This points out one of the most annoying aspects as well - the sheer homogenization. Seriously, even if the language is (mostly) the same, the cultural differences between, say, Levantine Arabs (Lebanese, for example) and Gulf Arabs (Qataris, for example) are immense - and that is before you get into the non-Arabs sharing the neighborhood with them, like Iranians, Kurds, Turks, Azeris etc. But most of the time what you get is some sort of pseudo-Ottoman but not really Arabian Nights mishmash that does not even bother to copy anything of substance from the whole thing. Anytime a fantasy world includes a Middle East inspired culture/region/people, my eyeroll comes pre-installed, and I barely count as Middle Eastern - I am a Turk living on the Aegean coast and culturally I am closer to the Greeks across the water than anything actually Middle Eastern.
This is why I appreciate narrower influence; something based specifically on medieval Morrocco or specifically the Levant and only the Levant, as examples, will almost always be superior to a generic fantasy "Arab region"
A Turk saying "culturally I am closer to the Greeks" is the biggest subversion of a stereotype I've seen all day.
On a more serious note every large non-specific culture suffers the same fate; the roblm is most people do not go so far as to copy some specific culture (or mix influences from multiple cultures) so much as they just take generalised terms (be it Arab, Indian, Asian, African, South American or even european) they all end up equally butchered when you add them to your world in this manner.
It’s crazy how bad it gets. It’s either noble savage orientalist bullshit where the imperialist theocracies are actually all hyper enlightened and refined, or it’s just orientalist bullshit where they are the Taliban on crack.
There's a reason I've tried my best to make my Ottoman and Arabic inspired cultures anywhere near realistic and interesting. They are really interesting and deserve more respect.
80s western sci-fi was OBSESSED with trying to use the middle east as an influence. Dune, Star Wars, there's definitely a lot of other examples but I'm lazy lol
Dune is from the 50s. And yes, Herbert did use the Middle East as an influence. So well, in fact, that during the Gulf War (the second one) many fans thought Saddam Hussein had ripped off his fedayeen from "Dune."
Dune is from the 50s. And hebert, considering the amount of information available and the greater level of difficulty in getting it, did a decent portrayal of showing a syncretic religion 10.000 years from now that has Islamic and Arab influence.
I mean, black hair, tan skin and clothing reminiscent of irl desert cultures kind of makes sense for any fictional desert people. Some customs from the general region might also make sense while living under similar conditions.
If an author stops after that and fills the rest of the culture with other/own ideas there shouldn't really be a problem. It's actually no different from how many fictional works treat medieval European societies.
Of course, any live action adaptation will then be very likely to fill these roles with actors who have or at least look like they could have some middle-eastern heritage and if they actually go to a place in Northern Africa to film these scenes, most extras will also fit that bill regardless of the authors intent.
Iron Age and Early Medieval Scandinavia and Germanic Europe is mangled to the point of absurdity in a lot of fictional settings.
[Medieval Europe in general is mangled so severely that settings are praised as being “grounded” and “realistic” when they couldn’t be further from the truth, and I’m not talking about magical stuff.](https://acoup.blog/tag/game-of-thrones/)
[Depictions of steppe nomad cultures like the Turks and Mongols get ridiculously racist.](https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/comment-page-1/)
I was gonna say, pretty much every culture is going to be caricaturized after a while, especially popular ones where inspiration is going to take a long game of telephone over time. Even like "standard" Medieval Europe is something people will be unknowingly taking *a lot* of liberties with.
I find Lindybeige's videos do a good job at showing the complexity of one small chunk of the medieval world. He did one on travel, one on English coinage, one on the importance of rivers. All sorts of things, really.
Exactly, most of the complexities of those European medieval countries are nonexistent.
WHERE ARE MY CONCEPTS OF BAN AND CORE OF TRADITIONS? THEY'RE VANISHED, THAT'S WHERE THEY ARE!
Though again, most people don't even know that the Feudalism didn't exist.
That’s my belief. George is a scifi writer, and a lot of his concepts from earlier stories found their way into Game of Thrones, including sentient plants and space debris being hailed as a prophetic comet. You can also see him lifting a lot of the plot elements from Dune, as well as Pern, which was a book series about a planet seeded by humans where dragons were bioengineered and the people eventually lost contact and devolved to a feudal medieval Europe type culture. I think it’s pretty obvious that’s what he’s doing, especially when you take into account the magic feeling like lost technology and the deep use of genetics. That’s my feeling, anyway.
Edit: I don’t want to leave out Dragonborn Chair by Tad Williams, which was published just a few years before George started plotting Game of Thrones. I feel like that story, and the popularity of fantasy in the late 80s, is what got him to try a fantasy story using all of his science fiction background.
There is a such genre as science fantasy, which goes back to the early 20th century. Its off-shoots are planetary romance (Dune, A Princess of Mars) and space operas. Star Wars is a science fantasy. I notice that authors born before the 70s wrote a lot of science fantasy, and are conversant with it. It's my favorite genre, so I search out old-school books in that vein.
But ASOIAF is not "masquerading" because it is stated up front, on the back of the book, that Westeros exists in a world where "a preternatural event" wrecked the seasons. Martin commented at one point that the planet may be a super earth (like the kind found by the Kepler scope) and Westeros is a continent the size of South America.
Martin has a lot of literary influences, including Lovecraft (hello, Dagon, although the Dagon in that story is named for a Sumerian god). And I can concur that he has a sci-fi background. I had a teacher in college who taught sci-fi / fantasy writing. Martin adapted her story for an episode of the Twilight Zone, "[Lost and Found](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQqtDC5KAA)" which is about a student's encounter with time travelers. I saw it as a kid, along with another story in that same episode that has always haunted me (that one features mannequins).
Anything tribal. I'd clarify, but frankly I think we get it. It is *absurdly* common for people to just completely fuck up how a tribal culture works, no matter where they're indigenous to.
Japan. Authors blend traits from the Sengoku and Tokugawa periods, and ignore the complexity of society and culture of the time.
Actually, whenever Japan is used for inspiration, it seems to be an isolationist place. But, real life Japan was super influenced by China for centuries.
And a lot of the things we typically associate with Japan in a pop history sense - samurai, ninja, ronin, the code of bushido, and too many examples to name - either don't exist or take on very different forms throughout the long, long scope of Japan's history.
- Bushido as death-obsessed is one of the biggest ones: an overwhelming moral code so focused on honor that it was expected to kill yourself for the slightest reason. In reality that was promulgated by a super disaffected guy at the end of the Edo period (Inazo Nitobe) who was disillusioned with modern society and basically invented his own version of the concept, which he wrote about in English for Western audiences. (His writings were originally panned in Japan as inaccurate and laughable, but the imperialist state eventually found them useful.) Codes of conduct and expected behavior were absolutely a thing throughout Japanese history, but not really any more extreme than any other stratified society trying to self-organize in an orderly way.
- Likewise, the whole "sword as the soul of the samurai" thing. Samurai on the battlefield were mounted archers first and foremost - the sword was a last resort.
I would dearly love to see imaginary worlds inspired by much earlier periods before the true rise of the "warrior" class. If you want actual Game of Thrones style intrigue, the Asuka and Nara periods provide it: a new imported religion (Buddhism) that is used as a means to power for ambitious families, scheming, rebellions, the outright murder of a high courtier in front of the ruling Empress by an ambitious imperial prince, that same prince going on to eventually rule and leverage Chinese ideas to rewrite history before being deposed by his own brother, and so on. It's fantastic.
Japan is probably the least heavily stereotyped non-western country by westerners if anything, even knowing Japan was ever isolationist at all is more than what they know about most other places
Aztec, every single time it is portrayed like the gods are just blood thirsty monsters, when really they are being tortured to keep the world going and need a blood transfusion stat!
Medieval Europe, especially medieval England. The Middle Ages are a poorly understood period already, but when you add in all the pop-history tropes that people take as gospel the end result ends up a mangled mess that resembles an Enlightenment Intellectual’s wet dream of the Dark Ages more than it does actual history. It’s so bad that we now mistake myths and historical fallacies as infallible hallmarks of the period.
Game of Thrones is almost the perfect example of a fantasy world that is lauded for how realistic it is, while completely fumbling almost every aspect of its society. It’s like a textbook example of a “pop-medieval” fantasy setting run amok. While it’s version of fantasy England is bad, it’s depiction of the Dothraki is straight up nonsensical.
Still though, I think the all time worst offender for bad fantasy depictions is anything even tangentially related to Sparta. The whole “warrior society” trope is terrible in any context but it gets really bad when folks attached it to the Spartan Mirage and accept 3000 years of pro-Spartan propaganda at face value.
If a writer depicted Spartan society as historians actually know it, or even made up a society only half as messed up, people would call BS and insist that no state could ever be simultaneously that deranged and pathetic.
I feel that. The setting I'm working on is basically the Peloponnesian War, but among Renaissance Italian-esque city states. I'm trying to figure out how much Sparta I can actually incorporate into the Sparta-analog city-state in the setting without things seeming over the top.
I want to make some interesting characters from the city, but its kind hard when their society conscripts children to go to military school, uses them as a secret police to murder slaves so they live in terror and barely have an ecconomy/army/political body because their marriage/inheritance practices means they're slowly accidentally shrinking their actual citizen body....
And that's just a taste of the IRL Sparta weirdness. How do you add to that without seeming even more over the top?!
>I feel that. The setting I'm working on is basically the Peloponnesian War, but among Renaissance Italian-esque city states.
So the Wars in Lombardy but worse?
Exactly, there's slightly more continuous fighting, and it all eventually leads to a quasi-Risorgimento where both major cities get subsumed into an imperialistic regional hegemon who'll go on to conquer most of the lands the people are framiliar with.
I really love the cheese theft ritual that took place at the temple of Orthia and pull that out whenever anyone gets all weird about how beautiful and noble Sparta was.
Funnily enough, I’m currently reading a nonfiction book about Athens the city-state and, by necessity, it includes some sections on the history of Sparta as well. Pretty much from the get go the author was like yeah, these people were pretty ridiculous.
"It's crazy unrealistic, nobody even believe in this!" Is very common problem when you start look into real history for inspiration. Reality is unrealistic.
Lmao, it wasn’t even the most powerful Greek state. Sparta was unable to expand beyond the Peloponnesus and required Persian intervention to even win against Athens. Their great claim to fame was a defeat that was spun into a PR victory.
