But from the description, I do recognize the subgenre you're referring to - about a sort-of isekai bringing technological uplift. I don't think it is the same genre, though it can definitely start out in a variant of the same setting before the setting's changed during the story. But then, the harder sci-fi can't use the same setting unless it waves its hands really fast about magic being simulated by nanotech - and even then I wouldn't really count it as hard.
There are a fairly small number of archetypes. What is a creature of light to be but an elf? A creature of darkness, but a goblin? A creature of fire but a dragon? A creature of earth but a dwarf? A creature of water but a mermaid? A creature of the air but an eagle? Who can be wise but a wizard, who brave but a knight, who fair but a princess, who virtuous but a prince, who dark but a dark lord? Who can rightfully rule but a king?
You can change the names, but the players remain the same. No one is fooled. The archetypes are too ancient and too primitive to be invented; they can only be dressed in the raiment of their offices according to some particular turn of fashion.
How then could the world they inhabit be any but the world they have always inhabited?
I disagree! Or rather, I half disagree and half think you're missing the question I was discussing.
Take Elves. You're right that on some level, they're defined by "creature of light." But, there're many degrees of freedom inside that definition. Consider Tolkien's Elves versus Shakespeare's Elves versus Lloyd Alexander's Fair Folk versus L. Frank Baum's Daughters of the Rainbow. They're all "creatures of light"; it isn't like one of them is more fully light than the others. But the Standard Fantasy Setting has clearly chosen Tolkien's version of them over the others.
Or, take kings. In my own abortive fantasy novel, I had a number of leaders who weren't properly kings. You could argue they were taking the same literary and symbolic role as a king even if they weren't called that, weren't chosen by hereditary right, and had limits on their power which most kings didn't have. You'd usually be right. But still, why does the Standard Fantasy Setting favor hereditary rulers called kings over other options?
Ah, so you were complaining not about a lack of variety of creatures but about a lack of variety of the standard creatures. I'm not current enough on contemporary fantasy to comment on that, though it does not surprise me. But perhaps it has to do with what we might call the great ennobling of which Tolkien is a major, if not the only culprit.
The legends from which these creatures come portray them largely as malevolent forces. They personify the dangers of life. Tolkien ennobled them, and in doing so made them more like men. Dragons have suffered the same fate, though not at the hands of Tolkien, and in being ennobled have become more like horses, or like men.
As for kings, they are a human universal. All societies are ruled by a king in council. We vary how we choose our kings and how they choose their councils, but the patterns in that track largely to the size and influence of the middle class. The rise of the middle class sucks the nobility out of men, and the dangers out of the natural world, so we turn to the creatures of legend and endown them with the nobility we no longer see in ourselves. And thus make them into a nobler version of ourselves.
But thus also you can't have a middle class in fantasy, or not very much of one, and that means you have a military/agricultural society in which kings rule by the assent of the great lords.
I'd say rather a lack of variety of creatures remixing the same themes, but I think we're talking about the same things?
You're right that most writers are following Tolkien's footsteps in describing these creatures, but I doubt that Tolkien was the one who made the fantasy creatures more like men. They are definitely personified like men in modern fantasy, more so than in old folktales, but I think that's more because of the genre difference. Look at my "The Short Fairy-Tale" from last year - no character in those fairy-tales was really personified! Conversely, the Elves in Dunsany's "King of Elfland's Daughter" are already feeling like humans long before Tolkien.
Let's notice something. There is much overlap between children's tales, like Cinderella, and fantasy, which looks a lot like those tales remixed for adults. And yes, it is Tolkien. Specifically The Hobbit. I am not entirely sure Tolkien meant that for an adult audience... we know well enough he kept rewriting his ideas. The Hobbit starts out much like a tale for children. That's why hobbits are small, so they are basically adult children. The trolls turning to stone is a very typical children's tale of a smart child tricking evil adults. Then it gets more serious later on... apparently somewhere halfway through the book Tolkien decided it is meant for adults anyway.
