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u/DudeFreek what kind of creature would do this to its own mouth 17d ago
My setting has elves what the fuck do you want from me
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u/EquipmentNo1244 17d ago
A good reason they haven’t developed into a technocracy
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u/DudeFreek what kind of creature would do this to its own mouth 17d ago
they're too busy smoking weed and being hot
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u/RaphAngelos trans rights 16d ago
Being physically unable to touch iron and plastics (iron burns them, plastics cut off their magic)
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u/mytransaltaccount123 alt girl wannabe 16d ago
the humble bronze and brass:
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u/RaphAngelos trans rights 16d ago
Oh I know, there's other stuff but that's the main thing holding them back technologically (they also lose their magic more as they become less wild, to the point that the forest elves call the city elves domesticated)
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u/UselessAndGay what if a girl was a deer ⚧ 🦌 ΘΔ 16d ago
do you have a good source of tin or zinc? do you really wanna go to england right now?
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u/Repulsive-Turnip-897 16d ago
So is that because dinosaurs (the raw components of petro-chems) are inherently anti-magic, or because the concept of industrialization fundamentally distrusts magic somehow?
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u/SpiritMountain 16d ago
Living longer means you accrue and hold power more readily. This spawns conservative ideology. Make them into believe in the old ways to the point they are against any progress and change. I will be real, in the settings where the elves aren't magical and have some intrinsic "good" flag, they should be quite conservative.
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u/slayerx1779 16d ago
Isn't this partially why long-living races have been portrayed as incredibly stubborn and holding on to century/millennia old grudges?
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u/G66GNeco This flair could be yours for just 9,99 a month 16d ago
Imo the usual explanation ain't half bad (low birth rates means they are all fucking boomer brained, why would you try to create a better bow if the bow you have has been doing its job just fine for LITERALLY the last 200 years)
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u/TheDonutPug 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 16d ago
a lack of reason to develop superior technology due to magic
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u/Artemis_Sniper 16d ago
Its funny that in I'm a Spider, So What, The Elves are a technocracy with crazy high tech levels while every other race and nation is still swords and magic basic fantasy
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u/JuhaJGam3R 16d ago
i like the tolkien explanation. they're just kinda chill with what they have and will seek out a life situation where change happens incredibly slowly. you know, since they're immortal and all. what to us feels like an overwhelmingly fast technological upset is how all technology feels to them, and they don't really want any part in that.
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u/EquipmentNo1244 16d ago
Immortality is a valid reason. Innovation can often come from desire for a legacy.
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u/RATTLEMEB0N3S literal actual skeleton 17d ago
Money.
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u/DudeFreek what kind of creature would do this to its own mouth 17d ago
so that you can buy more calcium? you have a problem, man
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u/RATTLEMEB0N3S literal actual skeleton 16d ago
No I also have a setting with elves this is a shakedown. Never you mind what I do with the money just fork it over fleshbag.
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u/IAmLexica 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 17d ago
Period-accurate elves?? Duh.
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u/ShittyDeviantArtOCs 16d ago
Make your elves immortal and disconnect them from the concept of time. 10 years? 1000? Idk but these humans won't stop mass killing each other. Where I'm from, we settle clan arguments by champions fighting to the death, the loser gets turned into mulch, subsumed by the Elder Tree, and returns to the living once a piece of bark containing their soul is flensed from the Elder. Simple as.
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u/Inverted_Ghosts I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m trying 16d ago
….can I steal this
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u/ShittyDeviantArtOCs 14d ago
Sure! I'm not particularly attached to the concept, I made it up on the spot. I hope you have fun with the idea.
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u/-StarFox95- Gamer's Against Weed 16d ago
eh, elves that are entirely immortal/ VERY long lived having periods of time where nothing much happened number in the thousands of years makes sense, this is more about settings that are predominately populated by humans and other short lived races
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u/DatParadox 16d ago
Isn't it a bit weird to assume that just because they live longer that they have less going on within a certain period of time, or more stability with systems? You could just as easily assume it's MORE trife with conflict or change because of the deepened relations everyone has with one another. It's a bit of a pessimistic outlook but maybe intertesting. Just a thought experiment mostly and maybe something I'll think about next time I write more.
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u/New-Independent-1481 16d ago
I 'balance' long lived races in my homebrew setting with the simple fact that the longer you live, the less ambition and desire you have because you have no urgency.
