Why does so much fantasy take place in medieval Europe analogues? I understand that a lot of it must be Lord of the Rings' influence, but it goes way beyond that. At least half are medieval, and a large amount beyond that are Renaissance. pic unrelated
>>47020844
The standard medieval Europe-type fantasy places a lot of emphasis on personal power. How much a character can accomplish depends on how good their individual sword hand or spellcraft is. How far they get in life depends on what they personally do. It is fairly empowering to have a character who is, effectively, in full control of their life and their decisions.
In a more modern setting, that isn't quite the case. Your ability to support yourself depends on how much you can work, then spending the money earned on someone else providing for you. Accomplishments typically involve working for others for recognition, and relying on others for access to better avenues. You don't just run into a pile of gold and suddenly have a better house.
That, and swords tend to rely more on personal skill for empowerment. Guns tend to rely more on firepower for empowerment. A highly trained swordsman can survive just on their own skills; I highly trained marksman can easily be killed by anyone with a gun and decent aim.
>>47020844
It's familiar.
>>47022381
There's plenty of outright modern fantasy - like urban fantasy, Buffy the Vamprie Slayer, Dresden Files stuff - but also a lot of modern stuff that isn't usually considered fantasy, but has a lot of fantasy elements or follows the same kind of story structure. For instance, a medieval fantasy story where 4 plucky adventurers go on a quest to save the world from an evil wizard becomes a story where a group of mismatched soldiers or spies go on a mission to save the world from a criminal mastermind.
Part of the reason fantasy is associated with the past is because that's where a lot of the ideas, like monsters and magic, come from in the first place. It's the same reason a sphinx or minotaur would feel out of place in LotR, it's the wrong time and culture. In modern settings people tend to use modern ideas - mutants, aliens, gadgets. So there's less need for outright fantasy.
Some fantasy settings don't worry about context, but there's a modern version of that too. The modern D&D kitchen sink is represented in superhero stories - which contain a lot of fantasy elements, even if they're not usually on the same shelf as LotR.
tl;dr modern fantasy isn't rare, it just looks different.
>>47020844
Because most fantasy writers (that you read) are from America, Australia, or Western Europe, so medieval Western Europe is the backdrop against which their cultural body of myths, legends, and traditional stories are set. Knights in shining armor, and all that.
>>47020844
Check out Codex Alera. It's basically Rome meets AtLA.
With giant wolf-men and Zerg.
>>47023039
It's funny. Urban Fantasy is very close to how old folk tales work.
Only instead of "Don't go into the forest; monsters live there." it's now "Don't go into the city; monsters live there."
That amuses me.
>>47020844
Most people know just enough about it to be familiair but not enough to make it boring.
Real medieval history is surprisingly modern in a lots of ways.
>>47020844
While the settings are Western European, I've personally felt that Chinese history matches the "feeling" of fantasy much better. Looking at different stages in Chinese history, you have the following:
>A unified world power with an almost divine ruler
>A fractured empire with pretenders fighting for the throne
>Barbaric hordes to the North
>Exotic and delicious brown kingdoms to the south
>Jungles, plains, steppes, deserts and wastelands alike
>Foreign invaders with strange weapons and even stranger customs
It just "feels" more fantasy than Western Europe, which is pretty much the same as one of the stages of Chinese history (warlords fighting over the remnants of a fallen empire) but never really grew out of that stage.
Not being denigrating here, I'm eurocentric as fuck, but I'm just looking at the "feeling" of Chinese history vs Western history, and China "feels" like more of a fantasy setting if we ignore the setpieces.
Most writers are from a European background or are extremely familiar with it. They write what they know.
>>47025624
All of those things happen off and on all the time in European history.
Expanding on >>47022381 (because I agree with all of that)
In addition to the extra focus on individualism and the ability to hone a craft by your own hard work, European mythology is centered around people (usually with God's help) fighting off evil. Dragons, demons, all that stuff were put down by heroes who put their faith in God or their sword or whatever.
That whole "hero rises up to slay evil" was born from the Greek and Roman myths that gave rise to the Medieval/Renaissance European mythologies (obviously simplifying centuries of history here). It fits really well with the narrative that lots of games like to play on, the whole band of misfits rising against impossible odds, playing the hero to an entire village about to be murdered by something that's just purely and simply evil.
Eastern mythologies, or hell even Native American or South/Central American mythologies may have huge amounts of influence you can pull from and their monsters may shit on European ones, but in most of those cultures (again, simplifying quite a bit here to make a point) the monsters and demons and things are just a part of the world. They're things that humans need to avoid, lest we perish, rather than something we can actually fight off and prevail over. Take the literally thousands of demons of various Eastern mythologies. Half of them are just minor annoyances that do things like "make your house smell of rotting fish." You can't fight the odor of rotting fish like you can a great dragon that's threatening to eat all the good Christian peasants.
>>47025624
perhaps the feel may be relevant, but the aesthetic is always cemented in western Europe.
>>47027210
>in most of those cultures (again, simplifying quite a bit here to make a point) the monsters and demons and things are just a part of the world.
At least in the case of some eastern cultures, "evil" was basically the same as "imbalance" and what would be considered a demon is simply a person or natural spirit which had taken something to such an extreme to become evil with it. So the idea isn't so much avoiding evil, as it is avoiding the excess that leads to becoming evil.
>>47027614
Which, again, is hard to translate into a hero mentality.
>DM: "You're fighting the very nature of humanity to create the thing that made it evil in the first place!"
>Players: "Sounds awesome, how do we fight it?"
>DM: "By living your everyday lives and trying not to do anything wrong!"
>>47027614
Don't think so. Every culture has a metric fuckton of monsters slayers.
At most in some cases the "monster" might be a little more prone to change its ways.
