a witch doctor who in reality is just a homeless guy selling a taste of his Perpetual stew that his grandmother started cooking during the Great Depression but if you think about it isn't that just further proof of my point I mean those people are essentially putting their faith in Magic so if they had happened to live in a world where magic was actually real their decision would actually be perfectly logical assuming they sought out a real Mage and not a guy in an Alleyway boiling a freshly caught Rat King anyway the point I'm trying to make here is that there are a few things I could think of that magic cannot just do better need food the local Druid Community can make the field Sprout more crops than your entire town could eat in a year broke your leg oh the CL in the temple down the road can have you patched up in a heartbeat housing crisis don't worry an expert team of wizards are Conjuring up all the stone and wood you'll ever need and are using their telekinesis to assemble it into beautiful new housing developments are you running late to a business meeting on the other side of the continent good thing the company bought you a ticket to the teleportation service so what then is the point of focusing your efforts and resources on technological development especially when you've already mastered magic to such an extent that it can do anything even sci-fi Tech could do it simply isn't very reasonable to go out of your way and invent an alternative to a problem that has already got a solution sure we created Electric engines for cars even though we have perfectly functional gas driven cars but unless magic is powered by Resource as finite as fossil fuels or it causes the environment to degrade from prolonged exposure to the Arcane I do not see why magic would be replaced in a similar way if anything it would be better if we could replace our own technologically produced cars with Enchanted carriages because unlike the autopilot of a Tesla a magic vehicle most likely wouldn't swerve out of their Lane just to hit a pedestrian family of four for the fun of it and if we continue with the electric car example have you seen how stubborn some people are when it comes to their beloved combustion engines there is just no way people would willingly switch over to technological Vehicles when they already have grown 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 magic car than a gas powerered one sure we don't know how long the former would take to make but for the latter we know that it took our world almost 400 years after the end of the Middle Ages before we started driving cars around and it's not like the first cars were even that much better than horong carriages anyway the point I'm trying to make 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 power an entire society that has grown accustomed to Arcane magic stuff with equivalent Tech you'll need a whole lot of electricity and if they first invent the steam engine that won't be enough so then you'll have to invent nuclear fision and maybe even nuclear fusion which we still can't do properly in our world meanwhile if magic has been explored since time in Memorial by the time you reach an age where great civilizations start blossoming magical knowledge could already be Advanced enough to the point where leading arcanists could start working on the magical equivalent of a nuclear power plant but behind every invention whether scientific or magical there is a person or a team of people but who are these people and how they differ between reality and fantasy well let's take a closer look at that shall we it is a well-known fact that many fantasy worlds are filled with various races of people that are incredibly long lived with that in mind I am going to assume the position of one of you dirty little medieval stasis deniers for a bit I'm sure you're probably thinking to yourself that the sheer amount of additional Knowledge and Skills a single scientist or engineer could crew during their vastly improved lifespan would Propel Society into the future at break next speeds because instead of having to constantly spend decades rehashing what is already known simply to train the Next Generation the brightest Minds could continue pushing beyond the frontiers of the unknown for so much longer I mean just imagine how much some of the greatest inventors in history could have done if they had been immortal like token's elves or even just got to live a couple of centuries like some of the humans of Middle Earth looking at you Aragorn you hands some smooth face octogenarian it really makes you wonder doesn't it how much earlier could we have mastered the understanding of mathematics and the mechanisms of nature if thees of myus was Immortal could Leonardo da Vinci have succeeded in creating a functional flying machine centuries before the Wright brothers if he had been given another hundred years of life would every 1980s household have been equipped with high-speed Wi-Fi if Nicola Tesla was still alive at that point or maybe just maybe provided a thousand years of life Elon Musk could one day come up with a viable Elden ring build sorry that may have been a bit too far I I understand if he needs multiple Shields to keep his thin skin protected from the meanies on Twitter oh well I've hit my quota for how many Elon jokes I'm allowed to make in a single video but man sometimes it really feels like you have struck Emerald uh gold like like you've struck gold with it with jokes like these um surely the greatest minds of the world would