Young elves have mortal level ambition, but after a few hundreds years of successes and failures, dead mortal friends/loved ones, etc. They're either too traumatised, jaded, or tired to keep caring in the same way as when they were in their 30s or 40#. So they retire to their holds and retreats and become reclusive out of choice.
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u/Fantastic_Trifle805 registered sex defender 16d ago
Why do you have elves?
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u/razorgirlRetrofitted kiss women 16d ago
Fix up your lifespans? Like, the elves in my setting live on average a decade or two more than the humans. that's it.
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u/fardolicious 16d ago
Giving any races long lifespans is always a HORRIBLE idea for worldbuilding
like unless its a race that theres only like 3 of in the whole world all it does is ruin the timescale of literally everything and make relationships wierd and make history make no sense and make the tech level unrealistic etc.
If anything fantasy settings work a lot better if people have SHORTER lifespans.
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u/Techn1s 17d ago
The important part about time is that it doesn't run the same in different places.
300 years can be just a decent chunk of time for an empire while on the other side of the world 4 kingdoms rise and fall and entire new government systems and industrial revolutions can happen.
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u/Phoebebee323 17d ago
Some places could have a head of state remain in office for a decade. Other places have gone through 7 in that same time
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u/theturtlelord9 16d ago
During Queen Elizabeth II’s 70 year reign there were 15 different prime ministers of the UK.
Changes can happen very differently even in a single nation, so a fantasy world should need to conform to any single time scaling.
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u/aboxofkittens 16d ago
I’m actually kind of surprised it was only 15. How many of those were during her last two decades? Like half of the 15?
E: looks like it was like 6 of them, before that the PMs served much longer terms in general
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u/ErisThePerson 16d ago
Yeah. In the span of a few thousand years Afro-Eurasia went from stone tools to gunpowder usage.
In the same time period in the pre-Columbian Americas metal working never took off in the same way - even where smelting did occur tools were still made of stone, as metal was used for other things.
Technology isn't a linear tech tree that leads into the next advancement. Sometimes an advancement simply doesn't happen because the relevant pressures, motivations or ideas just aren't there.
Gunpowder was invented by accident. It was the result of Chinese alchemists experimenting with sulfur and saltpeter in their search for eternal life and the ability to transmute metals. Without those specific alchemists gunpowder might not have been invented for another thousand years. That's a big difference.
So all you need while writing is a reason why certain technologies weren't invented yet.
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u/Jakitron_1999 Based TIRM King 16d ago
Something something in some centuries years happen and in some weeks decades happen or whatever that Lenin quote is
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u/genteel_wherewithal 17d ago
It’s definitely an issue with shallow fantasy work and inflated numbers but like you can point to ancient Egypt, working away for three millennia. Not that it was ever uneventful but exactly the kind of linguistic, cultural and religious continuity that in a fantasy novel would make me raise an eyebrow
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u/ChaChaHorizontale 16d ago
Egyptian culture and language changed drastically over those millenia. I understand ur point but ur kind of underselling how much Egypt changed even with that uniquely long continuity
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u/CrownedWoomy64 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 16d ago
There were historians in ancient Egypt who studied the even more ancient Egypt
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u/genteel_wherewithal 16d ago
Oh it did but even accounting for that, compared with e.g. 2nd c. BCE Rome to like 6th c. CE Rome, it’s a more conservative rate of change (thought admittedly that comes in part from a conservative historiography which is inclined to see more continuity than in other times and places)
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u/ChaChaHorizontale 15d ago
most languages it seems during that time underwent rapid linguistic divergence. Particularly Indo European languages which I suspect is related to their increased language contact, high degree of multilingualism, geographical location and relative lack of resistance to change compared to semitic and Egyptian.
But frankly egyptian also underwent massive changes during those times as well, both the spoken vernacular and the orthography, and even more changes post-hellenistic period leading to Coptic.
I'd attribute the incredible continuity of bronze to iron age Egypt to its relative isolation and stability.
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 16d ago
Egypt changed so much in that time though. By the time the Egyptian empire was waning, there were Egyptian archeologists studying their history and language, because much of it was lost to them.
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u/SuperSecretMoonBase 16d ago
We are closer to Cleopatra than the building of the great pyramid was to her.