But you have a good point, Schumpeter used to say that the stock exchange is a poor replacement for the Holy Grail. That is, there was some kind of an oomph about medieval nobility. They were somehow more respectable than some fat CEO and were more respected. They could jump on the back of a galloping horse in full armour. That was standard training.
There is also something that a child can understand about kingship. They live in a society (their home) ruled by a king and a queen. But they have no way to understand a land dominated by a middle class. There is no middle class in the home, even a middle class home. The medieval social structure was in many ways a fractal family structure, with the same relationships repeated at different scales. But a democratic middle-class society is not a fractal image of a family in any way.
That's why I keep thinking about the modern world. Throughout most of history, it was obvious to everybody that society must imitate the family, Father King and Holy Mother Church.
Even Jeremy Bentham who counted as a liberal back then said people grow up under the monarchy of their fathers - how could they be expected to deal with democracy well as adults? Back then it made sense and was often accepted.
We have a 200-250 years long experiment in something like democracy - for many countries much shorter, as Germany only seriously tried democracy after 1945 - and I am not 100% sure it can last. If you look at even Donald Trump, by 18th century standards even he is a radical leftist. A Jacobin. Eh, make it a Girondine, same same. Girondines were totally okay with letting things like king vetoing any legislation... still counted as fairly radical left back then. I don't know whether societies, history, human nature can really change that much...
I keep thinking about this. Is Thailand that badly governed? They are one of the very few serious monarchies left that have no oil and are not tax havens, so they are not playing the game on very easy mode.
Yes, the stock exchange feels normal and demythologized when the Holy Grail and medieval nobles aren't! That reminds me of the Tumblr memes about how we ride automata powered by necromantic sludge... except we don't actually think of those images when we drive our cars.
If I remember correctly, Tolkien's children grew out of bedtime stories before he actually finished the tale of Bilbo Baggins? But regardless, the story definitely does shift to more adult themes around the time Bilbo and the Dwarves unlock the door and Thorin first mentions the Arkenstone.
During the age of feudalism, before absolutism, kings had limited power, you know, Magna Charta and suchlike. Even in the age of absolutism, you know the French Revolution broke out because the king could not raise taxes without calling an estate-general, a parliament.
I don't really understand your question: monarchy is basically the standard default pre-modern government. If the setting should look medieval, it is kings. Kings are also popular. Practically the whole world was watching Charles III coronation. Everybody knows he has no power, but all that pomp is cool.
It might be better to ask why the setting should be medieval. I think mostly because swordfighting can be seen as an art, and it is seen as fair, as the better swordsman winning. People shooting each other with muskets is too much about dumb luck.
Also dunno whether you have noticed, but the kind of tales told to children, such as Cinderella, are all very medieval with princesses and kings. It seems that era is popular. In fact much of fantasy is basically children's tales remixed to be more suitable for adults.
Good analysis, as always! I'm currently playing Metaphor: ReFantazio, a game which has been praised for eschewing standard fantasy races and creating new ones from scratch. Personally, I find it mostly confusing to be dropped into a setting with ten or twelve different new races, right in the middle of the capital where all of them are present, and no way to tell who's what or what their general social role is... (The game keeps telling me that four races are considered "lesser", but hardly ever shows it beyond over-the-top racist comments or preachy sermons.) Using standard races would have worked better, I think.
In one of my ventures into worldbuilding—not a novel but a campaign setting, Tela—I came up with seven humanoid races, each with a name taken from legend and often from fantasy fiction. But I also defined them by a preferred habitat (in GURPS terms, a "terrain") and by analogies to one or more mammalian species.
Dwarves: underground (caves and mines); naked mole rats.
Elves: jungle and woodlands; gibbons.
Ghouls: desert; hyenas and coyotes.
Men: plains; horses.
Nixies: rivers and swamplands; beavers and otters.
Selkies: islands, beaches, and lagoons; sea lions.
Trolls: arctic and mountains; bears.
This led to such things as different lifespans, different mating behavior and family structures, and different political institutions. And then I went on to make up at least three different cultural patterns for each race that represented different ways of dealing with their behavioral tendencies and ecological niches.