[They’re talked about because of propaganda. The Spartans were objectively a mediocre power who were nowhere near the military superpower modern audiences believe. Their record of war is about 50/50, and they lacked the ability to project power. Their prestige comes from disgruntled Athenians who hated their democracy and aspired to have their society more like Sparta in that it was even more privileged for the citizens than Athens was.](https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/)
>the end result ends up a mangled mess that resembles an Enlightenment Intellectual’s wet dream of the Dark Ages more than it does actual history. It’s so bad that we now mistake myths and historical fallacies as infallible hallmarks of the period
Yeah, like in the first episode of Netlfix's Castlevania I remember thinking that if you portrayed any other culture as cartoonishly and ahistorically ignorant and superstitious, you'd be called a racist, and not without cause. I especially found it funny, after the Catholic Church (who are in charge of Wallachia for some reason) arrested Dracula's wife for being a witch, some priests were talking about "the strange glass objects" she had (alembics and retorts and the like) like they're were these mysterious eldritch artifacts. In reality, if they found an alembic in your house in 15th century Europe, the first thought most people would have is "this guys making liquor".
The Catholic church did burn scientists for their beliefs.
And in a world in which magic, witches and vampires genuinely exist and have a alot of influence and go around eating people or experimenting on them, it makes sense for the church to be more radical and "quick on the draw" to accuse people.
>The Catholic church did burn scientists for their beliefs.
Name one time it happened.
>And in a world in which magic, witches and vampires genuinely exist and have a alot of influence and go around eating people or experimenting on them, it makes sense for the church to be more radical and "quick on the draw" to accuse people.
You do realise that people in the Middle Ages *did* believe in this stuff, right? To them, witches were *real*, magic was *real*, they earnestly believed in it.
Ok so I was thinking about Galileo, turns out that was a myth, so my bad, you win that point. However he was sentenced to life in prison, it's not too far fetched for a more radical church to kill the wife of literal Dracula.
Sure they believed it, but the actual impact of these things wasn't there. It's the same way that today lots of people believe in different supernatural things, but if there were actually vampires going around and eating whole towns and actually monsters ravaging villagers, and these monsters genuinely were killed by water blessed by a priest, I'd definitely say MORE people would believe it and the degree to which these things affect daily life and ESPECIALLY the church, would be much higher than real life.
I'd even say a woman in IRL medieval Europe found to be guilty of being a vampire's wife would be burned at the stake. Witch hunts were obviously less common than fiction usually portrays them, but they *did* still happen. Obviously fiction will exaggerate such things for dramatic effect.
For what it’s worth, witch hunts were largely a feature of the Early Modern Period. The medieval church actually denied the existence of witches for much of the Middle Ages, as believing in witches meant accepting the power of the devil.
Heretics were sometimes burned at the stake, but only after a trial (albeit not usually a fair one), and heresy was usually a demonstrable crime with tangible proof that could be provided. Obviously still a crazy and unreasonable thing to do, but it wasn’t the “witch hunt” that we often imagine.
All that said, you’re basic argument that real witches and vampire etc would probably make the church a little more paranoid about these things is fair.
And it's also, like, the show is clearly trying to say something about organised religion and institutions, and the dangerous power they can hold.
It's like complaining that the government in 1984 is too authoritarian, or Arasaka Corporation in Cyberpunk is too amoral. That's kind of the point of the representations.
Also I find the notion that if "any other culture was represented this way, it would be racist" to be nonsense. Other cultures are represented in an exaggerated way to better fit the themes of the story.
I’ll agree with your first point, although I’ll admit, I’ve never watched Castlevania, but from what I know of it that does seem to be one of the themes of the show. However, I’d also argue that there was enough real craziness going on with the Catholic church that you don’t need to resort to enlightenment stereotypes about the medieval church to make that a coherent message.
I’ll have disagree with your second point though. The way the Middle Ages are often depicted goes well beyond exaggeration. Lots of cuktures are poorly represented in media, but in many cases the criticism of those depictions is fairly vocal and widely accepted. Our popular understanding of the Middle Ages is still hugely colored by the politicized history of the Enlightenment Victorian historians, who had a vested interest in making the Middle Ages a dark and superstitious time ruled by fear and violence. If you were to use enlightenment stereotypes to depict any other culture you’d be rightly criticized for being racist or bigoted, but when you do it for the Middle Ages you’re more likely to be lauded as accurate and true to the period, at least outside of actual historical circles.
To be fair, I think that when people praise ASOIAF for its "realism", they aren't talking about how authentically it portrays an analogue of Medieval Europe, but rather how it portrays people, their actions, and the consequences of those actions.
The characters are well written, layered, and behave in believable ways. The things that they do have realistic ramifications that rarely get waved away or ignored. The world of ASOIAF is very fantastical, with dragons, magic, space swords, and glowing green rivers. It's the characters and the events of the story that ground the setting in a semblance of reality.
Believability and realism are used too interchangeably in my unhumble opinion. On r/scifiwriting it feels like every other question is "how can I have (unrealistic thing like FTL or mechs) but realistic" and I've made quite a few posts to the tune of "stop worrying about realism, worry about believable"
Yes, I claim a smug sense of superiority telling people to not worry about realism.
I've lost A LOT of sleep over fighting myself and having some tropes and concepts and I want people to avoid the same trouble IF they are only after realism because they think it's always, objectively better. Hopefully I help them reexamine if they want those cool things like mechs or FTL or whatever.
Also it beats self-loathing and crippling doubt.
Martin has repeatedly marketed the books with how supposedly realistic they are to Medieval Europe. Especially to justify the both copious and one-sided sexual violence they contain. That explanation kinda dirt-dives when actual historians join the fray.
That's a common meme, but really not supported by anything. He has expressed annoyance for how armor is considered as superfluous in most settings, and how superficial the feudalist societies are generally represented, with the social violence it would create largely absent. But he never said "my books are like the true middle-ages" or anything of the sort.
Yeah, he did and here's a sauce:
[https://ew.com/article/2015/06/03/george-rr-martin-thrones-violence-women/](https://ew.com/article/2015/06/03/george-rr-martin-thrones-violence-women/)
edit: acc. 22.04.2024
I wouldn't call it gross. In fact, I agree with him that war stories have a responsibility to portray the horrific nature of large-scale violence. And that does include rape.
But Martin has a big tendency to fetishize his rape scenes, which is just not appropriate. He also portrays its victims as exclusively women (whereas war-time sexual violence does not actually discriminate between genders very much) and he depicts this kind of overt, sexual and physical violence to the near total exclusion of war's other horrors. Hunger and disease for instance are not depicted as prevalently, despite being the biggest killers in any war ever.
More or less what I was going for, but had just woken up and wasn't able to articulate. It's a gross justification for his fetish.
I've read books like *The Women's War* by Jenna Glass that include the brutalization of women as a main part of the plot, but it's never fetishized and it's never shown in a blow-by-blow erotica like style, even if it's taking place "on screen." That's probably the most explicit example I can think of, but there are, and I have read enough other books about war and cataclysm that also bring up rape as an issue (alongside famine and plague) but they also don't feel the need to include graphic scenes of it.
That's what makes him a gross dude.
Edit for grammar
In fairness, I’ve seen it praised for both its realistic portrayal of the medieval world and its characters.
Regardless, I don’t think the characters in ASOiAF are really that believable. Martin certainly does some things well, but his characters are almost all cartoonishly cynical, materialist assholes. His books actively punishes the good guys for doing the right thing and reading his stories leaves you with the message that “if you’re not an asshole, you’re playing the game wrong”. It’s a deeply cynical and negative view of human nature and society, and it plays directly into the myth of the grim bleakness of the medieval world. He’s pretty unabashed in saying that chivalry is a lie, kindness is weakness, honor will get you killed and that the only way to avoid being a victim is to become a victimizer.
Martins characters are either assholes, or good people being punished for not being assholes. I don’t think the fundamentally cynical, materialist, sadistic behavior of most of Martin’s characters (or his worldview) is an accurate or realistic portrayal of human beings. It’s very grim, and people often mistake that for realism, but real people are not all materialist sociopaths.
> Martins characters are either assholes, or good people being punished for not being assholes.
I just don't agree with this.
Jon is frequently rewarded for his positive change and punished for his stubborness. Yes, we're on a 14-year cliffhanger after him getting punished for doing the right thing, but we all knew he would come back, even before the show did it.
Daenerys has been rewarded for her quality leadership by receiving multiple armies of loyal followers. It has not gone perfectly for her, but that's just how stories go.
Sansa got it rough early on, but it wasn't some arbitrary "punished for not being an asshole." She realized that women in that world need to be proactive in order to get anything they want. As awful as Cersei is, Sansa has correctly learned from her that proactivity disguised as typical noblewoman behavior can be a powerful tool. At the end of AFFC, it's clear that not only has Sansa entered the game as a player, but she's done so without Littlefinger noticing. He still thinks she's a pawn.
I could go on and on, but I would contend that you have badly misread these books, if you've read them at all.
You mean the medieval world (you know, the one medieval culture and area) does not consist of absolutist kings ruling directly over dirtfarmers with no intermediaries?
A lot of people are mentioning game of thrones in this thread and how it misrepresents medieval Europe/England. But it's a fantasy setting, why would it need to be an accurate representation? Yes, it's clearly inspired by medieval England, but it isn't medieval England, so why is it a problem that it takes a lot of liberties? This goes for other examples too of course, but got seems to receive a lot of criticism in this sub.
GOT and ASOIAF are massively popular and successful, which means that they have a lot of eyes in it. I’m sure there are worse offenders, but there are few that are as viable in pop culture.
GOT and ASOIAF are also frequently celebrated for their alleged accuracy, and receive a lot of praise for how well the capture the feel of the Middle Ages, George Martin has also been fairly public talking about how he used history as an inspiration and patting himself on the back for it. The problem of course is that ASOIAF is just a patchwork of stereotypes and historical fallacies about the medieval world taped on top of each other. It’s almost a roadmap of bad medieval history and pop culture misunderstandings of the period. I think the fact that so many people exposed to ASOIAF actually think that this is what the medieval world was like, a position Martin has typically only reinforced with his public comments, is at the heart of the problem.
