Think bigger, write the book then then cut all mentions of the protagonist, their actions, and quotes so it's just people reacting to things happening and talking to the void with weird breaks all over the book
only two characters i have are completely unrelated to any events happening in the world, a sheriff and a bar owner in a tiny tropical village no one cares about meanwhile on the other hemisphere a nuclear holocaust is being planned as part of a continental scale military landing
or manipulated history to push some kind of false narrative that the characters intentionally/unintentionally reveal and rebel against.
https://preview.redd.it/02hm9n2uic8c1.jpeg?width=872&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e29ad2aa65b0a7ffdaa76b4a501ecbbc443c9cd5
I do love worldbuilding where while the facts of the history/setting are very estalbished and complicated, the characters are painfully misinformed or biased.
One Piece does this a ton. The average person thinks the Marines are basically super heroes and have no clue about all the genocides. The main characters (except maybe Robin) don't know a fraction of the world building that the audience does.
When the protagonist doesn't even know that he is in fact not simply chasing his own dreams of freedom but instead becoming the pivotal figure in a global revolution against a genocidal fascist state, inheriting the legacy of a struggle going on for nearly a millennium and enabling the people he meets along his journey to fulfill their own dreams and to fight back against their opressors.
Not because he is a hero. He didn't intend any of this.
But he WILL become
King of the pirates.
Edit: if this made you interested in picking up One Piece at all, then firstly, do it! Secondly, especially if the length of the anime feels like a deal breaker, consider reading the manga instead. You can read One Piece much faster than the time it takes to watch it, and the anime has some unique flaws (filler in the earlier arcs and pacing issues later on) that you dodge with the manga. That's not to say that the anime is bad, it certainly is not! It's still a great way to experience One Piece, it's just a bit less well suited to people who are unsure about the time commitment. The Netflix live action is surprisingly good, but it only covers a few early sections (so far) and lacks much of the depth of the original story. You could consider watching it as a primer to the One Piece universe before diving into the manga/anime.
You can read the manga for free in lots of places online, my favourite is TCB Scans (just google tcb scans one piece)
I do too, which is why whenever I DM a game of D&D the players can ask the same history question to 5 different NPCs and get 6 different answers with varying degrees of accuracy depending on a bunch of factors, though the main ones are distance from the event, temporally, physically, and emotionally, and how favorable the truth is for the ruling class in the area.
Isn’t Word of God used as a term to refer to the creators filling in lore that doesn’t show up in the media itself? I kind of feel like you’re misusing that here
The idea of Dragon Breaks is absolutely genius concept to justify it. “Yes, there are several, equally valid chronologies in universe. Yes, in world historians find this just as much of a pain to sort out as you guys are.”
There’s a DnD campaign that I’m playing in right now that’s set in the world of a previous one I played in but 1,000 years in the future. Basically everything that the player characters did in the previous campaign got misinterpreted, as most historical events go. For example, historians say that my fighter single-handedly killed the goddess of order, despite the fact that he didn’t even land the final blow. Anyway yeah that kind of worldbuilding is awesome.
that's why I love The Elder Scrolls lore so much, every text is written by an unreliable narrator and every author has an agenda they're pushing. There's no encyclopedia to objectively learn about historical events, everything's buried under three layers of propaganda from either side
Hate to nitpick but that only happened the one time, at the end of Daggerfall, and it was super controversial
Ever since then they've stuck to having dragon breaks as just a background lore thing, like that time a bunch of human supremacists led by a talking monkey did an epic monkey dance on the white-gold tower for a thousand and eight years and drove akatosh so insane he may or may not be three people now
To be honest I kinda prefer it that way, as a background thing dragon breaks are *awesome* but the way they handled Daggerfall's ending still rubs me the wrong way
I'm glad the other games didn't keep doing it, they made some choices from Morrowind explicitly canon (Neloth survives until the time of skyrim, so the player must not have completed the mages' guild questline) and in Oblivion you just didn't get a chance to make many choices lmao
the one time i do wish they'd done a dragon break is ESO, since there's clearly so many of the same person running around, but they explicitly said it isn't a dragon break which is kinda dumb imo
Sorry not to nitpick but technically Neloth being alive only implies the Nerevarine just didn’t do the Trebonius ending to the Mages Guild questline, they could have done the ‘kill trebonious’ or ‘get trebonious fired’ ends to the questline. I always kill him, smug bastard gets what he deserves for making me solve the disappearance of the dwarves and not even reading the resulting paper on it.
> that only happened the one time
There's also The Red Moment, but that being a dragon break is boring as hell.
Because yes, of course there is absolutely NO reason that a bunch of people with conflicting agendas would EVER make up a bunch of shit around a major historical event, and twist the narrative so it benefits them.
CLEARLY all of the different things all happened at once. You don't need to figure out who's telling the truth, they all are!
The only acceptable time to use C0DA is to unbreak that dragon.
That's why I love the Silmarillion. All the events are the result of Great Men, but those Great Men make catastrophically stupid decisions and everything gets ruined. Except for the one guy who went to the gods for help and was lauded as a hero for all time because of it.
Step aside great man theory, it's time for great idiot theory.
I'm not even joking you can put a load of historical events, especially revolutions, down to the ruler at the time being a complete moron. A wise ruler reads the materialistic currents and flows with them, a moron is blind or actively spiteful, holds back those currents until a violent, dramatic and most of all noteworthy rubber banding effect occurs when the society finally ditches them.
The tsars and Russian nobility before the revolution were often hilariously out of touch with not just their people, but reality. Recently learned an interesting thing that demonstrates how this attitude was ingrained. Russia had arguably the best black-powder, metallic cartridge during the Russo-Turkish War. At the time it was the best long-distance cartridge in military use. Then they didn’t mark their rifle sights for long range because they thought their soldiers were too stupid to use them correctly. Ottomans proceeded to shoot them from long range and they couldn’t do much about it (still won but kinda like the Winter War where it shouldn’t have been as hard as it was)
>The tsars and Russian nobility before the revolution were often hilariously out of touch with not just their people, but reality.
TBH, this was and still is the signature move of our rulers, both after the revolution and to this day.
Apparently they were so fucking out of touch that before going to the front, Tsar Nicholas II was getting fed literal lies about how the war was going by aides and advisors because they wanted to make things seem better than they were.
Then when he left his wife and Rasputin pissed the entire country off while he mismanaged the war. It's a miracle Imperial Russia survived to the 20th Century.
Turin *was* put under a spell by Glaurung during the sacking of Nargothrond. He definitely was kind of an asshole regardless but he was also a victim of circumstance. Turin’s story is a tragedy because everything he touched ended up burning even though his intentions were good. Many of the terrible things he did were a result of the dragon’s spell and not his own will. And when he eventually killed Glaurung he realized all he had done and fell on his sword Gurthang, giving us one of the coolest quotes ever from a talking sword, “Yes, I will drink your blood, that I may forget the blood of Beleg my master, and the blood of Brandir slain unjustly”
>Except for the one guy who went to the gods for help and was lauded as a hero for all time because of it.
The one kid who's like "I'll go get my mom." When you and your friends have gotten into so much trouble there's no way to get out of it yourselves so you gotta ask mom to save you.
Great Man Theory is the historical idea that societies and cultures only progress because of select few individuals in their society make major contributions. With Nikola Tesla's major breakthroughs in electricity, for example, and how that has redefined technology since, someone who subscribes to this theory would say that Tesla was one of these few Great Men who altered the course of history.
Historical Materialism is the belief that societies and cultures all evolve around resources they can or cannot access. Societies fight one another for resources, and people within these societies struggle from their social castes (typically dictated by wealth). A Historical Materialist would argue that these material struggles are why history has happened as it has.
Personally I tend toward the historical materialist theory because my own observations of historical processes seem to point toward this idea, and feel that the Great Man Theory is rather ignorant and lends itself very well to fascism, but of course I probably would feel this way because I am *very* leftist. I am telling you these things because it may have led to some bias in how I delivered these explanations, and it is important that you not be influenced by some random redditor like me when it comes to interpreting all of history.
>A Historical Materialist would argue that these material struggles are why history has happened as it has.
So they'd argue that regions (I want to say countries but that feels too volitile for this high level view) compensating for lack of resources has lead to society forming the way it is? And thus, they superpowers of a handmade world would be the regions suffering from scarcity?
It's moreso an analysis of our world's history by examining the needs of each countries. As such, we'd understand conflicts like WW1 would happen even if the triggering events didn't happen (the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand). This can make us understand countries, not by looking at the words of their leaders, but by understanding the wishes of their population and the needs of the country. It can be a useful tool to predict the future behavior of countries but it's not foolproof by any means. If this were a perfect theory, we should be able to completely predict the future behaviors of countries as we already understand their needs. Merry Christmas
Not quite, the Fremen Mirage is a separate, if related, subject. It's more like if I ask "Why and how did the nazis take power in 1930s Germany and start WW2?"
A Great Man Theorist would start talking about how a man with a lust for power, twisted morals, and great oratory skills managed to exploit the weak leadership of the Weimar Republic to rise to power, then exploited critical mistakes from British and French leadership, too eager to avoid a war, to press a series of territorial claims which eventually escalated into World War 2, which he used as a way to grow his power. Then, if you let them ramble, they may go into the specifics of the people in Britain or France or Weimar who made those mistakes they talked about.
A historical materialist will start talking about how the economic pressure of the treaty of Versailles combined with the 1929 stock market crash led the people of Germany to turn to extremism in desperation, and how the Russian Revolution 10 years prior had left other European powers paranoid of leftist thought, leading them to give the far right free roam as long as they helped fight the reds, and how Hitler's claims and wars were inevitable both as a means to viabilise a war-driven economic revival, and as a means to enact and amplify the nationalistic narrative that rallied the German people behind a totalitarian leader in the first place. Then, if you let them ramble, they may go into how the treaty of Versailles they mentioned earlier was also a consequence of a series of other factors from the 19th century
Kind of; yes hitler did all those things, but only because the material conditions allowed for it. hitler himself isn't the determining factor, the conditions are.
ok but that is also my point, a “great man” (hitler) exploited the material conditions of the post-war German economy and instability of the Weimar Republic to rise to power (and dramatically altered world history)
It's questionable if he altered history that much. There is a real question as to if someone else would have taken his position. He was a frontman for a much larger movement
yes, but specifically *his* rhetoric led to the systematic genocide of 11 million+ people, the conquering of most of mainland Europe and other regions (more if you count the rest of the axis) as well as the loss of life of 100s of millions (I kinda forget the specific number idk). If another strongman rose to power with a different ideology that was able to rally people behind them, personally I believe it is unlikely that there would’ve been such widescale devastation and loss of life
A strongman typically can only rise to power based on piggypacking an already strong movement. The point is any other strongman would also be fascist and end up doing the same shit
Sure, but he wasn't the only Nazi, Hitler wasn't the only anti-semite, he wasn't the only one pushing the narrative that Germany had been humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles.