But, you know, they still came up fairly close fits to the fantasy races they were named for.
I'm sure you could've made them more different if you'd really tried - and I can see how animal analogies could help with that! But yes, the traditional tropes do exert their magnetic pull.
>look at how Bret Devereaux has criticized fantasy armor designers for drifting farther from reality by chasing after past fantasy works
Oh, I could write about this a lot if I would feel like nerding out. Look at longswords. They are almost always wrong. Real life longswords were... long. Roughly what fantasy calls bastard sword. There is a whole, alive sport of fencing with them. Longswords could not be worn on a belt - just too long, and no one was trying that stupid stuff of wearing them on their backs. That fantasy topos comes from exactly one Japanese artwork that a ninja ties a sword to his back because his hands are busy climbing a wall. Then it somehow stuck. The kind of sword one could wear on their belt is usually called side-sword. This is a word from museologists, because most people most of the time just called their swords "sword", but Italian museologists came up with the classification spada da lato, and it got translated to English as a side-sword.
But I think the whole concept of adventuring is kind of screwed up. People did not run around wearing mail ("chain mail", which just means "chain chain" and of course there was no such thing as a "plate mail", "plate chain", it was just plate armour). It is very tiresome. People had put these things on when preparing for battle. Otherwise they were carried in some package. People travelled on travel horses, only sitting on warhorses before the battle. Generally a small team of 4-5 people did not travel much, they would get robbed and killed. People travelled in large groups. The entire "adventurer" thing would only make sense as some sort of a scouts for an army. Perhaps some kind of special ops for a king is perhaps thinkable, but always employed, not just looking for adventure in a freelancing way.
I find it interesting that while orcs are supposed to be stupid and evil, they are often recast as a kind of a noble savage, aggressive but honourable. Warcraft, for example. I think fantasy simply likes that concept, and orcs are the only standard race halfway suitable for that.
Do you include Jerry Pournelle's Tran in the standard setting? Sci-Fi fantasy is almost the same genre.
Haven't read it!
But from the description, I do recognize the subgenre you're referring to - about a sort-of isekai bringing technological uplift. I don't think it is the same genre, though it can definitely start out in a variant of the same setting before the setting's changed during the story. But then, the harder sci-fi can't use the same setting unless it waves its hands really fast about magic being simulated by nanotech - and even then I wouldn't really count it as hard.
Ha. I wrote that book. Not published yet. Needs a good cover and an edit, then up on Amazon.
There are a fairly small number of archetypes. What is a creature of light to be but an elf? A creature of darkness, but a goblin? A creature of fire but a dragon? A creature of earth but a dwarf? A creature of water but a mermaid? A creature of the air but an eagle? Who can be wise but a wizard, who brave but a knight, who fair but a princess, who virtuous but a prince, who dark but a dark lord? Who can rightfully rule but a king?
You can change the names, but the players remain the same. No one is fooled. The archetypes are too ancient and too primitive to be invented; they can only be dressed in the raiment of their offices according to some particular turn of fashion.
How then could the world they inhabit be any but the world they have always inhabited?
I disagree! Or rather, I half disagree and half think you're missing the question I was discussing.
Take Elves. You're right that on some level, they're defined by "creature of light." But, there're many degrees of freedom inside that definition. Consider Tolkien's Elves versus Shakespeare's Elves versus Lloyd Alexander's Fair Folk versus L. Frank Baum's Daughters of the Rainbow. They're all "creatures of light"; it isn't like one of them is more fully light than the others. But the Standard Fantasy Setting has clearly chosen Tolkien's version of them over the others.
Or, take kings. In my own abortive fantasy novel, I had a number of leaders who weren't properly kings. You could argue they were taking the same literary and symbolic role as a king even if they weren't called that, weren't chosen by hereditary right, and had limits on their power which most kings didn't have. You'd usually be right. But still, why does the Standard Fantasy Setting favor hereditary rulers called kings over other options?