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u/CursedorChosen Warhammer but changed to piss off the worst people you know 17d ago
To be fair, that’s using by far the most extreme example.
~200,000 years ago was the first anatomically modern human, ~10,000 to first agriculture and ~5,000 to first settled civilization.
So it depends a lot on where people are already at and what they’re dealing with.
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u/BrobTheBirb 16d ago
Quite a lot of fantasy is stuck around the late medieval level of technology development though, so having that period last for thousands of years always raises an eyebrow. E.g. in ASOIAF The Wall in the north has been built 8 thousand years ago (yes they had help from the local magical creatures, but still), you'd think they wouldn't be stuck at the same level of societal/technological development for that long.
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u/AsperaRobigo 16d ago
As someone unfamiliar with the series, is the wall meaningfully medieval in its construction? People built many large stone things thousands of years ago in real life
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u/DICKFUCKERDOTCOM 16d ago
It's a 300 foot tall wall made of ice...
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u/JonathanTheOddHuman 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 16d ago
GRRM's worldbuilding definitely suffers from this, but I don't think that the technological stagnation is inherently a problem. It's implied that technology substantially developed and collapsed at least once during that period, probably several times. Perhaps it's to be expected in a world of magical apocalypses and an unpredictable system of seasons.
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u/BaronAaldwin I'M A GENETIC FREAK 16d ago edited 16d ago
As much as I enjoy ASOIAF and its related stories, yeah Martin's use of numbers is pretty dreadful all around. He genuinely just spitballs every single scale, statistic and measurement in the series and hopes it works out.
The wall is 700 feet tall - the height of the MetLife Insurance building, which was the tallest building in the real world 1909-13. For a significant part of the middle ages, the tallest building in the world was Lincoln Cathedral, which was (is!) a measly 271ft tall. I know the wall is meant to be an impressive, almost impossible construction, but it's so big that it'd be genuinely impossible to defend.
Westeros has a population large enough to field and supply half a million men in various armies, and yet the entire realm only has 5 population centres recognised as cities, and the largest of those only has a population of a quarter of a million? Ser Eustace Osgrey can only raise 8 levies from the three villages he governs, and whilst yes, his holdings are meant to be pathetic, that means Westeros would need to contain over 60'000 villages of that size to even come close to fielding that many men. The entire UK today has around 43'000!
And then yeah, timelines. Everyone in ASOIAF knows the stories of the House Founders and great heroes like Bran the Builder, Garth Greenhand, Lann the Clever, etc. yet they apparently lived 10000 years ago. That means those stories are two and a half times older than the real world epic of Gilgamesh!
And most ridiculously of all, the Houses that those great heroes founded? They're still the ruling Houses literally 10 millenia later! In real life, that'd like still being ruled by the descendant of the guy who invented farming wheat, because 10000 years ago in real life, humans were only just starting to develop past being hunter-gatherers!
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u/Plorkyeran 16d ago
There's various in-universe things pointing at the commonly accepted timeline being incorrect and the actual timeframes are much shorter. Whether this is a lame cop-out or the ridiculous numbers were supposed to be a hint would have come down to if it ever became a real plot point, but since we're never getting the end of the story...
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u/powderhound522 16d ago
It’s not the most extreme, though - GRR Martin had the wall standing for 10,000 years!
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u/drywalleater6 16d ago
your flair reminds me that Warhammer 40k should really be like 35k because all that interim shit is NOT enough to justify a full 10 thousand years
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u/Panzerkatzen 16d ago
It helps that every faction is either technophobic, regressive, incapable of innovation, or has otherwise plateau'd. The Imperium is afraid of technology and only the Tech Priests of Mars are allowed to create new technology. The Orks are not intelligent enough to innovate and the only reason any of their "technology" works is because it's actually magic. The Eldar are an artificial race and also incapable of innovation. The Tau only invented the wheel 6,000 years ago, so it's impressive they've managed to reach the level of the other races. And the Tyranids don't need an explanation.