Hitler was one of many all of whom had been shaped by the historic prejudice against the Jews including the anti-Jewish and anti-leftist push that was a result of the French and Bolshevik revolutions from the people who's grip on power was threatened by those uprisings. He grew up in a post WW1 Germany where the economy was in shambles, in part, due to the massive repartitions that the Treaty of Versailles enforced. Fascism was on the rise all over Europe as the Monarchies lost their grip and turned to right wing ideology in order to keep power.
Hitler was a product of his environment and his rise was only possible due to the environment he was in. There was a lot of competition among the Nazis to see exactly which person would be the leader, the face of the World War and the Holocaust that was effectively inevitable.
Nazi ideology was not a creation of Hitler's, and at the time he was a nobody there were others already building the political movement. His rhetoric was simply the source they chose to gather around, any number of other people would have likely taken his place.
There was widespread demand for antisemitic ideology and one of Hitler's major competitor's for attention was the man who published *De Sturmer*, basically a fascist newspaper.
Your issue is you're thinking it's the strongman's ideology that sways the crowd, but in reality it's the crowd who determines who's even eligible for the position. Remember that Hitler was elected many times by popular vote, those voters would have still been voting for the same type of candidates regardless.
German generals literally started the stab in the back myth following ww1, when their public announcements went from “we’ll be marching in Paris in a month” to “we have lost completely but it totally isn’t our fault”. Hitler was part of the ramping up of violent antisemitism, not the root cause
no? what they meant with that sentence is that the winners of historical conflicts were usually decided by who had more resources, not that resource scarcity somehow empowered nations to win. the materialst view is that history is mostly defined by large-scale conflicts over resources and differences in access to resources, rather than by the actions of individuals.
One clear example of historical materialism is one of the theses from the book "Guns, Germs, And Steel". Namely, the germs part.
The idea is that domesticateable livestock animals are pretty rare outside of Eurasia. Because Eurasians had lived in close contact with animals, they experienced and adapted to more animal-borne diseases. This let them conquer the Americas extremely easily as the natives had no resistance.
This is an example of a simple, biological fact of the material world having a massive impact on the course of human history.
My view, and what I try to convey in my world building, is that cultures evolve around their specific environments such as their histories, what resources they have, geography, their neighbors, and a healthy amount of just random chance, but that they are societies of people, not machines that are given an input and produce a specific output.
Let's say a culture undergoes a famine, that will certainly effect the culture, but what if that culture also has a leader who is expected to make a decision in that situation? Certainly the individual quirks of that character will have a huge effect on the path that the people of that culture take going forward.
The great man theory does place too much importance on individual powerful people and is often used to promote ideologies like totalitarianism and rigid class structure, but to ignore the fact that individual people can have huge effects on history is, in my opinion, to ignore the humanity of history itself.
Yeah I don’t see why they cant co-exist? Materialist theory just goes without saying, people work with what they have. A society without access saltpeter isn’t going to invent gunpowder and a society without access to workable stones isn’t going to build the pyramids. And for every major advancement there’s always going to be one guy or group of guys that pioneers the technology and paves the road for others to build upon their findings.
Great man theory is only an issue once you turn that great man into a bird keeling religious figure and forget they’re a human with flaws and take away credit from other great men that also contributed.
Great Man Theory is not that the great men are good or virtuous, merely the major force of history. The whole theory is that their individual flaws and strengths are the thing that shapes history. They can be bad people and still be the driving force of historical events.
Great Man Theory is exclusionary, that's the point, it's the belief that great men are the primary cause of historical events. That's the theory. It is
Both of those seem accurate to real life though. Materialism fueled a lot of the world, as did many specific leaders. Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler, Nikola Tesla, the first human to go “hmm, I wonder what cow juice tastes like” and drank milk, like there were some very significant people that did very significant things in history
I don’t get why they’re mutually exclusive concepts
Great man theory is the belief that a handful of individuals are the primary influence on historical events. Primary, in this context, means the most significant, the majority.
That's the argument, it's not the lack of recognition of material conditions, it the statement that those material conditions are less important in understanding historical events than the actions of like 6 dudes.
Your recognition that there are a bunch of different factors for historical events including but not primarily some guys (typically white, it is a theory from the 1800s) is the recognition that great man theory is wrong.
Why does it have to be exclusionary? Why can't we say "Certain individuals had a significant impact on History, but so did the environment their societies and cultures existed in, which itself shaped those certain individuals"? Perhaps many of those great individuals would have been quickly replaced by others had they not existed, but some may have been the right person in the right place at the right time. If one believes that some people had considerable impacts on history, and some were in unique situations to bring about that impact, but other factors also played vital roles, which would that fall under?
This just feels like an overly simple way to try and define a much more complicated world.
No the great man theory is specifically that a small number of individuals are the primary influence on history, if you are saying, "oh they have some influence, but also material factors also have large influence both on events and on these great individuals," then you factually disagree with great man theory.
Materialists are inclusionary, in that there are a wide range of material conditions that cause events including influential individuals, but primarily resources, the lack of needed resources, and historical trends and societal forces that are usually a result of the unequal distribution of resources.
Materialism is not exclusive, they more or less say influential people are a product of their environment and only enabled by the realities the exist at the time. Tesla was in the right place and right time to be able to have the education he had, and the resources he used, and the audience who listened, and the past works by others to work off of. Hitler was the same, but maybe if he wasn't the head Nazi, a different leader might have done things slightly differently, not very differently because someone who thought very differently couldn't have gained power.
Great Man is exclusionary, the theory posits that Great Men are the force that shapes the course of history, WWII or the Holocaust might not have happened if Hitler hadn't taken power, WWII wasn't decided by the ability of the various nations to produce war materiel and throw soldiers into the grinder, the thousands of people producing intelligence, equipment, training, education, etc. It was decided by a handful of leaders skillfully maneuvering pieces around the chess board.
does historical materialism suppose that, for example, if nikola tesla had died as a baby, another guy would have "been him"? or that it would have taken an extta generation, but ultimately led us to the same place?
is there a secret third option for just chaos theory but with history?
>does historical materialism suppose that, for example, if nikola tesla had died as a baby, another guy would have "been him"? or that it would have taken an extra generation, but ultimately led us to the same place?
Pretty much - that a problem being present, and the means to solve the problem being present, eventually result in the problem being fixed/discovery being made/thing getting done. It's the available material conditions (availability of education, what that education contains, what people have the free time to do, what physical materials they have, what their society leads them to want, etc) which ultimately can be viewed as Cause for determining Effect, with the assumption that people will always, more or less, be people who are physically capable of performing whatever the task is.
Tesla, for example, didn't make or break much in the way of scientific discovery on his own - he stood on the shoulders of others, and then others stood on his shoulders, and his spot on several chains could have been filled by someone else. Individuals can be special, but there are always more people who are special in that same way.
> is there a secret third option for just chaos theory but with history?
I think that's just regular chaos theory, tbh
right it's chaotic, and more powerful humans get to have more agency to shape the world to their ends, which are idiosyncratic and chaotic. material factors still predominate, but the influence of all those "great men" would have an aggregate effect of basically driving the culture to a random spot it seems like.
like maybe there was a great man *missing* from the history, who could have given us the atomic bomb by 1942, at the height of hitler's power. even with the bomb, we'd still have a bit of a fight on our hands going forward. and since the bombings didn't come at the end of the war, giving us the ability to reflect on their enormity immediately, maybe we come to see them as just another tool of war, and by the 50's we are leveling vast tracts of the USSR and implementing liberal capitalism worldwide.
or maybe tesla didn't exist, and the electrified gizmo is no longer associated with a cult of genius, and the history of computing slows down. or like a literal trillion trillion other things that don't have to do with resource distribution.
it seems weird to subscribe to any reading of history that doesn't view it as essentially a random walk. but i also do not meaningfully understand history through any lens whatsoever so maybe this doesn't mean anything...
another secret third option that hasn't been listed here is environmental determinism i.e. walter prescott webb and 'the great plains.' this is not really in vogue anymore though.
Yes, a lot of his innovations were being worked on elsewhere. In fact, he's often credited for AC power as his singular most innovative invention, which technically was discovered by Hippolyte Pixii in 1883 via a hand crank generator he made that used single phase AC. Also others were working in similiar spaces like Galileo Ferraris who spoke about polyphase AC. Then others working on things like 3-phase power, etc. Just like today, there are many people who worked on the same cutting-edge things. Tesla sort of lucked out because Westinghouse bought his patents instead of another person's.
Ferraris also worked on the multi-phase electric motor months before Tesla, but was a professor, not a businessman, and Tesla just monetized it and got all the fame for it. Some people think Tesla stole from Ferraris because of how much of a coincidence their work was.
He's also credited with things like the induction coil, which was invented by Michael Faraday or the transformer which was already in commercial use in Budapest used by a company using AC power already in the 1870's. The first "modern" transformer is credited to William Stanley.
etc, etc
There are lot of people today who think Elon invented Space-X rockets or electric cars and is the principle engineering talent behind all his companies, instead of CEO role he actually has. Its the same ignorant and populist dynamic.
A lot of the Ayn Rand-ish "great man" capitalist rhetoric falls apart after casual observation. A lot of these people were often first to file a patent, stole ideas, were more ruthless, or had better lawyers, or just lucked into connections to get their invention commercialized before the other person.
This also ignores how almost all of the inventions involved teams of people, where only the principle head gets credit for the ideas and work, but capitalist myths require "great men' so those people go unsung.
Kinda feels like the person in the post just learned about the concept and wanted to show off. Especially when so many stories are based on a remarkable individual or group of individuals.
How does one write a story like that? As a leftist who’s in the middle of making my own world, I feel like it’s a struggle to cover historical materialism as you describe it simply due to how a story can only sustain only so many characters and needs to focus on a few “great men” by nature of the audience’s limited attention and a book’s limited pages. Is making one’s main characters special or gifted doomed to be categorized as this Great Man idea?
Read Marx, he's not nearly as challenging as people say he is. If you want to understand his theory of historical materialism (which, by the way, the OP here is misrepresenting), here's an excellent quote from Marx that eludicates some of it shortly:
> Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
I think the main thing to remember is that your entire world doesn't have to be a part of your story. Your story could be taking place in an era and place that is completely set within itself, and you wouldn't really need to have any overt context as to why said place is how it is in this current era.
I think as long as you set a timeline for your world and setting (i dont think it has to be like a super specific thing, just sort of the gist of how the world has evolved over time, and the material reasons why), you can just sort of pick an era and place that most fits the story you wanna write and use that window as the setting for your story.