achieve even greater things within the fields of Science and Engineering if they lived for hundreds of years right right my answer is maybe not to go back to the last section of the video too much but again why would you even research the Natural Sciences in the first place do you really think Benjamin Franklin would concern himself with electricity if he could shoot lightning from his fingertips no I think these great minds would be better off focusing their efforts on studying the Arcane after all if you had to dedicate your life to only one discipline either that of the magical or the technological during a time when you could either try to invent the first mechanical clock that is somewhat accurate at telling time or you could create a spell to manipulate time itself is it really a tough choice additionally I suspect that having that generational reset can actually be a great benefit to development for every year that goes by the world changes borders between countries fluctuate language evolves culture moves along Etc but with that people are born and raised in different Landscapes to their ancestors and therefore may approach any given situation with a different perspective let's say that a scientist has been researching the same niche of their subject their entire adult life it is easy then to be blinded by tunnel vision or to get hung up and subsequentially held back by old and outdated information from their youth there is even some data which indicates that older and more experienced doctors might actually have worse results compared to their younger counterparts though that is admittedly a bit of an oversimplification ation and even if these old smart geezers were to invent something new How likely is it that their equally ancient contemporaries would Embrace these advances with open arms it is no secret that old people tend to be quite skeptical when it comes to new technology be honest how many times have you met someone over the age of 50 that gets excited by all the new tech flooding into their homes yeah exactly the older you get the less excited you'll probably be by all the constant rapid changes that developing Tech brings about so if humans start to get tired of having to relearn how their remote control works after only a few Decades of Life how Fed Up do you think an elf would be after a thousand years of that nonsense ultimately when you're dealing with extremely longlived people if not outright Immortal it'll probably only stagger Society even more and that goes doubly so for the political side of things sometimes what you really need to get past a hurdle in history is a bit of instability and generational shifts are probably the healthiest most natural form of instability as they age people only get more set in their ways and politically they tend to become conservative or even regressive so much so that I firmly believe you're lying if you say you haven't heard most old Boomers whining about how things were better before and how terrible it is now that society's gotten flooded with new technology and immigrants as a proud Zoomer I believe that the kids these days are precisely what we need to see real change in society For Better or For Worse that applies just as much to a world stuck in medieval times if you want someone to challenge the status quo of the medieval feudalist Society it is going to be the energetic and passionate youth striving for improvement you can call the movement of the youth naive or foolish all you like 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 some inbred Noble for 50 years then they probably never will rather the true revolutionaries that are likely to bring change to society whether society's ready for it or not would be those that have only just gotten a taste of Injustice and immediately decided that they just won't have it these are The Visionaries and architects of the new age those that do not bend the knee to their overlords that view people as nothing but cogs and a great machine of productivity why settle for mediocrity when you can strive for greatness and so why settle for being a peasant at the bottom of a feudalist food chain when you can rise up and shatter the oppressive hierarchy keeping you in the mud alt together a spectre is haunting fantasy the Spectre of medieval stasis unless you desire an indefinite stasis a bubble of time preserved and unchanging then let people die at an early age or be stuck with Millennia old elves refusing to change their ways if so their lives depended on it or uh something like that I think we should probably move on now this one isn't so much an argument for why it makes sense from an inworld point of view but rather why it's a logical choice on the author's behalf let's be honest the Middle Ages just lend themselves really well to the fantasy genre just look at some famous medieval works of fiction set in their contemporary times such as the Divine Comedy Beowolf or the Arthurian Legends and you'll find stories that fit the fantasy label like a glove the Middle Ages were simply ripe with Fantastical myths and tales that have inspired countless authors over the centuries that followed to write their own stories about magic and monsters while there are a million ways to write a fantasy story the traditional narratological 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 is perfectly fit for Fantasy so are the Medieval Times a perfect fit for the hero's journey what makes for a better fantasy tale a medieval Knight who travels acoss cross unexplored lands in 