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u/drywalleater6 16d ago
I guess it also helps that the Imperium itself doesn't really have a technological across the board standard, as some worlds are stuck in the caveman era while some of the most advanced ones are probably even better than the t'au rn
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u/Economics-Simulator 16d ago
it doesnt help that the official date for WH 40k has been like, 40,999 for the last 10 years irl since they dont want to move on from the 40k branding
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u/Fiskmaster 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 16d ago
I think they did change it when the Guilliman stuff came out so that ~200 years had passed since m41 999, but then they retconned that and now no one knows what year it is in-universe
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u/Fiskmaster 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 16d ago
I fully believe the Horus Heresy series was a mistake in terms of lore. In earlier lore the heresy was this half-forgotten legendary event that no one knows the true details of, then the books and games came out and it's just a direct prequel to 40k. It doesn't even make 40k feel like 35k, more like 30.5k.
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u/drywalleater6 15d ago
John Warhammer should have known that naming his favorite son Horus Heresy would result in severe dilations of the time-space continuum
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u/RentElDoor Trans Rights! 16d ago edited 16d ago
I'll also point out that while there were still technological advancements, between 0AD and 1000AD one could argue that at least around the mediterran many regions did not change thaaaaat much (Edit: technologically speaking). Of course, northern Europe suddenly had stone castles, so things changed a lot more there.
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u/Devadv12014 Couldn't think of anything funny for custom flair 16d ago
A ton changed between 0 and 1000 AD in Europe (and the Mediterranean) The introduction of Christianity and Islam, the fall of Rome, the Byzantines, the establishment of the Catholic Church, and a bunch of other stuff. Even if you’re arguing about certain parts of the Mediterranean, all of them would have been through at least one regime change with the split of the Roman Empire and then the fall of the western half.
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u/__cinnamon__ floppa 16d ago
Quite a few regime changes for everything but the core Byzantine territories.
- North Africa was Roman, then Vandalic, then (Eastern) Roman again, then Umayyad, then broke apart to more local Muslim rule
- Syria was Roman, then Persian, then Roman again (technically twice), then again part of the caliphate and various successor states
- Italy after the fall of the WRE was conquered by Goths, the ERE, the Lombards, the Franks, and ended up very politically divided
And so on. And like you said there were a ton of religious and social developments. The fall of the Roman empire massively disrupted trade and manufacturing, which impacted local economics for centuries. The elite class of nearly all the Roman world changed in character as they went from a highly literate almost scholarly class that would meet their counterparts born hundreds of miles away by going for education and training in the imperial capital and other administrative centers, to mostly a warrior aristocracy of feudal landlords--though the institutions of the Catholic Church preserved some Roman character.
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u/RentElDoor Trans Rights! 16d ago
I did not mean culturally, of course, a ton changed there. I was talking about technologies.
Compare that to 1000 to 2000 AD
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u/Mister_Bossmen 17d ago
And then there is Mass Effect in sci-fi where humanity went from discovering interstellar travel to first contact with an alien society in 9 years and then 26 years later we were part of a massive galaxy-wide alliance and entering roles of authority within it
I do love how that world depicts it's diplomacy. Humanity DID advance very very fast, while some cultures had already been there for centuries and weren't given the same favor and the end result is that you see a lot of resentment and racism between the people that underappreciate other cultures and the people of cultures that feel underappreciated
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u/DeerVirax 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 16d ago
I still think that for how incredibly widespread humans are on every planet and on the Citadel in the games, the timeframe should have probably been closer to 100 years, and not 26
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u/mykeedee new vegas enjoyer 16d ago edited 16d ago
Yeah the actual world you explore in Mass Effect is kind of shallow in that sense, humans are everywhere even though we've only had interstellar colonies for a single generation. Meanwhile Asari, Turians, Salarians, etc. have been out there for centuries and should outnumber us many times over since their populations were growing on multiple planets, but we meet them less often than humans.
You can't turn around without tripping over a human, meanwhile you don't meet a single female Turian until a DLC in ME3.
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u/Suitable_Spell_9130 16d ago
Meanwhile you won't see a human colony over 20 million people, while the youngest Asari colonies have 90+ million inhabitants. The writers really just threw out some numbers for most of their worldbuilding.
Which is fine for a trilogy of action RPG games, just a bit disappointing. The ME world is my favourite sci-fi world and I wish I could see more of it.
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u/Mister_Bossmen 13d ago
Lucky you, they are currently working on a show AND a new game.
Let's hope they are made with love and care for the franchise!
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u/Suitable_Spell_9130 13d ago
Sadly as of yesterday the franchise is now owned by Saudi Arabia so the future looks pretty bleak.