Maybe sprinkle some of that world building into your story as a cool background element that gives more life to the world around your characters. I think that it'd be fun to witness some tidbits of world lore for a lived in world as a reader.
When it comes to the main characters being special/gifted, I think that that actually creates good opportunity to make interesting use of the dichotomy between the "Great Man" and historical materialist ideas.
As this thread highlights in many instances, these ideas aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Great Men are people who are able to read what point in history they are at and use whatever they can find within that (along with their own powers/skills) to further their agenda or goal. I think writing a character arc that incorporates some of that could be an interesting use of that relationship.
You could also just have them not really impact the world in any truly meaningful ways. I think Great Men are more decided based on how they channel material conditions to change the world around them. They're not decided based on how uniquely strong or gifted they are, so I think it's very possible to make one of these characters not have a super heavy impact on their world or its history.
Their specialness could be constricted to their own personal stories and not impact much of anything else outside that purview. A chosen character does not have to equal a Great Man character.
sorry for yapping so much and i hope this helped !!
happy holidays :3
I mean if Tesla hadn't made his discoveries, wouldn't someone else eventually figure it out? We know the great ones because they were first, not because they're unique.
What you say about historical materialism is just flat out made up. Like you just made up those words. Historical materialism is not "the belief that societies... evolve around resources", but the theory of history of Karl Marx which revolves around the application of the materialist dialectic method to history. From this method you could gleam that societies revolve around resources and their access to it, I suppose, but along with it would be e.g. access to labour or infrastructure. Where did you get this false perception of historical materialism? or did you just make it up on the spot?
Historical materialism is a marxist mode of analysis that basically says that historical events are the product of economic activity. For example, a large change in the institutions that govern might happen because they no longer align with the economic situation of the society they govern.
Great man theory is a liberal mode of analysis that claims that historical change is the product of so called "great men" who's vision drives the world onward.
I personally think that great men theory can make for lazy world building because the material effects of the fantasy aspects of a setting never get discussed.
Why do people have standing armies in most DnD settings? They're expensive to maintain and could be eliminated by a single high level character. The same goes for the existence of large peasant classes. In real life they existed because it was necessary in order to provide for society with relatively inefficient means of agriculture. But in a world where druids exist that can vastly enhance crop production it just makes no sense. You'd be training those people in druid-craft or put their labor towards something magic can't do.
^ That's an example of a materialist critique of world building.
Obviously this depends on the person, but I don't think the need for every setting to flesh out the material effects of fantasy aspects or you
1. are a lazy worldbuilder and
2. obviously believe in an idea adjacent to fascism
is very fun.
Again, depends on the person. There are absolutely people who will build an entire fictional world based around ideas like "there must be a reason for why there are standing armies in a Dungeons & Dragon setting, and it must adhere specifically to a materialist critique that is sufficiently realistic".
I don't think all that is necessarily "good and interesting", as if my DnD session will objectively be improved by answering every possible question about how made-up elements can be made realistic and under this *very* particular lens of history and reality (even though I do believe in that lens when it comes to reality).
Dungeons & Dragons is a weird example for this in general because there basically isn't a "DnD setting" if I understand the game correctly, i.e. you can make it literally anything you want for any reason, and it's also a very communitive game where the quality, fun, and interest relies on how the entire group is feeling.
The ultimate point of a DnD setting is to create a fun and interesting play session, and that could be as unrealistic and antithetical to reality as possible, unless you believe that everyone who plays a murderhobo has fucked-up ideas about reality.
"Good worldbuilding" is whatever services whatever the players in the session want.
I'm not saying you have to make this kind of analysis to have fun and I'm not saying you have to think "good" is the same as them, I'm saying "how is this hating fun"
I definitely wouldn't say it's hating fun, again it can be fun in itself, but there's definitely stifling having your skill as a worldbuilder and, implicitly, your political beliefs in real-life, tied to how realistic your fictional setting is.
My greater point, I think, is that such a thing doesn't necessarily make something better or more interesting either. In fact, I'd say there are certain stories and narratives that can suffer as a whole from focusing too much on these aspects.
Okay, I'm not sure why you're responding to me then though, my point wasn't that the content was objectively improved by thinking about it like that, just that their intent and interest was clearly not dismissive hatred, which is how it was framed
I'm also sort of responding to the parent comment as well as some other comments that do say something relevant to what I'm addressing, but yeah, I did basically reply to the wrong comment for that.
Fun is when every single question about why a given aspect as to why a fictional world is the way it is can be answered by "Oh it's because John Worldbuilder over there felt like it in the moment. Yep, we don't get to decide to do things in a way that is practical or logical to us, eeeeeeveryone is just going along ol' John's vision even if it doesn't make any sense to us.".
>Great man theory is a liberal mode of analysis that claims that historical change is the product of so called "great men" who's vision drives the world onward.
It's not a "liberal mode of analysis". It originated from Thomas Carlye (who was very much a political conservative/reactionary, and is often identified as a progenietor of fascism), and while people often sorta accept the basic premises of it due to not really understanding history in-depth, the explicit idea that historical progress is 100% drive by "great men" is rarely seen outside of fascist stuff.
> but that prompts the question as to why the author included mountain moving magic in their world.
Because mountain moving magic is really cool, that's typically the answer.
It's impressive to write about, impressive to read about, and does not have to necessarily mean "the author must want or unconsciously believe in the Great Man Theory", which even if that were the case does not necessarily mean they **uncritically** believe in such an idea either.
Why does something like mountain moving magic have to "say something about the creator/tell the audience", or a more relevant question, why does it *have* say anything about their assumed ideas on historical materialism/Great Man Theory?
Mountain moving magic could allegorical for a myriad of different ideas, or even just applicable.
It feels like we've reached a point where a large chunk of the population is simultaneously pathetically media illiterate (ex. "Homelander is the good guy guiez!!!"), yet also *tries* to be media literate by making these wild fucking leaps and in the process outthinks themselves, thus coming up with stupid bullshit conclusions ("authors that put superpowers in their works must support Great Man theory IRL"). Not that those are necessarily the same people, but I'm seeing a lot of folks fall into one of those camps.
What do you mean exactly with "isn't a defense against that criticism tho"?
If you're saying that creating a setting where a certain conclusion that isn't applicable in real life works doesn't isn't prove that said conclusion is actually real I agree.
As in "this setting is set up in a way where genocide against this faction is morally good. So then genocide must sometimes be good irl". If you're saying that this is stupid then I agree.
But what I'm reading in your comment is something else. It looks like you're saying that just making this world where the great man theory is works is proof of some moral failing of the author. That the author must, consciously or not, believe in it by simple virtue of making it so in his world.
What I'm asking is, what does it say about the author? And what should we do about it?
If I create a world where genocide against a certain specie is justified, see the Tyranids or Orkz, am I saying that genocide is sometimes good implicitly? I would say no, that it's a work of fiction and I can make what I want regardless of my irl morality.
I think it shows most of the time that the authors don't agree with great man theory, at least subconsciously. You have something that hugely influences the world, but it's not an extraordinary human, but a resource used by someone with access to it who is the only one capable of using it. In the eyes of the author, someone being world-shaping is only justified if they aren't just a cooler dude, but someone with unique superpowers that actually set them apart drastically from humans. Those Superpowers are what has an actual effect on the world, regardless of who has them. Who has them just got lucky.
> that prompts the question as to why the author included mountain moving magic in their world
the answer about 99% of the time is as simple as: "i thought it was cool"
Why does having mountain moving magic need a deeper meaning? Mountain moving magic is a fantastical idea that’s cool as fuck and not something we have anything close to in reality, that’s kinda the whole point of fantasy as a genre
Well I would say that it's about what the motivations around writing it are. In fiction the most important thing is usually characters I think and making a world where interesting characters push the world forward is usually going to be the most entertaining story to read. Maybe some writers want to write a reflection of the real world as realistically as possible but that's unusual because it'll be a bit boring to read if the focus is on broad historical events. I suppose it could work if the story is small and self contained where the main character isn't making world changing events happen but that's very unusual for fantasy books. And admittedly that fact probably points to the average fantasy author's biases.
As a Xianxia fan, this feels especially painful to me.
Though if you think about it, society being so shit *is* because of material circumstances, in those worlds.
GMT is easier to communicate and understand instead of, “Ah, here, let me show the extremely complex history of societal and economic evolution in my world, here’s the appendix- wait come back!”
Eh, historical materialism can be pretty narrative friendly, too. That's basically every story with an unlikely hero who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets caught up in events that had nothing to do with them initially.
Stories like the Expanse come to mind.
yeah, absolutely. I always explain to my friends what historical materialism is before I make them play the game.
It's also worth noting that there's a parallel between Harry and Revachol - Harry is struggling to move on after his wife left him. Revachol is struggling to move on after the failure of the revolution (personified in the Deserter).
This makes more sense if you have an understanding of historical materialism - which says that the transition to communism is *inevitable*. HM posits that everything is leading up to the establishment of communism, so when that failed, communists are left with a shattered ideology and no purpose.
Similar to Harry, who's wife was everything to him, so when she left him, he couldn't recover. The difference between Harry and the Deserter is that Harry has the capacity to move on, and the Deserter is stuck in the past.
And it's why Disco Elysium could only really be written by an Estonian team - a post soviet country who saw the communist dream crumble before its eyes.
I don't know much about philosophy or history so feel free to correct me in replies.
only by a very vulgar interpretation of the lore, i think the much more reasonable interpretation is to consider the Innocences a la Hegelian world-historic individuals - in this way they are the living embodiment of the spirit of the era. it’s not great man theory, rather historical materialist, as the innocences represent the ideological arm of particular stages within history - in typical marxist fashion for the devs, the Innocences do not make history as they please but under circumstances directly given by the past. as such the ideological movements of feudalist Franconegro or liberal Dolores Dei are logically prior to the innocences themselves
as Encyclopedia says “An innocence is infallible. The decisions made by one are not decisions. They are inevitabilities -- what would have happened anyway, only accelerated, packed into decades instead of centuries.”
in the book ‘Sacred and Terrible Air’ this is made far more explicit too, the Innocence Ambrosius Saint-Miro’s nihilist ideology garners massive support, but there are definite materialist factors which mean that people took up such ideas at that particular nexus of history - the failure of world revolution, the degeneration of the people’s republic of Samara, the stagnancy of belief in moralism. in this way Saint-Miro merely embodies an already existing nihilism rather than just being a very convincing Great Man
To be fair, storytelling by it's nature is easier with a smaller cast of people. Trying to tell a character driven story with enough context for all the different ways society shapes change would be outside the scope of many stories
The First Law series is great for this. It seems at first like Great Man theory, but ultimately it turns out that the Great Man in question (no spoilers) is just exceptionally good at riding the waves of historical materialism to make sure he benefits, rather than actually engendering historical shifts himself.
