It's kinda weird when people will say a piece of media takes place in "Medieval times" and yet it's a fantasy world.

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."

58 comments

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.

58 comments