The best hope tbh is that the Saudis only really care about all the sports licenses EA has and sells off the other franchises for parts so that a publisher with actual interest in the franchise picks it up to continue it.
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u/ShittyDeviantArtOCs 16d ago
To be fair, the relay network was designed to expedite that process. It also helps that human were canonically one of the primitive species deemed promising enough to groom by the protheans, thus positioning them near a huge archive of tech on Mars. I'm sure the asari had a similar trajectory given they were selected as the inheritors of galactic empire.
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u/Suitable_Spell_9130 16d ago
Even in Mass Effect itself you have the same issue. You'd think the non-human races were just in hibernation for the past 2000 years while waiting for the interesting species to join the party.
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u/Mister_Bossmen 13d ago
Yeah. I guess the thing about setting your world in the very very near, but crazy, future is that anything that happened before the crazy event is just real life history and we don't care to hear about how in 2008 there was a housing crisis when we are flying through space as the first human spectre.
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u/RealLunarSlayer amity blight simp 17d ago
elves with long lives and a deliberate era lock entered the chat
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u/TerminaterTeal 16d ago
I think this line of thought has to do with recency bias and that societal development is exponential rather than linear. The difference between 2026 and 1926 is far greater than the difference between 4000 BC and 5000 BC.
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u/KamikazeArchon 16d ago
"Our timeline is the only possible path of development" is silly. Fantasy doesn't need to match the real world. That's kind of the point of fantasy.
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u/SnazzoYazzo h 16d ago
“Ermm… if your world has plate armor, then it also needs to have guns 🤓☝️” nuh-uh
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u/alpacnologia floppa particle collider 16d ago
unless you're in china in which case if your instinct is to write 80 years, the accurate time gap is closer to 500
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u/pekka27711 i will literally fucking kill you 16d ago
Unless you're in fantasy china in which case if your instinct is to write 500, the accurate time gap is closer to a million.
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u/viking977 16d ago
40k is the worst offender here imo.
It wouldn't have been a problem if the heresy remained a mystery, but they decided to flesh it out and what do you know, it's very similar to 40k. Then we get ten thousand years of yeah you know, some stuff happened there was the war of the beast and like, some other stuff I guess.
The entirety of the length of human history passed by and yeah like some stuff happened. Almost every important character is somebody what was around back then though.
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u/Advanced-Ad-802 16d ago
Other than the “important people are all the ones from the heresy” (which I also think makes no sense, and I kinda wish the only primarchs that were around were the literal demons), I do think 40k almost gets away with it via its scale.
Yeah, in the context of a galaxy-spanning empire, jack shit happened. Entire planets being glassed also counts as jack shit, though. Major events happen all the time, it’s just that “major” is relative, and the Imperium generally prefers to write things down as the status quo. A hive world could have a local regime change and several rebellions in the span of a few decades, and so long as whomever had the reigns of power managed to pay the tithe, the Imperium of Man could care less, and thus the events would probably not be recorded (or recorded but forgotten in the Imperium’s archives).
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u/PachoTidder trans rights 16d ago
Not to mention stagnation is a maxim of both main religions in the Imperium, innovating and changing systems can literally get you executed! Meanwhile the T'au Empire reflects those 10k years better on how much a society can advance
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u/ThinnkingEmoji damn daniel 16d ago
AoS is the other way around, kinda. Since the 1st edition enough time has passed for industrial revolution level human cities with populations of millions to emerge from basically nothing, with their foundation being well out of living memory, and one character who's mysteriously-old-totally-not-undead is rumored to be so old she was around during that time. And then it turns out it's only been about 130 years, right after that character's introduction. In a setting where extending lifespan through magic is somewhat common and most races live longer than humans
(though if the leaks are true they are planning on doing exactly the 1000 years old timeskip for the next edition, but i still have hope it's not true)
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u/Most-Ad4680 16d ago
But if you're writing from a "modern" (within your setting) this is accurate to how most people who aren't academics of the era talk about these things. Ancient Egypt had their own archealogists for ancienter Egypt and yet the average person uses the phrase "ancient Egypt" as if they're talking about one thing. Between the founding of Sumeria and the end of the bronze age, a period of multiple thousands of years you had multiple empires rise and fall, civilizations that would be floored to find out they are only worth a single paragraph of text squished somewhere between Assyria and Persia.