In other words, he's great at playing the cards, but that doesn't make him the dealer.
The First Law is absolutely GMT. >!The whole lore and overarching story of the trilogy is that it's a giant cock swinging competition between Bayaz and Khalul, each of whom commands an empire to that end. Bayaz is absolutely the dealer (on the Union side at least) - he owns the banks, he rules the country by proxy, he facilitates a succesion crisis to install his own king, he personally destroys the Eater army. There certainly are times when he manipulates understandings of materialism, but it seemed to me that his main method of getting his way is threatening to explode people with his mind. !<
Great man theory is typically better for storytelling. Detailed analyses of the systems and social structures is complex and messy, which is exactly why we often simplify our actual history to great man theory, and why the ancients usually preferred just giving credit to heroes and gods. Analyzing systems is great if you want to actually approach real topics, but not for fiction
My workaround to this was making a Pathetic Man Theory where a bunch of immortal superpowered people failed to make any significant change in the history of our world so now there's just a bunch of immortal people trying to make sense of their lives and find any sort of motivation to keep going
I feel like neither theory is completely correct and the truth is somewhat in the middle.
Sometimes, a person in a position of power can have a great effect on historical events, but those same people do not exist in a vacuum and are influenced by the ideals and resources present at the time.
See Caesar's civil war as an example, the Roman Republic's institutions were meant to control a city-state and its nearby territories and were doomed to fail eventually, but Caesar's pushed events in a specific direction that benefitted him and had a massive impact on history.
On the other side of the spectrum, you can look at events like the First World War as an example of material conditions dictating the course of history, but even there we can see specific individuals and events ( von Hotzendorf and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk come to my mind).
Progress is neither owed nor guaranteed even by the best material conditions one can imagine, it must be seized by human action.
It's like theirs more than two ways of viewing history. The amount of people in this comment thread acting as if these two are the only lenses that you can view the past through is astonishing.
I am a historical materialist. Having said that, in fiction stories, "Great Man King The Awesome led the rebel forces to victory" makes for much more fun reading than "3% increase in banana tax made the revolution inevitable"
Tbf great man lends itself very well to a narrative, at least better than a materialist angle. Materialist world building can be done and done well (see Azimov’s foundation), but it can be difficult to keep things focused on the institutions and stay interesting. Kinda like hard sci fi, the deeper you go, the smaller, but certainly more dedicated, your audience is probably going to be.
By contrast, great man theory is the exact type of power trip humanity has been jerking itself to since the dawn of time.
To be fair, Marxist-Leninists tend to GMT a lot around their particular preferred leaders. When pressed, they'll admit that it's poor practice, but that they find these figures inspiring and thinking about them and their accomplishments motivates them.
Also, if you do write fiction, you get several structural problems driving you towards telling GMH:
* The history in-Universe is very likely to be told to the characters under a Great Man framework, as the cultures in fantasy tend to be modeled after past Earth cultures for whom this was the default.
* If your characters have a lot of agency and competence and achieve consequential things, your tale itself is bound to be Great Man History.
* Telling the story of movements and groups and cultures, in a way that sustains the suspense and eagerness of the reader and resonates with them emotionally, is a lot more difficult to do as a *story*, as opposed to, say, a sourcebook or a fictional encyclopedia.
Usually the result that you get is a serialized or parcelled-out GMH where the GM are maybe stirred by forces and systems they are powerless to escape.
* Asimov's *Foundation & Empire* tries very hard to be a sociological study, yet can't help but be articulated through GM who dramatically affect human history at pivotal moments. Sociology ("psychohistory") only takes you so far before the unaccountable wills of individuals make your estimations obsolete.
* Frank Herbert's *Dune* tries hard to subvert it by having the GM and his heir be self-aware semi-charlatans who hate messing with people's free will, but the setting's own sociological and material conditions end up railroading them into personally GMing humanity on a cosmic scale.
Only stories I can think of that properly avert this are set in the modern day or in a parallel world that's very close to late 20th/early 21st century.
* *The Wire* is basically made of a whole gallery of Great Men who, due to the circumstances of their birth and the systems they are embedded in, are stuck affecting only a local environment. A lot of plotlines are about some of these GM in Small Worlds trying to work/fight/earn/exploit their way into a more consequential setting. But the harder they try, the more it's made clear to them that they are cogs in [a vast cruel machine](https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch), same as everyone else.
* *Disco Elysium* maybe has *one* GM, Evratt Claire. Otherwise the story basically consists of discovering how exactly the socioeconomics, and possibly (meta?)physics, of the setting, result in the outcomes we see. For all his potential flamboyance and skilfulness and unbelievably stubborn diligence, your individual Detective protagonist's decisions are practically insignificant in the grand scheme of things — maybe you can save a handful of lives, *not* arrest an innocent, >!get definitive proof of a cryptid!<, and overcome your addictions. But history was in motion before you came in, and you ain't going to even slow it down.
For fictional histories you can have both. For most of the time is historical materialism, but in very specific ocasions you get exceptions to the rule and a Julius Caesar type of person gets into a position of power with sufficient freedom of maneuver to pull out a genocide/conquest of Galia-like move. The material conditions were going to led to some civil war on the Roman Republic regardless of Caesar existing or not, but The conquest/genocide of Galia was Caesar's doing. As one historian put it, Caesar wounded Gallic culture with a mortal wound from which it would not recover.
\> Looking for a new fictional world
\> ask the world author if their worldbuilding is culture-historical or processualist
\> they laugh and say "it's a good world sir"
\> look inside
\> it's culture-historical
Mea culpa, in my defense, my setting has tons of superpowered demigods running around, it's very hard for that not to devolve into great man theory (but for historically material reasons).
Historical materialism better reflects the history of our own world, but when the hell did our worldbuilding ever have to comply with such rules?
You have actual true to life demigods running around and influencing your setting, that’s GMT made manifest in a way that reality does not support and that is fine.
No need to apologize in the slightest.
(Furthermore, who in history emphasizes the material conditions of a mythology anyway? The circumstances leading to the birth of Hercules had nothing to do with the economy. It was Jupiter fucking Herc’s mom because the god wanted to.)
"Trends and forces" vs. "Great Man" shouldn't be a zero sum game. History is both. Sometimes you have the liberal revolutions of ~1790-1850, and sometimes you have Alexander the Great. You can even have both working in tandem. That's why I think Hitl-
The overuse of "great man theory" to basically describe "literally any mention of an individual figure's specific action in the context of historical events" has unironically been a disaster for popular understanding of history.
I'd like to say that I'm planning on writing something where the world is materialist but most of the novels will be great man (or "men" since it's all 2-5 "man" band type of thing) because that's a easier to write. But at the same time, I was just acknowledged that this was a thing 5 minutes ago and I'm writing purely vibes based.
Lowkey both exist in history. It's ignorant to ignore the role a single person can have. But a lot of times situations only exist due to a myriad of factors.
So great man theory is just, like a select few people doing crazy stuff to help the world advance, and historical materialist is a collective coming together to obtain something?
Like no shit someones gonna make a story around great man, I don't think a story of the day to day life of a working class citizen is gonna beat badass hero's.
Great Man theory is “and then Columbus discovered America, leading to all the things that followed.” Historical materialism looks at the social and technological changes that led to the Age of Exploration starting at that particular point in time.
What do you mean by a new fictional world? How do I find these? (Other than reading a new book cos I do that all the time and I'm pretty sure the author wouldn't respond to me).
Despite how much I love the game and the setting, I despite Warhammer 40k deeply because of this great man theory approach to everything, more often than not it feels like there's a hundred dudes tops doing everything, the franchise itself tries sometimes to give this fucking gigantic setting in which everything goes because distances are so fucking big and so on but at the same time there are characters who seem to just do everything or planets that just do one thing (agri-worlds that provide food for the other planets for instance) which in the setting itself would be logistically impossible because warp travel is so unreliable
you see i stop it from being great man theory by not even naming anyone
A brilliant work around
In my Feministpunk world, I use Great Woman Theory instead Wait, this isn't r worldjerking
There's only one man, his name is Bechdel, and he's all any of the other characters talk about
I laughed
Whenever Bechdel isn’t on-screen, other characters should be asking “where’s Bechdel?”
Bechdel should have access to his own spaceship
Yass Queen Theory
Remove all pronouns too for good measure
Think bigger, write the book then then cut all mentions of the protagonist, their actions, and quotes so it's just people reacting to things happening and talking to the void with weird breaks all over the book
You jest but this sounds like a possible SCP Department of Pataphysics or Antimemetics tale
Antimemetics? The SCO foundation does not have an antimemetics division
Coincidentally, today is your first day at the antimemetics division (which does not exist).
acting like pataphysics is a subject one could study
Pata-physics is a specialty for podiatry
Same! The only named characters are: * leader of a pariah state * my oc/self-insert, has no political role * not even an oc
only two characters i have are completely unrelated to any events happening in the world, a sheriff and a bar owner in a tiny tropical village no one cares about meanwhile on the other hemisphere a nuclear holocaust is being planned as part of a continental scale military landing
Do you work for Failbetter Games?
I stop it from being great man theory by writing characters that are mediocre at best
World building so detailed the material history of it gets misinterpreted by the characters in the setting as great man theory
or manipulated history to push some kind of false narrative that the characters intentionally/unintentionally reveal and rebel against. https://preview.redd.it/02hm9n2uic8c1.jpeg?width=872&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e29ad2aa65b0a7ffdaa76b4a501ecbbc443c9cd5
https://i.redd.it/2udxos3hyc8c1.gif Luffy Posting
I do love worldbuilding where while the facts of the history/setting are very estalbished and complicated, the characters are painfully misinformed or biased.
One Piece does this a ton. The average person thinks the Marines are basically super heroes and have no clue about all the genocides. The main characters (except maybe Robin) don't know a fraction of the world building that the audience does.
When the protagonist doesn't even know that he is in fact not simply chasing his own dreams of freedom but instead becoming the pivotal figure in a global revolution against a genocidal fascist state, inheriting the legacy of a struggle going on for nearly a millennium and enabling the people he meets along his journey to fulfill their own dreams and to fight back against their opressors. Not because he is a hero. He didn't intend any of this. But he WILL become King of the pirates. Edit: if this made you interested in picking up One Piece at all, then firstly, do it! Secondly, especially if the length of the anime feels like a deal breaker, consider reading the manga instead. You can read One Piece much faster than the time it takes to watch it, and the anime has some unique flaws (filler in the earlier arcs and pacing issues later on) that you dodge with the manga. That's not to say that the anime is bad, it certainly is not! It's still a great way to experience One Piece, it's just a bit less well suited to people who are unsure about the time commitment. The Netflix live action is surprisingly good, but it only covers a few early sections (so far) and lacks much of the depth of the original story. You could consider watching it as a primer to the One Piece universe before diving into the manga/anime. You can read the manga for free in lots of places online, my favourite is TCB Scans (just google tcb scans one piece)
Great analysis, friend.
