The Politics of Fantasy Maps

What do maps of fictional places reveal about politics and geography? This video essay explores questions about the creation of space, the subjectivity of maps, and the role of maps in modern media and worldbuilding.

An update:
Wow, when we made this we imagined only about 100 people would ever see it. This was completed years ago as a school project, which had a separate bibliography that has long since gone missing. Looking back on this, the attributions in the video itself were a bit messy and not exactly up to Academic standards on their own.

Correction: All of the quotes attributed to John Wyatt Greenlee are from “In the Beginning was the Word: How Medieval Text Became Fantasy Maps", which was Co-Authored with Anna Fore Waymack, whose name we accidentally failed to include. Our apologies, Anna!

Other works referenced:
Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods
By Eve Tuck, Marcia McKenzie

Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800-1914: Third Edition by Robert Gildea.

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Some Assumptions about Fantasy
A speech by Ursula K. Le Guin
Presented at the Children’s Literature Breakfast
BookExpo America, Chicago, IL
4 June 2004

Music Used:

"Infados" by Kevin MacLeod

"Thoughtful" by Lee Rosevere

"Debunking", "Casey like Beat", and "Fear the Edge" by Yuzzy

[adamclareburt]

A massive miss opportunity I often find with fantasy worlds is they normally only have 1 map. Why not multiple, say one nation or empire could create 1 map n another nation could create another contradicting map. This would be a really cool way to show internal division and disputed territory amount other things.

[FaunoAtelie]

You can use those biases, such as assuming certain places are empty, as an interesting worldbuilding tool as well. For instance, in a TTRPG campaign, you can convey the political and sociological bisases of a certain place (In this case the source of the map the players hold) by having the players find out a region or a culture is strikingly different from what they were shown previously.

[sharpie]

My favourite fantasy world I've made was explicitly built as "A Merchant's Guide to X." The author was a well-travelled merchant giving advice to others of his class and was based firmly in his own experience. It's highly opinionated, favours urban centres and great states, and is at times chauvinistic, all because these were the express interests of the author. There were even multiple editions over decades — in the D&D campaign I ran with this world, the players had an old version but stumbled into a civil war in what looked on the map like a large, perfectly stable empire. All-in-all, it provided the players a good opportunity to question their own Guide as they found it to so often flatten the reality on the ground.

[mimovres]

Tolkien’s aproach is pretty tolerant to these themes i believe. Not only because majority of civilization infrastructure is not adressed in any king (villages, less important towns, castles, etc.) but also the way he adressess the landscape. The states are not called by its inhabitants (there’s no edaina, or noldor empire) but by the land itself usually. Even concrete states like gondor or rohan have no clear border, making they ambiguous (mordor is an exeption as its border is literally outlined by mountain range

[Baronnax]

7:49 I agree, it'd be so weird. Imagine if the biggest nation in the Arab peninsula and it's inhabitants were titled after the Saud family. That'd be bizarre.

[AF-tvuf]

This is why I like turning random shapes and fractals into maps. The randomness eliminates my own biases as much as possible and forces me to mold my ideas to the geography and extrapolate instead of trying to impose what 'should' be there.

[HierophanticRose]

Political Maps of my campaign setting is looking more and more like Holy Roman Empire internal borders. I like to think of those borders more as "Spheres of Control" usually around settlements, helps creating realistic systems as well, forces me to think about it.

One thing I also like creating is culture, lifestyle, sprachbund, and de jure maps to give the world some dynamism I can play around with

[historymarshal]

Holy cow. This video and channel is criminally underrated. The quality of this is unreal. You are doing great, and can't wait to see what you do next.

[shadowwarriorshockwave]

Drops two great videos leaves refuses to elaborate

[haph]

I think it would be interesting to have, rather than a single “canonical map of the world”, to have two or three or four different maps, made from different perspectives. One can compare which cities and towns are labeled on each, what names they use (or a direct translation of those names if the story has fictional languages), and what features are drawn incorrectly, or not drawn.

[aracheldra]

The last RPG campaign I ran accidentally ended up a mapping experiment. I drew some coastlines, decided to mark languages (just some fuzzy, overlapping blobs to give a rough idea where each one was spoken), then ran out of time.

I ended up pretty happy with just the language map. It wasn't precise about borders, but it said a lot more about nomads and settlers; who lived or traded with whom; and how far the big imperial powers' might actually reached (versus where they drew their borders).

[cjspear]

This is a great exploration of maps in general, not just in the context of fantasy.

[Saltkoenigin]

Using the thoughts of this video for a minecraft world I yet have to build is truly amazing.
Having already mapped out my place which now needs to be put into a living map rather then a static one is something I want to achieve

[justanotherhumanuser]

>be me
>finds new video essayist with high-quality and insightful content
>wants to see more
>clicks on channel
>channel has two videos, both over a year old
>feelsbadman
Well, I suppose I'll subscribe on the off chance new content is eventually released.

[childofivy]

This makes me think of Zemuria, the fictional continent of the Trails video game series, and how the locations of countries contributes to the overall plot. Especially Crossbell, the city-state stuck in between two superpowers.

[K_J_Coleman_Composer]

I like the idea of a mapmaker slowly discovering the world through his journeys. The first book starting with a blank map and a single city.

[rogaldorn]

Very cool video. As a world builder, I personally think that world maps enter their final stage when different characters can point the same place and give it different names.

[cheesy_]

I just discovered this video and I gotta say, it's brilliant. The editing is very high-end and the content... Chef's kiss!

[aldariontelcontar]

Ursula misses the entire point of good vs evil thing: violence can only be countered by violence. If somebody is trying to kill you, you can only win by resisting, meaning violence.

Letting yourself get killed is NOT moral superiority.

[YYGC_Creator]

I gotta thank you for making this video because it opened a whole new perspective on map making altogether. I had been having a problem with a current world I've been attempting to build and never once thought of choosing a specific perspective to create it from, beyond "I need, the storyteller, need a map!" Great work.