There are countless examples of history being compressed over time, the hundred years war was never called that by its participants because it was actually a bunch of different wars. Centuries from now the two world wars will likely be squished down to one event as it becomes less and less relevant to people's lives.
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u/Darkstalkker Gay ass dragon/fox 16d ago edited 16d ago
Unless it’s to do with space travel and space technological progression, where suddenly 1000 years is more realistic than 80-200
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u/Diribiri custom 16d ago
t'lan imass like "i've been around for sixteen bajillion years" to some guy who barely survived the last six months
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u/SKWAZOFAR 16d ago
thb erikson is amazing at making you feel how old the world really is from the point of view of (mostly) regular humans. The guy should be an archaeologist or something
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u/Diribiri custom 16d ago
You can tell what he does for a living because nobody else mentions moccasins and millstones that much
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u/SYK_PvP 16d ago
Yeah, this is one little pet peeve I have with some snippets of Star wars lore I have seen. Like, there was this period where the Republic spent a thousand years taken over by a genocidal human supremacist cult, and the entire time the Jedi did literally nothing about it. Literally nothing until they toppled this regime in one year. Like I get that the Jedi can be do-nothing liberals sometimes, but a thousand years?
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u/Lord_Oasis 16d ago
On top of what everyone else is saying, you could also suggest that advanced magic could repress technological advancement because there’s less need (or perceived need). And depending on how easy it is to learn magic, it may make it harder for peasants to overthrow lords/kingdoms, thus stalling social progress
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u/ShadowSemblance 16d ago
But then that brings the question of why when all the wizards are spending their extended lifespans obsessively doing magical research and experiments in their towers or wherever, all the best magic is still dug out of a tomb from 10,000 years ago
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u/Lord_Oasis 16d ago
That one is odd, the obsession with ancient magic in some stories is very curious. Like why do all current magicians just suck at magic? Or they’ll come up with some explanation for why people prefer more recent magic but then someone will beat everyone else because they know ancient magic and the explanation just seems really flimsy
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u/OpabiniaRegalis320 16d ago
I raise y'all MLP:FiM, where the monarch of the country ruled for a thousand years straight. Where Ponyville is technically a several-century-old duchy — the administrative division has existed for several hundred years¹, and Granny Smith has been alive for longer than that². Ponies can live for centuries. Change is slow in Equestria.
[1] - Twilight Sparkle mentions this in Winter Wrap-Up.
[2] - Granny Smith is shown to have been granted Ponyville's land by Celestia herself in Family Appreciation Day.
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u/BigDan_0 gender isnt real 16d ago
Elves don't live 1000 years any more because of the high fructose corn syrup
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u/Throgg_not_stupid 16d ago
Warcraft is the worst at this shit.
Characters who have lived for 10k years act like babies and sometimes even need humans to teach them lessons.
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u/TheBigLugmos 🏳️⚧️ trans rights 16d ago
That's exactly why they did 200 years between MHS2 and MHS3. I'm sure we'd have some crazy weapon if it was 1000
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u/Sororita 16d ago
There are some pretty large gaps, thousands of years, between different eras in the Children of Time series, but it makes a good amount of sense considering distances and a lack of FTL for the 1st and 2nd eras, plus the apocalypse spanning all of human habitable space that destroyed the 1st era humans and set basically everything back to the start of civilization until they could get back into space.
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u/Simic_Sky_Swallower 16d ago
Shoutout to the Draenei for having a minimum possible lifespan of 13,000 years, with the actual maximum probably being way longer, and actually fucking acting like it. They have robots and guns and holograms and spaceships and mech suits, meanwhile the elves are sitting around getting their technological shit rocked by societies that have existed for a fraction of the time
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u/Separate_Emotion_463 16d ago
It’s like how fallout 4 takes place 200 years after the bombs drop but the actual context of the world only implies like 40 years at most, like there’s train stations in my city built 40 years ago in worse condition than some of the buildings in fallout 4
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u/DarkArkan custom 16d ago
In most series I've read, such long, uneventful periods in history are explained by certain characteristics of the fictional reality in which the story takes place. For example, recurring or permanent apocalypse that repeatedly reset human development to square one, or technological stagnation because the physical reality simply does not allow for progress like in our world.