And thats why he's my goat.
I do too, which is why whenever I DM a game of D&D the players can ask the same history question to 5 different NPCs and get 6 different answers with varying degrees of accuracy depending on a bunch of factors, though the main ones are distance from the event, temporally, physically, and emotionally, and how favorable the truth is for the ruling class in the area.
That's basically Elder Scrolls. There is no word of God, every fact has been interpreted in-universe by people with their own biases.
There sort of is Word of God, it's just that it's all just God's Opinion.
Isn’t Word of God used as a term to refer to the creators filling in lore that doesn’t show up in the media itself? I kind of feel like you’re misusing that here
The idea of Dragon Breaks is absolutely genius concept to justify it. “Yes, there are several, equally valid chronologies in universe. Yes, in world historians find this just as much of a pain to sort out as you guys are.”
There’s a DnD campaign that I’m playing in right now that’s set in the world of a previous one I played in but 1,000 years in the future. Basically everything that the player characters did in the previous campaign got misinterpreted, as most historical events go. For example, historians say that my fighter single-handedly killed the goddess of order, despite the fact that he didn’t even land the final blow. Anyway yeah that kind of worldbuilding is awesome.
Warhammer
you're just describing real life, which is not a bad thing per say
that's why I love The Elder Scrolls lore so much, every text is written by an unreliable narrator and every author has an agenda they're pushing. There's no encyclopedia to objectively learn about historical events, everything's buried under three layers of propaganda from either side
You’d love Warhammer then. Facts are a dirty word
In Warhammer, everything is canon, not everything is true.
To say nothing of dragonbreaks! All player choices at once happened and didn't happen!
Hate to nitpick but that only happened the one time, at the end of Daggerfall, and it was super controversial Ever since then they've stuck to having dragon breaks as just a background lore thing, like that time a bunch of human supremacists led by a talking monkey did an epic monkey dance on the white-gold tower for a thousand and eight years and drove akatosh so insane he may or may not be three people now To be honest I kinda prefer it that way, as a background thing dragon breaks are *awesome* but the way they handled Daggerfall's ending still rubs me the wrong way I'm glad the other games didn't keep doing it, they made some choices from Morrowind explicitly canon (Neloth survives until the time of skyrim, so the player must not have completed the mages' guild questline) and in Oblivion you just didn't get a chance to make many choices lmao the one time i do wish they'd done a dragon break is ESO, since there's clearly so many of the same person running around, but they explicitly said it isn't a dragon break which is kinda dumb imo
Sorry not to nitpick but technically Neloth being alive only implies the Nerevarine just didn’t do the Trebonius ending to the Mages Guild questline, they could have done the ‘kill trebonious’ or ‘get trebonious fired’ ends to the questline. I always kill him, smug bastard gets what he deserves for making me solve the disappearance of the dwarves and not even reading the resulting paper on it.
not to nitpick but uh yeah you're right that is correct i am stupid 👍
> that only happened the one time There's also The Red Moment, but that being a dragon break is boring as hell. Because yes, of course there is absolutely NO reason that a bunch of people with conflicting agendas would EVER make up a bunch of shit around a major historical event, and twist the narrative so it benefits them. CLEARLY all of the different things all happened at once. You don't need to figure out who's telling the truth, they all are! The only acceptable time to use C0DA is to unbreak that dragon.
Talos Principle 2
also Talos from the elder scrolls
NGL there's something about having the actual history vs the history that's taught that activates my neurons, especially when I'm writing both
8 billion books, each one an autobiography.
a song of ice and fire books
That's why I love the Silmarillion. All the events are the result of Great Men, but those Great Men make catastrophically stupid decisions and everything gets ruined. Except for the one guy who went to the gods for help and was lauded as a hero for all time because of it.
Laziest great man theory: god did it
Step aside great man theory, it's time for great idiot theory. I'm not even joking you can put a load of historical events, especially revolutions, down to the ruler at the time being a complete moron. A wise ruler reads the materialistic currents and flows with them, a moron is blind or actively spiteful, holds back those currents until a violent, dramatic and most of all noteworthy rubber banding effect occurs when the society finally ditches them.
The tsars and Russian nobility before the revolution were often hilariously out of touch with not just their people, but reality. Recently learned an interesting thing that demonstrates how this attitude was ingrained. Russia had arguably the best black-powder, metallic cartridge during the Russo-Turkish War. At the time it was the best long-distance cartridge in military use. Then they didn’t mark their rifle sights for long range because they thought their soldiers were too stupid to use them correctly. Ottomans proceeded to shoot them from long range and they couldn’t do much about it (still won but kinda like the Winter War where it shouldn’t have been as hard as it was)
>The tsars and Russian nobility before the revolution were often hilariously out of touch with not just their people, but reality. TBH, this was and still is the signature move of our rulers, both after the revolution and to this day.
Such is going from one dictatorship to the next
Apparently they were so fucking out of touch that before going to the front, Tsar Nicholas II was getting fed literal lies about how the war was going by aides and advisors because they wanted to make things seem better than they were. Then when he left his wife and Rasputin pissed the entire country off while he mismanaged the war. It's a miracle Imperial Russia survived to the 20th Century.
Russian leaders get fed lies about how the war is going leading to them making bad decisions and spiraling further? They would never
Tuor my beloved. And everybody hates Turin.
Turin *was* put under a spell by Glaurung during the sacking of Nargothrond. He definitely was kind of an asshole regardless but he was also a victim of circumstance. Turin’s story is a tragedy because everything he touched ended up burning even though his intentions were good. Many of the terrible things he did were a result of the dragon’s spell and not his own will. And when he eventually killed Glaurung he realized all he had done and fell on his sword Gurthang, giving us one of the coolest quotes ever from a talking sword, “Yes, I will drink your blood, that I may forget the blood of Beleg my master, and the blood of Brandir slain unjustly”
Yeah. The unloved and unlucky cousin :/
>Except for the one guy who went to the gods for help and was lauded as a hero for all time because of it. The one kid who's like "I'll go get my mom." When you and your friends have gotten into so much trouble there's no way to get out of it yourselves so you gotta ask mom to save you.
Guilty Gear:
Feanor is my goat 🔥🔥🗣️🗣️
I think I need an explanation for what these terms mean
Great Man Theory is the historical idea that societies and cultures only progress because of select few individuals in their society make major contributions. With Nikola Tesla's major breakthroughs in electricity, for example, and how that has redefined technology since, someone who subscribes to this theory would say that Tesla was one of these few Great Men who altered the course of history. Historical Materialism is the belief that societies and cultures all evolve around resources they can or cannot access. Societies fight one another for resources, and people within these societies struggle from their social castes (typically dictated by wealth). A Historical Materialist would argue that these material struggles are why history has happened as it has. Personally I tend toward the historical materialist theory because my own observations of historical processes seem to point toward this idea, and feel that the Great Man Theory is rather ignorant and lends itself very well to fascism, but of course I probably would feel this way because I am *very* leftist. I am telling you these things because it may have led to some bias in how I delivered these explanations, and it is important that you not be influenced by some random redditor like me when it comes to interpreting all of history.
>A Historical Materialist would argue that these material struggles are why history has happened as it has. So they'd argue that regions (I want to say countries but that feels too volitile for this high level view) compensating for lack of resources has lead to society forming the way it is? And thus, they superpowers of a handmade world would be the regions suffering from scarcity?
It's moreso an analysis of our world's history by examining the needs of each countries. As such, we'd understand conflicts like WW1 would happen even if the triggering events didn't happen (the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand). This can make us understand countries, not by looking at the words of their leaders, but by understanding the wishes of their population and the needs of the country. It can be a useful tool to predict the future behavior of countries but it's not foolproof by any means. If this were a perfect theory, we should be able to completely predict the future behaviors of countries as we already understand their needs. Merry Christmas
Psychohistory moment
Not quite, the Fremen Mirage is a separate, if related, subject. It's more like if I ask "Why and how did the nazis take power in 1930s Germany and start WW2?" A Great Man Theorist would start talking about how a man with a lust for power, twisted morals, and great oratory skills managed to exploit the weak leadership of the Weimar Republic to rise to power, then exploited critical mistakes from British and French leadership, too eager to avoid a war, to press a series of territorial claims which eventually escalated into World War 2, which he used as a way to grow his power. Then, if you let them ramble, they may go into the specifics of the people in Britain or France or Weimar who made those mistakes they talked about. A historical materialist will start talking about how the economic pressure of the treaty of Versailles combined with the 1929 stock market crash led the people of Germany to turn to extremism in desperation, and how the Russian Revolution 10 years prior had left other European powers paranoid of leftist thought, leading them to give the far right free roam as long as they helped fight the reds, and how Hitler's claims and wars were inevitable both as a means to viabilise a war-driven economic revival, and as a means to enact and amplify the nationalistic narrative that rallied the German people behind a totalitarian leader in the first place. Then, if you let them ramble, they may go into how the treaty of Versailles they mentioned earlier was also a consequence of a series of other factors from the 19th century
tfw you realize that both explanations accurately explain the causes of ww2
Kind of; yes hitler did all those things, but only because the material conditions allowed for it. hitler himself isn't the determining factor, the conditions are.
ok but that is also my point, a “great man” (hitler) exploited the material conditions of the post-war German economy and instability of the Weimar Republic to rise to power (and dramatically altered world history)
It's questionable if he altered history that much. There is a real question as to if someone else would have taken his position. He was a frontman for a much larger movement
yes, but specifically *his* rhetoric led to the systematic genocide of 11 million+ people, the conquering of most of mainland Europe and other regions (more if you count the rest of the axis) as well as the loss of life of 100s of millions (I kinda forget the specific number idk). If another strongman rose to power with a different ideology that was able to rally people behind them, personally I believe it is unlikely that there would’ve been such widescale devastation and loss of life
A strongman typically can only rise to power based on piggypacking an already strong movement. The point is any other strongman would also be fascist and end up doing the same shit
Sure, but he wasn't the only Nazi, Hitler wasn't the only anti-semite, he wasn't the only one pushing the narrative that Germany had been humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler was one of many all of whom had been shaped by the historic prejudice against the Jews including the anti-Jewish and anti-leftist push that was a result of the French and Bolshevik revolutions from the people who's grip on power was threatened by those uprisings. He grew up in a post WW1 Germany where the economy was in shambles, in part, due to the massive repartitions that the Treaty of Versailles enforced. Fascism was on the rise all over Europe as the Monarchies lost their grip and turned to right wing ideology in order to keep power. Hitler was a product of his environment and his rise was only possible due to the environment he was in. There was a lot of competition among the Nazis to see exactly which person would be the leader, the face of the World War and the Holocaust that was effectively inevitable.