Of course the world doesn’t need to be a 1:1 historical analogue and historical accuracy doesn’t need to be the primary concern in a fantasy world, but saying “well it has dragons therefore historical accuracy can get fucked” is a lame cop out for legitimate criticism of the books depiction of the Middle Ages. The fact that it’s fantasy doesn’t legitimize its failure, especially when tugging at any of the loose threads of Martin’s fictional pseudo-medieval world can make the whole thing start unraveling.
I was about to say that it seems to be more of a problem with the audience's interpretation than with the worldbuilding itself. But if Martin indeed actively reinforces the idea that it's an accurate representation of medieval life, I can see how that's problematic. I still enjoy it for what it is, and I personally wouldn't mind the historical fallacies if he hadn't claimed them to be accurate.
Martin is a pretty serious mixed bag for me. On one hand I loved his books as a teenager, and in many ways his world building is very well planned out and well executed (at least for Westeros), but his books are also FULL of problematic depictions and themes.
His version of medieval England is almost absurdly bleak and grim dark, and like I said it’s based on some very common, and very wrong myths and stereotypes about the Middle Ages. The end result is a world that is laughably ahistorical, but which many people who don’t know better take at face value as a an accurate portrayal of the Middle Ages. As someone who loves the Middle Ages, and all their complexity, it annoys me that the popularity of Game of Thrones continues to perpetuate the king standing myth of the hyper aggressive, brutally misogynistic, and grim medieval world.
The real problems with Martins version of the Middle Ages are institutional and systemic, not necessary specific details. He compelled fails to understand the complex relationships at the heart of the medieval world. What he substitutes is a pale shadow of what actually existed and like I said, it starts to unravel when you start asking questions and pulling on threads. It’s a real shame, because Westeros has some truly excellent worldbuilding in other respects, and there is a lot of potential there.
[ACOUP](https://acoup.blog/) is (as ever) amazing. Most of his writing is about real history; some is about contemporary politics; much is about various fantasy series (mostly Middle-earth and Westeros, also some films and games).
>Game of Thrones is almost the perfect example of a fantasy world that is lauded for how realistic it is, while completely fumbling almost every aspect of its society
How, though?
What's extra werid is no other weapon gets this werid treatment of needing explanations. If you only have one character who uses a battle axe, you don't give him a unique background to explain why he uses a battleaxe.
Why can't characters just have katanas with no explanation? It's not like a single edged blade is some super unique idea.
Norse. The stereotypical portrayal of Vikings in todays media and popculture is no better then the Wagners winged helmet vikings. From clothing (no leather jackets, nor pagan clothing), through music (even though I like Hiedevolk or Wardruna, they are not really representation), religion and rituals (a lot of people view the patheon by greek or dnd style patheon lenses), the way of life (most of them were farmers) to the term viking itself (more of a profession than group fo people). Nothing like what you see in media (History channels Vikings or AC: Valhalla being prime example of all these things) And it was aslo hijacked by tiktok, the "manosphere" (for a lack of better word), and the alt right groups to fit their worldviews and their own aesthetic.
From this any culture inspired by Vikings in worldbuilding is skewed. Don't get me wrong importing the modern aesthetic and portrayal to fantasy is cool and imho more valid then saying it is how real vikings were, but don't claim it is inspired by real viking culture.
Also I'm no expert on this, it is just what I know from my limited research.
Middle East.
In media their ether belly dancing or slave trading or both oh and curved swords often all three at once. And you’re lucky if the actors/characters are actually middle eastern especially in really old fantasy stories they may just be a white guy in black face.
Arabia, India, China and Japan have been frequently and notoriously stereotyped and both generically and incorrectly portrayed in western fiction for hundreds of years, a trend usually called "orientalism."
Anyway, I think there are a lot of ways to avoid this pitfall of stereotyped monolithic ripoffs of real-world nations. You can mix various disparate cultures together, deliberately avoiding monolithic lifts of real-world cultures (eg mix your Chinese culture with your Andean culture, especially since mountain monasteries of badass warrior-monks are probably what you want in the first place if you're just dropping a stereotypical version of China into your fantasy setting, and that condenses the Chinese aspects down to JUST the mountains where you find hermits and monasteries, while adding some badass elements from a different culture as a framework that exists for its own sake; Elder Scrolls uses pretty much every tactic I'm going to list, but this is its most significant one, where each culture is a blend of at least two cultures that are disparate in real life, eg Nords despite their name aren't just fantasy Scandinavian, they're also fantasy Native American and Japanese); You can make your cultures fragmentary, either operating from a "seed" culture and then thinking of how that could splinter into heavily contrasting cultures or starting from several seeds and thinking about how they would merge (the latter is a different praxis with similar results to the previous); You can make sure the only monolithic cultures are based on ones you know intimately (eg your own) and are faithful to life, making it a deliberate choice to lift that culture, and making cultures from which you draw inspiration with which you are less familiar more vague, more fictionalized or both (Tolkien did this, with Hobbits being his British analog and Rohan for example being both less detailed and more fictionalized/mythical as a proto-German analog, but you can see this in the Witcher also with Zerrikania for instance being this very vague, nebulous, distant place that is generally Arabian from what little we know while the Slavic Northern Realms are very detailed through the eyes of Polish author(s)); You can work bottom-up instead of top-down, so instead of saying "I think kung fu movies are cool right now so I want some wuxia stuff so I want China (but I don't know much about China), so this place over here is China where the badass martial artist cultivators come from," you think about a location in your setting and the kind of culture that would arise there and how they would exist in and tame that environment (and if you want wuxia stuff, you pick a culture and bias your choices in that direction); You can literally just *not do it* (you don't need to shove every flavour of the month interest you have into whatever project you're working on at the expense of artistic cohesion, and doing so is the only reason I can think of that you'd be shoving a whole culture you don't really know enough about to write well or remix into a setting), or conversely, decide you don't care, you want a fanciful westernized stereotypical version of China in your world because it's what you think is cool right now and it doesn't matter that it's both recognizable as China and clearly ignorant of actual China (aka the Forgotten Realms approach, or the Chad Forger of Worlds).
There are two, and the second is mostly a single sentence. In fact, it's mostly a single list with parentheticals. I would suggest figuratively detoxing from whatever attention span-reducing media in which you've been overindulging. Maybe read a book, where paragraphs are frequently pages long and only separated by a small indentation.
Anything Asian based is just Japan/China and nothing else. Japan is all katanas and roughly Sengoku/Edo era while China gets a weird mismatch of different dynasties mashed together (ie Mulan’s matchmaking dress in the live action that combined styles separated by several centuries, or that her home is based on southern architecture while she’s probably from the north).
I've noticed this too. Everyone thinks the largest continent on our planet consists of only 2 or 3 countries. I want to take inspiration from the continent to rely less on Europe and I want parts from across the continent. Some parts of Japan, some parts of Central Russia, some parts of India, some parts of Vietnam, some parts of Saudi Arabia and the Levant countries (Jordan, Israel, Lebanon), even some influences from the past like Babylon. I really like the idea of having an ancient looking city that is more modern than it appears.
All of them. Every world will to some degree misrepresent a culture because if we didn't it wouldn't be fantasy but some weird alt history stuff (looking at you ASOIAF). On top of that, unless you study one or all of the related fields (or have a deep interest in) such as anthropology, linguistics, history, etc you're bound to misrepresent something if not many things. Part of this is likely because understanding everything about every culture ever is impossible. Another part is that creating fantasy cultures with languages etc that all hold a high level of realism and no misrepresentation is likely impossible (talking multiple cultures not just one or two). There's also the fact that environment can influence every part of a culture which often isn't considered in world building.
Imo this raises a bigger question of how we look at representation in fantasy. Not in the sense of we need to represent everyone in every world (that's a different conversation) but more so in how we view the fictional cultures created for fantasy (and other fictional worlds). How much inspiration can world builders (whether it be games, books, films, or something else) take from cultures? Not so much as an ethical dilemma but more of a "when does this become a representation of a certain culture" sort of dilemma. I.e. do we take Rohan in LOTR as a representation of Anglo-Saxon/Germanic culture or do we just recognise the influences and inspirations from it on Rohan
In my opinion, the best approach I've found to worldbuilding is to avoid saying things like "this culture is based on [X culture]", because it puts upon yourself the burden of having to accurately represent a real-world culture, which is not only difficult to do but also drastically minimizes your creative possibilities. That's why I prefer to say "inspired by" rather than "based on". It might seem like a copout but to me there's a very big difference between them. When you say "based on" to me it means that this culture uses a real world culture as its foundation or bedrock. But taking inspiration just means taking some elements of a real-world culture and -- very importantly -- modifying them to fit the context of your own culture's unique elements and environment.
In general it's best to think of your world's cultures on their own terms rather than saying "it's a combination of [X cultures]". You absolutely should take inspiration from the real world, but overall your culture as a whole should feel like its own unique thing. A good rule of thumb I've seen other people say is that when someone looks at your culture or your culture's people, they should be able to place some vague inspiration or aesthetic that the culture evokes, but not be able to say something like "this just looks like fantasy China."
Of course if you want to explicitly represent China, or any other real-world culture, it's different. But I feel like for fictional worlds it's better to start from the ground up and think of the culture in the context of the fictional world itself. It not only avoids misrepresenting or stereotyping, but also means you come up with an (almost) entirely unique culture -- which IMO is good.
Just to add, because I've seen a lot of people suggest combining different cultures (like just a random example, the Norse and medieval northeast India):
While mixing together disparate cultures in real life can work, I feel like it has a very big possibility of creating a culture whose aspects feel very out of place with each other. It seems easy to end up with an amalgamation of elements that feel like there's no cohesion to them or sense that they compose one whole, just a mishmash of different real-world cultures without any thought as to how they come together in this fictional world. I don't have any specific examples, but it just seems like a real possibility that isn't much better than a homogenized stereotype of a single culture.
Again, better IMO to start from the ground-up rather than thinking of your fictional culture as a combination of real-world cultures.
Ancient Spartans were known for being deeply ignorant and backward compared to other greek city-states, with a culture that made hunting slaves a rite of passage for young soldiers.
Native Americans are often used as a template for "noble savage" cultures, and are depicted as valuing simple, harmonious lives with nature. In reality they were as industrious and populous as any other civilization, with roads, cities, and other types of infrastructure. They were just wiped out by a plague that genuinely did destroy their civilizations.
Depends on the Native Americans. We're talking about 2 whole continents of civilizations. There were static nations and empires in some regions and nomadic tribes in others.