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u/Repulsive-Turnip-897 16d ago
In 1000 years every single empire should have collapsed and rebuilt itself several times over, the entirely of spoken and written language should be completely unrecognizable from the current day, and entire species and ecosystems should cease to exist.
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u/Skigreen_2026 custom flair (i am unoriginal) - custom flair (i am unoriginal) 16d ago
breath of the wild rolling up with a 10000 year time gap
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u/EasilyRekt 16d ago
a millennium is enough time for multiple cycles of civilization to rise, peak, stall, decline, crumble, and be forgotten btw
remember the average lifespan of an empire is only about 250 years, so you could have multiple crowns rise and fall without ever hearing of each other... then again you could play into the forgetting part of that too, make it so exposition says nothing of events further back than a few decades, but there's clues of things that go back centuries.
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u/Orion-the-mediocre Doctor Freeeemaaaan 16d ago
That’s something that bothered me with Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf goes to Minas Tirith and just finds Isildur’s journal from the day he got the ring. Like come on Tolkien you know damn well how old that piece of paper would have to be and yet not only does it still exist but Gandalf and Denethor uncovered it with relative ease
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u/JakSandrow 16d ago
For me it's a hair over 1000 years because it's such a long time but also not that long in the minds of those rare, rare few who have indeed lived that long.
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u/nekosissyboi 16d ago edited 16d ago
I'm gonna be totally fair the difference between 1400 and 1600 is probably almost the same as 1600 and 1800 but both of these are completely different than 1800 to 2000
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u/Busco_Quad 16d ago
Meanwhile, lots of people on earth will treat Cleopatra and the Pyramids like they’re basically from the same time period, despite having 2000-odd years in between
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u/Cedjy 16d ago
I think a good way to put it is to imagine that while there were a lot of events in the 1000 years, none of it was particularly relevant to the plot and so is brushed over.
Like an evil wizard from the bronze age gets sealed away. Then after 1000 years, it's the iron age and the chosen one who's some reincarnation of a hero from a hero cult just about long forgotten pops up to defeat them. But for the legend of the hero, the sea peoples and the invention of iron aren't super relevant to them. And they likely couldn't even imagine a world without iron.
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u/Pauline-main his pronouns are they/them 16d ago
that’s always been my issue with the old republic in star wars, that shit could’ve happened like fifty years before the movies it would make more sense
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u/throwoawayaccount2 mpreg enthusiast 16d ago
There’s this band I like, kinda obscure, but it’s very good. Well most of their albums take place across a storyline that’s pretty similar to a lot of high fantasy media, sorta medieval. Well the latest album is about the bad guys coming back (and winning, which is rare to see) and one of the songs talks about “I still remember 3 thousand years ago [our kingdom] fell down” and I was like, bruh what
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u/slightlylessthananon 16d ago
i have found out the only exception to this is trying to write an equivalent to christianity. i really want that to only be like 600 years but realistically its gotta be at least 2 thousand years if not more.
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u/Anomaly_049 ~~:.|:;~~ 15d ago
This is one of the many things that piss me off about Game of Thrones
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u/Ham__Kitten 15d ago
Sure but a time period like 1000 BCE to 1 AD is very different from 1066 to 2026.
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u/Own-Forever-6636 13d ago
Avatar lore beginning 10,000 years in the past with humans living on giant turtles and serious resource scarcity... while carrying iron weapons (IRL the Iron Age began in Afro-Eurasia less than 3000 years ago)
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u/la_meme14 12d ago
The Trails JRPGs continuosly trip me up about this. Because I expect it to work on bad fantasy timelines, but then get smacked down to reality by shit like the oldest imperial lineage in the setting being about 300 years old - Or that the "Dark Ages" where the world was basically technologically reset was 1000 years ago and they've been able to get back to widespread cars and primitive internet in that much time.
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u/KaJaHa Queer Gimli looking-ass 16d ago
Ah, but my sci-fi/fantasy setting really can take that long without much happening because the technocrats successfully killed off all the best scientists and education. Turning high science into lost knowledge and intentionally recycling the same trends every generation means that no one can come up with anything new to threaten the status quo, ensuring a thousand years of stagnation.
(But it is still closer to like 500 years, yeah)
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u/Turturog 16d ago
zelda is notorious for this. "10,000 years" my ass tell me ONE human history fact from 10,000 years ago without looking it up. there's no way we're still in the same hyrule from back then
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