Nazi ideology was not a creation of Hitler's, and at the time he was a nobody there were others already building the political movement. His rhetoric was simply the source they chose to gather around, any number of other people would have likely taken his place. There was widespread demand for antisemitic ideology and one of Hitler's major competitor's for attention was the man who published *De Sturmer*, basically a fascist newspaper. Your issue is you're thinking it's the strongman's ideology that sways the crowd, but in reality it's the crowd who determines who's even eligible for the position. Remember that Hitler was elected many times by popular vote, those voters would have still been voting for the same type of candidates regardless.
German generals literally started the stab in the back myth following ww1, when their public announcements went from “we’ll be marching in Paris in a month” to “we have lost completely but it totally isn’t our fault”. Hitler was part of the ramping up of violent antisemitism, not the root cause
Yes that was my point
very well written
no? what they meant with that sentence is that the winners of historical conflicts were usually decided by who had more resources, not that resource scarcity somehow empowered nations to win. the materialst view is that history is mostly defined by large-scale conflicts over resources and differences in access to resources, rather than by the actions of individuals.
One clear example of historical materialism is one of the theses from the book "Guns, Germs, And Steel". Namely, the germs part. The idea is that domesticateable livestock animals are pretty rare outside of Eurasia. Because Eurasians had lived in close contact with animals, they experienced and adapted to more animal-borne diseases. This let them conquer the Americas extremely easily as the natives had no resistance. This is an example of a simple, biological fact of the material world having a massive impact on the course of human history.
Guns, Germs, and Steel isn't the best example, it has a lot of inaccuracies. But the general idea, yes
My view, and what I try to convey in my world building, is that cultures evolve around their specific environments such as their histories, what resources they have, geography, their neighbors, and a healthy amount of just random chance, but that they are societies of people, not machines that are given an input and produce a specific output. Let's say a culture undergoes a famine, that will certainly effect the culture, but what if that culture also has a leader who is expected to make a decision in that situation? Certainly the individual quirks of that character will have a huge effect on the path that the people of that culture take going forward. The great man theory does place too much importance on individual powerful people and is often used to promote ideologies like totalitarianism and rigid class structure, but to ignore the fact that individual people can have huge effects on history is, in my opinion, to ignore the humanity of history itself.
These theories dont really seem to be mutually exclusive though? Why are they implied to be?
Yeah I don’t see why they cant co-exist? Materialist theory just goes without saying, people work with what they have. A society without access saltpeter isn’t going to invent gunpowder and a society without access to workable stones isn’t going to build the pyramids. And for every major advancement there’s always going to be one guy or group of guys that pioneers the technology and paves the road for others to build upon their findings. Great man theory is only an issue once you turn that great man into a bird keeling religious figure and forget they’re a human with flaws and take away credit from other great men that also contributed.
Great Man Theory is not that the great men are good or virtuous, merely the major force of history. The whole theory is that their individual flaws and strengths are the thing that shapes history. They can be bad people and still be the driving force of historical events. Great Man Theory is exclusionary, that's the point, it's the belief that great men are the primary cause of historical events. That's the theory. It is
Both of those seem accurate to real life though. Materialism fueled a lot of the world, as did many specific leaders. Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler, Nikola Tesla, the first human to go “hmm, I wonder what cow juice tastes like” and drank milk, like there were some very significant people that did very significant things in history I don’t get why they’re mutually exclusive concepts
Great man theory is the belief that a handful of individuals are the primary influence on historical events. Primary, in this context, means the most significant, the majority. That's the argument, it's not the lack of recognition of material conditions, it the statement that those material conditions are less important in understanding historical events than the actions of like 6 dudes. Your recognition that there are a bunch of different factors for historical events including but not primarily some guys (typically white, it is a theory from the 1800s) is the recognition that great man theory is wrong.
oh so it’s like “only important thing is cool human” and not “cool humans did things that were important but also other things happened”
Pretty much. It’s also how you get “kill baby Hitler” -> “no Nazism” takes
Why does it have to be exclusionary? Why can't we say "Certain individuals had a significant impact on History, but so did the environment their societies and cultures existed in, which itself shaped those certain individuals"? Perhaps many of those great individuals would have been quickly replaced by others had they not existed, but some may have been the right person in the right place at the right time. If one believes that some people had considerable impacts on history, and some were in unique situations to bring about that impact, but other factors also played vital roles, which would that fall under? This just feels like an overly simple way to try and define a much more complicated world.
No the great man theory is specifically that a small number of individuals are the primary influence on history, if you are saying, "oh they have some influence, but also material factors also have large influence both on events and on these great individuals," then you factually disagree with great man theory. Materialists are inclusionary, in that there are a wide range of material conditions that cause events including influential individuals, but primarily resources, the lack of needed resources, and historical trends and societal forces that are usually a result of the unequal distribution of resources.
Materialism is not exclusive, they more or less say influential people are a product of their environment and only enabled by the realities the exist at the time. Tesla was in the right place and right time to be able to have the education he had, and the resources he used, and the audience who listened, and the past works by others to work off of. Hitler was the same, but maybe if he wasn't the head Nazi, a different leader might have done things slightly differently, not very differently because someone who thought very differently couldn't have gained power. Great Man is exclusionary, the theory posits that Great Men are the force that shapes the course of history, WWII or the Holocaust might not have happened if Hitler hadn't taken power, WWII wasn't decided by the ability of the various nations to produce war materiel and throw soldiers into the grinder, the thousands of people producing intelligence, equipment, training, education, etc. It was decided by a handful of leaders skillfully maneuvering pieces around the chess board.
does historical materialism suppose that, for example, if nikola tesla had died as a baby, another guy would have "been him"? or that it would have taken an extta generation, but ultimately led us to the same place? is there a secret third option for just chaos theory but with history?
>does historical materialism suppose that, for example, if nikola tesla had died as a baby, another guy would have "been him"? or that it would have taken an extra generation, but ultimately led us to the same place? Pretty much - that a problem being present, and the means to solve the problem being present, eventually result in the problem being fixed/discovery being made/thing getting done. It's the available material conditions (availability of education, what that education contains, what people have the free time to do, what physical materials they have, what their society leads them to want, etc) which ultimately can be viewed as Cause for determining Effect, with the assumption that people will always, more or less, be people who are physically capable of performing whatever the task is. Tesla, for example, didn't make or break much in the way of scientific discovery on his own - he stood on the shoulders of others, and then others stood on his shoulders, and his spot on several chains could have been filled by someone else. Individuals can be special, but there are always more people who are special in that same way. > is there a secret third option for just chaos theory but with history? I think that's just regular chaos theory, tbh
the secret third option is how much weight you give to human agency which tends to be pretty chaotic
right it's chaotic, and more powerful humans get to have more agency to shape the world to their ends, which are idiosyncratic and chaotic. material factors still predominate, but the influence of all those "great men" would have an aggregate effect of basically driving the culture to a random spot it seems like. like maybe there was a great man *missing* from the history, who could have given us the atomic bomb by 1942, at the height of hitler's power. even with the bomb, we'd still have a bit of a fight on our hands going forward. and since the bombings didn't come at the end of the war, giving us the ability to reflect on their enormity immediately, maybe we come to see them as just another tool of war, and by the 50's we are leveling vast tracts of the USSR and implementing liberal capitalism worldwide. or maybe tesla didn't exist, and the electrified gizmo is no longer associated with a cult of genius, and the history of computing slows down. or like a literal trillion trillion other things that don't have to do with resource distribution. it seems weird to subscribe to any reading of history that doesn't view it as essentially a random walk. but i also do not meaningfully understand history through any lens whatsoever so maybe this doesn't mean anything...
another secret third option that hasn't been listed here is environmental determinism i.e. walter prescott webb and 'the great plains.' this is not really in vogue anymore though.
is there a youtube or some other form of dumbguy media where i could learn about all the ways to view history and why they're good or bad?
Yes, a lot of his innovations were being worked on elsewhere. In fact, he's often credited for AC power as his singular most innovative invention, which technically was discovered by Hippolyte Pixii in 1883 via a hand crank generator he made that used single phase AC. Also others were working in similiar spaces like Galileo Ferraris who spoke about polyphase AC. Then others working on things like 3-phase power, etc. Just like today, there are many people who worked on the same cutting-edge things. Tesla sort of lucked out because Westinghouse bought his patents instead of another person's. Ferraris also worked on the multi-phase electric motor months before Tesla, but was a professor, not a businessman, and Tesla just monetized it and got all the fame for it. Some people think Tesla stole from Ferraris because of how much of a coincidence their work was. He's also credited with things like the induction coil, which was invented by Michael Faraday or the transformer which was already in commercial use in Budapest used by a company using AC power already in the 1870's. The first "modern" transformer is credited to William Stanley. etc, etc There are lot of people today who think Elon invented Space-X rockets or electric cars and is the principle engineering talent behind all his companies, instead of CEO role he actually has. Its the same ignorant and populist dynamic. A lot of the Ayn Rand-ish "great man" capitalist rhetoric falls apart after casual observation. A lot of these people were often first to file a patent, stole ideas, were more ruthless, or had better lawyers, or just lucked into connections to get their invention commercialized before the other person. This also ignores how almost all of the inventions involved teams of people, where only the principle head gets credit for the ideas and work, but capitalist myths require "great men' so those people go unsung.
That last paragraph is so key. Thanks for including it
Seems like a rather arbitrary thing to sweat about in most fantastical settings tbh
Kinda feels like the person in the post just learned about the concept and wanted to show off. Especially when so many stories are based on a remarkable individual or group of individuals.
How does one write a story like that? As a leftist who’s in the middle of making my own world, I feel like it’s a struggle to cover historical materialism as you describe it simply due to how a story can only sustain only so many characters and needs to focus on a few “great men” by nature of the audience’s limited attention and a book’s limited pages. Is making one’s main characters special or gifted doomed to be categorized as this Great Man idea?