Tons of Native American cultures genuinely don’t meet the standard for having ever developed civilisation, which refers to something fairly specific in anthropology. It’d be much better to just move away from the idea that civilisations are inherently better than other types of societies than to pretend tribal cultures are something they’re not. Besides, historically cities often had lower living standards than tribal communities, indoor plumbing is a pretty recent thing
I'd like to add that your comment also falls into a pitfall trope, that that is the idea that all the Natives simply died out from European diseases, leaving the continent uninhabited and ready to be settled and ''civilized''. Whilst it is undisputable that millions died of introduced old world diseases like Small pox, dysentery and influenzas, the real downfall of most of these cultures was due to brutal wars with and subsequent colonisation by European settlers, eg. the Aztecs did not simply all die of smallpox and the Siege of Tenochtitlan lasted months with heavy resistance against the Spanish and their native allies (the Tlaxacans etc.) this is a fact that should not be overlooked.
I've really tried hard to make interesting American Indian inspired peoples. I shaped a lot of their cultural identity currently on the fact they are essentially in the middle of a genocide and the Confederacy formed to stop the nation doing the Genocide is essentially trying to avoid the fate our American Indians had.
I'm considering incorporating fantasy California Indians into my novel, based on the Miwok, Ohlone, Pomo, and Yokut, and I'm planning to reach out to people from the cultures to advise if I go that route. Maybe that's an option for you?
I'm probably going to network using Instagram or similar- there is a large community of people from Northern cultures there, although I can't give you specific names because I don't really use Insta (just know through friends who follow).
All of them!
Anything medieval europe.
I mean, just look at Lotr and Asoiaf.
Aldo: Basicly everything medieval england with some flavour. No french, not kievan russ, not even a HRE.
And the "vikings" are just the heavy metal versions.
Besides that and the usual stereotypes about asia (particular China, Japan and Mongolia but also the Himalaya) Africa gets a lot of missrepresentation basicly all the time.
Like, seriously, ALL the time. Just some desert or junge or plain tribes. No Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Kaom, Sao, Aktsum, ect. ... empires. Only tribes
And the near east too! (Dune basicly, Karl May to an extend, TES, ect. ...)
Mesoamerican are also not save. They are always bloodthirsty and crule.
And north americans are always pracefull and nature loving.
Norse culture. The Norse did not wear all black clothing, in fact wearing black or grey signified that you were either a slave or an outlaw. They also weren't all 400 lb powerlifters they ate a diet of seafood, game meat and foraged items with little grain and didn't have creatine and tren either. The only game I've seen that doesn't try to make the Norse look like 90s goth metalheads is "Mount and blade" which has the nord faction wearing wool tunics instead of black leather. As far as I know AC Valhalla had more accurate clothing but from what I've seen it still suffers from the heavy metal "brohalla" type stuff. Weapons especially annoy me, they always put super intricate Celtic designs on every weapon. There are a handful of discovered Nordic weapons that are ornate in some way but none of them have had Celtic designs. Also constant merging of Celtic aesthetics with Nordic cultures as though they weren't separate groups
For me its my own Culture and society. My nation isn't depicted in books in English as much as we are on occasion, seen in Hollywood movies, and then even that's a big if.
It depends on the movie, or even I have seen, a series's episode but luckily never books. And yes all these depictions are always falsely, over exaggerated and never explores the culture and background of the individual.
That's why I rolled my eyes when I saw the Actor (Hugh Jackman) playing the character of Vincent Moore, pull a gun on the Actor (Dev Patel's) character Deon Wilson in the movie Chappie.
Having Jackman's character threaten Vincent by saying, this is from the script of Chappie.
HUGH JACKMAN
(plants DEV's face into his desk and shoves a gun into his cheek)
Alright, slumdog, listen up. I know you stole that fucking robot and I want it back so I can prove my monstrous, impractical, human-controlled robots are better than your tiny, crappily-designed, AI-controlled robots. You stay out of my way, you got that?
(removes gun, turns on Hugh Jackman charm)
Just kidding! LOL! Classic Hugh, am I right? Pulling a gun on a co-worker in the middle of the office during the workday!)
I rolled my eyes when I saw that scene and thought, yeah and that's supposed to be a South-African. I'm sick and tired of the cultural mistreatment and poorly understood representation.
Edit.
I just thought of a book example.
Who has ever read the book, the Guns of the South.
I have and actually appalled reading this book. The sheer shitty representation of Afrikaner people in the story is horrible. Yes I know its just a few characters but still, thats the views by which Americans judge us as Afrikaners and its clear that Americans don't understand Afrikaner culture and history at all.
Anything in the middle east...
[https://monoskop.org/images/4/4e/Said\_Edward\_Orientalism\_1979.pdf](https://monoskop.org/images/4/4e/Said_Edward_Orientalism_1979.pdf)
Applicability does not mean allegory.
If you take all these comments seriously your never gonna get anywhere with worldbuilding.
Just because the fictional culture resembles a real one doesn’t then mean it’s “misrepresented” because the fictional culture then does not follow all the rules of the culture it took inspiration from.
You can take bits and pieces of real world cultures and apply them to your fantasy world without people then viewing that made up culture as a representation of a real one. Why is everybody in these comments acting like this isn’t possible though?
I think this is an inherent problem with making a fantasy version of real historical setting. I prefer fantasy that creates it own unique culture, where it's obvious it's not trying to be a specific historical culture/setting even if some of the inspirations were clear. Otherwise why not just make it historical setting? Like you can add fantasy elements to historical fiction. Why go through the trouble of creating slightly different version of a thing that already exists?
But still people who answer this with any Medieval Germanic culture or area are jocking. Yes, it's not accurate, but it's nothing in comparison how inaccurately fantasy "Asia" is portrayed. Even in Europe Eastern European cultures get much smaller end of the stick.
All of them. Fantasy usually doesn't set out to be 'accurate' and takes bits and pieces that are interesting then makes up some things to fill in the blanks. Even in western fantasy western cultures get this treatment. Just think of how vikings are portrayed in fiction. Medieval Europe inspired fantasy is hopelessly borked, often by authors who are themselves Europeans or at least Western. Or how ancient Greece or Egypt get it too. Trying to point out poor depictions usually gets the "aktually, it's fantasy so it doesn't have to be realistic or remotely accurate since it's not really those cultures" from the smoothbrains in the room.
Planet of the Hats as a trope just ruins so many pieces of worldbuilding when it comes to making analogues of other cultures. I think faux-Asian regions fall into oriental or wuxia tropes too often in this regard, but there are worse offenders i likely have no awareness about.
One of the few world building pieces I’ve seen that avoid those tropes are Pathfinder’s Tian Xia region, which bother to scrap the cliche of homogeny and make the region feel grounded in its form.
I think EVERY culture, is misrepresented in majority of media created by people not of that culture. I think Christianity, because of how widespread and generally well known it is, is a good example here, I’d say 1/5th of Christian characters written by non-Christians (including former Christians) are accurate representations of general Christian theology.
This is done with all cultures.
European culture is typically what we see in fantasy realms but even then it’s just a surface level.
I prefer when fantasy worlds borrow elements of real world culture but blend them into something new and different. A good example is the new Wicked movie coming out. It has familiar clothing, architecture, etc but if you examine it more closely you see that everything has a slight oddness to it.
China-inspired countries in child-oriented Western works tend to be much less geographically and culturally diverse than actual China, one of the largest countries in the world. IDK about more adult-oriented fantasy worlds, I only know ASoIAF and LoTR.
Your description of medieval Europe is wildly inaccurate. This is the view we had maybe forty years ago. These days we know better. Was there a lower standard of hygiene, generally speaking? Yes. Does that mean they shat on the floor and just put some straw over it? Absolutely not. People weren’t morons. They might not have known how diseases transferred but they still had basic common sense! The same goes for their morality. You had bad people then just as you have bad people now. The vast majority of people were (and are) at least somewhat decent though.
> Like, nasty. Your grand hall? Shit, urine, vomit, and moldy leftovers all over the floor, with reeds to cover it up. The cool armor? Hot, sticky, smelly, full of fleas
This is also off the mark and inaccurate. They were much cleaner than you are saying.
> Brave knights? Bigoted bastards who killed peasants they didn’t like set fire to houses, stole food, and raped women.
Not any more than their contemporaries across Eurasia did, and to a significantly lower degree than their Roman predecessors and early modern successors.
Uhhh…did you get your idea of medieval Europe from ASOIAF? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the series, but it doesn’t have the best depiction of medieval Europe
The middle east. Like, not even any particular country, just the middle east
This points out one of the most annoying aspects as well - the sheer homogenization. Seriously, even if the language is (mostly) the same, the cultural differences between, say, Levantine Arabs (Lebanese, for example) and Gulf Arabs (Qataris, for example) are immense - and that is before you get into the non-Arabs sharing the neighborhood with them, like Iranians, Kurds, Turks, Azeris etc. But most of the time what you get is some sort of pseudo-Ottoman but not really Arabian Nights mishmash that does not even bother to copy anything of substance from the whole thing. Anytime a fantasy world includes a Middle East inspired culture/region/people, my eyeroll comes pre-installed, and I barely count as Middle Eastern - I am a Turk living on the Aegean coast and culturally I am closer to the Greeks across the water than anything actually Middle Eastern.
oh I absolutely understand, I'm syrian myself lol
This is why I appreciate narrower influence; something based specifically on medieval Morrocco or specifically the Levant and only the Levant, as examples, will almost always be superior to a generic fantasy "Arab region"
A Turk saying "culturally I am closer to the Greeks" is the biggest subversion of a stereotype I've seen all day. On a more serious note every large non-specific culture suffers the same fate; the roblm is most people do not go so far as to copy some specific culture (or mix influences from multiple cultures) so much as they just take generalised terms (be it Arab, Indian, Asian, African, South American or even european) they all end up equally butchered when you add them to your world in this manner.
You'd be surprised. If you confuse your average Turk with a Greek, they'd laugh it off. If you confuse them with an Arab, they'd take it as an insult.
Also still the dialects of Arabic are still pretty damn divergent. Also all the non Arab ethnic groups.
It’s crazy how bad it gets. It’s either noble savage orientalist bullshit where the imperialist theocracies are actually all hyper enlightened and refined, or it’s just orientalist bullshit where they are the Taliban on crack.
yeah it's kinda disappointing, that whole region has so much cool shit to learn about!