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 a castle which has been damaged and rebuilt a dozen times over the course of centuries where every little scar to its battlements tells the tale of a Siege or a newly built Palace that can be breached by a single man throwing a rock through one of its 100 glass windows I'm not saying that one is inherently going to make for a better fantasy story because both can be done equally well or poorly but I do think it's clear to see which time more naturally lends itself to these kinds of narratives not only do the feudal societies and overall Aesthetics suit the genre but more importantly the Middle Ages are already hardcoded with fantasy elements in the way that we see those times I also understand that the view we have of the Medieval era is both heavily distorted with anachronisms and misconceptions that simultaneously romanticize and demonize different aspects of the time this is of course a result of just how popular the Middle Ages are as a setting for fantasy fiction both today and in the past centuries which in turn has caused us to conflate these fictional reconstructions of the period with actual history we imagine Knights as these invaluable Paragons of virtue and we view medieval cities as gray and drab slums caked in mud when the reality is somewhere in between the medieval common folk actually had decent hygiene and knights were just as human as you and I meaning that they had as many vices as they had virtues but even if our image of the Middle Ages is distorted or even combined with elements of antiquity or Renaissance that pseudo-historical time that your favorite books movies and games are set in makes for great stories of course you can also go further back in time and find an equal amount of Fantastical Tales with the mythologies of ancient Greece and Egypt being Prime examples of it ancient Greek and Roman mythology for instance was to nobody surprise a very common source of inspiration for the authors of the Renaissance many of whom wrote stories that could be considered Proto fantasy themselves Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nights Dream is one such example as it is set in ancient Athens and features the Greek heroth thesis alongside a colorful cast of maybe not so Greek magical fairies no doubt a rather fantasy like story huh but the further down the river of time we float past Antiquity in the Middle Ages the less Epic Fantasy stories tend to become the Renaissance still maintains an air of the Fantastical sure but go even further to the Enlightenment and we find a time that thematically is the very antithesis of fantasy yes just as I implied before a skilled author can easily make an interesting fantasy story set in any era of human history especially if you play with a dichotomy that is created when the supernatural meets a time of rationalism but there are certain hurdles you have to overcome there simply is no inherent Call to Adventure in the time of the Enlightenment the world was for the most part already explored science was evolving faster than ever and it was working hard to eliminate the dated Mythos of the Old World by for the lack of a better word enlightening people soon thereafter as we approach industrial times we instead see new modes of transportation appear primarily trains and more reliable ships which effectively helped drink the world and suddenly no longer would a journey like that of odyss make any sense and even less so once you hit modern times as such the Medieval Era and to some lesser extent the Renaissance was the last point in human history that invited truly epic fantasy to take place it should also be noted that medieval stasis does not implicitly mean that Society has never progressed only that it cannot progress past 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 more so resembled Roman or Neolithic times so let's assume a fantasy world may have started prior to the Middle Ages why then do so many authors choose to make the entire history of their worlds look the same as the present I personally believe it mainly comes down to wanting to maintain a more cohesive and streamlined lore while also giving it more Epic Proportions there's just something a striking about imagining a dynasty of monarchs that goes back thousands of years all of whom lived in the same ancient castle if we go back to a song Ice and Fire for a moment one of the main strengths of the series are the noble houses of the world for instance the Starks were founded by bran the Builder who also started the construction of Winterfell considering that he lived some 8 to 10,000 years prior to the events of the book realism would dictate that the only thing he was building was a thatch 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 started making any form of Medal tools yet and the British Isles were still part of Mainland Europe besides as I mentioned earlier the scars upon the world tell a tale of the rone a castle that has seen a thousand battles and stood through the rise and fall of a dozen Empires Each of which left the own Mark is great for a work set in that world as such an author can utilize the fact that they can stretch the Middle Ages indefinitely into the future without having to worry that the world will end up in a state that might be intrinsically hostile to the type of story they want to tell so again if you want to create a medieval themed world of truly epic proportions to go with your equally Epic Fantasy story you'll just have to extend time a bit but there's also one