Why Fantasy Worlds SHOULD Be Stuck in Medieval Times

A contrarian video essay in support of the medieval stasis trope commonly found in fantasy fiction.

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● Livestream Highlights: @PerseusGrimLIVE

0:00 - Intro
2:59 - What’s the Point?
8:05 - Ancient Boomers
14:25 - The Story Argument
21:26 - Suppression
29:14 - Conclusion

Music Used: League of Legends, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Gwent, The Sims: Medieval, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, YouTube Audio Library, Oleanteros Ebinos Coltsfoot

[JakubHohn]

"Don't trust the cleric guy. He works for the big magic."

[bgiv]

Fun fact: battery-powered cars actually slightly predate gas-powered cars.

[vrabeldawg]

In a fantasy world where magic is understood, that is just technology. Its the practical application of known natural phenomena, so its technology. They wouldnt develop the same tech we have per se, but they would have their own advancements made just by people wanting to live more comfortable lives.

[Heldarion]

Perseus Grim: lengthy argument on why it makes sense to have a medieval stasis

Fantasy authors: I just love the medieval vibe

[longbeardbobson]

The irony is that the so called 'medieval era' was one of constant development and change in thought, culture and technology.

[mastercrash]

Sir, a second flying carpet has hit our mage towers

[AndrianTimeswift]

One thing I've been thinking about for a long time is how magic functions a lot like technology. A lot of "medieval" fantasy settings are actually quite modern when you get down to the nuts and bolts, but have a medieval veneer over them. They don't have human waste and horse dung clogging the gutters, for example, and the water from rivers is safe to drink without worry of getting sick (I once explained this in one of my settings by introducing a sewer druid treating a large city's water supply with aquaculture.). Light spells and cheap magical items can light up the darkness of night. Communication spells act like cell phones. Teleportation circles work like a mass transit system. Attack spells work like firearms and artillery. Flying carpets and broomsticks replace airplanes.

What's very tricky is figuring out how to develop a world history that incorporates magic. You have to decide when and where particular spells are discovered and how they would affect society. And in a world with magic, the magic is just another natural force like electricity or gravity, and it integrates with those other forces. You really have to be careful to set up the rules of magic such that they don't allow for the creation of perpetual motion or other world-breaking exploits. Otherwise you could, for example, use a magical pitcher that's always full of water to endlessly turn a water wheel, which can then be hooked up to just about any machine.

One thing I realized while playing Pathfinder is that you can use some relatively inexpensive magic items to give your fantasy world a firefighting service as good as or better than modern firefighting. A Decanter of Endless Water can work as a fire hose. Animated wagons can serve as fire trucks. Cheap wooden constructs can be made relatively fire-resistant and able to fly, reducing the need for human firefighters and making upper-floor rescues significantly easier and less risky.

Medieval stasis is much easier to maintain if magic is only available to a privileged few. The more people have access to magic, and the more versatile magic is, the greater the chance that someone will discover a world-changing use for the magic.

[ASolzhenitsyn]

I could totally see a dark lord in the penthouse of a giant skyscraper.

[charimonfanboy]

Science is not opposed to magic, and I am tired of people claiming it is. Science is a study of the natural world. If magic was a part of the natural world, it would be a part of science. If both existed in the same world.

Science is not the use of electricity or medicine, it is the way you investigate the world

[jonasgajdosikas]

the 2nd segment "What's the point?" kinda misses the point of why technological development occurs. humanity never had a "tech tree"; every development occurred because it benefited whomever created it. You don't invent a wheel to sometime down the road have cars, you invent it because it brings you the immediate benefit of transporting stuff easier.
The real question is if magic develops, because when knowledge literally is power, you don't really want to share it with those that might become adversaries. This keeping of knowledge means that likely many developments will be made and then lost because the only guy who knows about it died

[jacobkroesche]

To bring up the “Why bother with tech when magic can do it better” point, I feel like this alone only works if everyone has access to the magic system. If it’s like Star Wars with midiclorian levels or some crap, where only certain people has access, then there would be some people that would progress with science as a more widespread alternative, for those that can’t possess magic. If you’re writing a story, definitely use this in conjunction with something else, like outside suppression as you point out towards the end.