Ah, so you were complaining not about a lack of variety of creatures but about a lack of variety of the standard creatures. I'm not current enough on contemporary fantasy to comment on that, though it does not surprise me. But perhaps it has to do with what we might call the great ennobling of which Tolkien is a major, if not the only culprit.
The legends from which these creatures come portray them largely as malevolent forces. They personify the dangers of life. Tolkien ennobled them, and in doing so made them more like men. Dragons have suffered the same fate, though not at the hands of Tolkien, and in being ennobled have become more like horses, or like men.
As for kings, they are a human universal. All societies are ruled by a king in council. We vary how we choose our kings and how they choose their councils, but the patterns in that track largely to the size and influence of the middle class. The rise of the middle class sucks the nobility out of men, and the dangers out of the natural world, so we turn to the creatures of legend and endown them with the nobility we no longer see in ourselves. And thus make them into a nobler version of ourselves.
But thus also you can't have a middle class in fantasy, or not very much of one, and that means you have a military/agricultural society in which kings rule by the assent of the great lords.
I'd say rather a lack of variety of creatures remixing the same themes, but I think we're talking about the same things?
You're right that most writers are following Tolkien's footsteps in describing these creatures, but I doubt that Tolkien was the one who made the fantasy creatures more like men. They are definitely personified like men in modern fantasy, more so than in old folktales, but I think that's more because of the genre difference. Look at my "The Short Fairy-Tale" from last year - no character in those fairy-tales was really personified! Conversely, the Elves in Dunsany's "King of Elfland's Daughter" are already feeling like humans long before Tolkien.
Let's notice something. There is much overlap between children's tales, like Cinderella, and fantasy, which looks a lot like those tales remixed for adults. And yes, it is Tolkien. Specifically The Hobbit. I am not entirely sure Tolkien meant that for an adult audience... we know well enough he kept rewriting his ideas. The Hobbit starts out much like a tale for children. That's why hobbits are small, so they are basically adult children. The trolls turning to stone is a very typical children's tale of a smart child tricking evil adults. Then it gets more serious later on... apparently somewhere halfway through the book Tolkien decided it is meant for adults anyway.
But you have a good point, Schumpeter used to say that the stock exchange is a poor replacement for the Holy Grail. That is, there was some kind of an oomph about medieval nobility. They were somehow more respectable than some fat CEO and were more respected. They could jump on the back of a galloping horse in full armour. That was standard training.
There is also something that a child can understand about kingship. They live in a society (their home) ruled by a king and a queen. But they have no way to understand a land dominated by a middle class. There is no middle class in the home, even a middle class home. The medieval social structure was in many ways a fractal family structure, with the same relationships repeated at different scales. But a democratic middle-class society is not a fractal image of a family in any way.
That's why I keep thinking about the modern world. Throughout most of history, it was obvious to everybody that society must imitate the family, Father King and Holy Mother Church.
Even Jeremy Bentham who counted as a liberal back then said people grow up under the monarchy of their fathers - how could they be expected to deal with democracy well as adults? Back then it made sense and was often accepted.
We have a 200-250 years long experiment in something like democracy - for many countries much shorter, as Germany only seriously tried democracy after 1945 - and I am not 100% sure it can last. If you look at even Donald Trump, by 18th century standards even he is a radical leftist. A Jacobin. Eh, make it a Girondine, same same. Girondines were totally okay with letting things like king vetoing any legislation... still counted as fairly radical left back then. I don't know whether societies, history, human nature can really change that much...
I keep thinking about this. Is Thailand that badly governed? They are one of the very few serious monarchies left that have no oil and are not tax havens, so they are not playing the game on very easy mode.
Yes, the stock exchange feels normal and demythologized when the Holy Grail and medieval nobles aren't! That reminds me of the Tumblr memes about how we ride automata powered by necromantic sludge... except we don't actually think of those images when we drive our cars.
If I remember correctly, Tolkien's children grew out of bedtime stories before he actually finished the tale of Bilbo Baggins? But regardless, the story definitely does shift to more adult themes around the time Bilbo and the Dwarves unlock the door and Thorin first mentions the Arkenstone.