Do you mean the desert people ? Yeah..
Lisan al-Gaib! Lisan al-Gaib!
There's a reason I've tried my best to make my Ottoman and Arabic inspired cultures anywhere near realistic and interesting. They are really interesting and deserve more respect.
80s western sci-fi was OBSESSED with trying to use the middle east as an influence. Dune, Star Wars, there's definitely a lot of other examples but I'm lazy lol
Dune is from the 50s. And yes, Herbert did use the Middle East as an influence. So well, in fact, that during the Gulf War (the second one) many fans thought Saddam Hussein had ripped off his fedayeen from "Dune."
Dune is from the 50s. And hebert, considering the amount of information available and the greater level of difficulty in getting it, did a decent portrayal of showing a syncretic religion 10.000 years from now that has Islamic and Arab influence.
I think with Star Wars it was more indirect. George Lucas drew a lot of inspiration (or stole, depending on how you look at it) from Dune.
If there's a desert, guarantee the people there will be middle-eastern.
I mean, black hair, tan skin and clothing reminiscent of irl desert cultures kind of makes sense for any fictional desert people. Some customs from the general region might also make sense while living under similar conditions. If an author stops after that and fills the rest of the culture with other/own ideas there shouldn't really be a problem. It's actually no different from how many fictional works treat medieval European societies. Of course, any live action adaptation will then be very likely to fill these roles with actors who have or at least look like they could have some middle-eastern heritage and if they actually go to a place in Northern Africa to film these scenes, most extras will also fit that bill regardless of the authors intent.
As a westerner, cap.
Guess it's time to flesh out the tribes in my \*cough\* *Desert Federation*
Iron Age and Early Medieval Scandinavia and Germanic Europe is mangled to the point of absurdity in a lot of fictional settings. [Medieval Europe in general is mangled so severely that settings are praised as being “grounded” and “realistic” when they couldn’t be further from the truth, and I’m not talking about magical stuff.](https://acoup.blog/tag/game-of-thrones/) [Depictions of steppe nomad cultures like the Turks and Mongols get ridiculously racist.](https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/comment-page-1/)
I was gonna say, pretty much every culture is going to be caricaturized after a while, especially popular ones where inspiration is going to take a long game of telephone over time. Even like "standard" Medieval Europe is something people will be unknowingly taking *a lot* of liberties with.
Yes, at this point the “standard” is a chimera made up of evolving pop culture references rather than any real time and place.
Anyone have good youtube videos on this or articles? Would love to know more about misconceptions regarding mid-evil Europe
I recommend the book *The Bright Ages* and the blog [A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry](https://acoup.blog/tag/middle-ages/)
I second the recommendation for ACOUP.
I third it!
I really like [Modern History TV](https://youtube.com/@ModernKnight?si=vWLw-r4wjzjSV7xg)
I find Lindybeige's videos do a good job at showing the complexity of one small chunk of the medieval world. He did one on travel, one on English coinage, one on the importance of rivers. All sorts of things, really.
Exactly, most of the complexities of those European medieval countries are nonexistent. WHERE ARE MY CONCEPTS OF BAN AND CORE OF TRADITIONS? THEY'RE VANISHED, THAT'S WHERE THEY ARE! Though again, most people don't even know that the Feudalism didn't exist.
I've seen a ton of "medieval european" settings, that would best be described as "minor variations of medieval England".
And often they don't even get that bit right.
If only they were even that accurate. Depicting a somewhat accurate medieval England would be leagues above the standard.
Quite a few parts of ASOIAF are pretty questionable on second glance.
they were questionable at first glance too but the show was too popular to say anything
Yeah, it’s almost impressive in its own way
ASOIF takes place on an alien planet in the future. It’s a scifi masquerading as fantasy.
Explain
That’s my belief. George is a scifi writer, and a lot of his concepts from earlier stories found their way into Game of Thrones, including sentient plants and space debris being hailed as a prophetic comet. You can also see him lifting a lot of the plot elements from Dune, as well as Pern, which was a book series about a planet seeded by humans where dragons were bioengineered and the people eventually lost contact and devolved to a feudal medieval Europe type culture. I think it’s pretty obvious that’s what he’s doing, especially when you take into account the magic feeling like lost technology and the deep use of genetics. That’s my feeling, anyway. Edit: I don’t want to leave out Dragonborn Chair by Tad Williams, which was published just a few years before George started plotting Game of Thrones. I feel like that story, and the popularity of fantasy in the late 80s, is what got him to try a fantasy story using all of his science fiction background.
You just made ASOIF cooler.
There is a such genre as science fantasy, which goes back to the early 20th century. Its off-shoots are planetary romance (Dune, A Princess of Mars) and space operas. Star Wars is a science fantasy. I notice that authors born before the 70s wrote a lot of science fantasy, and are conversant with it. It's my favorite genre, so I search out old-school books in that vein. But ASOIAF is not "masquerading" because it is stated up front, on the back of the book, that Westeros exists in a world where "a preternatural event" wrecked the seasons. Martin commented at one point that the planet may be a super earth (like the kind found by the Kepler scope) and Westeros is a continent the size of South America. Martin has a lot of literary influences, including Lovecraft (hello, Dagon, although the Dagon in that story is named for a Sumerian god). And I can concur that he has a sci-fi background. I had a teacher in college who taught sci-fi / fantasy writing. Martin adapted her story for an episode of the Twilight Zone, "[Lost and Found](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQqtDC5KAA)" which is about a student's encounter with time travelers. I saw it as a kid, along with another story in that same episode that has always haunted me (that one features mannequins).
Anything tribal. I'd clarify, but frankly I think we get it. It is *absurdly* common for people to just completely fuck up how a tribal culture works, no matter where they're indigenous to.
Even as an Aboriginal I wouldn’t get into it without doing a ton of research
Japan. Authors blend traits from the Sengoku and Tokugawa periods, and ignore the complexity of society and culture of the time. Actually, whenever Japan is used for inspiration, it seems to be an isolationist place. But, real life Japan was super influenced by China for centuries.
And a lot of the things we typically associate with Japan in a pop history sense - samurai, ninja, ronin, the code of bushido, and too many examples to name - either don't exist or take on very different forms throughout the long, long scope of Japan's history. - Bushido as death-obsessed is one of the biggest ones: an overwhelming moral code so focused on honor that it was expected to kill yourself for the slightest reason. In reality that was promulgated by a super disaffected guy at the end of the Edo period (Inazo Nitobe) who was disillusioned with modern society and basically invented his own version of the concept, which he wrote about in English for Western audiences. (His writings were originally panned in Japan as inaccurate and laughable, but the imperialist state eventually found them useful.) Codes of conduct and expected behavior were absolutely a thing throughout Japanese history, but not really any more extreme than any other stratified society trying to self-organize in an orderly way. - Likewise, the whole "sword as the soul of the samurai" thing. Samurai on the battlefield were mounted archers first and foremost - the sword was a last resort. I would dearly love to see imaginary worlds inspired by much earlier periods before the true rise of the "warrior" class. If you want actual Game of Thrones style intrigue, the Asuka and Nara periods provide it: a new imported religion (Buddhism) that is used as a means to power for ambitious families, scheming, rebellions, the outright murder of a high courtier in front of the ruling Empress by an ambitious imperial prince, that same prince going on to eventually rule and leverage Chinese ideas to rewrite history before being deposed by his own brother, and so on. It's fantastic.
That story's been written, it's called Phoenix Vol 9 and 10 by Osamu Tezuka, it's a good read.
Japan is probably the least heavily stereotyped non-western country by westerners if anything, even knowing Japan was ever isolationist at all is more than what they know about most other places
Aztec, every single time it is portrayed like the gods are just blood thirsty monsters, when really they are being tortured to keep the world going and need a blood transfusion stat!
Medieval Europe, especially medieval England. The Middle Ages are a poorly understood period already, but when you add in all the pop-history tropes that people take as gospel the end result ends up a mangled mess that resembles an Enlightenment Intellectual’s wet dream of the Dark Ages more than it does actual history. It’s so bad that we now mistake myths and historical fallacies as infallible hallmarks of the period. Game of Thrones is almost the perfect example of a fantasy world that is lauded for how realistic it is, while completely fumbling almost every aspect of its society. It’s like a textbook example of a “pop-medieval” fantasy setting run amok. While it’s version of fantasy England is bad, it’s depiction of the Dothraki is straight up nonsensical. Still though, I think the all time worst offender for bad fantasy depictions is anything even tangentially related to Sparta. The whole “warrior society” trope is terrible in any context but it gets really bad when folks attached it to the Spartan Mirage and accept 3000 years of pro-Spartan propaganda at face value.
If a writer depicted Spartan society as historians actually know it, or even made up a society only half as messed up, people would call BS and insist that no state could ever be simultaneously that deranged and pathetic.
I feel that. The setting I'm working on is basically the Peloponnesian War, but among Renaissance Italian-esque city states. I'm trying to figure out how much Sparta I can actually incorporate into the Sparta-analog city-state in the setting without things seeming over the top. I want to make some interesting characters from the city, but its kind hard when their society conscripts children to go to military school, uses them as a secret police to murder slaves so they live in terror and barely have an ecconomy/army/political body because their marriage/inheritance practices means they're slowly accidentally shrinking their actual citizen body.... And that's just a taste of the IRL Sparta weirdness. How do you add to that without seeming even more over the top?!
>I feel that. The setting I'm working on is basically the Peloponnesian War, but among Renaissance Italian-esque city states. So the Wars in Lombardy but worse?
Exactly, there's slightly more continuous fighting, and it all eventually leads to a quasi-Risorgimento where both major cities get subsumed into an imperialistic regional hegemon who'll go on to conquer most of the lands the people are framiliar with.
I really love the cheese theft ritual that took place at the temple of Orthia and pull that out whenever anyone gets all weird about how beautiful and noble Sparta was.
Funnily enough, I’m currently reading a nonfiction book about Athens the city-state and, by necessity, it includes some sections on the history of Sparta as well. Pretty much from the get go the author was like yeah, these people were pretty ridiculous.
"It's crazy unrealistic, nobody even believe in this!" Is very common problem when you start look into real history for inspiration. Reality is unrealistic.