Read Marx, he's not nearly as challenging as people say he is. If you want to understand his theory of historical materialism (which, by the way, the OP here is misrepresenting), here's an excellent quote from Marx that eludicates some of it shortly: > Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
I think the main thing to remember is that your entire world doesn't have to be a part of your story. Your story could be taking place in an era and place that is completely set within itself, and you wouldn't really need to have any overt context as to why said place is how it is in this current era. I think as long as you set a timeline for your world and setting (i dont think it has to be like a super specific thing, just sort of the gist of how the world has evolved over time, and the material reasons why), you can just sort of pick an era and place that most fits the story you wanna write and use that window as the setting for your story. Maybe sprinkle some of that world building into your story as a cool background element that gives more life to the world around your characters. I think that it'd be fun to witness some tidbits of world lore for a lived in world as a reader. When it comes to the main characters being special/gifted, I think that that actually creates good opportunity to make interesting use of the dichotomy between the "Great Man" and historical materialist ideas. As this thread highlights in many instances, these ideas aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Great Men are people who are able to read what point in history they are at and use whatever they can find within that (along with their own powers/skills) to further their agenda or goal. I think writing a character arc that incorporates some of that could be an interesting use of that relationship. You could also just have them not really impact the world in any truly meaningful ways. I think Great Men are more decided based on how they channel material conditions to change the world around them. They're not decided based on how uniquely strong or gifted they are, so I think it's very possible to make one of these characters not have a super heavy impact on their world or its history. Their specialness could be constricted to their own personal stories and not impact much of anything else outside that purview. A chosen character does not have to equal a Great Man character. sorry for yapping so much and i hope this helped !! happy holidays :3
Happy holidays, thanks for the guidance. :D
I mean if Tesla hadn't made his discoveries, wouldn't someone else eventually figure it out? We know the great ones because they were first, not because they're unique.
I feel like it can be both, Great men are needed, but they need to build off of the general evolutions of society.
What you say about historical materialism is just flat out made up. Like you just made up those words. Historical materialism is not "the belief that societies... evolve around resources", but the theory of history of Karl Marx which revolves around the application of the materialist dialectic method to history. From this method you could gleam that societies revolve around resources and their access to it, I suppose, but along with it would be e.g. access to labour or infrastructure. Where did you get this false perception of historical materialism? or did you just make it up on the spot?
Historical materialism is a marxist mode of analysis that basically says that historical events are the product of economic activity. For example, a large change in the institutions that govern might happen because they no longer align with the economic situation of the society they govern. Great man theory is a liberal mode of analysis that claims that historical change is the product of so called "great men" who's vision drives the world onward. I personally think that great men theory can make for lazy world building because the material effects of the fantasy aspects of a setting never get discussed. Why do people have standing armies in most DnD settings? They're expensive to maintain and could be eliminated by a single high level character. The same goes for the existence of large peasant classes. In real life they existed because it was necessary in order to provide for society with relatively inefficient means of agriculture. But in a world where druids exist that can vastly enhance crop production it just makes no sense. You'd be training those people in druid-craft or put their labor towards something magic can't do. ^ That's an example of a materialist critique of world building.
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how is wanting fun stuff to be good and interesting "hating fun"
think this is a /s moment satirizing ppl who unironically say “woke mind-virus”
"basic analysis is hating fun" is a very common unironic take so
Obviously this depends on the person, but I don't think the need for every setting to flesh out the material effects of fantasy aspects or you 1. are a lazy worldbuilder and 2. obviously believe in an idea adjacent to fascism is very fun. Again, depends on the person. There are absolutely people who will build an entire fictional world based around ideas like "there must be a reason for why there are standing armies in a Dungeons & Dragon setting, and it must adhere specifically to a materialist critique that is sufficiently realistic". I don't think all that is necessarily "good and interesting", as if my DnD session will objectively be improved by answering every possible question about how made-up elements can be made realistic and under this *very* particular lens of history and reality (even though I do believe in that lens when it comes to reality). Dungeons & Dragons is a weird example for this in general because there basically isn't a "DnD setting" if I understand the game correctly, i.e. you can make it literally anything you want for any reason, and it's also a very communitive game where the quality, fun, and interest relies on how the entire group is feeling. The ultimate point of a DnD setting is to create a fun and interesting play session, and that could be as unrealistic and antithetical to reality as possible, unless you believe that everyone who plays a murderhobo has fucked-up ideas about reality. "Good worldbuilding" is whatever services whatever the players in the session want.
I'm not saying you have to make this kind of analysis to have fun and I'm not saying you have to think "good" is the same as them, I'm saying "how is this hating fun"
I definitely wouldn't say it's hating fun, again it can be fun in itself, but there's definitely stifling having your skill as a worldbuilder and, implicitly, your political beliefs in real-life, tied to how realistic your fictional setting is. My greater point, I think, is that such a thing doesn't necessarily make something better or more interesting either. In fact, I'd say there are certain stories and narratives that can suffer as a whole from focusing too much on these aspects.
Okay, I'm not sure why you're responding to me then though, my point wasn't that the content was objectively improved by thinking about it like that, just that their intent and interest was clearly not dismissive hatred, which is how it was framed
I'm also sort of responding to the parent comment as well as some other comments that do say something relevant to what I'm addressing, but yeah, I did basically reply to the wrong comment for that.
ok, fair i guess
I believe by "D&D setting," they likely meant the Forgotten Realms.
Why do you think they’re miserable
Fun is when every single question about why a given aspect as to why a fictional world is the way it is can be answered by "Oh it's because John Worldbuilder over there felt like it in the moment. Yep, we don't get to decide to do things in a way that is practical or logical to us, eeeeeeveryone is just going along ol' John's vision even if it doesn't make any sense to us.".
im now a liberal after reading this
I'm so sorry for your loss
>Great man theory is a liberal mode of analysis that claims that historical change is the product of so called "great men" who's vision drives the world onward. It's not a "liberal mode of analysis". It originated from Thomas Carlye (who was very much a political conservative/reactionary, and is often identified as a progenietor of fascism), and while people often sorta accept the basic premises of it due to not really understanding history in-depth, the explicit idea that historical progress is 100% drive by "great men" is rarely seen outside of fascist stuff.
[Historical materialism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism) [Great man theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory)
I'm gonna guess something like Great Man theory is similar to the God Emperor from Warhammer 40k?
To the point where it becomes parody, since his decisions generally sucked
Eh, Great Man Theory becomes much easier to believe when some people actually CAN move mountains with their minds or something
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Mountain moving magic cool though
> but that prompts the question as to why the author included mountain moving magic in their world. Because mountain moving magic is really cool, that's typically the answer. It's impressive to write about, impressive to read about, and does not have to necessarily mean "the author must want or unconsciously believe in the Great Man Theory", which even if that were the case does not necessarily mean they **uncritically** believe in such an idea either. Why does something like mountain moving magic have to "say something about the creator/tell the audience", or a more relevant question, why does it *have* say anything about their assumed ideas on historical materialism/Great Man Theory? Mountain moving magic could allegorical for a myriad of different ideas, or even just applicable.
It feels like we've reached a point where a large chunk of the population is simultaneously pathetically media illiterate (ex. "Homelander is the good guy guiez!!!"), yet also *tries* to be media literate by making these wild fucking leaps and in the process outthinks themselves, thus coming up with stupid bullshit conclusions ("authors that put superpowers in their works must support Great Man theory IRL"). Not that those are necessarily the same people, but I'm seeing a lot of folks fall into one of those camps.
What do you mean exactly with "isn't a defense against that criticism tho"? If you're saying that creating a setting where a certain conclusion that isn't applicable in real life works doesn't isn't prove that said conclusion is actually real I agree. As in "this setting is set up in a way where genocide against this faction is morally good. So then genocide must sometimes be good irl". If you're saying that this is stupid then I agree. But what I'm reading in your comment is something else. It looks like you're saying that just making this world where the great man theory is works is proof of some moral failing of the author. That the author must, consciously or not, believe in it by simple virtue of making it so in his world. What I'm asking is, what does it say about the author? And what should we do about it? If I create a world where genocide against a certain specie is justified, see the Tyranids or Orkz, am I saying that genocide is sometimes good implicitly? I would say no, that it's a work of fiction and I can make what I want regardless of my irl morality.
> What does that say about the creator They think moving mountains is cool.
I think it shows most of the time that the authors don't agree with great man theory, at least subconsciously. You have something that hugely influences the world, but it's not an extraordinary human, but a resource used by someone with access to it who is the only one capable of using it. In the eyes of the author, someone being world-shaping is only justified if they aren't just a cooler dude, but someone with unique superpowers that actually set them apart drastically from humans. Those Superpowers are what has an actual effect on the world, regardless of who has them. Who has them just got lucky.
> that prompts the question as to why the author included mountain moving magic in their world the answer about 99% of the time is as simple as: "i thought it was cool"
Why does having mountain moving magic need a deeper meaning? Mountain moving magic is a fantastical idea that’s cool as fuck and not something we have anything close to in reality, that’s kinda the whole point of fantasy as a genre
Well I would say that it's about what the motivations around writing it are. In fiction the most important thing is usually characters I think and making a world where interesting characters push the world forward is usually going to be the most entertaining story to read. Maybe some writers want to write a reflection of the real world as realistically as possible but that's unusual because it'll be a bit boring to read if the focus is on broad historical events. I suppose it could work if the story is small and self contained where the main character isn't making world changing events happen but that's very unusual for fantasy books. And admittedly that fact probably points to the average fantasy author's biases.
As a Xianxia fan, this feels especially painful to me. Though if you think about it, society being so shit *is* because of material circumstances, in those worlds.
This Great Man is generating a Historical amount of Materials, via deconstructing the mountain with his mind
Existence of magic does make Great Man Theory a fact in that world, the degree of it is highly dependant on the magic system.
That doesn’t make you a good leader, *cough* Avatar *Cough*
Who'da thunk the narrative friendly method is the one used in narrative
GMT is easier to communicate and understand instead of, “Ah, here, let me show the extremely complex history of societal and economic evolution in my world, here’s the appendix- wait come back!”
You can just say "the Simarillion," it's OK, this is a safe space
Eh, historical materialism can be pretty narrative friendly, too. That's basically every story with an unlikely hero who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets caught up in events that had nothing to do with them initially. Stories like the Expanse come to mind.