more explanation for medieval stasis and for this one we'll have to get a bit conspiratorial so put on your 10 great Helms and Brace yourselves cuz we're about to uncover a conspiracy so massive that it'll make Epstein's death seem like legitimate suicide Brian Martin professor of social sciences at the University of Woolen gong outlines the concept of intellectual suppression by the hand of the elite in his aptly named essay Elites and suppression his thesis assumes three conditions under which such oppression is enabled one there is a group seeking to maintain their power and its Associated privileges two there is some set of ideas or practices from which intellectual descent is possible and three there is a counterpower that may threaten the first group with use of set intellectual descent if we operate under these assumptions it is clear to see that the first group the group responsible for intellectual suppression would in this case be represented by Mages and other beneficiaries of magical power meanwhile the intellectual descent in this example stems from the Natural Sciences and Engineering which in turn threatens to create a counterpower in the form of a common folk 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 very existence if modern Weaponry should prove effective at killing even season Mages with this in mind it should be obvious by now that the magic class in the fantasy society would probably oppose the development of Technology while these worlds sometimes flirt with Renaissance ear attack by for instance implementing very early forms of firearms the typical hard cut off point for worlds in medieval state stasis tends to be drawn at the enlightenment considering that it was an ERA defined by intellectual Revolution it is no wonder that the stasis occurs prior to these epochs perhaps the only weakness of magic is the lack of availability although I implied that magic can solve all kinds of needs from curing diseases to letting you teleport around the world in a heartbeat there likely Aren't Enough petitioners of magic skilled enough to provide these services to everyone but looking 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 let technology catch up because let's be honest the Medieval ages are still centuries removed from proper medical care or mass production of food the Mages will have likely gained so much financial and political power that they could easily maintain their Monopoly of just about everything by suppressing the masses as such only the things which magic users would want no part would probably see significant developments for example it wouldn't be surprising to find the more sophisticated forms of waste disposal might find their way into these medieval fantasy cities since cleaning up other people's um refuges is hardly a glamorous or desirable job especially for someone like a mage in a world of magic technology is a great equalizer of power because as soon as new technology is invented it can be used by just about anyone while Mage might have to spend decades to learn how to shoot a beam of fire from the palms of their hands any Joe Schmo with a gun could probably kill him sure Mages might have some passive words in place to deflect regular 9mm bullets but could it withstand a 50 cal fired from a sniper rifle so far away that they wouldn't even see or hear it coming and even if they could survive that I have a feeling that your average Arcanist wouldn't be able to do much against the thermonuclear Warhead strike in their City take that Merlin now surely new inventions would still happen but this is precisely where the suppression comes into play say for example that someone invents a prototype for a weapon sophisticated enough that it could threaten a mage once they catch wind of it what's to stop the central Mage agency from knocking on the inventor's front door and that selfsame inventor might soon thereafter be discovered having roblocks thems with three crossbow bolts to the back of their head and no Trace remaining of their protot type or its blueprints on a more serious note an interesting example of technological suppression happening in a famous work of fantasy literature can be found in Brandon sanderson's mistborn series while mbor starts out closer to a Renaissance inspired setting rather than a medieval one it provides us a very interesting case to demonstrate my point at the start of the series Society has been stuck in this kind of stasis for close to A Thousand Years due to the suppression at the hand of the Lord ruler a seemingly unkillable Tyrant that has reigned over Empire for just as long however as we move a few centuries past the original mbor trilogy and look to 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 resembles more so the 19th century Victorian era complete with industrialized factories and you guessed it guns while coin shots and lurchers that is people with magical ability to telekinetically push or pull on metal Ain the top dogs in combat because they can manipulate bullets there is a catch the development of aluminum bullets and so-called Haze killer rounds made specifically to kill these people has greatly leveled the playing field and Dem monopolized the combat supremacy of magic so while that doesn't morally justify the Lord ruler suppression of Science and Technology in hindsight it also kind of validates his fears even if he himself could survive getting shot at an Empire can't be maintained by only a single individual and his superpowered magical minions most definitely wouldn't