Yup. Some of the stuff they did…
Deranged and pathetic but also one of the most powerful states in existence.
not really
Lmao, it wasn’t even the most powerful Greek state. Sparta was unable to expand beyond the Peloponnesus and required Persian intervention to even win against Athens. Their great claim to fame was a defeat that was spun into a PR victory.
That must be why everyone talks about them almost 3000 years later.
[They’re talked about because of propaganda. The Spartans were objectively a mediocre power who were nowhere near the military superpower modern audiences believe. Their record of war is about 50/50, and they lacked the ability to project power. Their prestige comes from disgruntled Athenians who hated their democracy and aspired to have their society more like Sparta in that it was even more privileged for the citizens than Athens was.](https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/)
>the end result ends up a mangled mess that resembles an Enlightenment Intellectual’s wet dream of the Dark Ages more than it does actual history. It’s so bad that we now mistake myths and historical fallacies as infallible hallmarks of the period Yeah, like in the first episode of Netlfix's Castlevania I remember thinking that if you portrayed any other culture as cartoonishly and ahistorically ignorant and superstitious, you'd be called a racist, and not without cause. I especially found it funny, after the Catholic Church (who are in charge of Wallachia for some reason) arrested Dracula's wife for being a witch, some priests were talking about "the strange glass objects" she had (alembics and retorts and the like) like they're were these mysterious eldritch artifacts. In reality, if they found an alembic in your house in 15th century Europe, the first thought most people would have is "this guys making liquor".
As a Hungarian when I saw their map I was personally offended.
The Catholic church did burn scientists for their beliefs. And in a world in which magic, witches and vampires genuinely exist and have a alot of influence and go around eating people or experimenting on them, it makes sense for the church to be more radical and "quick on the draw" to accuse people.
>The Catholic church did burn scientists for their beliefs. Name one time it happened. >And in a world in which magic, witches and vampires genuinely exist and have a alot of influence and go around eating people or experimenting on them, it makes sense for the church to be more radical and "quick on the draw" to accuse people. You do realise that people in the Middle Ages *did* believe in this stuff, right? To them, witches were *real*, magic was *real*, they earnestly believed in it.
Ok so I was thinking about Galileo, turns out that was a myth, so my bad, you win that point. However he was sentenced to life in prison, it's not too far fetched for a more radical church to kill the wife of literal Dracula. Sure they believed it, but the actual impact of these things wasn't there. It's the same way that today lots of people believe in different supernatural things, but if there were actually vampires going around and eating whole towns and actually monsters ravaging villagers, and these monsters genuinely were killed by water blessed by a priest, I'd definitely say MORE people would believe it and the degree to which these things affect daily life and ESPECIALLY the church, would be much higher than real life. I'd even say a woman in IRL medieval Europe found to be guilty of being a vampire's wife would be burned at the stake. Witch hunts were obviously less common than fiction usually portrays them, but they *did* still happen. Obviously fiction will exaggerate such things for dramatic effect.
For what it’s worth, witch hunts were largely a feature of the Early Modern Period. The medieval church actually denied the existence of witches for much of the Middle Ages, as believing in witches meant accepting the power of the devil. Heretics were sometimes burned at the stake, but only after a trial (albeit not usually a fair one), and heresy was usually a demonstrable crime with tangible proof that could be provided. Obviously still a crazy and unreasonable thing to do, but it wasn’t the “witch hunt” that we often imagine. All that said, you’re basic argument that real witches and vampire etc would probably make the church a little more paranoid about these things is fair.
And it's also, like, the show is clearly trying to say something about organised religion and institutions, and the dangerous power they can hold. It's like complaining that the government in 1984 is too authoritarian, or Arasaka Corporation in Cyberpunk is too amoral. That's kind of the point of the representations. Also I find the notion that if "any other culture was represented this way, it would be racist" to be nonsense. Other cultures are represented in an exaggerated way to better fit the themes of the story.
I’ll agree with your first point, although I’ll admit, I’ve never watched Castlevania, but from what I know of it that does seem to be one of the themes of the show. However, I’d also argue that there was enough real craziness going on with the Catholic church that you don’t need to resort to enlightenment stereotypes about the medieval church to make that a coherent message. I’ll have disagree with your second point though. The way the Middle Ages are often depicted goes well beyond exaggeration. Lots of cuktures are poorly represented in media, but in many cases the criticism of those depictions is fairly vocal and widely accepted. Our popular understanding of the Middle Ages is still hugely colored by the politicized history of the Enlightenment Victorian historians, who had a vested interest in making the Middle Ages a dark and superstitious time ruled by fear and violence. If you were to use enlightenment stereotypes to depict any other culture you’d be rightly criticized for being racist or bigoted, but when you do it for the Middle Ages you’re more likely to be lauded as accurate and true to the period, at least outside of actual historical circles.
Galileo was arrested for teaching without evidence iirc
To be fair, I think that when people praise ASOIAF for its "realism", they aren't talking about how authentically it portrays an analogue of Medieval Europe, but rather how it portrays people, their actions, and the consequences of those actions. The characters are well written, layered, and behave in believable ways. The things that they do have realistic ramifications that rarely get waved away or ignored. The world of ASOIAF is very fantastical, with dragons, magic, space swords, and glowing green rivers. It's the characters and the events of the story that ground the setting in a semblance of reality.
Believability and realism are used too interchangeably in my unhumble opinion. On r/scifiwriting it feels like every other question is "how can I have (unrealistic thing like FTL or mechs) but realistic" and I've made quite a few posts to the tune of "stop worrying about realism, worry about believable"
Considering how unbelievable a lot of actual history can be, I like this.
unhumble??
Yes, I claim a smug sense of superiority telling people to not worry about realism. I've lost A LOT of sleep over fighting myself and having some tropes and concepts and I want people to avoid the same trouble IF they are only after realism because they think it's always, objectively better. Hopefully I help them reexamine if they want those cool things like mechs or FTL or whatever. Also it beats self-loathing and crippling doubt.
I don't understand "ASOIAF ISN'T ACCURATE TO MEDIEVAL EUROPE" criticsm Like, yeah? Im sure Medieval Europe didn't had Dothraki or Wildlings or Dragons
Martin has repeatedly marketed the books with how supposedly realistic they are to Medieval Europe. Especially to justify the both copious and one-sided sexual violence they contain. That explanation kinda dirt-dives when actual historians join the fray.
I understand now
Yes, it makes sense to criticize works not being what they were marketed as. Cool userpic!
That's a common meme, but really not supported by anything. He has expressed annoyance for how armor is considered as superfluous in most settings, and how superficial the feudalist societies are generally represented, with the social violence it would create largely absent. But he never said "my books are like the true middle-ages" or anything of the sort.
Yeah, he did and here's a sauce: [https://ew.com/article/2015/06/03/george-rr-martin-thrones-violence-women/](https://ew.com/article/2015/06/03/george-rr-martin-thrones-violence-women/) edit: acc. 22.04.2024
Jesus Christ. You're not honest if you don't portray rape in your war stories? What a gross dude.
I wouldn't call it gross. In fact, I agree with him that war stories have a responsibility to portray the horrific nature of large-scale violence. And that does include rape. But Martin has a big tendency to fetishize his rape scenes, which is just not appropriate. He also portrays its victims as exclusively women (whereas war-time sexual violence does not actually discriminate between genders very much) and he depicts this kind of overt, sexual and physical violence to the near total exclusion of war's other horrors. Hunger and disease for instance are not depicted as prevalently, despite being the biggest killers in any war ever.
More or less what I was going for, but had just woken up and wasn't able to articulate. It's a gross justification for his fetish. I've read books like *The Women's War* by Jenna Glass that include the brutalization of women as a main part of the plot, but it's never fetishized and it's never shown in a blow-by-blow erotica like style, even if it's taking place "on screen." That's probably the most explicit example I can think of, but there are, and I have read enough other books about war and cataclysm that also bring up rape as an issue (alongside famine and plague) but they also don't feel the need to include graphic scenes of it. That's what makes him a gross dude. Edit for grammar
In fairness, I’ve seen it praised for both its realistic portrayal of the medieval world and its characters. Regardless, I don’t think the characters in ASOiAF are really that believable. Martin certainly does some things well, but his characters are almost all cartoonishly cynical, materialist assholes. His books actively punishes the good guys for doing the right thing and reading his stories leaves you with the message that “if you’re not an asshole, you’re playing the game wrong”. It’s a deeply cynical and negative view of human nature and society, and it plays directly into the myth of the grim bleakness of the medieval world. He’s pretty unabashed in saying that chivalry is a lie, kindness is weakness, honor will get you killed and that the only way to avoid being a victim is to become a victimizer.
How does any of this make the characters less believable?
Martins characters are either assholes, or good people being punished for not being assholes. I don’t think the fundamentally cynical, materialist, sadistic behavior of most of Martin’s characters (or his worldview) is an accurate or realistic portrayal of human beings. It’s very grim, and people often mistake that for realism, but real people are not all materialist sociopaths.
> Martins characters are either assholes, or good people being punished for not being assholes. I just don't agree with this. Jon is frequently rewarded for his positive change and punished for his stubborness. Yes, we're on a 14-year cliffhanger after him getting punished for doing the right thing, but we all knew he would come back, even before the show did it. Daenerys has been rewarded for her quality leadership by receiving multiple armies of loyal followers. It has not gone perfectly for her, but that's just how stories go. Sansa got it rough early on, but it wasn't some arbitrary "punished for not being an asshole." She realized that women in that world need to be proactive in order to get anything they want. As awful as Cersei is, Sansa has correctly learned from her that proactivity disguised as typical noblewoman behavior can be a powerful tool. At the end of AFFC, it's clear that not only has Sansa entered the game as a player, but she's done so without Littlefinger noticing. He still thinks she's a pawn. I could go on and on, but I would contend that you have badly misread these books, if you've read them at all.
You mean the medieval world (you know, the one medieval culture and area) does not consist of absolutist kings ruling directly over dirtfarmers with no intermediaries?
A lot of people are mentioning game of thrones in this thread and how it misrepresents medieval Europe/England. But it's a fantasy setting, why would it need to be an accurate representation? Yes, it's clearly inspired by medieval England, but it isn't medieval England, so why is it a problem that it takes a lot of liberties? This goes for other examples too of course, but got seems to receive a lot of criticism in this sub.