[Nikolas_Davis]

If we want to be realistic, the real headscratcher is not why fantasy worlds never progress beyond a medieval stasis, but rather why they seem so much more immune to collapse than the real world. Civilizations have crumbled multiple times throughout real world history: we had the Late Bronze Age collapse, followed by the Greek Dark Ages; the Low Middle Ages were also a dark age following the collapse of the Roman Empire, and characterized by shrinking of urban centers and decline of knowledge, literacy and technology. Similar collapses happened all over the globe, e.g. in pre-Columbian Americas.
We are so used to this idea of inevitable progress, that we assume a medieval setting _must_ evolve into an early modern and then a modern one, but this is just how things played out in the most recent part of our history. After all, the Middle Ages *themselves* were a setback compared to antiquity, at least the first few centuries, and going further back we see more setbacks than steady progress. There almost *was* a scientific and industrial revolution in Hellenistic times, which didn't last due to Hellenistic states' infighting and, later, the Roman conquest. Technological progress is fragile, unless it gains so much momentum that it goes global, or beyond. We've been _extremely_ lucky in the "real world".

[aattrpg]

I'd make the argument that that magic doesn't replace tech in the fantasy setting, but magic is tech, from that setting's viewpoint. A really good example is the Dying Earth Series.

[Shaso-xvtw]

My honest opinion is that the best time era for fantasy is a Bronze Age world. The Bronze Age as we know it lasted for thousands of years for the simple reason that iron, when not treated under specific circumstances, is actually a weaker metal than bronze. That also combines with the fact that we have every reason to believe based on ruins that bronze may have been discovered and lost several times in early Neolithic farming societies as a result of catastrophic disasters breaking the trade networks necessary to allow bronze to exist. In the Americas the native population literally never left the Bronze Age until Europeans showed up, likely because the resources to make bronze are more plentiful and closer together here than in Eurasia, meaning that after the Bronze Age collapse, Europe was incentivized to eventually figure out how to make use of iron sparking invention. This in combination with the fact that meteorite iron has gone through the strengthening process simply by entering our atmosphere means that some powerful iron blades will exist which is a great analogy to adamantine, and aluminum is a lighter material that is about as strong as bronze if properly treated in a way that could be done by expert craftsmen, which is a good comparison to mithril. Combine that with how wild and untamed large parts of the world was with there still being mammoths and other human races such as Neanderthals and genuine halflings, and the fact talker many rulers fashioned themselves as divinely chosen god kings or sorcerer lords and you have a fantastic setting which realistically would remain in stasis for many thousands of years.

[fakjbf]

For the point of scientists not keeping up with changes in their fields, Albert Einstein is a perfect example. He revolutionized physics and pushed forwards our understanding of the universe immensely. But he was vehemently opposed to quantum mechanics, he could not believe that the universe was fundamentally ruled by random chance and kept trying to find loopholes to make everything perfectly deterministic. The last decades of his life were spent futilely trying disprove a framework which is now the bedrock of our understanding of physics.

[evelynlewis]

I sort of disagree that the enlightenment is a hard cutoff for fantasy. I think the cutoff is rather, "Being far enough removed from the present that we can romanticize it, sufficiently lost in the mists of time." People are setting fantasy as recently as the 1890's now

[thelordz]

You are missing 1 giant point. A world that is as saturated in magic as you say would look nothing like a medieval fantasy world. Why build giant castles when a dude with a stick can just summon an earthquake and instantly tear down all that hard work? Why wear armor when some dude who just sat inside and read books all day can boil you in that metal with just a word? It's a very similar reasoning as to why castles and armor died out as cannons and guns become more effective. Even if it takes longer to train, one powerful mage is worth over a hundred knights and a thousand regular foot soldiers. The only way to counter this would be for magic to relatively rare, which then just provides incentive for technological progress.

[kimwelch]

"No, I think these great minds would be better off focusing their efforts on studying the Arcane, " and thus we have the reasoning that propelled Isaac Newton to pursue Alchemy. He wasn't being stupid, just thorough.

[nemesissombria]

Sorry, my magitech brain doesnt accept medieval stasis should be a thing.

[devonrager]

You say this like people wouldn't study how magic works with the scientific method. This is built on the presumption that magic in their world would be considered supernatural rather than part of the natural world and that science is a wellspring of knowledge rather than a set of tools for finding knowledge.