No, Game of Thrones didn’t take place in Medieval times lmao. Dragons and wizards didn’t exist in ye olde England.
It would be funny if people did this with more recent time periods and fiction. Like people genuinely thinking that victorian times had giant steampunk spider robots.
I will say it is a little concerning how often I hear people say shit unchallenged like “It takes place in the old days” about something that is a fantasy world that never actually existed. Makes me worried people can’t tell fantasy from reality.
Edit: This petty rant is because I was talking about GoT with a friend and told them that the constant sexual assault put me off watching it and they were like “Yeah, but that’s what it was like back then.”
My pet peeve is when a fantasy setting is based firmly on European medieval society, but operates in an early modern capitalist economy, instead of feudalism. This is most fantasy
Right? Where are the serfs!?
Writing theory
28·10 days agoIt is easier to imagine [an entirely different world with magic and dragons and shit], than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
Capitalism’s development was not such an ‘all at once’ phenomenon and the capstone of its supremacy still took many years after many dictatorships of the bourgeoisie were formed. England for instance, especially around its metropoles had well established manufacturing industries that were overcoming guild limitations and a thriving merchant class that were becoming embedded as the early capitalists, in like the 1600s well before steam power and the industrial revolution.
China for example is in the process of developing socialism, and a medieval fantasy world could be at the nascent developmental stages of Capitalism.
Sure, but those developments are very focused on manufacturing. Like off the top of my head, Skyrim represents it’s farmers as either independent farmers who own their own land, or wage workers employed by those farmers. They travel to towns and bring their produce to the local markets, and seemingly own all of their produce. So what do the Jarls own? They’re supposed to be lords, but they are really just generic governors. Similarly, it seems that anyone in Skyrim can cut down trees if they want to, they don’t need logging rights to cut and sell wood.
The Witcher 3 has a much more fleshed out economy from what I’ve played (only about 15 hours). The farmers, from what I can tell, are mostly wage workers, but the world is very clearly an early modern setting minus gunpowder, rather than a middle ages setting.
Agriculture is a very good benchmark for examining how an economy is represented. When a medieval fantasy setting has serfs rather than proles on a farm, it’s evidence that at the very least, the writer understands that different economic systems exist.
Middle Earth seems to work in its own way, which I’m happy about. The hobbits seem to be a fairly communal society, with noble families being mostly a formality. But crucially, hobbits seem to have their own understanding of productivity and economics, and thats fun and imaginative for a fantasy setting. The worst is when writers just crowbar capitalism into a feudal-inspired society because they can’t imagine anything else.
for you and others that enjoyed your post, have a look at the game ‘pentiment’. it’s a little indie rpg set in austria in a small town straddling the late medieval and early renaissance and tells a story of social change.
Hard to argue that Obsidian is a “little indie” studio, but the game definitely doesn’t have a bloated AAA scale.
Pentiment is one of Josh Sawyer’s pet projects and a delightful game!
oh no kidding, I didn’t realize obsidian was the dev. frankly I didn’t think it was possible that this type of game would be made by anyone but some indie studio
if they thought about it at all, they probably decided the jarls collect rent in cash, like land lords did in the 1800s (or today, for that matter) from their tenant farmers.
a cash based economy in medieval times? lol
This still could be feudal in its decline which saw the emergence of market economies, but generally I agree. I’ve soften on that opinion as I learned more about the social and economic development of merchant lead reorganization.
Peasants have to annually pay their feudal lord one (1) gold coin that they were somehow able to procure despite living miles away from the nearest city in the middle of a village nobody from that nearest city knows exist.
and all the anachronistic plate armor too! as a setting, “medieval times” is fantasy even without the magic
My biggest pet peeve is when something actually does take place in medieval times or Roman times or [insert past time period] but they are in the ruins of said times. Like in Ancient Greece all those buildings were new and brightly colored with paint, why are they in the white marble ruins of the society lol.
And they all have English accents
They’re obviously saying Medieval Times, the franchised dinner theatre production.
Of course!
I used to be a bit of a medieval history nerd and my friend got annoyed with how many “medieval facts” I liked to blurt out in simple conversation. So I ended up proposing a TV show called “In Medieval Times” where I would be dressed as a king eating a big ass chunk of mutton and he’d be dressed as a Jester and just angry and depressed all the time.
Lmao I love it
I’d watch the hell out of that
there used to be dragons in olden times though. like the Welsh flag is about this dragon that used to defend the kingdom.
his name was Mike and he got killed in a car accident in the 1970’s, marking the transition to modernity.
My dad convinced his current girlfriend that there used to be dragon spiders that could fly and spit flaming venom.
Dudes Rock
That and they believe people were walking around trading DnD gold for stuff like it’s a fantasy RPG
Generally people have no idea how the modern economy works let alone a medieval one
Didn’t the value of coinage used to be held in the metal itself, not trust? I thought that coins used to be semiprecious metals and occasionally precious metals.
While that was once true, you’re off by like 500-1000 years on the timeline for gold being a commonly struck currency, depending on what part of the world we’re talking about.
Early Lydian coinage was like 40-60% gold and the rest silver, in an alloy called Electrum.
The first gold and silver coinage was issued by Croesus in the 6th century BCE, and then Cyrus the Great ran with that bimetallic system when he introduced coinage to the Achaemenid Empire, but that was pretty much the only time til the 15th century Golden age of Genovese banking, almost two thousand years later that gold coinage was again commonly used.