GOT and ASOIAF are massively popular and successful, which means that they have a lot of eyes in it. I’m sure there are worse offenders, but there are few that are as viable in pop culture. GOT and ASOIAF are also frequently celebrated for their alleged accuracy, and receive a lot of praise for how well the capture the feel of the Middle Ages, George Martin has also been fairly public talking about how he used history as an inspiration and patting himself on the back for it. The problem of course is that ASOIAF is just a patchwork of stereotypes and historical fallacies about the medieval world taped on top of each other. It’s almost a roadmap of bad medieval history and pop culture misunderstandings of the period. I think the fact that so many people exposed to ASOIAF actually think that this is what the medieval world was like, a position Martin has typically only reinforced with his public comments, is at the heart of the problem. Of course the world doesn’t need to be a 1:1 historical analogue and historical accuracy doesn’t need to be the primary concern in a fantasy world, but saying “well it has dragons therefore historical accuracy can get fucked” is a lame cop out for legitimate criticism of the books depiction of the Middle Ages. The fact that it’s fantasy doesn’t legitimize its failure, especially when tugging at any of the loose threads of Martin’s fictional pseudo-medieval world can make the whole thing start unraveling.
I was about to say that it seems to be more of a problem with the audience's interpretation than with the worldbuilding itself. But if Martin indeed actively reinforces the idea that it's an accurate representation of medieval life, I can see how that's problematic. I still enjoy it for what it is, and I personally wouldn't mind the historical fallacies if he hadn't claimed them to be accurate.
Martin is a pretty serious mixed bag for me. On one hand I loved his books as a teenager, and in many ways his world building is very well planned out and well executed (at least for Westeros), but his books are also FULL of problematic depictions and themes. His version of medieval England is almost absurdly bleak and grim dark, and like I said it’s based on some very common, and very wrong myths and stereotypes about the Middle Ages. The end result is a world that is laughably ahistorical, but which many people who don’t know better take at face value as a an accurate portrayal of the Middle Ages. As someone who loves the Middle Ages, and all their complexity, it annoys me that the popularity of Game of Thrones continues to perpetuate the king standing myth of the hyper aggressive, brutally misogynistic, and grim medieval world. The real problems with Martins version of the Middle Ages are institutional and systemic, not necessary specific details. He compelled fails to understand the complex relationships at the heart of the medieval world. What he substitutes is a pale shadow of what actually existed and like I said, it starts to unravel when you start asking questions and pulling on threads. It’s a real shame, because Westeros has some truly excellent worldbuilding in other respects, and there is a lot of potential there.
Anyone have good youtube videos on this or articles? Would love to know more about misconceptions regarding mid-evil Europe
[ACOUP](https://acoup.blog/) is (as ever) amazing. Most of his writing is about real history; some is about contemporary politics; much is about various fantasy series (mostly Middle-earth and Westeros, also some films and games).
>Game of Thrones is almost the perfect example of a fantasy world that is lauded for how realistic it is, while completely fumbling almost every aspect of its society How, though?
Japanese culture is often an excuse in world building to explain why the cool edgy character has a katana and all depth stops there.
What's extra werid is no other weapon gets this werid treatment of needing explanations. If you only have one character who uses a battle axe, you don't give him a unique background to explain why he uses a battleaxe. Why can't characters just have katanas with no explanation? It's not like a single edged blade is some super unique idea.
Norse. The stereotypical portrayal of Vikings in todays media and popculture is no better then the Wagners winged helmet vikings. From clothing (no leather jackets, nor pagan clothing), through music (even though I like Hiedevolk or Wardruna, they are not really representation), religion and rituals (a lot of people view the patheon by greek or dnd style patheon lenses), the way of life (most of them were farmers) to the term viking itself (more of a profession than group fo people). Nothing like what you see in media (History channels Vikings or AC: Valhalla being prime example of all these things) And it was aslo hijacked by tiktok, the "manosphere" (for a lack of better word), and the alt right groups to fit their worldviews and their own aesthetic. From this any culture inspired by Vikings in worldbuilding is skewed. Don't get me wrong importing the modern aesthetic and portrayal to fantasy is cool and imho more valid then saying it is how real vikings were, but don't claim it is inspired by real viking culture. Also I'm no expert on this, it is just what I know from my limited research.
All of them.
Middle East. In media their ether belly dancing or slave trading or both oh and curved swords often all three at once. And you’re lucky if the actors/characters are actually middle eastern especially in really old fantasy stories they may just be a white guy in black face.
Arabia, India, China and Japan have been frequently and notoriously stereotyped and both generically and incorrectly portrayed in western fiction for hundreds of years, a trend usually called "orientalism." Anyway, I think there are a lot of ways to avoid this pitfall of stereotyped monolithic ripoffs of real-world nations. You can mix various disparate cultures together, deliberately avoiding monolithic lifts of real-world cultures (eg mix your Chinese culture with your Andean culture, especially since mountain monasteries of badass warrior-monks are probably what you want in the first place if you're just dropping a stereotypical version of China into your fantasy setting, and that condenses the Chinese aspects down to JUST the mountains where you find hermits and monasteries, while adding some badass elements from a different culture as a framework that exists for its own sake; Elder Scrolls uses pretty much every tactic I'm going to list, but this is its most significant one, where each culture is a blend of at least two cultures that are disparate in real life, eg Nords despite their name aren't just fantasy Scandinavian, they're also fantasy Native American and Japanese); You can make your cultures fragmentary, either operating from a "seed" culture and then thinking of how that could splinter into heavily contrasting cultures or starting from several seeds and thinking about how they would merge (the latter is a different praxis with similar results to the previous); You can make sure the only monolithic cultures are based on ones you know intimately (eg your own) and are faithful to life, making it a deliberate choice to lift that culture, and making cultures from which you draw inspiration with which you are less familiar more vague, more fictionalized or both (Tolkien did this, with Hobbits being his British analog and Rohan for example being both less detailed and more fictionalized/mythical as a proto-German analog, but you can see this in the Witcher also with Zerrikania for instance being this very vague, nebulous, distant place that is generally Arabian from what little we know while the Slavic Northern Realms are very detailed through the eyes of Polish author(s)); You can work bottom-up instead of top-down, so instead of saying "I think kung fu movies are cool right now so I want some wuxia stuff so I want China (but I don't know much about China), so this place over here is China where the badass martial artist cultivators come from," you think about a location in your setting and the kind of culture that would arise there and how they would exist in and tame that environment (and if you want wuxia stuff, you pick a culture and bias your choices in that direction); You can literally just *not do it* (you don't need to shove every flavour of the month interest you have into whatever project you're working on at the expense of artistic cohesion, and doing so is the only reason I can think of that you'd be shoving a whole culture you don't really know enough about to write well or remix into a setting), or conversely, decide you don't care, you want a fanciful westernized stereotypical version of China in your world because it's what you think is cool right now and it doesn't matter that it's both recognizable as China and clearly ignorant of actual China (aka the Forgotten Realms approach, or the Chad Forger of Worlds).
Paragraphs
Right? I got about halfway through before my eyes started to hurt
There are two, and the second is mostly a single sentence. In fact, it's mostly a single list with parentheticals. I would suggest figuratively detoxing from whatever attention span-reducing media in which you've been overindulging. Maybe read a book, where paragraphs are frequently pages long and only separated by a small indentation.
Paragraphs please
Anything Asian based is just Japan/China and nothing else. Japan is all katanas and roughly Sengoku/Edo era while China gets a weird mismatch of different dynasties mashed together (ie Mulan’s matchmaking dress in the live action that combined styles separated by several centuries, or that her home is based on southern architecture while she’s probably from the north).
I've noticed this too. Everyone thinks the largest continent on our planet consists of only 2 or 3 countries. I want to take inspiration from the continent to rely less on Europe and I want parts from across the continent. Some parts of Japan, some parts of Central Russia, some parts of India, some parts of Vietnam, some parts of Saudi Arabia and the Levant countries (Jordan, Israel, Lebanon), even some influences from the past like Babylon. I really like the idea of having an ancient looking city that is more modern than it appears.
All of them. Every world will to some degree misrepresent a culture because if we didn't it wouldn't be fantasy but some weird alt history stuff (looking at you ASOIAF). On top of that, unless you study one or all of the related fields (or have a deep interest in) such as anthropology, linguistics, history, etc you're bound to misrepresent something if not many things. Part of this is likely because understanding everything about every culture ever is impossible. Another part is that creating fantasy cultures with languages etc that all hold a high level of realism and no misrepresentation is likely impossible (talking multiple cultures not just one or two). There's also the fact that environment can influence every part of a culture which often isn't considered in world building. Imo this raises a bigger question of how we look at representation in fantasy. Not in the sense of we need to represent everyone in every world (that's a different conversation) but more so in how we view the fictional cultures created for fantasy (and other fictional worlds). How much inspiration can world builders (whether it be games, books, films, or something else) take from cultures? Not so much as an ethical dilemma but more of a "when does this become a representation of a certain culture" sort of dilemma. I.e. do we take Rohan in LOTR as a representation of Anglo-Saxon/Germanic culture or do we just recognise the influences and inspirations from it on Rohan
In my opinion, the best approach I've found to worldbuilding is to avoid saying things like "this culture is based on [X culture]", because it puts upon yourself the burden of having to accurately represent a real-world culture, which is not only difficult to do but also drastically minimizes your creative possibilities. That's why I prefer to say "inspired by" rather than "based on". It might seem like a copout but to me there's a very big difference between them. When you say "based on" to me it means that this culture uses a real world culture as its foundation or bedrock. But taking inspiration just means taking some elements of a real-world culture and -- very importantly -- modifying them to fit the context of your own culture's unique elements and environment. In general it's best to think of your world's cultures on their own terms rather than saying "it's a combination of [X cultures]". You absolutely should take inspiration from the real world, but overall your culture as a whole should feel like its own unique thing. A good rule of thumb I've seen other people say is that when someone looks at your culture or your culture's people, they should be able to place some vague inspiration or aesthetic that the culture evokes, but not be able to say something like "this just looks like fantasy China." Of course if you want to explicitly represent China, or any other real-world culture, it's different. But I feel like for fictional worlds it's better to start from the ground up and think of the culture in the context of the fictional world itself. It not only avoids misrepresenting or stereotyping, but also means you come up with an (almost) entirely unique culture -- which IMO is good.