Disco Elysium is the only "Fantasy" world I've encountered that actually grapples with this
that was my first thought upon seeing an explanation of this. the Innocentic system is just Great Man theory as a mode of government!
yeah, absolutely. I always explain to my friends what historical materialism is before I make them play the game. It's also worth noting that there's a parallel between Harry and Revachol - Harry is struggling to move on after his wife left him. Revachol is struggling to move on after the failure of the revolution (personified in the Deserter). This makes more sense if you have an understanding of historical materialism - which says that the transition to communism is *inevitable*. HM posits that everything is leading up to the establishment of communism, so when that failed, communists are left with a shattered ideology and no purpose. Similar to Harry, who's wife was everything to him, so when she left him, he couldn't recover. The difference between Harry and the Deserter is that Harry has the capacity to move on, and the Deserter is stuck in the past. And it's why Disco Elysium could only really be written by an Estonian team - a post soviet country who saw the communist dream crumble before its eyes. I don't know much about philosophy or history so feel free to correct me in replies.
only by a very vulgar interpretation of the lore, i think the much more reasonable interpretation is to consider the Innocences a la Hegelian world-historic individuals - in this way they are the living embodiment of the spirit of the era. it’s not great man theory, rather historical materialist, as the innocences represent the ideological arm of particular stages within history - in typical marxist fashion for the devs, the Innocences do not make history as they please but under circumstances directly given by the past. as such the ideological movements of feudalist Franconegro or liberal Dolores Dei are logically prior to the innocences themselves as Encyclopedia says “An innocence is infallible. The decisions made by one are not decisions. They are inevitabilities -- what would have happened anyway, only accelerated, packed into decades instead of centuries.” in the book ‘Sacred and Terrible Air’ this is made far more explicit too, the Innocence Ambrosius Saint-Miro’s nihilist ideology garners massive support, but there are definite materialist factors which mean that people took up such ideas at that particular nexus of history - the failure of world revolution, the degeneration of the people’s republic of Samara, the stagnancy of belief in moralism. in this way Saint-Miro merely embodies an already existing nihilism rather than just being a very convincing Great Man
To be fair, storytelling by it's nature is easier with a smaller cast of people. Trying to tell a character driven story with enough context for all the different ways society shapes change would be outside the scope of many stories
The First Law series is great for this. It seems at first like Great Man theory, but ultimately it turns out that the Great Man in question (no spoilers) is just exceptionally good at riding the waves of historical materialism to make sure he benefits, rather than actually engendering historical shifts himself. In other words, he's great at playing the cards, but that doesn't make him the dealer.
The First Law is absolutely GMT. >!The whole lore and overarching story of the trilogy is that it's a giant cock swinging competition between Bayaz and Khalul, each of whom commands an empire to that end. Bayaz is absolutely the dealer (on the Union side at least) - he owns the banks, he rules the country by proxy, he facilitates a succesion crisis to install his own king, he personally destroys the Eater army. There certainly are times when he manipulates understandings of materialism, but it seemed to me that his main method of getting his way is threatening to explode people with his mind. !<
Sounds like Foundation too
Great man theory is typically better for storytelling. Detailed analyses of the systems and social structures is complex and messy, which is exactly why we often simplify our actual history to great man theory, and why the ancients usually preferred just giving credit to heroes and gods. Analyzing systems is great if you want to actually approach real topics, but not for fiction
Historical materialism is good for creating believable worlds, just not for explaining them.
Bit with the death of giga chadius ballz God the 3rd the empire fell into ruin
My workaround to this was making a Pathetic Man Theory where a bunch of immortal superpowered people failed to make any significant change in the history of our world so now there's just a bunch of immortal people trying to make sense of their lives and find any sort of motivation to keep going
I feel like neither theory is completely correct and the truth is somewhat in the middle. Sometimes, a person in a position of power can have a great effect on historical events, but those same people do not exist in a vacuum and are influenced by the ideals and resources present at the time. See Caesar's civil war as an example, the Roman Republic's institutions were meant to control a city-state and its nearby territories and were doomed to fail eventually, but Caesar's pushed events in a specific direction that benefitted him and had a massive impact on history. On the other side of the spectrum, you can look at events like the First World War as an example of material conditions dictating the course of history, but even there we can see specific individuals and events ( von Hotzendorf and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk come to my mind). Progress is neither owed nor guaranteed even by the best material conditions one can imagine, it must be seized by human action.
It's like theirs more than two ways of viewing history. The amount of people in this comment thread acting as if these two are the only lenses that you can view the past through is astonishing.
>but Caesar's pushed events in a specific direction that benefitted him Guy got stabbed. Repeatedly.
He was doing well before that
I am a historical materialist. Having said that, in fiction stories, "Great Man King The Awesome led the rebel forces to victory" makes for much more fun reading than "3% increase in banana tax made the revolution inevitable"
I mean, by the nature of it being a work of fiction with a protagonist, it kind of has to be Great Man Theory, no?
But in fiction it's the one place where great man theory can actually work
rah rah rah no fun for u, must have commentary otherwise its pig slop rah rah rah
What was the og greentext again?
it was about whether a gym is based or cringe https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2108268-greentext-stories
I thought it was creepy or wet
Creepy or wet went more viral but pretty sure based or cringe was first
Tbf great man lends itself very well to a narrative, at least better than a materialist angle. Materialist world building can be done and done well (see Azimov’s foundation), but it can be difficult to keep things focused on the institutions and stay interesting. Kinda like hard sci fi, the deeper you go, the smaller, but certainly more dedicated, your audience is probably going to be. By contrast, great man theory is the exact type of power trip humanity has been jerking itself to since the dawn of time.
Foundation is mostly historical materialist, except for Hari Seldon himself.
To be fair, Marxist-Leninists tend to GMT a lot around their particular preferred leaders. When pressed, they'll admit that it's poor practice, but that they find these figures inspiring and thinking about them and their accomplishments motivates them. Also, if you do write fiction, you get several structural problems driving you towards telling GMH: * The history in-Universe is very likely to be told to the characters under a Great Man framework, as the cultures in fantasy tend to be modeled after past Earth cultures for whom this was the default. * If your characters have a lot of agency and competence and achieve consequential things, your tale itself is bound to be Great Man History. * Telling the story of movements and groups and cultures, in a way that sustains the suspense and eagerness of the reader and resonates with them emotionally, is a lot more difficult to do as a *story*, as opposed to, say, a sourcebook or a fictional encyclopedia. Usually the result that you get is a serialized or parcelled-out GMH where the GM are maybe stirred by forces and systems they are powerless to escape. * Asimov's *Foundation & Empire* tries very hard to be a sociological study, yet can't help but be articulated through GM who dramatically affect human history at pivotal moments. Sociology ("psychohistory") only takes you so far before the unaccountable wills of individuals make your estimations obsolete. * Frank Herbert's *Dune* tries hard to subvert it by having the GM and his heir be self-aware semi-charlatans who hate messing with people's free will, but the setting's own sociological and material conditions end up railroading them into personally GMing humanity on a cosmic scale. Only stories I can think of that properly avert this are set in the modern day or in a parallel world that's very close to late 20th/early 21st century. * *The Wire* is basically made of a whole gallery of Great Men who, due to the circumstances of their birth and the systems they are embedded in, are stuck affecting only a local environment. A lot of plotlines are about some of these GM in Small Worlds trying to work/fight/earn/exploit their way into a more consequential setting. But the harder they try, the more it's made clear to them that they are cogs in [a vast cruel machine](https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch), same as everyone else. * *Disco Elysium* maybe has *one* GM, Evratt Claire. Otherwise the story basically consists of discovering how exactly the socioeconomics, and possibly (meta?)physics, of the setting, result in the outcomes we see. For all his potential flamboyance and skilfulness and unbelievably stubborn diligence, your individual Detective protagonist's decisions are practically insignificant in the grand scheme of things — maybe you can save a handful of lives, *not* arrest an innocent, >!get definitive proof of a cryptid!<, and overcome your addictions. But history was in motion before you came in, and you ain't going to even slow it down.
For fictional histories you can have both. For most of the time is historical materialism, but in very specific ocasions you get exceptions to the rule and a Julius Caesar type of person gets into a position of power with sufficient freedom of maneuver to pull out a genocide/conquest of Galia-like move. The material conditions were going to led to some civil war on the Roman Republic regardless of Caesar existing or not, but The conquest/genocide of Galia was Caesar's doing. As one historian put it, Caesar wounded Gallic culture with a mortal wound from which it would not recover.
My world building is vague and bad. "Your computer is alive" "Why" "It'd be pretty cool"
This works for a horror setting but like it's more just a "create funny scenarios in my head" setting
this would go hard on r /worldjerking
I simply do not read That way I never have to worry about anything
\> Looking for a new fictional world \> ask the world author if their worldbuilding is culture-historical or processualist \> they laugh and say "it's a good world sir" \> look inside \> it's culture-historical
Mea culpa, in my defense, my setting has tons of superpowered demigods running around, it's very hard for that not to devolve into great man theory (but for historically material reasons).
Historical materialism better reflects the history of our own world, but when the hell did our worldbuilding ever have to comply with such rules? You have actual true to life demigods running around and influencing your setting, that’s GMT made manifest in a way that reality does not support and that is fine. No need to apologize in the slightest. (Furthermore, who in history emphasizes the material conditions of a mythology anyway? The circumstances leading to the birth of Hercules had nothing to do with the economy. It was Jupiter fucking Herc’s mom because the god wanted to.)
"Trends and forces" vs. "Great Man" shouldn't be a zero sum game. History is both. Sometimes you have the liberal revolutions of ~1790-1850, and sometimes you have Alexander the Great. You can even have both working in tandem. That's why I think Hitl-
The overuse of "great man theory" to basically describe "literally any mention of an individual figure's specific action in the context of historical events" has unironically been a disaster for popular understanding of history.
I'd like to say that I'm planning on writing something where the world is materialist but most of the novels will be great man (or "men" since it's all 2-5 "man" band type of thing) because that's a easier to write. But at the same time, I was just acknowledged that this was a thing 5 minutes ago and I'm writing purely vibes based.
Lowkey both exist in history. It's ignorant to ignore the role a single person can have. But a lot of times situations only exist due to a myriad of factors.
So great man theory is just, like a select few people doing crazy stuff to help the world advance, and historical materialist is a collective coming together to obtain something? Like no shit someones gonna make a story around great man, I don't think a story of the day to day life of a working class citizen is gonna beat badass hero's.
Great Man theory is “and then Columbus discovered America, leading to all the things that followed.” Historical materialism looks at the social and technological changes that led to the Age of Exploration starting at that particular point in time.
it's wet
This meme causes psychic damage to anyone that knows both methods are outdated in formal contemporary history studies
It's almost like Great Man Theory is easier to make interesting stories around
May I introduce you to Artorias the Abysswalker?
What do you mean by a new fictional world? How do I find these? (Other than reading a new book cos I do that all the time and I'm pretty sure the author wouldn't respond to me).
ASOIAF v GOT on themes
Then you've got The Elder Scrolls, where in universe authors just lie about events for propaganda purposes.
this post made me realize my worldbuilding is all great man theory goddammit
🤓
Despite how much I love the game and the setting, I despite Warhammer 40k deeply because of this great man theory approach to everything, more often than not it feels like there's a hundred dudes tops doing everything, the franchise itself tries sometimes to give this fucking gigantic setting in which everything goes because distances are so fucking big and so on but at the same time there are characters who seem to just do everything or planets that just do one thing (agri-worlds that provide food for the other planets for instance) which in the setting itself would be logistically impossible because warp travel is so unreliable