The Roman accounting system was based around the as, which was a bronze or copper coin, and then multiples of that, which were generally issued in silver or alloys like orichalcum (brass).
Charlemagne introduced the Carolingian coinage system which was silver denominated. This was the official coinage for the HRE for a few hundred years and directly led to more recent coinage.
However, debasement of currency was quite common during both of these eras and while sterling silver was pretty much always used in the British for example, other supposedly equivalent coins struck elsewhere would have entirely different metal compositions and the values became really hard to track as a result, so the origins of coinage became a more important factor than the supposed face value.
Under the Milanese House of Sforza, Genoa basically had the first two banks in Europe and went absolutely buckwild financing the entire continent with gold coins backed by slavery and set the stage for the colonization of the new world and transatlantic slave trade over the next few centuries.
TLDR: In the middle ages, gold coins were something that most people would never see or touch, there’s like a 2000 year gap surrounding this era in which the entire continent of Europe pretty much just didn’t use gold coins for major denominations that people would actually use because they didn’t have access to gold.
There’s also a lot more nuance to how coinage was actually used (or how it wasn’t) in the medieval economy, but I’m sure someone else will help elucidate this as this is something I don’t know much about.
Do you have any book recs about the rise of financing by way of the Sforzas?
It’s not specifically or exclusively about Genovese financing in this era, but Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto was suggested to me by someone back on r/CTH about the rise of colonialism in this era.
We find evidence of lots of tokens being traded around, as well as ledgers keeping track of debt. Barter societies seem to be somewhat mythical, but so does extensive use of currency.
It seems more common that people just kept track of stuff owed or stores issued chits indicating credit. There’s some evidence of some of these chits being used very far from the store that issued them which is pretty cool.
Yep, it’s even in the Constitution:
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
The issue isn’t really with the dragons and wizards and steampunk mechs, though, so much as that the whole world of the work is fictional. Like if someone were to say that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy takes place in or about the late 1970s, I wouldn’t see much of a point in disputing it even though the Earth is decidedly not a computer built by mice to calculate the ultimate question to which the answer is 42.
Obviously not, that would be ludicrous. It was COMMISSIONED by mice.
Oh yeah, sorry, of course.
Game of Thrones’s politics was at least based around the War of Roses.
But funnily enough I was thinking this morning of how much “Medievel” stuff is just a hodgepodge. I didn’t realize how inaccurate a lot of that stuff was till middle school or so.
My pet peevee with fantasy is that it seems to be built on the European medieval world. I’d love to see something taking place in an Indian or Islamic or Aztec or whatever setting.
You might dig The Lions of Al-Rassan. Set in a fictionalized Andalusia during an Islamic ascendency
Amazing book. If wistful bittersweet was condensed into ink on pages it would be this.
I’ve never seen someone do the reconquista from a tragic point of view before.
You could try Mo Dao Zu Shi for a Chinese flavored feudal fantasy settings. It’s good and also pretty gay.
Can only recommend guy gavriel Kay so much but under heaven is pseudo warring states, sailing to sarantium is eastern Roman empire (yes Europe but eastern! and cool).
“Yeah, but that’s what it was like back then.”
There’s so many things like this where the pop culture expectation is completely wrong but it’s self-reinforcing so even movie directors who know better have to go along with it. Give me a movie about gladiators where most of the fights are like WWE matches and the stars all do advertisement spots for money, dammit!
Gladiators with product stickers engraved upon their armor like roman NASCAR
But it’s also chariot Mario Kart
One of the Asterix comics has a bit where Julius Ceaser is annoyed at having so many commercial breaks between the shows.
I’m going to start a new conspiracy theory that says wizards used to be real and all over the place until Christians managed to eradicate all witchcraft during the Dark Ages.
Change Christianity for capitalism and patriarchy and you have the non-fiction book ‘caliban and the witch’
It’s easier to say that it takes place in medieval times than saying “it takes place in a fantasy setting inspired by medieval Europe.”
And then on top of that it’s usually more a pastiche riffing on the early modern period anyways.
“It takes place in the old days” about something that is a fantasy world that never actually existed
people yearning for the return of a mythical golden age you say
And why does every goddamn fantasy story have to take place in these pseudo-medieval times anyway? Because Tolkein had a hard-on for feudalism? Why not have a fantasy world set in like, an ancient bronze age/chacolithic sort of society? Where “civilisation” is only a few centuries old and magic itself is a kind of new thing as well? Or one where the technology has developed based on the fantasy elements? Don’t need crop rotation when you can have druids replenish the soil, or proper coking furnaces when you have fire mages who can make extreme heat with a spell. Damn. Now I’m getting into the “magic as labour” thing again.
There are a near infinite number of manga and anime that approach this topic / setting differently.
Black Clover is what you’re describing almost to a T. Its premise is “magic is so commonplace and everyone can do it that it’s strange that the protagonist is one of the few who can’t do it”.
I quit this show after a few episodes though. I like shonen well enough but the near constant screaming was just not my bag of what I was trying to watch at the time. I’ve heard it tones down on that and gets better in the later seasons though.
I know there’s good stuff out there, but it’s more fun to complain about how a very large number of low quality anime/manga just take the same generic “fantasy europe but also like a video game” sort of setting.
Clan of the cave bear is Neanderthals. Good shit.