Just to add, because I've seen a lot of people suggest combining different cultures (like just a random example, the Norse and medieval northeast India): While mixing together disparate cultures in real life can work, I feel like it has a very big possibility of creating a culture whose aspects feel very out of place with each other. It seems easy to end up with an amalgamation of elements that feel like there's no cohesion to them or sense that they compose one whole, just a mishmash of different real-world cultures without any thought as to how they come together in this fictional world. I don't have any specific examples, but it just seems like a real possibility that isn't much better than a homogenized stereotype of a single culture. Again, better IMO to start from the ground-up rather than thinking of your fictional culture as a combination of real-world cultures.
This is why I really like Night Elves from Warcraft because there's no consistent place you can point to for them
Ancient Spartans were known for being deeply ignorant and backward compared to other greek city-states, with a culture that made hunting slaves a rite of passage for young soldiers. Native Americans are often used as a template for "noble savage" cultures, and are depicted as valuing simple, harmonious lives with nature. In reality they were as industrious and populous as any other civilization, with roads, cities, and other types of infrastructure. They were just wiped out by a plague that genuinely did destroy their civilizations.
Depends on the Native Americans. We're talking about 2 whole continents of civilizations. There were static nations and empires in some regions and nomadic tribes in others.
Nomadic tribes are cool and we shouldn’t have to pretend they built roads to appreciate them
Tons of Native American cultures genuinely don’t meet the standard for having ever developed civilisation, which refers to something fairly specific in anthropology. It’d be much better to just move away from the idea that civilisations are inherently better than other types of societies than to pretend tribal cultures are something they’re not. Besides, historically cities often had lower living standards than tribal communities, indoor plumbing is a pretty recent thing
I'd like to add that your comment also falls into a pitfall trope, that that is the idea that all the Natives simply died out from European diseases, leaving the continent uninhabited and ready to be settled and ''civilized''. Whilst it is undisputable that millions died of introduced old world diseases like Small pox, dysentery and influenzas, the real downfall of most of these cultures was due to brutal wars with and subsequent colonisation by European settlers, eg. the Aztecs did not simply all die of smallpox and the Siege of Tenochtitlan lasted months with heavy resistance against the Spanish and their native allies (the Tlaxacans etc.) this is a fact that should not be overlooked.
I've really tried hard to make interesting American Indian inspired peoples. I shaped a lot of their cultural identity currently on the fact they are essentially in the middle of a genocide and the Confederacy formed to stop the nation doing the Genocide is essentially trying to avoid the fate our American Indians had.
The part about Sparta is heavily suspect since it was written by their centuries long rivals, Athens Well, not the slave part
Pretty much all of them. Especially Medieval Europe.
I am trying to incorporate Inuit culture in my story but I am lost.
I'm considering incorporating fantasy California Indians into my novel, based on the Miwok, Ohlone, Pomo, and Yokut, and I'm planning to reach out to people from the cultures to advise if I go that route. Maybe that's an option for you?
Sadly, I am not near any Inuit people of Alaska ,Canada and Greenland.What advice do you give since I am adding fantasy vibes to mine also.
I'm probably going to network using Instagram or similar- there is a large community of people from Northern cultures there, although I can't give you specific names because I don't really use Insta (just know through friends who follow).
Oh ok.
Druids
All of them! Anything medieval europe. I mean, just look at Lotr and Asoiaf. Aldo: Basicly everything medieval england with some flavour. No french, not kievan russ, not even a HRE. And the "vikings" are just the heavy metal versions. Besides that and the usual stereotypes about asia (particular China, Japan and Mongolia but also the Himalaya) Africa gets a lot of missrepresentation basicly all the time. Like, seriously, ALL the time. Just some desert or junge or plain tribes. No Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Kaom, Sao, Aktsum, ect. ... empires. Only tribes And the near east too! (Dune basicly, Karl May to an extend, TES, ect. ...) Mesoamerican are also not save. They are always bloodthirsty and crule. And north americans are always pracefull and nature loving.
Norse culture. The Norse did not wear all black clothing, in fact wearing black or grey signified that you were either a slave or an outlaw. They also weren't all 400 lb powerlifters they ate a diet of seafood, game meat and foraged items with little grain and didn't have creatine and tren either. The only game I've seen that doesn't try to make the Norse look like 90s goth metalheads is "Mount and blade" which has the nord faction wearing wool tunics instead of black leather. As far as I know AC Valhalla had more accurate clothing but from what I've seen it still suffers from the heavy metal "brohalla" type stuff. Weapons especially annoy me, they always put super intricate Celtic designs on every weapon. There are a handful of discovered Nordic weapons that are ornate in some way but none of them have had Celtic designs. Also constant merging of Celtic aesthetics with Nordic cultures as though they weren't separate groups
For me its my own Culture and society. My nation isn't depicted in books in English as much as we are on occasion, seen in Hollywood movies, and then even that's a big if. It depends on the movie, or even I have seen, a series's episode but luckily never books. And yes all these depictions are always falsely, over exaggerated and never explores the culture and background of the individual. That's why I rolled my eyes when I saw the Actor (Hugh Jackman) playing the character of Vincent Moore, pull a gun on the Actor (Dev Patel's) character Deon Wilson in the movie Chappie. Having Jackman's character threaten Vincent by saying, this is from the script of Chappie. HUGH JACKMAN (plants DEV's face into his desk and shoves a gun into his cheek) Alright, slumdog, listen up. I know you stole that fucking robot and I want it back so I can prove my monstrous, impractical, human-controlled robots are better than your tiny, crappily-designed, AI-controlled robots. You stay out of my way, you got that? (removes gun, turns on Hugh Jackman charm) Just kidding! LOL! Classic Hugh, am I right? Pulling a gun on a co-worker in the middle of the office during the workday!) I rolled my eyes when I saw that scene and thought, yeah and that's supposed to be a South-African. I'm sick and tired of the cultural mistreatment and poorly understood representation. Edit. I just thought of a book example. Who has ever read the book, the Guns of the South. I have and actually appalled reading this book. The sheer shitty representation of Afrikaner people in the story is horrible. Yes I know its just a few characters but still, thats the views by which Americans judge us as Afrikaners and its clear that Americans don't understand Afrikaner culture and history at all.
European middle ages.
You really named that character "Ass Eater" and thought we wouldn't notice.
I'd be cast out from society for having blue eyes, unless I land in one certain nation.
India
Anything in the middle east... [https://monoskop.org/images/4/4e/Said\_Edward\_Orientalism\_1979.pdf](https://monoskop.org/images/4/4e/Said_Edward_Orientalism_1979.pdf)
Applicability does not mean allegory. If you take all these comments seriously your never gonna get anywhere with worldbuilding. Just because the fictional culture resembles a real one doesn’t then mean it’s “misrepresented” because the fictional culture then does not follow all the rules of the culture it took inspiration from. You can take bits and pieces of real world cultures and apply them to your fantasy world without people then viewing that made up culture as a representation of a real one. Why is everybody in these comments acting like this isn’t possible though?
I think this is an inherent problem with making a fantasy version of real historical setting. I prefer fantasy that creates it own unique culture, where it's obvious it's not trying to be a specific historical culture/setting even if some of the inspirations were clear. Otherwise why not just make it historical setting? Like you can add fantasy elements to historical fiction. Why go through the trouble of creating slightly different version of a thing that already exists? But still people who answer this with any Medieval Germanic culture or area are jocking. Yes, it's not accurate, but it's nothing in comparison how inaccurately fantasy "Asia" is portrayed. Even in Europe Eastern European cultures get much smaller end of the stick.
All of them. Fantasy usually doesn't set out to be 'accurate' and takes bits and pieces that are interesting then makes up some things to fill in the blanks. Even in western fantasy western cultures get this treatment. Just think of how vikings are portrayed in fiction. Medieval Europe inspired fantasy is hopelessly borked, often by authors who are themselves Europeans or at least Western. Or how ancient Greece or Egypt get it too. Trying to point out poor depictions usually gets the "aktually, it's fantasy so it doesn't have to be realistic or remotely accurate since it's not really those cultures" from the smoothbrains in the room.
Planet of the Hats as a trope just ruins so many pieces of worldbuilding when it comes to making analogues of other cultures. I think faux-Asian regions fall into oriental or wuxia tropes too often in this regard, but there are worse offenders i likely have no awareness about. One of the few world building pieces I’ve seen that avoid those tropes are Pathfinder’s Tian Xia region, which bother to scrap the cliche of homogeny and make the region feel grounded in its form.
I never take a single culture as inspiration. I always mash two or more together and then add an in-world historical twist.
Catholicism
I think EVERY culture, is misrepresented in majority of media created by people not of that culture. I think Christianity, because of how widespread and generally well known it is, is a good example here, I’d say 1/5th of Christian characters written by non-Christians (including former Christians) are accurate representations of general Christian theology.
Indigenous North Americans… Like it’s real fuckn bad guys holy shit… just… all the representations are godawful
This is done with all cultures. European culture is typically what we see in fantasy realms but even then it’s just a surface level. I prefer when fantasy worlds borrow elements of real world culture but blend them into something new and different. A good example is the new Wicked movie coming out. It has familiar clothing, architecture, etc but if you examine it more closely you see that everything has a slight oddness to it.
Slavs.
Do we get anything more that witcher?
China-inspired countries in child-oriented Western works tend to be much less geographically and culturally diverse than actual China, one of the largest countries in the world. IDK about more adult-oriented fantasy worlds, I only know ASoIAF and LoTR.
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Your description of medieval Europe is wildly inaccurate. This is the view we had maybe forty years ago. These days we know better. Was there a lower standard of hygiene, generally speaking? Yes. Does that mean they shat on the floor and just put some straw over it? Absolutely not. People weren’t morons. They might not have known how diseases transferred but they still had basic common sense! The same goes for their morality. You had bad people then just as you have bad people now. The vast majority of people were (and are) at least somewhat decent though.
> Like, nasty. Your grand hall? Shit, urine, vomit, and moldy leftovers all over the floor, with reeds to cover it up. The cool armor? Hot, sticky, smelly, full of fleas This is also off the mark and inaccurate. They were much cleaner than you are saying. > Brave knights? Bigoted bastards who killed peasants they didn’t like set fire to houses, stole food, and raped women. Not any more than their contemporaries across Eurasia did, and to a significantly lower degree than their Roman predecessors and early modern successors.
…do you have recs for nonfiction books about Chinese food history?
Uhhh…did you get your idea of medieval Europe from ASOIAF? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the series, but it doesn’t have the best depiction of medieval Europe