be as powerful or dangerous if your average Joe kept a gun under his pillow lastly I want to discuss one more even more potent power looming over many fantasy worlds and this one doesn't even require you to be conspiratorial to believe and that is gods in fantasy worlds it is not uncommon to find gods or otherwise divinely powerful entities that are actively meddling in the Affairs of Mortals so in a world world where Gods regularly communicate with their respective priests Champions and perhaps even Ordinary People it is not difficult to imagine that they might also have certain preferences regarding what the world should look like perhaps the churches of the world have maintained their Gothic architectural style because the deity they're dedicated to really likes the look of it and maybe the gods themselves also just have a pension for The Adventurous Fantastical stories we've already established to be so perfectly suited to the medieval era they might even have the foresight to see the world end in a nuclear apocalypse should mortals be 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 horrifyingly beautiful mushroom-shaped cloud or they're just afraid that an intellectual Revolution like that of the Enlightenment would shift the people's Focus away from worship and 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 about the Tower of Babel according to the story the early humans were set on creating a tower tall enough to reach heaven not liking the sound of that and worrying that this would only be the start of the shenanigans humans could achieve together the abrahamic God decided to do a bit of trolling by making them all speak different languages as a result the humans involved in the process of building the tower could no longer effectively communicate thus suppressing their progress not the nicest because you'd think he could have just politely asked them to stop building the tower since he's literally their God but hey I guess it's not the worst thing that has ever happened to a tower at least considering what happened in New York City at 88:13 a.m. on September [Music] 11 feel convinced yet okay so maybe it doesn't make perfect sense as I said in the intro to this video but I do legitimately believe that there are cases where medieval stasis isn't completely irrational but of course if I drop the whole lawyer act for a moment I fully admit that most worlds probably should progress past the Middle Ages at least from a realism standpoint as a fantasy fan however I do love me some magical medial worlds regardless how overdone it might be at this point there are probably a million counterarguments I couldn't address in this video both for the sake of runtime and because some of them are just pretty good counterarguments if you can think of any yourself I I'd be happy to read them in the comments and while you're at it maybe leave a like or a dislike on the video and subscribe to the channel half of my arguments are of course also purely based in hypotheticals and don't even really apply to my initial examples rather they are more suited for generic Dungeons and Dragons ask High fantasy worlds where almost anything is possible with magic A Song of Ice and Fire for one is a very low fantasy setting which means that it probably should evolve much like the real world since there is no Magic available can substitute all the functionalities of modern technology in The Lord of the Rings on the other hand we actually do get a glimpse of forward progression at the end of Return of the King while it was cut from the movies The Hobbits actually returned to the Shire only to find that it's been ravaged and industrialized by soromon or well it's industrialized until the hobbits decide to get rid of it all and return to their old ways perhaps that is the answer anyway sure there are many fantasy worlds that would be miserable to live in but aren't all fantasy stories still intrinsically Escapist to some extent even if they are gritty and Grim by never allowing their worlds to become industrialized the problems that the characters face remain distant from those we face in our own day-to-day lives yes the life of a medieval peasant was hardly glorious and neither is it in most fantasy worlds but the Simplicity of their day-to-day can easily be romanticized so many fantasy Heroes with humble beginnings are either ripped from their happy life lives as farmers and blacksmiths by the ultimate Evil or they set out on adventures specifically because they are so bored with the same peaceful lives that many of us dream of while being trapped in a late stage capitalist dystopia the hobbits are in many ways the very apotheosis of this romanticized fantasy existence when you get to Liv token's Rose tinted in medialized 19th century anachronistic hybrid of a time why would you want to progress past that point I mean just compare the joyful peaceful lives of the hobbits in the Shire with stressful ones of our own they don't even really benefit from the magic of their worlds and yet their simple lives are more fulfilling than anything you can hope to get in a corporate metropolis a close-knit community isolated from all the woes of the world spending their days eating their six meals and tending to the crops why then disturb The Quiet Sounds of Nature with loud Machinery why poison their crystalline rivers with chemical waste and why pollute the blue skies and their clouds with suffocating smog for in the words of Bill baggin himself it is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life