During the age of feudalism, before absolutism, kings had limited power, you know, Magna Charta and suchlike. Even in the age of absolutism, you know the French Revolution broke out because the king could not raise taxes without calling an estate-general, a parliament.
I don't really understand your question: monarchy is basically the standard default pre-modern government. If the setting should look medieval, it is kings. Kings are also popular. Practically the whole world was watching Charles III coronation. Everybody knows he has no power, but all that pomp is cool.
It might be better to ask why the setting should be medieval. I think mostly because swordfighting can be seen as an art, and it is seen as fair, as the better swordsman winning. People shooting each other with muskets is too much about dumb luck.
Also dunno whether you have noticed, but the kind of tales told to children, such as Cinderella, are all very medieval with princesses and kings. It seems that era is popular. In fact much of fantasy is basically children's tales remixed to be more suitable for adults.
*Discworld not Diskworld.
Good analysis, as always! I'm currently playing Metaphor: ReFantazio, a game which has been praised for eschewing standard fantasy races and creating new ones from scratch. Personally, I find it mostly confusing to be dropped into a setting with ten or twelve different new races, right in the middle of the capital where all of them are present, and no way to tell who's what or what their general social role is... (The game keeps telling me that four races are considered "lesser", but hardly ever shows it beyond over-the-top racist comments or preachy sermons.) Using standard races would have worked better, I think.
In one of my ventures into worldbuilding—not a novel but a campaign setting, Tela—I came up with seven humanoid races, each with a name taken from legend and often from fantasy fiction. But I also defined them by a preferred habitat (in GURPS terms, a "terrain") and by analogies to one or more mammalian species.
Dwarves: underground (caves and mines); naked mole rats.
Elves: jungle and woodlands; gibbons.
Ghouls: desert; hyenas and coyotes.
Men: plains; horses.
Nixies: rivers and swamplands; beavers and otters.
Selkies: islands, beaches, and lagoons; sea lions.
Trolls: arctic and mountains; bears.
This led to such things as different lifespans, different mating behavior and family structures, and different political institutions. And then I went on to make up at least three different cultural patterns for each race that represented different ways of dealing with their behavioral tendencies and ecological niches.
But, you know, they still came up fairly close fits to the fantasy races they were named for.
Interesting!
I'm sure you could've made them more different if you'd really tried - and I can see how animal analogies could help with that! But yes, the traditional tropes do exert their magnetic pull.
>look at how Bret Devereaux has criticized fantasy armor designers for drifting farther from reality by chasing after past fantasy works
Oh, I could write about this a lot if I would feel like nerding out. Look at longswords. They are almost always wrong. Real life longswords were... long. Roughly what fantasy calls bastard sword. There is a whole, alive sport of fencing with them. Longswords could not be worn on a belt - just too long, and no one was trying that stupid stuff of wearing them on their backs. That fantasy topos comes from exactly one Japanese artwork that a ninja ties a sword to his back because his hands are busy climbing a wall. Then it somehow stuck. The kind of sword one could wear on their belt is usually called side-sword. This is a word from museologists, because most people most of the time just called their swords "sword", but Italian museologists came up with the classification spada da lato, and it got translated to English as a side-sword.
But I think the whole concept of adventuring is kind of screwed up. People did not run around wearing mail ("chain mail", which just means "chain chain" and of course there was no such thing as a "plate mail", "plate chain", it was just plate armour). It is very tiresome. People had put these things on when preparing for battle. Otherwise they were carried in some package. People travelled on travel horses, only sitting on warhorses before the battle. Generally a small team of 4-5 people did not travel much, they would get robbed and killed. People travelled in large groups. The entire "adventurer" thing would only make sense as some sort of a scouts for an army. Perhaps some kind of special ops for a king is perhaps thinkable, but always employed, not just looking for adventure in a freelancing way.
I find it interesting that while orcs are supposed to be stupid and evil, they are often recast as a kind of a noble savage, aggressive but honourable. Warcraft, for example. I think fantasy simply likes that concept, and orcs are the only standard race halfway suitable for that.